Hi all, Stephen, thanks for posting this. :-) From my perspective, there's two items of particular interest here that I haven't seen discussed on this list or elsewhere - namely "Disrupting the disrupters" and "Community council". The board minutes aren't really sufficient to understand the details of what the WMF board members are thinking about with these topics, so I'd like to ask the WMF board members if they would be willing to share their understanding of what these topics entail either here or on-wiki please? (BTW, in general I'm much more in favour of seeing detailed minutes that explain what was discussed, why it was discussed, and what individual people thought, rather than high-level summary minutes that say what was discussed without explaining the details. The [[Five Ws]] and the additional 'how' are an excellent guide here!) Thanks, Mike On 21 Apr 2014, at 20:14, Stephen LaPorte <slaporte(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi Mike, Sure. Both were open discussions, and no decisions were taken or specific proposals developed. And neither topic is in any way limited to being a "board discussion": both are broad-ranging topics concerning all of us. We took these up to, as a board, have some time to step back and think about big-picture issues. The "disruption" discussion was largely focused around talking about potential threats and "disruptions" to our future. These are both current trends that we see happening and potential things that could happen that would impact the sustainability and future of Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. For instance: the rise of mobile impacting how people access the sites. Young people in school taking Wikipedia for granted because they've never known anything different (and not realizing they can help out too). We don't do anything about making video easier to use, and so we miss out on a whole class of educational material. A competitor could build a reading and/or editing interface that is far superior to ours, causing a fork in readers or editors. The rise of more SOPA-like bills could make our operating environment untenable. (These are just topics that were raised that I remember off the top of my head, not a complete list). The discussion was wide-ranging, inconclusive, and was meant to help us think about risks that could impact the direction of WMF activities as well as a kind of strategic planning warm-up. The community council was not a long discussion, and was similarly inconclusive; it was mostly along the lines of what Lodewijk said, that this seems to be a need that is long-standing in our community. Other trustees may have more details to add :) best, -- phoebe On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 12:49 PM, Michael Peel &lt;email(a)mikepeel.net&gt; wrote: -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers <at> gmail.com *