[Foundation-l] Board meeting report

[Kat Walsh]

On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 9:11 PM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net> wrote

Thanks for the summary post!

> [...]
> For the broader discussion, first of all, thanks to everyone who gave
> their input here, it was tremendously valuable. As indicated earlier, we
> didn't have this conversation to make an immediate decision at the
> meeting. The board does want to maintain our commitment, as reflected in
> both the foundation and the community, to free and open access to
> knowledge. Along those lines, the earlier draft of a file format policy
> will be revisited, and we may consider passing a revised version.
> However, it's also not clear that this would be a good idea. One issue
> would be if it inadvertently prohibits positive approaches in the
> future, such as the uses for Flash that Brion mentioned. (At least,
> nobody seemed to have a problem with those, please correct me if that's
> not the case.) So I wonder if it might not be wiser to avoid attempting
> something at the board level that requires us to pin down definitions
> for file formats, platforms, and so on in ways that may have unintended
> consequences. Further feedback and discussion is welcome.

Well, since you've opened it up to discussion...!

As Michael says, there weren't really any hard decisions made on this
-- more of a discussion of our varying points of view and reasoning.
And so I will give my own opinion in response to his: I'm in favor of
having a firm resolution so there is some clear and definite text to
point to that says we do have that commitment to openness, and gives a
set of criteria to evaluate a new proposal with. (It's possible the
drafting may turn out to exclude something we all agree should be
permitted, or have other unintended consequences, in which case I
think we could all agree to amend it! I don't believe the current
proposal disallows anything we would allow -- in particular it takes
into account things like acceptable subsets of otherwise problematic
formats -- but I hope people will correct obvious omissions in the
posted draft.) But I think it would be worthwhile to have as an
explanation of what we're doing -- or not doing -- and why.

[...]
> Finally,
> I'll just save the chapter business for a separate email in the next day
> or so.

Well, now you're just leaving people in suspense! :-)

Cheers,
Kat

-- 
Your donations keep Wikipedia online: http://donate.wikimedia.org/en
Wikimedia, Press: kat at wikimedia.org * Personal: kat at mindspillage.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mindspillage * (G)AIM:Mindspillage
mindspillage or mind|wandering on irc.freenode.net * email for phone