[Foundation-l] Expert board members - a suggestion

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/8/28 Tim Landscheidt <tim at tim-landscheidt.de>:
> Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>>> [...]
>>>> The WMF as a membership organisation would be great, but I don't think
>>>> it is practical. A better option (which I have discussed with a few
>>>> poeple) would be having the chapters as members of the WMF and the
>>>> community as members of the chapters. There are other global
>>>> non-profits that work along those lines. (The International Federation
>>>> of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, for example.)
>
>>> Why? What's broken at the moment? The servers are running,
>>> and I really cannot see how a different form of organization
>>> would have any favourable impact on a few million people
>>> writing the best free encyclopedia (*1) in this solar sys-
>>> tem. Not to speak of this thing with the sum of all know-
>>> ledge being shared by every single human being.
>
>> I think most people want the WMF to do more than just keep the servers
>> running, though. It is the extra stuff that depends on good
>> governance.
>
> I did not ask what you think other people want, I asked what
> you think is broken at the moment and how that could be
> mended by another form of organization.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." is a good principle for maintaining
the status quo, it isn't a good principle if you want progress. The
job isn't done yet, so progress would be good. If you want progress
you have to be willing to implement enhancements as well as fixes. One
of the main fundamental problems I have found with the WMF is with
regards to prioritising. Often the WMF doesn't prioritise the same
things as the community seems to want. The dumps that Anthony
mentioned is a good example of that - a significant number of
community members complained about the dumps not working for years
before much progress was made and they still aren't completely
working. The tech team prioritised other things over the dumps, had
the community had the final say they may have done otherwise (or they
may not, no detailed discussion of the options ever took place in
public so it is difficult to know what conclusion would have been
reached).