Daniel Kinzler wrote:
Over the last couple of months, the Architecture Committee has been working on a charter that defines the Committee's purpose of authority. Thank you for your input! The final draft of the charter is now available at:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_committee/Charter
For a final round of feedback, we are following the procedure we also use when approving RFCs. As per yesterday's ArchCom meeting, the charter is entering the Last Call period. If no new and pertinent concerns are raised and remain unaddressed by July 26, the charter will be enacted as the new basis of the committee's operation and authority.
How do you reconcile these two sentences?
"The WMF CTO is automatically a member."
"TechCom has full discretion over adding or removing members, with the CTO having veto power. Committee membership is not tied to employment by the WMF or any other organization."
I don't think the Wikimedia Foundation Inc.'s current CTO should automatically be a member of a technical committee for Wikimedia projects. And I certainly don't think the current CTO should have veto power over anything. I'm also pretty wary of this document as it seems to have been almost entirely written by Wikimedia Foundation Inc. employees. Where is the input and representation of the rest of the Wikimedia technical community outside of current Wikimedia Foundation Inc. (or Wikimedia Deutschland) employees?
And then there are parts like this:
"Conflicts can be escalated to the [current Wikimedia Foundation Inc.] CTO."
Bleh. This page is speaking out of both sides of its mouth. It's claiming to be representative of the Wikimedia technical community, while also basically (re-?)establishing itself as a mere extension of the current bureaucracy of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. The lofty sentences such as "Within Wikimedia, technology leadership is not vested in a single individual, but in the technical community. That leadership is focused in TechCom." are counter-acted by the finer print (i.e., the actual proposed implementation of this committee).
MZMcBride