All of this could be read as "let's make a call for community input for the sake of political correctness, so the community thinks their opinion is important for us....but we have taken the decision several months ago anyway".
M.
El 04/10/2015 a las 02:38 a.m., Florence Devouard escribió:
Le 04/10/15 00:13, Nathan a écrit :
Evidently the Signpost has scooped the WMF by revealing that Montreal has been selected for the 2017 Wikimania host city in a secret process that completed this past August. [1]
It seems like the community could have been looped into this new method before it was a done deal.
~Nathan
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-09-30/News_a...
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
As member of this community, I would to shortly comment in my individual capacity.
The situation is completely embarassing. Yeah, it is.
The community met during Wikimania.
- We discussed committee membership.
- We discussed moving away from the current bidding process, which is,
- in our opinion, broken
- We discussed making Montreal our choice, to be announced at the
*earliest* convenience (keep in mind this was discussed in July), as part of our new process but only after talking with the Montreal team
- We finally discussed a notion of location with global areas
Very rough notes of that meeting were posted on meta : https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_Committee/2015-07-16
We closed that meeting with the following todos
- Ellie had to check with Montreal (which she did)
- James had to propose areas (which he did)
- the committee had to meet again a month later (which it did)
When August meeting came,
- we discussed and finalized membership (keep in mind that not all
members were in July meeting and not all members were in August meeting)
- Ellie informed us that Montreal team was happy to move forward and
we planned an announcement
- James proposed a set of areas, with propositions for the coming years
- James proposed a draft of announcement
AND THIS IS WHERE THE WHOLE SITUATION BUGGED
The announcement of the new bidding system, the locations and Montreal were in one document only. And the problem is that the committee did not agree collectively with the area chosen, nor with the predetermination proposed. (I, in particular, indicated my (very) deep disagreement that middle and south africa were completely excluded from the list. I expressed my (serious) desire that the decision of the rotation places be not made now by the committee, but with community input). The committee concluded that 1) the draft announcement was to be reworked and that 2) we would announce the new system and seek input from the community before its finalization in the following weeks.
This was over a month ago. Since then, what happened ? We made some improvements to the draft. Iolanda tried to push for the announcement of the new process and of Montreal to be made. Ellie noted that the organizer of Montreal was on a leave for 3 weeks and that she would prefer to wait his return and a visit to Canada to finalize things more, and that she would rather that the new process be announced as part of a larger community consultation that would include discussion both about the program and the future location, to be held in October.
And there you are... there is this...dual situation between ... the community wanting to know as soon as possible, so as to weigth in the decision... and the staff... who want to polish things as much as possible before any public announcement and call for input. And of course... these two tendancies are not fully compatible. And a pinch of feeling of "non ownership" from committee members, as only the Chair of the committee should be the one to finalize and send the announcement.
Eh :)
Well, there you are. Now things are out.
We are indeed seriously considering Montreal pending a site visit this month (october).
Josh, for the record, I am very sorry because I had no idea you were preparing a bid. I thought only Montreal had been really. This is actually part of the reasons why we wish to change the biding process. We have seen too many teams work like crazy for weeks, even months, to prepare a bid that will go nowhere because another city will be winning. This is such a loss of energy and time ! We think it would be so much positive to get community members to focus more on building a great program more than on finding the proper venue/hotel/restaurant etc.
Hopefully, James will be available to post a clearer and complete message early next week on that topic. Bottom line is that there is a community consultation planned on that topic.
Again, I post this in my personal capacity.
Florence
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe