Angela wrote:
On 5/26/06, Robin Shannon
<robin.shannon(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I think we need to
engage anyone who is willing to be engaged in a debate about where we
should be heading and how we should go about it.
How? Previous public Wikimedia meetings have led nowhere and done
nothing other than highlight how few people in the communities are
interested in _doing_ anything - as opposed to debating on mailing
lists.
Since most of us don't have sufficient funds to travel to public
meetings, nor sufficiently flexible schedules to sit around on IRC, it
should be no surprise that we're much more willing to debate on mailing
lists, which are the most inclusive. If there were a public meeting in
Atlanta, I would certainly attend, but to my knowledge there hasn't been
one.
As for what needs doing, many of us are doing the one thing that IMO
needs most urgently to be done, and without which nothing else is
particularly useful---improving the encyclopedia. I agree there are
other things that should get done, most notably some sort of
infrastructure for a "Wikipedia Review" or "Sifter" or "Wikipedia
1.0"
project (or whatever name it ends up going by). I don't personally have
the expertise or free time to do that, and it seems nobody else has been
forthcoming either, so if hiring someone to do it is the best way to get
it done, that seems like a reasonable use of funds.
I just think
that the future direction of wikimedia
is up to the community not the board or its officers, staff or
whoever.
Nice idea... how about you suggest how that might happen? There are
currently two community representatives on the Board, though it's
increasingly obvious that the community are not using either Anthere
or myself to get anything to happen. Anything that does happen comes
through private mailing lists and an increasing number of internal
processes that even Board members don't always have access to.
I've personally been pretty happy with the community representation on
the board; IMO you and Anthere usually align with the interests of the
majority of the community.
The latter part seems a bit disturbing---is it even *legal* for the
Wikimedia Foundation to have processes that its Board doesn't have
access to?
-Mark