On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 8:00 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
This is a general comment, but having finally gotten around to reading some of the mailing list posts to this list (wikimedia-dc) from the past few days, a lot of the tone of various aspects of this proposed chapter, etc. strikes me as stiflingly and wholly unnecessarily formalistic. I appreciate organization and I appreciate passion, but I think there are some people who are much more interested in mock government and rules of order than a more laid-back approach where the goal is that people who enjoy free culture/wikis/etc. hang out and geek out.
Perhaps I'm alone in these feelings and perhaps I simply need to stop associating with whatever Wikimedia DC becomes, if the general consensus is that things are headed in the right direction. I do wonder if others agree, though.
Does Wikimedia DC have a statement of principles or anything like that at this point?
MZMcBride
As someone who is complicit in this formality, I have to say I agree 100% with you. I don't like bureaucracy. And let me say, if I have the honor of being Chairman of the Wikimania Planning Committee, I will not run it like a committee. I will run it like a business (without the profiteering part), because up to this point, I considered Wikimania to be like a start-up business.
Unfortunately when you start a corporation as we did here, you have to engage in a lot of bureaucratic hullabaloo. I think that's why we delayed making one until we had to (we are hosting Wikimania, after all), and my interest is getting it done with so that we can get down to the real business. (That's why I am somewhat disappointed that we have had a lot of debate over things that should be commonsense matters, like figuring out how members will give us ten bucks so we can keep the lights on.) That's what all the discussion is about -- setting up the corporate structure. After that, we will have only four of these bullshit meetings a year, and even then we can tie them into regular social meetups. I'm not the President and I respect Katie's vision of the organization, but as I see it, Wikimedia DC is a vehicle for things that require a lot of planning and that's it. We won't have to get the board together to agree to hold a meetup, but we will to figure out how to raise and spend the $300,000 Wikimania will cost.
I'm very much sympathetic with your argument and I hope to get this back-end business done as soon as possible, but it was inevitable that we would have to do stuff like this.
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