Guys,

I do check this list from time to time, and stay across the conversations at the foundation– l list although, like so many others I’d never go there. But we are starting to see something approaching a strategy now, so can I bring up what Samuel was saying earlier about the proliferation of mail lists, and Guillaume Came back with about “the foundation forgetting their volunteer basis”.

We seem to be stuck in this limbo, even while people make the obvious points continuously. E.g I had the pleasure of meeting Sue Garner at the GLAMwiki in Australia. You might know that we’ve got some recommendations that will apply in other countries as well as Australia (just by the by) http://wikimedia.org.au/wiki/GLAM. The main one being Publish stable and clean URLs for individual item records in collections, incorporating persistent identifiers.

The other main one is, Use a "free-culture" Creative Commons license (either CC-by or CC-by-SA) for content on GLAM websites. I think it will require a Minister to create a policy for this, and I’m working on that, not just for Wikimedia project but others. In the meantime , you can see wikiaus are trying to coordinate with the GLAM’s over here, and around the globe (because GLAMs have global communities like wikimedians, for much longer periods of time).

So we need to coordinate our activities with other people in other countries; many of whom have asked for a moderated web forum ever since I came here years ago. I seen others set up forums on the side, which disappeared after a while because they were strategically ignored by head office. Hey, I can’t figure out why the culture closed down over the years. I take it there are a million emails going backwards and forwards to and from San Fran, below the radar, all duplicating similar messages ad infinitum. Just read through this mail list to get some idea. (The GT tool helps to make sense of an overpopulated email list. (with entries not people). I’ll point you at an entry by Tim, as he’s usually so quiet, knowledgeable and patient.)

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/177857#177857

Now I’m not a young man, and my eyes are poor, and twitter is out of the questions, because i need time to think what needs to be done all the way through. So IRC is OK for my younger peers but nothing I can communicate with, and emails are scattered around a hundred lists. So my 30 years of starting and running companies is nothing which I might contribute to WMF’s strategy. Like Samuel, I need some modicum of structure. So let me just point at two web forums. http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/  and http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/  The content isn’t important, just the design. I’m sure others would have their suggestions, which I’d like to hear. All I can suggest is that HO might give forums a try, like so may have ask for continuously over the years. If you see how these two communities moderate, they rarely delete, they just move distractions and repetitions to a ‘room’s thread, where people can talk through what’s on their mind, as loudly and as passionately as they like. And keep the record of a subject where it can be found, easily.

With regard to the “real time” stuff, well that’s something I’m working on as well, again, not just for wikimedians but for people who they might want to collaborate with. It’s hampered primarily because no telcos are designing cheapo conferencing tools for global communities, and unis don’t (seem to) have relationships with the WMF, and are funded nationally, so we can’t get serious about running a few globally distributed conferences.  http://www.accessgrid.org/nodes

So you ask for projects, and these are two. But please, don’t include them in a long drawn out strategy. Cast your mind back a long way before the WMF got professional, when we didn’t have people abiding by what they were taught in an educational institutions. Cause that IS the problem. In Australia, we used to say, “just have a go” and often people would. But you know how it is. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

BTW Eugene. We’re using this tool in an open gov initiative, which you might find useful. http://gov2taskforce.ideascale.com/ And please give my regards to Sue.