-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 15/02/13 11:44 AM, James Alexander wrote: This statement in a nutshell: "This isn't working, or it's a filter to prevent action (in which case it's working great.)" Amgine

On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 1:39 PM, Stephen LaPorte <slaporte(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Stephen, That says, "Policy and political issues include public support for or against proposed laws and executive actions, online backing for political initiatives, and partnerships with organizations to promote shared policy and political positions.... [examples include] Collaborative Advocacy / We collaborate with another organization to take action on a particular policy or political question." Am I correct in saying that there have not been any such actions since that Foundation Policy was approved? I propose that the Foundation survey the community asking about how often they expect such actions to take place. I am sure there will be a wide range of opinion. Some such as myself would support formal proposal and consideration rather frequently, and plenty of people think that they should never occur. Will you perform such a survey? Sincerely, James Salsman

On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 4:26 PM, Stephen LaPorte <slaporte(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Would you please say why? What do you see as advantages and disadvantages of learning the community's expectations about the frequency of actions taken in support of editors?

Amgine wrote: Select them at random and send them an email. I know from experience that inactive admins respond at about a 15% response rate, so it would be easy to get a statistically significant number of editors to respond. Recent donors respond at a greater rate. (I doubt that the Foundation should try to survey readers who do not edit about advocacy actions, because I don't think there should be actions on behalf of the reader-only community. Having said that, I think the Foundation most certainly should be taking actions in support of the broad editor community, not just Foundation staff.) What questions, in particular? I'm growing increasingly concerned that there is a whole class of information that Foundation staff will actively try to prevent learning, especially when the answers might be embarrassing. At first I thought it was isolated to the proportion of impoverished long-term volunteers. The reactions to my survey attempting to determine the answer were positively shameful, including repeated false allegations by Foundation staff that I had violated policies including one that they knew had never been approved. But now I'm not so sure it is isolated: The Foundation apparently does not want to know the opinion of donors and the community as to whether staff should be paid competitive salaries (my preliminary survey suggest that those opinions are very much opposed to the status quo) and now it seems there is no interest in determining how offen the community thinks advocacy actions should occur. It would not take very much time, effort, or money to learn the answers to these questions. Who would have thought that the Foundation would be opposed to finding them? Sincerely, James Salsman

I've been working as a professional statistician for most of the past two decades, in applied fields where problems result in immediate failures of various algorithms. These opinion questions aren't sophisticated. People will answer when they are asked. What do you think makes sampling so difficult, in the case, for instance, of how often advocacy actions should be proposed? On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 9:22 PM, Amgine <amgine(a)wikimedians.ca> wrote:

On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 10:41 PM, Amgine <amgine(a)wikimedians.ca> wrote: No, randomly selecting editors with email registered from those who have edited on any project a certain number of times in the past month, say five times to use one of the Foundation's definitions for active editors, and asking them their opinion in their primary language as determined by the project they have edited most frequently over that period, will result in an answer which reflects the geographic distribution of the editor community. No, but their number of active editors reflects the proportion in which the Foundation should reasonably weight their editors' opinions of, in this instance, how often advocacy actions should take place. My most recent professional publication is https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B73LgocyHQnfS0g5ZEw1aFNKT2s/edit but the bulk of my income over the past year has been from work done for commodities futures traders.