[Wikimedia-l] Proposal to use the internal wiki more

[Everton Zanella Alvarenga]

Hi Phoebe and all,

I am not say if saying this is wrong or brakes the confidentiality contract
I've signed as a contractor. My apologies if it is wrong, but I think it is
not. I am sorry to say there are some documents of projects I have been
working on that I believe could be done directly on meta or some other
public wiki. There are some cases, yes, some more elaborated document
should be done to be released in public, but I don't think it is always the
case.

I believe we are wasting resources and energy in some cases not using the
community intelligence and knowledge, even having very high qualified
professionals working on this documents, as it is the case I have seen so
far. Closed mailing lists, closed wikis, closed working groups, closed
meetings... all this doesn't make me feel comfortable, to be honest.

I don't want create a pandemonium here. My opinion here is just to share
one thing I've felt that can diminish the power of crowdsourcing we are all
used to and I believe we have to think ways to improve that.
Wikimediaworld it too complex, there is too much information, projects
and opinions
going on and it is really difficult to organize all that.

For instance, there is this https://collab.wikimedia.org What is this for?!
I have receive (maybe?) one e-mail about this wiki and once I've seen a lot
of crucial and important answers for the Brazil program were there. I
cannot understand why it is not public. Really. Just to you have an idea,
I've asked in December to have this collab (Collab of collaboration?) wiki
to be on the main page of office wiki, but no answer so far.

The organization has grown too fast and maybe it is time to rethink our
best practices and how we operate, analysing everything we are using,
creating a kind of guide, mainly for those professionals that will arrive?
If I am not wrong, how can we do that?

I love this from another group

"Running through all of our activities is a strong emphasis on *decentralized
collaboration*. In particular, a primary aim is to help others develop open
material as well as creating it ourselves. We believe that the future lies
in collaboration between a multitude of different groups and that *no one
group or organisation can, or should try to, “do it all*”. It is when we
work together that we are the strongest."

and I am not saying it is easy to implement it. But we have to be self
critical on how to achieve this, for those who agree it is a better way to
work.

Tom

On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 5:39 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> You're being snarky, but I am going to take this as a good-faith
> question....
>
> I have access to the office wiki, left-over from being a board member,
> though I do not edit there and have only accessed it a couple of times over
> the years. I think I can safely say without violating confidentiality that
> it is mainly used as a tool to run a discrete, physical, boring office. It
> is where you will find things like staff phone numbers, info on the
> employee health plans, how to send to the office printers, and how to
> submit an expense report.
>
> As on internal, there's also lots of outdated stuff, like old notes from
> 2008 staff meetings; there are scratchpad idea pages that probably could be
> elsewhere, and there are some pages about department functions and project
> drafts that I'm sure no one would mind being on meta, but much of the
> interesting stuff is public (the annual plan, the communications calendar),
> and as far as I can see with a quick scan there are not large-scale
> discussions happening there.
>
> So, back to the start of the thread: using a wiki effectively does seem
> like a scoping question, yes, and I think internal (and any other
> internal/private wiki) would benefit from specific scoping like Mike
> proposes; his suggestions seem reasonable to me. I think I can also say
> without violating confidentiality that almost all of the mail to the
> internal list in the last few months has not been discussion focused, but
> rather has been notices of chapter board elections, meetings and reports,
> and I would love to see all that traffic be public (even if it's on a
> separate list so not everyone has to get the notices if they're not
> interested) -- there's nothing inherently confidential about it, and it
> would be nice for that info to be easily findable.
>
> -- phoebe
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-- 
Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful
than a life spent doing nothing."