[Wikimedia-l] Questions for the Board post-Wikimania

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

phoebe ayers, 15/08/2013 12:26:
> And lastly of course what's been on everyone's mind lately is we must
> continue to try to figure out the best way to develop and roll out products
> in our complex, opinionated, multilingual community. To be frank, I don't
> know what the the best role for the board is in this process. I try to be
> careful about keeping my public comments to a minimum when tech debates are
> raging, as I think all the trustees do, because it's usually just not
> helpful to randomly weigh in. Does that mean developers feel unsupported by
> the board? That would be an unfortunate side effect of trying not to
> overstep our role...

 From a Wikimedia projects point of view, what I'd rather like to know 
is how the annual plan ends up containing some specific technical 
goals/products. This is for sure something under the board's 
responsibility as the board approves the plan, however – just we don't 
know absolutely anything in general on how the annual plan is produced 
and why it is as it is – it's not clear who proposes, who reviews and 
who actually decides what ends up in the plan, not to speak of the 
rationale. Does the board have any role in shaping the engineering goals 
as defined by the annual plan, apart from the final rubberstamping in a 
yes/no vote following some two weeks of discussion out of several months 
of mysterious drafting?

Neom

P.s.: Generic questions to the board on this list are usually 
ignored/missed, unless [sometimes] when they are in reply to something 
posted on behalf of the board; in theory I guess the place for such 
public questions would be https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/BN which 
offers some permanency, but has never been really used yet.