Anthere wrote:
Now that several people have expressed their feeling
we are non
transparent, I would like that they go further than just stating a
situation, and make suggestions to improve.
Not non-transparent, quite; just not transparent enough. And I'm happy
to try and help think of suggestions.
I have a problem with the equation
board : amount of time spent answering personal mails + amount of time
spend on OTRS + amount of time spent writing board meeting reports +
amount of time spent writing to this list + amount of time spent on
setting up a wikimedia foundation website + amount of time spent
writing Quarto
With
Wikipedians : we are not informed.
It does not fit :-)
Using this framework, I would like to analyze a small part of the problem.
A significant portion of the tasks you mention are important, but do
almost nothing to keep the community informed. Much of this is dealing
with people outside Wikimedia, which is important for public relations,
but not terribly relevant to internal lines of communication. The
Wikimedia website and OTRS particularly fall into this category. Quarto
mixes the two, but given its nature and time schedule, it works best at
the motivational and look-what-we've-accomplished aspects, not so much
the things that require feedback and interaction with the community
(that's not a criticism of the Quarto, I think it's wonderful at what it
does).
You mention answering personal mails. I would guess that again, many of
these deal more with the non-Wikimedia world. And some of the others
probably are just making you waste time in answering. As for the ones
that really are useful, if you answer them, what have you accomplished?
You've informed one person, that's all. The community at large has no
more information than before.
Consider that for this one person who asked, there may well be several
people with the same question who didn't ask. How do you know who they
are? You don't, so instead think about answering more of these questions
publicly, so there's at least a chance the other people will get that
information. I think you can judge which questions warrant public
answers, but I would venture that almost any time you've been asked the
same question twice by different people, you should be making the answer
publicly available.
This mailing list, or another one as appropriate to the topic, can be a
good place to do this, and I won't go into that item from your list
beyond that comment. However, with respect to writing board meeting
reports, other people have mentioned that it would be nice to see logs.
In fact, I would go farther than this - don't write reports at all! Do
less work for a change, because here I think other people can do it for
you. If you post the raw material and simply provide a link, those of us
who are really interested will read the whole thing, and people from
that group can produce a summary for the rest. That's part of the idea
behind a project like the Signpost.
* exactly on which topic do you feel you are not
informed ?
I'll mention one example for now. I've asked a few times on this list
about the progress with direct credit card payment processing (at least
twice, once after the last fundraiser and then following up later). I
don't recall that there was any response. Finally, in the latest board
meeting notes, it's mentioned that this is expected to be ready for the
current fundraiser. But even then, when I go to the fundraising page
right now, this option is still not there.
Well, time is short for all of us, this has been a long message, and
I'll have to wait to say more until later.
--Michael Snow