[Foundation-l] Our values

[Brianna Laugher]

I love it. I also agree that having written-down values is extremely
useful and, well, valuable.

> Other values have other impacts. When we talked to Sue last summer
> before hiring her, we made super clear that it was super important to us
> to hire staff with international awareness (either non US staff, or US
> staff having lived outside of the US, or at a minimum, US staff being
> multilingual). Sue has been extremely careful to take such guidelines
> into account, and all recently hired staff is in one way or another,
> respecting these guidelines.

I'm sure I am not the only editor that appreciates that WMF is really
following through on this commitment to its global community, and not
thinking the US is "enough". It's really impressive and great
leadership.

> Quality of service is a priority
> We will try our best to give access to high quality Wikimedia project
> content 24 hours a day and 7 days, as well as provide access to
> regularly updated, user-friendly, and free dumps of Wikimedia project
> content.
> To insure world-wide, unrestricted, dissemination of knowledge, we do
> not enter into exclusive partnerships, with regards to access to our
> content or use of our trademarks.

I wonder if this "quality of service" might not be simplified to
"Quality" to incorporate that communities have a value of accurate,
readable, useful information - not just whatever data there happens to
be.

The dumps point also in my mind relates to community & freedom (below).

> Freedom
> We make extra efforts to use only free software on our own servers, and
> to support open and patent-free media formats that are viewable and
> editable with free software.

I think Freedom is an important point but it just needs to be
expanded. Link it to free licenses. So far there is no mention of free
licenses and that is something that needs to be mentioned I think.
Maybe "free software" needs a qualifier "a la FSF" because this is
something that is still not clearly understood, in my experience at
least.

> Transparency
> We must communicate Wikimedia Foundation information in a transparent,
> thorough and timely manner, to our communities and more generally, to
> the public.

The communities also rely on transparent mechanisms.

But... I suppose the communities' values are for the communities to
determine.... :) WMF is showing a good lead then.

> Independance
> As a non-profit, we mostly depend on gifts to operate (donations,
> grants, sponsorship etc...). It is very important to us to ensure our
> organization stays free of influence in the way it operates. For this
> reason, we strictly follow a donation policy, reserve the right to
> refuse donations from a limited number of sources, and try to multiply
> the number of sources.

"reserve the right to refuse donations from a limited number of
sources" is not quite clear in this context, needs clarification or
rewording.

I wonder if it is worth mentioning Neutrality, or whether it may be
considered part of Quality (as in, neutral things are higher quality
than biased things).

I agree that NPOV is not good to have as a direct value - it can't
quite work for all the projects - but even POV material can be
presented in a neutral way, or flagged as non-neutral, and that is
good and appropriate I think.

cheers,
Brianna

-- 
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/