[Foundation-l] Board-announcement: Board Restructuring

[Tim Landscheidt]

"effe iets anders" <effeietsanders at gmail.com> wrote:

>>   Personally, I would not mind if the current board's terms
>>  end 2099 as long as the servers are running, MediaWiki is
>>  maintained and developed and the financial conduct does not
>>  cross any legal limits.

> I am not sure how to read this, but I would like to state that the
> mission of the Foundation (and actually of the Movement, which is much
> more important) is much broader then that. If we would only care about
> the servers, software and legal limits, I would very seriously wonder
> why we are continuing, because Free knowledge is about much more then
> that.

> There are roughly four aspects of Free Knowledge in the game here.
> Creating, Maintaining, Gathering (but not creating yourself) and
> spreading. All those are of major importance. To create Free
> Knowledge, you need a community (which you have to maintain) and good
> infrastructure (ie, software), to maintain the Free Knowlegde you need
> both a Community and the Technical things (ie, servers). to gather you
> need much more contacts and goodwill, knowledge of local customs etc,
> and to spread, you need again another set of skills and resources.

> So please let's be proud on our mission, and try to work it out in
> it's full glory.

There is much pathos in those words, and I seriously doubt
that many users see themselves as part of "the Movement" (or
would want to pledge themselves to anything like that). But
be that as it may.

  So, assuming the end is "is to empower and engage people
around the world to collect and develop educational content
under a free license or in the public domain, and to dissem-
inate it effectively and globally", you have identified four
(possible) means to achieve it. I do not see that board com-
position or councils are among them and I could not imagine
how they would be able to foster the stated end anyhow.

Tim