Dear all,
as some of you might have noticed, there was a discussion scheduled during Wikimania about the volunteer council. The discussion was well visited, with 40-50 attendees (all seats were taken and some people standing in the back) I lead this discussion, and would like to give a little follow up on it.
First of all, I would like to shortly summarize what I think were the most important conclusions from this discussion. Please note that when I say agreed, I did not mean this was a formal decision, but a common agreement between the attending people in that particular part of the discussion. This has no binding status, but should be seen as a clear indication of what might be consensus on a wider scale as well.
Everybody agreed that there was actually a need for a volunteer council. Now that the Board takes more distance, the staff is professionalizing, there is a gap that is becoming wider and wider, about community regulation. Ideally, this would be filled by the community. Besides that, it was noted that the communication between the staff and board on one side and the community at large on the other side could be improved a lot.
Besides that, it was also agreed that it would not be workable to let a small committee (council) do everything we would like it to do. It is unlikely that a small group of people can maintain contact with a large number of communities, and solve all the issues which might require more specialized and dedicated working groups. It was suggested to come up with several councils for all these tasks, but after a while it was more or less widely agreed upon that it would probably be most workable to have one council, which would appoint working groups or committees (temporary or continuous) to take care of specific issues.
It was also agreed that since the Board rejected the resolution, the only option left over now is a grass roots council, that would have to proof itself and has to grow into it's role.
It was suggested to have a mechanism to have people from all communities, and have a trapped system leading to the final council. This could for instance be with a Wikipedia council, or a Spanish language council etc, which would together choose a Wikimedia Volunteer Council. This was a heavily discussed subject.
For so far the summary.
My personal view here is that I am glad we agreed all that there is an actual need. Even taking into consideration that there was a bias in the audience, I believe that this could be sufficient ground to assume consensus on this without having all kinds of votings. My other view here is "keep it simple". Especially in the beginning, we should have a very very simple model for the council. Otherwise it is impossible to gain sufficient support for it. I also see now that grass root is the only option left over. These grass root members should work out some of the details as they go, and should start within a few months if possible. (to keep momentum)
Right now, I see little added value for a voting process. I would appreciate some input on that though. I believe that for the initial members, we don't need popular wikipedians, we don't need icons, we need stable and available people, who are willing to cooperate and compromise, who are willing to coordinate and communicate, who are willing to share and listen to the community. What we need is a wide variety of volunteers. Not per se in gender and nationality, or even language, but more in opinions and ways of thinking. We need some people who are active in the chapters, but also who are not so active there, we need a technical volunteer, we need someone involved with wiki approval policies perhaps, we need someone who is active in the stewards corner, some people who are speaking a non-english language and many other criteria. We will most likely not be able to create a full variety, but my personal belief is that we should try to work this out as much as possible.
The next step would be, in my humble opinion, analog to the creation of the enwiki arbcom, which was also initially appointed. Elections every XX months for a part of the council. This would be up to the council actually to decide upon probably, but I see unfortunately not many other ways to keep the community directly involved in this process. The exact details would have to be worked out later on of course.
For all this, we would need someone to guide these processes. We need someone more or less neutral (not a candidate or staff member for instance) to set up such a group, and help to work to a set of definitions and goals. After that, it is up to the council to work things out.
Another option is to appoint the group of people I selected earlier on for the Provisional Council resolution, and keep things moving of course :)
I would appreciate some input of course. However, please be aware that this is a raw draft of what I think here, but that it has been built upon the many many discussions that have been there.
With kind regards,
Lodewijk
Besides that, it was also agreed that it would not be workable to let a small committee (council) do everything we would like it to do. It is unlikely that a small group of people can maintain contact with a large number of communities, and solve all the issues which might require more specialized and dedicated working groups. It was suggested to come up with several councils for all these tasks, but after a while it was more or less widely agreed upon that it would probably be most workable to have one council, which would appoint working groups or committees (temporary or continuous) to take care of specific issues.
I can certainly agree strongly with this. There are lots of ideas about what this body should/would/could do, but I don't believe we can devise a single body to perform such a varied and burdensome set of tasks. Having a body to create councils for specific issues seems like a very reasonable method of solving this issue. Creation of such sub-councils would scale reasonably well, and would be able to make good use of expertise in particular areas.
I look forward to other comments on this issue in particular.
Mike.lifeguard
Thank you for the report, Lodewijk.
effe iets anders wrote:
I believe that for the initial members, we don't need popular wikipedians, we don't need icons, we need stable and available people, who are willing to cooperate and compromise, who are willing to coordinate and communicate, who are willing to share and listen to the community. What we need is a wide variety of volunteers. Not per se in gender and nationality, or even language, but more in opinions and ways of thinking. We need some people who are active in the chapters, but also who are not so active there, we need a technical volunteer, we need someone involved with wiki approval policies perhaps, we need someone who is active in the stewards corner, some people who are speaking a non-english language and many other criteria. We will most likely not be able to create a full variety, but my personal belief is that we should try to work this out as much as possible.
This makes a lot of sense to me. I would even say that variety of opinions is not so much what you're describing as variety of experience. A variety of opinions is rarely something we lack, but often different experiences are missing. There are so many ways to be involved in Wikimedia, none of us can really touch all of them. Being able to hear from them, so we know when a particular interest is affected, would be valuable. Knowing which people to talk to when you want to get the perspective of that experience also helps. And as you mention, sometimes the differences are around languages or projects, but more often they arise as we specialize within the larger universe of whatever project we're working on.
--Michael Snow
I took part on this session on the WikiMania in Alexandria. As far as I can remember, there were still a lot of very fundamental things that was unclear. Some of these fundamental questions were far from in a state of consensus. I remember that the discussion broke up because we ran out of time.
The following are some of these fundamental questions that I don't think the session had got a consensus answer:
1) What is the purpose of such a council? What should it do? What can it improve? What is its duty? As far as I remember there were various ideals and oppinions on what it means "to represent the community". 2) How should such a council be created? One idea was that this is a council with every project elect one representative on it. But there were also other ideas.
I think that before these questions are really answered and agreed a further move is difficult. And I am not sure if even all people who took part of the session read this mailing list ...
Ting
-------- Original-Nachricht --------
Datum: Sat, 2 Aug 2008 12:17:03 +0200 Von: "effe iets anders" effeietsanders@gmail.com An: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Betreff: [Foundation-l] Volunteer Council - some thoughts after a discussion on Wikimania
Dear all,
as some of you might have noticed, there was a discussion scheduled during Wikimania about the volunteer council. The discussion was well visited, with 40-50 attendees (all seats were taken and some people standing in the back) I lead this discussion, and would like to give a little follow up on it.
First of all, I would like to shortly summarize what I think were the most important conclusions from this discussion. Please note that when I say agreed, I did not mean this was a formal decision, but a common agreement between the attending people in that particular part of the discussion. This has no binding status, but should be seen as a clear indication of what might be consensus on a wider scale as well.
Everybody agreed that there was actually a need for a volunteer council. Now that the Board takes more distance, the staff is professionalizing, there is a gap that is becoming wider and wider, about community regulation. Ideally, this would be filled by the community. Besides that, it was noted that the communication between the staff and board on one side and the community at large on the other side could be improved a lot.
Besides that, it was also agreed that it would not be workable to let a small committee (council) do everything we would like it to do. It is unlikely that a small group of people can maintain contact with a large number of communities, and solve all the issues which might require more specialized and dedicated working groups. It was suggested to come up with several councils for all these tasks, but after a while it was more or less widely agreed upon that it would probably be most workable to have one council, which would appoint working groups or committees (temporary or continuous) to take care of specific issues.
It was also agreed that since the Board rejected the resolution, the only option left over now is a grass roots council, that would have to proof itself and has to grow into it's role.
It was suggested to have a mechanism to have people from all communities, and have a trapped system leading to the final council. This could for instance be with a Wikipedia council, or a Spanish language council etc, which would together choose a Wikimedia Volunteer Council. This was a heavily discussed subject.
For so far the summary.
My personal view here is that I am glad we agreed all that there is an actual need. Even taking into consideration that there was a bias in the audience, I believe that this could be sufficient ground to assume consensus on this without having all kinds of votings. My other view here is "keep it simple". Especially in the beginning, we should have a very very simple model for the council. Otherwise it is impossible to gain sufficient support for it. I also see now that grass root is the only option left over. These grass root members should work out some of the details as they go, and should start within a few months if possible. (to keep momentum)
Right now, I see little added value for a voting process. I would appreciate some input on that though. I believe that for the initial members, we don't need popular wikipedians, we don't need icons, we need stable and available people, who are willing to cooperate and compromise, who are willing to coordinate and communicate, who are willing to share and listen to the community. What we need is a wide variety of volunteers. Not per se in gender and nationality, or even language, but more in opinions and ways of thinking. We need some people who are active in the chapters, but also who are not so active there, we need a technical volunteer, we need someone involved with wiki approval policies perhaps, we need someone who is active in the stewards corner, some people who are speaking a non-english language and many other criteria. We will most likely not be able to create a full variety, but my personal belief is that we should try to work this out as much as possible.
The next step would be, in my humble opinion, analog to the creation of the enwiki arbcom, which was also initially appointed. Elections every XX months for a part of the council. This would be up to the council actually to decide upon probably, but I see unfortunately not many other ways to keep the community directly involved in this process. The exact details would have to be worked out later on of course.
For all this, we would need someone to guide these processes. We need someone more or less neutral (not a candidate or staff member for instance) to set up such a group, and help to work to a set of definitions and goals. After that, it is up to the council to work things out.
Another option is to appoint the group of people I selected earlier on for the Provisional Council resolution, and keep things moving of course :)
I would appreciate some input of course. However, please be aware that this is a raw draft of what I think here, but that it has been built upon the many many discussions that have been there.
With kind regards,
Lodewijk
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I think you should be careful in assuming that consensus is established, or even indicated, based on an amorphous discussion at Wikimania (of which there is, presumably, no record) composed of 40-50 people. The simple fact is that the attendees are not necessarily representative of the whole community, and as Ting's post demonstrates the outcome is detabale in any case.
If you want to organize people with a common vision and begin working to solve some problems you have identified, I don't think anyone would have a problem with that - similar, essentially, to the way the Mediation Committee and the Mediation Cabal work on en.wikipedia. What is puzzling, and where the agreement starts to break down, is the persistent desire for an official imprimatur or other mechanism to confer interwiki authority for the volunteer council. You're absolutely entitled to setup a process for arriving at solutions to problems where the authority required is no more than that conferred by the consent of the parties, but beyond that you need to demonstrate a community consensus. Wikimania discussions typically don't work for that purpose.
Nathan
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org