Anthere's Weblog

Last Monday, I informed the community I did not intend to run for the board of Wikimedia Foundation this summer. I do not know if I ever would have the guts to be more specific, but here is at least the official announcement

Lire la suite

Ce soir, je découvre quelques photos de la "board retreat" (de Wikimedia Foundation, fin octobre à Frankfurt...), prises par Brion.

Et quelques unes me sautent aux yeux, tant elles contiennent la substantifique moëlle de ces trois jours.

De droite à gauche, Brad Patrick (notre directeur exécutif), Tim Shell (membre du conseil) et bibi en pleine action. Mots clés, collaboration et café à volonté. Au fond, sur le mur, on aperçoit le résultat de notre travail. Je suis l'auteur principal de la fabuleuse carte du monde (il faudrait que je retrouve une photo de cette carte...)

Erik et les stroopwafels, une friandise apportée en quantités industrielles par Oscar, à la demande de Delphine. Croustillantes, dorées, dégoulinantes de sucre, miel etc... je comprend à présent pourquoi je n'ai réussi qu'à en manger une... Erik a ses faiblesses... Je sais désormais comment manipuler cet esthète (pas de café, pas d'alcool, pas de cigarette... mais des stroopwafels). Bon à savoir

Delphine (à gauche) et Jimbo. Des moments houleux. On aperçoit la mandarine de la parole dans la main de Jimbo. Silence, on tourne.

Erik, avec sa mandarine. A gauche Brad. A droite Tor. Les spécialistes du language du corps peuvent s'en donner à coeur joie.

Kudos à Brion pour cette photo inoubliable. Lors de la séance de SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats), deux des weaknesses citées seront les volontaires et le manque de responsabilité. Volunteers and Responsability (lack of). A réfléchir...

Finalement, une autre image mythique. La board retreat restera aussi ceci, le geste choisi par chacun d'entre nous pour se définir, Oscar qui dirige, Jimbo qui tape au clavier, Alison qui reste assise les bras croisés, Tim qui fait "prosit" avec sa bière, Michaël buvant son café, Danny répondant au téléphone, notafish nageant tel le dauphin, Mitch allongé à plat ventre sur la carpette, et j'en passe. J'avais choisi de cueillir le tournesol MediaWiki et de sentir son parfum... avant de de me voir offrir ce bouquet par Brad et Danny, pour me remercier d'être là, tout simplement. Les larmes m'en sont montées aux yeux. Ce que je peux être sentimentale parfois J'ai gardé la carte accompagnant le bouquet. Le bouquet fut disposé au centre du cercle, car le tournesol sait tourner pour orienter sa face de lumière vers celui qui mérite notre attention. Certains termineront le jeu de la mandarine directement sur la carpette....

J'ai un sentiment bizarre. Très bizarre.

J'essaye de me rappeler mes débuts sur Wikipédia. Accueillie sur fr.wikipedia par Aoineko. Sur en.wikipedia par Maveric (j'essayais de démarrer un article sur la fertilisation - celle de la terre avec des engrais, alors qu'il imaginait la fertilisation de l'oeuf...). Le trolling. Les guerres d'édition avec RK. Papotages. Et puis plus tard, l'élection au conseil d'administration de la Wikimedia Foundation. La réelection. Et le sentiment croissant de frustration. L'immobilisme. Les difficultés du passage d'une organisation familiale à une organisation un peu plus professionnelle. La démission d'Angela.

Et puis finalement, je me retrouve présidente de la Wikimedia Foundation

Et je me souviens d'un article que j'ai écris. Il y a longtemps. Twelve leverage points to intervene in a system. On a la ville, on a le lac. Yapuka construire l'usine.

Ca y est ! On y est presque. Après près de 3 mois d'attente, une retraite (stratégique bien sur) va avoir lieu à Frankfurt.

Overall Purpose

The retreat is fundamentally a strategic planning retreat with dedicated time to address organization-wide goals and issues. The retreat will consist of a balance of trust and team building activities, strategic planning processes and group dialogues.

Retreat Goals

• Enhance trust and good working relationships among board, staff and key volunteers
• Review and agree upon vision, mission, strategic objectives, action plans and timeline
• Engage in-depth conversation that yields shared goals for mission, governance and organizational sustainability
• Clarify structure, roles and action steps to implement the mission and target objectives.

Après nous être battu pour savoir qui participerait (au final, environ 25 personnes, board de la Foundation, conseils des associations locals, staff de la Foundation, et quelques "élus"), la réalisation du programme fut assez facile.

Reste à savoir ce qu'il sortira de cette retraite.... un peu plus de sérénité après des bières en commun, ou au contraire des tensions supplémentaires ? Des grandes idées fumeuses et irréalisables ou au contraire un agenda net et précis ? Une organisation plus solide ou bien la chienlit ?

J'ai presque peur d'y aller...

After I wrote A mission: providing free knowledge, Delphine commented with a detailed blog, in which she argues that the reference to "free as in free beer" is in reality one of the most important terms in the mission statement, as it garantees the content will stay accessible to everyone.

Because without breaching the free as in speech statement, the Foundation could decide that all access to the sites are only possible to people who have paid, say 100 dollars. The only thing the Foundation would have to do then is provide a machine-readable Transparent copy to anyone who pays the 100 dollars.

I'll have to agree with that.

This nevertheless does not solve my issue which is that the Foundation bylaws only garantees a "free as in free beer" access for the website itself. The "free as in freedom" license garantees the page content may be reused, access to its "code" is possible, access to edit history as well.

However, the Foundation does not garantee that a whole project/language (enwikipedia, dewikinews, frwikibooks...) full dump or partial dump will be forever free of charge. And as of today, the Foundation is not particularly making efforts to ensure the dumps are technically reusable (Delphine is correct in reminding that the biggest project/language dumps are already so big that individuals may not really use them as of today. And html dumps were just an experiment till today). In short, even if we do not meet the "financial" barrier, we are already meeting this technical barrier, which limits the reuse of our content.

Overall, the Foundation is respecting a certain engagement toward editors if each article is considered a document under GFDL. If the whole project/language is considered a document under GFDL, things are getting more fishy.

A solution might be one which has been discussed a lot in the past, but never officially implemented: Terms of Use.

The terms of use are contractual agreements between an organisation and users of a service. They generally detail restrictions on what each party is and will be responsible for in relation to the service. They may give rules concerning copyright and other legal details. Terms of Use may be set up in order to let an audience know specifically what can and cannot be done to the work with or without the creator's permission. It is, therefore, extremely important that terms of use be as specific and accurate as possible.

For example, editors currently agree to give their work under GFDL licence (for example). Could we not imagine that the Foundation in turns agree to say that free of charge dumps will be provided at least once a month? The dumps provided could either be global, or only encompass a certain category of articles.

The Foundation may very well change its terms of agreement later, but it will have to inform editors of such a change. Right now, its mission goes beyond its simple statement. There is a non-spoken promise.

I have given myself the mission of updating the Wikimedia Foundation bylaws.

And a couple of days ago, I had a thought. The sort of thought that gives you a bad chill in the back, going up to the neck and twisting your mind with fear.

I was looking at the mission statement.

"Wikimedia Foundation is dedicated to the development and maintenance of online free, open content encyclopedias (...) and other collections of documents, information, and other informational databases in all the languages of the world that will be distributed free of charge to the public under a free documentation license such as the Free Documentation License (...). The goals of the foundation are to encourage the further growth and development of open content, social software WikiWiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge. "

Free content is a matter of liberty, not price
This statement insists *very much* on providing content free of charge. But not so much insists on the free as in freedom, which is what unites all wikipedians.

See the Free Software Definition here. Transcripted for Wikimedia projects, we get something like:

Free content is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer.

Free content is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the content. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the content:

The freedom to read the content, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to get the knowledge from the content, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1).
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the content, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3).

The full content should always stay fully and easily accessible.

Access to the source is a precondition for this. For Wikipedia and other wikimedia projects, access to the source is essentially access to the webpage itself. The content may be accessible from various scales. From the webpage itself (use your mouse and drag and click to copy/paste the content of the article) to the full database.

Access to the webpage itself is cool. This is for the journalist to complete a news article. This is for the student to copy for doing his homework.

But to really fullfill our mission, the full content should always stay fully and easily accessible. Making a DVD or making a book is only really feasible with quick and easy access to the entire database. If the person interested in making a DVD has to retrieve the pages one by one, reuse of the content, whilst still possible, will in reality become a real chore.

If at some point, access to the full content is restricted either because of the addition of a technical barrier, or because of the addition of a financial barrier, then the Foundation will be failing to the global spirit uniting the thousands of contributors of the website.

Could that happen ?

DataFeed for a fee. Dumps for free until ... ?

The whole content may be retrieved only by two means. Spidering the site itself (and thus consuming bandwidth, which has a cost for the Foundation). Or using the dumps.

As of today, dumps are available for free. They are done roughly once a month (though when a language dump fails, it is usually necessary to wait for the next month). Using a dump is not so easy...
In december 2005, Tim Starling made a html dump, which is much easier to use. No update has been provided though, and I have not heard any further html dump planned.

Spidering the site is discouraged. Sites are sometimes blocked for doing so. It is recommanded to ask for a datafeed agreeement. Live feeds are available that provide more up-to-date content and eliminate the requirement to install new dumps. This service involves a financial arrangement as it requires developer time and the use of the servers.

What I fear could happen in the future is that blocking sites mirroring our content occur more and more frequently, with a strong incentive for paying the datafeed. Hence setting up a financial barrier for reuse.

Of course, the dumps are free... but if the argument was made that datafeed were against a fee, to balance the bandwidth use involved, and the salary of the developers setting up the datafeed... why would not the argument be made that the dumps also require a payment ? After all, making the dumps is also taking several hours of developer time. Developers now employees of the Foundation (so arguably, making the dumps require Foundation money through the payroll).

As soon as a payment is asked, there is a financial barrier to reuse. Whatever the amount. And the barrier will be higher for those with little money... who may precisely be those who needs the content primarily.

I already hear the argument... "but we'll ask money only from those sites with money. The commercial ones. Non profit websites will get it for free if they ask". This is already what we are doing with the spidering (we do not block non profit websites, we block commercial mirrors).

The problem I have with this argument is simply... that it does not fit with the licence we chose. Our licence allow reuse without restriction. Included for commercial reasons.

Low update frequency of the dumps

Naturally, it may be that no money is ever asked for the dumps, in which case, my whole argument falls. But there are other means to limit reuse. For example, instead of doing the dumps once a month... they might get done once every 6 months, or once a year. One may get for free the outdated content. The updated content might be available with a datafeed... against a payment.

Another possible directions to consider...

A dynamic website with no dumps for the stable version ?

There are frequent discussions about stable versions. One step which might be perceived as a "good idea" is to set up an independant website, with the "qualified" version on it, whilst Wikipedia stays the live website with open editing. Thousands of editors work on this "stable" version, with in mind the license. Technically speaking, it may have no sense whatsoever to set up a wiki to host the stable version. Instead, the website might be a dynamic one, fetching and distributing the page automatically. In which case, the source code is not visible any more. The dumps are still available, but only for the live version of Wikipedia, not for the "stable" version. Ultimately, the "stable" version is a fork, with no visible source code, nor dumps, nor spidering possible. Pages may only be copied one by one... But editors are still working on what they believe is a free project.

The new website is free of charge, but not free as in freedom. A liberty was lost in the process. The text is still under gfdl, but to make a DVD of this, one better go up early. Or negociate with the Foundation. Which implies... the content is actually under Foundation control. Not free.

What about an update of the Foundation mission ?

To go back to my mission statement.

"Wikimedia Foundation is dedicated to the development and maintenance of online free, open content encyclopedias (...) and other collections of documents, information, and other informational databases in all the languages of the world that will be distributed free of charge to the public under a free documentation license such as (...). The goals of the foundation are to encourage the further growth and development of open content, social software WikiWiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge. "

That mission statement garantees that the content will stay accessible free of charge to the public. Nothing else.

Today is today. Tomorrow is tomorrow. Do you know who will be running the Foundation next year ? In 2 years ? In 10 years ?

Anthere

in this blog, I could not help but react at "And in fact the Wikimedia Foundation works perfectly alright without democracy, as does the Nobel Foundation. The former only needs to keep the servers running. The latter only needs to find the best scientists. Both tasks can be accomplished with a handful of administrators and a network of experts. These small tasks are independent of the whole body of article-editing or science that they serve."

Why reacting ?

Well, first because I do not think that the Foundation is working perfectly alright. Second because I object to the mission statement as described by Lars. I (and all Foundation people I presume) tend to see it much larger. But looking at the stated the mission of the Foundation bylaws, I can not blame him.

"Wikimedia Foundation is dedicated to the development and maintenance of online free, open content encyclopedias (...) and other collections of documents, information, and other informational databases in all the languages of the world that will be distributed free of charge to the public under a free documentation license such as (...). The goals of the foundation are to encourage the further growth and development of open content, social software WikiWiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge. "

It would be difficult to draft a more fluttery mission statement. We have to fix this...

Then, it came to my mind that... the premise that the Foundation does not need members because it is a Foundation and Foundation are used for purposes where democracy is not an issue... struck me as totally aside the point. Because the Foundation is not a Foundation.

We need members because our goals are actually complex and we need a very diverse set of attitude, because our goals are politically loaded.

I then wondered why on earth we were officially a Foundation ? What the differences were between a Foundation... and an association and why do people set up Foundation or Association ? And whether all Foundations were with no members ?

Here are beginning of answers (from Kelly, Xirzon, Cimon, TimShell)

It's more common to see a foundation when the foundation was created to carry out one person's dream especially when that one person is substantially well-funded and where that person wishes to retain permanent control over the organization.

An association, contrariwise, is more commonly used when many people, often with limited resources, want to come together to accomplish a goal. The association format, with membership, is used to pool resources to accomplish what one could not do on his or her own. In a membership society the one individual will not be able to retain control for long, as the other members will generally expect to be allowed to have some say in the running of the organization. Associations often have staff.

There is more control in a non-member foundation than in a member association since there is less chance of outsiders joining and taking over a foundation than a member association. On the other hand, members of an association may be kicked off much more easily if things go wrong.

Foundations are more likely to have staff and are likely to be grant-issuing bodies e.g. the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli Lilly Foundation. Apache is called a foundation and has members. FSF also has membership

There's no legal distinction in the US between a Foundation and an association (well, there are at times) but an incorporated association and a foundation are not legally distinguishable except sometimes for tax purposes. They're both not-for-profit charities, corporations not engaged in business for profit and incorporated under statutes intended for that purpose

According to Wikipedia : Foundation (charity) — a kind of philanthropic organization, set up as a legal entity either by individuals or institutions, with the purpose of distributing grants to support causes in line with the goals of the foundation.

Foundations typically dispense money. WMF does not do this. As has been pointed out, the fact that WMF has the word Foundation in its title is a bit misleading. WMF is a non-for-profit corporation that is not really a Foundation, and which is misleadingly named. WMF is more accurately an association.

If we ever develop a sustaining endowment, *that* would be a proper foundation. The foundation (if we had one) would be the holder of our investments and would pay out to the association funds necessary to do its work.

Yesterday, I read this email from Lars, a long time wikipedian. He gives a good description of the creation of the Wikimedia Foundation, back in 2002-2003, which I believe, completes pretty well the historical time I gave at Wikimania, with a focus on the membership issue.

I think it is worth copying below for historical purpose and to comment upon later.

---

There was a decision point back in 2002 or so, where Wikipedia was still more or less Jimbo's private property, and the question was where to put it. Many Germans and other Europeans wanted a membership association, but Jimbo went for a foundation. Later (in 2004) the German national chapter was structured exactly like the membership association (Verein) that they had wanted also for the international body. There is a fundamental difference between the two kinds of organization, but I think this was more clear to the Germans than it was to Jimbo or most Americans.

(...)

However, one fundamental requirement for a membership association was also missing. The word "Verein" means union, a get-together of equals. The corresponding verb "sich vereinen" means "to unite", to team up. And there simply was nobody who equalled Jimbo. The German Wikipedians could get together as equals to form their national chapter. Their elected board was only slightly more into Wikipedia than the rest. There was nobody there with the God-like status of Jimbo.

I think the only way Wikipedia could have been turned into a real membership association is if a global "chapter" of wikipedians had been formed in 2002, without Jimbo, and then started to negotiate with Jimbo about the future rights to domain names and servers. As we all know, this didn't happen.

This leaves Jimbo with the decision, and it is a fact that his position is more like that of Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie, or Alfred Nobel. One day he finds himself in possession of something that should live on after him, and there really is little point in his family to inherit it. What do you do in such a situation? You start a foundation. Its bylaws is your last will. If a board member needs to leave, the rest of the board must find a new board member. Many newspapers are owned by foundations, so it makes sense for a web media venture as well.

The fact that two out of five board members should be elected by the community is merely a curious detail of the Wikimedia Foundation. This is not expected from a foundation. Foundations are used for purposes where democracy is not an issue. And in fact the Wikimedia Foundation works perfectly alright without democracy, as does the Nobel Foundation. The former only needs to keep the servers running. The latter only needs to find the best scientists. Both tasks can be accomplished with a handful of administrators and a network of experts. These small tasks are independent of the whole body of article-editing or science that they serve.

Lars