[Wikimedia-l] Communication plans for community engagement

[Romaine Wiki]

In my opinion the liaisons failed very much with the VE, as they act like a car salesman who gives much the impression that communication is only in one direction: the community. They said they send our feedback to WMF but we haven't seen any results at all from that. After a month still all feedback was untouched, nothing was changed on all subjects we have given feedback on. Even critical bugs. I sure believe that the liaisons do their work, and that the problem lies in WMF itself, but still the liaisons became very much annoying. It is like they got a training to talk everything right or minimize the serious critic. I really hate such behaviour, to me and the rest of the community it is a signal that we aren't taken seriously. I consider the liaison involvement as a failure, certainly not recommended to repeat that in future this way.

Besides that, with previous software changes we have had technical ambassadors who maintained mostly the feedback between developers and the communities and that worked well so far I can see. I seriously do not understand why they ignored them with the VE and instead hired liaisons which behaved more like staff of WMF with the agenda that they must sell the car, than neutral people who are involved in the local community. That is not the way how communities should be approached. 

Perhaps the gap between communities and WMF, already there in 2007, still hasn't become much closer since. I think the problem lies in the idea that the WMF is thinking top-down, while the communities work bottom-up (they do the actual daily work at the end). Also I notice for years that there is also a gap between North America and the rest of the world in culture, or at least certainly between North America and Europe. Both are part of the western culture, but still the way Americans deal with things is not the way Europeans would deal with. WMF seems to be too much America based and doesn't internal reflect enough the worldwide movement the whole Wikimedia community is. As I see a clear gap in culture between North America (including WMF style) and Europe, I guess such gap is also there between North America and other parts of the world, but I do not have a clear view on those areas.

Romaine



Katherine Casey fluffernutter.wiki at gmail.com
Tue Jul 23 14:03:50 UTC 2013

(...)

> *Or, to tl;dr this whole thing*: Liaisons could be SO MUCH MORE USEFUL than
> they are right now, and that would go a long way toward improving these PR
> disasters. But that would require the cooperation of every aspect of the
> Foundation's staff.
> 
> -Fluffernutter