On Monday 14 February 2011 02:03 AM, Hari Prasad Nadig wrote:
It is probably unfair to say that the chapter hasn't communicated much
on time in just the last one month right after it has got registered
legally, when the information that flowed right from the time the EC
was formed (by you) haven't gone out appropriately and on time. This
has been more or less the case for almost two years from there. The
leadership has changed in last month. Is that why only the last
month's updates are being targeted?
No, it is not. Lack of transparency always
concerned (eg:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2010-March/000474.html
). And as you know, January last week's thread was originally about
Malayalam Wikipedia's edit count, later diverted and subject changed
(Start
<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-January/thread.html#1834>,
First Diversion
<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-January/001864.html>,
.....) to Indian Chapter. Then interim EC's *very delayed* announcement
about leadership change immediately worsen the situation. Reason for
changing the leadership is still unknown (or atleast to me).
I am sorry but frankly, making things foggy is not appropriate for an EC
Member.
I believe Indian Wikimedian community must consider seriously about
Jyothis' and Achal's suggestions.
On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 1:26 PM, Achal Prabhala <aprabhala(a)gmail.com
<mailto:aprabhala@gmail.com>> wrote:
Couldn't agree more. I think that there is/ has been a lot of needless
noise. It's not productive to cast insinuations against the chapter or
foundation (or community for that matter) as a whole.
I do think, however, that communication from the chapter regarding the
last set of meetings (and changes then on) have not been communicated
very well. If, for instance, some of the basic questions were to be
addressed, I suspect that there would be much less basis for this kind
of distracting and unhelpful noise. As far as I am concerned, I have
fairly simple question: I still don't know why one set of the India
chapter leadership (scroll down:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_India/MoA-ChapComVer) was
suddenly replaced by another (as detailed
here:http://wikimedia.in/wiki/Announcements/Communication_from_the_Executive_Committee_regarding_first_meeting_on_January_22,_2011).
Not being on the EC, I am aware that there might well have been good
reasons to reshuffle of the chapter leadership team; I would
merely like
to know what these reasons were. And also how you decided to
change the
structure, who stood for elections to various posts, etc. - as I would
expect from any Wikimedia community body.
Perhaps this is something that the chapter can consider in this
instance, and in the future.
As for Praveen's email, thanks for the explanations, Delphine,
Anirudh,
others.
However, Anirudh, while the point about moderation/spam filters makes
sense, mailman does generate emails (on a daily/per instance basis) to
the admins of a list to check/approve messages caught in the
filter. So
I would imagine that for a message to stay unanswered/unresolved for
three days indicates that the burden of administration on
WikimediaIndia-l deserves to be shared by more than two people
from the
Wikimedia India chapter.
Specifically, and to follow up on the intent expressed in previous
messages (from Jyothis, Salman, Delphine and others), how can we
help to
immediately create a process whereby two non-chapter community members
from India might be added as Admins to WikimediaIndia-l? Hari and
Anirudh, I would imagine that the instant you can facilitate this
process, there will be sufficient uptake from the community to fill
these two slots - many thanks in advance for considering this request
from us seriously.
Good wishes,
Achal
On Sunday 13 February 2011 11:59 PM, Jyothis Edathoot wrote:
Achal,
Good points. Thank you.
To have additional mods, it is fairly a simple process to add them in
mailman. I would suggest that atleast as a start, we can ask people
here to nominate themselves for the positions and we can pick two.
Would be great if they are already familiar with the work. *Please
note* that it is not a title, but a daily work that comes your way.
About the chapter issues, I dont think we need to say more that what
Tinu and many others have already mentioned about. While not counting
out the efforts that were made by the existing EC on building this
out, Transparency is the primary issue that echoes thru. It is
probably worth remembering that chapter is just a support system and
has no control over the projects or its actions. It is neither an
administrative power nor a place for people who just want to have a
title on their business card or get their expenses covered. Chapter
will be answerable to every single paisa spent to the community and
community should stand up and demand for the clarity and visibility on
things. If the chapter cannot do it, trust me, it will not last for
ever. Probably the interim EC should not have re-elected themselves
behind closed doors. Instead, they should have probably opened the
memberships and conducted the election for the first official EC.
However, my vision about the future of EC is slightly different from
what we have now. Unlike many other chapters around the world, Indic
chapter have a unique challenge: Many different language Wikimedia
projects, ranging from highly active to dead, (and more on the way)
rolls up under its umbrella. To deal with this, we can probably take a
page out of our democracy itself and consider building a
representative assembly style administration system for our future.
Some thoughts around this:
1. *Local Representation:*All local wikis should elect a respected
member of their community for a period of a year (or two) and
form an administrative council for the chapter. This could be
per language basis or per project basis, based on their
community size. I would not exclude English, but would limit the
participation to one member in council. for the rest of projects
- It could be probably like for every project that has more than
50 (this is just a number, we can look at the real world
situations) active people (not including bots) - we can allocate
one member per project to the council. other wise, one member
per language projects would be enuf. this is just to ensure that
we have enuf coverage per project and per language depending on
the size of people.
2. *Formation of EC:* From the administrative council, the EC can
be elected in for a term. This election should be by the chapter
members / local language wikimedians.
3. *Limit on Term in EC:* It may also be worth enforcing that no
project gets more than one (or at the most 2) consecutive term
in EC (if we have enuf representations to fill in all slots).
This will ensure that all projects gets it share of EC terms
over the years.
4. *Communication: *A Monthly or quarterly report of the chapter
activities should be published by the EC and admin council.
Individual representatives are and should be responsible for
communication between chapter and projects. Should there be a
reason to replace the member by the local community, such a
provision should be provided.
5. *Removal of member: *Inactivity and lose of trust by the general
public should be considered as a reason for removal as usual. On
the other hand, if the rest of the administrative council
members feels against one member, chapter should be able to
request for replacement citing proper reasons for it.
6. *Funds and Grants: *All funds and grants from chapter account
probably can be openly discussed and approved on the foundation
wiki or meta wiki (like the foundation grant process)
7. *Audit and Annual report:* End of every financial year, an audit
committee for the financial and functional aspects of the
chapter's actions should be formed from the administrative
council and audit results should be made public along with the
annual reports.
We can go on like this, but I would leave it open to further discussions.
Thanks.
Regards,
Jyothis.
http://www.Jyothis.net
http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jyothis
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jyothis
I am the first customer of
http://www.netdotnet.com
woods are lovely dark and deep,
but i have promises to keep and
miles to go before i sleep and
lines to go before I press sleep
completion date = (start date + ((estimated effort x 3.1415926) /
resources) + ((total coffee breaks x 0.25) / 24)) + Effort in meetings