On 11/06/2013 12:30 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
Do they consider their roles to be part of a MediaWiki centric meritocracy or a Wikimedia centric meritocracy?
(...)
I also caution against use of the "meritocracy" term, as I think it's pretty loaded and has a history of enabling stagnation and ingraining of cabals and antisocial behavior in free software communities. While I certainly like to think I've earned my fancy title with years of hard work, there are strong social/popularity and random-event components in any kind of ranking like this.
Agreed. I meant "meritocracy" in its unloaded form and I'm happy to use whatever alternative term. A typical open source project has committers and maintainers, roles that we have as well. They also have a release team, which we have as well. Some have a formal project leader (temporary or for life, individual or plural), some have none, as it is our case now.
Is this what this thread is all about? Having a project lead role to make decisions when maintainers alone are not enough?
Wikimedia vs MediaWiki centric... yes, it's complicated--and then again perhaps it's not. In any case, the structure and roles of this project should come from within and be independent from the structure and roles of the WMF.