On Aug 15, 2013 4:53 AM, "Steven Walling" <swalling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Thanks Steven! Answering for myself (and only myself) I am in two minds about this question. On the one hand, yes, of course engineering is a core activity for us - well over half, as you point out - and I wish it was an area that was better represented on the board. I do think we should pay attention to that when recruiting expert seats, and I do also wish our own dev community was better represented in (all kinds of) governance. On the other hand, I think the main contribution that recruiting for this would likely bring is helping the board stay more focused on tech. No one person is going to be able to instantly understand all our projects -- someone with a managerial background at another shop would have to rethink their assumptions, as chances are excellent that whatever products they'd worked on, they won't be as multilingual or community focused as ours. And someone from our own tech community would have the same challenge all of our community trustees do, of having to relearn their relationship to Wikimedia and balance many competing interests. So while yes, I think as a board we should pay more attention to our overall technical landscape, I think that we can push ourselves to do this at a governance level without having individual specific hands-on expertise (similarly, just because Kat's now left the board doesn't mean we're going to stop getting legal updates and making that area as a priority). For instance, Erik's been giving some very helpful visual editor updates to the board recently, similar to his public emails; I hope that kind of ongoing update will help both the board & senior staff reflect on and plan our activities. So I'd like to back up a little bit and ask you and the community at large, and especially the engineering community, what we need to solve for. What challenges aren't we meeting? What strategic questions should we tackle? What philosophical and/or strategic support does the tech community want to see from the board? For instance: in the past we've set our highest-level priority at Wikimedia as recruiting and keeping more editors, which has led pretty directly to things like E3, mobile editing, and the visual editor being prioritized. But of course there's a lot of other engineering & product areas to think about, everything from building features for existing editors to disaster planning in ops to supporting the staff + volunteer dev community (I'm quite pleased, incidentally, to see new 3rd-party mediawiki projects; that's been a gap for a long time). And lastly of course what's been on everyone's mind lately is we must continue to try to figure out the best way to develop and roll out products in our complex, opinionated, multilingual community. To be frank, I don't know what the the best role for the board is in this process. I try to be careful about keeping my public comments to a minimum when tech debates are raging, as I think all the trustees do, because it's usually just not helpful to randomly weigh in. Does that mean developers feel unsupported by the board? That would be an unfortunate side effect of trying not to overstep our role... best, Phoebe

On 08/14/2013 01:52 PM, Steven Walling wrote: With or without expert seats, I believe the whole tech planning process would improve if our tech volunteers (tech ambassadors?) would be more involved since the beginning. This might mean a longer discussion, but also more transparent and with a better community backing since the beginning. Moving some discussions early in the planning process might save a lot more time and energy discussing months later, when prototypes and betas start to show up. And by that time it could be the own tech ambassadors the ones defending the plan they helped build. Opinions are mine, etc. -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil