I would love more context for this (excellent, ambitious) discussion. What timescales are to be considered? What range of scope reassessment is appropriate?
A long-range planning section would be helpful, if only to provide context for more immediate targets. For comparison, here is a brief list of 'three-year' goals I had more than three years ago, when the foundation was but a legal construct. A couple of them have since been met :) :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/three-year_plan
I'd like to see Wikimedia as a community take some 300-year stances on knowledge dissemination, what is important and what will pass, what comes first and what comes next. I'd like a shared roadmap for improving language coverage: how can we move beyond single-common-language, do we have tiers of language support that new languages filter up? how do we integrate, support, and iconify clear communication: simple v. complex language, language learning?
We also need focused discussions about ideals and goals over shorter timescales... and ideas about projects that support and expand our ideals that other non-WM projects could take on. Where do our projects fit into the grander scheme of things? What are our grandest ambitions, our fallback positions, our contingency plans?
Conservation and innovation could both be better served by our plans. We could use a serious endowment discussion. Preparation for how to sustain Wikimedia services and data across a major global war or catastrophe. A list of valuable collaborative projects not yet begun. A list of significant tools and services that would enhance development and use of the projects.
On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
- A project team made up of a small number of people accountable for
driving the work forward, keeping it on track. I expect it would be mostly paid staff and paid support. It would be process-focused > not substance-focused.
Or support the work with bureaucratic help? These are two fine uses of paid teams / contracts in my mind for massively parallel volunteer projects. Then again, some of the best "drivers" I can think of are volunteers who are engaged 24/7.
- A small number of Working Groups... to evaluate and synthesize
recommendations from the Sub-Groups
There's nothing wrong with having a good multi-layered process. Sometimes that's not the most effective, though - I hope there is always an open low-process low-barrier to entry process in the background, like the Nupedia wiki, which is expected to at worst produce great draft material without strictures (and at best can do much more).
idea. The people in the Sub-Groups will need, ideally, to have real subject-matter expertise, or be willing to work hard to get it where it's missing.
I see energy and an interest in discovering what's possible as being more valuable than subject expertise. Choosing by expertise and then seeing how much work people do is a standard weakness of traditional committee-forming. Choosing by activity and merit without filtering first allows selection of people who truly thrive on whatever the task at hand is.
- There is also a big question about languages. The work will need to
be done in English,
Can you elaborate a bit? Could a group that all speak better French than English not do their work in French and have it translated for others? I would hope the language issue could be phrased as "All work will need to be translated into English as a shared working language"...
but we will also want to provide avenues for non-English-speakers to participate, other than through their own direct connections to people who do speak English. That will be hard.
'avenues for participation' rather than equal representation and participation, seems in a small but persistent way to run counter to the mission.
- I am also thinking about how best to involve the voices of readers
This is really important. WP has 3 billion readers, all of them potential contributors, sources of ideas. Again, the majority of these readers do not read English as their first language.
SJ