[Foundation-l] Volunteer Council - A shot for a resolution

[Birgitte SB]

--- Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:


> 
> >  Regarding smaller wikis.  If the Council members
> wish
> >  to make such communities feel heard they can do
> so
> >  without being from that community themselves or
> >  reserving seats for that community.  I don't like
> >  describing the Council in terms of
> representation,
> >  because then people will vote for personal
> >  representatives and this in my mind should be
> more a
> >  working body than a governing body.  There is no
> need
> >  to "govern" wikis, but the wikis do have needs
> that
> >  are not being met by existing structures.
> 
> There are two important roles of the Council which
> requires representation:
> 
> - Communication: person from wiki X hears what are
> the needs of wiki Y
> through this channel. While such communication is
> quite possible, for
> example, here -- I don't remember that I heard here
> anything like
> "contributors of Swahili Wikipedia are talking with
> contributors of
> Maltese Wikipedia about their common needs". By
> giving a duty to some
> contributors to talk, I am sure that we will have at
> least -- more
> talk, more communication.


The duty can also be given to a working group rather
than one Council member. A working group could be
charged with organizing laisons with wiki of level X
activy.  A chat room for each group could be organized
and and a rotating language/topic schedule publicized.
 To foster communication translators would be
recruited as well those knowlegable of specific topics
for the scheduled chats and people would do their best
the rest of the time. There is certainly some number
crunching to be done to catagorize the various wiki
projects into useful groupings.

> - Decisions about common interests and goals: What
> is, for example,
> NPOV to us? A Bible? A sacral code which should be
> copied and
> translated only? If not, who is responsible for its
> development?
> English Wikipedia contributors only? What about some
> other basic
> values (i.e. Five pillars)? What about trash on some
> projects? If we
> want to work on any meta thing we need to have a
> legitimate body to
> make such decisions.
> 

These are decisions that should be left up to
individual wikis. But there should certainly road-maps
developed to give guidance.  I would even hope to see
workshops done on certain topics.  But the idea would
be to educate editors from local communities about the
issue at hand and empower them to improve their own
wiki with the information. Not to decide what is
"trash" on xx.WP and authorise Foo to delete it.

Birgitte SB


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