I see people joining this list, and I want to get some idea about what people think is the status of ComProj.  Do we still have a purpose?

What is that purpose?

Cary

>>>> Hi Cary and thanks,

This is quite long so forgive me. I just had to get this off my chest.

I had thought, when joining this list, that it would be the beginnings of a place where we would be able to improve the communications (tools) between all the various global communities from which WMF projects are comprised. After seeing what just one tool (a wiki) and a vision (to build an encyclopaedia) could do I naturally thought this would be the place to develop comms tools, particularly the real time ones, which could help them share an understanding of where things are, if not “the next steps’. As it is things seem to have become frozen in time. i.e. email lists and IRC.

Over the past 7 years I have seen the development of tools like forums (as one example), where a group of moderators assist people, from all over, to get orientated at places like sitepoint (global web designers) and whirlpool (Australia broadband users). I’ve also watched as the global research networks, which support old ways of learning get fatter and fatter. http://global.dante.net/ , while the real time tools available (only) to people inside the national institutions have really grown up. E.g. http://evo.caltech.edu/evoGate/

I had visions of using stuff like EVO to run regular link ups between WMF’s global groups, or at least once a year at wikimania. My hope was that by doing so our communities could change the face of old educational institutions, addicted, as they are, to ‘delivering’ an education rather than sharing an inquiry, or building an article. You see telcos only build these kind of ‘products’ for multinationals. And you have an asterix PBX in san fran now. You just don’t apply the same kind of model to the real time stuff as Wikipedia or other WMF projects. i.e. the ‘global community’ model. In brief, due to the employment of professionals, the old organisational model of a ‘head and branch’ replicates an old Rotary rather than globally distributed multi nationals (like Sun who i worked for decades ago), where there was really no head office, just global nodes of experts. And please, I don’t mean to criticise anyone personally. You (especially) have my greatest admiration.

But for WMF to achieve its goals it really needs to provide its global groups with some collaboration tools, which really can’t be afforded by a charity, and shouldn’t be reinvented anyway. So it needs to collaborate with leaders in their field, and I don’t mean, with respect, (just) software vendors like kaltura. It requires approaching collaboration from the network level because clouds/grids are replacing  the old client server model (as you know). We are, in short, trying to get the akamai’s of this world to conform to a collaborative model, which is hard when most institutions just want to publish and “be damned”. Even the opencourseware consortia’s members want to duplicate 200 hundred times rather than building one great ‘article’.

Enough. Sorry for the earful. I’ll just leave you with this suggestion for an experiment. http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator/browse_thread/thread/8697984587472c02?hl=en

You’ll notice that Wayne, one of WMF’s advisors makes the comparison in models quite clear (the link on my second entry).

Hopefully Liam (wittylama) from the Australian chapter might mention a few of these things while he’s over there (in San Fran).

My best, simon