On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 1:53 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
Theoretical overlap, perhaps. People in the role of
"Community Liaison,
Product Development and Strategic Change Management", a title Orwell would
be proud of, are not doing what's being described in this e-mail. The
current community liaisons are really paid advocates and they're tasked
with shilling bad products. This isn't the fault of the people in these
roles, many of whom I know and respect, but we should be honest that their
role is much closer to that of a marketer or public relations person.
You're being a jerk in this paragraph, Max. There is a huge difference in
attitude, skills, and experience between marketers/PR people and the
Wikimedians that work in the community liason role. The community liasons
put in a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to advocate not only *to *the
community, but *for it* within the Foundation. They do this quietly, often
behind the scenes, and with little praise. If you know and respect these
people, the respectful thing would not be to reduce their very hard jobs to
a pithy but inaccurate summary for your rhetorical purposes.
To come back to the proposal: there's a lot of merit to the idea of a
formal community group not paid by the WMF to get deeply involved in
understanding the engineering roadmap and advising the Foundation. The list
of potential tasks Gryllida made is pretty good.
There are certainly staffers who've seriously considered trying to set this
up. The only barrier has been time and energy. It's probably best if the
community just goes ahead and elects a volunteer group, and then proposes
that it work with WMF engineering and product teams. TL;DR: be bold. If
you're not proposing setting up something involving money, the only barrier
is finding the right people, which will just take time. A gesture of good
faith might be to involve one relevant WMF person, like Rachel diCerbo (the
new director of the community liasons in product). She's been doing this
kind of thing a long time.
Steven