Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-27/Board elections/Ting Chen

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

I read a tickle article on a german IT newspaper about Wikipedia at the beginning of 2003. I think it was about the 10,000th article on de-wp. Years before that I had already worked as a moderator in fido net on a forum with the name WISSEN, which is the german word for knowledge. So as I read that news it was as if I met an old friend again. Since then I am stuck in the Wikimedia community.

I am especially proud of my contributions of articles in zh-wp and de-wp. While at the beginning of my contribution most of my works was to create new articles, in the last time improving stubs had became more and more prominant. I take this as a very good sign of the improvement of our projects in total.

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

While the staff of the Foundation is getting professionalized and the structure is getting mature, the role of the Board of Trustees are the following:

First of all, the Board is the control instance of the Foundation and its staff. It has the role to see that the staff works correctly and efficiently and that the Foundation in total is working in accordance to our goal and our mission. The most prominant example of this role is the Audit Committee, which is a board committee. There are other instances where the board is in the controlling function.

The second major role is to issue policies that has impact on all projects. One of the most important such policies is the privacy policy. Another policy that was issued this year was the change of license. WikiMedia projects has the tradition of project autonomy. Policies issued by the board and would have impact into the community must be considered very well. It must be so important for our mission and goal that the violation of the project autonomy is justified. This is also one of the reasons why we must have board members that are deeply rooted in the projects and the community.

The third major role is to develop strategies and visions for the future of the Foundation. This is the reason why this year's election is especially important and interesting. The board members that are elected in August would be the leading figures in the strategy delelopment in the next year.

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

I think the most important thing that I bring to the board is my link to the community, especially to the chinese community, but in some extent also to the other asian communities. In my last term I had overseen necessity to be a contact to the german community. I will improve that in my next term.

• What specific goals would you have as a trustee?

This is a difficult question. First of all the board is not an executive organ. So the trustee doesn't have this or that specific task that he should do, with which he could be measured. Second the board as it momentarily is is a team. It works together. Although everyone has a different interest and knowledge, sometimes we have different opinions the board had always worked out a consensus in the last year and had passed all its resolutions unanimously. So we had all worked on all topics together. It is difficult to see who is responsible for what. I would hope that the board after the election remains so.

Aside of the above points. I would like to see in the next two years that we get the chapters, friendly organizations and so on issue settled. I have worked with the ChapCom in my last term. And we have had the issue of the Brazil chapter which didn't institutionalized themselve and thus theoretically doesn't match the necessiry condition of a chapter. I would like to work with the community to get a solution for this and other cases in the future.

Another specific goal is naturally strategic planning. I would like to work on it and work as a facilitator between the community and the board.

There are other goals, that are indirectly related with the trustees work. Those are keep my work in the projects, as a facilitator for consensus finding and as a contributor; keep or even expand my links to the diverse communities; make a presentation on every Wikimania during my term.

• 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?

The most important duty of the Foundation is to support our projects. And that means continued working on our infrastructure and software. Instabilities like shortly before happend should be avoided as most as possible, when next year the Usability Project is ended it should not mean the end of our effort in improving our usabilities, and we need desperately a second database server farm. These things has the most highest priority for me because they are essencial for all our other efforts.

The other for me high priority topic is Outreach. There are different interests on this line. We have an established community in the developed countries, should we give them more support, if yes, which support? We have a badly established community in the rest of the world, should we be more active in community developping here? Should we do both? How do we want to weight our resources in the different efforts? These are questions that we must answer.

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

I think the Foundation should more actively and stronglier go against companies like Baidu or Hoodong who steal the hard work of our contributors and make money with them and don't care at all about free content.

I know that some of our employees are working very very very very very hard. I think the Foundation should take more care of its employees.

• 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 think the project autonomy is very important. There are many reasons to uphold this principle. Most of all, I think it is the best grant for us that the projects are really neutral. From my point of view I think we must think this globally. If let we say en-wp calls for the involvement of the Foundation, then why not also zh-wp, or nl-wp. The Foundation would be get involved into community problems that it cannot solve correctly from such a distance. I think this possibility is real. In zh-wp we DO have from time to time people who say the Foundation should decide. And it is not only a Wikipedia problem. I know at least one chapter with internal problems that also have member who want of call Foundation to decide their internal differences. I believe the Foundation cannot decide correctly in these cases. The community must solve their problems by themselves. And I believe that the community can solve the problem. Let me give you an example here. More than five years ago the zh-wp almost splitt because of the problems between the simplified and traditional chinese differences. The result of this crisis was that the community developed the method to automatically convert the characters and phrases. We survived the crisis and we got stronger. I think we have always the feeling that the momentary problem is so big that it is going to be a crash down. And if we look back, we can see that we are constantly in such problems, only that with the solution of one problem other problems got more imminent.

I think call for an authority from "above" is like the "Dark Force". It is not stronger, it is only "quicker, easier, more seductive".

• 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?

The principle should be, relationships that are in the line alone with our mission and goal should we pursue. Relationship that is out of the line shouldn't we pursue.

There are like minded institutions like Mozilla or FSF or CC, these are our friends. Friends still have different interests and opinions. But in general we pursue similar goals and share similar values. With these organizations we work together.

Museums, archives, galaries, libraries etc. has partly similar gaol as we. A lot of them are public institutions with the mission of knowledge distribution. They are differently organized as we, they have different business models and financial backgrounds. A cooperation with them would be good. But because they have different business models we should negociate with them carefully. Our chapters are doing good work here.

I consider most for-profit companies as our consumer. Normally they pursue totally different goals as we. Though as an effect we get our content more widely distributed or get our software improved, and this again is in the line of our mission. We charge them to improve the financial situation and stability of the Foundation, and the Foundation can do with this money other things to support the community and project. I think this is a critical point. The money we earn from our business goes to the community and projects. Not for other things.

I can imagine that by some companies we would decline a business even if it seems lucrative to us. For example if the potential deal is contradictory to our mission and goal, or if the potential partner has a mission and goal that are contradictory to that of ours.

• 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?

To be honestly. When I ran for the election last year I didn't think that we would be able to collect so much money. When last year we set the goal of 6M I doubted that it is achievable. I am happy that I am wrong. I think our gaol this year is again very ambigious and I hope that we will arrive it. There are so much things that we can do that we can even spend double of that. I had mentioned in the question about strategic planning what we can do. We will not able to do them all, anyway not at the same time. So we need the money. The most important thing is that the increase in our budget would result in better community and project benefit.

• 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?

Chapters are important volunteers organizations. The board had its spring meeting this year with the chapter meetings at the same time and same place. It was a very good experience. It also showed how important the Foundation and the board consider the chapters are. In the last year the Foundation had tentatively began to put seed into areas where we think has the potential for chapters but has not yet had such initiatives. For example we organized Wikipedia Academy in India with Jimmy and Sue attending the event. I think these are good works. Chapter forming is a delicate process. I think the Foundation should put seed if there are potential, but we cannot force it forming. I also think that the Foundation should take more care about chapters that already exist. In my opinion chapters with less than 50 members are more or less endangered. The Foundation should especially see that they don't fail. Here we must still find better methods. We have at the moment at least one chapter that has no activity at all. It is sad to bury a chapter, in this case it is especially painful for me, but I think we also need a process to declair a chapter as no more a chapter. Something that is dead, but still exists in paper and on our worldmap would not help anyone at all.

• 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?

The Advisory Board is a resource of knowledge, contact and information. We have had members of the Advisory Board for example in our Board Nomination Committee. Rebecca MacKennen had provided valuable informations while our trip in China. I expect our Advisory Board to play an important role in the strategic planning.

I think that our Advisory Board at the moment still lacks geographical and linguistical diversity.

• What have you done as a board member? What do you hope to do in another term, and why haven't you done it already?

As I have said in the answer of an earlier question the current board had worked harmonically and as a team. There were constant interactions and interchanges between the board members. We had worked together, I think almost all on all resolutions we had handled. For my part I can say that I was always good prepared when we have meetings. I had worked with other trustees on the resolutions. Despite of this I was member of the NomCom and was the link between the board and the ChapCom. Especially on the ChapCom I had worked as a communication channel between both. Later I worked on the Wikimania Committee to select the site for 2010. I think I had improved the interest and understanding of especially the zh-wp-community about the Foundation. We had two candidates out of the zh-wp community for the steward election last year. The zh-wp community had strongly supported the license change and had very actively took part in the pole about our contributors and users. I think this is partly because I have always informed the community early and thoroughly. I feel it as a personal failure that the de-wp community was so supprised about the license change and would also strengthen my effect to inform this community about future movement of the Foundation in my next term. I assisted Jimmy Wales by his visit last year in Beijing and had worked on our contact with the chinese officials. WikiMedia projects were blocked in China for long time. They are unblocked before the Olympics along with a lot of other websites. Most of these other websites are blocked again, our projects not. I think we had done well in this effort.

In my next term I would like to see that we get the question about the chapters sorted out. We started to work on this subject but we are just at the beginning. What I also really would like to see it happen and to take part on it is to have Wikipedia Academy in Beijing, Chengdu and Guanzhou. I believe we are on the way to it and see the possibility good, that this would happen in the next two years (ok, perhaps not in all three cities, but at least in one). And I would like to see that we have a second data center established.