[Foundation-l] A first Board retrospective

[Erik Moeller]

I wanted to give everyone a heads up what things have been like for me
on the Board for the last 2 1/2 months. This may also help orientation
of new members. This is going to be shorter than I'd like it to be --
stuff keeps piling up and if I spend too much time on this people will
start shouting at me for not doing other things. ;-)

The Board is a group and acts as such, so I will use the "we" word a
lot. It's really hard to take credit for anything in such an
environment, which in some ways is very wiki-like.

1) Workload. Board is a _lot_ of time commitment at the moment. To
give you an idea, there have been 760 messages exchanged on the Board
level since September 26. In addition, there's internal-l (chapter and
committee people as well as some trusted individuals, more below)
which gets about 150 messages per month, foundation-l (500-1000
messages per month), and the various project lists which we of course
cannot follow completely.

We now have weekly IRC meetings (participation optional but
encouraged) and have had two face-to-face meetings since I joined (in
Frankfurt in October and in St. Petersburg in November). What's all
this communication good for? WMF is a very young organization that
needs to define its structures, its place in the world, and needs to
find ways to sustainably operate. Think of it as a continuous
brainstorming process with concrete outcomes.

As the Board expands we try to identify individual responsibilities so
we can share work  and ignore e-mails that are not relevant to us.

2) Results. I'm fairly happy with progress we've made in the last few
months. The Frankfurt Retreat was an effective meeting to build trust
and relationships with the chapters. We also agreed upon some key
strategic outcomes, which have been reported on here.

Of these, the following have been achieved:
- audited financial statements
- revised bylaws
- first phase of Board expansion
- chapter agreement

The following is well on the way:
- Advisory Board
- revised Mission/Vision
- trademark registration process / three-tiered trademark policy
- domain name workgroup
- fundraiser (hopefully this month), probably including matching gifts
- CEO search
- MediaWiki long term strategy / tech meeting
- Staff planning, but this will depend a lot on how much money we can raise.

Hopefully we'll also get a budget sorted out soon. Mind you, the Board
isn't "doing" all these things, it is mostly making sure that they get
done according to an agreed upon strategy. It's our staff (Brad,
Danny, Carolyn, Barbara, the tech team ..) that is doing much of the
implementation work. Of course, they get paid for this while we don't.
:-)

3) Committees and openness. One of the big scary open tasks is "fixing
the committees." We have a consensus on the Board+ED-level now that
the current system doesn't work well -- it is too closed and stagnant.
We need to get fresh people involved on a regular basis, and work
towards dynamic task-oriented groups rather than expecting a small
core group of people to do everything and be trusted with anything.

Anthere and I have differing views on the concrete steps that need to
be taken, and we'll try to reach an agreement in the coming weeks (now
hopefully also involving the new Board members).

In terms of openness and transparency, we've also reached agreement
that the internal list and wiki (internal-l and
internal.wikimedia.org) need to become open to people who are not part
of a committee or chapter, but highly trusted regardless. Having
countless separate private lists doesn't really work well except for
the aforementioned taskforces, so we're trying our best to have one
large, private group with well-defined processes of joining and
leaving.

It is now possible for people on internal to suggest members and vote
on them in  RfA style. Perhaps we will also allow an outside
application process, but that does not exist yet.

Delphine has managed to somewhat convince me that task-oriented groups
benefit from a certain amount of privacy; that is, if you are focused
on solving a particular problem, and you are productive, it doesn't
help for completely uninvolved people to chime in randomly. Rather, it
is crucial that these groups _report_ on their outcomes regularly and
openly. In other words, we do not always need to expose our intestines
as long as it is clear to everyone what we are doing.

4) Various to-do. These are necessarily incomplete; I'm focusing on
items that were brought up in my initial RfC as well as at the Board
retreat.

- QA / stable version. This is a short term process where the Board
needs to have some involvement to ensure that we're not quietly
becoming Nupedia. ;-) We've reached agreement now that this will be
done by an outside developer if at all possible, to allow Brion and
Tim to focus on day-to-day operations and the big single login
transition. It will probably be implemented in such a way that
individual projects have a reasonable amount of flexibility in the
configuration.
- Better process for outside parties to use Wikimedia trademarks,
including non-commercial entities. Perhaps develop a free content
approach to trademarks/logos.
- Establish mid term and long term strategy with regard to project and
business development. Project charters.
- Make processes multilingual. There are some good technical
developments here (both Multilingual MW and LiquidThreads are under
active dev.), but we really need to factor this into our core
organizational strategy.
- Better event strategy. The EventsCom is still dysfunctional.
- Systematic approach to spam/SEO/self-promotion. Will hopefully
relate to whatever new QA tools we develop.
- Help establish community structures for developing sound
project-level legal policies.
- Better speaker/contacts coordination. This is really needed both for
conferences and for our developing efforts to involve schools,
libraries and universities.
- Research. It's on my to-do list to redefine the CRO role and propose
a candidate, hopefully before the end of the year.
- Volunteer coordination. We need to do a much better job telling
people how they can help, i.e. a kind of open task database with clear
instructions for participating.
- Awareness. In general, there are a million things we can do to make
people aware of what WMF is, what chapters are, etc. We should start
doing a few of them soon. ;-)

Again, Board role is to make sure that these things (can) happen, not
to implement them directly in most cases.

5) Final thoughts. I do believe we're on track to becoming a mature
and scalable organization. The expanded Board, Tim Shell's resignation
and Jimmy's choice to nominate Florence as Chair reflect our
commitment to not being a "one man show," but a community-driven
effort. Jimmy deserves our gratitude for taking things into this
direction, and for his continued commitment and leadership. I remember
well when Wikipedia was at wikipedia.com and it was very much an open
question for me whether there was an IPO in its future. Now we're one
of the most fascinating charitable organizations on the planet.

The WMF does not exist in "Internet time", and it has taken years for
it to grow up (and will still take a few more). This can be
frustrating given the exponential growth of WP in particular.  But I
think we will be able to keep up eventually, as long as we don't
suffer the illusion that all it takes is to expand the Board to 7, 9,
11 members -- it's the organization itself which needs to become
scalable. On the positive side, we've been incredibly efficient with
our finances so far.

I personally hope that the WMF can become a model how non-profits of
this type _should_ be run, and that more essential Internet
infrastructure will move into the non-profit sector in the long run.
It is my conviction that society will be better off if we can
emphasize cooperation over competition, and the needs of the many over
the wants of the few.

The free content and open source movements reflect this cooperative
model. While they allow competitive forking, such forking is generally
considered unproductive and discouraged unless absolutely necessary.
While the needs of individuals are resolved (by acting on them),
social structures and funding models evolve to address the needs of
the many with priority. I long for a world which follows these ideals
consistently, and hope that we can be leaders to show that it is
possible.

Lastly, and importantly, in spite of frequent and generally
constructive disagreement, I believe the Board is becoming a solid
team that can "get stuff done." The word "community" is becoming a lot
more real to us as the years go by.  When it counts, we will be there
for each other, and for you.
-- 
Peace & Love,
Erik