How will you vote or propose changes on the board about the foundation reducing its greenhouse gas emissions from flights (meetings, chapter traveling grants, and Wikimania) and hardware, and using renewable energy (directly or via certificates)? -- Jeandré, 2011-05-15t18:41z
Well, it took me some real time to find out what I could say about it. I did not imagine that the Foundation could produce so much greenhouse gas emission and I would have said it is rather an individual issue than a general problem. However I happen to have read an interesting piece of news about accepting a grant ($18.000 for 18 people, that is $1.000 per person just for the flights...)
[1] for an Ibero-American Wikimedia Summit when you also have a Wikimania in Israel less than two months later. I wonder why this event was not grouped in Wikimania (ensuring then that it will meet a great success) and now I understand much better your question, I was being too naive... So indeed traveling should be used when really necessary using when it is not, as others have suggested, other technical means to communicate. One cannot help but wonder if there is also a need to spend some good time around and visit some countries aside from discussing Foundation issues, I hope I am wrong and that this is not the main objective of such meetings.
Marc-André Pelletier (
Coren)
Being aware of the environment is a process, not a checklist we can fill in. Artifices like certificates are little more than a method to "feel good" environmentalism, and not a real solution.
What I see as right approach is to make sure that we answer two simple questions when we make a decision: what is the environmental impact of that decision, and is there a reasonable way to mitigate it?
In my experience with any collaborative group effort, it is essential to have some face-to-face interaction first and occasionally, especially when the group is international or otherwise diverse. After that, I've found virtual interactions, from email to calls to video, quite effective even on complex issues. So I'd believe less travel might be feasible, but I have no experience yet with the particular needs of this Board.
The board and staff jointly should continue to investigate ways to make the central server systems more energy-efficient.
I agree with most answers here, that certificates would just be window-dressing, since we are not in the business of raising money in order to give grants to worthy green initiatives.
This seems like a typical discussion to have with our community and not just amongst the board members. I am willing to follow the community opinion on this topic within reasonable ranges.
If you insist to know my personal opinion, I think that the environment is not our core mission. Our core mission is about knowledge and making that available to everyone on this planet. Our impact is not in fighting greenhouse gasses, our strength lies in knowledge and content.
We should however do whatever is reasonable to mitigate any negative impact our actions have on others, including environmental distortion. However, please realize that our efficiency is much better than any of the other top-10 websites. We have much less staff flying around the world, we have smaller offices etc. What is reasonable? Reasonable is to have more online meetings where efficiency is comparable; reasonable is buying recycled printing paper, reasonable is taking the train instead of the plane when comparable time and costs.
We could buy certificates, but that would go at a cost - less other activities or more donation banner time.
I've never liked RECs - it has always struck me as a lazy, and largely ineffective, way of becoming "green". I don't subscribe the current political fads and policies (which are mostly about politics, not ecology), instead I prefer an approach termed "everything begins at home", where we make
pro-active actions to reduce our carbon footprint. I think this should apply to the foundation as well.
There are a number of ways to address this. The first is technology. I am not completely versed in the specifics of the foundation's tech infrastructure (this is something I have to look into), however, tentatively I can say: A lot of research has been done (by Google, Facebook, etc.) into radical and reduced emission data centre technology. There is no way we can go as far as billion dollar companies, but it is worth looking at different approaches to reduce our footprint (perhaps even to the level of partnerships to take advantages of that tech).
The second way is the staff footprint; encouraging digital meeting rather than face-to-face is a no-brainer (after all, we are an online project). I have ample experience in virtual team-working (from my career as a programmer) and there are some fresh ideas I could bring to bear on that problem.
I'm no eco-warrior. But I think it does us good to be concerned about the planet - it is good PR to do so, it will reduce costs, is in keeping with our founding ideals and it leads by example.
The aim of Wikimania is to be a presencial meeting to allow knowing phisically another wikimedians so the flights are neccessary, the energy that the servers uses may be the minimal, so the monitor may be turn on only if neccessary. A minimal gas emission for meeting targets of the foundation is always necessary
I'm a Plant Ecologist as a formation, and I worked as a researcher in Environmental Sciences for some time (namely on desertification). This makes me very aware of the risks associated to global warming, but at the same time I'm convinced that at this moment there is no wonder solution for the issue. My personal believing is that a good start could be trying to limitate our individual energy consumption, especially by eliminating unnecessary waste of it (simple gestures as switching the LEDs of out TVs off). Also, we should have to use web-based communications instead of travel, unless it is not strictly necessary. This approach directly reflects into less a necessity of energy production, and in the reduction of individual carbon footprints. As people caring for the future generations (why bother to write an encyclopedia, if we were not?), Wikimedians should have to apply energetic deflation to their lives, thus improving our impact on the planet and positively reflecting this approach on Wikimedia reputation.
With regard to greenhouse gas emissions, I believe the Foundation should respect the law and ethics, just like any other organization. But this is not the Foundation's purpose, vision or strategy. Therefore, dealing with these matters falls outside the Board's competences. The Board's role is to choose an executive director. I am fully confident that it will do a good job in all the aspects of day-to-day management, including making sure that these factors are considered.
While there isn't a perfect alternative to face-to-face meetings, today's video conferencing technology is very much evolved, and people can have group voice chats from just about everywhere. This could save quite a bit of travel for the board and for WMF staff. I'm not deluding myself that it can replace all of it or anything close to that. As for hardware's greenhouse emissions, I cannot recommend much more than using new hardware that conforms to greener standards. I don't think that buying RECs or otherwise directly investing donator money in offsetting greenhouse emissions is a recommended use of our donors' money. We should be saving our own operational costs, and in the process saving greenhouse emissions. I find that sufficient in our case.
Harel 19:07, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
As a Board member I would have a duty to ensure that donors' money is spent as promised to them, and in line with the Foundation's Bylaws (see in particular Article II). I'm not sure that spending money on RECs or other means of off-setting environmental impact, though proposed with good intentions, falls under these restrictions. That said, reducing energy use and other environmental impacts can often be done at the same or lower cost than the original effort, and clearly looking at these is something we should do in the Foundation, Chapters and the wider movement.
In relation to two of your particular questions, I don’t have a good answer for the first one, while I have
some answer for the second one.
Wikimedia movement wants to be global and flying is necessary for a global movement. Traveling this way is far at least 20 years. However, I suppose that there are some options here, but I am sure that none of them is substantial.
In relation to hardware, AFAIK, the most serious issue is (or will be for sure) about the energy consumed by data centers. In that case, WMF could choose data centers which use more renewable energy.
My general answer is that there are many ways to reduce pollution. From the position of local contribution, WMF and chapters should, for example, reduce printing as much as it is possible; have efficient cooling and heating systems etc. From the position of entities which are giving money for various chapter and community projects, they should make the list of requirements for reducing pollution. (Of course, it should be reasonable: in many parts of the world there are no reasonable options to do something cleaner.)
At some point of time -- however, I have no idea when it could be -- WMF should employ a person (likely, an ecologist) who would care about all details related to reducing pollution generated by WMF, chapters and movement itself.
I would also ask you and people well introduced in those issues to start the project (page on Meta), make a group [or not] and make proposals for making WMF and the rest of the movement “greener”. I am sure that your proposal would be carefully considered no matter if I am elected or not.
(This is basically the same answer I've given previously, but my position has not significantly changed.)
I encourage being mindful of environmental impact without being wasteful in other ways in attempts to meet this goal. But mainly I see avoiding environmental waste as aligned with avoiding other types of waste: we want to purchase efficient hardware because wasting power is expensive, we don't want to take unnecessary trips because travel is expensive and wastes time.
However, the value of face-to-face meeting, even for an online-based organization, is too great to forgo it completely: avoiding wastefulness doesn't mean eliminating costs. Most WMF business already takes place via IRC, wikis, and email, but the higher bandwidth of face-to-face interaction and the different kind of interaction it enables is something I think we should continue. The venues have largely been chosen with other considerations in mind: where the offices are, which chapter is willing to host a meeting, how it meets other goals such as outreach or meeting other stakeholders. For a global organization, yes, some people will travel a long way.
(There are small measures we can take such as avoiding unnecessary printing, and purchasing from environmentally responsible suppliers, and I hope that we will do that. But all of it is nearly insignificant in comparison to air travel.)
Our projects are digital: they replace printed paper material for thousands and millions of people, need no shipping, require no replacement or disposal. Perhaps the greenest thing we could do is encourage more people to use them.
First of all, I should say that face-to-face meetings can't be replaced by online meetings, and that they are truly important for an organization of volunteers like ours. So I don't think is realistic or even wise to propose a drastically cut-off of travels and on-site meetings.
This said, I agree with the importance of reducing our carbon footprint by means of:
- Using low impact datacenters.
- Promoting hardware recycling.
- Limiting printings to the strictly necessary.
- Establishing partnerships with specialized environmental agencies to find common strategies to reduce our carbon footprint.
The Foundation should set a standard of sustainability that can scale up further. We make an effort to limit expected travel, but travel is where we could make the greatest impact here. Since the community depends on effective remote communication and collaboration, I hope to see the WMF invest more in tools to make remote collaboration posible, for both large and small meetings. For hardware, I would like to see the WMF follow the model of our EvoSwitch partnership to set up carbon-neutral hosting (and identify more hosts willing to donate bandwidth to the projects) for all infrastructure.
The Foundation is very careful on its spendings and by doing so we take very a lot of care of being not wasteful and not harm the environment. We don't need a board resolution for that. A board resolution in this case would change nothing and is only good for PR, and that PR is not worth the CO2 that would be used to produce it. Our mission is to collect human knowledge and to deliver that knowledge to the humanity. I believe that with knowledge people can make better decision. So we are helping people making better decision. Also in relation to the environment. This is the best we can do and we shale concentrate on this. If people want to donate to CO2 reduction, they can do this in a far more direct and effective way. Donate money to WMF so that WMF can by certificates is an utterly ineffective methode. It is a waste of resources and is contraproductive to our mission and the mission of the environmental organizations.
Ads and fundraising.
How will you vote or propose changes on the board about paid ads on Wikimedia sites? Will you keep the foundation's 2009 fundraiser promise of staying "Ad-free forever"?
- support ads
- pop-ups/flash/banners/graphics
- flash/banners/graphics in skin whitespace or at bottom
- company logos in site notices
- prominent text ads
- company names in site notices
- text ads in skin whitespace or at bottom
- opt out
- opt in
- maybe support ads
- only for a huge amount of money
- only during budget emergencies
- only if editors support it
- ad-free forever
- other
How will you vote or propose changes on the board about banners as huge as those of the 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 fundraisers?
How will you vote or propose changes on the board about things like hiring a PR company? If you do support hiring a PR company, what do you think of paying them a quarter of a million US$?
Should the foundation expand its employees to hundreds, and have a continuously larger budget? -- Jeandré, 2011-05-15t18:46z
- PR company project info: [2], [3]. -- Jeandré, 2011-05-16t12:05z
I am fiercely opposed to ads here, or even during TV programs... but it would be far worse here since TV programs are mainly meant for entertainment and that our projects are about knowledge... Well, your numbers about the PR were a real (unpleasant) surprise to me. I had read some userpages of Spanish users complaining about the heavy cost of the WMF staff but well there seems to be many financial issues that need some closer glance and some rethinking. I cannot tell you if the number of the employees is normal or not though it seems a number really high to me, if there were some reports about the roles and what is done I could make a better judgment about the situation. However this situation does not really surprise me at all, Wikimedia seems to be suffering the same illness many other organizations have; some fighting against Cancer or some other caritative works have nearly 50% of their spending that does not go to their initial/main objective. I think this should be the role of the Board to check that everything is fine and it should answer about this and prove us that such spending is necessary with reports and sound data. On the other hand I have witnessed many very active employees of the Foundation doing a great job so I cannot tell more without substantial data.
Marc-André Pelletier (
Coren)
I do not and will never support any form of paid advertisement.
I honestly don't know if the current PR efforts (including the way fundraising banners are handled) is optimal. Certainly, the resources spent there seem out of proportion with reality, and would bear reexamining.
As for the size of the staff, I don't think it's reasonable to make size objectives. I have a really hard time imagining how we could meaningfully employ hundreds of people, and I can think of much better things to do with a budget that to pay for administrative overhead. I think expansion of the good work we do is best looked at from the perspective of helping and supporting groups in the trenches than trying to do everything ourselves.
No ads ever, on standard pages of wiki projects. It goes against our central tenets, and would lose us readers as well as editors.
For fundraising, we need a banner and slogan that gets noticed, but appeals to rather than annoys the people it's aimed at. I'm dubious that a PR company is the best judge of that, in this case. Why not tailor banner for editor vs reader based on login or not?
Staffing level should always be determined by need rather than growth, but open to new jobs that would significantly enable new initiatives.
I have no intention whatsoever to support paid advertizements on Wikimedia websites unless there is a clear mandate from the community to do so.
Putting ads on our websites would cause serious damage to our communities and we can't afford that. Being the only ad-free top-10 website is currently a good selling point.
For the other question (PR company, staffing) I think that we should always keep the effectivity in mind: does an extra staff member help or replace community? I remember the times where there were only a few staff members, and at that time I would probably have found the idea of 70 staff members ridiculous. Right now I cannot imagine us going to hundreds either, but I can't exclude the possibility when there are very good reasons. I do prefer other scaling methods in general though, through chapters, other partner groups, enabling volunteers etc. The same for the PR company: do they add that much value, are they really necessary? I don't dismiss the idea out of hand, but would definitely ask critical questions when presented such amounts of money allocated to market research.
Ad-free forever, naturally. This is not only my view, but the view of the larger community as well and I do not think it is something that will change for a long time.
The fundraising banners caused some disgruntlement at the time because of their size. On the other hand to enable us to avoid running ads we do need to do significant fundraising. I think it would be worthwhile doing a proper study into whether a very large banner had an appreciable affect on donations, or whether we could use a smaller one. There is, somewhere, a balance between the disruptiveness of the fundraising and reaching our targets.
PR, again, needs looking into as that is an extra-ordinary amount ot be spending (I need to look into the financials in more depth because I am not aware of the exact outline of how that was spent). As it is, this issue is a general annoyance of mine - large charities/companies spending significant portions of cash on "branding" and PR. In my experience very little of it is value for money, and a more scaled down approach can achieve exactly the same end. We should be exploring different approaches, those more in keeping with our ideals and goals. That may include/require a modest sum spent on consultancy.
As I discussed in another of the questions; we should be expanding (staff and technology) where it is
sensibly needed to work on expanding our aims/ideals. That might mean we end up being somewhat inefficient, and long term we
must streamline spending. But, it seems reasonable to work with inefficient but radical growth in the short term. WMF, as with all organisations, has a "life cycle" akin to a person - to my mind we are reaching the cusp of adult hood and have a few more teenage years yet to get through till maturity fully sets in. Now is the time to use our momentum to establish the foundation fully, and in a few years we can work to rationalise spending.
Ad-free forever, this the basis of the projects. Otherwise WMF would become in a commercial project
I feel that turning the current model of WMF operations from ad-free to commercial would damage to the basis the very same substance its projects. Always talking from my professional standpoint of digital media expert, I think that the greatest asset of WMF is not its servers or funds, but the willingness of contributors to wrap around a common, higher scope, e.g. the education of all the humanity. Whenever WMF would become another commercial project, it would lose its volunteers at the speed of light, because they would not feel anymore to be a part of something. At the same moment, before answering to the question about whether the WMF should have to hire a PR company, I would like to have the answer to the question "What for?". If the PR company would have the scope of setting up a campaign for rising up the level of donations, it should have to be carefully assessed the desired level of ROI, and the confidence interval of it (e.g. are we spending 250k and have an expected ROI of 2,5 millions? Yes, sure we should have to spend this money, but I would like to see how solid the ROI assessment is). We always have to remember that the Foundation is managing donors' funds, and any action has therefore to be carefully evaluated. All and all, my opinion is that we should have to remain ad-free...forever is a bold word, but for sure it is appropriate. The same approach should have to be applied to the number of WMF employees, whose number should have to be proportioned to the dimension of the work to be performed.
My opposition to unwanted advertising is not irrational. There are two reasons for it. First, I believe it diverts the reader's attention and therefore is detrimental to the project's goals. Second, I think it creates needs that not all readers will be able to satisfy, which in turn creates anxiety. Therefore, the price paid by readers far exceeds any sum this could bring into our coffers.
Fundraising campaign banners lack the latter problem but do have the former. Therefore, in my candidacy I suggest working to establish an offline fundraising network and promoting recurrent donations.
I would only agree with displaying advertisements if readers have opted in beforehand. I submitted an idea in this regard to the strategic plan, which still has not been discussed enough.
With regard to employees or the hiring of external providers, whether for PR or any other purpose, it is very clear. First, I think it should only be done to carry out necessary tasks that volunteers do not want to do. Second, we should be thrifty and always get a good result from each cent spent.
That said, if we get good value for our money and each employee performs tasks that are crucial but cannot be done by volunteers, then I hope we need a lot of them.
These are four different questions, let me answer the first two and I suggest you split the other two away. I wrote in my statement that I want our project to remain ad-free, unless this becomes the very last way to finance the operation of our projects (in other words, without ads they will have to shut down). I think it's a simple principle that everyone can understand. As for the huge banners of the last fundraisers, it was just one of the things that I didn't like too much about both fundraisers, but I don't think they are some fatal mistake that mustn't repeat. There were more important issues about community involvement with the fundraiser, and about localization of the fundraising slogans, that I find more deserving of critique.
Well, to answer your 3rd and 4th questions: $250K for a PR company sounds like a lot, and it's difficult for me, from my current position, to gauge the justification for this expense - what we gained from this PR company and how much the competition would have cost us. It would be reckless for me to criticize this decision without more comprehensive background information.
As for the foundation growing to (many) hundreds of employees, I don't think this is going to happen in the foreseeable future or that it's a welcome phenomenon. There is a certain level beyond which it doesn't make much sense to expand. We're not a for-profit organization that would normally seek to expand thus grow its profits. I'm not in a position to assess how much the current employees are overworked. If we start seeing employees (of the WMF, of WMDE?) reinventing the same projects and programs again and again that were already tried in different guises, we'll know we're treading water and that growth potential has been exhausted.
- Advertising
- Option 3, "ad-free forever", except that Option 2 part 2 ("maybe but only in emergencies") should also be considered. Thankfully we are very far from being in an budget emergency, and the most important part of being a Board member is ensuring that we don't ever reach one.
- Fundraising
- I think we should make the fundraising impact as small as possible whilst raising the needed funds and getting the right message across, but no smaller. Of course, the exact details of fundraising are an executive rather than non-executive function, and so are run by the Foundation staff (not the Board) with the input of the community, and I would press for ever more community involvement to ensure that this is addressed. (Disclaimer: I helped out a very little with this year's fundraiser, mostly in a "technical" capacity of how to make templates work.)
- Hiring external resources
- It is easy to take a hardline position on hiring in external resources, whether for PR or other services. The Foundation already has a practice of hiring a mixture of permanent staff for long-term roles and contractors for shorter-term ones. However, in some cases agencies can make more sense than having a contractor - for example, if you want to draw on an agency's wide range of skills from a dozen different people for a month and then stop using them, and of course hiring an agency with a proven track record can be faster than trying to hire the right one-person contractor. US$250,000 is a good deal of money, but I'm not sufficiently close to the details of the case you highlight to judge whether it was a wise expenditure of money.
- Expansion
- In general, I am sceptical of whether we will need quite as many staff as some project that we do, but we should not have political concepts of the "right" number of staff - we should instead discuss each position or function as they come up. Sometimes people worry that we are replacing volunteers with staff, and removing the early stepping-stones that people can take to move from just working on the wikis to working with the wider movement organisation. I would look to make sure that we give the community as many opportunities as possible to serve.
Ads: We don’t need ads, and it is highly likely that, if elected, I wouldn’t be in situation to consider ads as an option during this mandate.
However, if we are talking generally, I can imagine the situation when alternative sources of money could be needed. However, again, in non-catastrophic scenarios, such situation would be visible at least year or two before the necessity to implement it. That means that there would be enough time to describe the situation to the community and ask it for approval.
Banners: While I hope -- but I am not sure -- that similar amount of money could be achieved with smaller banners, I am sure that those banners could be more innovative and not so irritating.
PR company: As someone who is well introduced in what PR companies are doing, I know that hiring a PR company is waste of money in the case of WMF. We don’t need to defend ourselves from negative PR -- as negative PR against Wikimedia brings much more negative publicity to a person/organization which does it (cf. Sanger’s negative campaign) -- and everything else is just about regular work with media + Wikimedia has enormous reservoir of creativity inside of the community. Hiring a person for ~$100k for a year instead of company for $250k for a quarter would be much more wiser solution.
WMF employees and budget: Personally, I am in favor of having larger number of smaller organizations than having one big. When one small crashes, other organizations could survive. That issue is partially covered by chapter model, where chapters are basically independent organizations. And chapters are taking their parts of responsibility (cf. my answer on the question Funding of the chapters’ activities). And I would like to see more examples of that type.
It should be also noted that WMF’s growth is limited by the nature of its goals. WMF could have three digits number of employees, but I am sure that it would never have a need to have four digits number of employees, no matter how much money it generates. But, in any case, that’s related to the specific needs and I have to say that I don’t have precise picture of WMF's or community's needs for number of WMF's (and chapters’) employees.
The first time I answered this question I was more ambivalent about ads: not something I thought of as the best option, but something I'd be willing to consider. I've gotten gradually less receptive to the idea of advertising as I become less and less convinced it would ever be necessary to save the project. (And there is a philosophical aspect: if we cannot get enough financial support from public donations to continue operating, perhaps we
should fail and be replaced by something better.) I think advertising distorts the information environment in ways that are subtle and insidious, and even people who think they are too smart and too media-literate to be influenced by advertising are still shown to be influenced by it. Almost no source of information is free from it. And once it is there, you may try to forget that it exists, not treat it as a factor, but you can't really; you have to second-guess your decisions, wondering if you really decided something because it was the best option or because you're thinking about keeping advertising.
As for the banners: the board has very little input into the fundraising specifics at all; they are the work of the staff along with the community volunteers; I think this proper and will not propose changes to this. Aside from the idea that we should have a fundraiser and that it is OK to use the site for it, I believe this is an area where the board should not often be intervening directly; where board members give feedback, it should be with the same level of authority as any other community members. (This is a difficult area for any board member to get used to, I think: learning when it is and is not proper to request changes from the staff. Especially for the community-elected members. Sometimes being mindful of good practice does mean letting the office do things that you doubt are going to work, or that you would have done differently! We should be able to step in if things are really going contrary to our mission and values, but there also must be mutual trust between the staff leadership and the board.)
Similarly, I leave the question of hiring a PR company entirely up to the Executive Director, whose responsibility it is to use staff or contractors as necessary to achieve the organization's goals. (We should not hire a company who is known to engage in unethical practices, or one who will not respect our wishes--but this is a consideration for any company, not just fundraising.) If the money used to hire the company was spent wastefully, that's something to take up with the ED. I think spending on fundraising should be as efficient as possible and should not be an excessive proportion of the budget, but that doesn't mean spending as little as possible. If spending $10K means getting $1M that we wouldn't get otherwise, and spending $250K means getting $10M that we wouldn't get otherwise, we should spend $250K. (For a $20M organization, this is still a quite reasonable amount--whereas we shouldn't be one of those organizations that spends $10M on raising funds to get $11M back.)
As for staff expansion: I don't know about "hundreds", but I think the current plan for over 100 is reasonable. (Actually, it has taken me a long time to conceive of the idea.) Is this the optimal size for the organization? I don't know. (When I first joined the board, we had about 3 employees.) Maybe it's the wrong size. But the idea is reasonable. I can think of plenty of areas where having more full-time staff would be a great help, particularly in the technical areas.
I think our projects should remain ads free. And we should find the banners' sizes that best fit with a succesful fundraising. I don't think big banners are needed for a good campaign, but this is only opinion: there are better ways to test the appropiate size and shape.
Regarding the size of WMF, I prefer a small team of specialists and external consultants when needed rather than a big paid organization. But, again, I'm not saying we reached our limit. For some time, perhaps the staff will still growing, because, as I said, WMF is still young and expanding.
The key is planning the future with caution, carefully avoid hiring people for tasks that can be developed in a voluntary basis and empowering local communities rather than hiring consultants to work in the field.
We should always be ad-free.
We should improve how we target our fundraising banners so that they are not presented continuously to our active users, and so they are less huge than those used this past year.
The question of staff size is worth its own question. The WMF should scale how well it works with and through the community in line with any other staff growth -- in order to grow quickly, if that is necessary, we would need to improve our capacity to better channel the energies of the smart, talented, motivated people already driving our movement and the projects forward. The heart of our projects is their ability to catalyze hundreds of thousands of people to do tremendous work together; if we try to grow as a centralized foundation without this balance, we may work against our heart, even if that growth lets us realize some short-term goals more quickly. And as you point out, any benefits gained through expansion of permanent Foundation staff add to our annual upkeep costs, while benefits gained through strengthening and expanding the community are more sustainable.
Q1: I don't see any necessity on put adds, so 3. Q2 and Q3: We had gained a lot of experiences and professionalism in fundraising in the last years. Our staff work out the yearly campaign and I am fully in trust of their ability, which they showed in the last years. So currently I don't see necessity here either to change or to request external resources. Q4: As I already said in another question the reason why we grew is not because we want to be big, but because of the expectations from the community and because of need. We cannot let an employee work 60 hours a week because this inhuman, inmoral and illegal. This said, I believe in a few years we will reach a point where our organization is well set and well organized, and our chapters will professionalize and take more and more responsibilities regionally.
Bugzilla.wikimedia.org have tons of bug reports and feature requests to MediaWiki software backlogged. Some of then are particular to non-Wikipedia projects, such the ones at oldwikisource:Wikisource:Wishlist. Unfortunately the lack of attention for those projects is foundable in more moments, such in the time of publishing the Wikimedia Strategic Plan. In your view, what the Board can do to help those projects (both in advertising and development)? At the time of Wikimedia brand survey some suggested that non-Wikipedia projects needs to found an organization to adopt them, allowing Wikimedia to discontinues support to then. Do you agree or those projects are only in lack of a major attention or even to the creation of local chapter-like groups? Lugusto • ※ 23:12, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Marc-André Pelletier (
Coren)
There is always a little bit of unease when a software project is cared for and financed by (one of) its primary users. The entity doing the financing rightfully expect that
its priorities will be taken care of, but the wider community must not be forgotten in the deal.
This is a very real problem in the case of Mediawiki because the core developers and gatekeepers are developers for the Wikipedias first and foremost. I think that relationship is a little too close to be comfortable now, and the software development should be "spun off" to a separate nonprofit (that, I expect, the Foundation will want to continue contributing to — as one of its users).
I have always found it a bit tricky to fully focus on one project (Wikipedia). Having been involved with Wikimedia Nederlands board for five years, I have experiences however how hard it is to get anyone outside Wikimedia enthusiast for a non-Wikipedia project. I do know that various chapters and the Wikimedia Foundation have made efforts to help the non-Wikipedia projects, but not as much as to help Wikipedia.
We should be honest to ourselves, and realize that other Wikimedia projects will likely never be as successful as Wikipedia is nowadays. At the same time, a website providing learning materials (wikibooks, or even wikiversity) can be much more effective in reaching our goals than an encyclopedia, if they are embraced by the educational community. The problem we encounter here is that a) the software is not made for creating modern (audiovisual) learning materials, b) there is no critical mass of material or community to make it work, and c) it requires more dedication to write a book than to write an article in Wikipedia - it is harder to enter the community effectively.
Some of these factors are outside our reach, some are within. A potentially great way of accomplishing this promotion would be some kind of meta-organization promoting Wikibooks (the Wikibooks Association, anyone?) in an affiliated groups style. They could probably work more effectively and dedicated on the promotion of such project in alignment with the Foundation than the Foundation all by itself. But this would have to come from and be supported by the relevant communities.
I think we are reaching the stage now when we can focus on the other projects more directly and intently. And we should. For example; a lot of people credit Wikipedia with being a good, neutral source of current events as they happen. Personally I am very proud of that. On the other hand that is not really in keeping with our mission - and current events is one of the most complex and disrupted area of the project. It would be awesome for Wikinews to take over that role. There are some great, well sourced essays on WP that would make an awesome start to a Wikibook. And so on. Now is the time, as we move to expand our reach, to promote those projects harder.
As to the bug reports - that is an issue I believe is being partially addressed with this years hires :) Continuing that trend seems sensible.
The Mediawiki is a separate project. It allows running several wikis and it's open code and free licensed. If any user has a question, why couldn't do it? If an user needs a plugin, the development team may solve the request. The system must be open.
Leaving alone projects is always something painful, especially for the persons which have devoted time and effort to build them up. But on the other side, I would like to reverse the question, based on the simple management assumption that not everything that is feasible should have to be implemented. If it is indeed true that developing new projects is a way to expand Wikimedia reach and capabilities, on the other side it should have to be considered that Foundation has limited human and financial resources as any other organisational entity in the world. Therefore, and in order to help not to develop backlogs, it should have to be carefully and responsably assessed at the appopriate level whether opening a new project is worth or not; and if it is, whether it is the right time to launch it. As a community, we should have to be aware about the necessity of investing disproportionately on projects, so not to compromise the growth of the potentially most "urgent" and "lively" projects with the launch of new ones. It requires a sound planning approach, and a rigorous decision-making process.
I have personally promoted several sister projects through partnerships with administrations, universities and other organizations. We at the Catalan-speaking projects widened the strategic plan and devoted a section of it to sister projects. Several Wikisource strategic objectives have already been met.
In my candidacy, I explicitly suggest investing in developing technologies specifically for these projects. I think we still need to understand the factors that will determine their success, including taking advantage of a synergy with Wikipedia.
I do not think we can ensure these projects will be successful just by paying more attention and providing more technical tools to them.
I think offline support is essential to some of them (e.g., through chapters o other organizations). Personally, I would throw all my weight behind an attempt to create a solid group that wants to establish a themed chapter to promote some of these projects.
This is a painful and controversial issue that has been with us for a few years now. The non-Wikipedia projects fail to gain the success and the visibility (and hence, the Foundation's attention) of Wikipedia. Which is here the cause and which is the effect is a matter of personal taste. I personally think that not all non-Wikipedia projects have the same chances for success - some like Wikisource and Wikibooks are better suited for the wiki platform, whereas others like Wikinews or Wikiquote have IMHO a smaller potential for success. I certainly wouldn't want to see these projects somehow leave the foundation and go looking for other organizations to support them. Perhaps the WMF has to introduce organizational changes in its own structure to cater for these projects - perhaps a small department devoted to them.
MediaWiki is an excellent piece of software, one which I use at work in several forms. That does not mean it is perfect for every use, and it clearly does not serve projects other than Wikipedia as well as those communities would like it to. I think the "sister projects" are very valuable and that the Foundation should try to devote resources to them to help them flourish, but I cannot make promises that if elected everyone on (say) Wikispecies would get their every wish in the next year. Life is full of compromises, and though we have sided a little too often with Wikipedia before, we should keep trying to work on a path that serves all our communities
I think that MediaWiki is a separate good from other Wikimedia projects. Thus, it should be autonomous enough to get its own funding and its own development rules.
WMF should guarantee the core of development, as well as its own needs. Besides that, future MediaWiki autonomous governing body should broadly define how much money is needed for developing and/or implementation of specific extensions and other kinds of enhancements.
Such model would allow anyone to search for funds independently of current WMF’s priorities and to get extensions implemented. That includes, for example, deal between, let’s say, Wikisource community and Wikimedia France (but any non-Wikimedia organization, too) to do fundraising for Wikisource-related extensions.
One difficult aspect of the board role is prioritizing. Even with the resources that we have, we still cannot do everything at once. The strategy process was meant to identify those areas that should be the greatest priorities going forward in a way that had broad consensus. The Foundation's resources are mostly being put toward the goals identified there; the executive director is evaluated based on progress toward them, and the budget drawn up to support them. One avenue for more organized support of the projects that are getting less attention may be through chapter-like groups; if you have seen the Movement Roles group, you have seen that there is a lot of support for groups that are based on common interest rather than common geography.
We're planning to devote a lot of resources to technical improvements in the coming years, including staff to help make it easier for volunteers to contribute to MediaWiki, but there are still more requests than can reasonably be fulfilled by staff. But the main way the projects not currently part of the highest-priority group can be advanced is the way that most of the work on the projects has always been done: through groups of volunteers taking the initiative to work on what is most important to them.
Sister projects such as Wikisource -- which has the potential to become the main multilingual repository for millions of classics and public documents, used by classicists and historians the world over -- represent our greatest opportunity to grow and to expand our circle of contributing groups. The WMF should see them as a way to engage more people in our work, which they are, and should take their needs as seriously as we take those of Wikipedia.
Fixing bugs in the latter serves more people now, but fixing fundamental bugs in the smaller projects may serve more people in the long run, by attracting them to our projects, giving them a reason to contribute (or to move their bespoke content management solutions onto a Wikimedia project), and attracting future readers who are looking for knowledge beyond encyclopedia entries.
While sister projects didn't get mentioned by name in some of the strategic planning, innovative work to find ways to support sister projects is supported broadly under our goal to support more community innovation. We should give them even more explicit attention than this.
As I had already said in two other question, we have constantly demands and expectations from the projects and the communities. But our resources are limited, if we don't want to get into the Cathedral. At the moment our focus on tech development is definitively on support more participation, and thus support for feature desires from smaller projects fall back. I understand the frustration of these communities and it looks like the easiest way is to have an organization dedicated for these projects. But this is only a seemingly most easy way. If we have a new organization, it must at first build up itself, it must raise fund to do the work it is supposed to do. All these are not so easy. And I really doubt that our small projects would have the capacity to do all these. In the past I had always advocated for our small projects, for example on my trip to Nairobie I spoke with an NGO about how they can use Wikiversity to document their experiences. Or on the chapters conference this spring in Berlin I suggested that the chapters can work together, and make connections for school classes of different part of the world to write a Wikibook together: How my world looks like, or something like that. I think that our different projects have great potential, but we must be more resourceful and more innovative to dig those potentials out. And a great deal of that don't really need the help from the Foundation.
a bit of bread and butter stuff: minutes of 7 meetings (2009-2011) are missing right now. thus, it doesn't look like the current practice - regardless of approval-delays and the BGC results - meet the pretty impressive Transparency is king-lecture (noted: by wmf staff) in Berlin last march.
after all: the board has to keep accurate records of all Foundation meetings anyway, the signpost (among others) has started to mention these delays once more and we don't need a board + extras-version (properly working committees should (and in fact often do) publish reports of their activity anyway).
therefore, i would like to know: how you intend to improve this situation to ensure transparency - in time - and a sounder communicative practice of the board (regarding this aspect) in the future? thx & regards --Jan eissfeldt 01:05, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I am sorry to say that this is a nearly general flaw of the upper structures of the Wikimedia. It is not limited to the Board unfortunately, I am still waiting to know who were the candidates chosen by the Chapcom/Chapters to be their Trustee in the Board, which were the criteria that made Phoebe a better candidate than Gerard for instance or if the fact of being monolingual is not a problem when being chosen by multilingual structures. Indeed much transparency is needed in the Board and everywhere, and minutes and reports must be made public on a periodic basis.
Marc-André Pelletier (
Coren)
Transparency is indeed important, but I would be very surprised if the delays in publishing minutes are caused by anything but happenstance rather than an attempt to hide anything. Have you
asked the current secretary why those minutes have not yet been published?
That said, the importance of transparency isn't so much in the formalities of what is on the public board record so much as what takes place behind the scenes and internally to the staff. I'm more troubled by how opaque the office is than poorly filed paperwork.
I would first like to know the exact cause of these delays. In general I agree that openness here is good, and that minutes should be published yesterday rather than tomorrow. But without knowing the reasons, I cannot suggest a solution.
The usual approach in these situations is to have a non-board member record or write up minutes, this can streamline the approach, and is what should be employed.
I also would like the cause of these delays. The minutes sould be published at a reasonable time.
I believe that publishing the minutes of Board meetings (apart from personal data and details on ongoing negotiations that should be kept confidential) is the minimum we should demand in terms of transparency and openness towards the community.
I think this should not only bear upon the Board, but also committees that influence the movement (such as the ChapCom, the Grant Advisory Committee) and other committees that may be established, as well as Chapters and other groups.
My own experience says that, in practice, this works best if the secretary is not a member, which allows him to focus on this task. In fact, the Bylaws provide for the appointment of a secretary who is not a Board member.
I think Millosh answered the question quite well. Based on my experience with Wikimedia Israel's board, it's easy and very desirable to strive to make transparency king at all times, while the mundane reality of things is that some matters like finances and human resources are sensitive in the long term. A group of people such as the board should have some way to
also, sometimes converse non-publicly, even if the default should be for its discussions to be made fully public. It's often difficult to get people to speak honestly and candidly when everything is 100% transparent. Board meeting minutes should reflect a summary of the discussion made, not necessarily every single word said by everyone.
Having said all that, I think that the main reason for minutes not being published is that sometimes there's no scribe taking notes in real time, or anyone with enough time to turn those notes into publishable minutes. After a certain time elapses, all is forgotten about and the minutes never get published. For this, the board should have a secretary (from among the WMF staff?) not only coordinating and facilitating the board meetings, but responsible for publishing the minutes in a timely fashion.
Also, I don't think there should be some supervisory committee like Millosh suggested. Either we trust the board or not. If the board is not trusted something more drastic should be done about it. The supervisory board seems to me to imply that we don't trust the board, and to create unnecessary bureaucratic overhead and theatrical drama.
I think that there is probably a need for some staffing to support the Board itself, including in the drafting, circulating, correction and publishing of minutes, resolutions and other material. It is clearly not good enough to be so far behind in these matters, and we should urgently ensure that it at least does not get worse. For Board meetings that are from 2009, however, there is probably nothing we can now do, as the Board members' memories will not be enough to write the minutes from scratch.
I may imagine three main reasons for not publishing minutes: (1) nobody has enough time to do that; (2) some information from the meeting are better to stay unpublished for some time because of tactical reasons; (3) some information from the meeting are better to stay unpublished because long-term reasons.
The first reason is not a valid one. If nobody from the Board has enough time, then Board should have technical support from staff.
The second reason is valid, but missing minutes and notes from 2009 are not in that category, obviously.
Because of that, if something would be really damaging for WMF and Wikimedia movement if published (on short or long term), it would be good to have a body which would have access to all Board's minutes. It could be an informal group, like the group of chairpersons of chapters or it could be elected Supervisory Board based on some principle (let's say: 6 from the community and 4 from the chapters).
The other way for dealing with it, but not mutually exclusive with the first one, is to create position of the Information Commissioner (or a body for that), which would process requests for information from the community. For example, if Board thinks that some information is really confidential and Information Commissioner agrees with that, person which wants to know it would have to sign NDA if she or he wants to know it.
There are a few reasons minutes are sometimes delayed--for example, some are being held because things discussed in them need to be finalized--for example, notice of a resolution appointing certain people to a committee pending their acceptance should be held until they accept, or a resolution that we will approach some other organization regarding a partnership will be held until someone has actually sent the letter. Some are held because of disagreement about how a discussion is described that needs to be resolved. And finally, minutes are not published until approved, and sometimes the vote is left as an agenda item for the next meeting, along with other administrative tasks, and when they are voted on between meetings some of us occasionally file away the email and forget that there is a vote ongoing to approve them (I say, slightly guiltily).
(The minutes, incidentally, are taken by Sue's assistant, so that all of us may participate, and the secretary isn't left trying so hard to scrawl down notes that he does not have a chance to think of what he would like to say!)
Recent minutes are sometimes not approved until the next in-person meeting of the Board. This is often too slow, and at least a basic understanding of what transpired at a meeting is essential to transparency. We have started to publish a detailed agenda for Board meetings to address this, and should work to further speed up the resolution process.
One way to improve transparency would be to publish a minimal update to the meeting agenda immediately after each meeting, noting any explicit actions taken at the meeting. It is usually the wording of the narrative and the context for more elaborate decisions that takes some work and voting, to effectively represent the conversation -- the list of explicit actions would be no more than a few lines, and could be reviewed at each meeting as a point of final business.
Hello Jan. As board chair I take responsibility also for the work of board officers, so it is part of my responsibility to take care that the board minutes would be published in a timingly manner. This includes all board minutes since August 2010, when I took the chair's position. For the three minutes that are missing since that time. The February 22nd minutes is already approved and should already be published. I will take care that this will be done in the coming days. The March 25th and 26th minutes is currently in board approving process. The April 8th minute would be followed sometime in the next weeks. The "IRC meeting" last June and Mai was a little unfortunate. They were not IRC meetings. The board had experimented a little with Skype calls. But the connection was disastrous, so there are technical difficulties to collect the minutes. Since I took the chair's position I switched our meetings back to the IRC channel.
Assume a project 100% obeys US law and has an educational/artistic purpose. How should the project's scope be defined? Should the consensus of project members define the project's scope, or should scope be defined by popular vote of the ten individuals who sit on the board? (To those candidates seeking re-election who were actually sitting on the board in May '10 when this issue arose, a followup: how did you actually stand, advocate, and vote on this issue when it arose?) Alecmconroy 22:45, 23 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Marc-André Pelletier (
Coren)
I don't think you're asking the right question; or at least your question is loaded the wrong way.
Strictly speaking, the community of users working on a project define its scope (by virtue of what they are doing). The Foundation and, by extension, its trustees decide whether a project is compatible with its fundamental objectives. A project whose scope drifts away from what is acceptable needs to either correct course, or find hosting elsewhere.
Just as the board would (correctly) decline to host a new project that is detrimental to its objectives, it also cannot allow one to become detrimental.
Many people mentioned it already, so it will not be a surprise when I state this is a tough question. The question has several sides which should be considered. First of all, in practice the community will be the biggest decision maker in the real scope of a project. The board and foundation can define whatever they want, but if the whole community decides to work on only a part of that, that is what happens.
However, it would be naive to say all this lies with the community - that would simply not be true. The way the Foundation puts its focus on a scope and how resources are being spent definitely has an influence on how a project develops. Especially when it comes to technical support. This should happen as much as possible in collaboration between the Wikimedia Foundation and the communities.
There is also the issue of the Foundation taking decisions on what is explicitly not allowed - limiting the scope of projects by force. In some situations, this is totally reasonable - you already mentioned the most important ones in your caveats: when it comes to legal compliance and the mission of the Foundation. Other reasons could include when a small community is taking a project hostage and doesn't allow others to join - this would violate important principles Wikimedia honors.
In general, my view is that the community should largely be responsible for defining the scope of a project. They have, and should continue to have, a high level of autonomy supported by the foundation. In cases where a project diverges so widely from the aims or ideals of the foundation then the board should step in to advocate those ideals and ensure they are followed. A power that should be used in a limited, "gentleman's agreement", form.
Having read the questioners talk page for further detail - on this specific issue I think that it was not something necessarily for the board to try and impose. It is out of scope for the board to say to Commons "you will not have these types of images". If commons were flooded with low quality or poor pornographic images then, perhaps, there is scope for them to make a recommendation to the community to focus on the policies and approach to pornography. But the ultimate decision really rests with the community.
I am a firm believer in consensus and think that conflicts only arise when dialog has failed.
For example, if the community wants to broaden a project's scope to the extent that it requires a server capacity and bandwidth the Foundation cannot afford, the Board should not strive to change this scope. Instead, it should dialogue with the community to seek extra sources of funding together and to keep the scope within feasible limits for as long as these sources have not been found.
There are two things missing. On the one hand, a body that sheds light on possible problems between projects and starts a dialog when gridlock occurs and no-one deals with it. On the other hand, we need more dialog between the Board and the community. I think this lack of dialog is due to the fact that the community is not organized enough to take part in the decision-making process and making its voice heard in the Board.
I believe these two issues can be solved with a Project Council and a committee whose task would be to promote such a dialog. This is what I have proposed to the Roles Movement.
Regarding my oppinion on may 2010 discussion about images on Commons it can be found here:
[4]
This question is phrased in such theoretical terms that it's difficult to give a real answer. Naturally the project members define its actual scope by their very work. However the board has the fiduciary and legal obligation to make sure that the projects abide by the principles of the organization, that money (and effort and time and energy) is spent in a thoughtful and responsible manner, and that the law is indeed kept.
"Community consensus" is a difficult concept when you're talking about a new project. Do you look for consensus only within the group of people that want to start the project? If so, you are likely to end up with a quite insular view of what to create. However, if you ask the whole of the movement community, many of the people commenting will be shaping a project in which they are unlikely to ever take part. I think that there is certainly a role for the Board in mediating on behalf of the wider community between these two extremes of defining what "community consensus" is, but as much as possible this should be an on-wiki, community task.
In the sense of institutional protection of free speech, US stand very high. While this is true, I will appreciate the facts that WMF is US-based organization, as well as that servers are there.
Having that in mind, and having in mind that the scopes of Wikimedia projects are well defined, I see no reason for any unilateral Board action which tends to deal with content and project scopes. While I think that Board should keep integrity of Wikimedia projects, any decision not essential for infrastructure existence mustn't be made if significant portion of community disagree with it.
While there were decisions essential to infrastructure existence, there were no such situations where significant part of the community disagreed with a viable decision of any Board member. That includes the fact that Jimmy's reaction was far from essential, as well as very bitter taste of the initial nonsenses said by some of other Board members. (To be fair, they apologized a week or so after.)
To summarize this part: I can imagine the situation when Board members have to take their part of responsibility by making unpopular decisions. However, through the existence of Wikimedia Foundation such situation didn't happen. Out of emergency situations Board must not do anything against community will.
Speaking about my personal positioning related to that situation, it was very clear. When I saw that Commons community was openly thinking about abandoning Commons, I went there to support them to stay and fight against Jimmy's unreasonable actions.
I want to add one personal note here: May 2010 events were the trigger for my candidature. Last two elections (2010 elections for chapters seats and 2009 community elections) I had been candidate just up to the moment when I saw that enough good Wikimedians became candidates. Being a Board member is responsibility which doesn't fit perfectly with my personal life expectations. If elected, I know that I will have to change some of them. (I am highly involved Wikimedian and I don't need to become a Board member to fulfill my Wikimedian aspirations.) However, except Kat, I don't see any other strong candidate who has plans to guarantee integrity of the community in situations like May 2010 incident was. (Saying so, I may be wrong in relation to my perception of "strong candidate" -- elections will show am I right or not; I may be wrong about positions of other strong candidates, but I would like to see their explicit opinions before I change the last sentence.)
There isn't one answer to this question. The first group to define the scope of a project are those who found it--the proposer and those who support the proposal. WMF doesn't create content projects out of nowhere; they first come from proposals by groups of people who want to build them. A successful proposal is first discussed and reshaped and then approved by the board; the board can nudge the discussion one way or another, or point out some aspect that is an absolute no.
I can only assume that you're talking about Commons here, as that's the only such decision that I can think of. I expressed some of my position on my [mailing list post]. But I'll make the issue more general: I think projects should be able to go along with the scope that was approved in its initial proposal, and to develop its own policies, except where those policies and practices conflict with the Foundation's mission and values. Where to draw that line is difficult. Most project self-govern well the vast majority of the time; it's the only way the projects survive at all. It's not because there is no oversight, but because the people who are most actively building that project share the same idea of how best to align with that mission and put it into practice, and are able to do so effectively. For anything to succeed, it must have the project communities behind it making it succeed; if the project communities aren't invested in making something happen, it doesn't happen.
The board must be able to influence policies and practices that are not aligned with Wikimedia's purpose. Usually the way the board should do this is as minimally as possible: talking about goals and philosophies rather than specific details of implementation, letting the editors themselves determine how best to achieve those goals.
Projects are created with a certain scope through public discussion -- and at that point they are accepted as new projects by the Board. Scope should be determined by a consensus of project members, prospective members, and other interested people in a public discussion. If a project chooses to violate a fundamental principle of the projects, the Board could challenge that change -- and if a scope discussion is locking out prospective contributors (say a group with a vested interest in one sort of scope tries to exclude people who wouldn't want to contribute to a project defined in that way), then the Board should be able to ensure open participation.
But any direct intervention by the Board in project scope definition should be only as a last resort. This might happen in an emergency, or if public discussion and facilitation fails, but in the former case the urgency of any 'emergency' should be evident, and in the latter the failure of that public discussion should be clear to all.
At first for your last question to the actual board members, I made a long answer in
my talk page. I will not copy it here because it is really long. I believe that at first the projects should have a clear definition of its scope. Second that that scope should be defined by the community. And third that scope should be in accordance to
our mission. It is the obligation of the board to revoke or correct the scope if it works against or endangers our mission. It is also the duty of the board to give guidances to the projects if there are problems or dangers. A very good example of this is the BLP resolution from the board. Wrong and unreferenced BLPs impose a danger to our projects and our movement. The board issued the resolution to give the community a guidance and to emphasize the problem so that the community is aware of it. Another example is the newly issued Openness resolution. Harsch treatings of newcomers empose a danger of our projects, community and movement. The board issued the resolution to acknowledge those part of the community that had constantly worked on the openness and friendliness and give them a stronger backup.
Currently, some members of the board are unelected but still have a full vote on the board. If you are elected, will you support a move to an all-elected board, or do you think it's important to retain the voting-but-unelected aspect in the future? Alecmconroy 22:45, 23 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Right now I feel somewhat safer with some people (generally experts) not belonging to the community, they cannot (or at least should not) have partisan, biased views when confronting some issues. I would not obviously say the same if there really were equal chances for all the "community" candidates and if a big part of the editors were aware of the upper structures and interested in them. The fact is that you have some kind of "personalities" already known and/or involved in the movement that stand much better chances to be elected than some of us, nearly anonymous candidates (in my case I may be a bit known but unpopular for many...) even if we can be devoted editors. I would say there are some kinds of clans, mainly pro-Board or pro-Chapters and some people left in between and I do not want clans to rule since I think we should all work together with transparency and honesty; so these three options are not sufficient for me... However I think some changes should happen because I deem that the Board is way too passive now and then I also advocate, like Gomà, for a change in the seats, but from 3 to 4 for the community however if possible without restrictions because of the belonging of people, because I think it could be very complicated and would seem unfair to some valuable people engaged in Chapters activities.
Marc-André Pelletier (
Coren)
Without offering an opinion on any of the currently appointed board members, I have no opposition to the principle. Having the right expertise, or combination of backgrounds, on the board is important to make sure we don't end up with self-selected blinders, and elections will often create a board of "good generalists" but rarely with an optimal mix of skills.
Having the ability for the board to add to its numbers by appointment when it needs to do so is invaluable flexibility, though I'd expect that filling all four seats should be rare.
The size and membership of the Board is a sensitive, extensively discussed and complicated issue. I like the idea that there is a balance between different selection methods for board members. This leads ideally to a mix of skills, background and experience. A board should be more than the sum of its members.
That being said, I am not persuaded that we currently have the perfect mix. I would not be all for a total revolution and have a fully directly elected board, but an actual majority of elected board members (including the chapter selected seats) would have my support. But this would not be my first priority. I would be definitely in favor of allowing the board (and community!) to indicate missing skills and backgrounds through a nomination committee which could be mitigated through board-selected board members.
I would like however this nomination process to become more transparent. I regret the removal of the
nominating committee from the bylaws.
Those members are there to bring specific skills/ideas important to the board; we do need people with those skills. Getting those from the community isn't a trivial process. If a legitimate proposal to have the same skillset come from within the community could be put together I would at least consider it.
Another benefit is that the board then has members from outside the community, that is a good thing IMO.
I believe these members can be relevant, since they enrich the Board with people whose points of view and expertise go beyond those of the editor community.
But I think the editor community should have the peace of mind of knowing that most members have been chosen directly by editors, which is not the case right now.
I also believe that Chapter-elected members should be seen as an opportunity to provide some of this expertise; therefore, there is no need to have as many Board-elected members as now.
That is why I support changing its make-up. Right now we have 3 community-elected members + the founder + 2 Chapter-elected members + 4 Board-elected members. I am in favor of changing this to 5 community-elected members + the founder + 2 members elected by Chapters and other groups + 2 Board-elected members.
I also support making the election of the two latter groups wholly transparent, so that the reasons and the process by which they are elected are clear.
This is the kind of question you have to sit on the board to really form your opinion about. From the outside, the proportion of voting non-elected trustees seems high. Perhaps too high? Maybe, I'm not sure. As long as all board members are truly dedicated to the mission of the foundation, they can be elected by the community, by the chapters, or recruited for their expertise - the exact proportion is really something negotiable and I think the importance of that proportion might be exaggerated for no good reason.
I think that as much as possible the Board should be drawn from the movement community - whether as an editor, a member of a Chapter, a developer, or one of the many other ways in which people can be a part of our work. However, ultimately the Board needs some very specific skills in finance, law, cross-cultural working, and management of charities, and just having staff advising on this isn't enough. Appointing a minority of the Board based on their skills is a good way of achieving this balance between being a core part of the movement acting in the community's name, and making sure that the Board is able to undertake its duties.
Personally, I would like to see experts from the community, organized inside of professional groups/committees to delegate expert seats inside of the Board. I think that we have diverse enough community to build expert environment within it.
At the other side, I think that expert members of the Board are and were serving well, mostly.
It should be also noted that Board requires expert seats and that it is not likely to have all needed experts elected inside of the group of 10 Board members. Our community tends to elect people with tech background (or at least with well above average tech literacy), which means that we will always have deficit of elected people from other areas. So, without any better solution, selecting expert members looks like a valid option.
If elected, I would open discussion inside of the Board to start with building professional Wikimedian groups one by one. If such groups start to function, Board would be able to replace expert seats with delegates of relevant professional groups one by one.
I was part of the group that decided on the current structure, so it is perhaps natural that I still support it! I think it's valuable for us to have board members who come bringing outside expertise, and that we should continue to do so. The community elections identify people who are trusted to uphold the ideals of the project, but that group doesn't always contain the skills and expertise needed. Part of the job of the community representatives is to identify others who are able to bring useful knowledge and experience to all of the board's decisions.
(We had a Nominating Committee, made up of community members, as a required part of the process for appointing non-elected board members; they were to help identify and research candidates for these seats. The committee was ultimately not a very effective solution, but input from community members is still valued in filling these expertise seats.)
I think the approach of "bringing specialist to the Board" is reasonable when talking about small organizations. Since the Board has at its disposal a full staff of specialists to ask for advice, I don't see the need of "Board appointed Board members". I will propose to reduce the number of non elected members changing the current proportion of members of the Board.
Having a diversity of views and experience on the Board, not limited to active community members, is important. Chapter seats can address some of this, but the process used to find our latest Trustee (Bishakha) involving a global search process and external recruiters to supplement community suggestions, filtered up many more potential Trustees.
Our appointed Trustees contribute much to our decision-making process. The challenge we currently face is finding a way to regularly renew the pool of good candidates for those appointed seats, and to ensure there is new blood and new ideas on the Board. Since the Nominating Committee was disbanded, we have no process for identifying potential appointed Trustees, unless a missing need is identified first. (This is different from our other processes, which identify great potential candidates each year even when the incumbents turn out to be the best.)
The nominated board members add skills into the board that the board will not get if it is purely elected, and they add values into the board that the board will not get if it is purely elected. So I will keep the status quo.
Are you in favor of the Wikimedia Foundation accepting monetary donations in the form of Bitcoins? --Cyde Weys 21:01, 26 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Well, first of all I would like to thank you because I did not know anything about Bitcoins and it seems something interesting to me. Then I do not see any sound reason not to accept it since it seems to be working even if it has not reached yet a worldwide visible expansion and/or acceptation. I would daresay that every donation is great and welcome, whether it is time and energy (many editors give so much...) or money even if it is virtual.
Marc-André Pelletier (
Coren)
A priori, I see no reason why we could not.
Digital currency currently has limited use and adoption, but the very limited overhead of allowing such donations make its acceptance a "no brainer" in my mind.
I do not feel this is a question that should be answered on a board level. The board could set criteria which should be evaluated, but the staff should, in communication with the community, make the decision which methods to use exactly. Criteria could include how secure they are, how solid their actual value is (as in services that can be rendered from them) and how big the potential is (are there many people willing to donate/pay such electronic currency, or would the effort required to set up the reception outweigh the advantages).
Yes, if that digital money becomes well known and reliable the WMF can accepting monetary donations in this form
I believe we should be open to the possibility of using new currencies, including issuing our own currency. But we should be careful to avoid being tooled as a way of advertising.
With regard to the bitcoin, I think it is an interesting mathematical exercise, but from an economic point of view I see the same pros and cons as the gold standard, but with added technical risks. Personally, I find schemes like time banks much more interesting.
As long as these bitcoins can be easily converted into a currency we can use for our expenses at a (very) reasonable fee, I don't see any particular problem. However, what would we gain from it? I still don't see how the gains will be bigger than the bother.
I am neither against nor in favour of donations in any particular form, including Bitcoin, donations in kind, and other forms, as long as the Foundation can use them usefully. The role of the Board in this question would be to review whether this is a sensible financial choice for the Foundation to make, but the original decision is the role of the staff of the Foundation, not the Board.
Yes. Because we should and because we can. Bitcoins are money guaranteed by Internet users and we should support such initiatives. As EFF feels comfortable to accept bitcoin donations, I see no reason why WMF wouldn't feel comfortable, too.
In general, this sort of thing isn't a decision the board would make; it's up to the staff, who handle most of the fundraising operations. (We don't generally accept donations of commodities below a given minimum value because of the work involved in handling them.) Bitcoin is interesting in that many of its supporters are also among the people most likely to want to support Wikimedia, so it may be worth making a special request that the staff look into it. (Out of curiosity I asked someone at FSF, which already takes Bitcoin, if it had been any trouble; it was mostly simple, but a few issues came up that may present barriers--acknowledging contributions for tax purposes is difficult, for example. Many similar decisions that seem simple actually come with many more practical considerations than are visible on the surface; payment processing is definitely one of these!)
No. As a board member it is my duty to take care that the Foundation works and works good. It is my duty to take care that the Foundation avoid any unnecessary risks, especially those that has nothing to do with our mission. Bitcoins is not official, it has inherent failures of risks and it is totally unnecessary for us to take part in such experiments. So, a definitive and clear No.
Do you agree with the possibility of being two or more chapters at the same territory? Which advantages or problems do you think that could have? How would you solve an hypothetical ovelap between chapters? --Millars 16:35, 28 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I am really glad to have such an interesting question, which is normal since the Spanish Chapter and its members are so concerned about what will happen with the Catalans. I have no problem with overlapping (but well most of you knew this...). We have overlapping people in many Chapters (I mean people who belong to two or three chapters) so why not have overlapping Chapters or structures. Similar organizations can coexist in the same space and it implies more freedom to choose (I mean we have many bakers in our cities, many supermarkets or caritative organizations... and then we choose according to diverse factors: taste, proximity, mood...) and I think it could even prove better to have them since they could generate outstanding collaboration and sharing different visions of things that could be helpful and complementary, obviously if each of them treat the other with respect and does not deem to be superior because they represent a larger territory, they are more efficient and so on... From what I heard you did a great job in the Valencian country as a member of Wikimedia Spain while collaborating with Amical (the Catalan pirate Chapter for those who do not know the name...). Wikipedias in my opinion are too concerned about themselves and hardly exchange informations with one another except for translations (I wish for example I had more information about Georgia...), I had the opportunity to organize a Wikimeeting (Viquitrobada) in Perpinyà involving people from different wikipedias and I think that the results were quite positive and gave birth to some potential collaborations, new projects and wish to improve the "native" wikipedia. So I do not see any overlapping problems as long as nobody wants to keep a territory for themselves (or are trying to overleap others) because they represent the state; everyone should be free to act where they please with respect of the existing structures (structuration could really become too oppressive if it went on this way and would damage some parts of the projects... especially the smallest ones...) and if what they do is good it is good for the movement. Exclusivity would be a problem, especially when wanting to force people to belong to a place where they do not feel at ease or when hampering/banning initiatives of other groups. If we can create positive environments that suit people and then tell them to collaborate on an equal ground and respecting their organization (be it big or small), we can reach wonderful and better results for the sake of the movement.
Marc-André Pelletier (
Coren)
No response yet.
I am all for involving as many people in Wikimedia as possible, and offering people the model they feel most comfortable with. However, for chapters we have clear definitions, and geographical scope is one of them - overlap would not be very helpful in executing their tasks and mainly lead to lots of confusion to non-Wikimedians. I would much rather see us leaving the path of only working through chapters, and also offer explicitely other models to enable volunteers to help Wikimedia fulfilling its mission. So in this hypothetical situation, the national organization would probably be the chapter, and the other one (trans- or subnational) would be a "group" of Wikimedians which we still have to find a descriptive name for.
It is very hard to find people to establish a Chapter. Therefore, it is quite unlikely more than one will be created. But if there are volunteers who are able to do a good job and the editor communities of the Wikipedia and sister projects active in the languages and territories where they wish to operate give their consent, I would not oppose that.
It is not a question of pros and cons. In my opinion, free knowledge simply does not fit in with monopoly or exclusivity.
Fear of problems is reminiscent of the logic used in for-profit activities. Just like anyone who works in the field of free knowledge for free, Chapters will always have more work pending than what they are able to do. Having more Chapters working in the same territory is just like having more editors writing on the same Wikipedia language edition: the more, the merrier.
Regarding to Spain there are in fact two organizations operating as chapters and overlapping. They have very different organizational structure and working style but when dealing with activities to promote Wikipedia and sister projects the only problem for coordination is the fact that one of them is not still recognized as chapter.
For example Millars from WM ES (Approved chapter) and several people from WM CAT (not yet approved) are cooperating in organizing Wiki Loves Monuments in Europe but
they were not allowed to attend Wikimedia Conference 2011 where WLM topics where disused because they were not a chapter.
I answered elsewhere on these question pages that I'm in favor of accepting as many affiliated groups as we can, in diverse formats and organized along different themes, either geographical or not (Organization of Geologists on Wikipedia?). I'm not enamored with the one formal chapter representing one political country principle. It doesn't always make sense, and there's also no clear 1:1 mapping with projects in many many cases. If other groups want to organize themselves differently for whatever reasons, I think we should embrace that. Sure, there's lots of potential for overlap, controversy and misunderstandings which we'll have to sort out. But in most situations, for most co-operations and activities, only one of the groups potentially involved will be really enthusiastic while the others remain passive. This will solve at least those cases. And all we should really care about is enthusiasm and people on the ground doing cool stuff, not titles, territories, turf wars and formalities.
In a limited sense, yes - I think that a federal model of chapters would be a good one for some situations. This would involve a number of chapters that don't overlap in the same country or area (like the EU or Middle East) with a "top level" representative body. In some cases this top-level body might be a real chapter, with members, tax-exempt status, etc. (e.g. a Wikimedia United States), in others it might just represent the interests of a group of chapters and be mostly a name for lobbying (e.g. a Wikimedia Europe).
I also think that it would be great to have formally-recognised non-geographic community groups, like "Association of Blind Wikimedians", who could work together, lobby the Foundation and the wider movement community on their interests (e.g. special needs from the MediaWiki software, or looking to set up a new project). However, in my mind these bodies would not be formal organisations with money-raising aims, but instead more informal, wiki-like community groups for people to help each other.
However, I do not think that two chapters should compete with each other, trying to do the same things in the same territory. So, in answer to your question, no: I think the potential problems are too large. For example, we would be competing with ourselves for attention, as well as every other non-profit and online group, which means wasted effort. If two overlapping chapters get into a disagreement (e.g. over whether to engage with another charity) it wouldn't serve the community, the movement, or our readers/etc. well, which should always be our first thought. If we end up having federal chapters, we will need to make sure that there are strong and agreed boundaries for how each organisation works so that we do not run into these problems.
Most importantly, this question is for discussion between chapters and WMF, as the number of Wikimedians organized inside of chapters has become significant enough.
That issue has been already partially addressed inside of the Movement roles initiative. The New group models addresses needs of various Wikimedian groups which wouldn’t get chapter-level recognition under current rules.
At the other side, my personal opinion is that we should care about three issues: (1) number of Wikimedians organized inside of particular organization; (2) representation of smaller cultures and (3) cooperation between Wikimedia entities.
So, hypothetically, if we have two organizations which cover Tokyo metro area, which cooperates regularly between themselves, I see no reason not to recognize both. Both organizations have potential to have more members than some of our smaller chapters. (That includes [Wikimedia] Serbia, which has a bit more than half of Tokyo inhabitants. However, Tokyo is completely urbanized, with much better transport and much better Internet penetration.)
At the other side, chapters from small countries have to have their own voice for matters which they care, no matter how many Wikimedian organizations exist in larger countries.
By my opinion, except necessity of cooperation and representation of small populations, everything else should be left on initiatives of particular Wikimedian groups. I don’t think that we should stop them from being formally incorporated into Wikimedia movement.
Are you in favor of minorized or stateless languages Chapters, e.g. an Occitan, Catalan, Breton, Esperanto or Welsh Chapter?
What do you think of having Esperanto serve as lingua franca in the WMF in order to avoid the hegemony of a big and statal language which happens to be identified for good or worse with some countries and cultures?
--Lembeye 13:29, 29 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Marc-André Pelletier (
Coren)
No response yet.
Similarly to my statement the question above, I am all for enabling the Esperantean Wikimedians to do their work as effective as possible. I am however unsure if "chapters" are the right model for that, considering the lack of geographical scope. I could (depending on purpose, participation, viability and resources) support such a group as a non-chapter group, within a similar model as described before. But lets not create confusion in terminology and call it a 'chapter'. The same goes for other stateless languages.
As for the lingua franca question, which is a totally different one, I think we should consider which of the languages enables most people to participate. In my experience, this would be English, but I am open for suggestions supported by research to alter that opinion.
Yes, see what I answered in the previous question - I related to such other forms of chapters or affiliated groups there. As for Esperanto, it's a noble idea but totally impractical as long as English is well known by many and Esperanto is well known by very few.
I've already touched on this in my candidate statement and other answers, but yes, I think we should have Associations that cover people wherever they are, alongside the Chapters. I note BTW that Wikimedia UK already covers Welsh-languages speakers there (the vast majority), if all they want is a Chapter - but of course, that's the point, it's the focussed Association that people want and which I think we should grant them.
There are two reasons for organization of language/cultural based Wikimedia organization: (1) better ‘’territorial’’ organizational potentials than country-level organization and (2) representation of particular language and culture.
In the first case, I am in favor of creating Wikimedia chapters (however, cf. my answer on previous question: it should be discussed within chapters, first).
In the second case, it is better to organize “partner organization” as defined inside of the New group models. The point is simple: a lot of members of smaller cultures are now scattered through their countries or even throughout the world (like Roma people are). The best way to represent themselves is to create a national or international organization which would cooperate with relevant chapters and WMF.
Lingua franca emerges as a product of complex social relations at regional and/or international level. English is lingua franca of the contemporary world and it is not possible to change that fact by decree. If it matters to you, it is likely that in ~20 years we won’t need lingua franca anymore, as machine translators will be much more useful.
