On 21 June 2010 20:56, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 21 June 2010 21:34, Mariano Cecowski
<marianocecowski(a)yahoo.com.ar>
wrote:
I don't know about other Wikimanias, but I
guess they also had an
internal postmortem. I don't think you can expect an
organization to
disclose its internal affairs like that, but I'm sure any Wikimania
organization will be happy to share its rights and wrongs with any future
organizing committee.
I completely disagree. I don't think a Wikimania local team should
have "internal affairs" - Wikimania is an annual event of the
Wikimedia movement, not a one-off event of a small group. The rest of
the movement is not "external" and shouldn't be treated as such.
If you don't allow for private discussion and post-mortems within a group
of
people, then the likelyhood of effective management and feedback
decreases. This is not because the Wikimania team is being secretive, but
because talking only amongst yourselves that know each other best gives a
place to air honest feedback in a way that would not happen if that feeback
between the team was forced to be public. Furthermore, there is sensitive
information about things like sponsors, finances, relationships between
people that simply don't need to be made public as it would cause more harm
than good. Every chapter has a private executive channel, and even the
Wikimedia movement has an internal mailing list - none of these imply that
the rest of the community is "external" but simply that some things are best
kept private. Furthermore, you can't actually force people to talk in
public, all you do is drive it underground turning what is a legitimate
internal discusison into a cabal.
wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata