Bod Notbod wrote:
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 12:23 AM, Noein
<pronoein(a)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