Gavin Chait wrote:
The most immediate concern for the Wiki Foundation is less the idea of an office with furniture and windows, or even the difficulties of collaboration, mostly it is continuity.
At the moment the founders are involved. They have an idea of what they want and how to achieve that. There are now thousands of regular contributors who are influencing that direction. There are millions of occasional contributors who muddy the edges. How do you ensure continuity?
This is a question with profound implications. Accomodating these segments of our society without losing focus is no trivial problem.
One of the first development organisations I worked in 15 years ago was a student-run endeavour at the University of Cape Town. Every year hundreds of students volunteer and contribute to different projects. Each project is run by older students. Continuity is difficult where students graduate and leave each year. Sometimes entire projects vanish when the students who know how to run them fail to come back.
Students enrolled in a programme of finite duration are more likely to make provision for their successors. If a project vanishes when they leave maybe it has outlived its value. Our senior people are here for an indefinite period, and may find it more difficult to envision their project mortality.
The solution was to employ a small band of professionals whose task is to make sure that projects are properly budgeted and accounted for, keep track of how the different projects interact, and ensure that the overall emphasis of the organisation remains focused. The professionals ensure consistency while the volunteers contribute fresh ideas, fresh thinking, new directions and lots of enthusiasm.
It has worked well for more than 50 years for this organisation.
Offices are far less important than continuity. And the more you rely on volunteers, the more important it is to have a solid base of professionals - where-ever they may be.
Your conclusion is well taken. But before this can happen there needs to be a fundamental understanding about the role of the professional and the role of the volunteer. Larry Sanger was good for Wikipedia at the time that he was here, but someone like him would be totally unsuitable to the present circumstances. Decisions often _must_ be made without waiting around debating like the Paris Commune. The questions that then arise are What do we want our professional to do? What do we want him not to do?
Ec