Re: [Wikimedia-l] Questions for the Board post-Wikimania
phoebe ayers, 17/08/2013 17:49: P.s.: Generic questions to the board on this list are usually ignored/missed, unless [sometimes] when they are in reply to something posted on behalf of the board; in theory I guess the place for such public questions would be https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/BN which offers some permanency, but has never been really used yet. Well, threads like this are fine; this came out of the Wikimania questions, as Steven noted. We can certainly try to revive the board noticeboard too! As a way to revive it, any trustee can pick an unanswered question from the Wikimania wiki page and answer it there without polluting their email. ;) Nemo ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Questions for the Board post-Wikimania
On 08/14/2013 01:52 PM, Steven Walling wrote: Would the Board consider recruiting expert seats with more experience in engineering and product development? With or without expert seats, I believe the whole tech planning process would improve if our tech volunteers (tech ambassadors?) would be more involved since the beginning. This might mean a longer discussion, but also more transparent and with a better community backing since the beginning. Moving some discussions early in the planning process might save a lot more time and energy discussing months later, when prototypes and betas start to show up. And by that time it could be the own tech ambassadors the ones defending the plan they helped build. Opinions are mine, etc. -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Questions for the Board post-Wikimania
On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 2:22 AM, Steven Walling swall...@wikimedia.orgwrote: Hey all, During Wikimania's QA panel, the Board lamented that, as always, they did not have enough time to answer all the questions from the audience and posted beforehand on-wiki. They did say they were accessible to follow up with on unanswered questions though, so I am taking this opportunity to start an open thread. The question I am personally interested in, I posted on the Wikimania wiki page,[1] and it's... The 2013-14 Annual Plan allocates 40% of the Wikimedia Foundation budget and 59% of the staffing to engineering and product development. However, it seems that few of Board members have professional expertise in theses areas (compared to previous years and in general). Does the Board feel it has the necessary expertise to lead the Foundation in this area? Would the Board consider recruiting expert seats with more experience in engineering and product development? Dear Steven, This is a good question and I largely agree with Phoebe. In June 2012, the then board did an exercise where we tried to identify missing board skills. As part of the Board Governance Committee's aim of increasing board transparency while retaining the privacy that we need to carry out our work effectively, this has now been posted at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_skills_matrix_2012 Keep in mind that this is a year old. Even so, hope it provides some overall context and a few indirect glimmers into answering the question that you posed. Needless to say, a similar matrix done now may yield somewhat different results. Best Bishakha ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Questions for the Board post-Wikimania
phoebe ayers, 15/08/2013 12:26: And lastly of course what's been on everyone's mind lately is we must continue to try to figure out the best way to develop and roll out products in our complex, opinionated, multilingual community. To be frank, I don't know what the the best role for the board is in this process. I try to be careful about keeping my public comments to a minimum when tech debates are raging, as I think all the trustees do, because it's usually just not helpful to randomly weigh in. Does that mean developers feel unsupported by the board? That would be an unfortunate side effect of trying not to overstep our role... From a Wikimedia projects point of view, what I'd rather like to know is how the annual plan ends up containing some specific technical goals/products. This is for sure something under the board's responsibility as the board approves the plan, however – just we don't know absolutely anything in general on how the annual plan is produced and why it is as it is – it's not clear who proposes, who reviews and who actually decides what ends up in the plan, not to speak of the rationale. Does the board have any role in shaping the engineering goals as defined by the annual plan, apart from the final rubberstamping in a yes/no vote following some two weeks of discussion out of several months of mysterious drafting? Neom P.s.: Generic questions to the board on this list are usually ignored/missed, unless [sometimes] when they are in reply to something posted on behalf of the board; in theory I guess the place for such public questions would be https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/BN which offers some permanency, but has never been really used yet. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Questions for the Board post-Wikimania
On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 2:17 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.comwrote: phoebe ayers, 15/08/2013 12:26: And lastly of course what's been on everyone's mind lately is we must continue to try to figure out the best way to develop and roll out products in our complex, opinionated, multilingual community. To be frank, I don't know what the the best role for the board is in this process. I try to be careful about keeping my public comments to a minimum when tech debates are raging, as I think all the trustees do, because it's usually just not helpful to randomly weigh in. Does that mean developers feel unsupported by the board? That would be an unfortunate side effect of trying not to overstep our role... From a Wikimedia projects point of view, what I'd rather like to know is how the annual plan ends up containing some specific technical goals/products. This is for sure something under the board's responsibility as the board approves the plan, however – just we don't know absolutely anything in general on how the annual plan is produced and why it is as it is – it's not clear who proposes, who reviews and who actually decides what ends up in the plan, not to speak of the rationale. Does the board have any role in shaping the engineering goals as defined by the annual plan, apart from the final rubberstamping in a yes/no vote following some two weeks of discussion out of several months of mysterious drafting? Hey, I'm hoping another trustee will jump in here since I wasn't involved with the last annual plan (thanks to my gap year off the board). But it's a good question. In general: the specific plan activities are written by the staff; the board's influence is more on the level of approving the overall balance and resourcing to different activities/goals (like how much do we focus on product development vs. other development, etc.) And, the board needs to see that the big issues (editor retention/keeping the sites up/etc) are being addressed -- but how that happens is something we generally leave to the staff's expertise. -- phoebe P.s.: Generic questions to the board on this list are usually ignored/missed, unless [sometimes] when they are in reply to something posted on behalf of the board; in theory I guess the place for such public questions would be https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/BN which offers some permanency, but has never been really used yet. Well, threads like this are fine; this came out of the Wikimania questions, as Steven noted. We can certainly try to revive the board noticeboard too! ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Questions for the Board post-Wikimania
On Aug 15, 2013 4:53 AM, Steven Walling swall...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hey all, During Wikimania's QA panel, the Board lamented that, as always, they did not have enough time to answer all the questions from the audience and posted beforehand on-wiki. They did say they were accessible to follow up with on unanswered questions though, so I am taking this opportunity to start an open thread. The question I am personally interested in, I posted on the Wikimania wiki page,[1] and it's... The 2013-14 Annual Plan allocates 40% of the Wikimedia Foundation budget and 59% of the staffing to engineering and product development. However, it seems that few of Board members have professional expertise in theses areas (compared to previous years and in general). Does the Board feel it has the necessary expertise to lead the Foundation in this area? Would the Board consider recruiting expert seats with more experience in engineering and product development? Thanks Steven! Answering for myself (and only myself) I am in two minds about this question. On the one hand, yes, of course engineering is a core activity for us - well over half, as you point out - and I wish it was an area that was better represented on the board. I do think we should pay attention to that when recruiting expert seats, and I do also wish our own dev community was better represented in (all kinds of) governance. On the other hand, I think the main contribution that recruiting for this would likely bring is helping the board stay more focused on tech. No one person is going to be able to instantly understand all our projects -- someone with a managerial background at another shop would have to rethink their assumptions, as chances are excellent that whatever products they'd worked on, they won't be as multilingual or community focused as ours. And someone from our own tech community would have the same challenge all of our community trustees do, of having to relearn their relationship to Wikimedia and balance many competing interests. So while yes, I think as a board we should pay more attention to our overall technical landscape, I think that we can push ourselves to do this at a governance level without having individual specific hands-on expertise (similarly, just because Kat's now left the board doesn't mean we're going to stop getting legal updates and making that area as a priority). For instance, Erik's been giving some very helpful visual editor updates to the board recently, similar to his public emails; I hope that kind of ongoing update will help both the board senior staff reflect on and plan our activities. So I'd like to back up a little bit and ask you and the community at large, and especially the engineering community, what we need to solve for. What challenges aren't we meeting? What strategic questions should we tackle? What philosophical and/or strategic support does the tech community want to see from the board? For instance: in the past we've set our highest-level priority at Wikimedia as recruiting and keeping more editors, which has led pretty directly to things like E3, mobile editing, and the visual editor being prioritized. But of course there's a lot of other engineering product areas to think about, everything from building features for existing editors to disaster planning in ops to supporting the staff + volunteer dev community (I'm quite pleased, incidentally, to see new 3rd-party mediawiki projects; that's been a gap for a long time). And lastly of course what's been on everyone's mind lately is we must continue to try to figure out the best way to develop and roll out products in our complex, opinionated, multilingual community. To be frank, I don't know what the the best role for the board is in this process. I try to be careful about keeping my public comments to a minimum when tech debates are raging, as I think all the trustees do, because it's usually just not helpful to randomly weigh in. Does that mean developers feel unsupported by the board? That would be an unfortunate side effect of trying not to overstep our role... best, Phoebe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
[Wikimedia-l] Questions for the Board post-Wikimania
Hey all, During Wikimania's QA panel, the Board lamented that, as always, they did not have enough time to answer all the questions from the audience and posted beforehand on-wiki. They did say they were accessible to follow up with on unanswered questions though, so I am taking this opportunity to start an open thread. The question I am personally interested in, I posted on the Wikimania wiki page,[1] and it's... The 2013-14 Annual Plan allocates 40% of the Wikimedia Foundation budget and 59% of the staffing to engineering and product development. However, it seems that few of Board members have professional expertise in theses areas (compared to previous years and in general). Does the Board feel it has the necessary expertise to lead the Foundation in this area? Would the Board consider recruiting expert seats with more experience in engineering and product development? There are several other excellent questions posted on-wiki as well. I know people are still traveling and likely jet-lagged even if they're home, so I am in no huge hurry to get an answer. Thanks to the Board in advance. :-) -- Steven Walling https://wikimediafoundation.org/ 1. https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Board_Q%26A ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
