2008/9/8 Martin Peeks martinp23@googlemail.com:
Now, I have some questions about this new organisation. Not much information seems to have been forthcoming thus far on the ML (or has been hidden in bickering!), so first I'd ask that the interim board provide (say) weekly reports to us on progress, whether or not there is anything to report, during this initial phase of high momentum. Questions:
- Where are we now?
- Who is involved at the moment and in what capacity?
- What are their plans for the chapter, both short-term and long-term?
Apologies if these have been answered already, but as I say, things have been rather drowned out thus far..
Weekly reports don't seem to me like a successfull strategy for two reasons:
1) If there isn't anything to report in a given week, people are going to be dismayed 2) People will scrape and scrounge to report *anything*, even if it's not really news, just so they don't look like they're not doing anything 3) It doesn't get the larger community involved in the process at all.
I've seen weekly meetings used to far greater effect. Wikimedia Canada was having weekly IRC meetings until they set up milestones and elected a steering committee. Now the steering committee meets regularly through some conference call software (dont remember the name of it) and they hold public IRC meetings regularly but at longer intervals.
Having a meeting instead of just a report gives you the ability to divvy up necessary tasks to willing volunteers who otherwise wouldn't know that such a task even existed. IRC is a great and easily accessible venue for this. I don't know if #Wikimedia-uk exists yet or not of freenode, but it would be trivial to have it set up if not.
--Andrew Whitworth