If I remember correctly, I think that's how the Content Translation project started -- it was someone's personal project, which got more people and attention because it's a great idea and showed real success.
It's hard to know what the mechanism would be for how to gauge community support at meaningful intervals. Most people aren't paying a lot of attention to what the WMF is working on from one day to the next, and there's only so many big surveys you can do before people get tired of them. It's a tough problem.
On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 4:53 PM, Yuri Astrakhan yastrakhan@wikimedia.org wrote:
Something in Oliver's departure email caught my eye:
- "Because we are scared and in pain and hindered by structural biases and
hierarchy, we are worse at our jobs." (quoted with Oliver's permission)*
And that got me thinking. WMF, an organization that was built with the open and community-driven principles - why have we became the classic example of a corporate multi-level hierarchy? Should we mimic a living organism rather than a human-built pyramid?
This may sound naive and wishful, but could we have a more flat and flexible team structure, where instead of having large teams with sub-teams, we would have small self-forming teams "by interest". For example, someone decides to dedicate their 20% to building support for storing 3D models in wiki. Their efforts are noticed, the community shows its support, and WMF reacts by increasing project resourcing. Or the opposite - the community questions the need of a project, and neither the team nor WMF can convincingly justify it - the project resources are gradually reduced.
An organism reacts to the change of its environment by redistributing resources to the more problematic areas. Would small, flexible, and more focused teams achieve that better? _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe