Wikimedia meetings/2008-10-03

Reported by Michael Snow, foundation-l, October 18 2008

I wanted to give a report on our board meeting earlier this month. This is not in place of the meeting minutes, which will be published when they're ready and approved. But the discussion here was very helpful to the meeting, and I'd like to share some of what we worked on, and mention outcomes where there are any.

I'll start with policy business. We approved two updates to our official policies. One is the revised privacy policy which has been discussed here a few times previously. The other is an update to the gift policy, which was no longer reflecting our organizational structure and needed some more specific guidance. The updated policy is not a substantive change in our philosophy, it simply clarifies some points. For example, the foundation intends to convert gifts of securities into cash upon receipt, rather than having them sit for long periods and be subject to market fluctuations (in the past, we've both gained and lost money in such circumstances, so it's pretty much a wash). Oh, and in case you were wondering, the policy documents that we won't normally offer naming opportunities. Well, we can name servers, but for some reason donors haven't shown too much interest in that. Patti has put the new versions of these policies up on the foundation website.

Stu updated us on the status of the audit, which is progressing reasonably well, certainly more quickly than last year. The audited financial statements should be ready for us to approve no later than the next board meeting in November (on IRC).

Speaking of next board meetings, we also set the board's calendar for the coming year. That should make it easier to plan our schedules and make sure all trustees can attend (this was the first time we've had everyone together since I joined the board). It may also be of interest to people who are thinking of being candidates, either in next June's elections or for the chapter-selected seats. In addition to the IRC meeting November 3 this year, in 2009 we've set aside January 9-11 in San Francisco, April 3-5 (location to be determined, possibly in conjunction with a chapters meeting), August 27 in Buenos Aires (as usual, a short meeting prior to Wikimania), and October 23-25 in San Francisco again. More IRC meetings may be scheduled as necessary, but those don't involve travel and are easier to plan.

Jan-Bart gave a presentation on open standards, which led into the broader topic (including file formats) that I introduced earlier. Jan-Bart feels that considering our commitment to these ideals - freely licensed content, free software, web standards - our projects are not doing nearly as much as they could on open standards in education. It's an important aspect of our mission, the standards often exist already and are in use in the educational community, and our impact in that world would grow significantly by working towards them.

For the broader discussion, first of all, thanks to everyone who gave their input here, it was tremendously valuable. As indicated earlier, we didn't have this conversation to make an immediate decision at the meeting. The board does want to maintain our commitment, as reflected in both the foundation and the community, to free and open access to knowledge. Along those lines, the earlier draft of a file format policy will be revisited, and we may consider passing a revised version. However, it's also not clear that this would be a good idea. One issue would be if it inadvertently prohibits positive approaches in the future, such as the uses for Flash that Brion mentioned. (At least, nobody seemed to have a problem with those, please correct me if that's not the case.) So I wonder if it might not be wiser to avoid attempting something at the board level that requires us to pin down definitions for file formats, platforms, and so on in ways that may have unintended consequences. Further feedback and discussion is welcome.

Along with standards and file formats, the issues we spent the most time on were the advisory board and chapters. As this message is already rather long, I'll be more brief about those. We've realized that advisory board members were originally appointed for one-year terms, so most of them have been serving longer than anticipated. We discussed the skills and qualities we want the advisory board to help with, and will be inviting some of the existing group to continue on, while also adding new appointments from time to time. Jan-Bart is working on a proposal for handling this, so we can have less of an ad hoc approach. Finally, I'll just save the chapter business for a separate email in the next day or so.