[Foundation-l] Wikimedia "Storyteller" job opening

[Wjhonson]

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Snow <wikipedia at frontier.com>
To: foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Sent: Tue, Mar 1, 2011 3:49 pm
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia "Storyteller" job opening


On 3/1/2011 2:41 PM, Pronoein wrote:

> Thank you for your answer Michael. However:
> «Note that this survey was aimed at less experienced editors. »
>
> I remember for example that many administrators quit during the sexual
> content controversy because of the decision of Jimbo. Those people were
> driven by a vision of a certain type of governance and felt betrayed or
> disappointed.

I acknowledge the limitations of the survey, and as always would be 
thrilled if we had more and better data. But since you were connecting 
your thesis to a broad systemic trend, I considered it more useful to 
look at evidence of systemic trends, not anecdotal reactions to a single 
incident. In terms of volunteer motivation, I'd have to think being 
"driven by a vision of a certain type of governance" has to rank pretty 
low, considering that our mission has nothing to do with promoting any 
particular vision in that field. A survey of former administrators or 
something like that might be informative, certainly, if somebody is 
available to drive that. My guess is that compared with other former 
volunteers, their responses would have more similarity than difference.

--Michael Snow
-----------------------------

I think you two are talking at cross purposes here.
It's not that volunteers are motivated to contribute *based* on the governance model.
It's that they decide to *quit* based on the governance model.

The police are your friends until they screw with you.  Then they are not.
Can a person who has been screwed with, ever be reconciled again to the project?

The project has situations encoded into it, which don't go away simply because they are ignored.

W