[Foundation-l] Would you consider being on the Board?

[Michael R. Irwin]

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Brion Vibber wrote:
>  
>
>>I'm curious.
>>
>>What can the board and management (whatever its structure) *do* that will be better?
>>
snip

>  
>
>>What are examples of things a hypothetically ideal management would do *right*
>>that the present management is not?
>>    
>>
>
>Some of the areas where we have been failing is in the timely
>negotiation of partnerships which are consistent with our charitable
>mission and which would both reduce our reliance on fund drives, and
>increase our abilities to meet our charitable goals.  We are doing a
>great job in some areas (English, German, French, Japanese, and several
>other European languages), a decent job in some areas (Chinese is not
>bad, Arabic shows promise), and a fairly poor job in other areas (Hindi,
>Swahili, Bengali, etc.)
>
>  
>
>>If there's something that management needs to *do* which will actually be better
>>served by a new management structure or new board members, then by all means
>>let's talk about it, but let's not put the cart before the horse.
>>
>>What first, then how.
>>    
>>
What is a functioning Wikiversity.

How.   Perhaps rather than simply launching our own producing some 
innovation from peer based free knowledge production we should consider 
canning the Wikiversity proposal and contacting these folks regarding 
partnering opportunities:

http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Wikibooks:Staff_lounge&action=edit&section=8

They may be resistant at because it sounds line they are lining up 
corporate funding to pay the content creators.   Obviously this is a bit 
at odds for our type of distributed production of free content where 
everyone contributes as they can and will.

However.   They may find that the production of large quantities of free 
content takes a large distributed effort which they cannot afford.  In 
which case they may be interested in partnering with us in getting 
Wikiversity going or establishing a Denverversity with local Colorado 
assets.   University of Colorado had a damn fine computer and 
engineering program twenty years ago when I attended as a freshmen and 
at that time they collaborated in cooperative projects with the other 
state schools quite frequently.

They might be interested in providing us the infrastructure and allowing 
us with our leading edge experience to take the lead in establishing the 
social environment and helping define the policy issues that need to be 
researched and tested to shield the state taxpayers from any liability 
issues.

At a minimum I would expect an effective management group to glean some 
useful intelligence regarding their thoughts on how to proceed and how 
they are thinking about addressing the large issues that will face 
effective Wikiversity.   Presumably we can find a way to publicly 
propagate this information back to our appointed proposal development team.

An easy way might be to just give them the appropriate URLs and a 
special engraved invitation to come to meta and redline all existing 
proposals pages and debate as they see it.   Perhaps they could tell us 
their perspective .... either as a locally uninterested ..... not 
competitor they essentially have overlapping markets ... as an outside 
consultant which similar experience sharing expertise and gathering 
information and ideas on how we intend to initially attack the challenges.

regards,
lazyquasar