James! Thanks for this case in point.
The free knowledge ecosystem includes hundreds of thousands of devs around
the world. Most don't think to collaborate with us or through our
codebases, most who do bounce off of current systems, and those who stay
still have a hard time getting code reviewed or fit into a roadmap, or
small grants.
But W also have more genuine, unqualified goodwill than any technical
project I know. Few doors for technical collaboration or future-creation
would be closed if we only learn how to ask and welcome the result.
So instead of asking "which tools should we try to test + implement, if we
can figure out how to configure it" or "which of these independent
proposals seems worthy of a one-time grant" (like any startup or website or
grantor out there, limited by the time of the few people setting it up), we
should Be Bolder.
Sketch in broad strokes what we need and want to see, commit to working
together to make it so, look for partners who want to collaborate with us
in making the best ecosystem on the planet. E.g.
— what open graph database will scale to support general knowledge graphs
10 and 100x our current size? The whole planet needs one. Whatever we
migrate to next should be <http://should.be/> a community that joins us to
reach that goal.
— what discourse tools can support our wide ranging and intense
discussions, constantly tested by our active (once rare, but increasingly
possible and important in a networked world) collabs and consensus-building
across language divides?
There are So. Many. Other areas where the ecosystem of open tools is
scattered, loving, and small, and focus by and with us could elevate the
possible into the commonplace.
— embedded annotation, like Hypothesis
— simultaneous editing, like Etherpad
— embedded synchronous discussion, like IRC or Brave Talk
— content translation flows
— visualizations w embedded data, like OWID
— media editing, like videowiki
— format conversion + transcoding
— working with file formats of existing and emerging fields of
knowledge-worl
— book creation
— course creation
— script creation
— data reconciliation, like OpenRefine
Most of these ideas have approaches (open tickets in Phab) with some depth,
with internal and external champions, and with potentially modest
implementations that could be distributed if that ever became a burden. But
these opportunities are sitting unresolved because a) they don't fall under
the goals of any existing initiatives, and b) we've built
anti-infrastructure: a system that makes contribution from the edges hard
or risky. Lots of tickets opened by people offering to do the work note
that they want some sort of confirmation that the result could be adopted
or implemented, before they commit months of effort to it.
Our internal models for priority and focus need to consider the broader
picture of the technical ecosystem we could empower and uplift, and need to
register the value of working with and committing to other entire networks
(including having many times more people solving these issues alongside
us). Otherwise we are not providing the infrastructure needed by our own
editing networks, not to mention the rest of th free knowledge ecosystem.
🌍🌏🌎🌑
On Sat., Jun. 18, 2022, 6:37 p.m. James Heilman, <jmh649(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I have not found getting funding from the WMF for
projects easy. VideoWiki
for example has mostly been funded by WikiProjectMed / personally funded.
Our first grant application since fully taking on the effort was declined
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Rapid/WPM:VideoWiki> and
our programmer working on the project has thus moved on. Our experience has
been similar regarding our collaboration with Our World in Data. We have
gotten the interactive graphs working on our own site
<https://mdwiki.org/wiki/WikiProjectMed:OWID> and offered to work on
doing the same for Wikipedia (plus making them multilingual). Jumping
through hoops to meet WMF requirements will; however, cost about 1,000 USD.
WikiProjectMed has never received funding from the WMF and as a much much
smaller NGO cannot cover these programming expenses for the movement.
James
On Sat, Jun 18, 2022 at 3:49 PM Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote:
We face the paradox
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox>
of choice <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice>, the lull of peace,
and the fog of distributed bureaucracy.
~ With great possibility comes disfocus. (and a few things with focus!)
~ With no clear challenge or adversary, we've become comfortable fussing
over small changes... Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and
companies race to enclose derivatives of our work. This peace is coming to
an end.
~ Our central overhead costs are quite high. So high^ that it seems to
baffle everyone involved, each believing the bureaucracy must be caused by
some other part of the system, outside of their or their org's control.
Our projects are already a global standard for multimodal collaboration
at scale, we should embrace that and rise to meet it. Building some of the
world's best free, mulitilingual, accessible tools for is within our remit,
experience, and budget.
[Discourse raised a *total *of $20M over its lifetime. we could
support + spin out free-knowledge free-software layers like that every
year.]
Let's practice working together, focusing on a few things each year that
can change not only our projects but the world, honoring existing work and
aggressively shedding anything we are doing that others are alreay doing
almost as well.
SJ
*^* Up to 10-to-1 in some areas, plus delays of years inserted into
otherwise continuous processes. This ratio can slip into the negative if
one includes opportunity cost, or funded work that displaces or drives out
comparable voluntary work; or that demands thousands of hours of input for
little result.
🌍🌏🌎🌑