On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 2:17 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <[email protected]>wrote:
> 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 [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe>
