[Foundation-l] Board-announcement: Board Restructuring

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
I think you have the wrong end of the stick. The board and the organisation
are relatively unimportant; their function is to facilitate.They cannot do
much else because they do not scale. They cannot support the 300+ languages
that need support and they don't. It is not that they do not want to, they
cannot. Languages are supported by Betawiki and its community. The real
power is in doing things, making things work better. It is humanly
impossible for either the board or the organisation to do more than enable
the community to function.

When you consider what needs to be done, like making our content continually
and consistently available, find some university or technical high school
students to work on this or find money and hire some contractors. It is not
as if this cannot be done and it is not as if you need the board's or the
organisation's permission to do this. What you need is to make sure that it
is done in harmony with the existing people and infrastructure.

You do not need anything to make a difference except for initiative and hard
work to pull things off. I agree with you 100% that it takes involvement in
order to understand what the issues are. The difference is that it goes two
ways. If you want more people from the editing community to be part of the
organisational infrastructure of our projects / communities these people
will have to get their hands dirty and involve themselves. Editors, even
prominent editors, do not necessarily make good organisers when editing and
talking is all they do. Sadly as people grow more into these other aspects
of what makes us function, their thinking will slowly but surely diverge
from what their old crowd considers to be valid and true This is imho why
some think that people "sell out" once they have a new role.
Thanks,
     GerardM

On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 9:03 AM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 10:52 AM, Brad Patrick <bradp.wmf at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >   Toiling on a project is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition
> to
> > be a Board member at WMF.
>
>
> I disagree with this and think it is wrong that it is possible to be a
> Board
> member or Foundation employee with no editing experience and no
> involvement
> in the community. It will always be the case that their first inclination
> was not participation, but was rather money or power. Further, in my
> experience, the best leaders are those who have also served on the front
> lines. Without this first hand experience you may develop surface-level
> knowledge of how the community works, but never understanding.  The more
> Board members and Foundation employees there are that do not have this
> experience, the further those bodies distance themselves from the
> community.
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