Talk:Board Governance Recommendations (April 2016)

Who did develop these recommendations, what was the reason / context ?

To gain a broader and deeper understanding for the proposed Movement Charter (June 2024), I'm searching for the history of Wikimedia governance, policies and rulings and found this article. Would it be possible to write a short introduction where is being explained who did develop these recommendations, what was the background/context, what were the needs and/or issues and what were the outcomes? Did the Board approve a new set of principles? The impression evolves that much of what the Movement Charter Drafting Committee did try to put down in the Draft Charter, has been done before, but knowledge about it is incomplete. Maybe I can, with others, fill this gap by collecting the most important discussions and documents. Thanks beforehand, Kevin Bouwens (talk) 08:17, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

@Kevin Bouwens: hello, and thank you for translating texts here into Dutch. This page is not an article in a Wikipedia meaning of this word, so no introductions -- this wiki is used for hosting governance related publicly available documentation of the Wikimedia Foundation (Board meeting minutes, resolutions etc), and this is the text of the recommendations the Wikimedia Foundation Board Governance Committee developed after a discussion at the Board meeting in March 2016, you can find the minutes here with more context, leading to the development of the recommendations: Minutes:2016-03-21, and some outcomes were documented already at the next meeting in April: Minutes:2016-04-22.

Re broader context -- 2016 was a year with a lot of leadership transitions for the Wikimedia Foundation. The Executive Director at the time resigned, and there was a search for a new one. The Board leadership changed, and a new Executive Director was appointed. You might also look at the recommendations of the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) (approved by the Board in June 2016). This eventually led to the 2019 Governance Review, and a set of changes.

I do not think there is a good overview of the history of Wikimedia governance, as this is a very broad topic. And the Wikimedia Foundation Board related piece of it is probably the best documented one, volume wise. The work around the draft Movement Charter indeed involved looking at how things were in the Movement, and the Committee reviewed, and read a lot about past and current practices, but the idea behind was to be future oriented, and see how we can make decisions together as the Movement, so I am not entirely sure how helpful the 2016 conversations will be for your endeavour --アンタナナ 09:10, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

@アンタナナ a kind hello too! Background to formulate these questions was not so much to only gain insights myself, but to send a signal that the texts in this section (foundation.wikimedia / governance) are being offered to the public in a way that it's made quite difficult to gain basic contextual understanding and knowledge about the work of the Foundation (and the Chapters and at the moment the Movement Charter Drafting Committee). It's more about 'user friendlyness' or 'user experience' for all readers and I was aware that this is not Wikipedia, so an official document must be published 'as is'. Generally speaking, introductions like used on Wikipedia are a good method to attract readers and help them understand, together with other instruments as there are context, explanation, categorization, linked keywords and links to previous, following and/or related documents like minutes, etc.. It's right to point out that this is not Wikipedia so for this area a format should be chosen that can offer the static official documents, surrounded by supplementary documents and explanatory texts. The existing format with 'tabs' that has been used on meta.wikimedia for the content page of the Movement Charter (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter), could work here fine too, I guess. It would be nice when (certain) people outside the WMF could work on the tabs meant to offer supplementary documentation and context, and bring in their experience and knowledge (for instance former Boardmembers, affiliates and communitymembers active in conversations). With an 'editor-in-chief' deciding on what can be published and what not.

My 'endeavour' is rooted in the culture I come from, Western-Europe, where it's usance to archive conversations on governance that have lead to law- and policymaking. To archive as a verb, meaning not only a certain place where documents are being stored, but have documents being professionally made accessable and searchable to the public, for now and in the future. As far as I know this also is common use in the USA. From this perspective your links and explanations are very helpful, they should not be hidden away on this talkpage!

Conversations, arguments, problems etc. on governance from 2016 (or even 1789, 1215 or 528, to mention some highlights in Western-Europe governance history...) can give guidance to work effectively and efficient on future governance. To give an example: when community members are drafting a charter and think the WMF Terms of Use have been set up by the Foundation or "top-down", they will (might) have a different attitude towards them than when they would have had the knowledge that the ToU were drafted through weeks of intensive discussions by community members, thus "bottom-up" (see: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2011/12/31/terms-of-use/ 'Terms of Use' by Geoff Brigham, a former legal counsel of the WMF). Without sound knowledge about the civil law environment in which the Wikimedia Movement operates, where the WMF is the highest rulemaking body, which I believe not many understand; of the most important existing policies and the reasons why and ways how they have been developed, and about governance conversations in the past, such an undertaken has pretty low chances to lead to sound principle law- or rulemaking for the future, imho, which is the main reason to give this some thoughts and work. Thanks for your attention, --Kevin Bouwens (talk) 09:29, 20 July 2024 (UTC)