On 6/14/06, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/13/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
I agree completely. I resist very strongly any separation of
foundation
and community.
How about a different point of view? Separated in concept, but united in practice. I am aware it sounds very inclining to a certain cultural background, but still daresay this idea itself can be applied to many cases, specially we need to cooperate with each other.
Separation itself is nothing wrong. Separation without communication nor collaboration is bad, or useless at best, assuredly.
If there is no separation, we require never two words or concepts: in practice the community isn't involved into a certain matter which the foundation cares for, and vice versa, I assume. If that sounds too metaphisical or awkward, we might need another terminology, like
distinction, instead of separation.
Delphine: Thank you for that. This is exactly what I think we should tend towards.
'Separated in concept, united in practice'. It would have been a great subtitle for an Alexander Dumas novel. ;) Aphaia or Delphine can one of you explain what this means?
Let me explain what I meant with the statement that Jimmy commented on. I'll try not to repeat myself too much, but rather to expand and explain.
The point made earlier about separation of foundation and community refers to posts where people argue that the foundation has different responsibilities, different legal liabilities, by necessity a different modus operandi and even a different set of objectives, other than those of the community. (paraphrasing here) Some made it sound as if the community should mind its own business and let the foundation do what it knows is best for all of us. (again paraphrasing) This is what I and others objected to. We should not think of a foundation and a community as separate entities, with operations that are mutually unconnected. I'm glad Jimmy endorsed this view, though I am not sure we agree on the finer details, where decision making dynamics are involved.
Of course foundation and community are not identical. Not a dualistic wave/particle entity. They are different. The foundation and the board take responsibility for judicial and administrative obligations and committments that need to be dealt with daily. By paying our bills, signing contracts, guarding our rights, etc they serve the community. That is all fine with me.
The crux of the debate as I see it is: Can the foundation have an autonomous role in defining Wikimedias long term goals, and even more important the final say? Can the CEO and/or the board formulate Wikimedia long term strategy by itself, decide which deals to strike with what kind of corporations on which terms, and which grants to accept on which terms, without clear, written and binding general principles a.k.a. mandate from the community? Can the board appoint members from outside the community (still hypothetical but hinted to by Jimmy) and explain afterwards that this was the perfect candidate (compare CEO), or should the board use reason and arguments to convince the community of its wise proposal and possibly stand corrected ?
Whether discussions on this list are representative for the vox populi is anyones guess. If they are, about half of the community would like to see fundamental changes in how that same community is represented. Of course everyone may be tempted to think that the silent majority approves current status quo by not complaining, but equally so one can think it approves current criticism by not countering it. The silent majority is like a portrait that smiles at you from every corner of the room, but to everyone else at the same time. There is only one way to know what the community really wants: let's ask them explicitly. Either by survey or plebiscite. It would strengthen the sense of community if people cannot only express an opinion (survey) but really exert influence (plebiscite0. Of course the usual precautions against sock puppetry apply.
I'm in favour of chosen representatives, checks and balances, written procedures, formally approved strategy. all of this without becoming overly bureaucratic. Some slowing down might be inevitable but might be a good thing when broad outlines are to be defined. I'll happily trust the board to translate these strategical community approved outlines into daily tactical decisons, and answer the community about them afterwards.
Erik Zachte
On 6/15/06, Erik Zachte erikzachte@infodisiac.com wrote:
On 6/14/06, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/13/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
I agree completely. I resist very strongly any separation of
foundation
and community.
How about a different point of view? Separated in concept, but united in practice. I am aware it sounds very inclining to a certain cultural background, but still daresay this idea itself can be applied to many cases, specially we need to cooperate with each other.
Separation itself is nothing wrong. Separation without communication nor collaboration is bad, or useless at best, assuredly.
If there is no separation, we require never two words or concepts: in practice the community isn't involved into a certain matter which the foundation cares for, and vice versa, I assume. If that sounds too metaphisical or awkward, we might need another terminology, like
distinction, instead of separation.
Delphine: Thank you for that. This is exactly what I think we should tend towards.
'Separated in concept, united in practice'. It would have been a great subtitle for an Alexander Dumas novel. ;) Aphaia or Delphine can one of you explain what this means?
To make a long story short, as I see it (and as I have made clear in an earlier post) the Foundation should *not* be ruled byt he community, no more than the community should be ruled by the Foundation. Separation as Aphaia put it and to which I agreed means that those from the community who wish to participate in the organisation are more than welcome, but that the community does not have the high hand on things it cannot be held responsible for. I said it earlier and I'll say it again, a great editor in any of the Wikimedia projects does *not* make a great board member/commity member/CEO/accountant, you name it. And the trend as I see it today is that people in the community judge by what they can see. And if the community is not involved in Foundation day-to-day business, they only see how many edits a person has. Not what their real skills are.
Delphine
PS. Erik, if you could *please* stop breaking the threads, it would be much appreciated.
Delphine Ménard wrote:
To make a long story short, as I see it (and as I have made clear in an earlier post) the Foundation should *not* be ruled byt he community, no more than the community should be ruled by the Foundation. Separation as Aphaia put it and to which I agreed means that those from the community who wish to participate in the organisation are more than welcome, but that the community does not have the high hand on things it cannot be held responsible for. I said it earlier and I'll say it again, a great editor in any of the Wikimedia projects does *not* make a great board member/commity member/CEO/accountant, you name it. And the trend as I see it today is that people in the community judge by what they can see. And if the community is not involved in Foundation day-to-day business, they only see how many edits a person has. Not what their real skills are.
Delphine
One thing that democratic institutions do very well with is to get a diversity of opinions regarding a topic. And to get opinions from new or shifting viewpoints earlier than most other types of governance units.
The Wikimedia Foundation needs to decide who their "constituants" really are in this case. In other words, who do the board members really represent, and what is their purpose in being? And what is the role of the WMF in regards to the Wikimedia projects?
The concern is that perhaps the board is becomming too insular and not really paying attention to the participants on the various Wikimedia projects. My response to the above questions, from my viewpoint, is that the WMF exists as a support to see that the content on the various Wikimedia projects is developed in a consistant and organized fashion. And to maintain the servers and other physical and intangable assetts that belong to the "community" that is putting all of this together. They also exist to keep the needs of potential readers of Wikimedia materials and content in mind, as there certainly exists an audience of people who read Wikipedia but don't actively work in the creation of content.
One other constituancy group that is not often mentioned here is also the MediaWiki software developers. While the software does exist to serve and help develop the community, there is a somewhat seperate community of people who are developing the software running all of this, and that is indeed a seperate "product" that adds to the dynamics of the WMF, and something that must be managed as well by the WMF board. With very few exceptions these are all volunteers and are just as valuable as people writing Wikipedia articles. And requires volunteer management experience.
The extra dynamic here is that there do exist multiple projects, and in essense seperate communities, including different groups speaking multiple languages. fr.wikibooks has a very different group of people than zh.wikipedia, for example. The WMF needs to cope with the needs and wants of both groups, and that isn't easy.
What the WMF does not represent is publishers who distribute Wikimedia project content, ISPs, or corporate sponsors, including grant agencies, nor any government. It also doesn't represent critics of Wikipedia, nor people who feel they have been wronged by Wikimedia projects (read John Siegenthaler here), nor does it represent members of the popular press even though nobody likes bad publicity.
To this end, the view that there is some sort of seperation from the community and that there are two distinct entities, the foundation and the user/contributors is a falsehood. The real truth is that there are a huge number of people that the WMF represents, and that they can't be beholden to a single group, such as en.wikipedia. While Wikipedia certainly is the flagship project, the actual percentage of the total amount of Wikimedia content that is hosted on en.wikipedia, along with the number of participants, is a minority. And a shrinking minority at that. If you believe that decisions reached on the Village Pump of en.wikipedia represent the whole of Wikimedia projects, you have lost sight of many other participants that never get to those pages, even on Wikipedia.
My concern is that some recent actions, notably the checkuser policies but other issues as well, have ignored these other constituant groups and may cause some additional problems in the future if they are ignored. I'm not saying that it is easy to get in touch with such a diverse group of individuals, but it is worth it to at least try. Board members that are appointed because of close ties to current board members or because they are politically connected by whatever term you want to use to describe the politics, may not have the best interests of the Wikimedia projects at heart. At the very least there needs to be a way to get a voice heard, and to have an avenue of appeal if you don't think something is working out, or that some sort of injustice is happening.
Treating the user community as the enemy is going to seriously cause problems in the future if it is not addressed right away. And some recent comments on this mailing list have made me feel like just that.
On 6/15/06, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
Treating the user community as the enemy is going to seriously cause problems in the future if it is not addressed right away. And some recent comments on this mailing list have made me feel like just that.
On my part I haven't heard Delphine taking the community as an enemy to the foundation, and thank her for her plain but well thought expantion of my brief comment. Also personally I'm grad to see a reader who has grasped what I had meant.
Separation, or distinction is itself not evil. To respond Erik Sachte, I thought the two spontenous individual bodies, never mixed, but working together, both attempting to listen to the other for further understanding and cooperation.
On 6/15/06, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote: [snip]
The concern is that perhaps the board is becomming too insular and not really paying attention to the participants on the various Wikimedia projects.
[snip]
Can you cite examples?
It is my belief that the board and other people deeply involved in the foundation are currently mismanaging their time by spending far too much of it being concerned with the potential reaction of every random non-productive armchair expert who inevitably crops up to call foul on any possible idea.
It's a lot easier to speculate on what we could and should do than to actually do it... and it's a lot easier to naysay than to act. It's nearly impossible to find a solution to anything complex without at least a few people writing kiloword screeds on the great evil of the solution. We must stop allowing ourselves to be victimized by people whose only skills are complaint and speculation and whose only assets are time and a desire to hear themselves talk.
[snip]
Treating the user community as the enemy is going to seriously cause problems in the future if it is not addressed right away. And some recent comments on this mailing list have made me feel like just that.
[snip]
Where has the foundation treated the community like the enemy? Which community? Which comments? What could have been done better?
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Can you cite examples?
It is my belief that the board and other people deeply involved in the foundation are currently mismanaging their time by spending far too much of it being concerned with the potential reaction of every random non-productive armchair expert who inevitably crops up to call foul on any possible idea.
It's a lot easier to speculate on what we could and should do than to actually do it... and it's a lot easier to naysay than to act. It's nearly impossible to find a solution to anything complex without at least a few people writing kiloword screeds on the great evil of the solution. We must stop allowing ourselves to be victimized by people whose only skills are complaint and speculation and whose only assets are time and a desire to hear themselves talk.
Can you cite examples?
Many of the people complaining on this list about board management are precisely the same people who have been actually doing things to advance our projects. Erik Moeller is to a large extent responsible for the existence and organization of both Wikinews and the Wikimedia Commons. Tim Starling is one of the major MediaWiki developers. And so on.
Does your comment have any substance besides a gratuitous and unfounded personal attack on people you happen to disagree with?
-Mark
On 6/15/06, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote: [snip]
The Wikimedia Foundation needs to decide who their "constituants" really are in this case. In other words, who do the board members really represent, and what is their purpose in being? And what is the role of the WMF in regards to the Wikimedia projects?
[snip]
To this end, the view that there is some sort of seperation from the community and that there are two distinct entities, the foundation and the user/contributors is a falsehood. The real truth is that there are a huge number of people that the WMF represents, and that they can't be beholden to a single group, such as en.wikipedia. While Wikipedia certainly is the flagship project, the actual percentage of the total amount of Wikimedia content that is hosted on en.wikipedia, along with the number of participants, is a minority. And a shrinking minority at that. If you believe that decisions reached on the Village Pump of en.wikipedia represent the whole of Wikimedia projects, you have lost sight of many other participants that never get to those pages, even on Wikipedia.
I suppose this is a general *you*, but I'll answer for myself. As a French writing to you in English, living in Germany, chair of the chapters committee, member of three chapters, admin on three projects (fr, commons and meta), I am conceited enough to believe I am probably the last person who could be accused of believing that the English village Pump represents the whole of the Wikimedia projects. No more than the French, the Wiktionnary village Pump, or the Commons one.
This said, what I understand of your comment, is that the Foundation is not heeding the people who never express their opinion, may it be on these lists, on the village pumps, or even on their user pages. Well, I am not sure I get how the Foundation is always the one supposed to be fishing for comments. Actually, I believe our board members/committees have done a pretty damn good job at trying to get feedback. If they don't get it, there comes a time in life where you just need to act. So they did.
And here, I mean feedback as a whole, ie. if *the community* wants to have a say in the appointment of the next accountant, we organize ourselves and make sure a proposal/counter-proposal is proposed to the board for review. Right now, all I see are individuals (and I include myself in those) who are expressing their opinions.
In my opinion, saying that the WMF represents the users *is* the falsehood. If we kept it on a strict legal level, authors that contribute their content under the GFDL are *not* assigning rights to the WMF, or asking the WMF to represent them in any way. Now we might argue that image (PR) and such are a form of representation. Well, it is not clear to me, and I believe it is not clear to anyone so far, or we wouldn't have this conversation.
[snip]
Treating the user community as the enemy is going to seriously cause problems in the future if it is not addressed right away. And some recent comments on this mailing list have made me feel like just that.
In the end, I find it rather amusing that it is always the *poor community* (of which I feel a member, just in case that is not clear) that is being treated as an ennemy. After threads on end on the subject, it rather looks to me as the Foundation is the one that's considered the ennemy.
I believe I have always been an advocate of stronger separation (read: make sure everybody knows exactly what they have to do, what they are responsible for) AND better communication and collaboration.
It seems to me an easy exercise to talk of *the community* when nobody seems to have a real understanding of who/what *the community* is. Is it you? Is it me? Is it us? And if it is us, who is *us*?
Delphine
Delphine Ménard wrote:
Treating the user community as the enemy is going to seriously cause problems in the future if it is not addressed right away. And some recent comments on this mailing list have made me feel like just that.
In the end, I find it rather amusing that it is always the *poor community* (of which I feel a member, just in case that is not clear) that is being treated as an ennemy. After threads on end on the subject, it rather looks to me as the Foundation is the one that's considered the ennemy.
I believe I have always been an advocate of stronger separation (read: make sure everybody knows exactly what they have to do, what they are responsible for) AND better communication and collaboration.
It seems to me an easy exercise to talk of *the community* when nobody seems to have a real understanding of who/what *the community* is. Is it you? Is it me? Is it us? And if it is us, who is *us*?
Delphine
I hope this last comment doesn't get out of context here. I was not trying to imply that you, Delphine, are considering the group of users contributing to Wikimedia projects to be the enemy. However, I have seen this sort of attitude in many different situations, where indeed this is the case in terms of actions and words spoken by those in leadership or authority positions. This is the same as police officers seperating themselves from the citizens they serve, never trusting a person that comes under their gaze and thinking everybody is a criminal suspect just waiting to do them in. Or perhaps a fast-food burger restraunt employee who doesn't reall care about the customers and does all kinds of things like serve frozen patties and spit into their drinks. This is a danger in almost any situation and something to constantly be under guard to watch for and avoid if possible.
As far as who is "The Community", I hope I answered that in my previous post, and you did respond to that somewhat, Delphine. Thanks. I was trying to note that there have been some situations where the Village Pump on en.wikipedia was considered to be the final word, especially for setting preceedence. While some issues do seem to come up on en.wikipedia before they hit other projects and languages simply because of the sheer size of that community, other approachs and solutions to some of those problems have come up on the other projects (including other languages) where the solution is quite a bit different in the environment of those other projects. And bottom-up solutions to many of the problems for Wikimedia projects can be found, where micromanagement is not necessary.
Here is a summary of what I consider the "community" to watch for:
1) Editor/Contributors of Wikimedia projects, including all sister projects and in all languages, and projects like Meta, Commons, etc. 2) Software developers for MediaWiki software and related systems that help run the interfaces and equipment hosting Wikimedia projects. 3) Volunteer system administrators of the physical equiment (not always the same as #2, although there is some significnat overlap here) 4) Readers and consumers of information produced by Wikimedia projects
That is a very tall order to fill, to take care of all of these groups, and in that sense you are correct that the board represents much more than just the Wikimedia editor/contributors, who are likely to be the most vocal and active of the above four categories in term of policy decisions. I've seen Wikipedia quoted in my dead-tree local newspaper (by the newspaper editor!), so the influence of readers is much more diverse and widespread than most people even on this list are willing to admit. Obviously some decisions are going to, by necessity, be made that one of these groups, the editor/contributors, are not going like or approve of.
A "fifth" component of the community that may or may not be established but also watch for is the professional staff that is likely to develop with the Wikimedia Foundation. There already are some employees of the WMF, and they will have a very different perspective on how things should operate as well based on their own experiences and dealings with the rest of the Wikimedia community. The WMF board is also going to be made aware of the needs of this group as well, although how much weight each group is given is going to be up to the temperment of the members of the WMF board.
I am not implying that the current board is out of touch. Far from it. Just that this is something to be ever vigiliant about and to remember and watch for, to see that it doesn't get unbalanced.
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
Delphine Ménard wrote:
Great work both of you!
Some really good analysis of constituent groups. We (anybody bored and willing to volunteer if they thought it might get used or be valuable sometime somewhere) could probably cut and pasted and have an entire section of a business operations plan or marketing analaysis a quarter to half finished.
Anybody know if the new Interim Director is bringing his own ops plan or likes to develop his own in private?
Last time I initiated business planning at meta I was designated a troll so expect no dangerous unilateral initiative from me.
I will merely keep this as a reference or maybe use some of it for a lession plan or two at Wikiversity.
Thanks folks!
regards, lazyquasar
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
Delphine Ménard wrote:
To make a long story short, as I see it (and as I have made clear in an earlier post) the Foundation should *not* be ruled byt he community, no more than the community should be ruled by the Foundation. Separation as Aphaia put it and to which I agreed means that those from the community who wish to participate in the organisation are more than welcome, but that the community does not have the high hand on things it cannot be held responsible for. I said it earlier and I'll say it again, a great editor in any of the Wikimedia projects does *not* make a great board member/commity member/CEO/accountant, you name it. And the trend as I see it today is that people in the community judge by what they can see. And if the community is not involved in Foundation day-to-day business, they only see how many edits a person has. Not what their real skills are.
Delphine
One thing that democratic institutions do very well with is to get a diversity of opinions regarding a topic. And to get opinions from new or shifting viewpoints earlier than most other types of governance units.
The Wikimedia Foundation needs to decide who their "constituants" really are in this case. In other words, who do the board members really represent, and what is their purpose in being? And what is the role of the WMF in regards to the Wikimedia projects?
The concern is that perhaps the board is becomming too insular and not really paying attention to the participants on the various Wikimedia projects. My response to the above questions, from my viewpoint, is that the WMF exists as a support to see that the content on the various Wikimedia projects is developed in a consistant and organized fashion. And to maintain the servers and other physical and intangable assetts that belong to the "community" that is putting all of this together. They also exist to keep the needs of potential readers of Wikimedia materials and content in mind, as there certainly exists an audience of people who read Wikipedia but don't actively work in the creation of content.
One other constituancy group that is not often mentioned here is also the MediaWiki software developers. While the software does exist to serve and help develop the community, there is a somewhat seperate community of people who are developing the software running all of this, and that is indeed a seperate "product" that adds to the dynamics of the WMF, and something that must be managed as well by the WMF board. With very few exceptions these are all volunteers and are just as valuable as people writing Wikipedia articles. And requires volunteer management experience.
The extra dynamic here is that there do exist multiple projects, and in essense seperate communities, including different groups speaking multiple languages. fr.wikibooks has a very different group of people than zh.wikipedia, for example. The WMF needs to cope with the needs and wants of both groups, and that isn't easy.
What the WMF does not represent is publishers who distribute Wikimedia project content, ISPs, or corporate sponsors, including grant agencies, nor any government. It also doesn't represent critics of Wikipedia, nor people who feel they have been wronged by Wikimedia projects (read John Siegenthaler here), nor does it represent members of the popular press even though nobody likes bad publicity.
To this end, the view that there is some sort of seperation from the community and that there are two distinct entities, the foundation and the user/contributors is a falsehood. The real truth is that there are a huge number of people that the WMF represents, and that they can't be beholden to a single group, such as en.wikipedia. While Wikipedia certainly is the flagship project, the actual percentage of the total amount of Wikimedia content that is hosted on en.wikipedia, along with the number of participants, is a minority. And a shrinking minority at that. If you believe that decisions reached on the Village Pump of en.wikipedia represent the whole of Wikimedia projects, you have lost sight of many other participants that never get to those pages, even on Wikipedia.
My concern is that some recent actions, notably the checkuser policies but other issues as well, have ignored these other constituant groups and may cause some additional problems in the future if they are ignored. I'm not saying that it is easy to get in touch with such a diverse group of individuals, but it is worth it to at least try. Board members that are appointed because of close ties to current board members or because they are politically connected by whatever term you want to use to describe the politics, may not have the best interests of the Wikimedia projects at heart. At the very least there needs to be a way to get a voice heard, and to have an avenue of appeal if you don't think something is working out, or that some sort of injustice is happening.
Treating the user community as the enemy is going to seriously cause problems in the future if it is not addressed right away. And some recent comments on this mailing list have made me feel like just that.
Many of the excellent points raised above by Roberth are often addressed in a business plan or operations plans. Most not small U.S. business entities have an annual update process whereby these plans are reviewed, adjusted, modifed to reflect the organizations current intentions. The process is used to update and propagate critical information between all levels and often even mere stakeholders. The plans are typically not intended as straightjackets rather they are a snapshot at a moment in time of the best summary of itself the organization can provide to all its diverse elements. Another similar tool is a stakeholders report that summarizes past periods performance compared to the planned performance and analyzes causes or sources of any major deviation and appropriate adjustments if any.
Does such a beast exist somewhere publicly available?
regards, lazyquasar
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org