[Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness

[Quim Gil]

On Tue, 2011-04-12 at 10:36 -0700, ext Sue Gardner wrote:
> We do all see the world from where we sit, and we interact with the
> people we already know ... so, experienced editors will be more
> exposed to the kinds of concerns shared by other experienced editors,
> and those concerns will instinctively resonate more for them.

Fully agree. About "from where we sit", 5 and 10 years ago Wikimedia was
basically 'a sitting user experience' both for readers and contributors,
just like any other online project at that time. This defines the vocal
community we have today, but things have changed and now communities
like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and etc can't be conceived without all
the users and contributors doing whatever NOT sitting in front of a
computer.

In fact Wikimedia content is also popular among mobile users (directly
or through apps), but what about mobile contributions?

After a decade swimming in free software development communities one
can't avoid seeing the parallelism on this and on another important
topic:

- Editing is not the only way of contributing, therefore it's good to
think explicitly of 'contributors' beyond 'editors', and think of
contributions that don't require editing.

Which is parallel to the well known

- Developing is not the only way of contributing, therefore it's good to
think explicitly of 'contributors' beyond 'developers', and think of
contributions that don't require coding.


A very promising land can be found precisely (paradoxically?) in the
crossroads between editors and developers. Editing is mainly a manual
task, requiring a higher community involvement as your edits grow.
Software won't write articles for you anytime soon, but it can help
channeling the unilateral input of zillion users doing each a small
contribution. Busy editors know where that input is most needed and in
which form it's more useful for the project. Inspired developers can
make these contribution tools seamless and even fun to use - and
rewarding.

Mobile devices are very promising in this sense. People spend huge
amounts of fragmented times checking/posting online stuff and playing
mobile games, in situations that are *not* in-front-of-my-laptop-again.
Many of them would welcome to use some of that time doing something more
useful to the World, as long as it's not demanding and doesn't require
sitting in-front-of-my-laptop-again.

There is a collection of proposed casual mobile contributions at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Projects/App_Features_%
26_Roadmap#New_features . Editors are encouraged to have a look, add
more use cases, help prioritizing those features and of course bring
amazing ideas. With a bit of luck (and persistence) those features will
end up in mobile apps used by a massive and diverse wave of new
contributors.

A % of those users will have a curiosity to get involved beyond the
almost unconscious one-hand mobile contributions, and hopefully they
will receive another hand from the established editors to get them
enrolled in one of the many interesting tasks and projects around.

--
Quim