hi all,

this is an update on the work of the Board Governance Committee over the last months that some of you have requested.

Among other things, the Board Governance Committee has worked on: - Creating the Board’s competence matrix[1], - Discussing the most critical needs for the expert seats, and proposing technology (deep, intimate understanding of how software works, possibly coming from open-source involvement), as well as global organization and community management and change in non-profit world as the major ones, - Discussing the calendar for the vacant expert seat recruitment, and adjusting to the WMF HR staff available support (scheduled to start in August), - Discussing the vacant community seats solutions (and proposing shortening the terms and having community elections in early 2017, so that the elected members would join the Board at April meeting), - Appointing the new Election Committee (and proposing a process in which the further development of this body will be partially transferred to the community), - Reviewing the possibilities for an external Board review (as recommended by the FDC), - Increasing transparency (a set of concrete measures soon to be put forward by Dariusz and Maria, following several discussions), - Introducing a workshop[2] for external Board members about wiki-culture and copyright (topics picked by the community[3]) at Wikimania, - Conducting an internal Board[4] survey about our understanding of our tasks, governance practices, etc. - Discussing general governance improvements[5] for the Board.

We have also considered introducing one centralized place on meta for Board-community communication, but after discussion with the staff we have concluded that we're going to rely on small incremental improvements in communication first.

The remaining topics still include: - the Advisory Board redesign/restart, - the Board's composition and structure analysis, - possible external reviews or consulting, - introducing workshops on best governance practices (and other topics of interest) for Board members, - other governance improvements and tasks.

let me know if you have any questions!

dj "pundit"

(current Trustee and BGC member, passing BGC chairing to Natalia Tymkiv)

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_Governance_Commit... [2] https://wikimania2016.wikimedia.org/wiki/Training_sessions/Proposals/Wikimed... [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_Governance_Commit... [4] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2016-03 [5] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board_Governance_Recommendations_(April...)