[Foundation-l] Re: Information flow

[Michael Snow]

Anthere wrote:

> Now that several people have expressed their feeling we are non 
> transparent, I would like that they go further than just stating a 
> situation, and make suggestions to improve.

Not non-transparent, quite; just not transparent enough. And I'm happy 
to try and help think of suggestions.

> I have a problem with the equation
>
> board : amount of time spent answering personal mails + amount of time 
> spend on OTRS + amount of time spent writing board meeting reports + 
> amount of time spent writing to this list + amount of time spent on 
> setting up a wikimedia foundation website + amount of time spent 
> writing Quarto
>
> With
>
> Wikipedians : we are not informed.
>
> It does not fit :-)

Using this framework, I would like to analyze a small part of the problem.

A significant portion of the tasks you mention are important, but do 
almost nothing to keep the community informed. Much of this is dealing 
with people outside Wikimedia, which is important for public relations, 
but not terribly relevant to internal lines of communication. The 
Wikimedia website and OTRS particularly fall into this category. Quarto 
mixes the two, but given its nature and time schedule, it works best at 
the motivational and look-what-we've-accomplished aspects, not so much 
the things that require feedback and interaction with the community 
(that's not a criticism of the Quarto, I think it's wonderful at what it 
does).

You mention answering personal mails. I would guess that again, many of 
these deal more with the non-Wikimedia world. And some of the others 
probably are just making you waste time in answering. As for the ones 
that really are useful, if you answer them, what have you accomplished? 
You've informed one person, that's all. The community at large has no 
more information than before.

Consider that for this one person who asked, there may well be several 
people with the same question who didn't ask. How do you know who they 
are? You don't, so instead think about answering more of these questions 
publicly, so there's at least a chance the other people will get that 
information. I think you can judge which questions warrant public 
answers, but I would venture that almost any time you've been asked the 
same question twice by different people, you should be making the answer 
publicly available.

This mailing list, or another one as appropriate to the topic, can be a 
good place to do this, and I won't go into that item from your list 
beyond that comment. However, with respect to writing board meeting 
reports, other people have mentioned that it would be nice to see logs. 
In fact, I would go farther than this - don't write reports at all! Do 
less work for a change, because here I think other people can do it for 
you. If you post the raw material and simply provide a link, those of us 
who are really interested will read the whole thing, and people from 
that group can produce a summary for the rest. That's part of the idea 
behind a project like the Signpost.

> * exactly on which topic do you feel you are not informed ?

I'll mention one example for now. I've asked a few times on this list 
about the progress with direct credit card payment processing (at least 
twice, once after the last fundraiser and then following up later). I 
don't recall that there was any response. Finally, in the latest board 
meeting notes, it's mentioned that this is expected to be ready for the 
current fundraiser. But even then, when I go to the fundraising page 
right now, this option is still not there.

Well, time is short for all of us, this has been a long message, and 
I'll have to wait to say more until later.

--Michael Snow