<quote name="Rob Lanphier" date="2016-01-28" time="11:52:11 -0800">
Generally speaking, the position WMF executive management has taken in the conversations that I've had is that WMF needs to do a better job listening to the community. Saying that ArchCom has "no say" basically is taking a needlessly fatalistic stance of a mindless wage slave. I know y'all well enough to know that everyone on this thread is intensely mission-driven, and "mindless" is about as far from a truthful description anyone could give.
I think the charitable interpretation is that it was/is unclear to some (I'm mostly going off of my interpretation of some of the questions asked during the planning phase of the DevSummit here (aka: hearsay)) if the DevSummit was going to be a "place of decisions" or something else (education, etc), and if it was to be a place of decisions then without explicit buy-in from WMF management those decisions could be less-than-timely implemented (if those who could do the implementation were a contested "resource" with some other high priority request that wasn't at the DevSummit).
Apologies for my long sentence with too many parentheticals.
ArchCom strives to define what we should do, based on listening to the community and using our collective expertise to craft a vision based on what we learn. What "WMF senior leadership" (pls define) does with that information is probably not in scope for this mailing list.
Except for when what I outlined above happens, aka something that has general consensus within the "community" and even ArchCom doesn't get any legs because those who could/should do it are tasked with other things. In other words: it's not unreasonable to assume those people won't spend their personal time doing that work.
However, this might be rat-holing on this one aspect around "resourcing", so I'm willing to both be told I'm wrong and drop it.
Greg