Aubrey,
You speak so much truth in your words that I'm feeling overwhelmed right now. Because like a doctor who cares about his patient, you have just very lovingly and figuratively told me, "you are deeply sick". It hurts, I struggle accepting the truth, but deep inside I know that the only thing I can do is to acknowledge your words, and as every human before of me ask the perennial questions: "why me? what could have I done differently?"
You are right, I put my whole being into this project, I have seen it as a way to find purpose, meaning, liberation, and instead what I have found is the emptiness, my own and that of the people who are in the same situation as me. Maybe they also need the same things as I do, but we never talked about it so I don't know what they need, they never told me. Unlike other people, however, I do know what I need to find purpose here.
To me purpose comes from the mutual acknowledgment with my peers that we are here for something bigger than ourselves. We might never achieve those dreams, but being next to someone who understands you because they are in the same situation, makes life more bearable. But do we share the same dream or aspiration at all? Has anyone ever take a collective vow to show to themselves and to others that this is what matters in their life, and that they are committing to it? I do not think anyone has ever done that. You say that you have given up, but I do not want to reach that point. I feel I want to try to build a real community environment and give everyone a chance before giving up on them.
My desire as I was typing my email was to be seen, to be recognized by who I am, to be understood even. That is something that only a true friend could do for me, but as you say we are not good friends even if we did some cool things together. We want to collect "all human knowledge", but what do we actually know about each other? Is that not valid knowledge or what? In my opinion the knowledge about the people in this movement, what they do, who they are, what are their dreams, their aspirations, should be collected with at least as much interest as we collect all other kind of knowledge. Yet nobody does that.
If there is no collective information about who I am and what I have done these years, how can I expect other people to value me as much as I want to value them? I am as guilty as anyone else for not caring about my fellow volunteers in this project, but that doesn't need to continue being that way, it can change. I can commit to write a page on Meta about any volunteer who wants their work on this project to be seen and recognized, and of course anyone can do that for me to. We only need the will.
You say that that WMF bears responsibility in the "failure" of our Wikisource community project, and that it is not important now. I do not agree about the timing, I find it is very relevant now, because the same pattern that has happened before, it is happening again now. And the pattern is that of the individual voice vs. the organization. We are like ants next to a giant, we complain and say what we need, but we are so little in comparison that our voice doesn't reach any ears. For Wikisource we thought, ok, if we are not being heard as individuals maybe we'll be heard as an organization, but that didn't happen either! So now that I have this issue about the Wikimedia Blog and I complain about it, I feel helpless because it is again an individual standing up against a behemoth that will not listen neither to myself as individual nor to myself as an organization. What is there for me left to do?
The only thing it is left for me to do is to question the legitimacy of the WMF as the leadership organization of the Wikimedia movement, understanding leadership as the capacity to listen to many individual voices and act in a way that is beneficial to all of them. If the WMF is incapable of listening to my individual voice, then I want either a reform in the WMF to include people who are able to listen at the top of the hierarchy, or a new organization who can listen and create a common vision out of what it hears. Things like the Strategy process are supposed to help with this goal, however I feel it doesn't offer the space for day to day activities or to challenge participants with new ideas, then it has no use for me.
So yes, I will follow your advice and I will pick my battles, putting myself first. In this case my battle from this moment on is to recognize the authority of the Wikimedia movement as a whole, and build leadership legitimacy for me and all those in the movement who are able to listen. I do believe that such people exist in our movement (I know a few), and that they have a very high capacity for listening, but they themselves are not being heard, and that is extremely unfair, and it is something I would like to correct because me and the movement would benefit greatly. And as you said money is necessary, so it has to be paid.
@SJ: as you can see from my email, there are deeper issues than just the blog.
@Pine: Thank you for our conversation this morning. I learnt a lot from hearing your perspective, and I felt heard by you because you gave me the opportunity to voice my concerns, and you asked me questions about them.
@Frederick: Yes, money is an issue that has to be discussed with the community broadly. I think it might be too much to elaborate about it now on this conversation, but it can be the topic for another thread. About volunteer burnout, I feel many of us feel underappreciated because there is no space in our projects for appreciation. For now the only proposal I had in mind is about creating pages on Meta for volunteers, so the work of individuals can be seen completely. Perhaps it needs more discussion.
Regards, Micru