Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-27/Board elections/Steve Smith

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

• I honestly can't remember how or why I became involved with the Wikipedia community, though it was apparently via this edit to en-wiki article on Igor Ulanov. I am probably most proud of my five featured articles, though I think I've also done some good work closing deletion discussions (this one comes to mind) and improving others' work, usually through the WP:GAC and WP:FAC processes.

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

• The role of the Board of Trustees is to set high-level direction for the Foundation and to appropriately supervise the execution of this direction by WMF staff.

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

• Well, since the Signpost's en-wiki's newspaper, I guess I'll start with a connection to en-wiki. While it's not required that the WMF's largest project be represented at the Board level, it's probably desireable, and right now there are no community trustees with even one hundred edits to en-wiki in 2009 (Jimbo's got more than five hundred, but he's a special case, and more than half of those are to his user talk page in any case). Probably more important than that, though, is the reformist zeal I would bring. The current board appears to be focused on good governance and competent management of the WMF. While those are laudable objectives (and so I laud them), I think we'd be well-served by somebody with the desire to shake things up (said desire to be tempered by a healthy caution, of course), somebody with specific goals to advance.

• What specific goals would you have as a trustee?

• I'm glad you asked! As I say in my candidate statement, I have six main objectives:

1. promote the use of the “specific expertise” board seats to become less insular,
2. make what adjustments to the privacy policy as are necessary to promote accountability on-wiki,
3. issue such Foundation-level dictates on biographies of living persons issues as can be issued without jeopardizing the Foundation’s protection under s. 230 of the Communications Decency Act,
4. advocate for the Foundation-imposed creation of committees in our largest projects, such committees to be
   • empowered to make project-specific policy,
   • elected to finite terms by the community and recallable by same,
   • overrulable by community consensus,
   • authorized to alter their own makeup, and
   • no threat to the Foundation’s Section 230 immunity as a nonpublisher;
5. guard against over-optimistic growth projections, and
6. oppose paid advertising on any Wikimedia project.

I elaborate on 1, 4, and 5 in later questions. I elaborate on 6 here. I'd be happy to elaborate on the others on request.

• 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?

• I think the WMF needs to recognize that it's probably nearing the end of its growth phase. In the next few years, I think it should be looking at finding a stable state—not one in which there is no further innovation, but one in which its continued operations are not reliant on extremely high rates of revenue growth, as has been the case every year of the WMF's existence so far. This is likely to involve refocusing on its core mission at the expense of things that may not be critical to this mission. While I foresee a bright future for the WMF (even if I'm not elected), I don't foresee a money tree springing out of the ground in its backyard.

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

• One thing that the WMF is not doing that it should be is filling the specific expertise seats on its Board of Trustees. Fully half of these have never been filled, which is appalling given the promise that these seats represent for making the Board less insular (i.e. less filled with people whose major understanding of WMF comes from working on its projects). As I said last year, "Community members are major stakeholders in the Foundation's activities, but so are our readers, our subjects, our donors, and the broader public. Although it's not feasible for all of these groups to elect their own directors, it's important to get people on the Board whose perspective on the Foundation and its projects isn't that of contributor."

• 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?

• I have long realized that governance on the English Wikipedia is broken, and made fixing it the centrepiece of my campaign last year. Ideally, it would not be the place of the WMF to fix governance on the English Wikipedia, but in reality it's the only one that can: The Community (TM) is obviously unable to impose a rational governance model on itself, and it has recently served notice that it won't accept even modest measures in that direction being imposed by the Arbitration Committee. Accordingly, I would like to see the WMF—ideally not the Board, but if the Board doing it is the only way to get it done, then the Board should do it—set out something like the following: on any project with an Arbitration Committee, the Arb Comm may request that the Foundation impose a Governance Committee. Where an Arb Comm does that, the Foundation will direct that an election be held under the supervision of the Arbitration Committee to create an initial Governance Committee. That initial Governance Committee would have as its sole mandate setting out rules governing the Governance Committee: how it's selected, what its powers are, etc. I believe that this maximizes the level of community self-government while still pulling us out of the non-functioning morass of WP:CONSENSUS.

• 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?

• This is a very general question, but I'll give it my best shot: the Foundation should pursue partnerships that directly further its objects without compromising its independence. I'm not particularly concerned whether these are with for-profit or non-profit entities, nor am I especially concerned about the nature of the partner's activities outside of the scope of the partnership. The Foundation should refrain from partnerships that require a great deal from it for benefit that is merely tangential to its objects and from partnerships that compromise its independence, for example by making it heavily reliant on a single partner to the point that that partner is in a position to dictate terms.

• 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 first element of the Board's medium-term financial strategy should be recognition that this growth rate is not going to continue indefinitely. I'm actually concerned that it might not continue at the anticipated pace even into the next year, though I imagine that the staff and current board based their projections on a more thorough examination of the situation than I have made, so I'll be deferential to a degree on that question. But non-profits do not grow forever; the WMF should be seeking a stable state at which the budget grows annually at a rate not much beyond inflation.

• 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?

• The WMF should support chapters' activities, while recognizing that the quality of governance and operations from chapters is going to be extremely variable. Where (and only where) chapters demonstrate the necessary competence and integrity, the WMF should allow them to make use of WMF intellectual properties in support of their own operations. Besides that, I'd like to see chapters free to innovate. While I think we've swung too far in that direction of decentralization, there's no question that decentralization has been a major ingredient of the WMF's success so far.

• 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?

• I like the Advisory Board, and many of its members are the sort of people I think we should be looking at to fill our "specific expertise" seats. What we can ask of them depends in part on what kind of commitment its members are willing to show towards a non-remunerated position. Ideally, I'd like to see it become sort of a study group for broad (and generally non-operational) questions facing the WMF.

• 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 the last time you ran?

• Who says that I expect a different outcome? Realistically, I'm running in a race with three winners, and there are four candidates running (Ting, Ad, Jussi, and Samuel) with a record of achievement in the field of defeating me, and a fifth (Kat) with a record of doing well at these things as well, so I suspect that I'll lose again this time. That's okay. My goals are broadly similar as they were last time, though I've refined my thinking on the Foundation-imposed governance bodies somewhat (I'd rather see them imposed from the Foundation staff-level than by the Board of Trustees, and I'd like it to be in the province of Arb Comms for communities that have them to ask for them to be activated), and I'm also putting a greater emphasis on accountability at the expense of pseudonymity than I was last time.