Berto wrote:
Do you know someone who works at a multinational volunteer collective?
Myself. The Dutch Barge Association is organizing the 2009 Black Sea Rally (from Ireland to Kiev and back by internal waterways and seas). It's very complicated, as it means crossing the Bielorussian border on private boats, and passing 200m away from Chernobyl. For the organization we use... a closed wiki. Over 200 stubs were needed just to map small needs like gas connectors, diesel availability, etc.
Find out what they think the parallels are between their organizations or projects and ours.
- DBA has an external goal. Wiki is a means to us. Here the means coincide
with the end. 2) DBA has but 1400 members (some 800 barges, I believe), a clear internal hyerarchical structure, periodical mass meetings, a paper magazine. Internet is very important to us, but we mostly do our stuff on real water and meet in real life. The whole structure was born as a traditional english "user group" in the 90's, when a growing number of englishmen started to buy old dutch Tjalken and Luxemotors for them to cruise on european inland waters. 3) Projects are largely born much in the way they are born here. If anyone has enough political ability to collect support for a project, than it will eventually become an official thing. 4) While we do actively lobby whenever european laws come to touch our interests, the only funding we request goes to canal dredging and lock-gates maintainance. DBS is fully funded by the 50 quids we pay each every year to get our memberships. 5) The community is keeping a constant eye on whatever happens, I can hardly think of something like META for us. Our village is too small to have unknown districts. 6) We do have minorities (sailing barges). Yes, I'm into minorities even there :) Must be something in my DNA :) 7) Vandalizing pages is potentially dangerous for the life of our members (all it takes is moving navigational data), so we do not accept anonymous contributions. If you are not a member you need a member to grant for you in order to be accepted. 8) There has been a long discussion before accepting to use a wiki for the project. Many people rated wmf as "too chaotic" for them to accept anything coming from here. Yet now consensus is that the wiki is useful, and IMHO it really is. I forced the decision by setting up the wiki myself and emitting the first users. Once it stopped to be a concept and it became "simply a tool" all doubts vanished. I expect another major cruising association to adopt a closed wiki in the next future.
Bèrto
Very interesting. Thnaks for sharing that with us. Ant