Hi Bohdan,

Thank you for your interest in Wikipedia Education Program and the Wikipedia Education Collaborative. The Education Collaborative is a group of experienced program leaders who have been running successful education programs for a long period of time. The group aims at helping other program leaders, educators and other program volunteers achieve their goals easier by providing the needed advice and model programs.

The Education Collaborative list is an internal mailing list for the member discussions. It is closed for the members. However, the Collaborative is a transparent initiative. The activities of the Collab is publicly reported on the WMF blog and the Education Newsletter [1], [2]. 

Please feel free to reach out to the Collab members listed here with any questions you may have about WEP or if you need help with coordinating any WEP-related events. I am sure they will be happy to help.

As Vojtech has mentioned, please more read about the membership criteria here. Generally, any active program leader can request membership of the Education Collaborative. However, they will need to meet the membership criteria e.g. the Collab need for new members, the current members/coordinators approval, etc. 

I hope that answers your questions. Please don't hesitate to contact me with any further questions you may have.

Regards,

Samir

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 2:10 AM, Bohdan Melnychuk <base-w@yandex.ru> wrote:
While writing my letter of GLAM lists I recalled that I was once rejected membership in Education-coop mailing list. The reason was "Closed List".

As far as I know it's a list for a cabal of people who are working on Education (an[1] Education Collaborative). I know of them since their meeting in Prague[2] as a friend-wikimedian of mine attended it. The process of selecting people to that meeting was quite cabalish (with absolutely no public announcement) as well, iirc. During the meeting it was completely ungooglable, iirc. IIRC, the only mention I found back then was in some affiliate's google calendar. But I'm not about a meeting ages ago. I'm about the collaborative itself.

I'm not actually a person of WEP[3] but still I'm a person who don't likes when things are hidden but there's no real reason to do it. It looks like the case for me. I don't see why should it all be that much cabalish. Doesn't collaborative a derivative from collaboration? My views on word are often somewhat perfectionist but anyway I just can't see how collaboration and making things that closed can co-exist.

I'm fine with closed lists, teams and stuff in general as there are things which should not be discussed in public or it could because it's easier to make a tiny group of people do something instead of crying out to a lazy unorganised crowd. But just make it clear how can one (apply to) join or e.g. just join as a observer/non-voting commentator/whatever.

Footnotes:
[1] afair the page on outreachwiki was about some older formation under the name. it's probably fixed since that time) Education Collaborative
[2] was it already 2 years ago? time sure runs fast
[3] which means that it's not like I can e.g. go organise a WEP thing offline — the most I can do in real actions is helping a WEP person. That's if actions are about WEP and not about something general which any wikimedian can do.

Yours sincerely,
Base

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Samir Elsharbaty,
Communications Intern, Wikipedia Education Program
Wikimedia Foundation
+2.011.200.696.77
selsharbaty@wikimedia.org
education.wikimedia.org