We are. It's not about particular thread on this list, it's about our
existence. Initially I thought it's because the level of our
responsibility, but eventually I've realized we are simply boring and
nobody bothers about that.
Our meetings and conferences look like the meetings of a regional branch of
German Social Democratic Party at the best. In regular occasions they are
more like the meetings of a village cell of a communist party from an East
European country during the 80s.
This enormous distance between the value of our work and ideals and
presenting ourselves to *us* in the range between shiny snake oil merchants
and demagogues nobody trusts is quite striking. (OK, there is one more end,
thus making a triangle: highly specialized topics which require highly
specialized knowledge to participate.)
The distance is also quite striking because the most witty people I ever
met are from the Wikimedia movement itself.
It's endemic. From local Wikimedian meetings to Wikimania. The most
interesting part of such events is talking with other Wikimedians.
Listening talks, lectures and ceremonies is the worst option. Workshops and
collective decision making are like gambling: it could be constructive, but
it could also be not just wasting time but occult session with the only one
goal: to drain the energy from the participants.
On average, I would rather spend two times more time talking with a
Wikimedian than listening her or his lecture or talk.
There are some straight forward techniques. For example, we could work on
making our talks much better. We could also ask HR professionals how to
make our live interaction better.
However, being boring is somehow quite deeply rooted inside of our culture.
While trying to become "serious", we lost our ability to be playful.
Creativity is something we treat as the least important of our activities.
This is not something which could be fixed quickly. There is no a pill to
magically cure it. But we could start thinking about this as a problem and
start implementing various ideas to tackle it.
I wouldn't say that our revolution forbids us to dance. (Whenever somebody
from Bay Area is DJ-ing, we dance and it's beautiful, no matter how trashy
the music is.) But I am sure we can do better.