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