What do we agree on: Advocacy TF recommendations

Hi Filceolaire,

I agree with most of what you say here, but there is one piece that I disagree with. And I think it's an important issue, and that a lot of people share your view --- so I'd like to take this opportunity to argue for a different perspective that I think is more correct.

I don't believe the Foundation has "two sides," and I don't believe that the Board's role is to represent the interests of editors to the staff. The Board's job is governance: it is supposed to oversee the work of the staff, ensure the sustainability of the organization, and maintain a sharp focus on the advancement of the mission. That's its fiduciary responsibility: it's a moral commitment and a legal obligation.

That's because the Wikimedia Foundation is not a professional association, nor a union, nor a membership organization. Like all mission-driven organizations, we have a responsibility to the recipients/beneficiaries of the mission, which in our case are the readers of the Wikimedia projects, as well as prospective readers. Essentially, serving information seekers is why we exist.

I should also explicitly state the obvious: the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation focuses a large proportion of its energy on supporting and facilitating the work of editors. That is only reasonable and correct, because editors are the people who create educational materials for readers. In other words, the Wikimedia Foundation is here to serve readers, and we do that largely by supporting editors.

So, upshot, our world looks like this: we are all here to serve readers. The editors do that by creating educational materials. The staff does that by maintaining the platform, helping ensure readers' needs get met, and that the editing community is appropriately supported so it can do its work. The Board does it by overseeing the work of the staff and keeping everyone focused on the mission that we all share.

Sue Gardner01:37, 11 March 2010

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.

Sj02:29, 19 March 2010