Anna,
As you may have noticed, threaded discussions become difficult for me to visually navigate after a while. Thus, the color.
Sorry, colour doesn't come through on the mailing list.
Call me naive, but I’m excited by the prospect of the movement strategy https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017. I know that many other things will need to happen to arrive at the state that you speak of, but thinking together at that scale is likely a good start in my mind. It might even be a necessary but insufficient pre-requisite for the kind of collaboration you speak of.
Let us hope that it does what is both necessary and sufficient.
The current notion being instantiated in the proposed Technical guidelines
is very much about a wise and benevolent Foundation steering its ideas through a reluctant community. That is frankly insufficient.
Would you direct me to those Technical guidelines? I don’t know the reference and I should.
They are at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_Collaboration_Guidance which is currently under discussion. This appears to be a successor project to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_product_development_ process/Communities which is described as stalled.
Maybe not. But if it could strike a deeper cord around transparency, I wanted to show up for that conversation. Talk openly. Let people know
that
we are listening, that we believe in transparency… that’s why we all
fought
for it.
To be clear, I have no sense whether it did strike a cord around transparency, but I enjoyed the conversation nevertheless.
My experience of the Foundations notion of Transparency has been patchy
at
lest -- and that's a polite way of saying breathtakingly awful.
That good? All jokes aside, I take this very seriously. I’d like to hear your notion of transparency, but first I’ll offer this one that I recently heard because I have the sense that it will resonate with you. We're in the final stages of an org-wide conversation on our values https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Values/2016_discussion/Framing. We invited some current and former community-selected board members as well as volunteers beyond the board to these conversations. I enjoyed them very much.
Normally, I would attribute this quote, but these conversations were anonymized, so I don’t have permission to reveal my brilliant source. They talked about how transparency was likely not the right word for what they really wanted. They wanted a way to join in. They wanted to know where they could plug in. Is that a notion of “maybe more than transparency" that resonates with you?
That’s the problem that I’m chewing on. And so your ideas around collaboration are interesting to me. So I’m thinking about them. What they would mean, how it could be done, the myriad of constraints that make it seem quite difficult to orchestrate.
The difference between Transparency and Engagement is indeed what I have been concerned about. But genuine engagement cannot take place on a basis of asymmetric access to information. So transparency seems to be the prerequisite
What has changed in the last fortnight to make me expect that it will be different this year?
Look, if there’s one thing I think I’ve learned throughout my career, it’s all of the things that could go wrong. Sometimes it feels like that’s all I have to offer: what not to do.
I also don’t think grand pronouncements are the way to go. So I’d be happy to explain some of the things that I do think have changed, as long as you know I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I’m just legitimately answering your question from my partial point of view.
Leadership has changed. I see more people internally looking to involve relevant stakeholders in their work (New Readers and ORES come to mind). I’m also hopeful about the movement strategy process. It looks like a good faith effort on everyone’s part to come together and discuss the future in open, inclusive, documented discourse https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017.
I see progress, not perfection.
I see confusion. In the last fortnight was a reference to the ED's public pronouncement that she thought it waste of her time to engage with people like me directly on her Meta talk page. Her predecessor had not thought that.
In the middle ground, there is the
issue of the current product roadmap and its delivery. Perhaps an indication of what that roadmap is may help to refine and revise the
plan
that will have to be drawn up for executing the work that is left
hanging
by these events.
[...]
I don’t have enough information.
[...]
Is any of those close to the truth, do you think?
I do not know.
I want to be polite here. It is very unusual for an organisation like the WMF not to have the sort of Roadmap that I describe, and extraordinarily unusual that a person at your level in the organisation should not know of its existence and be able to confirm at least whether or not it exists. You must be aware that your answer suggests at a bare minimum the possibility that you, as an officer of the WMF, are evading the question.
You've helped me see some new possibilities for how we might organize. Thank you.
Thank you,
"Rogol"