Hi Bishakha,

Pardon my forking the thread here.

I have previously asked about having more transparency and openness for WMF Board meetings. From my skimming of Board minutes, it's difficult to perceive what level of diligence is being done by the Board. I realize that corporate notetaking practices sometimes suggest summarizing discussions in meeting minutes as "discussion about X" rather than listing detailed questions. I would encourage more detail and transparency about Board deliberations, along the lines of what is being done for departmental quarterly reviews (which I greatly appreciate).

James' and others' points about the WMF Board's role being about high-level strategic direction are well taken. I realize that the Board has limited capacity to manage the organization, as do all the levels of management in the organization. Even at the strategic level, I would hope to see more Board transparency about deliberations for major decisions, which would in turn give everyone in this quasi-democratic movement more visibility into the Board's thinking and more confidence (I hope) that the Board is providing sound leadership on behalf of the community.

How to reconcile the need for more transparency with the need to have frank discussions is a difficult question. I would suggest that the Board take a look at our laws in Washington State regarding open meetings for governmental organizations, and the exceptions to open meetings laws. Overall, I think we do pretty well here at having civil, frank discussions in public most of the time. I have a lot of faith in the goodness of democratic processes, and I believe that a quasi-democratic system is the only viable way for a crowdsourced project like Wikipedia to succeed and to thrive.

I suggest that WMF Board transparency, roles and composition would be good subjects for discussion at the upcoming Wikimedia Conference. I hope that current serving Board members would be willing to have that discussion there in person. I'm sure that at least a few other attendees would be interested in participating, and it might be possible to arrange remote participation as well via live IRC interactions similar to what is done for WMF metrics meetings.

Thank you very much,

Pine

On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 10:49 PM, Bishakha Datta bishakhadatta@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 12:34 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:

I'm generally supportive of this legal action, but I am troubled by this statement:

"I trust our legal team to make decisions about what legal actions to participate in."

...WMF needs an activist board. All of the guidance that I read about boards in general says that good boards do due diligance, and I would encourage the WMF board to be proactive and ask tough questions. This can be done while maintaining a positive and respectful atmosphere.

Dear Pine,

As a recently-retired board member, I want to briefly chime in here. Apologies for dragging this thread off-course from the announcement.

There seems to be an assumption that board members don't ask good questions unless they are 'activists' - that is simply not true of any board I'm on, and most certainly not of the WMF board. To combine this with James' email replying to yours, 'providing oversight', 'strategic direction' and 'doing due diligence' often means asking the right questions, including 'tough' questions - at board meetings or via email, but not publicly.

Over the last five years, we've seen greater and greater clarity in separating board and staff roles at the WMF - that's a good thing that most organizations need to do as they mature, and helps both the board and the staff do what they should be doing, instead of getting their roles mixed up.

Best Bishakha Pine

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