I wouldn't be too sure of that. You need to consider who the targeted audience is for your feedback. I would guess the organizers of the coming year(s). So a postmortem would make most sense on the wikimaniateamwiki (yes, another internal wiki). I had in 2008 for example much use of the program committee postmortem documentation of 2007 in Taiwan - even though it was not public. As long as it reaches the right people. It is a lot of effort to make a public version in some cases, and then I really dont see the point of obligating people to make such a version - especially if the consequence of that is that the chance they actually will do that, decreases.
Lodewijk
2010/6/21 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com
On 21 June 2010 22:25, Liam Wyatt liamwyatt@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).
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