On 14/08/07, Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Yes. I have rather too many projects going at the moment so I will decline this one for now. anyone else reading this is welcome to take it up.
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.
Well I guess we come to the crux of the problem. :) Nothing can be demanded of volunteers. Or can it? The Board members are volunteers too, but they voluntarily take on more responsibility. Implicitly they give up the right to simply stop showing up, stop logging in, they give up the right to leave in a sulk if something happens they don't like, or they find a more interesting hobby. Of course they can still leave... but they are more entangled.
Well you don't need to look very long at the projects to realise the huge variety in commitment, of the volunteer editors. There is no official way to recognise that. I don't know if there should be.
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".
I like this idea and I like to think I have already started to work like this. (Well, I say, 'this is not working, toolserver person that is my friend, can you please write something that does a close enough job?' - it's doing pretty well for us so far. *grins*)
But this is a little problematic. When should a person feel they can start to speak on behalf of their project, or even a faction within their project? Because if all volunteers are equal, or equally volunteery, then there is no compelling reason to listen to one more than another. Does this make sense? If I was to try and approach a group that I thought could make a good partnership with Commons, what can I say? None of the volunteer editors have any authority to speak on behalf of their project or the Foundation. "I'm one of two hundred other geeks with way too much spare time. is that compelling?" :)
Maybe no one feels like they can or should speak with authority. For editing a huge collaborative project that seems to actually work reasonably well. But in other aspects, for example figuring out a priority list of problems, I suspect it works less well.
I also think with some trepidation of the Wikibooks-Lulu press debacle of July 06. Danny's posts were not encouraging: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/htdig/foundation-l/2006-July/021541.html http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/htdig/foundation-l/2006-July/021569.html Jimmy having the book removed from Lulu http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/htdig/foundation-l/2006-July/021567.html Danny: "It is the bad result of people acting unilaterally on behalf of the Foundation without fully understanding the implications of what they are doing." Jimmy: "this is not an issue of the foundation versus the community, but rather about an individual versus both the community and the foundation. We should have been told first, there should have been a discussion and some consideration given to a number of important factors."
Obviously we are not the same people we were then...
Nonetheless we (and by "we", I mean "I") intend to act in a way that is more bringing solved -problems to the Board, and asking for the official tick-off, rather than the traditional approach of "we're drowning, rescue us NOW".
Anyway, the point is that Commons now has some plans for some good initiatives, and Official People are at least vaguely aware of them, and thus we can expect our relationship to progress to a thing of symbiotic beauty revered by all. Or something. I spent too long trying to word this right and now it's time for tea. :)
cheers Brianna