Fred Bauder wrote:
On Jun 19, 2006, at 5:07 AM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
To continue the ongoing board development
conversation....
The board is considering adding some prominent person from outside the
core Wikipedia community to the board and seeks brainstorming ideas of
what type of person could be good, as well as mentions of names who we
might want to approach.
Larry Lessig - head of Creative Commons
Mitch Kapor - head of Mozilla Foundation (Firefox), founder of EFF,
and
extremely passionate about the Wikipedia mission (and he edits
Wikipedia, and he is absolutely fascinated by and supportive of our
community model)
Richard Stallman - needs no introduction
Eben Moglen - main legal mastermind of the FSF
Comments on these names are welcome... as are further ideas of course!
I have always viewed Jimbo's suggestion that we "distribute a paper
encyclopedia to African children" as quixotic but I have in
connection with a possible board member wondered if we could create a
series of documents which focus on public health which would prove
useful in Africa, possibly also in China and other regions, and be
worth distributing as part of a public health education campaign.
There was lately a cholera epidemic in Angola which affected most of
the country. There is a lot of ignorance involved in this sort of
situation. I don't see this project so much directed to children as
to local decision makers. It would contain information about disease
and disease prevention, etc. The question, bottom line, is would a
project of this nature actually prove effective? Or should we first
see if we could even mobilize around it? One of the good aspects
regarding this possible board member is that he is a hands on,
computer literate guy with experience in give and take.
Fred
I might be interested in the guy name ;-)
Regarding "would a project of this nature actually prove effective", I
am giving a presentation end of august in an international health forum
(
http://www.hcuge.ch/genevahealthforum/) and this is exactly the type of
question I hope can receive a beginning of an answer.
I do not really believe we can mobilize around it before setting up a
framework around. We need partners for such project and these partners
input will be essential to define which content should be included or
not included, and what the audience would be.
However, admittedly, what I would worry about is, if a framework is set,
with partners and of course, a deadline, I am not sure we would succeed
to mobilize enough and in a sufficiently effective way to respect the
limits. I think we can do huge things, but generally, we are bad with
deadlines because a volunteer may come and go.
Also, one of the reasons why Wikipedia typically is successful is that
it can be build by tiny bits. Doing just a bit is easy. A little step
that most of us can climb without too much efforts. It is much more of a
problem to participate to a long term project, in which significant
amounts of efforts must be brought be each contributor.
Ant