[Foundation-l] Community Assembly

[Chad]

Part of the reason to keep it as it is:

A) It happens so rarely, a committee is hardly called for, and
B) The Board needs to be involved anyway.

Thus, community debate followed by Board approval is the best
method. It's worked thus far, and I would say it can continue to
work.

-Chad

On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 12:50 PM, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/5/14 Chad <innocentkiller at gmail.com>:
>> As I pointed out on Wikipedia Weekly earlier this week (Ep. 49 hasn't come
>> out yet), the Board /must/ be involved in the creation of new projects (note:
>> this is new *projects*, not new *languages*). [...]
>
> More to the point, it'd be overkill to do it any other way
>
> We create new projects very rarely - let's look at the past list.
>
> 2001 - Wikipedia
> 2002 - Wiktionary
> 2003 - Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikisource
> 2004 - *Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews
> 2005 - [nothing]
> 2006 - Wikiversity
> 2007 - [nothing]
> 2008 - [nothing so far]
>
> That's a total of nine projects (omitting incubator and meta, as not
> really standalone projects) - and of those nine, only *one* was
> founded in the last three and a half years.
>
> Because we draw the definitions of our projects so widely, it is
> generally fairly unlikely that a lot more will come along that we want
> to do, and which we can't subsume into an existing project - it's
> unlikely we'll create a Wikirecipies or a Wikilaw or what have you -
> and so whilst I certainly don't rule out there being more, I don't
> imagine we'll see many of them.
>
> Why develop a lot of policy, a lot of structure and committees and so
> on, for something that's likely to only be meaningful once every five
> years or so? We can handle it by the traditional methods - a bunch of
> enthusiasts get together, make a case, get more people, take it to the
> Board - if and when it becomes necessary.
>
> It may not be efficient or ideologically tidy, but it certainly beats
> wasting our time creating a committee that never does anything :-)
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
>
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