Hello all,
Tonight we had a very successful IRC meeting in the ComProj IRC channel and I think that several decisions were reached that should help the future of the group. I will detail these below. Because not all members were present, please feel free to give your comments on the list here, and if you disagree with the conclusions we drew, please say so.
The first item was ComProj's current membership roster. I pointed out that the private spreadsheet containing the information provided when people join ComProj was a bit pointless as it remained private and so we agreed it should be put on meta. However, it does contain some confidential information, namely e-mail addresses, real names and some brief real life bios. Since we do not want to offend anyone, I intend to filter these out until I get confirmation from individuals that they are happy with their information being listed. I will keep you informed about how I get along with this.
The next item was ComProj's organisation. schiste suggested that we get people involved with the group as project managers and just that - people who may not really be appropriate for doing projects themselves. He said that lots of people who do communications work do not like project management, so this would allow them to just get on with their specialisation. schiste volunteered to try to find a pool of project leaders from across Wikimedia. Please let him know if you are interested.
We now hope to have projects being assigned leaders (the idea is that co-ordinators (me, Sandy, Cary) will do this) and then work can begin. I aim to do some restructuring of our pages on meta tomorrow so that this can be slotted in. Hopefully, this will mean that people will get chance to work at something they really want to do and projects can be completed in a more timely manner.
As chair I will still be trying to pull stuff together by arranging and organanising meetings and attempting to liaise between project leaders etc. which I think is working reasonably well. It should be made clear that even though we now have three layers of co-ordinators, project leaders and members, everyone within ComProj is most definately equal - it's just that we are doing different jobs. Managing a project, for example, is a skill in the same way graphics designing or writing is.
Again, please feel free to offer comments. I will be updating you as I work on our pages on meta, which I would hope we start to use more.
[[m:User:Sean Whitton]] ComProj chair