On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 4:36 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
Is someone saying "I have courage and integrity" all it takes to convince you that they are indeed possessed of those qualities? Every politician says that. I'd reserve judgment and wait to see their performance.
That's good for the beginning. If a politician says that he or she has "courage and integrity" that defines his or her attitude. At this moment of time our movement is in the process of waking up and we need that kind of attitude.
What would be bad -- again from the perspective of what a politician says -- is the construction like "This is great community and I would like to join your path!"
Both constructions are positive in general, but presently we need the attitude of change, not the flattering attitude.
The second good thing is that we can keep him accountable for what he said, like you are doing that with your politician. (Counting that we have much more influence on WMF structures than average voter on the state structures.)
Besides, what has been lacking is not courage. Creating the Superprotection feature, pressing ahead with the Flow concept in the face of massive community skepticism and rolling out a very poorly implemented VisualEditor undoubtedly took courage of a sort.
That isn't courage, but despair to show that something has been done. In this context, courage is to have a vision (which includes community), make the plan (which includes community), do the job (which includes community) and implement the features in acceptable way for the community.
Those three features you mentioned are different issues.
Superprotection clearly needs political decision, i.e. particular communities should be asked about such actions.
VisualEditor is good and needed feature in theory, while, as you mentioned, poorly implemented. Obviously, it needs polishing and more QA work.
However, in relation to Flow, I think that such features should be discussed and pushed if necessary. Counting, of course, that they've been well implemented, without significant problems. We need *really* new features, capable to introduce different paradigm into our daily work.
It's obviously on the new management to find a way how to overcome previous issues.
What's been lacking is an ability to convince the community through argument rather than the exercise of power, an ability to understand the community's needs and concerns, and sheer old-fashioned engineering competence – something the VisualEditor signally failed to demonstrate.
From my perspective, what we didn't have last years is actually
courage to do new things. From what I heard from the first hand, and besides low level features like Parser is, Flow is the first real innovation in wiki software since talk pages themselves. The sum of all previous "innovations" gave the impression that the world is going into one direction, while we are waiting in the early 2000s.
The reason for that is exactly cowardice on all levels of power structure in our movement. Basically, as somebody gets some permissions, he or she becomes much more afraid of doing anything which would endanger his or her position. And as it goes up, the level of cowardice was just growing.
The product of that process is that sometimes things can't be prolonged anymore, something has to be done because any reason. Then we get forced implementations, promoting bizarrely insignificant features as great achievements, confronting with the Wikipedia communities or other parts of the movement. That's despair, not courage.
And that's why we need people of courage and integrity in the top managerial positions. Those capable to work well under community pressure till the product is done. Damon sad that he is such person and I am very happy to hear that. That's good starting point. We'll see the product of that, of course.
On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 6:07 PM, Lila Tretikov lila@wikimedia.org wrote:
Are you in? Or are you out? That is the question.
If the military allegory is the right thing to make, imagine that you are a general of Napoleon's army in Moscow. Your army conquered almost everything in the most important part of the world, but it's exhausted. That's the present state of the morale in our communities. You need now firefighters, not court-martial.