I do not think it is a good idea to have community members directly involved in these meetings. First off, any community member who participates is in no way representative of the broad international community as a whole, so granting individuals access gives them a radically disproportionate influence on the outcome of these meetings.
Secondly, this is the team's ONE chance per quarter to have the undivided attention of the Executive Director, and they need to be able to communicate directly with her for the purpose of evaluation of their work. They have one hour, and they have to be able to ensure that they cover the essential points of their message. Even a few off-point questions can have a significantly adverse effect on their ability to update the ED on their progress on the responsibilities within their portfolio. This is part of the evaluation of the performance of the teams and its individual members, which is directly a responsibility of the ED and the executives, and is absolutely not a responsibility of the community.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask community members to put their questions on the talk pages of the minutes, and for the community to expect that questions relevant to the responsibility of the team will receive a response.
Risker/Anne
On 5 October 2014 14:13, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Tilman,
Thanks for redirecting the thanks to Anna and Maria.
Erik mentioned quarterly reviews accounting for community feedback: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/471142. Involving community members directly in meetings could be interesting if done carefully, and/or there could also be ways of amplifying the weight given to community feedback already received about projects like Flow when conducting quarterly reviews. I believe that Communications already wants to find someone who will perform sentiment analysis, and perhaps summarizing community sentiment for quarterly reviews could be part of their job.
Let me quote the end of the notes from this quarterly review of Grantmaking:
Anasuya: As we are. If we are moving to a much more proactive structure, we are going to need much more tech support internally. There needs to be a larger long term strategy around that. Lila: it should show success and then Product can invest. We need to integrate these projects in the communities. Let's say the library is a good one, someone in product needs to look at it and see what is the threshold of success and how much staffing do we need so that we can match it. And it seems like Growth may be the place to evaluate these things. Erik: We also need to look at your team's short term needs. Like I did on Friday with Frank Schulenburg and Floor with regard to the education program's needs. Lila: I think the next steps is to group about this and determine next steps.
To me it sounds like there is further significant business to be discussed that is effectively a part of this quarterly review but time expired for this particular meeting, so I am hoping that there will be notes from the discussion that follows. In order for me to comment usefully, it would be good to know if that follow up discussion has already happened and if so what was decided in that discussion, or if that discussion is planned for the near future.
Thanks,
Pine
On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 8:27 AM, Tilman Bayer tbayer@wikimedia.org wrote:
(For other readers: Pine appears to refer to the publication of the minutes from the quarterly review meeting for the Wikimedia Foundation's Grantmaking team, announced in a separate thread at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-October/074824.html
)
On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 1:14 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Tilman, thanks for those notes.
As mentioned at the top of the page, these minutes were actually taken by Anna Koval and Maria Cruz. (I had been unable to attend this particular review due to a conflicting meeting.) So the thanks should go to them ;)
There was discussion awhile ago about involving the community in
quarterly
reviews,
I don't recall that discussion, do you have a link?
and I have some questions and comments about this review, mostly for Lila.
Sure! Feel free to leave them on the talk page - as community members have already been doing with other reviews this week.
However, I would like to see the notes from the "group" mentioned at
the
end
of the quarterly review before I make comments, or if there is an opportunity for community participation in the "group", I would like to participate in a community capacity, if that is ok. (:
Well, again, I wasn't at the meeting myself, but my interpretation of that sentence is that "to group about this" simply was a somewhat colloquial expression meaning to have a smaller followup meeting between staff from the Product team and from the Grantmaking team, including Erik and possibly Lila, about the particular issue in question - technical support for grantmaking work which would need dedicated time from WMF software developers in the Product team. I'm not sure what you meant by "the notes" - please be aware that not every WMF staff meeting has a designated minute-taker - and in any case "group" was a verb here, not a noun ;)
-- Tilman Bayer Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications) Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB
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