[Foundation-l] A question for the Wikimania jury

[Austin Hair]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 5:32 PM, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 6:20 PM, Majorly <axel9891 at googlemail.com> wrote:
>  >  I don't have any issues with the members of the jury, but others might, and
>  >  there's currently no real way to bring up problems.
>
>  I agree with Majorly on this, and maybe this is the root reason why
>  people seem to be so disgruntled with these processes. We've got this
>  closed and secretive selection where a small group are making these
>  sweeping decisions. The "community" (however you choose to define
>  that) isn't given any input in this matter whatsoever. We don't get to
>  help in the decision-making process (except for submitting bids which
>  are judged on unknown criteria), and we don't get to express problems
>  in any orderly way after the fact.

The deliberations may be private, but the process certainly isn't
secretive, and it's not at all the case that others from outside the
jury have no input.

The timeline, with a step-by-step description of the process, can be
found at <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2009>.  There were
two public IRC meetings, and the Q&A pages on meta were open to
anyone, not just members of the jury.  We did see more public
participation with the 2008 bid process, but this was coming straight
out of the 2007 event, when Wikimania was on everyone's minds and
interest was a lot greater.  I'm not aware of any kind of conscious
effort to close out the community for the 2009 selection.

The criteria are very well known, and posted at
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2009/Judging_criteria>.
These, too, were open to comment by the public before being finalized;
in fact, until just now the page still read "This is a work in
progress. Please consider and comment. This list of criteria will be
closed on February 29, 2008."

>  I won't harp on this issue anymore here other then to say, as I say
>  often, that a little bit of openness and communication can go a long
>  way to solving problems.

I and others on the jury have made every effort to explain how we
arrived at our decision, and I continue to do so while reasonable,
productive discussion is still taking place.

Austin