Hello all,
Some comments by email:
1) I think the most important thing to get right at the start of the process is a commitment to public and particularly chapter participation. Since this proposal appeared fully formed over the past few days, we should take time to iterate, and engage the groups who will be part of the long-term process, so they feel their shared ownership of the process. There are already some useful comments on the talk page, and I imagine a discussion process will take longer than a week.
2) I am not sure that the Board is the primary group that needs to approve of this direction. I am more concerned about ensuring that the chapters feel comfortable with its frame - it will be much easier to resolve any miscommunications with the Board. And I feel that many chapters haven't had a chance to look at and digest the proposal or its intent.
As a result of the above, hurrying to get something approved at next weekend's Board meeting may not be helpful for securing our long-term goals.
3) I think our end goal should be answering the questions of how we achieve our mission goals as a movement, as Barry commented. A charter may be part of that (particularly for chapter-foundation relations, less so for individual wikimedians and the thousands of small wikiprojects and interest groups). But we should also focus directly on the questions, and on what needs to be resolved for each of them -- some will require more than a statement of principles.
Barry writes:
Austin writes:
As previously discussed, the draft proposal (to whom is apparently not yet clear) is at [1], so please weigh in as soon as you can. Since our working timeline has this made official in just a few days, this is the #1 priority.
I had a look and I'm OK with the general scope, though a bit nervous about how the team is going to accomplish all of this work. I do wonder whether some issues aren't really answerable at this stage. For example, it isn't clear to me what the best organizational form(s) is/are in large, complex countries like India, Brazil, China, etc. We might need to stay flexible as things emerge. While I like the general goal of creating something with longevity, we need to think about resilience
To clarify the scope, and who will be accomplishing the work (my initial impression was that we would all be facilitating the work of a much larger public group, various parts of which would be interested in different parts of the problem space), perhaps we can spend some time refactoring the Key Issues and the goals in "Purpose of the movement roles project". There are already some suggestions on the talk page.
On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 11:01 PM, Bishakha Datta bishakhadatta@gmail.com wrote:
Para 2 - May be better to refer to Wikimedia movement here, rather than Wikimedia organization?
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Stakeholders Do we need to use the term "unaffiliated volunteers?" Or will just volunteers suffice?
+1 to both.
I like "individual Wikimedians" instead of "volunteers", since participants at most levels of organization are voluntary. (And we also need a designation for small groups, such as wikiProjects, coding projects, groups that run informal local fundraising campaigns, &c).
SJ