About https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_noticeboard#Sugge...
On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 10:52 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Quim, can you clarify your comments about the Technology Committee? The committee is my proposal as a community member; it is not a top-down, Board-created idea. Its membership is designed to be broadly representative of the MediaWiki user community. The Board mandate is necessary to give TechCom similar placement to AffCom, the FDC, and other community-led and Board-chartered committees that report directly to the Board. I am not sure how you see TechCom as anything but a community-based organization.
This is just my personal opinion. Sitting here every day, and seeing also not only the big hot topics but the many small novelties and discussions that the tech community generates, the Tech Ambassadors are the ones actually doing something in order to keep a fluent communication between developers and editors today. I would encourage and empower them to try out solutions to get the communities better involved as participants of our development process.
I would trust a process promoted by the Tech Ambassadors and evolved through many iterations and lessons learned, more than a committee that went from community proposal to board approval in one go. I don't think the problems we have will be solved by a committee of members elected or appointed for periods of n years. I would rather see how certain ambassadors earn the respect of their content projects and the technical community (WMF teams included) through continuous participation, wise words, and useful work.
Yes, we need some structure, but a light and flexible structure that fits in our open source development process.