Thank you for the report, Lodewijk.
effe iets anders wrote:
I believe that for the initial members, we don't
need popular
wikipedians, we don't need icons, we need stable and available people,
who are willing to cooperate and compromise, who are willing to
coordinate and communicate, who are willing to share and listen to the
community. What we need is a wide variety of volunteers. Not per se in
gender and nationality, or even language, but more in opinions and
ways of thinking. We need some people who are active in the chapters,
but also who are not so active there, we need a technical volunteer,
we need someone involved with wiki approval policies perhaps, we need
someone who is active in the stewards corner, some people who are
speaking a non-english language and many other criteria. We will most
likely not be able to create a full variety, but my personal belief is
that we should try to work this out as much as possible.
This makes a lot of sense to me. I would even say that variety of
opinions is not so much what you're describing as variety of experience.
A variety of opinions is rarely something we lack, but often different
experiences are missing. There are so many ways to be involved in
Wikimedia, none of us can really touch all of them. Being able to hear
from them, so we know when a particular interest is affected, would be
valuable. Knowing which people to talk to when you want to get the
perspective of that experience also helps. And as you mention, sometimes
the differences are around languages or projects, but more often they
arise as we specialize within the larger universe of whatever project
we're working on.
--Michael Snow