Dear Brianna,
Just re-reading this one about the need to “introduce new forms of communication”. It seems perfectly obvious doesn’t it?
The one thing which has struck me as very strange around the WMF traps is how so much time is spent in using wikis to produce (virtual) libraries, while there is so little interest in improving the comms side of things – in using technologies which might pass for (what in academia) are called virtual classrooms. IRC and mail lists were terrific once upon a time. Now they’re just anachronisms.
Splitting into ever more narrow elists won’t help us here. It’ll just lead to more horizontally challenged discussions, many of which can be seen to be repeated at different times, in a different place, if one could be bothered searching forever.
Forums, on the other hand would at least give us an opportunity to have discussion, which if someone misses, might at least retain the pertinent parts for all time on one thread. It might even give us the opportunity to bring together proposals common to all projects. But even forums are an asynchronous thing. Could we, while working through this reformation, give some thought to the real time comms stuff. E.g. The wikipedia weekly conversations are a good beginning in getting people actually talking.
Sewers have a way of driving people out of their comfortable routines. It’s a year ago since Eric pointed out the need. HYPERLINK "http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2007-January/026707.html" http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2007-January/026707.html This time, hopefully, we might not jump to grasp the obvious and simply look to having ONE portal as the locale of a comms hub. Eric makes a very important point = “There are literally thousands of GROUPS we want to work with in our global strategy to spread (I’d say Share) free knowledge”. It’s this concept which every globalizing .org is contending with right now. How to help globalizing groups (like this one) get together, and give them a place in cyberspace, which doesn’t go away or get buried in a vast domain, and isn’t overwhelmed by the initiated.
If you stay across the conversations at aarnet (the Aussie Academic Research Network) and others, this kind of talk revolves around a (global) peer-to-peer Multicast architecture = strands of nodes which are stung together on demand, and work equally on both directions. WMF networks are halfway there. But the only way I can see progress here is to for WMF project people to have relationships with aarnet’s peers in a few countries so the client/server replacement can be made obvious. For the interested, this is one fat end of the (real time) technology. HYPERLINK "http://www.accessgrid.org/%22http://www.accessgrid.org/
We need to start somewhere, so I’ve put a links down the bottom right of this page. HYPERLINK "http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communication_Projects_Group%22http://meta.wi... imedia.org/wiki/Communication_Projects_Group One to a skypecast room (the input). One to wikipedia weekly’s page (the output). Not happy with skype as it’s really just another network island but, as it comes out of beta, it should help global groups to get the hang of a simple way to talk, stream, record and podcast. Any other suggestions, please just note here. One size will not fit all.
Enough. It should be an interesting year if we can figure out how to filter out the crap and recycle our waters. Happy New Year. simonfj
On 22/12/2007, Jimmy Wales <HYPERLINK "http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l%22jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
I am unsure what we should do about foundation-l. It has become a sewer. It is difficult to balance our very strong desire for an unmoderated forum where people can feel comfortable making strong criticisms (nothing wrong with that!) with a forum where trolls are exhausting a lot of good people and spreading misinformation due to the inability of others to keep up with the sheer volume of malice.
I strongly agree that something needs to change, but I am not sure what.
There are a few things that could happen. 1) Split foundation-l into several mailing lists for different purposes. copyright-l would be a good start. board2community-l may be another. :) 2) Introduce other mediums of communication, to complement or replace mailing lists, such as message boards (forums) or blogs. Forums have the ability to "pin" important topics at the top which could be useful, and also offer an ability to offer feedback on a posts' relevance *without actually replying to the post*. Mailing lists lack this... 3) Introduce more guidelines about what's appropriate in terms of what community members can "demand" from WMF Board and staff, where the "openness" limits lie. I don't think staff should be subject to arbitrary interrogation from mailing lists, maybe with some exception for the ED. Or if the ED is required to write monthly-or-so reports to the mailing list, that could be a good alternative to any interrogation.
cheers Brianna
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