[Foundation-l] strategic planning IRC office hours

[Samuel Klein]

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 6:44 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> I don't think it's comparable. The Quality Portal was an attempt to
> drive attention towards some existing technologies and initiatives -
>

We have a simple and popular mechanism for creating portals.   Why not ask
the target audience how best to drive our collective attention?



> The strategy process is a year-long, facilitated process with lots of
> planned outputs and deliverables. Importantly, it's also intended for
> people outside the existing community to give input on our five-year
>

What are the planned outputs and deliverables?
It's nice to hear you say five years :)



> The idea of a strategy wiki is more comparable, if anything, to
> <usability.wikimedia.org>, which seems to be working quite well to
> focus attention and discussion.  And again, I don't think merging
>

I thought the reason to have a separate usability wiki was as a showcase for
the new and developing design.  It's only had 100 editors in the past month.

Creating new portals whenever a new project is conceived keeps us from
fixing the real problem I hear you describing : better portal support within
mediawiki, with optoins for focused recentchanges, separate sidebar links,
&c.



> A blank slate can help to ensure that participatory structures are
> understandable.


I'm not sure what you have in mind.  Can we use a specific structure as an
example?

ultimately useful, and perhaps can also help to escape groupthink by
>

You replace one vested group (people already regularly editing the host
wiki) with another (people who split off to found the new wiki).  both run
the risk of 'groupthink' and founder effects.

Another reason to consider a new wiki is that it makes it easier toroll-out
> specific extensions that we want to consider using for thisprocess. Philippe
> has been looking at various talk page extensions,
>

A great topic for public discussion - what's the problem newbies face that's
being solved? Is this also part of the general usability discussion?  which
extensions?

I think that any change designed to make brainstorming and planning more
effective and inclusive would be welcomed by many Meta editors.  (So even if
you do start a new wiki, please offer to implement those tests on meta as
well!)

SJ