On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 4:36 PM, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)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(a)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.