Talk:Wikimedia Foundation board meetings

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Archive 1 (2004-2006, discussion of all WM meetings, including about Foundation membership, shared hosting, trademarks, grants, promotion, fundraising, developer teams, communication, private wikis and official positions)

Archive 2 (2007-present, for Board meetings only, including comments on specific meetings)

Comments and proposals for future meetings

Please leave comments on recent or ongoing meeting meetings, or suggest agenda items to address in upcoming meetings. –SJ · talk

Related discussion from 2013: Democratizing the Wikimedia Foundation.

How to document WMF Board resolutions and meetings here on Meta

Martijn Hoekstra and I started talking about this on Sj's talk page. I suggest we continue it here.

In general, I think the best approach would be to copy the information about every meeting and every resolution from the WMF wiki to Meta, and then continue the work of categorizing them. This would more or less include the things linked at wmf:Meetings and wmf:Category:Resolutions. I've already done some work on WMF wiki in categorizing the resolutions by type and by year; these categories would need to be renamed here to distinguish them as "WMF" resolutions (and meetings), but otherwise that structure could be built up.

SJ suggested, and I tend to agree, that each meeting should have just one page, including both agendas and minutes. Martijn suggests that the redlinks for nonexistent minutes might be useful, which is a point worth considering.

I see three advantages:

1. Any Meta contributor (or anonymous IP) would be able to contribute to the organizing, instead of just those few of us able to edit WMF wiki;
2. The talk page for each resolution and each meeting could be useful, for capturing discussion about specific resolutions or topics;
3. This approach merges the structure, whic is an advantage to those looking to learn or participate in discussions by year or topic. For instance, somebody exploring the Meta category for what happened in the year Category:2010 would find WMF resolutions and meetings alongside Wikimania, chapter activities, etc. for that year, and also searching on a topic like "licensing" would find WMF resolutions relating to licensing alongside other information;

The only downside I see is that it is a kind of activity which, I believe, should be primarily handled by paid staff. As I see it, an organization committed to transparency should be proactive in making its significant activities visible in an organized and browsable way. But since this appears unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future, it's probably better to just get the work done, rather than worry about who is doing it. -Pete F (talk) 11:12, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

• Of course, copying pages here doesn't eliminate the possibility that paid staff could to the work; it merely reduces the incentive for them to do so. -Pete F (talk) 11:18, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
  • I see your point, but the experience so far is that paid staff isn't interested in doing so anyway, so if we want to have this, we're going to have to do it ourselves. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 12:13, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
  • So, shall we get started with this? Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 12:04, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
    • I was waiting to see if there was any objection first -- but it seems there is none. It would take be a huge amount of work to copy all the pages over manyally -- how much experience do you have with bots, AWB, etc.? Should we ask around for some help with that? Do you have a preference for whether we start with meetings or resolutions? -Pete F (talk) 17:05, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
    • (Also it might be a good idea to leave a note at Wikimedia Forum for a couple days before getting started.) -Pete F (talk) 17:07, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
      • Ideally the pages should be imported, which is much faster and preserves the history. —Pathoschild 17:51, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
    • I did some AWB stuff, but I never used it cross project, and I'm unsure if it can help here. I'm inexperienced with bots, maybe they could help. If the database is not available to labs (is it?) them maybe through the API. If importing is an option as Pathoschild suggests that would be even better, but I have no idea how naming conflicts would be resolved, and what rights are needed. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 20:40, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
    • Doing through the API with a userscript should work, the api and CORS are enabled. I'll cook something up in the coming days. By far the easiest would be a straight page create. How about creating the pages as an exact mirror of Foundation, and transcluding them through on the meta meeting pages? Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 13:14, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

      • Moving the pages from WMF wiki might be a reasonable start, but there are some naming oddities we will want to take care of right away. Some of it is conventions that make sense on a wiki devoted to WMF, but need to be more specific here; some of it is practices that are less than ideal; and a lot of it is just different styles in use over the years at WMF wiki, that have never been standardized. Perhaps it would be best to agree on a naming convention before we get started, and take care of it immediately after importing, so we don't create confusion.

        • Resolutions use a "fake" name space -- that is, they tend to begin with the word "Resolution:" even though there is not an actual name space set up with that name.
        • Meetings tend to use sub-pages, in a way that would be better handled by the kind of categorization we're discussing here. Some are under Meetings/ and others under Minutes/. Take a look at Should we use sub-pages?

        On Meta Wiki, it is important to make sure these are clearly identified as Wikimedia Foundation resolutions and meetings, as there are many bodies that meet and create resolutions in the Wikimedia world. How about this for a naming convention:

        • WMF Resolution - Licensing policy for WMF:Resolution:Licensing policy -- and sub-pages, of course, for all the translations. (There are also WMF:Policies in addition to resolutions.)
        • WMF board meeting 2008-03-01 for WMF:Minutes/March 1, 2008 (Agendas do not seem to have separate pages on WMF wiki, which is probably a good thing.)

        -Pete F (talk) 17:35, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

        I'm good with any convention as long as there is a convention, and things can be easily found. Using the same layout as Foundation wiki simplifies import, and transcluding meetings, and minutes to the same page would give the same overall effect, but that's me being lazy. If something else is preferable, something else is fine by me. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 18:34, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

        So WMF board meeting 2008-03-01 would have a section agenda, a section minutes, and a section approved resolutions, the first two in full, and the last one a list of links to the actual resolutions? Or not the agenda? If not, where do we put that? Or should the minutes simply supersede the agenda once they are available? I have a very small preference to use subpages (WMF Resolution/Licensing policy) over the flat format (WMF Resolution - Licensing policy), but not to a degree I want to argue over it if you like the flat format better, as long as they are properly categorised. How would you like the categorisation scheme? Category:WMF resolutions of meeting dd-mm-yyyy on the page, where those categories are members of Category:WMF resolutions by meeting and Category:WMF resolutions passed in yyyy, with the passed in year a subcat of by year, and a central Category:WMF resolutions across all of them, and something similar for the minutes (apart from minutes by meetings, obviously)? Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 09:20, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Overall -- I think a large-scale import like this should have buy-in from a broader group. I suggest we continue to discuss here a little, to refine our preferred path forward; and then create an RFC and/or an entry at Wikimedia Forum. -Pete F (talk) 17:36, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm fine with that, but - as the cynic that I am - I think we will find that 95% of the people won't care, and the remaining 5% will end up in a dispute over the naming convention. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 18:34, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

I won't predict how many will actually care, but I would contend that most people should care -- information about the WMF's workings is important to our various communities in many ways, and it has been in a bit of a shambles for many years. As for the naming convention, that's why I suggest establishing a strong proposal here, before broadening the venue; if we can build some strong, small consensus, that should ease the process.

I prefer not to take on a major import of hundreds of pages without offering it up for broader critique first. -Pete F (talk) 19:45, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

Fair enough. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 09:20, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Naming convention for new pages on Meta

Summarizing from above, as I believe this is the one thing we need to get resolved before proposing this at Wikimedia Forum and then (assuming it's approved) doing the import.

Immediately after importing from Meta, we will need to move all the pages; mainly, because the titles need to make it clear that these are meetings and resolutions of the Wikimedia Foundation (which is more or less assumed in their current home on WMF Wiki). As long as we are moving them, we should introduce consistency and use a sensible convention. Considerations:

• Should there be a new namespace for these? (I say no. -Pete F (talk))
• Should we use sub-pages? (I say no; Martijn Hoekstra says yes; let's discuss elsewhere to resolve this. -Pete F (talk))
• Names should make it clear these are meetings/resolutions of the WMF board, not of other groups.
• Should there be just one page for the agenda and minutes of each meeting? (I think that is how it's always been on WMF wiki, and I think it should stay that way. Sj has said the same; Martijn seems unconvinced as yet. -Pete F (talk) 00:04, 5 March 2015 (UTC))
• How will translations work -- is that simply an easy import of the relevant sub-pages, or is there more to it?
• Do we also want to consider WMF:Policies?
• Once we move everything over, how should we organize resolutions? (Martijn would like the meeting pages to list resolutions explicitly. I think it would be sufficient if there were a category for each meeting, containing each resolution considered/passed at that meeting, linked on the meeting's page. -Pete F (talk))
• In addition to categorizing resolutions by date, as Martijn has described, I would like to categorize them by topic (e.g., licensing, privacy, etc.) But there is no urgency to do that immediately after import, it's something I/we can work on gradually.

Here is an example the naming convention we have so far:

• WMF Resolution - Licensing policy for WMF:Resolution:Licensing policy -- and sub-pages, of course, for all the translations.
• WMF board meeting 2008-03-01 for WMF:Minutes/March 1, 2008

Here is how I imagine the process working:

1. Import all files with the prefix Meeting/ or Minutes/ or Resolution: from WMF to Meta, keeping the same name.
2. Rename all those files (with a bot?) to match the naming convention agreed upon.
3. (Less time-sensitive) Start categorizing resolutions by topic.

Comments/questions/concerns/ideas? -Pete F (talk) 00:04, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Minutes?

Err...the minutes of meetings do not appear to have been updated since mid 2018. Could someone please do so? Or link if somewhere else? Casliber (talk) 14:13, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

@Casliber: It appears that a Foundation employee did it up through October 2018. I did add the January Agenda/Minutes to the page, but the November 2018 minutes list as Login Required. Hasteur (talk) 21:56, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

okay, so what happens now then? Casliber (talk) 00:33, 17 June 2019 (UTC)