Gregory Maxwell wrote:

Sorry Fred, I think you misunderstood Angela's email. I believe this was an entree intended for someone specifically, at least thats the impression I got, and the email is just a mere polite pretext. Is this not the case?

Not at all! We are genuinely interested in assessing who from the community would be available and interested.

Since Angela has been advocating a high degree of openness, why don't we start with this request? When did random requests on troll infested mailinglists become an appropriate way to select board members?

This is foundation-l, where we discuss the foundation. The board has expressed an interest in having more people involved on the board, and would like a general indication of interest in serving, both from people who are willing to go through the election process to be a "community representative" in the formal sense, and also those who have professional or other qualifications but who might not have the fame or popularity within the community to go through that process.

--Jimbo

On 6/6/06, Lord Voldemort lordbishopvoldemort@gmail.com wrote:

I think before (or maybe along with) this call, you need to specify the requirements of Board members. Some people may not understand fully the time requirements

It's hard to say what the time requirements will be since a lot of what the Board previously did is being decentralised though committees, or handed over to staff, such as the future CEO.

Angela.

On 6/5/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:

This is a semi-digression, but one thing that would also be nice to know is how to get on those (new or old) committees, and what sorts of time and expertise they require. I know I'd be willing to devote some time to a committee if it aligned with my interests and expertise, but the process is currently a bit murky to me.

Hi Mark, you can find all existing committees listed at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_committees

Not all committees have their details or procedures outlined yet (I'm not sure if some of them are operational), but the following committee pages detail how their membership is managed: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special_projects_committee http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapters_committee/Rules_of_procedure http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_committee

With regards to time, I can only speak for the committee that I'm involved with (the special projects committee), and even still, it really depends on the kind of work that you're interested in doing. Some work is constant (ie evaluating and responding to requests for collaboration, requests to use our content in some way etc.), some work is occasional, like writing grant proposals, but, overall, it's an hour or two per day along with a three hour or so meeting more or less every two weeks. Again, different committees will have different workloads, methods, so it's difficult to say exactly what and how much is involved.

With regards to expertise, that's something that I'd like to get a much better picture of, as we sometimes get proposals for things that we are just not currently equipped to deal with, and it would be good to know who in the community to turn to at times like those. I think I can speak for the whole SPC that we'd love to hear ideas on how to improve this process, get more people involved, and generally get through our burgeoning workload that bit faster and more efficiently.

Cormac

Jimmy Wales wrote:

valdelli@bluemail.ch wrote:

...

The community could accept only representative members voted with normal procedure.

Of course.

But community vote is not the only way to get board members. We have some very good board candidates who are not famous in the community and who could bring to the table professional expertise that we greatly need, but who would not put themselves through the troll wars of an election.

This sounds reasonable, although I think they're not entirely different things, if we're speaking in an informal sense (which is really what will dominate community-board relations more than the formal setup will). It's possible, for example, that there are people who would actually prevail in an election, but are deterred from running because of the election process. If they were appointed, those people could be said in some tea-leaf-reading sense to actually represent the community. Then there are gradations---people who wouldn't actually win an election, but who are generally respected and don't engender much objection; then unknown people; and finally people who are actively disliked by a large segment of the community.

We could try some variation on some of the consensus-style methods we tend to use on the encyclopedia. For example, solicit nominations, possibly in private, and then privately contact the people nominated to ask if they'd accept a position if chosen. Then make a (public) list of potential candidates, and solicit feedback on them, possibly privately-expressed feedback so people don't have to publicly attack anyone. Then appoint the people who have reasonably good consensus support. Assuming the feedback is indeed expressed in private, and the list is more than a handful of people, those not selected shouldn't really be negatively impacted (not being selected for 2 slots out of a list of, say, 15 isn't particularly bad).

This is a little trickier than the way we do it on articles, because to avoid public flamewars and driving people off, much of it would have to be done in private communications, and therefore the decision of what constitutes consensus would have to be made by whoever reads those emails. It could be the current board, or someone they designate. Technically/formally, that would essentially be the board appointing new members itself, but if you five agree to follow some rough community consensus in making those appointments, I'm pretty sure you're not going to actually lie to us and claim someone had consensus support when they didn't, even if we have no way of verifying that.

Anyway that's a pretty off-the-top-of-my-head outline of how to design a system that merges community consensus and sensitivity towards potential members who aren't politicians, so I'm sure there are better ways of doing it. I do think some sort of balancing of those goals is necessary, though.

-Mark

Delirium wrote:

Jimmy Wales wrote:

...

valdelli@bluemail.ch wrote:

...

The community could accept only representative members voted with normal procedure.

Of course.

But community vote is not the only way to get board members. We have some very good board candidates who are not famous in the community and who could bring to the table professional expertise that we greatly need, but who would not put themselves through the troll wars of an election.

This sounds reasonable, although I think they're not entirely different things, if we're speaking in an informal sense (which is really what will dominate community-board relations more than the formal setup will). It's possible, for example, that there are people who would actually prevail in an election, but are deterred from running because of the election process. If they were appointed, those people could be said in some tea-leaf-reading sense to actually represent the community. Then there are gradations---people who wouldn't actually win an election, but who are generally respected and don't engender much objection; then unknown people; and finally people who are actively disliked by a large segment of the community.

We could try some variation on some of the consensus-style methods we tend to use on the encyclopedia. For example, solicit nominations, possibly in private, and then privately contact the people nominated to ask if they'd accept a position if chosen. Then make a (public) list of potential candidates, and solicit feedback on them, possibly privately-expressed feedback so people don't have to publicly attack anyone. Then appoint the people who have reasonably good consensus support. Assuming the feedback is indeed expressed in private, and the list is more than a handful of people, those not selected shouldn't really be negatively impacted (not being selected for 2 slots out of a list of, say, 15 isn't particularly bad).

This is a little trickier than the way we do it on articles, because to avoid public flamewars and driving people off, much of it would have to be done in private communications, and therefore the decision of what constitutes consensus would have to be made by whoever reads those emails. It could be the current board, or someone they designate. Technically/formally, that would essentially be the board appointing new members itself, but if you five agree to follow some rough community consensus in making those appointments, I'm pretty sure you're not going to actually lie to us and claim someone had consensus support when they didn't, even if we have no way of verifying that.

Anyway that's a pretty off-the-top-of-my-head outline of how to design a system that merges community consensus and sensitivity towards potential members who aren't politicians, so I'm sure there are better ways of doing it. I do think some sort of balancing of those goals is necessary, though.

-Mark

Your email is very interesting Mark.

Before we recruit a new trustee, we should consider the following points carefully: * What sort of person we are looking for, and what skills, qualities or experience do they need? * How will a new potential trustee benefit our organisation? (with perhaps a list of benefits / advantages and decide if a candidate will meet these.)

To answer these questions, we might look at this list of 12 main roles for the board

What do trustees do?

Trustee boards have twelve main roles:

1: Set and maintain vision, mission and values

Generally, I think this will be best done by community members.

2: Develop long-term strategy with the chief executive officer

This might require big shot outsiders, people with a large vision and bringing insight we do not necessarily have in our organiation

3: Establish and monitor policies to govern organisational activity (guidance of staff, reporting policies, monitoring policies, code of conduct, conflict of interest policies)

These might be best done by people who already know a bit about non profit organisations.

4: Set up employment procedures, plus recruit and select new trustees board

again, might be better to know non profit organisation, plus human management, organisation skills... and probably to know pretty well the community.

5: Ensure compliance with governing document. In this case... we should first *write* the governing document, which allow us to comply with the charitable goals.

May come from community... or not.

6: Ensure accountability as required by law

Here, a board member will legal experience might be best.

7: Ensure compliance with the law

Same

8: Maintain proper fiscal oversight (securing resources, monitoring spendings, approval of financial statement, budget, fundraising...)

Requires someone experienced on fiscal issues. Probably a big shot might help on this side as well (fundraising) or a bizdev specialists (both are probably not in the community).

9: Select and support the chief executive

Errrrr. Collective role :-)

10: Respect the role of staff. Staff guidelines.

Tricky in an organisation based largely on volunteers

11: Maintain effective board performance

a performant chair might be best here

12: Promote the organisation

Hiya. All big shots and many community members are good at that. So, this is not a major need for the current research of new board members.

---------

if you look at it well, you will see that we probably need one or two big shots to help in particular with vision and fundraising issues (in short, someone with good insight, and who will make the Foundation appears brigther).

We may benefit of professionals who know very well non profit organisations management (may or may not come from outside), finances and legal issues.

This suggests to me we need probably to expand the board from 5 to 9. My best perception of this would be 5-6 from community. And 3-4 outsiders.

I would support Tim resigning as early as possible. I have nothing against him, but we need active board members and he is simply not. Resigning this summer for example.

Wikimania will be the opportunity to meet a lot of people. Last year Wikimania was also that opportunity. We'll also be able to meet outsiders over there, and maybe to consider inviting them on the board.

What I would like to is that we replace Tim with an outsider and add two community people. Or if more board members are replaced, two outsiders and two community people.

But what would be suitable would be to stick to the needs defined above. More help in finances, legal, fundraising, non-profit organisation.

Outsiders will obviously be appointed. For community members, we roughly have 4 solutions * board appoint people (benefit, we are more likely to get people with the best skills compared with what we need. Drawback : see current criticism) * community votes for people (Drawback : less chance to get great people from minority languages or projects. Might miss some great choices.) * community votes per group perhaps, board pick up in the outcome (en.wiki arbitration type). (Drawback : board might be expected to pick up those with highest number of votes anyway) * Board pre-selection, then community vote (Benefit : more likely to get what is truely needed).

To remove the bias of large language groups or large projects and to make elections a less painful system, we might also rely on a system of "grand electeurs" (each language/project nominate a couple of people to vote in their name). The "grand electeurs " group being more likely to elect people based on their participation on Foundation issues, rather than purely on their fame.

On 6/6/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:

To remove the bias of large language groups or large projects and to make elections a less painful system, we might also rely on a system of "grand electeurs" (each language/project nominate a couple of people to vote in their name). The "grand electeurs " group being more likely to elect people based on their participation on Foundation issues, rather than purely on their fame.

I really like this idea, but it will be a tricky work to write down a policy for this kind of elections. This sounds a lot like the US Electoral College (that's where it's come from, I guess), but I think it will give us everything we need : the possibilty for the communities to really express themselves, and the assurance that the electors will have a good knowledge of the Foundation and its works. However, this would mean more wiki-politics. And nobody likes that.

Solensean.

Delirium wrote:

Mathieu Amo wrote:

...

On 6/6/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:

...

To remove the bias of large language groups or large projects and to make elections a less painful system, we might also rely on a system of "grand electeurs" (each language/project nominate a couple of people to vote in their name). The "grand electeurs " group being more likely to elect people based on their participation on Foundation issues, rather than purely on their fame.

I really like this idea, but it will be a tricky work to write down a policy for this kind of elections. This sounds a lot like the US Electoral College (that's where it's come from, I guess), but I think it will give us everything we need : the possibilty for the communities to really express themselves, and the assurance that the electors will have a good knowledge of the Foundation and its works. However, this would mean more wiki-politics. And nobody likes that.

Is the whole issue really a problem? It only would be if everyone votes mainly for "their" people, but I'm not sure that's the case, and instituting a system like that might actually make it happen. When the first board elections were held, for example, Americans made up at least a plurality of those voting, possibly a majority, and yet the two winners were French and British (and the next-most-supported was German).

-Mark

Hoi, Do you believe people know and therefore vote on people "they" do not know .. what would be the difference then between the people they know and what is considered "their" people. So why do you think people will not vote on their people?

When I voted for the board for the first time, I did not know any of the members so I asked "my" people who to vote on. "They" said vote on Angela and vote on Anthere because we certainly need someone who is not English language based. I am still happy with this advise because they became part of "my" board, but I disagree with what you say. It is wishful thinking. Then again, having a two tired system is not necessarily that great an idea either.

Thanks, Gerard

On 6/6/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:

Still... it is significant that the candidate with the most votes is from the language wikipedia which is the largest. Then that the two next candidates were respectively from the second biggest and third biggest languages (as well as in both cases participants to the english speaking version). Would a great italian person, not participating to the english or the french or the german languages have a chance ? Unlikely.

I'd say it's pretty much a requirement that a board member speak the English language fairly well, since this is the language in which the business of the board is conducted. Location is enough of an issue, no sense adding language to the mix.

Of course this doesn't rule out someone who doesn't participate at all in the English language projects. In fact, I suppose it doesn't even rule out someone who doesn't speak English *if* the board wants to spend foundation money hiring a translator. But I do think it makes is "unlikely", as you put it, that someone who doesn't participate at all in the English language projects (or at the very least the mailing lists) would make the best board member.

Maybe if there was already a translation system in place... global-l@wikimedia.org, a tightly moderated mailing list (to keep the traffic low) where every message was translated into 20 languages or so? It's a ways off, at the least.

Anthony

Delirium wrote:

Jimmy Wales wrote:

...

valdelli@bluemail.ch wrote:

...

The community could accept only representative members voted with normal procedure.

Of course.

But community vote is not the only way to get board members. We have some very good board candidates who are not famous in the community and who could bring to the table professional expertise that we greatly need, but who would not put themselves through the troll wars of an election.

This sounds reasonable, although I think they're not entirely different things, if we're speaking in an informal sense (which is really what will dominate community-board relations more than the formal setup will). It's possible, for example, that there are people who would actually prevail in an election, but are deterred from running because of the election process. If they were appointed, those people could be said in some tea-leaf-reading sense to actually represent the community. Then there are gradations---people who wouldn't actually win an election, but who are generally respected and don't engender much objection; then unknown people; and finally people who are actively disliked by a large segment of the community.

We could try some variation on some of the consensus-style methods we tend to use on the encyclopedia. For example, solicit nominations, possibly in private, and then privately contact the people nominated to ask if they'd accept a position if chosen. Then make a (public) list of potential candidates, and solicit feedback on them, possibly privately-expressed feedback so people don't have to publicly attack anyone. Then appoint the people who have reasonably good consensus support. Assuming the feedback is indeed expressed in private, and the list is more than a handful of people, those not selected shouldn't really be negatively impacted (not being selected for 2 slots out of a list of, say, 15 isn't particularly bad).

This is a little trickier than the way we do it on articles, because to avoid public flamewars and driving people off, much of it would have to be done in private communications, and therefore the decision of what constitutes consensus would have to be made by whoever reads those emails. It could be the current board, or someone they designate. Technically/formally, that would essentially be the board appointing new members itself, but if you five agree to follow some rough community consensus in making those appointments, I'm pretty sure you're not going to actually lie to us and claim someone had consensus support when they didn't, even if we have no way of verifying that.

Anyway that's a pretty off-the-top-of-my-head outline of how to design a system that merges community consensus and sensitivity towards potential members who aren't politicians, so I'm sure there are better ways of doing it. I do think some sort of balancing of those goals is necessary, though.

-Mark

---

foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Bah.

In other words we must allow the current stacked Board to stack the future Boards to get the desired responsible, effective, expert Boards.

This begs the question ..... if a stacked Board is the best way to attract the skills and participation needed to effectively manage our communities then why is there a lackluster interest for volunteers with the expertise to participate in current community management activities?

A bigger stacked Board micromanaging the community will leave us in the future right where we are now.

regards, lazyquasar

On Jun 13, 2006, at 12:01 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:

Michael R. Irwin wrote:

...

A bigger stacked Board micromanaging the community will leave us in the future right where we are now.

I'm curious.

What can the board and management (whatever its structure) *do* that will be better?

What are examples of things a hypothetically ideal management would do *right* that the present management is not?

Deal with marshaling assets and legal resources to deal with defamation litigation. Tackle the problem of how to effectively avoid such litigation.

Fred

I suspect this would be a much more productive discussion than constantly claiming the board is "stacked" -- which of course it is, intentionally and openly so. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that; this isn't a democracy, it's a business (even if a non-profit one) and the board's job is not to represent the users, it's to ensure that the company implements its goals (as stated in the bylaws).

If there's something that management needs to *do* which will actually be better served by a new management structure or new board members, then by all means let's talk about it, but let's not put the cart before the horse.

What first, then how.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

---

foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Jun 13, 2006, at 12:27 PM, Lord Voldemort wrote:

On 6/13/06, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:

...

On Jun 13, 2006, at 12:01 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:

...

Michael R. Irwin wrote: What can the board and management (whatever its structure) *do* that will be better?

What are examples of things a hypothetically ideal management would do *right* that the present management is not?

Deal with marshaling assets and legal resources to deal with defamation litigation. Tackle the problem of how to effectively avoid such litigation.

I think this is being handled. And a step forward in this realm is the taking on of Brad as in-house council as communicated late yesterday or early today. Wouldn't you agree? --LV

Of course, but it remains a perpetually unsolved task. No criticism was implied. Just a task that needs work. Brion's question is a setup for this sort of response to any suggestion. I chose to ignore that in order to focus on the part that I see.

Fred

---

foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Jun 13, 2006, at 1:19 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:

Fred Bauder wrote:

...

On Jun 13, 2006, at 12:01 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:

...

What are examples of things a hypothetically ideal management would do *right* that the present management is not?

Deal with marshaling assets and legal resources to deal with defamation litigation. Tackle the problem of how to effectively avoid such litigation.

Is there anything specific in what you'd like to see done about it? What can the management do to make this work more visible or more complete?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

I think the major step leadership can do is to made every administrator and user aware that one of the major risks of being a publisher (which Wikipedia and each user is) is defamation litigation. [[Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons]] is an example of good work in that direction. So, consciousness raising and support for administrators who take the initiative and act boldly in this area (the arbitration committee can help in this now). All this goes toward building a track record of good faith efforts to minimize the consequences and damage that results from vandalism and malicious editing. When we do end up in court it is going to very helpful to be able to document the policies and actions we took to minimize and control damage resulting from defamation.

Also we need to start lining up legal resources for every language and jurisdiction on Earth. If someone is libeled in the Finnish Wikipedia, what happens? Do we just say, tough, see you in court in Florida? So part of this is public relations. Being able to quickly apologize in Finnish might be very helpful.

And I guess, we need to consider the question raised by the Siegenthaler incident and focused on by Brandt: the degree of our responsibility for the anonymous malicious editor. The legal defense that we are not a publisher, nor are we responsible for identifying the person who made the malicious edit might be effective, but that is very like keeping a stray dog around and when it bits someone, saying, "not my dog".

Fred

---

foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Brion Vibber wrote:

Michael R. Irwin wrote:

...

A bigger stacked Board micromanaging the community will leave us in the future right where we are now.

I'm curious.

What can the board and management (whatever its structure) *do* that will be better?

There were some other posts that had some interesting ideas so I will be concise and off the cuff.

The Board and Management could acknowledge that the Projects manage themselves according to approved procedures and core values and focus on delivering a robust, adequate infrastructure. If a problem is identified the Board or manager should have a project point of contact .... say a project mailing list ???? where they can go to request appropriate attention.

By placing the burden on the Board, management, and/or employees to come convince consensus driven, roughly democratic groups of interested volunteers there is a problem to be resolved our project leadership, local expertise, and community structures would regain some relevance.

The Board could respond in a timely manner to project proposals and other activities requested from the communities of volunteers. The easiest way to kill any initiative in any organization is to simply keep iteratively requesting unjustifed rework. Wikiversity is basically defunct via this technique.

Any decent secretary or executive assistant could set up a suspense prioritized action queue and coordinate emails between the Board members so that any given activity that was accepted for action by the Board goes back out with a decision within a reasonable period of time. Say a month. This assumes that communications procedures are nailed down and followed by the Board Members.

What are examples of things a hypothetically ideal management would do *right* that the present management is not?

Eliminate uncertainty by making decisions in accordance with due process. Notice this requires some due process to be defined. Wikiversity has been blindsided repeatedly after it tackled new requirements levied by the Board. Nobody likes to play rigged games where others can change the rules arbitrarily.

I suspect this would be a much more productive discussion than constantly claiming the board is "stacked" -- which of course it is, intentionally and openly so. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that; this isn't a democracy, it's a business (even if a non-profit one) and the board's job is not to represent the users, it's to ensure that the company implements its goals (as stated in the bylaws).

I disagree. It is predominantly a participatory informal "democracy/committee" process in the projects and the volunteers in many cases are voting with their feet and manhours. Our micromanagers cry here on the mailing list that nobody wants to participate or help do the drudge work. Apparently nobody wants to preemptively participate in effective policy making rather than wait and come cry about decisions when they are finally made by somebody else. Basically the projects have no way to ratify any policy that cannot be arbitrary overturned.

Further, there were a lot of people who donated a lot of time before Jimbo stacked the Board. He was not the only stakeholder or philanthropist with a vested interest at the time of that unilateral action. Like it or fork it is not an appropriate response when other stakeholders cannot match the hardware or bandwidth requirements. Great sound bite though.

A further problem is that the bylaws were written to express Jimbo's goals, not those of the community at large. People keep claiming there is no cabal. I would very interested in exactly how many people participated in filling out the initial paperwork for the Foundation. Further, it is Jimbo and only Jimbo who interprets those goals. Wikiversity is a natural fit with the existing projects and the slogans and bylaws yet it is not being implemented despite overwhelming community support.

If there's something that management needs to *do* which will actually be better served by a new management structure or new board members, then by all means let's talk about it, but let's not put the cart before the horse.

What first, then how.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

What would be a redefinition of our concepts of customers and suppliers. The projects are the Wikimedia Foundation's customers who create the information the Foundation wishes to be delivered worldwide to other customers/users. Yet the projects are treated as property which can be controlled by Board.

The Foundation needs to manage the infrastructure and let the projects manage themselves. The large successful projects will fall right in line with the overall principals of neutrality and freedom of information because it was the successful articulation/evolution of these that feuled Wikipedia's explosive growth. The projects that drift inappropriately will fail and fade. I agree that the Foundation must enforce the core principals that were articulated to receive project approval for Foundation hosting but this must be seen as an impersonal, neutral, enforcement by the Foundation, not a possibly arbitrary or biased or uninformed judgement by a single individual.

Standard tasks should be defined where possible with specific scopes and procedures. People like credit. An effective manager should be able to devise a way to give credit to the volunteers or paid staff as they completet the tasks he has prioritized or scheduled.

Let us consider the old saw: lead, follow or get out of the way. A problem right now is that many of the volunteers have little or no idea when "leadership" at the top Foundation level has gotten out of the way. Every thing slows or stalls until somebody invites leadership to come microdecide and as a result the Board gets ever more overloaded.

How is an interesting question.

Unstacking the Board would immediately solve many problems at the strategic organizational level. It would restore credibility to the Board with some factions while reassuring the projects that there was truly an entity that could restrain Jimbo from running amok on Wikibooks.

It would also begin to define the Foundation as an entity independent of Jimbo that will be capable of surviving indefinately. Notice this is required to meet future committments to deliver free information made while requesting donations from participants creating and using the information. The Foundation has a clear Fiduciary responsibility to those donors who sent cash in good faith even if it values the time of our other philanthropists at zero responsibility or committment.

regards, lazyquasar

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

What makes you think that the project 'manage themselves'? As far as I can tell many of the projects substantially mismanage themselves. Most of the wikipedias, for example, are loaded with inaccurate and potentially libelous material and the projects have thus far formulated no systematic solution to addressing such quality issues.

Where is this potentially libelous material they are supposedly "loaded" with? If you are making this claim: There have in the past existed a nonzero number of libelous claims in Wikipedia articles, that's certainly a reasonable claim. But to claim they're "loaded" with such material requires some evidence.

As for accuracy, in the first place the projects have relatively good accuracy, as confirmed for example by the _Nature_ review. However, it is widely agreed that we can do a better job labelling which of our articles are in progress and which are "ready" to various degrees, and there are a number of proposals to do so. Since this requires some coding it is indeed possible that the Foundation could help out here by, for example, hiring a coder to implement some features to help make this happen. The fact that we haven't eliminated world hunger and cured cancer all at once doesn't mean that things are being "mismanaged", merely that there remains more to be done.

-Mark

On 6/13/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:

Thirty six presses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scot_Alan_Bittinger

[sigh] Deleted already. As I said.. it's pointless to try to make examples because people just fix them and then we pretend that it's solved... we're so deep into firefighting that we refuse to acknowledge that we have serious systematic problems.

For those who are not enwiki admins, the text was:

== Scot Alan Bittinger == ---- '''Scot Alan Bittinger, is a douchebag .. His mom is cool though ..''' == Pictures == http://www.filelodge.com/files/room14/335815/598456464_l.jpg

The only revision was: 05:55, May 15, 2006 . . Sluggishbizkit

On 6/13/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:

Sure, there are systematic problems with building something of high quality using a wiki.

It's not a fault of wiki

But do you really think the board can do anything to fix them? Moreover, do you think a different board would have fixed the problem you've pointed out by now?

The foundation can help, yes. For example, we could direct our paid developers to create simple tools which help users review. Things like the ill fated 'reviewed revision' which actually work. If the community is unwilling to do this work even when made as easy and efficient as possible, which I expect, then we need to staff up for it.

I don't fault the current board for not doing this yet. I was specifically addressing the claim that the projects correctly manage themselves. They don't.

I have no clue why you attempted that blame the board angle here, because my post had nothing to do with that...

The foundation hasn't solved this yet, but things take time... and perhaps the foundation is somewhat hand-tied right now with this constant worry of having to work with the community for every little thing or suffer the wrath of the perpetually annoyed windbags.

I could fault a lot of people for a lot of things, it's pretty easy to assign blame.. but I wouldn't fault the board for Wikipedia quality problems, at least not directly. ... Faulting them for assigning too much importance to a community which has demonstrated a pervasive unwillingness to behave responsibly? perhaps :)

After seeing Wikipedia in action for so long people tend to forget just how amazing it is. Pretty much anyone can edit pretty much any part of it at any time. It's remarkable that the idea works in the first place.

That has nothing to do with Wikipedia and everything to do with human nature. I was mistaken about this at one point, but SJ clued reminded me of one of the lines Jimbo used to repeat a lot "People are basically good". This why you can park your car on a public street day in and day out and not come out and find it keyed or vandalized every single day.

So basically we've managed to do about as well as human nature would cause us to do as a default. ... and now we sit in awe of our success, and I think thats pretty broken.

On 6/13/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:

I find it strange that you excuse the Foundation for not doing it because "things take time", but this fact is insufficient to explain why the community, despite expending some efforts, has not finished doing it.

Fundamentally I can forgive the Foundation because it hasn't tried to solve this problem. Also, the things that the foundation would need to do are fundamentally different from the work being done by the 'community': Raising money to hire people to do this work when the 'community' is objecting and claiming that they have it under control.

Exactly how is the community working to solve the problem of new articles being created which are never reviewed by anyone involved with the project?

Even things as simple as garbage being added to articles could be improved right away. For example, Article gets moved to Article/development. A copy is made back to article, a template added, page protected. Sitewide JS hacks fix up edit links for most browsers. Done. It's not perfect... but if successful mediawiki could be easily enhanced to support the model. We've been arguing and blowing hot air for at least a *year* on how to solve that problem, yet we've taken nearly no action. No one has come up with a perfect system, or at least if someone has no one has implemented it yet. It's probably no possible to come up with a solution the the community can agree is good because our deadlock prevents us from building the experience needed to build a good solution or even evaluate the qualities of a proposal... In some cases the community is simply terrible at decision making, someone long winded noncontributing naysayer able to come in and disrupt progress.

And I see that I am becoming long winded myself. My apologies, this is my last post to the litst today.

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

On 6/13/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:

No one has come up with a perfect system, or at least if someone has no one has implemented it yet. It's probably no possible to come up with a solution the the community can agree is good because our deadlock prevents us from building the experience needed to build a good solution or even evaluate the qualities of a proposal... In some cases the community is simply terrible at decision making, someone long winded noncontributing naysayer able to come in and disrupt progress.

And I see that I am becoming long winded myself. My apologies, this is my last post to the litst today.

Too bad. Some good information forthcoming.

It seems most people agree that there are many approaches and none of them are totally perfect. Thus our deadlocked discussions.

When we deadlocked in this fashion where I used to work as a project manager we often prototyped several approaches and tried them. We did this even for private sector customers. Then we picked the best selection, combination or threw our hands up and promised to start over in the morning.

Perhaps we should do some prototyping and testing. We may find different groups prefer different methods in different sections of the database with some flash over points that could be defined.

regards, lazyquasar

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

On 6/13/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:

...

Where is this potentially libelous material they are supposedly "loaded" with? If you are making this claim: There have in the past existed a nonzero number of libelous claims in Wikipedia articles, that's certainly a reasonable claim. But to claim they're "loaded" with such material requires some evidence.

Nine presses of random page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrisholme Thirty six presses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scot_Alan_Bittinger

It seems you're unlucky or something, because I just hit random page a full 100 times and found nothing particularly bad.

In any case, I don't think we disagree that there should be a way of tagging pages with their degree of "doneness". I don't see what that has to do with community mismanagement in need of the Foundation to fix it though---the community has in fact proposed doing just that, complete with some detailed proposals, while the Foundation certainly hasn't (see: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_proposals). It hasn't actually happened yet because: 1) it's only been fairly recently (I'd say the last 6 months or so) that it's become a more pressing priority than writing content in the first place; 2) it's a fairly difficult problem to solve without falling into the bottomless pit of complex-but-gameable systems.

That said, I don't object to the Foundation prodding things along, for example by organizing a working group to come up with a more final proposal suitable for implementation. Some coordination across projects would be particularly helpful with that.

-Mark

Michael R. Irwin wrote:

I have been eagerly awaiting Wikiversity for about three years now as it was an obvious synergistic project. I would be curious as to what the real holdup is with it. Are we afraid of hardware or bandwidth limitations? Are a bunch of self motivated learners to potentially radical and threatening to the status quo?

Perhaps the irony is that the board has deliberately chosen not to engage in "top down management" and to let this community "manage itself". This has a lot to recommend it, because the wikiversity proposal is a lot stronger for it.

But if you are really upset that this community-driven process takes so long, then instead of clamoring for the board to not micromanage, you should perhaps ask us to do so. I am quite sure that we could get Wikiversity approved and up and running in 2-3 weeks time, if we chose to run roughshod over the community to do it.

This is actually a very typical scenario, of course.

--Jimbo

Walter van Kalken wrote:

Jimmy Wales wrote:

...

Michael R. Irwin wrote:

...

I have been eagerly awaiting Wikiversity for about three years now as it was an obvious synergistic project. I would be curious as to what the real holdup is with it. Are we afraid of hardware or bandwidth limitations? Are a bunch of self motivated learners to potentially radical and threatening to the status quo?

Perhaps the irony is that the board has deliberately chosen not to engage in "top down management" and to let this community "manage itself". This has a lot to recommend it, because the wikiversity proposal is a lot stronger for it.

But if you are really upset that this community-driven process takes so long, then instead of clamoring for the board to not micromanage, you should perhaps ask us to do so. I am quite sure that we could get Wikiversity approved and up and running in 2-3 weeks time, if we chose to run roughshod over the community to do it.

This is actually a very typical scenario, of course.

Although the community should ideally decide about things it is my feeling that that is more often than not an utopian thought. The problem is everybody tries to throw their opinions in a debate and tries to get attention to these opinions. This usually results in an endless debate. Many debates within our community therefor are already going on for 2,3 or more years. This because some people leave. Some people join and new views are expressed and the same debate is extended again. Because of this we never reach any conclusions to a debate. Which is one of the things that make people very tired of wikimedia (me for instance)

I feel that there are 3 solutions:

1. A top down approach. The community gets x time to debate an issue

(say 1 - 3 months) after that the boards takes this debate into account and makes a decision and that is final

2. A variant of 1) The community appoints 1 or 2 discussionleaders. They

will guide the debate in phases. Thesis->Antithesis etc. And will write a conclusion to the debate at the end. And present this conclusion as the community consensus and the board has to accept this.

3. The least feasible though I think an interesting option. People start

to group themselves in parties and every party has 1 person as its spokesperson in the debate. This means that it will not become a cacophonia of voices and the debate might proceed faster. After 1-3 months the spokespersons should reach a consensus which is acceptable to most.

Hope someone reads this

Waerth/Walter van Kalken _______________________________________________

I read it.

Some mighty fine reasoning.

From my perspective all of these approaches and variations have been implemented from time to time locally so you are spot on.

regards, lazyquasar

Jimmy Wales wrote:

Michael R. Irwin wrote:

...

I have been eagerly awaiting Wikiversity for about three years now as it was an obvious synergistic project. I would be curious as to what the real holdup is with it. Are we afraid of hardware or bandwidth limitations? Are a bunch of self motivated learners to potentially radical and threatening to the status quo?

Perhaps the irony is that the board has deliberately chosen not to engage in "top down management" and to let this community "manage itself". This has a lot to recommend it, because the wikiversity proposal is a lot stronger for it.

But if you are really upset that this community-driven process takes so long, then instead of clamoring for the board to not micromanage, you should perhaps ask us to do so. I am quite sure that we could get Wikiversity approved and up and running in 2-3 weeks time, if we chose to run roughshod over the community to do it.

This is actually a very typical scenario, of course.

Ever consider activating the URLs which we ... sorry God King, you control via the Foundation?

The initial development and prototyping could proceed effectively we could be attracting participation and the Board could make it clear that if the Wikimedia Foundation, or God King, or Community whoever is really the driving force and final say around the Wikimedia organization and community decided against it .... then the database would be backed up and burned on CD or posted for download for any and all who wish to pursue the concept elsewhere. Then a nice clean deactivation and delete of the prototype space could occur.

I am quite sure given the proven talent of our developments and some of your employee something like this is possible on servers the Wikimeda Board of Developers controls.

If it is not possible I would be interested in any perspectives from the Board or the employees or the developers regarding why not. It will be helpful to any future attempts to initialize an equivalent project elsewhere on other assets.

A calender year is not a trivial asset to retirees or people nearing retirement in the U.S. with the kind of expertise we need to succeed with Wikiversity. The average U.S. male kick offs within a few years of retirement. It would be nice if we could keep them around for a few years working for us creating free knowledge content that could be delivered to the rest of the world.

Further, a calender year is not trivial to a starving entrepreneur anywhere on this planet that just needed some information to succeed and feed his family or a sufficient grounding in some relevant area of knowledge or information to get gainful employment in a sweatshop paying something instead of nothing.

As the previously designated troll and not on the current committee appointed by the Board of Directors of the Wikimedia Foundation I hearby request that you direct Brion to active the wiki and URL at the domain wikiversity.org currently controlled by the Wikimedia Foundation at his earliest efficient time on a time and material available no impact to the rest of the operation basis with the clear understanding that if the project is declined for support by the Wikimedia Foundation it will be backed up, posted for download in whatever appropriate compressed format is effective and available, and deleted from Wikimeda Foundation servers.

There. You have a request for action from the bottom. An easy demonstration of bottom up methods in our peer based community and a full CYA for later if the surging naysayers manage to convince the community at large and/or the responsible controlling board members that Wikiversity must not be operated by the Wikimedia Foundation and/or community for whatever prevailing reasons or conclusion that dominate that decision making process.

Finally. We are on parallel top down design, bottom up optimization, experimentation, and initiative destined to meet in the middle under the final say of the Board and/or prevailing factions of the community at large.

Have a nice day.

regards, lazyquaser

Brion Vibber wrote:

Michael R. Irwin wrote:

...

Brion Vibber wrote:

...

What can the board and management (whatever its structure) *do* that will be better?

snip some background

...

I disagree. It is predominantly a participatory informal "democracy/committee" process in the projects and the volunteers in many cases are voting with their feet and manhours.

I disagree with your disagreement here. ;)

The *projects* are participatory informal "democracy/committee" process, but The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is not.

Then they should consider budgeting for an adequate payroll, raise adequate funds, begin defining work processes, and hiring and training staff. Volunteers are not going to do anything for long with which they do not have some kind of input, buyin or warm fuzzy that they are appreciated. Budget for plaques, list the achievements somewhere, coach the paid staff to really appreciate any and all errors as a golden opportunity to help train the volunteer staff while getting away from their normal duties ... paid recess! Many options have been previously devised, some time googling or yacking aimlessly on the community mailing lists or wikis should discover something somewhere.

It sounds to me like one of the chief issues is identifying the boundary between management of the projects and management of the company. Would you agree with this? If not, how would you describe the issue?

Yes, exactly! Some others have made this point very effectively on this thread as well.

snip further agreements

How is Jimbo's historical and ongoing status as default big cheese for all projects related to the composition of the board? (This is not a rhetorical question.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Huh? You were there! Writing or debugging too much code to pay attention to the politics?

I summarized it a few minutes ago over on textbook-l. It is a low volume list, anyone interested in my crude, grumpy, outline of history can find it there.

Concisely, he screwed up bigtime.

He should have trusted the community of volunteers and stood for election, he would been a shoe in by a landslide ..... he was still picking up most of the cash expenses and everyone recognized he truly was one of two key founders leading the community in establishing/evolving a successful project approach. His timing was good when he unilaterally established the non-profit. Everyone could pretty well tell the wikipedia.org was on the verge of large success. Who wants to abandon an impending gigantic success over a petty point of organizational common sense?

Instead he announced he would stack the Board to protect the project from the feared arrival of the unwashed masses (can not lock them out after all .... most of them know some stuff we want them to give us to publish freely) and proceeded to put two handpicked trustees/employees along with himself and designated two slots to be elected by count of active handles or sock puppets.

I realize that we are supposed to assume good faith and all that but subsequent conflicts of interest really beg the question when combined with the lack of community participation and planning in setting up the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. There were people on the list with legal, business, engineering, education, etc. education and experience that could have helped avoid many of the problems that you folks now face, which were designed into the organization at the onset and allowed to fester.

high regards, lazyquasar

On 6/14/06, Michael R. Irwin michael_irwin@verizon.net wrote:

Instead he announced he would stack the Board to protect the project from the feared arrival of the unwashed masses (can not lock them out after all .... most of them know some stuff we want them to give us to publish freely) and proceeded to put two handpicked trustees/employees along with himself and designated two slots to be elected by count of active handles or sock puppets.

Are you saying that the election of Anthere and Angela was not legitimate ("active handles or sock puppets")? I would beg to differ on that point. While I sympathize with Tim Starling's point that membership would be a reasonable method to guarantee the organization's long term independence, I think the elections that took place were unquestionably fair and open, and reasonable measures were taken to deal with manipulation.

Again, I would also like to remind you that wikipedia.org is wikipedia.ORG today. We take this for granted today, but it was by no means a guaranteed outcome, especially for a project created by an Ayn Rand objectivist. ;-) I would even go so far to say that Wikipedia could be _very_ successful (not as successful as it is, but still) while being proprietary. And it could have made Jimmy _lots_ of money. Instead he put a lot of his own money into Nupedia and Wikipedia, and is unlikely to get much, if any, of it back. As often as I may disagree with him, it is absurd to assume greed as a factor in his principal actions. If Jimmy wanted to be "filthy rich" (rather than independently wealthy), he would already _be_ filthy rich, and Wikipedia would be Wikipedia.COM.

That is not to say that there aren't conflicts of interest. Certainly Jimmy wants to make Wikia succeed, and it is important for the organization to be set up and run in such a way that people associated with Wikia (Michael, Angela and Jimmy) can (yes, _can_) recuse themselves when there is an obvious COI. The fact that 3 out of 5 Board members are associated with a for-profit that stands to benefit from certain actions of the non-profit they lead does of course lend a lot of weight to arguments for a larger and more diverse Board, and more community involvement in the executive body. But these arguments should be made under the full assumption of good faith of everyone involved.

Erik

On 6/14/06, Michael R. Irwin michael_irwin@verizon.net wrote:

Erik Moeller wrote:

...

Again, I would also like to remind you that wikipedia.org is wikipedia.ORG today. We take this for granted today, but it was by no means a guaranteed outcome, especially for a project created by an Ayn Rand objectivist. ;-) I would even go so far to say that Wikipedia could be _very_ successful (not as successful as it is, but still) while being proprietary. And it could have made Jimmy _lots_ of money. Instead he put a lot of his own money into Nupedia and Wikipedia, and is unlikely to get much, if any, of it back. As often as I may disagree with him, it is absurd to assume greed as a factor in his principal actions. If Jimmy wanted to be "filthy rich" (rather than independently wealthy), he would already _be_ filthy rich, and Wikipedia would be Wikipedia.COM.

I think you are dreaming. The dot.com changed to dot.org after some serious business planning got started by a few members of the "community" at large and with some steady pressure from other long time valued contributors. A potential threat emerged to Jimbo's iron fisted control via paying the bills for the bandwidth and servers and he moved quickly to quash it via unilateral organization of the non profit and design of the charter for retained long term god-king status, or if assume good faith this was merely coincidental timing.

A scan of the wikipedia-l list shows that the idea for turning Wikipedia into a non-profit was in the works for a very long time, almost from day one, though it was initially alluded to more as if it were going to be a private foundation rather than a public charity.

I remember thinking that I'd believe it when I saw it. Then I saw it, and now I believe it. From all the evidence I've seen Jimbo doesn't seem to be greedy when it comes to money. Of course I've heard him say before that he isn't doing it out of altruism, so I do wonder what his real motive is.

If wikipedia.com had not previously embraced the FDL and then made some committments regarding advertisement free long term free access it might very well gone the way of Nupedia. Jimbo kept his options open as long as possible and then moved like a good entrepreneur to succeed and salvage what value he could. The fame, honorariums, and name recognition might yet make him a fortune or at least a high salary or return via Wikia, speaking engagements, or executive level consulting but probably not until he "over delivers" on some fairly lofty advertised goals.

It's certainly possible. In fact, I think Jimbo could fairly easily turn his fame into money, if that's what he desires. To quote Citizen Kane, "it's no trick to make a lot of money... if what you want to do is make a lot of money." I think that goes doubly so for someone in the position of Wales.

Perhaps he has already "over delivered" adequately. Perhaps not. There seem to be a lot of people on this list making valid points regarding the maintenance or improvement of the overall quality of the aggregate data you folks currently have in Wikipedia. It appears to be steadily improving to me, but I do not do any systematic sampling. Most of the stuff I am interested in for research background is fairly concrete data and well frequented.

...

That is not to say that there aren't conflicts of interest. Certainly Jimmy wants to make Wikia succeed, and it is important for the organization to be set up and run in such a way that people associated with Wikia (Michael, Angela and Jimmy) can (yes, _can_) recuse themselves when there is an obvious COI. The fact that 3 out of 5 Board members are associated with a for-profit that stands to benefit from certain actions of the non-profit they lead does of course lend a lot of weight to arguments for a larger and more diverse Board, and more community involvement in the executive body. But these arguments should be made under the full assumption of good faith of everyone involved.

We assume good faith by policy but start to decide on an individual or community basis that people are trolls or undesirable after a certain time.

It is ludicrous to set up a board that in the longterm needs to recuse up to four fifths of its membership regarding much of its responsibility. You are welcome to assume good faith as long as you like. This is an amateurish setup that should never have been established when dealing with publicly donated funds. It should be fixed as soon as feasible with some style and grace. The current board could establish some appropriate useful policy for future board members regarding conflicts of interest and independence whether elected or appointed and then the people with conflicts should ease themselves off the board at completion of their terms or divest their conflicting investments. Everybody gets their ticket punched so they can put on their resume they were Founding Board Members or Trustees of the prestigious Wikimedia Foundation and the conflicts go away in the next round of elections or appointments. It may not be much for their hard work on our behalf but at least it some recognition for their efforts.

I certainly agree that the situation looks bad, and really it seems inevitable that if there haven't been actual problems that there will be ones in the future. Then again, Wikia and Wikimedia have both moved toward decentralizing day-to-day decisionmaking, by hiring a CEO. Hopefully this means the potential number of conflicts of interest will go down.

I'd like to see Wikimedia become much more open. This involves having more board members, and more diverse board members, but it also involves having a definite membership with a real voice in the whole process. Currently it's still up in the air whether or not Wikimedia even has any members that aren't on the board.

Things have been gradually getting better, though. The original "stacked" board seems to be capable of independent thought after all, and there's talk (which seems to be legitimate) about expanding it even further. A CEO has been selected to decentralize the day-to-day operations. The finances are being audited by an outside third party, which hopefully will catch any grey-area or outright illegal use of funds. And the foundation is slowly moving out of the first stage of denial with regard to the fact that it has no legal members.

Anthony

Jimmy Wales wrote:

Michael R. Irwin wrote:

...

Wikiversity is a natural fit with the existing projects and the slogans and bylaws yet it is not being implemented despite overwhelming community support.

It should be noted that I am a strong supporter of Wikiversity. So, whatever merits the rest of your rant might have, this does not seem to be particularly relevant.

The Wikiversity group was asked to make some relatively minor adjustments to the charter, adjustments which addressed the concerns *not of the board*, but of the people who had opposed to creation of Wikiversity.

The board has not been presented with a followup proposal for a vote.

--Jimbo

You ever heard of management by walking around?

This is a farcical response to a year delay after members of your Board of Directors presented a "freeing the curriculum" presentation.

From 200 voting supporters and a fair amount of activity in the temporary space we are down to a committe of five, a couple of alleged trolls, and maybe a few editors shifting back and forth from wikibooks.

Squandering that momentum and presenting this incompetence to practicing professionals, a few of whom definately came calling with interested graduate students, is not our finest hour.

Fun to find we are on speaking terms again.

regards, lazyquasar

Jimmy Wales wrote:

Michael R. Irwin wrote:

...

Wikiversity is a natural fit with the existing projects and the slogans and bylaws yet it is not being implemented despite overwhelming community support.

It should be noted that I am a strong supporter of Wikiversity. So, whatever merits the rest of your rant might have, this does not seem to be particularly relevant.

The Wikiversity group was asked to make some relatively minor adjustments to the charter, adjustments which addressed the concerns *not of the board*, but of the people who had opposed to creation of Wikiversity.

The board has not been presented with a followup proposal for a vote.

--Jimbo

Actually, it was, but the follow-up was ignored, together with no real means or process to submit the follow up proposal. And the objections that were raised by the board were so curt and lacking any detail that the participants trying to modify the Wikiversity proposal have resorted to tactics more related to reading tea leaves than anything else.

Some significant changes have taken place in the proposal, never the less, and there is going to be something forth coming in just the next few weeks. A much more expanded and detailed proposal for Wikiversity is going to be presented to both the Wikimedia community at large, as well as to the WMF board for formal approval. It should hopefully address some of the areas that lacked detail in the original proposal. All I can say is simply be patient and hopefully most people who are supporters of Wikiversity will be pleased with the results, as will some of the critics.

On 6/13/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

I will only say briefly

*cough* I suppose I'm not very good at writing briefly. Apologies for that.

Erik

Jimmy Wales wrote:

Brion Vibber wrote:

...

I'm curious.

What can the board and management (whatever its structure) *do* that will be better?

snip

...

What are examples of things a hypothetically ideal management would do *right* that the present management is not?

Some of the areas where we have been failing is in the timely negotiation of partnerships which are consistent with our charitable mission and which would both reduce our reliance on fund drives, and increase our abilities to meet our charitable goals. We are doing a great job in some areas (English, German, French, Japanese, and several other European languages), a decent job in some areas (Chinese is not bad, Arabic shows promise), and a fairly poor job in other areas (Hindi, Swahili, Bengali, etc.)

...

If there's something that management needs to *do* which will actually be better served by a new management structure or new board members, then by all means let's talk about it, but let's not put the cart before the horse.

What first, then how.

What is a functioning Wikiversity.

How. Perhaps rather than simply launching our own producing some innovation from peer based free knowledge production we should consider canning the Wikiversity proposal and contacting these folks regarding partnering opportunities:

http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Wikibooks:Staff_lounge&action=...

They may be resistant at because it sounds line they are lining up corporate funding to pay the content creators. Obviously this is a bit at odds for our type of distributed production of free content where everyone contributes as they can and will.

However. They may find that the production of large quantities of free content takes a large distributed effort which they cannot afford. In which case they may be interested in partnering with us in getting Wikiversity going or establishing a Denverversity with local Colorado assets. University of Colorado had a damn fine computer and engineering program twenty years ago when I attended as a freshmen and at that time they collaborated in cooperative projects with the other state schools quite frequently.

They might be interested in providing us the infrastructure and allowing us with our leading edge experience to take the lead in establishing the social environment and helping define the policy issues that need to be researched and tested to shield the state taxpayers from any liability issues.

At a minimum I would expect an effective management group to glean some useful intelligence regarding their thoughts on how to proceed and how they are thinking about addressing the large issues that will face effective Wikiversity. Presumably we can find a way to publicly propagate this information back to our appointed proposal development team.

An easy way might be to just give them the appropriate URLs and a special engraved invitation to come to meta and redline all existing proposals pages and debate as they see it. Perhaps they could tell us their perspective .... either as a locally uninterested ..... not competitor they essentially have overlapping markets ... as an outside consultant which similar experience sharing expertise and gathering information and ideas on how we intend to initially attack the challenges.

regards, lazyquasar

But community vote is not the only way to get board members. We have some very good board candidates who are not famous in the community and who could bring to the table professional expertise that we greatly need, but who would not put themselves through the troll wars of an election.

Personally I (totally) agree, impersonally I disagree.

I've had experience on this situation when I was in Italy when a politic government could not be done in the past and the nation have had a "technical" government with very good ministers. They have made a very, very good job but for a limited time because the representatives of politic didn't accept to be replaced. What is the moral? There is a part in the community who can move opinions and destroy the good job of "skilled" persons, if these technical members don't have the ability to be a little more leader.

Regards

Ilario

On 6/5/06, Alison Wheeler wikimedia@alisonwheeler.com wrote: [snip]

is about the creation of a freely-accessible encyclopedia to every person on the planet*.

[snip]

And when did the purpose of the project relax from being the creation of perpetually [[Free content]] to merely the creation of content which is accessible without a charge?

I'm picking a nit here, no doubt, but it's an important one... and I don't want to see this thread cited in a later argument when Wikimedia UK isn't around to clarify.

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

On 6/5/06, Alison Wheeler wikimedia@alisonwheeler.com wrote: [snip]

...

is about the creation of a freely-accessible encyclopedia to every person on the planet*.

[snip]

And when did the purpose of the project relax from being the creation of perpetually [[Free content]] to merely the creation of content which is accessible without a charge?

Greg, please, calm down. I am quite certain that Alison means "freely-accessible" as in "free as in speech, not free as in beer".

I say "freely accessible" a lot myself.

--Jimbo

(just found that my answer lost itself!)

On Mon, June 5, 2006 21:10, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

On 6/5/06, Alison Wheeler wikimedia@alisonwheeler.com wrote: [snip]

...

is about the creation of a freely-accessible encyclopedia to every person on the planet*.

[snip]

And when did the purpose of the project relax from being the creation of perpetually [[Free content]] to merely the creation of content which is accessible without a charge?

I'm picking a nit here, no doubt, but it's an important one... and I don't want to see this thread cited in a later argument when Wikimedia UK isn't around to clarify.

Firstly, it was a post by me and nothing to do with WMUK, but "freely-accessible" content *is* "perpetually free content" so far as I too am concerned and is not restricted just to charges. Freedom can refer to platform, access, language, methods (eg not just print but braille and spoken) not just cash and where it goes. Just as Wikimedia isn't now only about Wikipedia - where we started. We have all the projects to improve and expand.

The cash we need to support our range of projects though, is another thing entirely. We need lots of that ... and to spend it wisely ...

Alison Wheeler

On 6/5/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

On 6/5/06, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:

...

With the talk on this list recently of jobs that need doing, I'm interested to know whether there are many people who would be interested in being a member of the Board if there were more seats available.

I probably would throw my hat into the ring once more, especially now that the Board is shifting towards strategic long-term thinking and planning. I might also be interested in working within an ExecCom, depending on its roles and responsibilities. However, this should all be decided through open processes.

I think the more relevant discussion is the one about outsiders or semi-insiders who have important qualifications and whom we might want to invite to serve in a board role or an advisory one.

I'm also interested.

On 6/9/06, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:

I'm very surprised that the only people who are interested in a Board position are Fred Bauder, Walter van Kalken, Erik Moeller, The Cunctator, and the two people who wrote to me off-list.

:-) I doubt that this is the case. It's just that hypothetical questions like that are unlikely to generate many answers, not to mention that many people may not be comfortable expressing their interest in this way. I expect we'll see a diverse group of candidates if and when one or two open community board seats are actually widely announced.

Erik

On 6/8/06, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:

I'm very surprised that the only people who are interested in a Board position are Fred Bauder, Walter van Kalken, Erik Moeller, The Cunctator, and the two people who wrote to me off-list.

You don't honestly believe that everyone interested in a Board position saw that message and answered you, do you?

On 6/9/06, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:

I expect anyone serious about joining the Board this year to be reading this mailing list. They couldn't possibly have a thorough enough understanding of what the Foundation is about without doing that, and for a community representative (as opposed to the outsiders who may be appointed), I do expect them to be participating in foundation issues before they're appointed, as well as being active on the projects.

Actually I think the Board could profit substantially from bringing in some outsiders with experience in operating nonprofits but unsullied by exposure to the myriad wrong ways that we do things here at Wikimedia.

Kelly

Tight control of "volunteers" is standard operating practice at almost all nonprofits, a management practice that can only produce big trouble here. Some insight into how our process works is necessary.

Fred

On Jun 9, 2006, at 6:28 AM, Kelly Martin wrote:

On 6/9/06, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:

...

I expect anyone serious about joining the Board this year to be reading this mailing list. They couldn't possibly have a thorough enough understanding of what the Foundation is about without doing that, and for a community representative (as opposed to the outsiders who may be appointed), I do expect them to be participating in foundation issues before they're appointed, as well as being active on the projects.

Actually I think the Board could profit substantially from bringing in some outsiders with experience in operating nonprofits but unsullied by exposure to the myriad wrong ways that we do things here at Wikimedia.

Kelly _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Some good points. We definitely want control over what a volunteer lawyer or public relations person is doing.

Fred

On Jun 9, 2006, at 8:41 AM, Kelly Martin wrote:

On 6/9/06, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:

...

Tight control of "volunteers" is standard operating practice at almost all nonprofits, a management practice that can only produce big trouble here. Some insight into how our process works is necessary.

There's a difference between our editors and our volunteers. Our editors are, in many ways, our customers, almost as much as our readers are. Our volunteers are the people who serve on our myriad committees, who speak for Wikimedia with the press and with donors, the people who handle OTRS, our developers, our server administrators, and others working in a Foundation-related role. It makes sense for us to exercise tighter control over these people than we do now, and we can certainly do so without impacting the open editing aspect of our projects that has been so successful so far.

I'm undecided as to whether the Foundation should exercise more control over project administrators; I think this is an issue that needs to be discussed in more depth than it has to date.

Kelly _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

Participating in foundation issues doesn't mean wading into a troll > fest.

I can assure you that there are other people who are interested that didn't bother contacting you.

Well, anyone who is interested, is warmly invited to contact the board, publicly or privately. We are seriously trying to assess the best way forward, and knowing who is interested and what qualifications they have is important to that process, of course. :)

--Jimbo

2006/6/9, Angela beesley@gmail.com:

If it was intended for someone specifically, I would have asked that person privately rather than posting to the list. This was not intended as a "polite pretext" to anything, but a genuine query as to whether there would be anyone willing to be on the Board if the Board were about to appoint someone.

I definitely would be willing if asked, but I did not react because I considered myself too little qualified to actually run, solicit or whatever.

On 6/9/06, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote: [snip]

Once the Wikimedia Board starts acting like a nonprofit board, cuts its meeting frequency to a more reasonable 3 to 6 meetings a year, and decides to delegate authority to an appropriate cast of professional and volunteer administrators (instead of trying to run the entire organization itself), then I would be interested. However, I simply don't have the time to participate in the micromanaging disaster that is the current Board of Directors; the way they're trying to run it is is a full-time job and I can't afford to give up my current full-time job for a position that doesn't pay anything.

I usually hate me too, but Kelly really hit the mark with her comment here. It is unreasonable to expect any board to undertake the daily operation of the organization and the perceived need to select people suitable for daily chores will just end up compelling us to select people who are unsuitable for driving our long term mission.

We are not the only charitable organization in the world, yet we seem to know so little of what has been earned by others. ... But what else should we expect from a group with tens of thousands of participants which still has substantial difficulty getting 40 man hours a week applied to resolving problems which are bringing us into disrepute in international news. To get something as simple as libel patrolling going we need to be slammed on three news networks, have unilateral staff action which is met with widespread whining, and we must receive a personal appeal from god^WJimbo... and still we still do a fairly weak job.

On Fri, June 9, 2006 17:57, Anthony DiPierro wrote:

The thing is, the vast majority of those tens of thousands of participants don't really care about the foundation. They just want to work on a free encyclopedia/free news reporting service/free image repository/whatever. It'd be interesting if nothing else to see just what percentage of Wikipedians have any desire at all of being Wikimedians.

except that the real thing is, you can't separate the two. Wikipedia (and Wikibooks, Wiktionary, etc) all exist not by the grace of god, but by the grace of Wikimedia (Foundation). If someone wants to play rough with a Wikipedia entry they don't go after the individual editors and try and trace all the IP addresses, but look to the legal body responsible for that entry, WMF. As such, whether they are aware they "care about the foundation" or not, we need to educate them better that they need to.

It's a bit like people who don't vote as they say it isn't relevant to them. WMF is relevant to *every* editor and reader of every project.

Alison Wheeler

In-Reply-To: 50174.82.45.205.32.1149878975.squirrel@webmail7.pair.com on Fri, 9 Jun Alison Wheeler wrote:

On Fri, June 9, 2006 17:57, Anthony DiPierro wrote:

...

The thing is, the vast majority of those tens of thousands of participants don't really care about the foundation. They just want to work on a free encyclopedia/free news reporting service/free image repository/whatever. It'd be interesting if nothing else to see just what percentage of Wikipedians have any desire at all of being Wikimedians.

except that the real thing is, you can't separate the two. Wikipedia (and Wikibooks, Wiktionary, etc) all exist not by the grace of god, but by the grace of Wikimedia (Foundation). If someone wants to play rough with a Wikipedia entry they don't go after the individual editors and try and trace all the IP addresses, but look to the legal body responsible for that entry, WMF. As such, whether they are aware they "care about the foundation" or not, we need to educate them better that they need to. .............

Alison raises a crucial point here (even if tangent to Anthony's). So, if WMF attracts rough play by being the legal body responsible for entries - what can be done to eradicate said responsibility??

Backing up to Anthony's post. I readily admit that there are plenty of Internet services which I enthusiastically & respectfully employ without ever really caring about their foundations. WP is a whole other animal however, and it is difficult to see how anyone who's been made aware of the phenomenon could fail to be extremely interested in all its aspects. But gawd knows, this is the exact type of thing I can be so wrong about. Therefore, who has some good ideas on how to estimate what percentage of Wikipedians are interested in WMF?

Z.Clark

Message-ID: e692861c0606090944s42fcc73fk2954121566648988@mail.gmail.com Fri, 9 Jun 2006 16:44:34 - Gregory Maxwell wrote:

==================== Quote ==================== ................ I usually hate me too, but Kelly really hit the mark with her comment here. It is unreasonable to expect any board to undertake the daily operation of the organization and the perceived need to select people suitable for daily chores will just end up compelling us to select people who are unsuitable for driving our long term mission.

We are not the only charitable organization in the world, yet we seem to know so little of what has been earned by others. ... But what else should we expect from a group with tens of thousands of participants which still has substantial difficulty getting 40 man hours a week applied to resolving problems which are bringing us into disrepute in international news. To get something as simple as libel patrolling going we need to be slammed on three news networks, have unilateral staff action which is met with widespread whining, and we must receive a personal appeal from god^WJimbo... and still we still do a fairly weak job. ================== END Quote ==================

I salute Mr. Maxwell for highlighting two important issues in a way we can all find useful. His 1st paragraph is appreciated for its insights into the poster himself, and also for his perspective on board related issues. It's the 2nd paragraph, however, that is the focus of this post.

Again, the only benefits I see in persistently placing WMF projects under the traditional umbrella of charitable organizations are largely all negative. It's NOT that you've fail to be charitable. But to the contrary, you've literally redefined charity - raising the very concept to a whole new plateau. And its due to this -a whole new dimension of dignity- that there is no practical purpose to be served by aligning yourselves with mere redistribution networks. What the nonprofit pontiffs have to teach you pales in comparison to what you could learn from your own strengths. Because -unlike them- you are the antithesis of their zero sum games.

Gregory then alludes to the libel theme (as covered by Erik 20 hours earlier) and effectively expresses how ineffectual he feels we are handling this matter. I for one, can readily relate to his frustrations regarding libel. However, my suspicion is that "something as simple as libel patrolling" may require a bit more than "40 man hours a week" effort. Moreover, IMHO hours have nothing to do with the crux of the problem (otherwise, our "tens of thousands of participants" would have largely solved it). For unlike a sense for quality -which is universally innate to the human spirit- "libel" is an manufactured artificial legal concept. Its successful defense is a case by case issue with a different complex rule set for each country. In other words we're well equipped to freely produce clean world class quality product, but the deceptive proprietary world of enigmatic authorities is a closed irrational sphere ill suited for free rational participation.

For some follow-up on this train of thought see subject: 'Muijzenberg #00 - (re)organizing wikimedia'

Z.Clark

On 6/10/06, Kim Bruning kim@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:

On Tue, Jun 06, 2006 at 03:06:25AM +1000, Angela wrote:

...

With the talk on this list recently of jobs that need doing, I'm interested to know whether there are many people who would be interested in being a member of the Board if there were more seats available. If that is something you'd consider, please let me know.

The old internet maxim is that anyone who wants the job, probably isn't suited to it. It might be wiser to find people who might be suitable, and then somehow do them an offer they cannot refuse.

I don't know any people from outside wikimedia at this moment in time who might be helpful. I'll leave that to others.

I do know people from the community, and can make some reccomendations.

People who would likely actually be suited from the community or otherwise might be:

• Members of chapter boards , who we could steal
• people currently doing other foundation work who could be "promoted"
• People generally trusted inside a particular wikipedia community
• all around smart people.

Some aspects that might be good

• Typically "older" users who have a lot of experience
• People who are mild, and unlikely to enter conflict
• People who have also had some amount of real life experience.

Here's some people with current responsibilities, that I know of and can quickly dig up out of my (endo)memory.

• James Forrester (arbitration, current foundation work, uk chapter)

• Sannse (mediation and arbitration, otrs)

• Mindspillage (Mediation and arbitration, otrs, press contact)

• Oscar (Did interim management irl, setting up wikimedia netherlands chapter, otrs, might not enjoy getting more work)

• Essjay (Some current foundation work, highly trusted. Wikipedoholic)

• Amgine (Often more approachable than anyone else on foundation matters, press)

• Elian (Already used to bossing jimbo around O:-) )

• Delphine (Chapters committee)

• Bishonen (Known to a lot of people, seen as voice of reason)

• Explicitly not Brion. He's doing too much useful work as a developer. :-)

If eveyone else searches their memory in the same way, we'll quickly have a decent shortlist.

Only come up with suitable people for now. Don't worry if they protest or refuse for now, we'll sort that part out later.

So now it's up to the rest of the list to come up with some more names. Ideas?

On a somewhat subtle point, being on the Board would presumably involve publicly revealing one's real-life identity, no? That might be a factor for people like Essjay, who have generally avoided doing so.

Kim Bruning wrote:

Some aspects that might be good

• Typically "older" users who have a lot of experience
• People who are mild, and unlikely to enter conflict
• People who have also had some amount of real life experience.

I agree with these guidelines except for the second. There is no use having someone who is just going to follow the group dynamic and agree on everything just because they are afraid of being confrontational. In most organisations the real changes come from conflict. Conflict when constructive and directed properly is useful and should not be something we shy away from. Cheers, Nathan.

sannse wrote:

Nathan Carter wrote:

...

Kim Bruning wrote:

...

Some aspects that might be good

• Typically "older" users who have a lot of experience
• People who are mild, and unlikely to enter conflict
• People who have also had some amount of real life experience.

I agree with these guidelines except for the second. There is no use having someone who is just going to follow the group dynamic and agree on everything just because they are afraid of being confrontational. In most organisations the real changes come from conflict. Conflict when constructive and directed properly is useful and should not be something we shy away from. Cheers, Nathan.

There is a big difference between being assertive and active, and being confrontational and aggressive.

--sannse _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

The point is conflict is not something to be avoided in the business world. Cheers, Nathan

On Sun, June 11, 2006 02:38, Kim Bruning wrote:

The old internet maxim is that anyone who wants the job, probably isn't suited to it. It might be wiser to find people who might be suitable, and then somehow do them an offer they cannot refuse.

Maybe we should start on the principle that anyone reading Foundation-l in the first place is already too far gone but are more likely to be 'persuadeable' ;-0

Some aspects that might be good

• Typically "older" users who have a lot of experience
• People who are mild, and unlikely to enter conflict
• People who have also had some amount of real life experience.

The age range we have working on Wikimedia is amazing. Regularly I am surprised to find that the person I thought was "old" is actually "young", and vice-versa. And long may that remain so. Foundation activitity though does, as you say, require more 'real life' skills and an ability to make connections, decisions and responses that will stand up to scrutiny - both professionally, legally and from the community.

I would strongly disagree with the second one there though. Not with 'conflict', as that really is something we don't need (and, arguably, have some of already that we need to sort out) but there are difficult decisions ahead for WMF and the projects both that will not be easy.

As a whole we are now becoming more visible to the non-net person; regularly quoted in newpaper and magazine articles to readers who aren't online and don't - quite - realise our modus operandi is truly as open and free as it is. And that will mean with the explosive growth we have experienced - and will no doubt continue to find ourselves in - there will come a point when we need to decide which paths are the ones best taken. That will require a Board prepared to take the 'hard decisions' and a wider membership willing to make practical and *possible* suggestions with methodologies that can be considered and to accept the choices that get made. And all to work together to make it happen without total all-out conflict getting in the way.

Only come up with suitable people for now. Don't worry if they protest or refuse for now, we'll sort that part out later.

hmmmn. Not quite so sure I could support that option. Wasn't there someone who once said "If nominated I won't stand, if elected I won't serve"? We need people who will *do* things not just talk about them or refuse to get involved!

Alison Wheeler