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

[Michael R. Irwin]

Robert Scott Horning wrote:

>Delphine Ménard wrote:
>
>  
>
>>To make a long story short, as I see it (and as I have made clear in
>>an earlier post) the Foundation should *not* be ruled byt he
>>community, no more than the community should be ruled by the
>>Foundation. Separation as Aphaia put it and to which I agreed means
>>that those from the community who wish to participate in the
>>organisation are more than welcome, but that the community does not
>>have the high hand on things it cannot be held responsible for. I said
>>it earlier and I'll say it again, a great editor in any of the
>>Wikimedia projects does *not* make a great board member/commity
>>member/CEO/accountant, you name it. And the trend as I see it today is
>>that people in the community judge by what they can see. And if the
>>community is not involved in Foundation day-to-day business, they only
>>see how many edits a person has. Not what their real skills are.
>>
>>Delphine
>> 
>>
>>    
>>
>One thing that democratic institutions do very well with is to get a 
>diversity of opinions regarding a topic.  And to get opinions from new 
>or shifting viewpoints earlier than most other types of governance units.
>
>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?
>
>The concern is that perhaps the board is becomming too insular and not 
>really paying attention to the participants on the various Wikimedia 
>projects.  My response to the above questions, from my viewpoint, is 
>that the WMF exists as a support to see that the content on the various 
>Wikimedia projects is developed in a consistant and organized fashion. 
> And to maintain the servers and other physical and intangable assetts 
>that belong to the "community" that is putting all of this together. 
> They also exist to keep the needs of potential readers of Wikimedia 
>materials and content in mind, as there certainly exists an audience of 
>people who read Wikipedia but don't actively work in the creation of 
>content.
>
>One other constituancy group that is not often mentioned here is also 
>the MediaWiki software developers.  While the software does exist to 
>serve and help develop the community, there is a somewhat seperate 
>community of people who are developing the software running all of this, 
>and that is indeed a seperate "product" that adds to the dynamics of the 
>WMF, and something that must be managed as well by the WMF board.  With 
>very few exceptions these are all volunteers and are just as valuable as 
>people writing Wikipedia articles.  And requires volunteer management 
>experience.
>
>The extra dynamic here is that there do exist multiple projects, and in 
>essense seperate communities, including different groups speaking 
>multiple languages.  fr.wikibooks has a very different group of people 
>than zh.wikipedia, for example.  The WMF needs to cope with the needs 
>and wants of both groups, and that isn't easy.
>
>What the WMF does not represent is publishers who distribute Wikimedia 
>project content, ISPs, or corporate sponsors, including grant agencies, 
>nor any government.  It also doesn't represent critics of Wikipedia, nor 
>people who feel they have been wronged by Wikimedia projects (read John 
>Siegenthaler here), nor does it represent members of the popular press 
>even though nobody likes bad publicity.
>
>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.
>
>My concern is that some recent actions, notably the checkuser policies 
>but other issues as well, have ignored these other constituant groups 
>and may cause some additional problems in the future if they are 
>ignored.  I'm not saying that it is easy to get in touch with such a 
>diverse group of individuals, but it is worth it to at least try.  Board 
>members that are appointed because of close ties to current board 
>members or because they are politically connected by whatever term you 
>want to use to describe the politics, may not have the best interests of 
>the Wikimedia projects at heart.  At the very least there needs to be a 
>way to get a voice heard, and to have an avenue of appeal if you don't 
>think something is working out, or that some sort of injustice is 
>happening.  
>
>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.
>
>  
>

Many of the excellent points raised above by Roberth are often addressed 
in a business plan or operations plans.   Most not small U.S. business 
entities have an annual update process whereby these plans are reviewed, 
adjusted, modifed to reflect the organizations current intentions.   The 
process is used to update and propagate critical information between all 
levels and often even mere  stakeholders.   The plans are typically not 
intended as straightjackets rather they are a snapshot at a moment in 
time of the best summary of itself the organization can provide to all 
its diverse elements.  Another similar tool is a stakeholders report 
that summarizes past periods performance compared to the planned 
performance and analyzes causes or sources of any major deviation and 
appropriate adjustments if any.

Does such a beast exist somewhere publicly available?

regards,
lazyquasar