For what it's worth, In early October 2015, the Discovery department was very clearly told by Wes (who I believe was not yet a c-level) that the mysterious term "Knowledge Engine" was being deprecated, and that the Discovery team was not working on any huge product-like initiative. The team was to remain focused on the work they were already doing: improving and enhancing search within and across wikimedia projects, Wikidata Query Service, maps, portal improvements, etc.
It sounds like there were ongoing communication disconnects between board<->execs and/or execs<->managers. The good news is that regardless of what was happening at higher levels, the team was never pulled into any work on moon shots.
For context, I was the agile coach for the search team in April 2015, and then became the agile coach for the Discovery department when it was created as part of the re-org shortly after that.
Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation
On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 6:04 AM, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
The project formally know as the Knowledge Engine was frequently referred to as a "moon shot" in November 2015 by a number of my fellow board members. This terminology I believe accurately highlighted the size, expense, and risk that this proposal was.
How we have described the KE to our movement has been significantly different. All efforts appear to be to minimize what was proposed. And efforts to explain it at all have only occurred after greater community understanding became inevitable.
I find it disappointing to see the ED and some board members try to deny and downplay the plans that previously existed. While the ED has recently apologized for the lack of transparency, this was brought to her attention many times before, and thus I am not convinced her apology will result in a change in her approach.
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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