Delphine Ménard wrote: 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. -- Robert Scott Horning

On 6/15/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning(a)netzero.net> wrote: [snip] [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] [snip] Where has the foundation treated the community like the enemy? Which community? Which comments? What could have been done better?

On 6/15/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning(a)netzero.net> wrote: [snip] [snip] 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] 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 -- ~notafish

Robert Scott Horning 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