As announced in my previous response, here are some general concerns about the various committees created through: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolutions

=== Openness ===

The secret to our project-level success has been that we allow ordinary people to do extraordinary things. This distinguishes Wikimedia from other organizations. It is essential that we preserve this principle in our organizational work.

There has been a committee before these new committees; it is the Wikimedia Research Network which I started while I was CRO. This committee is open. Anyone can join, it has public meetings anyone can participate in, and public IRC logs and reports. I hope that we can make these new committees (except for the Executive Committee) similarly open.

That does not mean that every member has to have the same rights and privileges. There can be leaders, a trusted (elected or appointed) core group, and a larger open membership group surrounding the core. There may be meetings which are open to all members, and those which are only open to the core group.

But I hope we all agree that an approach which maximizes openness and participation is desirable. I would very much like to see open meetings about the formation of these committees, open discussions about their purpose, and open reports about their activities. I would appreciate some Board-level oversight to ensure that this openness is preserved.

Are there still documents on the internal wiki or relevant messages on the internal mailing list which have not yet been, but can be publicized? If so, I would appreciate it if this was done.

=== Multiple languages ===

I do not find anything in the resolutions about languages. In fact, as far as I know, all the committee organizers speak English. This is to be expected and perfectly alright. However, as a community which strives to bring knowledge to people in their language, I find it highly important that people are enabled to participate in their language on an international level. (We do enable local participation through the projects and chapters.)

This is a tricky problem, but I believe there are reasonable ways to deal with it. For example, every committee can agree on its most commonly spoken language - in almost all cases, this will be English. Beyond that, it can form language-specific subcommittees that meet separately, and that relay the results of their work through someone who speaks the common language.

This may seem like overkill, but do keep in mind that if we aim for open committees with different levels of authority, we will also end up with fairly large groups, so this will become a real issue. I certainly hope that it will! :-)

=== Multiple projects ===

Among the resolutions, there is a "Special projects" committee which, at the moment, has no definition. I'm not sure if I would call Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, Wikinews and Wikimedia Commons "special projects". (Wikispecies is perhaps one because of its relation to a grant.) Yet, all of these projects have very specific needs.

For example, there have been ideas floating around for Wikinews to work together with journalism schools and radio stations. There's been talk about collaboration between Wikisource and Project Gutenberg / Distributed Proofreaders. And there are about a hundred different possible collaborations actively being explored around Wiktionary and its potential successor, from the European Union's terminology databases to Swahili dictionaries.

It is clear that these partnerships need to be pursued by people close to the projects, who understand their needs and who are in touch with the right people, some of them because of their personal background, others because of their passion.

In all these cases, it would greatly help to have a workgroup that is authorized and tasked with pursuing these partnerships, and that can act in the name of the Wikimedia Foundation, together with the Executive Committee (more on this below).

Wikimedia is much more than just Wikipedia. Therfore, I think it is absolutely necessary to think about forming project-specific committees for each Wikimedia project. I understand "special projects" to be something separate from this - things like grants work, new project proposals like Wikiversity, and other meta collaborations. What do the organizers of the special project committee think about its role?

In line with my earlier comments about the Executive Committee, if we end up with project-specific committees, their leaders could be elected by their communities, legitimizing them and at the same time ensuring their participation on the ExecCom.

=== Clear definitions ===

At the moment, none of these proposed committees has a clear scope or clear definition. There is a communication committee, for example. Communication cannot be compartmentalized; every single committee needs to be able to communicate with the inside and outside world. My concern is that as these definitions are made, there will inevitably be scope conflicts between the committees.

This reinforces my earlier point about the need for openness. Perhaps an open meeting with all committee organizers and interested parties could be organized soon to hammer out the basic definitions, in order to avoid overlap. Angela, Anthere and Jimmy, would you be willing to organize something like this in the near future?

Best,

Erik