[Foundation-l] Hiring of Interim Executive Director and Legal Counsel

[Delphine Ménard]

On 6/15/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
[snip]

> The Wikimedia Foundation needs to decide who their "constituants" really
> are in this case.  In other words, who do the board members really
> represent, and what is their purpose in being?  And what is the role of
> the WMF in regards to the Wikimedia projects?
 [snip]

> To this end, the view that there is some sort of seperation from the
> community and that there are two distinct entities, the foundation and
> the user/contributors is a falsehood.  The real truth is that there are
> a huge number of people that the WMF represents, and that they can't be
> beholden to a single group, such as en.wikipedia.  While Wikipedia
> certainly is the flagship project, the actual percentage of the total
> amount of Wikimedia content that is hosted on en.wikipedia, along with
> the number of participants, is a minority.  And a shrinking minority at
> that.  If you believe that decisions reached on the Village Pump of
> en.wikipedia represent the whole of Wikimedia projects, you have lost
> sight of many other participants that never get to those pages, even on
> Wikipedia.

I suppose this is a general *you*, but I'll answer for myself. As a
French writing to you in English, living in Germany, chair of the
chapters committee, member of three chapters, admin on three projects
(fr, commons and meta), I am conceited enough to believe I am probably
the last person who could be accused of believing that the English
village Pump represents the whole of the Wikimedia projects. No more
than the French, the Wiktionnary village Pump, or the Commons one.

This said, what I understand of your comment, is that the Foundation
is not heeding the people who never express their opinion, may it be
on these lists, on the village pumps, or even on their user pages.
Well, I am not sure I get how the Foundation is always the one
supposed to be fishing for comments. Actually, I believe our board
members/committees have done a pretty damn good job at trying to get
feedback. If they don't get it, there comes a time in life where you
just need to act. So they did.

And here, I mean feedback as a whole, ie. if *the community* wants to
have a say in the appointment of the next accountant, we organize
ourselves and make sure a proposal/counter-proposal is proposed to the
board for review. Right now, all I see are individuals (and I include
myself in those) who are expressing their opinions.

In my opinion, saying that the WMF represents the users *is* the
falsehood. If we kept it on a strict legal level, authors that
contribute their content under the GFDL are *not* assigning rights to
the WMF, or asking the WMF to represent them in any way. Now we might
argue that image (PR) and such are a form of representation. Well, it
is not clear to me, and I believe it is not clear to anyone so far, or
we wouldn't have this conversation.

[snip]

> Treating the user community as the enemy is going to seriously cause
> problems in the future if it is not addressed right away.  And some
> recent comments on this mailing list have made me feel like just that.

In the end, I find it rather amusing that it is always the *poor
community* (of which I feel a member, just in case that is not clear)
that is being treated as an ennemy. After threads on end on the
subject, it rather looks to me as the Foundation is the one that's
considered the ennemy.

I believe I have always been an advocate of stronger separation (read:
make sure everybody knows exactly what they have to do, what they are
responsible for) AND better communication and collaboration.

It seems to me an easy exercise to talk of *the community* when nobody
seems to have a real understanding of who/what *the community* is. Is
it you? Is it me? Is it us? And if it is us, who is *us*?



Delphine
-- 
~notafish