On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:11 PM, Bod Notbod bodnotbod@gmail.com wrote:
I think you're wrong.
Try to get any sense out of the upper echelons of your phone company, your gas providers, whoever gives you your electricity.
The Wikimedia community is huge. The staff relatively small. It's unthinkable you'd write to AT&T and get a response from the CEO. Looked at in that light, the WMF is very transparent. The WMF office would be incapable of turning over every query the wider public has. We're a community and we should be supporting the office folk in their roles. They do not have a call centre and nor should they.
However, should you have a question that needs to be looked at by someone high up, my best recommendation is to be a good community member. If you have a rep for doing lots of good work on the projects you will come to the attention of WMF staff and they will communicate with you because they have to come to know and respect you.
To illustrate; I worked on the Wikimedia Strategy website for two or three months. During that time I had a few exchanges with Philippe who is now full-time (he was a contractor, I believe, when I was interacting with him)... and I just know that if I have any deep-seated problem, something I think is important *that the community can't answer for* I can go to him. And I can say to him "Hey, here's this thing. Who would you recommend I contact on this issue?"
However, that's on the trust that I won't pester him on any old thing that crosses my mind. It would have to be something big. And for the most part I would go to the community first, and if I felt there were a groundswell of opinion behind me I'd write to someone in the WMF and say "hey, look, there's a couple hundred people here taking one side on this issue and I think someone at WMF should take a look".
We cannot expect such a tiny staff to be open to all of us. You have to build out from your own opinion/idea, nurture and grow it and if it gains ground then go to the WMF.
User:Bodnotbod
It doesn't make sense to compare the WMF to AT&T. I agree that compared with large corporations nationwide, the WMF is enormously communicative and transparent. On the other hand, it is after all a corporation designed to promote and preserve a set of community developed projects; the community in this case is not a group of passive consumers, but the most essential element of the entire corporate mission. More importantly, criticism of communication is not generalized pissyness - it is prompted by specific actions of the WMF or its staff / board on the projects, and applies to imperfect or incomplete communication around those actions. When the WMF makes a decision to intervene in the projects, full and informative communication isn't just a nice-if-you-can-get-it side benefit of dealing with a small company - it's essential to maintaining the fabric of a massively participatory and cooperative endeavor.
Nathan