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
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