Hi,
I know that I'm still technically on wikivacation, but I'm beginning to feel full of energy again and want to briefly share my thoughts on the matter of bounties and expenses, which has been hotly debated in the last few days.
First of all, I think that Angela should absolutely go to Paris on the foundation budget. This is not an entertainment trip. This is the first opportunity for Jimbo, Anthere and Angela to sit down together and discuss what will happen in the next few months.
Angela went to Berlin from her own money to observe the creation of the German chapter (with me trying to give her a real-time translation of what was going on), and in Paris she would have a similar opportunity to talk to French Wikimedians about the French chapter, both sharing her own experiences and getting new input. This is exactly what board members should do.
Face-to-face meetings are much more productive than IRC simply because real human interaction has a much higher bandwidth than letters in a window on a computer screen. That was obvious at the WOS in Berlin, as I know that some people are still reeling from the whole experience. ;-) Getting Angela to mingle with the French Wikimedia community will benefit the whole project.
Of course I understand the general objections, but calling foundation- related travel expenses "perks" is ridiculous and offensive. Anthere and Angela are giving a large part of their personal lives to this project at the expense of their career and family. Asking them to either fund their own travel expenses or stay at home undermines the whole purpose of the board, which is to keep an eye on the development of *all* of Wikimedia, and for that it is absolutely necessary to actually meet with real human beings.
It would be a shame if we returned to our usual anglocentric way of doing things while Jimmy is still on his missionary trip through Europe. Wikimedia is an international organization, and real world board meetings should take place in different locations to give Wikimedians from the whole world an opportunity to directly talk to the trustees they voted for. Now just because these experiences might actually be enjoyable to the trustees doesn't mean that they aren't valuable to Wikimedia as a whole as well.
I do believe that funds which were not explicitly designated for the purpose of funding foundation organizational activity should not be permanently used for said purpose. So what we should do is clarify on the donations page how much of the money is going to be used for which purpose.
But we will soon get a check over 10,000 euros from the Prix Ars Electronica award, and that money can be designated by the trustees for various purposes, and a certain amount of it (say 2000 euros) should certainly be designated for organization expenses. Temporarily withdrawing the necessary funds from a non-designated pool until we get the check is not a serious issue.
The key here is that everything is transparent and open. The fact that we are seriously debating whether we should give one of our trustees 400 bucks or so to meet with the elected board and discuss the creation of a new chapter shows quite well that we are already much, much more open than virtually every other organization of the same type.
Now, designating money for org. expenses does not preclude us from doing the same for development expenses. As some of you know, the creation of a development bounty system was a core part of my election platform. From communicating with Jimbo and Angela I got the impression that they share the belief that selectively funding specific tasks would be a good idea. I don't know where Anthere stands on the issue.
Again, we could use a certain amount of money from the Prix Ars Electronica funds for a first test drive (I'd suggest $2000). If it turns out that such a bounty system does more harm than good, we can always stop doing it. It is unlikely that a single experiment will have devastating effects, but it is quite possible that it will lead the way toward a complementary development process.
The key question is how to define priority tasks. Because the developers are the benefactors of such a system it is somewhat dangerous to let them alone make the decision, even if that is done through voting. On the other hand, non-developers often do not have the understanding necessary to make these decisions.
I do not yet have a final answer to this question. For the experiment phase, I think appointing one developer and one technically-minded non- developer who have to reach consensus would be a simple solution. I would like to nominate Tim Starling and Daniel Mayer for these two roles. If Tim doesn't want to do it, I would suggest Jens Frank, who has already said that he wants to leave bounty tasks to others, so he would have a certain level of objectivity.
(I'm not nominating myself because I would consider participating in the bounty system, and because I think I'm a little too biased in favor of certain tasks to be an objective judge.)
Essentially, these two people would be in charge of evaluating "grant proposals", which could be made by anyone (developers or users). In the long term, I believe it would make sense to replace them with an appointed or elected committee, which would have to include at least one leading developer representative with the power to veto certain proposals (for being infeasible, impractical, incompatible etc.).
But again, we should experiment with different approaches.
The amount of money for each task should of course be related to its complexity, and be decided by the bounty managers. The bounty would be paid if the developers and the bounty managers agree that the task has been completed.
Regarding Erik Zachte's remark that $100 is not a lot of money, that is of course correct. However, the purpose of this system is not so much to give participating developers a salary, but to provide a little extra incentive for completing tasks which we all agree need to be done, but which have been largely ignored for months. We can always raise the bounties if it turns out that they are ineffective. $15/hour seems like a reasonable starting value. I know Java programmers who work for less than that.
To preempt the inevitable comment that we don't do the same thing for articles or wikibooks, that's true, but that doesn't mean that we never will. If this bounty system works, it is quite possible that we will try a similar approach to fill important gaps in the various Wikimedia projects. As always, it is of key importance that any such process is open and transparent, and that all funds which are used for this purpose have been designated for it from the start.
With all this talk about expenses, we have to keep in mind that Wikimedia will quite possibly be an organization with a multi-million-dollar budget in just a couple of years. I am very confident that we will be able to raise $100K or more through grassroots donations this year. Like the energy of our content contributors flows into many different areas, the money which is given to Wikimedia should flow wherever it can be usefully and productively spent.
A lot of our money will be going into hardware purchases for quite some time, but it would be irresponsible not to carefully consider and explore other ways in which money can help along our mission of educating humanity.
All best,
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
Face-to-face meetings are much more productive than IRC simply because real human interaction has a much higher bandwidth than letters in a window on a computer screen. That was obvious at the WOS in Berlin, as I know that some people are still reeling from the whole experience. ;-) Getting Angela to mingle with the French Wikimedia community will benefit the whole project.
I disagree with this---meeting with a tiny fraction of the Wikimedia community and making decisions at such meetings is detrimental to the project. Real work and decision-making should be done online, in public, where everyone can participate. If people want to socialize in person, that's fine, but we shouldn't be making decisions at meetings either behind closed doors or at which only a small fraction of Wikimedians are present.
And, I don't think calling such meetings "perks" is an overstatement. I've observed quite a few non-profit meetings, as well as meetings and conferences in academia, and they rarely have much real work being done. They're social and networking events, and the most "real work" that gets done is at best finding out about something that you make a note of to look up and read later. The actual real work gets done via email or telephone (or both) either before or after the conferences. H. Cheney's recent email indicated he's had similar experiences on the non-profit boards he's sat on, so this seems to not simply be my personal experience.
-Mark
Mark,
It's clear your objections run deep -- you seem have a standing problem with the entire idea of a board of trustees that is, well, trusted with the interests of the Wikimedia Foundation. This can be seen also in your strong bias and mistrust concerning the governance of nonprofits. If this is so, your issues are not with the particulars of how we are going about things, but of an entire concept of the board.
However, this community has decided to go ahead with the board, so that designated individuals can spend more time on issues that need it. This includes fundraising and building links among the different wikis, which have both been our weak spot. Your characterization of these meetings as "perks" that happen "behind closed doors" is misleading and disingenuous. No one has suggested anything of the sort, and Wikipedians should have every confidence that things will be open and inclusive.
You've cited H.Cheney's comment, while conveniently leaving out others' (including my own) positive experiences in working with nonprofits and the benefits of face to face meetings for this type of collaboration. The use of "social and networking events" as a pejorative is odd considering Wikipedia is one of the largest social software systems and collaborative projects in the world.
-Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado)
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 02:32:29 -0500, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote:
Face-to-face meetings are much more productive than IRC simply because real human interaction has a much higher bandwidth than letters in a window on a computer screen. That was obvious at the WOS in Berlin, as I know that some people are still reeling from the whole experience. ;-) Getting Angela to mingle with the French Wikimedia community will benefit the whole project.
I disagree with this---meeting with a tiny fraction of the Wikimedia community and making decisions at such meetings is detrimental to the project. Real work and decision-making should be done online, in public, where everyone can participate. If people want to socialize in person, that's fine, but we shouldn't be making decisions at meetings either behind closed doors or at which only a small fraction of Wikimedians are present.
And, I don't think calling such meetings "perks" is an overstatement. I've observed quite a few non-profit meetings, as well as meetings and conferences in academia, and they rarely have much real work being done. They're social and networking events, and the most "real work" that gets done is at best finding out about something that you make a note of to look up and read later. The actual real work gets done via email or telephone (or both) either before or after the conferences. H. Cheney's recent email indicated he's had similar experiences on the non-profit boards he's sat on, so this seems to not simply be my personal experience.
-Mark
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Andrew Lih wrote:
It's clear your objections run deep -- you seem have a standing problem with the entire idea of a board of trustees that is, well, trusted with the interests of the Wikimedia Foundation. This can be seen also in your strong bias and mistrust concerning the governance of nonprofits. If this is so, your issues are not with the particulars of how we are going about things, but of an entire concept of the board.
Oh, having a board is fine, so long as it only handles unimportant things. We decided to have a board initially not because anyone thought it was a good idea, but because the State of Florida requires non-profits to have boards of trustees consisting of five or more people. For one reason or another, Jimbo decided it would be a good show of community participation and democratic fuzziness and whatnot if we elected two of these five members, and so we did.
As a legal matter, the board has authority over the project; as a moral matter, it does not. Jimbo was previously the benevolent dictator, and to a large extent remains so, but he rarely took decisions unilaterally, instead guiding a consensus process and respecting the outcomes of that process even if he occasionally personally would have done things otherwise. I'd expect the board to at the very least do no more than he previously did, and ideally to work to continue the process he starting of devolving decision-making to the community at large.
In short, boards are unwiki, but we are required by law to have one, so we do.
However, this community has decided to go ahead with the board, so that designated individuals can spend more time on issues that need it. This includes fundraising and building links among the different wikis, which have both been our weak spot. Your characterization of these meetings as "perks" that happen "behind closed doors" is misleading and disingenuous. No one has suggested anything of the sort, and Wikipedians should have every confidence that things will be open and inclusive.
I don't see how they will be open and inclusive unless the Foundation is prepared to pay for hundreds of Wikipedians to attend them. If they involve only a minutely small percentage of the users, then they are worse than no meeting at all, and bias decision-making towards those with the resources to attend.
You've cited H.Cheney's comment, while conveniently leaving out others' (including my own) positive experiences in working with nonprofits and the benefits of face to face meetings for this type of collaboration. The use of "social and networking events" as a pejorative is odd considering Wikipedia is one of the largest social software systems and collaborative projects in the world.
Wikipedia is indeed a social and collaborative system, but it takes place online, on a large scale. If the Foundation can come up with funding so that any significant subset of its users can meet somewhere, or even any significant subset of one of its language encyclopedias can meet, I would not object to that. However, so far there have been no proposals for that, only proposals for small cliques of users to meet, which I feel is detrimental to the project on a whole. All important work should take place online, in public, with as full participation as possible, not take place behind closed doors and then reported after the fact.
As for other comments on travel reimbursements as a good thing, one of them even cited EU-funded projects, which are pretty notorious for being full of wasteful perks (http://www.iht.com/articles/521419.html among thousands of related articles).
-Mark
--- Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Oh, having a board is fine, so long as it only handles unimportant things. We decided to have a board initially not because anyone thought it was a good idea, but because the State of Florida requires non-profits to have boards of trustees consisting of five or more people. For one reason or another, Jimbo decided it would be a good show of community participation and democratic fuzziness and whatnot if we elected two of these five members, and so we did.
Yeah - unimportant things such as making sure we have servers and they keep running. Unimportant things such as setting up chapters and other outreach efforts. Unimportant things like creating a CD/printed version. Unimportant things such as hiring an on-site server admin. Utterly unimportant things such as having representative members with the ability to help make this all happen. Sure - all very unimportant. "Democratic fuzziness" ?? What are you smoking?
... I don't see how they will be open and inclusive unless the Foundation is prepared to pay for hundreds of Wikipedians to attend them. If they involve only a minutely small percentage of the users, then they are worse than no meeting at all, and bias decision-making towards those with the resources to attend.
Have you been listening? My idea is to have quarterly meetings in different parts of the world that will hosted by a different Wikimedia chapter each time. The trustees thus come to the users. Our elected representatives and Jimbo should be there. The meetings will also be conducted in *real time* online via audio/video streaming (which can be had fairly cheaply nowadays).
Wikipedia is indeed a social and collaborative system, but it takes place online, on a large scale.
So I guess you are against the idea of Wikimedia chapters as well.
If the Foundation can come up with funding so that any significant subset of its users can meet somewhere, or even any significant subset of one of its language encyclopedias can meet, I would not object to that. However, so far there have been no proposals for that, only proposals for small cliques of users to meet, which I feel is detrimental to the project on a whole. All important work should take place online, in public, with as full participation as possible, not take place behind closed doors and then reported after the fact.
'Cliques' - can you be more offensive? The meetings *will* be very public (see above). Why would you assume anything else? You are making the improper conclusion that real world = closed door.
As for other comments on travel reimbursements as a good thing, one of them even cited EU-funded projects, which are pretty notorious for being full of wasteful perks (http://www.iht.com/articles/521419.html among thousands of related articles).
Perks my ass - having the elected trustees visit the people they represent while at the same time conducting quarterly meetings are all very important. Only so much can be done online and with computers - the human element is not present and thus a great deal of communication is lost.
-- mav
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Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Oh, having a board is fine, so long as it only handles unimportant things. We decided to have a board initially not because anyone thought it was a good idea, but because the State of Florida requires non-profits to have boards of trustees consisting of five or more people. For one reason or another, Jimbo decided it would be a good show of community participation and democratic fuzziness and whatnot if we elected two of these five members, and so we did.
Yeah - unimportant things such as making sure we have servers and they keep running. Unimportant things such as setting up chapters and other outreach efforts. Unimportant things like creating a CD/printed version. Unimportant things such as hiring an on-site server admin. Utterly unimportant things such as having representative members with the ability to help make this all happen. Sure - all very unimportant. "Democratic fuzziness" ?? What are you smoking?
No, the board emphatically should not handle any of those things you listed. These are decisions to be made by the Wikimedia community, not a committee. Top-down committee decisions are not the wiki way of doing things.
... I don't see how they will be open and inclusive unless the Foundation is prepared to pay for hundreds of Wikipedians to attend them. If they involve only a minutely small percentage of the users, then they are worse than no meeting at all, and bias decision-making towards those with the resources to attend.
Have you been listening? My idea is to have quarterly meetings in different parts of the world that will hosted by a different Wikimedia chapter each time. The trustees thus come to the users. Our elected representatives and Jimbo should be there. The meetings will also be conducted in *real time* online via audio/video streaming (which can be had fairly cheaply nowadays).
How are they going to come to the users? Are they going to have thousands of meetings? It would take about 5-10 meetings in the US alone to come within range of a decent majority of users, another 10-15 in Europe, 5-10 in Asia, and so on.
Wikipedia is indeed a social and collaborative system, but it takes place online, on a large scale.
So I guess you are against the idea of Wikimedia chapters as well.
No, having local chapters to make tax deductions work more smoothly is perfectly fine.
If the Foundation can come up with funding so that any significant subset of its users can meet somewhere, or even any significant subset of one of its language encyclopedias can meet, I would not object to that. However, so far there have been no proposals for that, only proposals for small cliques of users to meet, which I feel is detrimental to the project on a whole. All important work should take place online, in public, with as full participation as possible, not take place behind closed doors and then reported after the fact.
'Cliques' - can you be more offensive? The meetings *will* be very public (see above). Why would you assume anything else? You are making the improper conclusion that real world = closed door.
Real world by definition means only a small group of users will participate in the decision-making.
As for other comments on travel reimbursements as a good thing, one of them even cited EU-funded projects, which are pretty notorious for being full of wasteful perks (http://www.iht.com/articles/521419.html among thousands of related articles).
Perks my ass - having the elected trustees visit the people they represent while at the same time conducting quarterly meetings are all very important. Only so much can be done online and with computers - the human element is not present and thus a great deal of communication is lost.
How are they going to visit the people they represent? They represent people spread out over the entire world. Unless we are going to give them a travel budget up in the millions, and have them spend weeks per year travelling, that's simply impossible.
Plus, I don't really see it as "people they represent" anyway. The people represent themselves, and ought to make the decisions themselves, preferably through some sort of consensus-based system, with a voting-based system as a fallback.
-Mark
--- Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
No, the board emphatically should not handle any of those things you listed. These are decisions to be made by the Wikimedia community, not a committee. Top-down committee decisions are not the wiki way of doing things.
The 'committees' you talk about will be almost entirely composed of non-board members. But the board provides the legal and financial backbone. Somebody has to sign the checks and somebody has to be held responsible for making sure progress is being made on projects. That is where the board comes in.
How are they going to come to the users? Are they going to have thousands of meetings? It would take about 5-10 meetings in the US alone to come within range of a decent majority of users, another 10-15 in Europe, 5-10 in Asia, and so on.
Individual users would travel to the meetings. A day of driving or on a train can cover a large geographic area. Other international groups also rotate where they meet in order to cover as much of the world as possible. But creating these kind of ties is needed for the long-term survival of the foundation.
No, having local chapters to make tax deductions work more smoothly is perfectly fine.
Wow - how very minimal. Like it or not but chapters are going to be much more than that.
Real world by definition means only a small group of users will participate in the decision-making.
No it does not. Anybody who is interested can help with the work. The trustees are also elected representatives so they already have the authority to make decisions as needed and with the consultation of the membership. Again, this is true if you like it or not.
-- mav
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Daniel Mayer wrote:
How are they going to come to the users? Are they going to have thousands of meetings? It would take about 5-10 meetings in the US alone to come within range of a decent majority of users, another 10-15 in Europe, 5-10 in Asia, and so on.
Individual users would travel to the meetings. A day of driving or on a train can cover a large geographic area. Other international groups also rotate where they meet in order to cover as much of the world as possible. But creating these kind of ties is needed for the long-term survival of the foundation.
I'm not sure you realize how big the world is---a day of driving or on a train covers a miniscule fraction of the world. Covering even 80% of Wikimedians within a day's train or car distance would require on the order of hundreds of meetings. In the US alone, it would require meetings in: * Some city in the northeast (Boston, NYC, etc.) * Seattle * Chicago * One of San Francisco, Los Angeles, or San Diego * Phoenix * One of Houston, Austin, or Dallas * Atlanta * Denver * Somewhere in Florida
Of course we would also need meetings in Canada, 2-3 countries in northern europe, 2-3 countries in eastern and southern europe, Korea, the PRC (at least a few cities), the ROC, Singapore, South Africa, Israel, Turkey, Russia (probably multiple cities), Egypt, Brazil, Argentina, Australia ... and those are just a bare-bones start.
So I really don't see how regular meetings with a significant portion of the membership could possibly be a feasible option even in the long term, unless perhaps suddenly plane flight becomes dirt-cheap, or Wikimedia becomes willing to fund travel of ordinary users to the meetings.
-Mark
--- Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I'm not sure you realize how big the world is---a day of driving or on a train covers a miniscule fraction of the world. Covering even 80% of Wikimedians within a day's train or car distance would require on the order of hundreds of meetings. In the US alone, it would require meetings in:
- Some city in the northeast (Boston, NYC, etc.)
- Seattle
- Chicago
- One of San Francisco, Los Angeles, or San Diego
- Phoenix
- One of Houston, Austin, or Dallas
- Atlanta
- Denver
- Somewhere in Florida
My partner and I have driven all over the western part of the U.S. so I'm well aware of travel times (Sacramento to Yellowstone in 17 hours, Sacramento to the Grand Canyon in 14 - no problem at all when you have more than one driver). For example, a single meeting in Northern California/Southern Oregon would cover the entire western seaboard of the U.S. and much of the interior west. A few more meetings would cover the rest of the nation. Part of the meet-up process will be to carpool, expanding the range that any auto can cover in a day.
Of course we would also need meetings in Canada, 2-3 countries in northern europe, 2-3 countries in eastern and southern europe, Korea, the PRC (at least a few cities), the ROC, Singapore, South Africa, Israel, Turkey, Russia (probably multiple cities), Egypt, Brazil, Argentina, Australia ... and those are just a bare-bones start.
So why the defeatist attitude? Just because the Olympics can only be in one nation every four years does not mean that rotating where it is held is a bad idea (same thing for EVERY international organization that rotates where its meetings are held). The foundation will persist for a very long time, giving ample opportunity (4 times a year every year) for all regions of the world to be covered. As with the Olympics, we could have competitions about where to have the next meeting; chapters would have to demonstrate that they can secure the facilities necessary to conduct the meeting and perhaps even help with the travel expenses of the trustees. I foresee these meetings as opportunities to energize the membership and act as launching pads for fund drives and special projects.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 17:15:25 -0700 (PDT), Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
--- Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
No, the board emphatically should not handle any of those things you listed. These are decisions to be made by the Wikimedia community, not a committee. Top-down committee decisions are not the wiki way of doing things.
The 'committees' you talk about will be almost entirely composed of non-board members. But the board provides the legal and financial backbone. Somebody has to sign the checks and somebody has to be held responsible for making sure progress is being made on projects. That is where the board comes in.
To amplify this - don't forget the bulk of Wikipedia is being supported by Jimbo/Bomis resources given for free. This cannot last in the long term. Colocation, bandwidth, electricity, hardware and labor are all donated by them because of their kindness, but this is not sustainable or robust. We need to plan right now while Wikipedia is in a state of financial and social healh. This is exactly the time to have designees think about how to achieve this. It is not abandoning wiki principles by imbuing individuals with the responsibility of overseeing this process. The bills have to be paid to keep the project going.
These were all issues that were brought up during the face-to-face Wikimeetup in London, and something several of the Wikipedians discussed over dinner. The conversations were never to hijack the decision-making as the "cabal" of individuals who happened to be there. The question of "What would the community think about this?" was ever-present.
That's what the Trustees vote was for - to designate those individuals with this responsibility. The vision statements, candidate positions and discussion during the election indicate most people feel it was more than simply to satisfy the letter of the law.
-Andrew
On 06/22/04 at 02:32 AM, Delirium delirium@hackish.org said:
And, I don't think calling such meetings "perks" is an overstatement. I've observed quite a few non-profit meetings, as well as meetings and conferences in academia, and they rarely have much real work being done. They're social and networking events, and the most "real work" that gets done is at best finding out about something that you make a note of to look up and read later. The actual real work gets done via email or telephone (or both) either before or after the conferences. H. Cheney's recent email indicated he's had similar experiences on the non-profit boards he's sat on, so this seems to not simply be my personal experience.
I think these comments reflect a grave misunderstanding of the importance of meetings.
In the past, I've been involved in a number of EU-funded projects among at times quite disparate participants, and it was always a given that such projects -- after being approved for funding -- got off to a start with a meeting with everyone involved. Sometimes this was the only time the participants met; they then went back to their respective countries and spent the duration of the project working in their offices and communicating by email and telephone. But that initial face-to-face was critical; it isn't something that can be measured in cold person/hour metrics but rather reflects some as yet not entirely well-understood psychological truth: long-distance, distributed projects work better when the participants have first met.
If Jimbo, Anthere, and Angela will be working closely together in the coming months and years, as appears to be the case, than it is entirely appropriate, no, *imperative* that they meet each other. I would therefore be in favor of Angela being reimbursed for her travel expenses to attend the Paris meeting.
V.
Viajero wrote:
In the past, I've been involved in a number of EU-funded projects among at times quite disparate participants, and it was always a given that such projects -- after being approved for funding -- got off to a start with a meeting with everyone involved. Sometimes this was the only time the participants met; they then went back to their respective countries and spent the duration of the project working in their offices and communicating by email and telephone. But that initial face-to-face was critical; it isn't something that can be measured in cold person/hour metrics but rather reflects some as yet not entirely well-understood psychological truth: long-distance, distributed projects work better when the participants have first met.
It is possible meetings can sometimes be helpful. However, they can be helpful in a number of cases:
* Wikipedians collaborating on writing an article meet to draw out an outline, or hammer out differences, or otherwise work on the article in person * Wikipedians researching an article visit national archives, national libraries, organizations' offices, embassies, or various other sources of information * Developers installing a new set of servers visit the colocation facility to do so in person * Developers working on software meet to draw up a design over a weekend, rather than back and forth over email * The board of trustees meets, as discussed
Of these five possibilities, which are only five of many, I don't see the last one as the most important, yet no one so far has proposed funding any of the previous four. Given that our primary project is currently an encyclopedia, I think if we are to fund any travel, it ought to first be that travel that contributes most directly to producing a high-quality encyclopedia. Therefore, if we are to have a travel fund, it ought to pay researchers and article writers. (The details, of course, are subject to debate.)
-Mark
On 06/22/04 07:32, Delirium wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote:
Face-to-face meetings are much more productive than IRC simply because real human interaction has a much higher bandwidth than letters in a window on a computer screen. That was obvious at the WOS in Berlin, as I know that some people are still reeling from the whole experience. ;-) Getting Angela to mingle with the French Wikimedia community will benefit the whole project.
I disagree with this---meeting with a tiny fraction of the Wikimedia community and making decisions at such meetings is detrimental to the project. Real work and decision-making should be done online, in public, where everyone can participate. If people want to socialize in person, that's fine, but we shouldn't be making decisions at meetings either behind closed doors or at which only a small fraction of Wikimedians are present.
It's getting ideas flying back and forth at high bandwidth. Based on the London wikimeet, just all being in one place supplied piles of good ideas and the energy to do something about them. I really do think you're completely wrong here.
And, I don't think calling such meetings "perks" is an overstatement. I've observed quite a few non-profit meetings, as well as meetings and conferences in academia, and they rarely have much real work being done. They're social and networking events, and the most "real work" that gets done is at best finding out about something that you make a note of to look up and read later. The actual real work gets done via email or telephone (or both) either before or after the conferences. H. Cheney's recent email indicated he's had similar experiences on the non-profit boards he's sat on, so this seems to not simply be my personal experience.
My personal experience of a wikimeet says otherwise. (My anecdote can beat up your anecdote.)
- d.
Delirium wrote:
I disagree with this---meeting with a tiny fraction of the Wikimedia community and making decisions at such meetings is detrimental to the project. Real work and decision-making should be done online, in public, where everyone can participate. If people want to socialize in person, that's fine, but we shouldn't be making decisions at meetings either behind closed doors or at which only a small fraction of Wikimedians are present.
I think you may have not understood what a board exactly is.
Anthere wrote:
Delirium wrote:
I disagree with this---meeting with a tiny fraction of the Wikimedia community and making decisions at such meetings is detrimental to the project. Real work and decision-making should be done online, in public, where everyone can participate. If people want to socialize in person, that's fine, but we shouldn't be making decisions at meetings either behind closed doors or at which only a small fraction of Wikimedians are present.
I think you may have not understood what a board exactly is.
I know what a board is, but I disagree that we should have one running significant parts of Wikimedia projects. Hierarchical top-down control is the exact opposite of the wiki way of doing things.
We do of course need a board for legal reasons, and the board may need to make some decisions. But it should not be running the project, and when it does make decisions, it should do so as openly and publicly as possible, in consultation with the normal consensus-based method of decision-making we use.
-Mark
--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
.... Face-to-face meetings are much more productive than IRC simply because real human interaction has a much higher bandwidth than letters in a window on a computer screen. That was obvious at the WOS in Berlin, as I know that some people are still reeling from the whole experience. ;-) Getting Angela to mingle with the French Wikimedia community will benefit the whole project.
I totally agree with this. Especially at this point it is very important to create ties among various Wikimedians. Yes this is in part socializing, but that is *vitally* important when forming (or keeping together) any organization. It is absurd and dangerous to just discount that as a "perk."
Also, I forgot the exact percentage, but more than half of all human communication is from body language and verbal patterns/tone so we cannot only depend on web-based communication. A mix is needed (esp for the trustees). Paying travel expenses for quarterly meetings seems to be most reasonable. Each quarterly meeting could be hosted by a different Wikimedia chapter from a different part of the world - thus forming a strong tie between the foundation and its chapters. Meetings in-between quarterly ones can be conducted via less expensive means.
.... I do believe that funds which were not explicitly designated for the purpose of funding foundation organizational activity should not be permanently used for said purpose. So what we should do is clarify on the donations page how much of the money is going to be used for which purpose.
What we need is a budget that spells this out. A link could then be provided for those interested in how the foundation plans to spend their donation money.
But we will soon get a check over 10,000 euros from the Prix Ars Electronica award, and that money can be designated by the trustees for various purposes, and a certain amount of it (say 2000 euros) should certainly be designated for organization expenses. Temporarily withdrawing the necessary funds from a non-designated pool until we get the check is not a serious issue.
Exactly - those funds can be used for travel, special projects, and software bounties.
... I do not yet have a final answer to this question. For the experiment phase, I think appointing one developer and one technically-minded non- developer who have to reach consensus would be a simple solution. I would like to nominate Tim Starling and Daniel Mayer for these two roles. If Tim doesn't want to do it, I would suggest Jens Frank, who has already said that he wants to leave bounty tasks to others, so he would have a certain level of objectivity.
Nod. I'll accept if asked by the board to do this. But, IMO, this should be part of an official Wikimedia committee so a trustee will have to be a member as well. Angela seems to be the obvious choice.
... Regarding Erik Zachte's remark that $100 is not a lot of money, that is of course correct. However, the purpose of this system is not so much to give participating developers a salary, but to provide a little extra incentive for completing tasks which we all agree need to be done, but which have been largely ignored for months. We can always raise the bounties if it turns out that they are ineffective. $15/hour seems like a reasonable starting value. I know Java programmers who work for less than that.
The amount of money is not as important as the recognition that the winner accomplished the task - IMO. The award is more than just some cash. But the cash is still a tangible thing and thus adds a great deal of 'realness' to the award (however "nominal" 100 bucks may be - in India that is two weeks wages for a tech support rep while in the U.S. it is a days wages for the same work). A page tracking who brought in what bounties would be a good way to encourage use of the system.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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Erik Moeller schrieb:
Again, we could use a certain amount of money from the Prix Ars Electronica funds for a first test drive (I'd suggest $2000). If it turns out that such a bounty system does more harm than good, we can always stop doing it. It is unlikely that a single experiment will have devastating effects, but it is quite possible that it will lead the way toward a complementary development process.
Before starting a test drive we need a way to measure the harm done. The problem is that the psychological effects might take time. Maybe it'll take half a year before we realize that most programmers are waiting for new bounties before starting the dirty programming work, and only very few are still working for free, but only because they need this or that feature for their own wiki installation.
I'm not against a bounty system, just a bit skeptic. I fear that after the first test drive the people in favor of it will point to the tasks done and the skeptics will just have their premonition but no way to prove it.
Kurt
I already sent this mail five hours ago, but it seems to have gotten lost somewhere.
Erik Moeller schrieb:
Again, we could use a certain amount of money from the Prix Ars Electronica
funds for a first test drive (I'd suggest $2000). If it turns out that such a bounty system does more harm than good, we can always stop doing it. It is unlikely that a single experiment will have devastating effects, but it is quite possible that it will lead the way toward a complementary development process.
Before starting a test drive we need a way to measure the harm done. The problem is that the psychological effects might take time. Maybe it'll take half a year before we realize that most programmers are waiting for new bounties before starting the dirty programming work, and only very few are still working for free, but only because they need this or that feature for their own wiki installation.
I'm not against a bounty system, just a bit skeptic. I fear that after the first test drive the people in favor of it will point to the tasks done and the skeptics will just have their premonition but no way to prove it.
Kurt
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