[RCom-l] Welcome to the Research Committee

[Erik Moeller]

Dear all,

thank you again for accepting my invitation to join the Wikimedia
Foundation research committee. I have launched the page on Meta
describing the committee, which also contains your bios:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee

Please make any further edits to this wiki page as you see fit.

Please note that this discussion list is _publicly archived_. I will
set up a simple alias for off-list communications if needed.

I've suggested a very simple charter to begin with: the talk page on
the wiki would be a good place for us to discuss this as needed. As
per the suggested charter, I'd like to occasionally add Wikimedia
Foundation staff to this mailing list as non-voting members without
process overhead, and I'll have a first batch of these shortly.

Here are some immediate action items that everyone could help with:

* If there are simple ways to make the Research Committee landing page
more useful, please go ahead and improve it. :-)
* I'd like to organize an IRC meeting soon. If someone wants to take
the lead in setting up a subpage to plan the meeting agenda,
date/time,IRC channel, etc., that would be great.
* Let me know if you think additional infrastructure is immediately
required. I think we may end up setting up an OTRS queue to process
requests by researchers, but I don't think we're there yet.

The page above is public, I will send out an announcement tomorrow to
give you an opportunity to jump in to make it better. ;-)

Finally, I will share with you a Google Spreadsheet that is a first
simple crack at tracking WMF-sponsored research projects. I don't
think Google Spreadsheet is a good tool for this going forward, but it
will give you a sense of what I imagine some cornerstones of a roadmap
would look like.

I look forward to working with all of you. :-)

All best,
Erik
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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