Wikimedia Foundation elections/Board elections/2009/Candidates/Questions/2: Difference between revisions
→"Office actions" and BLP issues: There is a wisdom in committees not evident in any one of the individuals of that collective, singularly. |
|||
Line 74: | Line 74: | ||
While I haven't had to participate in OFFICE actions, and I suspect there are very few office actions that are operated on any but some of the largest language projects, but have had to witness a few cases where there have been "complaints" of harm, libel and the like (the most bizarre perhaps being the case of a lady Video Jockey who made a complaint to the police so they could see if it was illegal to edit her article in a way that made her feel "uncomfortable"; specifically quoting catty words she had uttered in a major newspaper against another female political candidate in a race she was running in etc.) My attitude is that we should be skeptical about one-sided claims of harm. Investigating the issues behind such ought to be done with a huge amount of diligence, as interfering with the normal procedures of a project is something that shouldn't ever be lightly done, and never never never with fear or favor. |
While I haven't had to participate in OFFICE actions, and I suspect there are very few office actions that are operated on any but some of the largest language projects, but have had to witness a few cases where there have been "complaints" of harm, libel and the like (the most bizarre perhaps being the case of a lady Video Jockey who made a complaint to the police so they could see if it was illegal to edit her article in a way that made her feel "uncomfortable"; specifically quoting catty words she had uttered in a major newspaper against another female political candidate in a race she was running in etc.) My attitude is that we should be skeptical about one-sided claims of harm. Investigating the issues behind such ought to be done with a huge amount of diligence, as interfering with the normal procedures of a project is something that shouldn't ever be lightly done, and never never never with fear or favor. |
||
|Koenigsberg = I don't particularly have a problem with taking a timeout from an article to cover all of our bases. This is how I read the OFFICE dictum. It is temporary, I think that that is the key to it. I don't love it, however, I do not foresee it causing a long term conflict with the object of the encyclopaedia projects, which is of course to build the sum of all human knowledge, in every language. As to POV issues, if WP:OFFICE leads to the removal of notable, well sourced material, I think that the community will be right to take issue with that. I do not expect that to happen. |
|Koenigsberg = I don't particularly have a problem with taking a timeout from an article to cover all of our bases. This is how I read the OFFICE dictum. It is temporary, I think that that is the key to it. I don't love it, however, I do not foresee it causing a long term conflict with the object of the encyclopaedia projects, which is of course to build the sum of all human knowledge, in every language. As to POV issues, if WP:OFFICE leads to the removal of notable, well sourced material, I think that the community will be right to take issue with that. I do not expect that to happen. |
||
|Stenberg = I uphold that an encyclopedia's register should be dispassionate, yet engaged. We as a Community should strive for balance and where possible a full, informed and systemic framing of an article with rich context and historicity. I favour a deep consultation model throughout the Community which subsumes Foundation, Projects, Charters, programmes, editors, administrators and audience, amongst others particularly benefactors. I do not favour censorship unless in situations of compassion and duress or where minors may be impacted. Even then the censorship is not one of filtering holdings but one of retrieval. I also favour decentralized governance, a reticulum of interpenetrating amorphous sapiential circles, to engage the term of Margaret Mead. Consensus fails without having deep consultation and broad catchment and representation from our manifold constituencies. This is a fundamental flaw in Wikimedia currently. To further my Platform standing and to strengthen consensus, I intend to table a universal communication channel with social media capability integrated directly with the online interface. Or at minimum a widget or plug in that provides for deep consultation and the establishment of communities that can amass according to interest and necessity. Information will be interrogable and reportable. I don't use IRC, though I appreciate its function in the history of the Internet and particularly hacker culture. Particularly given the impending strategic envisioning, it is timely to progress beyond IRC. The nature of privilege in the Community is sensitive. We should endeavour to be open and accessible wherever possible. Wales has established and invested this failsafe, this safety valve within the Board and before I establish a platform or opine as to its benefit or otherwise, I would require a statement or consultation from legal counsel and exposure to prior case studies and to dialogue with the Community. There is a wisdom in committees not evident in any one of the individuals of that collective, singularly. |
|Stenberg = I uphold that an encyclopedia's register should be dispassionate, yet engaged. We as a Community should strive for balance and where possible a full, informed and systemic framing of an article with rich context and historicity. I favour a deep consultation model throughout the Community which subsumes Foundation, Projects, Charters, programmes, editors, administrators and audience, amongst others particularly benefactors. I do not favour censorship unless in situations of compassion and duress or where minors may be impacted. Even then the censorship is not one of filtering holdings but one of retrieval. I also favour decentralized governance, a reticulum of interpenetrating amorphous sapiential circles, to engage the term of Margaret Mead. Consensus fails without having deep consultation and broad catchment and representation from our manifold constituencies. This is a fundamental flaw in Wikimedia currently. To further my Platform standing and to strengthen consensus, I intend to table a universal communication channel with social media capability integrated directly with the online interface. Or at minimum a widget or plug in that provides for deep consultation and the establishment of communities that can amass according to interest and necessity. Information will be interrogable and reportable. I don't use IRC, though I appreciate its function in the history of the Internet and particularly hacker culture. Wikivoices has foregrounded to me that only certain collected individuals talk and have a voice in Wikimedia. There is a certain humanity to hearing one another and seeing one another if possible. We don't all write well, we aren't all clearly and powerfully literate. Particularly given the impending strategic envisioning, it is timely to progress beyond IRC. The nature of privilege in the Community is sensitive. We should endeavour to be open and accessible wherever possible. Wales has established and invested this failsafe, this safety valve within the Board and before I establish a platform or opine as to its benefit or otherwise, I would require a statement or consultation from legal counsel and exposure to prior case studies and to dialogue with the Community. There is a wisdom in committees not evident in any one of the individuals of that collective, singularly. |
||
|Rosenthal = Having had to implement an office action on an article at the request of the foundation staff, I disagree that it should be limited to the General Counsel. It is part of the necessary oversight that the WMF (both staff and board) must have over the projects to protect the foundation's mission. The second half of the question is not related to board activities, but I will answer it anyway. Our policies require us to maintain a neutral POV. We should strive to do no harm. It is extremely rare that these two things are incompatible with each other, and almost never in a well cited, verifiable, researched article. |
|Rosenthal = Having had to implement an office action on an article at the request of the foundation staff, I disagree that it should be limited to the General Counsel. It is part of the necessary oversight that the WMF (both staff and board) must have over the projects to protect the foundation's mission. The second half of the question is not related to board activities, but I will answer it anyway. Our policies require us to maintain a neutral POV. We should strive to do no harm. It is extremely rare that these two things are incompatible with each other, and almost never in a well cited, verifiable, researched article. |
||
|Mituzas = Our General Counsel suggests that we should do as few as possible 'office actions' - and I support him. It is not much of an issue lately, and I think that foundation should always try to have best possible dialogue between community and staff - and have bidirectional support on all the issues, that previously required unilateral actions. This is definitely scaled down activity from few years ago, and I think that everyone involved now is happier :) |
|Mituzas = Our General Counsel suggests that we should do as few as possible 'office actions' - and I support him. It is not much of an issue lately, and I think that foundation should always try to have best possible dialogue between community and staff - and have bidirectional support on all the issues, that previously required unilateral actions. This is definitely scaled down activity from few years ago, and I think that everyone involved now is happier :) |
Revision as of 08:49, 1 August 2009
Foundation Endowment
What are your thoughts about the establishment of an endowment for the Foundation? More specifically: (i) How should establishment of an endowment be traded off against shorter-term objectives? (ii) What size endowment should be targetted? (iii) What operations should be supported by distributions from the endowment, and why? Jeremy Tobacman 21:59, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
Also, we're still quite agile organization, which may scale down certain projects in case of financial problems. We are in somewhat uncharted lands, and endowment would commit us to certain way of financial planning way too early.
Of course, we may consider endowment as restricted funding option - if any grant makers are ready to switch from institutional funding to endowment building.An unfortunate but true side-effect of having a large endowment (no giggling, children) is that the WMF may be criticized for having one, or too large of one. Annual giving could erode if too many potential donors begin to view the endowment as alleviating the need for more funds. Smaller non-profits (like Wikimedia) are often criticized for not spending the lion's share of funds on current needs. Grant-making organizations might even pass over an organization that already has significant endowment capital.
Apologies for sounding like a broken record, but the Wikimedia Foundation needs to stop practices like underspending the Technology budget by 65%, and dealing Stanton Fund gift money directly to the privately-held company (Wikia, Inc.) of the Foundation's founding trustee, before it even dares consider launching an endowment fund campaign!An another intermediary step that can be taken right now, is to regularize the handling of the current financial cushioning strategy. It clearly was impossible in the previous term or the one before that, and it won't be implementable in the current accounting term either, because of the explosive growth of the size of our operations in terms of staff and office space. But once the move to an alternative location in SF is out of the way in terms of one time financial outlay; I think it only prudent that there is a clear strategy on how the cushion is handled. This would be prudent in itself, and since hopefully it would be a strategy that can be publicly expressed, as a completely serendipitous bonus, it should alleviate all the unnecessary foaming of the mouth from our more excitable critics :-) If that is ever possible :-/
To be clear, my feeling is that an endowment is useful if and only if the amount of money coming in as donations is an order of magnitude larger than currently. Specifically it would be useful if there was a sudden donation of an order of magnitude beyond our current revenues. It is conceivable that we might be able to grow in easy stages into a size where our revenues are even several orders of magnitude larger than currently before an endowment would be near inescapable. I have to say that in terms of future planning, when and if our revenues continue growing, it would be wise to begin the endowment sooner than it is absolutely indispensible, to give it time to grow.
It will be a glorious day when we are in a situation where all the money to run the servers can be scraped off the interest on the endowment. May I live to see that day!Yes, we need an endowment fund, and should set one up now, even before we have planned a fundraiser for it (see i.). An endowment is essential to safeguard the future of any long-lived institution. Our annual budget is now many times our basic operating expenses, with over $8M a year in recurring expenses in the current 2009-2010 financial plan (for comparison, $8M is roughly the annual upkeep of the Clinton Presidential Library). Moreover, the plan calls for Foundation spending next year to grow faster than revenue - this is short-term planning. We must prepare for the long term at the same time.
- (i) - Some donors, particularly larger individual donors, may give to an endowment what they would not to a general fund. The endowment should be supported through careful outreach to major donors, and through policies allocating a portion of major unrestricted gifts to the endowment. The greatest investment required to set up an endowment is the definition of what it would support, something that we must do regardless as part of strategic planning.
- (ii) - This is a topic for discussion with the Foundation's finance team. The endowment should be large enough to sustainably support the basic operation of the Projects (see iii. below), able to grow with inflation while supporting any needed central server farms and technical support with its interest, and of a size that we can raise. An initial target of $10M would match current expenses. Expenses have grown geometrically in years past, but there has been no focus on separating the costs of a core set of services from other expenses.
- (iii) - First we need to work together to definine a core set of services that define our mission. I would include:
- Reliable read/write access to the projects through the Wikimedia domains, and the hardware and bandwidth this requires;
- Reliable access to dumps and statistics
- Reliable backups of private and public data
- These services should be supported as robustly as possible : making it easier for third parties to help support them in-kind with their own time, money, and hardware; having someone keeping the infrastructure involved up and running - either with a dedicated team or with some other effective supporting network; maintaining and improving ways to find and access dumps, from a fileserver and mirrors to actively-seeded torrents of large files; and regularly generating statistics from available sources while protecting private data [which makes this a difficult task to let others share].
- Distributions from the endowment should support all of this, as well as efforts to reduce the future cost of maintaining them.
"Office actions" and BLP issues
As a member of the Board of Trustees you would apparently have the power to take "office actions" with respect to content. Current policy states that "office actions" are edits intended "to prevent legal trouble or personal harm and should not be undone by any user." Jimbo Wales has stated that WP:OFFICE may be used in "cases involving a threat of legal action, but in other cases it may be simply as a courtesy". Would you support restricting this power to WMF's General Counsel? If not, do you see any conflict between satisfying an article subject who is complaining of "harm" and maintaining a neutral POV? How high a priority to you is "personal harm" avoidance?Bdell555 03:02, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
As a completely unrelated to the question above, but intimately entangled with the rationale I offer why consolidating the OFFICE power back into single hands would not be a good idea, I note as a sidebar that the reason that having a single Executive Director is not in violation of this doctrine is precisely because the staff is thoroughly insulated from having any influence on editing activity, apart from situations where legal matters are not in play. And that insulation should be further enhanced rather than creating a breach across it directly connected to the General Counsel.
On the separate issue of "harm"...
While I haven't had to participate in OFFICE actions, and I suspect there are very few office actions that are operated on any but some of the largest language projects, but have had to witness a few cases where there have been "complaints" of harm, libel and the like (the most bizarre perhaps being the case of a lady Video Jockey who made a complaint to the police so they could see if it was illegal to edit her article in a way that made her feel "uncomfortable"; specifically quoting catty words she had uttered in a major newspaper against another female political candidate in a race she was running in etc.) My attitude is that we should be skeptical about one-sided claims of harm. Investigating the issues behind such ought to be done with a huge amount of diligence, as interfering with the normal procedures of a project is something that shouldn't ever be lightly done, and never never never with fear or favor.Wikimedia's Counsel may request such an action, but would not need to do so through the Board. Thankfully this is rarely done - it is generally an ineffective way to get things done, and an unnecessary imposition on community processes.
Yes, there is a central conflict between satisfying an article subject who is complaining of harm and maintaining a neutral POV; and it is one that community editors and OTRS respondents must cope with every day - independent of whether or not the Foundation feels an additional legal reason to respond to such a complaint.