On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 12:01 PM, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
I think that this is a very unhappy wording; there is nothing wrong with the bid or the city by itself. As much as I find the wasted effort scandalous, it is not the fault of our friends from Montreal.
About the process of the past weeks since Wikimania in Mexico I cannot say much, I have not been involved, and I don't want to judge about something I don't know much about.
What I know about is that "the community" does not exist as an organ. How to make decisions "by the community"? Hold a referendum for every little question that arises in an organizing committee? Even in the WCA Council we saw how months were wasted for clear decisions that in other contexts had been made in a couple of days.
Kind regards Ziko
The WCA council was a bureaucratic mess that seemed almost doomed from its inception. I think the comparison is inapt.
To reduce the level of criticism and resistance, the Wikimania committee merely needed to conduct its deliberations partly in the open and follow the typical steps of consulting with the community. Make a page, float some ideas, listen to feedback, incorporate as much of it as possible, and then make a decision. Many people commenting here would not have taken the opportunity to be involved in that process, but would have been comforted that it existed.
And not for nothing, but a lot of the ideas in the threads of yesterday and today were interesting and worthwhile; the benefit of consulting with the broader community is that problems and opportunities are both more likely to surface than in a closed, hierarchical decision making process.
It still is not apparent that the Wikimania committee even sought or acquired the endorsement and permission of the WMF or the Board to make such a major change in the host site selection process. The committee seems to have become characterized by its secrecy and disregard for public input, which is quite a reversal from its past history.