Your idea is a great one, except... I was going to say
"you can't see
the forest for the trees", but actually it's the other way around. I
think you're too focused on the big picture (communicating with the
community) to see that smaller steps can help a great deal.
I haven't seen any small step solution that improves the situation,
though. Unless there's two way communication then it's the WMF telling
people "here's what we're going to do" without any way for them to
give us proper feedback. We can't possibly host discussions with all
of our communities, and it's really unfair to only select the biggest
ones.
Sure, it's great to have lots of peopled involved
in the discussion
leading to a big change, but it's not bad at all to have some people
involved in the decision making, but _everybody_ in the loop about the
decision taken. Think of it as law-making: some people gather, discuss
and take a decision, which is then made public for all interested
parties before it comes into force.
I really feel that the blog is the best place for announcements like
this. At least everyone can give feedback in the comments. It's a
single communication location that has a relatively small amount of
traffic that is very specifically focused on community matters.
As I said to Tilman: don't ignore or postpone
small fixes just because
you're waiting for a great new version sometime in the future.
That's why I recommended the ambassador's route. It's the best interim
solution proposed so far.
If we
can't crowdsource this, then it's never going to happen. This is
how our community scales. We have less people on the entire Wikimedia
staff than we have projects (by a very large number). We can't
possibly hire enough people to properly cover discussions in every
single project.
This makes sense and is probably the right solution for the
Community->WMF channel. However, the 2 directions need not be
perfectly symmetrical. It is far more important for the WMF->Community
channel to be reliable, timely and deliver the message as close to the
destination as possible. There are many reasons for this, the most
important one being that the WMF takes decisions that affect the
community, but not the other way around.
I think the most important thing is to enable the communities to give
feedback. There's a number of decent ways to notify the community of
changes. The blog is likely the easiest route for that.
I think WMF->community communication isn't a good way to handle
things, unless it's simply announcements. Many of the complaints
raised can be linked to poor communication. We need two way
communication.
- Ryan