I was glad to see this detailed note of an important gap in search, but it left me wondering how the board views its role in strategic planning? TL;DR: top-level prioritization should be done in a more public and transparent manner, probably with more board input Historically, it seems like the board has approached the strategic plan as something to review after the plan is solidified rather than driving the plan in a meaningful way. There is a bit of evidence that the board is taking a more active role in planning in the 2016 Governance recommendations [1], although it looks like it is being sent to the Audit Committee, which I'm not sure I agree with. In 2015, when the board opened up for Q&A questions at its noticeboard [2], some of the questions were around the board's view of specific issues. The only board member who mostly responded deferred having any judgment on features or software issues whatsoever. For example, someone questioned Superprotect, with the board member responding: "I think that the super protect feature is something that falls within the domain of our Executive Director, whom I trust to have good judgment. I would personally never vote for or against a specific feature of Mediawiki software, unless this is at the specific request of the Executive Director, it simply is not our job" ... Features like Visual Editor, Flow, or search improvements are voted on whenever the budget comes up. It may be dressed up as "Editing" or "Discovery", but it's basically about a large, long-term feature. And work on these features is done at the cost of not working other items such as features requested by editors (see Community Tech) or other stakeholders (e.g., unclear how line-level employee feedback is rolled up). When I was on the board of a couple nonprofits, we did relatively detailed strategic planning. For example, the board decided it was important to overhaul and modernize our website, and then we monitored progress on its overhaul by staff over time. It wasn't easy to extract priorities from a bunch of people with diverse opinions on what was worth doing, and staff played a huge role in recommending and assembling these opinions into a reasonably scoped plan which they ultimately executed. But the board took ownership of the plan because they played a major part in its draft. Historically, boards were the driver of major plans (see *Governance as Leadership*, p4 [3]) but as nonprofits grew large, that role is often taken by executive leadership. It's up to the board to figure out how it wants to run the organization, but I hope to see the board taking a stronger, more public role in planning. Perhaps I just haven't read deeply enough, but the strategic planning process seems like a black box right now. My hope is that board members feel comfortable championing causes that they feel are important, but also take time to champion the causes that are important to other stakeholders, which can be discovered through well-designed research, surveys, and anecdotes (like this search observation!). I do recall filling out a survey on future WMF priorities a few months ago, but I don't recall feeling altogether satisfied with it. I feel bad about this wall of text. Random postscripts: When I was serving on boards, I read an interesting book called *Governance as Leadership* which emphasized the somewhat fuzzy concept of "generative thinking" which allows the board and executive team to partner effectively. It also puts the history and typical roles that a board plays into context. It's important to keep marginal cost and return on investment in mind. Even Google continues to spend an enormous amount on search. I work as a software developer in downtown San Francisco. A couple of my friends work at privately-funded startups - ranging from 20 to 70 people - where the employees literally vote on the company's direction. At my company, the strategy is set by the executive team, where engineering hours are allocated to various categories (new products, maintenance, internal engineering). We do a lot of estimation to allow the product and executive team to figure out what new features make sense, and a lot of the internal engineering time goes into devops, refactoring and underlying architectural improvements. Sam Altman of Y Combinator noted: "The company will build what the CEO measures". So if the board has a goal in mind, think carefully about the metrics. [4] [1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board_Governance_Recommendations_(Apri… [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_noticeboard/Arch… [3] https://smile.amazon.com/Governance-Leadership-Reframing-Nonprofit-Boards/d… [4] http://blog.samaltman.com/startup-advice-briefly On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 1:32 PM, Pax Ahimsa Gethen < list-wikimedia(a)funcrunch.org&gt; wrote: -- Ben Creasy http://bencreasy.com <http://bencreasy.com?t=email>