Dear all,

thank you again for accepting my invitation to join the Wikimedia Foundation research committee. I have launched the page on Meta describing the committee, which also contains your bios:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee

Please make any further edits to this wiki page as you see fit.

Please note that this discussion list is _publicly archived_. I will set up a simple alias for off-list communications if needed.

I've suggested a very simple charter to begin with: the talk page on the wiki would be a good place for us to discuss this as needed. As per the suggested charter, I'd like to occasionally add Wikimedia Foundation staff to this mailing list as non-voting members without process overhead, and I'll have a first batch of these shortly.

Here are some immediate action items that everyone could help with:

* If there are simple ways to make the Research Committee landing page more useful, please go ahead and improve it. :-) * I'd like to organize an IRC meeting soon. If someone wants to take the lead in setting up a subpage to plan the meeting agenda, date/time,IRC channel, etc., that would be great. * Let me know if you think additional infrastructure is immediately required. I think we may end up setting up an OTRS queue to process requests by researchers, but I don't think we're there yet.

The page above is public, I will send out an announcement tomorrow to give you an opportunity to jump in to make it better. ;-)

Finally, I will share with you a Google Spreadsheet that is a first simple crack at tracking WMF-sponsored research projects. I don't think Google Spreadsheet is a good tool for this going forward, but it will give you a sense of what I imagine some cornerstones of a roadmap would look like.

I look forward to working with all of you. :-)

All best, Erik