User talk:AaronSw/Election/Signpost

Board of Trustees elections

Hi. I'm Ral315, editor-in-chief of the Wikipedia Signpost. We're doing candidate profiles for the Board elections. We publish in a matter of hours, so I hope you can answer them before press time. The questions we'd like you to answer are below. Talk to Flcelloguy if you have any questions; he'll be covering the elections this year. Thanks, Ral315 (talk) 16:21, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

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Hello!

The Wikipedia Signpost, a community-newspaper in the English Wikipedia, is covering the Board of Trustees elections and will be featuring each of the candidates in next week's issue. As such, we would appreciate it if you would take some time to answer a few interview questions. Each candidate will be asked the same questions; by no means, though, feel obligated to answer any (or even) all of them, though we would greatly appreciate it if you did.

Some of the questions may be a bit redundant to the candidate information you have filled out already. This is both for convenience and for giving you the opportunity to expand on some of them a bit. However, we ask that you keep all responses brief, limiting them to no more than one or two paragraphs each.

You may leave replies to my English Wikipedia talk page, or on my meta talk page.

As always, the Signpost reserves the right to re-distribute the questions and replies, shorten any responses if necessary, and take any other editorial action deemed appropriate.

Thanks again for your time, and please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions! ~~~~

Your name:

Aaron Swartz

Your username most commonly used:

AaronSw

Your current geographic location, along with your age:

Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 19

Projects with significant contributions (please both name the language and project, and link to your contributions):

en.wikipedia, en.wikisource, en.wikiquote, en.wikinews, meta.wikimedia, wikimania2006

Do you have any rights (i.e. admin, bureaucrat) or positions (i.e. dispute resolution, CheckUser, etc.) on any of those projects? If so, which ones? When did you get elected or promoted for each one?

No.

Do you hold any universal rights (i.e. steward, etc.) for Wikimedia Projects? If so, since when?

No.

When did you first start contributing to Wikimedia projects? Why and how did you initially join?

I started actively contributing in mid-2003 when I begun studying Internet and US constitutional law and wanted to write down all the things I was learning for others. I quickly got addicted and began contributing on more and more subjects and reorganizing other pages. I made Special:Random my homepage and tried to improve things whenever I saw an opportunity.

Briefly describe your career ("real-life"). How do you think this will help you be a successful Board member?

About six years ago, I built my first web application. I called it theinfo.org, but it was basically the same idea as Wikipedia. Not surprisingly, it didn't take off, but I never stopped thinking about the problem. Since then, I co-authored the RSS 1.0 spec, worked on the specifications for the Semantic Web, and was an early employee at Creative Commons. Most recently, I co-founded Reddit, which, after one year, is already in the top 1500 sites on the Internet (according to Alexa).

Throughout this I've learned about web technologies, building and managing democratic online communities, scaling a rapidly-growing website, the laws and politics of free culture, how to work in formal organizations, and the technologies appropriate for building free knowledge.

Of all the candidates right now, why do you stand out from the field? What makes you the best candidate?

I think I have a clear, broad vision of the core values that have made Wikimedia successful and the long-term direction in which they head. I've described this briefly in my candidate's statement and plan to say more in a series of essays over the coming weeks.

A knowledge of several languages has been cited as a key requirement for a Board member. Do you speak any other languages other than English? Why do you think language is or isn't critical to the Board?

It's essential that the community representative to the Board represent the entire community, across all languages. As a Board member, I would not only try to write up the details of what was going on inside the Board for the public, I would work to make sure these notes were translated into as many different languages as possible, so that everyone has a chance to follow what the Board is doing and provide their input.

What do you expect to do while serving on the Board? What are your expectations?

Primarily, I hope to represent the community. That means telling the community about what's going on inside the Board, pushing the Board to delegate power to the community whenever possible, and working with the community to solicit input and direction for what they want from the Board. I want to make sure that things like Wikipedia remain community projects, with the Board's job limited to helping them achieve their goals.

Secondarily, I hope that my experience in organizations and technology can help the Board build the infrastructure necessary to do just that: ensure the projects survive, thrive, and grow.

What can you bring to the Board? What can you contribute to the Wikimedia Foundation?

I believe I answer this in the questions above.

Describe the one issue that you think is most pressing and pertinent to the Foundation right now, and how you would approach the situation.

A key issue is that the Foundation needs to move from a small group of people to a lasting organization that will be able to sustain and support the projects for the long term and do so in such a way that continues to respect the community's primacy. This is a fairly unique task -- few other organizations need to both last and not be in control -- but an essential one.

What is your vision of the Board in the Foundation heirarchy? How do you feel about the current leadership?

The Board's job is to set the scope and direction of the Foundation. Neither its members nor its structure is well-suited to having it run day-to-day operations. But this is nothing special -- few organizations are run directly by their boards.

As a Board member, you will be serving as a representative of the communities. Do you think you can represent the community and understand its concerns? Why?

The size of the community is enormous -- it goes beyond the community of admins, beyond the community that goes to meetups, beyond English, beyond Wikipedia -- and it would be absurd to think that any single person could single-handedly represent all their varied views and perspectives. Instead, the job requires facilitating communication between the Board and the community -- telling the community what the Board is doing, telling the Board what the community wants.

If I bring any special experience to that task, it's as someone whose experience of Wikipedia is more along the lines of an average editor, rather than someone deeply involved in the politics of the project. Quiet editors make up the core of our community, but precisely because they are quiet, their voices on most issues are rarely heard. As their representative, I will do my best to represent them as well, not just the active voices who dominate most current policy discussion.

What do you think of the Wikimedia Foundation and its mission in general? If you could change one thing about the running of the Foundation, what would you change?

It's hard to imagine a grander or more noble goal than giving every single person is free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Having spent time hanging out with many different parts of the Internet community, I can honestly say that I've rarely seen a group as far-sighted or as generous as the community around Wikimedia. The people involved in the projects are tackling the big issues; the Foundation's job is to get the obstacles out of the way and let them do it.

If elected, can and will you devote the appropriate time and other resources needed to serve on the Board?

Definitely. My current job gives me enormous flexibility to devote time to Wikipedia and I think the next few weeks will demonstrate that I've been taking full advantage of it. In my past work as a representative to the World Wide Web Consortium, I was able to take the time necessary to participate in Working Group discussions and pay my way to fly to all the meetings; I expect to be even more involved as a member of the Board.

Have you ever attended Wikimania or any other meetup? What role do you think these meetups play?

I've attended Wikimania and other Boston-area Wikipedia meetups and events. It's been wonderful meeting other Wikipedians and feeling the energy that we share for the project. But obviously it's a small subset of the community who attends such things, so I'd be careful about extrapolating too far.

Please list (and link) any other pages where you have gotten questions and comments pertaining to the Board elections; we are compiling all of the questions and would appreciate this.

I'll link to everything from meta:User talk:AaronSw.

What would you say to a potential voter who is undecided right now?

Wait to see how the next few weeks unfold. We should take this election as a real opportunity to discuss the future of the project as a community, not just vote for someone to do that work for us. I hope to share my thoughts over the next couple of weeks; I hope you'll also share yours.

Is there anything else you would like to mention?

Perhaps it's just my background as a programmer talking, but I think that one thing I think we should discuss more is the power of the software. Code is law, as Lessig says, and more than any policy decision or Foundation decree, what the code that runs Wikipedia does has a profound impact on the site, in everything from who can easily contribute to the kinds of things the software makes it easy to say. When we're discussing big issues like these, I think that aspect needs to be considered.

Thanks again.