[Foundation-l] Wikimedia "Storyteller" job opening

[Philippe Beaudette]

On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 11:06 AM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:

> Sue Gardner wrote:
> > Ah, Sarah, I don't think that's particularly fair. Bear in mind we've
> > just published a strategic plan that 1,000+ Wikimedians helped create.
> > I'm not denying that some Wikimedians may feel alienated from the
> > Wikimedia Foundation: I'm sure it is true for some. But "something in
> > which we have no input" is, IMO, not a fair characterization.
>
> This is an interesting comment given who actually authored the strategic
> plan. It's my understanding that several people (Eugene, you, Erik, and
> others) wrote different parts of the report, which were then compiled by
> people from Bridgespan. Is that accurate?
>
> Is there a record of who wrote which parts of the report? It would be
> particularly interesting to see how much of it came from volunteers.
>
> MZMcBride
>
>
>
MZ,

   She didn't say they sat down and banged out the plan on their IBM
Selectric.  She said they helped create it.  That's entirely accurate.  It
grew from the work of the task forces, research around the proposals,
research in general…. all of those done by volunteers. While the final
wording may have been "smithed" by a relatively smaller set of people, the
first attempt was actually to have community members do that as well.  It
didn't work well - either because it's a task that was poorly facilitated
(and if so, I'm to blame), or a task that was poorly defined, or simply a
task that the people who were there weren't interested in doing (and as
volunteers, that's their right and privilege), the writing had to be
assigned to a number of people.

I dislike this posts like this one, which (at least from one perspective)
engage in a game of rhetorical "gotcha".

pb