Minutes:2015-04-13
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Wikimedia Foundation Board minutes
April 13, 2015
- Location: San Francisco and web conference (Google Hangout)
- Board of Trustees present: Jan-Bart de Vreede (Chair), Patricio Lorente (Vice-Chair), Phoebe Ayers, Frieda Brioschi, Guy Kawasaki, Sam Klein, María Sefidari, Jimmy Wales, Stu West, and Alice Wiegand.
- Non-Board members present: Lila Tretikov (Executive Director), Geoff Brigham (Secretary and General Counsel), Damon Sicore (Vice President of Engineering), Kim Gibley (Strategy Coordinator) Stephen LaPorte (Legal Counsel), Trish Silber (Retreat Facilitator).
Jan-Bart called to order a special meeting of the Board of Trustees at 12:05 PM PST. Stu, Guy, Lila, Kim, Damon, and Stephen were present in San Francisco, and Jan-Bart, Patricio, Phoebe, Frieda, Sam, María, Jimmy, Alice, and Trish joined remotely via web conference. Stephen called roll and confirmed that a quorum was present and able to simultaneously hear the meeting.
Strategy update
Kim updated the Board on the community consultation that took place on February 23, 2015, through March 6, 2015. The strategy team is still in the process of reviewing and bucketing the responses based on common content features. Some specific patterns are emerging from these responses, such as language and translation, multimedia, and the importance of accuracy of neutrality. Many of these themes were consistent with the recent donor survey, and previous editors surveys. Kim reviewed the strategy process so far, including internal strategy research tracks, recent organizational changes related to community engagement and partnerships. The next steps are to build a strategy framework and finish preparing the results from the community consultation.
Board members discussed the strategy, including opportunities for more Board feedback in strategy development and the long term visions for MediaWiki.
Engineering update
Damon gave a presentation on recent work in the Engineering team. Damon reviewed Visual Editor's public bug triage system, the plan for future rollouts and announcements, the performance benchmarks and other success criteria. Board members discussed how the feature may be received by different groups of users. Damon explained that the feature's first target audience is for new users, but it is available for other users who enable the visual editor in their settings. The Visual Editor is currently enabled on some wikis, and it will be enabled incrementally for more users during the rollout.
The Board thanked Kim and Damon for their presentations, and they were excused at this point in the meeting.
Housekeeping
The Board unanimously approved the minutes from the March 16, 2015 meeting, after a motion from Jan-Bart seconded by Stu.
Movement partners
Alice briefly reviewed the proposal from 2012 for movement partners, as distinct from chapters, thematic organizations, and user groups. Alice will work with Lila on the process to address movement partners in a way that does not slow down the many existing forms of partnerships in the Wikimedia movement.
Executive Session
The Board excused Geoff, Stephen, and Trish from the meeting, and the Board held a confidential executive session.
The meeting closed at approximately 1:45 PM.