What do we agree on: Advocacy TF recommendations

Our mission is to empower and engage people to organize and develop information in an educational way, and then to distribute it to every person in the world. The second part -- distributing it to everyone -- is a daunting but known problem; if we don't manage to get it to everyone, the nature of the licenses we use empowers the rest of the world to carry knowledge the last hundred kilometers. It is the first part of the mission, empowering and engaging creators and organizers, that we do better than anyone else -- but that is still a bit of a mystery.

As a Trustee, my fiduciary responsibility is to the advancement of the mission, which in our case means not losing sight of what we do best: expanding our community of creators, organizers, and developers; empowering them and amplifying their work where possible. It also means improving how we serve information seekers, but that task is better-distributed: there are dozens of major reusers and redistributers of Wikimedia content who are helping us serve information seekers, innovating interfaces and visualizations, providing read-only mobile versions of Wikipedia.

If we fail to effectively understand and support and expand our editing community (which should ideally grow to encompass every reader -- the hundreds of millions of facebook users could all just as easily have made a few dozen edits and image uploads to articles they care about), noone else will do it, and our Projects will fail. We are all hear to serve not readers but creators, and to make every reader into a creator, to remind the world that everyone has something to teach.

Sue is right that it is the Board's job to keep everyone focused on the mission that we share; and we need to restore our traditional focus on what matters most: making resources that everyone can edit.