And ... Mark went on...went on... went on...
Take, for example, the issue of dues. One way to decide it is to have the board debate amongst themselves (either online or in person), solicit input from users, and then make a decision on what level to set the dues at. Another possibility is to have a wiki-style discussion it, possibly on meta (I'm willing to use meta over mailing lists if that's the preference of most other people). If a consensus emerges, then we set the dues at the consensus amount. If there are strong disagreements, then we can identify a few of the leading choices and hold a vote. Given that we already have voting software that has been used successfully, this is fairly easy to do.
I don't see any particular reason to favor the top-down decision-making process, especially given how alien it is to the way we (not to mention just about all others wikis) have been doing things to date, which has been rather successful in most respects.
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http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2004-June/000406.html
Watch-out : this was a sollication for input
With this mail, on this mailing list, a week ago, I announced a brainstorming page about dues. I also announced it on the goings-on : http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goings-on
The page in question is here. It is public and non protected. You can *edit* it : http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Membership_fees
I had no feedback on the mailing list. I had a bit of feedback on the wiki itself. I had some good feedback from french discussion. I discussed it in length last week end on irc (a very cheap discussion medium, neat when wiki is broken, and very useful for live discussion). This occured on the english channel and the foundation channel, most of saturday and sunday.
I also had a couple of private exchanges by mails on the topic.
I also made additional suggestions 2 days ago on the foundation mailing list. Suggestion for which I had *no* comment whatsover.
I contacted Michael for his input, and asked him if he was willing to participate, for I think he can really help on this. Michael was on holidays, and just came back. He indicated he would come and see. I am waiting for his feedback.
I had a short exchange a few hours ago with Arne, from the german chapter as well. We planned to discuss this again (this evening if possible, but we missed each other).
With the initial feed back I had, I started writing down some points today, during my lunch time.
Tomos also started posting a resume of our discussion this week : http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interorganizational_relations_among_chapters
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Signature : The one thing I can say : the one who does nothing but just whines that decisions are taken without him or *could* PERHAPS be taken without him, is responsible of that situation.
Wikipedia is just this : it gives you the ability to act yourself, this is so great, so take that chance
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