(Personal capacity) Pine: I think you're reading far more into Phoebe's comment than it actually contained. What she said was "I trust our legal team to make decisions about what legal actions to participate in." In other words, to make evaluations about the probability of success, the necessity of the thing that's being (defended|challenged) to the legal framework that lets the projects exist, and act on that basis.
Unless I missed an election and the board now contains the equivalent expertise in internet law and the intricacies of our governing frameworks to an entire legal department, it seems entirely appropriate that these kinds of evaluations be left to the, you know, lawyers. I agree that boards should ask tough questions, but I've never been in a WMF board meeting and, to my knowledge, neither have you. There's a wide range of options between "directly making decisions about legal questions" and "not asking questions"; it's not as binary as you seem to believe. This applies to the VE as much as it does anything else. If you think the WMF needs a more activist board - which seems to mean "a board that makes individual, specific product decisions and assumes legal expertise", I encourage you to run in the next election and we'll see what the movement as a whole thinks of that position. On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 3:04 PM, Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm generally supportive of this legal action, but I am troubled by this > statement: > > "I trust our legal team to make decisions about what legal actions to > participate in." > > In general I think highly of Michelle, but this statement fits a > long-running pattern I percieve in WMF governance of the board being > deferential to the ED and staff. This goes back to Sue's tenure and > possibly longer. I feel that the Board should respectfully ask tough > questions about staff recommendations. Had the board done so, we might all > have been saved from the MediaViewer, VisualEditor, and other product > dramas because the Board would have been vigilant about project selection > and quality control. WMF needs an activist board. All of the guidance that > I read about boards in general says that good boards do due diligance, and > I would encourage the WMF board to be proactive and ask tough questions. > This can be done while maintaining a positive and respectful atmosphere. > > Thank you, > > Pine > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > 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 mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
