[Foundation-l] We have the problem

[Milos Rancic]

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 11:29 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> When you talk in terms of all singing and dancing council, you talk about
> people who are to be involved in EVERYTHiNG. I feel uncomfortable with this
> notion as it feels like yet another talking shop first and foremost. Compare
> this with how Betawiki works for instance; a new extension is seen as being
> relevant and the people at Betawiki do triage on the software; they make it
> fit the Betawiki environment. A good example is the software Jan-Bart spoke
> about at the WikiMedia Conferentie Nederland from the UNESCO, Siebrand spend
> a lot of time on it already.

A short answer here. There are two different things:

One is related to addressing problems which are not anyone's business.
We built some institutions, some of them we didn't. So, anyone who is
asking for some kind of help has to have luck: is their problem of the
type which has some institution for solving or not. So, there should
be a place and group of people which support that place -- which would
deal with "the rest of the issues".

The other thing is do we need a centralized place for decisions which
affect all projects and communities. I think yes, but it seems that my
view is a minority one. So, as we don't have such place, Wikimedians
are not able to make decisions at that level. As it is a majority view
(majority wants that someone else is making decisions instead of
themselves), practically, I don't have anything against the present
situation.