Wikipedia:WikipediaWeekly/Wikimania 2009/Halprin

Full audio of this interview can be found at Wikipedia Weekly Episode 82 from Wikimania. This segment starts at 9 minutes 15 seconds into the podcast.

Andrew Lih: For some folks, when they heard the announcement of the amount of the donation, [they were] obviously very excited. But with that, with the appointment of you to the board, there was some concern that this was the first time the foundation had taken money and also put someone from the organization on the board at the same time. How would you respond to some of the folks who are concerned, given that previous board members were fairly independent of donation or elected from the community?

[For Halprin's reponse, italics are used when he is presenting someone else's viewpoint or describing what he thinks they would say, and bold is used to indicate vocal emphasis.]

Matt Halprin: Yeah, so first thought: totally valid question. I think if I was an active member of the community I'd be wondering the same thing.

I guess I'd say it this way: I understand the board has several community-elected seats, and then it has some specific expertise seats, and then it has the founder's seat. And with respect to specific expertise—it's hard to describe for people who weren't part of the conversations over the last several months between Sue Gardner and her team and me and others at Omidyar Network. But if it didn't make sense, I wouldn't be on the board, or we wouldn't be on the board.

I think the question that Sue looked at [was]: in terms of specific expertise, at this point in Wikimedia's and Wikipedia's development and evolution, is it helpful to have someone who's worked for six years at a large platform with 100 million active members with 32 sites around the world with experience around platform integrity and quality and things like that, who also brings 10 years in a strategy consultant practice before that? And the answer they come to is: that would be actually really helpful, because we're just kicking off the the strategy project, so having someone who did that for ten years as part of their career could be helpful.

And while I don't know Wikimedia well—this is kinda day 3 for me so I'm really a neophyte and have a lot to learn—at least I have some experience with large passionate communities using a technology platform. Now there's obviously the problem of: well, but wait a minute, you don't know anything about [us]; you've not been an active community member, so you don't know this stuff; how can you contribute?

And I think what I would say—actually I said it at the board meeting yesterday or maybe monday—is: what the board has is a lot of intense expertise on how Wikimedia works and how Wikip[edia works]...almost to the potential issue of being a little too inwardly focused. And that there's actually a period of time where I can contribute by being fresh eyes and asking a lot of stupid questions. And a lot of them will be stupid but one or two of them may actually make people go, that's interesting, we haven't questioned that in a couple years, maybe it is time revisit that. And at some point I'm going to go native too. So 6-9 months from now I'm going to be breathing all the same fumes and doing those things, and hopefully I'll be able to stay true to some principles of good strategy work that will help.

But I think that at this point in time, I think what Sue would say is, that even if Omidyar Network hadn't gotten involved, once she got to know me that she would have actually said: hey, this is someone who could be helpful for us at this point in time. And it may be in a year or two from now it doesn't make sense any more because your organization will be in a different place. But for right now that's the general approach.

So there's no tie between the grant and Omidyar Network taking a board seat. That's absolutely not part of the conversation. It something that Omidyar Network likes to do with our organizations, because we think we tend to be able to help and we have experience, but there's no tie with the grant that we've made to Wikimedia Foundation.