Hi all,

I've had a read through the log from the meeting I missed last week
and I have some thoughts to share on what was discussed, so I thought
I'd send them to the mailing list. As I have said I won't be able to
attend tonight either, and I'm sorry about that. Hopefully you can
still do okay, but we'll see what comes out of this message first. I
think that this is probably important enough (if I may say so!) for
you to reply straight back to the list rather than me personally, if
you wish to.

I don't know how much Cary knows about Sandy's current status, and I
do not wish to pry unnecessarily. However, it is clear that we are
going to have to adapt to her not being around in order to be more
useful to Wikimedia. Right now I think we're hovering a bit, not
really knowing what to do without her. Whilst we obviously can't speak
for her, I'd like to propose that we try and reorganise a bit with the
presumption that she will not be back for some time, because I believe
that is what she would wish us to do. This is because we want to get
stuff done.

This brings us on to the question of leadership. When Sandy asked me
to co-ordinate the group I didn't really know what to expect, but now
after working with the group for some time and after what I have seen
discussed in the log and assuming that I have interpreted it
correctly, I think I know what I need to do. I would like to act more
as a chair than simply a co-ordinator, and I use this term because I
refer specifically to other successful committees around Wikimedia:
enwiki's Mediation Committee works very well with a chair and tight
team and I think we could create a similar environment. However, I
need to know that you're all okay with me trying to be more proactive
before I do anything :)

I think that Cary is right in that we need to formulate a decent
mission statement or some form of structure that we can cycle through
to get projects etc. completed. However, I think that before we work
on that we first need to sort out a better method of communicating. As
some of you know I'm a freenode staff member and we have all observed
on multiple occasions that IRC isn't good enough on its own (despite
the fact we're trying to run an IRC network) and must be complemented
by other means. So, my proposition is that e-mail is used as a
constructive discussion environment and then if certain people working
on specific projects want to have an IRC session, they can then do so.
I would argue that the current weekly meeting idea isn't working well
enough. We could still have it, but I would like to make it of less
importance. I know that Sandy wasn't keen on the idea of using the
list in this way, but I would argue we need to change until she gets
back, and then re-evaluate things.

So, after that ramble, what do you all think? :-)

Sean

--
—Sean Whitton (seanw)
<sean@silentflame.com>
http://seanwhitton.com/

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