[Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness

[Ting Chen]

Dear community,

on the IRC board meeting at April 8th 2011 the board approved 
unanimously the following resolution:



We, the Wikimedia Foundation Board, believe that the continued health of 
our project communities is crucial to fulfilling our mission. The 
Wikimedia projects are founded in the culture of openness, 
participation, and quality that has created one of the world's great 
repositories of human knowledge. But while Wikimedia's readers and 
supporters are growing around the world, recent studies of editor trends 
show a steady decline in the participation and retention of new editors.

As laid out in our five-year Strategic Plan, and emphasized by these 
findings, Wikimedia needs to attract and retain more new and diverse 
editors, and to retain our experienced editors.  A stable editing 
community is critical to the long-term sustainability and quality of 
both our current Projects and our movement.

We consider meeting this challenge our top priority. We ask all 
contributors to think about these issues in your daily work on the 
Projects.
We support the Executive Director in making this the top staff priority, 
and recommend she increase the allocation of Foundation resources 
towards addressing this problem, through community outreach, 
amplification of community efforts, and technical improvements.
And we support the developers, editors, wikiprojects and Chapters that 
are working to make the projects more accessible, welcoming, and 
supportive.

The Board resolves to help move these efforts forward, and invites 
specific requests for Foundation assistance to do so.  We welcome and 
encourage new ideas to help reach our goals of 
[[strategy:Openness|openness and broader participation]].

We urge the Wikimedia community to promote openness and collaboration, by:
* Treating new editors with patience, kindness, and respect; being aware 
of the challenges facing new editors, and reaching out to them; and 
encouraging others to do the same;
* Improving communication on the projects; simplifying policy and 
instructions; and working with colleagues to improve and make friendlier 
policies and practices regarding templates, warnings, and deletion;
* Supporting the development and rollout of features and tools that 
improve usability and accessibility;
* Increasing community awareness of these issues and supporting outreach 
efforts of individuals, groups and Chapters;
* Working with colleagues to reduce contention and promote a friendlier, 
more collaborative culture, including more thanking and affirmation; and 
encouraging best practices and community leaders; and
* Working with colleagues to develop practices to discourage disruptive 
and hostile behavior, and repel trolls and stalkers.


;Resources
: 
[[strategy:Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary|Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary]]
: [[strategy:Editor_Trends_Study|2011 Editor Trends Study]] 
([[strategy:March_2011_Update|Executive Director's summary]], 
[[strategy:Openness|ideas]])


-- 
Ting Chen
Member of the Board of Trustees
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
E-Mail: tchen at wikimedia.org