[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcement: Fabrice Florin joins Wikimedia

[Bod Notbod]

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 21:26, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> Personal perspectives are perhaps not very suitable for the "official
> blog" (but may be),

Ah. OK. I confess I'm more of a Signpost reader than of the blog, so I
hadn't thought of it having a particular style or code.

> anyway engineering reports are being published
> regularly since a while and they're a very good way to know what's going
> on at least in the technology department, without having to read MiB of
> text.

Yes. To clarify, it's not that I feel a sense of "I don't know what
they get up to in that office"... I'm sure most things I'd be
interested to know I could find out with judicious searching. I'm
thinking more along the lines of not just putting names to faces but
also a greater insight into what their current working day is like and
projects of note.

Maybe forget the blog and Signpost. If we go here:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors

We see that some staff don't yet have pictures. I would respect the
choice of anyone who didn't want a pic up but they do go a long way in
helping someone retain a name in their mind. Also some of the names
are wikified but clicking through doesn't take you to anything
substantive in some cases. Other names are not wikified at all. Some
of the job titles are wikified and clicking takes you through to the
job spec, which is great... but not all have that.

So any work that could be done to standardise the page somewhat would
be most welcome. And I would definitely welcome it if staff were to
project a bit of their personality in some kind of statement of their
own. It all adds to that sense of the Foundation being approachable
folk working to help us volunteers.

What I'm calling for, basically, is efforts to retain that feeling
that you knew the staff which was easy to achieve when numbers were so
small and will naturally lessen as the organisation grows, but a
lessening which can be mitigated to some degree.

Bodnotbod