[Foundation-l] Options for community organization

[Lars Aronsson]

Milos Rancic wrote:

> - For those who are interested in organizing community, I think 
>   that the best way is to self-organize themselves and start to 
>   work on sensible proposals.

A trade union can organize a strike, a church community can 
organize to build a church, a political party can win an election 
and a guerilla can cause a revolution.  The Wikimedia Foundation 
has organized fundraisers and keep the servers running, with some 
paid staff.  The chapters have organized various exhibitions and 
information outreach events and a running toolserver.  But what is 
"the community" supposed to organize?  What difference in the 
world is this kind of organization supposed to achieve?

> - At the other side, communities should start with 
>   self-organizing their inter-project cooperation at the lower 
>   scale

Individuals and small groups are already participating in more 
than one project, be it Wikipedia+Wikisource, multiple languages 
of Wikipedia, or even Wikipedia+Wikitravel+OpenStreetMap which 
reaches outside of the Wikimedia Foundation. They're already 
talking on each other's IRC channels, mailing lists, village 
pumps, exchanging interwiki links and ideas. How does this need 
any further "organization"?  Why should people need to contact 
you, when they can just start doing these things?  It's as easy as 
editing Wikipedia.

Some things that individuals can't easily do is organizing local 
events of a certain size.  That's what we have chapters for.

> I would like to make a group for initiating self-organizing of
> inter-project coordination.

Pardon?  Why do you make it sound as if all you want is to get the 
role of a bureaucrat, no matter what needs to be done?  Can you 
point to some problems that need to be fixed, instead of just 
pointing to yourself as a solution for a non-existing problem?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se