Bod Notbod wrote:
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 12:23 AM, Noein pronoein@gmail.com wrote:
I've been watching the dialogues between the WMF and this mailing list for a while now and most of the conflicts are the same: bad communication. This is apparently not due to individuals but institutional.
I think you're wrong.
To paraphrase a common bromide in Finnish, I think he is right, wrong, and grand-daddys long-johns.
Try to get any sense out of the upper echelons of your phone company, your gas providers, whoever gives you your electricity.
The Wikimedia community is huge. The staff relatively small. It's unthinkable you'd write to AT&T and get a response from the CEO. Looked at in that light, the WMF is very transparent. The WMF office would be incapable of turning over every query the wider public has. We're a community and we should be supporting the office folk in their roles. They do not have a call centre and nor should they.
I think the big issue is that communication goes upwards, downwards, and laterally, and those are three issues that correctly shouldn't be mixed up, when examining how well we as a whole are doing in the field of internal communication.
However, should you have a question that needs to be looked at by someone high up, my best recommendation is to be a good community member. If you have a rep for doing lots of good work on the projects you will come to the attention of WMF staff and they will communicate with you because they have to come to know and respect you.
Absolutely true, but when the information is going downstream, there have been instances where there hasn't been a clear presumption that people in the various communities themselves know what they are doing, as a default, taken as a whole.
I genuinely think this is just a learning curve people who have come from more traditional top-down organizations have to pass through; and I have seen very encouraging signs that the staff can learn new tricks, and are gradually "getting it".
The big unadressed problem is lateral communication between particular organs. Top-down and bottom-up communication are things that generally tend to have a dynamic that is self-correcting (though sometimes drama-filled). But communication between parts that are nominally on the same level, is not so easily fixed.
Chapters are organizing as a conduit for such communication between languages -- though it has to be said at a snails pace, and in fits and starts.
On the foundation top level we all know that there is on-going work on how to optimize the advisory committees usefulness.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen