[Foundation-l] Omidyar Network Commits $2 Million Grant to Wikimedia Foundation

[Kropotkine_113]

Thank you very much all of you (Brigitte SB, Ting Chen, Mickael Snow and
others).

To close my participation in this thread I just add three points  :

- My question about the wikimedia membership criterion wasn't very
important, but just-to-know ; thanks for your explanations.

- The communication process on this whole story has been disastrous ;
this, added to the fact that Wikis, Q&A and help pages are not
up-to-date or are confused, tranforms a maybe-good-decision (I have my
own opinion on this point ;)) in a too-weird-to-be-good-decision ; the
"NOMCOM disapearance in vacuum" is a good example. It doesn't worth 10Mo
discussion threads, I think you are aware of this.

- Even more important point is the cultural gap between Foundation's
intentions and communication, which are very "north-american slanted" (I
don't know how to say that), and its perception by a very multicultural
community. The gap is particularly large concerning financial/executive
power relations. You have to be very careful about this and to be very
pedagogic when you report such decisions, because when the story will
appear in french village pump (for example) it will be hard tuff for
chapter's members to explain it correctly (if possible). The answer
often used is : "It's not evil, it's just the way american people deal
with it every day". Just let me tell you that's not a sufficient answer
for many people (like me ;)). I think that a non-used but very efficient
solution would be to share informations before the official report and
to work closely with local chapters ; but this is a more wide problem
and slightly out-of-the-scope of this thread.

Kropotkine_113



Le mercredi 26 août 2009 à 19:46 -0700, Michael Snow a écrit :
> Kropotkine_113 wrote:
> > Does he fulfill the Nomitanig Commitee selection criterion : "Membership
> > in the Wikimedia community" ?
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Nominating_Committee/Selection_criteria#General_needed_traits
> >   
> Ting already answered the rest of these questions, but I will elaborate 
> on this one. The page is perhaps not completely clear, but the 
> Nominating Committee used it as a workspace to brainstorm and prioritize 
> possible criteria. Thus, it was not decided that we should make 
> membership in the Wikimedia community a criterion for the appointed 
> seats, as most of us did not think this was a priority. I think this is 
> quite understandable, since these seats are designed to allow us to find 
> outside expertise for areas not already covered by the board members 
> selected by the community. Neither Matt nor anyone else pretends that he 
> was a member of the Wikimedia community before he was appointed to the 
> board. I know that he was looking forward to getting to know people from 
> the community at Wikimania, though.
> 
> --Michael Snow
> 
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