Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-27/Board elections/Samuel Klein

Hello, Signpost! Feel free to ask me additional questions of your own, or to leave suggestions and ideas.

How did you become involved with the Wikimedia community? What contributions are you most proud of?

I started editing in early 2004. I was using offline wikis with a group of friends to organize notes and documents, and saw that many wikiphiles were talking about Wikipedia. I had been working as a software developer and teacher to organize information online, translate the web, and make education freely available. What initially attracted me was the transparency of contributions, the dedication to being available in every language, and the complete ownership of the project given to the community. It took me a couple of months before I believed that this was actually a collective project, and not something run by a company to gather 'user-generated' content for its own ends.

Once I understood this, I devoted a lot of time each week to the project. One early contribution I was proud of was helping to keep VfD tidy (and designing this table layout for instructions, which may be my most copied contribution). I became as active in editing Meta as I was on the English Wikipedia, organizing cross-wiki translation, working on press releases and grant proposals, proposing medium-term plans and ideas for multilingual communication and special projects.

I am proud of my work on the Wikimedia Quarto, a newsletter I published with Anthere in 2004 and 2005 - it was a way to broadcast news, art, and accomplishments from different projects and languages, reflections from Board members, and interviews about Wikipedia with people like Ward and Larry Lessig. We published in 5 languages, and other translations were added for some of the issues later on.

I am also proud of my work to make Wikimania a popular, regular, volunteer-run event. It is good to have real-life gatherings to discuss Wikipedia, both to build trust among community members and to connect with users and supporters who don't follow on-wiki discussion, or are developing their own extensions and ideas. I planned the speaker programs for the first two Wikimanias with Jakob Voß and Phoebe Ayers, and organized Wikimania 2006 in Cambridge at Harvard Law School. I am proud that Wikimania has remained a central annual event for international Wikimedians to meet in person and for discussing all kinds of wiki projects and innovations.

What do you see as the role of the Board of Trustees?

I see the Board's role as a balance between oversight of the mission, support for the Foundation and its staff, and facilitation of long-term planning and discussion.

- The Board supports the Foundation by overseeing its work.

- The Board supports the community by approving new Projects and Chapters, and ensuring the Foundation does not infringe on project autonomy.

- It facilitates broad discussion to set high-level goals and policies affecting all projects or the Foundation.

This includes engaging its own members, the Advisory Board, the Foundation staff, and the communities to review and plan for short- and long-term needs of the projects

- It mediates between the Foundation and community, with elected representatives representing the community in internal discussions.

As part of this, the Board reviews community concerns and complaints and helps the Foundation respond to them. This role has been diminished in recent years, and may be delegated to a community group, but it is an important one.

Facilitating broad discussion is the most important role at the moment. We have not started a new project in years; aside from Wikipedia and Commons it would be hard to say any of the other projects have lived up to their potential, and there are basic technical and structural needs of smaller projects that are not being met. The Board has recently been fairly passive, which needs to change to support this discussion and mediation.

If elected, what would you bring to the board that it currently lacks?

Energy, communication, and public activity

The current board has been fairly passive, and has rarely engaged the community. It has kept a small agenda compared to the growing number of opportunities facing the Foundation. This is dangerous, as our projects depend on the constant influx of new ideas.

I would have an open door policy, with regular public meetings, publicly shared agenda topics, and a public personal calendar. I would encourage community members to bring new ideas and concerns to the Board, engage their input and ideas before a new major initiative was underway, and facilitate community discussion about where we should be heading and what is needed to get there all the time, not just in the context of strategic planning.

A passion for making Wikipedia's sister projects and new projects successful and better known.

Wikipedia is one arrow in the quiver of free knowledge, and we have not risen to the challenge of making her sister projects shine. The Board is seen as the barrier to starting any new large-scale project (including those with broad support), and is expected to mediate discussions about how to prioritize technical requests from smaller Projects; yet it has not done so in a long time. (more on project needs)

A focus on making Foundation-level governance accessible in many languages.

People who do not speak English well have traditionally been left out of planning and elections related to the Foundation, though many communities have set up regional chapters with other primary languages. One candidate for the Board this year who is not a native English speakers has said he feels embarrassed to engage in public discussions about his goals and ideals. The Foundation's list of Resolutions affecting all projects is available only in English (two 'translations' listed haven't been updated since 2006). None of this is acceptable for a project that means to effectively serve every community in their own language -- we can look to other international organizations for existing solutions.

Experience in education, government relations, and offline distribution and creation of educational content.

My work with One Laptop per Child has given me a chance to engage with politicians, libraries, and educational NGOs around the world.

I also bring a background in software development and cyberlaw, but there are lawyers and programmers on the Board who can offer the same.

What specific goals would you have as a trustee?

Making translation issues a top priority : until this is resolved, the community members who need better translation tools and processes the most will not be able to make their voices heard or participate in these discussions.
- Translating Foundation documents into a set of core Wikimedia languages. This would include founding documents, resolutions, policies, and press releases.
Treating all Projects on an equal footing as part of the Foundation's mission, and balancing their needs accordingly.
Weekly communication with the community.
- Hosting open office hours every other week, where anyone could bring concerns and suggestions for the Board's consideration. Sending summaries of these discussions to the Board and Foundation staff.
- Working through consensus, representing the views of the community before my own. This requires regular publication of non-private issues before the Board, and regular discussion with community members and advisory board members about them.
Delegating authority to expand and enrich the projects to the community.
- Reminding Wikimedians that they can develop and build connections with local organizations to share material with the Projects, organize presentations and outreach, and launch new projects of their own. (Having a local Chapter is not a prerequisite for this. People need to be reminded of this regularly; this is the sort of thing Jimbo used to do long ago, when he noted regularly that he didn't do any of the work, but just kept the servers running.)
Laying the groundwork for a long-term (100-year) plan for sustaining the Projects.
- Making sure the Strategic Planning process focuses on defining and promoting the community's needs, and builds tools that can be used every year to refine and improve on our future plans.

I would also work to build consensus within the Board; it is important to have a harmonious Board that is comfortable discussing controversial topics and sharing ideas openly. This does not seem to have been a problem recently, though it has been at times in the past.

What are the key elements you would like to see prioritized in Wikimedia's strategy?

The Wikimedia Foundation is beginning an organized effort at strategic planning, in which the board will play a major role. What are the key elements you would like to see prioritized in Wikimedia's strategy for the coming years?

A permanent process for community-driven strategic planning. This should be sustainable without elaborate bureaucacy or staff.
- This should include a global list of community feature requests, concerns, and other priorities, with active facilitators helping to idntify which requests are essential to which audiences. This would include many ideas, needs, and concerns that are hard to express as 'bugs' from discussion portals and lists and personal essay pages, explicit output from community discussions of future plans, and tickets in bugzilla. It should be a key part of any future planning effort.
- Special attention is due to features for Wikipedia's sister projects (e.g., structured data, new namespace options; options for importing, exporting and format conversion).
A plan for improving translation tools and helper interfaces across the projects (e.g., shared translation memory, cleaner interlanguage links to, side-by-side translation support, multilingual announcements).
Separation of core services, such as hardware, bandwidth, dumps and statistics, from other services and initiatives - so that the former can be safeguarded effectively and permanently.
An endowment dedicated to maintaining the core Wikimedia services under any circumstances. Fundraisers specifically targeting this endowment.
A plan for reaching offline audiences, and helping them edit and contribute media to Wikipedia offline - for editors with sporadic connectivity or via sneakernet.
Development of a branch of the Foundation dedicated to development of MediaWiki in general, or even a parallel MediaWiki foundation, to promote its use by individuals and small groups.
The omnipresence of MediaWiki as a casual wiki platform should be taken seriously as an accomplishment by the Foundation and a potential channel for making contribution to our free knowledge projects easier. Meanwhile many new proprietary solutions for wiki-style collaboration are being improved. There are many long-term advantages reasons to support the community of MW users strongly.

What do you think the Wikimedia Foundation isn't doing that it should be? What is it doing that it shouldn't be?

The Foundation is

discouraging public comment on its work. The WMF wiki is lightly visited and not open to any sort of public contribution - visitors may not comment even on talk pages, nor is there a canonical link from pages there to a discussion page elsewhere.
minimizing public participation in planning new major initiatives. New projects such as the Usability project and Ford Foundation project to enhance Commons are presented once they are already underway, and rarely for discussion before that; they are planned privately and run by staff. This is inefficient and disempowering, leads to passive contributors.

The Foundation is not

focusing on how to make projects other than Wikipedia a success, even in areas such as free textbooks where there has been a surge of public interest and investment
investing in an endowment, or preparing for a financial downturn.
organizing long-term widely-distributed mirrors, backups, and archives.
investing in the community to help talented community members and volunteers learn how to support new aspects of the projects, from grant-writing and fundraising analysis to research and testing. (Some portion of any resources invested in new staff should also go towards better infrastructure and community support for the same areas; anything else is less sustainable.)

The English Wikipedia community is concerned with project governance...

The English Wikipedia community is increasingly concerned with questions of project governance. Who has authority to set and reshape policy, and who should?; how can a project so large, with so diverse a community, make collective decisions?; does consensus scale, or will some form of democracy be necessary to address the project's problems?; and many others. What role, if any, do you think the Board of Trustees can or should play in addressing governance and policy problems on individual projects?

The Board should not be involved in governance and policy issues on individual projects.

That said, the Board must deal with similar issues in organizing input on a large scale and making collective decisions, and should serve as a model for how to tackle the problem. It should solicit advice from the world's best facilitators, and from its other global collaborations, solicit research into options and opportunities and broadcast the results, and consider different options for revising its own policies and principles over time. All of this should be done in a way that is useful to individual projects facing similar challenges.

As an example, the current strategic planning project is directly trying to answer some of these questions within a year. The staff and consulting group who have been hired to help out should share their methods and research goals as well as their ideas with the community, so that others can learn from the process.

What sorts of partnerships should the Foundation pursue?

Wikimedia's partnerships with outside organizations--including for-profit companies like Kaltura and Orange as well as non-profits and public institutions like Mozilla Foundation and various archives and museums--have becoming increasingly prominent. What sorts of partnerships should and shouldn't the Foundation pursue?

Firstly, the Foundation should engage its diverse community of contributors and supporters - many of whom are professionals in doing this - to identify useful partnerships to pursue. This is a process which was of wide general interest years ago, before these types of discussions were moved to private channels and implicitly made off-topic for general input.

Secondly, the Board's role is to advise on or review suggested partnerships to ensure they do not compromise the mission, not to plan this aspect of Foundation planning.

That said, partnerships with aligned international foundations and non-profits seem well-suited for long-term preservation of the Foundation's goals:

worldwide institutions dedicated to organizing and sharing knowledge, such as libraries, museums, universities and other schools, are already realizing a similar mission. They simply need to see Wikimedia as a group they can work with.
foundations and government bodies devoted to education, such as the NEH and ministries of education, often dedicate initiatives to creating free knowledge. They need to recognize Wikimedia as a neutral global repository and archive for such work, and a potential partner for developing interfaces useful to new audiences.
international bodies dedicated to peace and improved communication around the world, such as UNESCO and the Peace Corps, are committed to preserving and sharing local knowledge and ideas. Wikimedia needs to become known as one of the world's largest international collaborations, one contributing directly to improved understanding across language and cultural divides.
foundations dedicated to linguistic and primary-source preservation regularly create single-topic silos paralleling commons, wikibooks, wikisource, and wiktionary. Wikimedia projects need to be recognized for the long-term archival and classification resources they are; then other projects with much higher overhead and production costs, such as the World Digital Library, will be more inclined to include Wikimedia synchronization in their plans.

What is your view of the current financial plan?

Over the last three years, the scope of the Wikimedia Foundation has expanded rapidly, with a budget growing from $3.0 million in fiscal year 2007-2008 to a planned $9.4 million in 2009-2010. What strategy should the Board of Trustees pursue in planning for future financial growth? What is your view of the current financial plan?

The current financial plan calls for continued diversification of sources of income and support, which is important - from new types of partnerships to stronger regional chapters to in-kind support. However, it includes no medium-term financial planning and is silent on an endowment or fallback plans, while adding new permanent expenses and positions. Considering the global economic climate, this is short-sighted.

The Board should request that the Foundation develop an endowment strategy and contingency plans, including insurance against emergencies and disasters.

Ideas I would like to see discussed include

explicit investment in our community of volunteers to develop their capacity to assess the promise of new grants, develop content partnerships, facilitate large-scale collaboration, test and review software extensions and related tools, and research the projects -- all areas in which there are many more opportunities than the people engaged in such work are able to assess, let alone pursue.
a plan for long-term sustainability of the projects at minimal recurring cost, separate from supplementary plans for new projects.

What role do chapters play in your vision for Wikimedia?

What role would you like the board to play in fostering the initiation, growth and viability of local Wikimedia Chapters? What role do chapters play in your strategic vision for Wikimedia?

A strong network of local chapters is a simple and sure way to ensure the future growth and innovation of the projects. Chapters and less formal groups provide a local network of support and collaboration for new ideas, local partnerships, and outreach. They also provide a future framework for making Wikimedia a truly multilingual organization, something which remains a bit untested.

The Board itself approves new Chapters, and should make that process as clear and uncomplicated as possible. Local groups supporting Wikimedia should be supported, even before they have the desire or organization to become a formal chapter. Chapters should be required to commit to the Foundation's mission, but otherwise should be restricted as little as possible.

Chapters should be empowered to develop local partnerships and represent the projects at events, and there should be better ways to provide fledgling local groups with visibility. I would encourage better ways for groups to publish ideas, request funds, boxes of swag, or technical support; and easier ways to set up pages and mailing lists for their groups (this has gotten better recently).

How does the Advisory Board fit into your strategic vision for Wikimedia?

How does the Wikimedia Advisory Board fit into your strategic vision for Wikimedia? Are there any specific tasks you would ask of them as a trustee? Are there critical areas of expertise that are not represented on the Advisory Board and you think should be?

Wikimedia is currently a very attractive organization to be associated with. The Advisory Board could be used to bring in experience and networks that we currently lack, in the spheres of education, libraries, academia, UN bodies, international non-profits, volunteer networks, fundraising, translation, grassroots political and news networks, and more.

I would specifically look for more advisors who have helped facilitate international dialogue and consensus-building in the UN and similar large international organizations. I would ask the Advisory Board for guidance in:

- reaching new audiences (young, old, in small towns, offline, through mass media, through guilds of expertise; finding tasks for non-editors)

- becoming more accessible and reusable (in various formats, online, in research, through existing publishing channels, through existing education mechanisms)

- improving retention while lowering the burden on established editors (accessibility, community-building techniques, large-scale facilitation, techniques for flame-war firefighting)

- internal communication within the projects. there are many lessons from online communication that we can use to help WikiProjects and new initiatives get more attention or targeted attention on-wiki; we can do much better than a crude distribution of site-wide notices for anons and logged-in users.

You've run unsuccessfully for the Board of Trustees before. What has changed?

You've run unsuccessfully for the Board of Trustees before. What has changed — with either the community or yourself—that you expect a different outcome? Do you have different goals than you did the last time you ran?

The Board has become increasingly passive over the past year, even though public interest in Wikimedia and suggestions from the community are more numerous than ever before. A passive board is dangerous, and can lead to complacency with our current policies and efforts, even where they are not achieving our desired goals. And in places we have stopped learning from one another and from our own great discoveries - we have turned away from open collaboration and discussion in places where we need scale and creativity.

I have a number of new goals (above), which come from talking with many Wikimedians about what they want to see from the Board. As a Board member, I will work to change how people communicate with the Board, and push for more diverse engagement in Foundation-level decisions. This will change the landscape of participants in future elections as well.