On 8/13/07, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Indeed. Well, it was such a good wheel, I think it is still worth reinventing. :)
lol.
So let me try a different approach. Rather than waiting for Florence to try again something that she and other people have tried before, or for "the Foundation " to issue a dealdine, why don't you, Brianna, come up with a "state of commons" that you broadcast across lists and projects and ask for the same from other projects, just because you're interested?
I am a fervent believer that top down has its limits, and that a call from a "fellow community member" might be better heard altogether. My take being that an "official" request is not always the answer to everything, on the contrary.
Hm, well I very very much doubt that my call should be better-received than Florence's, or another Board members'.
Well, a call from a fellow community member hasn't been tried yet. Call from the Foundation/officials have been tried and have failed. I am convinced that trying otherwise is worth at least the try.
Florence said "What would be real cool would be to try to keep a written state of each project..." Having the Board make a request is maybe one way to make that happen. I did not intend to attack or blame Florence or anyone else for not having done this.
And this is not what I thought you had done. To tell you the truth, I was amazed that Florence was actually saying this, because I remember her spending nights on end trying to stir the communities to write something for Quarto at the time, to no avail. How one forgets...
I guess underlying this discussion is some lack of certainty about what is the exact relationship between the Board and the projects. Probably all Wikimedians have slightly different visions about what they want the Board to be or do. Where some favour a "hands-off" approach maybe others prefer intervention.
Agreed. At this level though and for what you ask, I have witnessed the fact that the board asking just "doesn't work". At least it "didn't" a few months/a year ago. Maybe it would have changed today, maybe not.
The Mission statement says "The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content... the Foundation provides...an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects..." ( http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission )
So is that empowering and engagement anything more than keeping the websites up, keeping the servers running? Should it be? What is the organisational framework?
Those are very good questions, as always with you. I am not sure however that to "empower" entails asking the community/ies to "do" anything it/they don't feel like doing in the first place.
In the past few months, I have observed the reactions of "the community" at every single decision the board has made, or every single request for comments board members have called for. I must say that the response rate has been, at least in my eyes, rather disappointing on the one hand, and the critics have been, at least in my eyes, rather upsetting on the other hand.
My take at this stage, and that is a personal opinion, is that it is high time that people like you and I, who feel they are part of "the community", organize themselves so as to be able to present a valid partner to the organisation.
By valid partner, I meant that saying "this is not working, fix it" is in my opinion, not the way to go. I'd rather hear something along the lines of "this is not working, here is how to fix it, here are the people that can fix it and here is how much it takes to fix it. Give us the money -- organisational framework in my acception of the term-- to fix it".
Does this sound like I am being attacky and saying "this should have all been done yesterday"? I hope not, because I have great respect for all the present and past Board members, and witnessing the evolution of WMF into a professional, powerful, thoughtful and smart organisation. But I hope the end is now in sight for the "working Board" (another year at most?), and that discussions about the project/Board relationship will be welcome.
No, don't worry, you don't sound attacky. At least not to me. :-) And please do not take any of my remarks personally because they are not personal, but just happen to fall in this thread/conversation with you.
Of course, we can ask the board/the Foundation to ask "the community" to provide a "state of the projects" before the x deadline. But I would only urge the Foundation to do so if I was certain that "the community" will not, three days after the deadline, say that really, the Foundation does not communicate. Communication is, and should always be, a two way street.
My observation to this date is that the expectations seem to be voiced always on the same side. Does that mean that the Foundation does not need info from "the community"? I think not, Florence has voiced it clearly in her previous email.
Mind you, this is true on different levels such as chapters not communicating well enough, etc. I am not trying to "blame" this on anyone or any organisation. I am just tempted to say that all of us should make an effort not to "demand", "request" or "ask" from the other, but to start by "giving" to the other. I am convinced that if information really starts coming from those who ask for it, it will flow as it should have done from the very beginning.
Not sure I am very clear here, but I hope so.
Delphine