[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Research Team: Getting started

[Erik Moeller]

Hi,

in response to my appointment as Chief Research Officer of the Wikimedia 
Foundation, I have put together a page describing this role, as well as 
a potential larger Wikimedia Research Team that I want to form. Please see

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research_Team

for details. To the Board: The proposal is largely unchanged from the 
version I sent you, but it includes a note about what I call 
"semi-official titles". I suggest therein that members of the Team can, 
internally, use certain titles like "WRT Survey Coordinator." Please - 
and that goes for non-Board members as well ;-) - let me know how you 
feel about this idea, I think it could help reduce the impression that 
the "Chief Research Officer" holds special authority over the other 
members, and generally motivate people to join and work in certain roles.

The page includes a list of individuals I'd like to invite to join the 
team; if you feel that anyone is missing from that list, please add 
them. I will extend personal invitations soon, but if you see your name 
on the list right now, please do indicate if you're interested (just 
strike through or remove your name if you're not). Of course, if you 
yourself are interested and not listed there, feel free to add yourself 
to the list of members right away. There's no application procedure -- 
we can always deal with problems as a team if there are any.

I'm copying this to wikitech-l, as I want to encourage the developers to 
take a look at the above page. I want to ensure you that at no point 
will anyone try to tell volunteers what to do, or what code to accept, 
and any assignment to developers paid by Wikimedia will have to be made 
by the Board: the Team only gives recommendations. I also absolutely 
want to encourage any interested developers to join; if there are any 
conflict of interest issues, we can deal with them as they arise. I have 
mainly not listed developers in my list of proposed members because my 
intuition is that most of them are too busy to get involved, but I'd be 
happy to be proven wrong on that count.

I'm sure that some of you will be skeptical about the usefulness of a 
systematic research effort: In the open source world, code is everything 
and words are often considered meaningless. However, I believe strongly 
that analysis should precede implementation, and that volunteer 
development can be combined in useful ways with targeted, task-oriented 
coding. The Research Team also has other roles, but see the page on Meta 
for details.

All best,

Erik