On 21 June 2010 22:25, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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.
The discussion can happen in private, but the results need to be
public or there is really no point. The people discussing it will
probably never run a Wikimania again, so they don't really need to
know what did and didn't work. Anything that needs to be confidential
can be redacted from the public version and the un-redacted version
only shared with people that specifically need to know (teams
organising future Wikimanias, and maybe those bidding to organise
them).