On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 7:32 PM, Bod Notbod bodnotbod@gmail.com wrote:
I *think* it's almost inevitable that a side-effect of strat is that some volunteers will want to discuss ideas with WMF staff; it's acknowledged that the role of the WMF, of chapters and of volunteers overlap to some degree and while discussion may clarify this to some extent I think Strategy volunteers will be wanting to communicate with WMF staff more than they had done previously... I know I will.
Are you talking about wanting to communicate with staff members on strategy-related topics? If so, that should probably be happening *on* strategywiki. If you contact a staff member about strategic planning in one of the ways below, I suggest you just point them to a public thread on strategywiki so more can participate/view the discussion.x
And what I noticed was that whereas, for example, Sue Gardner and Erik Moller have wiki-linked job titles - which you can click to see their respective responsibilities - there are quite a few staff entries that do not.
See the bottom of the page, where it links you to .odt files with most job descriptions[1]. Most other job descriptions can be found in the "job opening" page then the position was advertised[2].
It occurs to me that if every effort were made to put the role/responsibilities of ALL staff on the wiki it would really help people to address their ideas to the people most able to help.
See above. ;-)
Which brings me to a further point; the staff page has wiki-linked names which take you to a user page and its associated talk page.
Yep, that's their userpage where they include more personal information about themselves (e.g. link to other userpages/sites, biography).
Is the talk page the advised way to contact a staff member directly?
Not the foundationwiki one, no, because most people wouldn't be able to talk to them there. (You need an account.)
Or is one discouraged from attempting to contact staff directly in general? Are the mailing lists the approved way of getting through to the WMF? Or should we direct everything through Cary as Volunteer Coordinator?
[I don't work for the Foundation, so don't take this as an official answer. ;-)]
Personally, I don't think you should feel discouraged from contacting staff directly. Quite a few of them have accounts on others wikis (like Meta, for example) and you can talk to them on their talk pages there. Also, they all have e-mails in the form of flastname@wikimedia.org (first initial, last name), so you should feel free to e-mail them.
Mailing lists are usually best for contacting multiple people or when you want to get feedback on something, not for when you want to contact a specific staff member.
All this being said, don't feel bad if you want to run something through Cary first. He can always help you figure out who's the best person to handle your query, it might not necessarily even *be* a staff member.
I think answers to these questions will be very useful to strategy volunteers and so I'd like permission (or explicit advice not) to paste up the response on the Strategy wiki.
The mailing list archives are public, so I don't think anyone would care if you reposted what's discussed in this thread.
[1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Policies#Related_documents [2] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Category:Job_openings