While I as much as any hope for positive developments in relation to the
board, and certainly it's good to hear of enthusiasm and recognition of the
need to improve the board, if I might inject a note of caution.
Every trustee acknowledges that there's a clear need for the Board to
assume a leadership position for our movement.
I suggest it is not even /possible/ for the Board to assume a leadership
position for the movement, and that the Board's efforts to do so over the
past ten years have been damaging to the movement. The core idealism of
the movement --- the thing that drives volunteers to donate passionate
labor, which can only be driven by idealism --- is, I maintain, that
information providing should be in the hands of The People; a fundamentally
bottom-up ideal. The more the centralized WMF tries to direct things, the
more it conflicts with the ideal in fact; and the more it is /seen/ to try
to direct things, the more it saps the desire of volunteers to donate labor
because it seems less like pursuit of the ideal. If the WMF has a useful
role to play in the movement, it is neither leadership nor top-down
software initiatives (which most of the current initiatives are).
It has also been clear in recent times that the Foundation has evolved a
corporate culture that self-justifies some of its most unfortunate
attitudes, and in this regard I admit I am unsettled when I see statements
such as
We must not shy away from those challenges, nor from
the decisions we have
to make.
From the outside, I honestly can't tell whether to
cheer or cringe. This
would be a good attitude to take toward various necessary
changes to the
Foundation, yet it also sounds like the reasoning that was used, not long
ago, to justify a position that any volunteers who disagree with the
Foundation's dictates should leave.
Within the Board of Trustees, Maria Sefidari and I take the lead on the
necessary steps are being taken. Katherine and
Foundation staff already
have worked on the first steps to reach that goal.
Our goal is to make sure we — as a movement — will have a strategy that we
can all embrace and push forward together.
I do hope that everyone together can find a positive way forward (says the
optimist in me, even while the pessimist in me lists all the things likely
to go wrong).
Pi zero