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

[phoebe ayers]

On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 2:17 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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?
>

Hey, I'm hoping another trustee will jump in here since I wasn't involved
with the last annual plan (thanks to my gap year off the board). But it's a
good question. In general: the specific plan activities are written by the
staff; the board's influence is more on the level of approving the overall
balance and resourcing to different activities/goals (like how much do we
focus on product development vs. other development, etc.) And, the board
needs to see that the big issues (editor retention/keeping the sites
up/etc) are being addressed -- but how that happens is something we
generally leave to the staff's expertise.

-- phoebe


> 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.


Well, threads like this are fine; this came out of the Wikimania questions,
as Steven noted. We can certainly try to revive the board noticeboard too!