Hello,
What do you consider the aims of Commons to be?
What kinds of things should we be trying to do? How will we know when they're done?
I have written up some thoughts about this: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pfctdayelise/Aims_and_goals
Explicitly, I think our aims are these: 1. Support the Wikimedia Foundation project websites by striving to assist editors, in their native languages, in providing, finding and using free content media 2. Collect and provide free content media for all possible educational* purposes 3. Manage and evaluate said content by volunteer community 4. Encourage and communicate the ideas of copyleft and "free content", and highlight the alternatives to the current "All rights reserved" over-copyrighted culture
note that "educational" refers to the intention of the media, not any restrictions on use of the media. Any of our media may be used for any purpose, educational or not. But on the other hand, some content will never be appropriate here, regardless of how free the license terms are.
note that "multilingual" and "wiki are not ends in themselves, but just means we use to achieve these aims.
maybe some people will think 1 does not belong, and maybe some people will think 4 does not belong. in fact some people may think 2 is the single only purpose. Well, I consider in the volunteer-driven projects of WMF, "content" (2) and "community" (3) and two sides of the same coin. For me 4 is important because we want people to use our work, not just gather a nice dusty unknown archive. And 1 is a pragmatic statement of our situation today. No other WMF project is as integrated with all the others as Commons is. And the more that use increases, the more obvious it makes our usefulness to the whole world.
On the page linked above, I wrote some examples of explicit goals we could set towards each of these aims.
Many of the goals I set are almost purely technological. There is simply a lot of functionality that we need, and don't have, at the moment, and there is basically no way to replace it. I have come to the conclusion that several core MW functionalities need to be majorly adapted for Commons, ie not an easy toolserver-based fix.
Perhaps if we can present such united aims to the Foundation with solid community support, we can get a promise of more developer support from them in turn. Perhaps. :)
Comments on wiki or mailing list are always welcome.
cheers, Brianna user:pfctdayelise