Hi Lodewijk and all,
As a result of our All-Hands event in early January this year, an informal group of staff members (namely: Siko Bouterse, Guillaume Paumier, Edward Galvez, Caitlin Cogdill, Jessica Robell and myself) decided to come together and start a series of conversations about transparency. Our goal was to provide practical examples of how to apply our value of transparency to our day-to-day work in practice.
We started a Meta page to identify some good transparency practices and guidelines, initially intended as a resource for our co-workers, but we hope it may also be useful for others in the movement. We can’t do this as staff alone, though.
As you noted in your email, recent events make a conversation about transparency crucial right now, and that’s why we would like to invite anyone to share stories, ideas and best practices on this Meta page. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Transparency/Practices Stories about how transparency or lack of transparency affects your work (or your organization's work) in the movement can help to communicate the significance of this value.
We hope to see your stories and ideas there. Lodewijk - we've already added your suggestion from this thread to the talk page, but people should of course feel welcome to incorporate ideas directly into the main page as well.
To be clear, this page isn’t meant to replace the meaningful discussion and changes that many are pushing for on today’s issues here, but just as another resource for documenting how those of us who believe in transparency can better live this value.
In solidarity, Adele
On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 2:59 PM, Pete Forsyth peteforsyth@gmail.com wrote:
Lodewijk,
Thank you for this suggestion. I drafted a proposal about a month ago for something like this, as a community-initiated project; however, I agree that something with explicit buy-in from the Board would be much better. Still, perhaps this draft will be useful; it is Proposal #1 (of two) on this page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Peteforsyth/Heilman15
Do keep in mind, it is a bit out of date; help in updating it and/or moving it to main space as a more formal proposal is welcome.
-Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]]
On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 2:45 PM, Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org wrote:
Hi Lila,
Thank you for the update and the pointer.
As you probably noted, there have been several 'incidents' quickly following each other, which worry me, and probably you too. You're saying that you welcome feedback and discussion, and that you're having internal conversations on how to improve communication.
When problems continue like this in governments, you often see (well,
this
probably depends on the country) that a committee is appointed to investigate what is really the problem, and to come with some general recommendations for structural improvements.
I'm not sure if this is the most effective method, but it might be an effective way to gain back a bit of trust. Why not appoint a small committee of a few trusted community members, that can get a bit more information (also when that has to remain confidential) and make some structural recommendations with regards to communicating with the community? Normally I'd expect the Board to take such role, but given recent events, I don't have the feeling the Board is best placed to do
so.
Just thinking out loud, maybe there are better ideas to approach this in
a
way that builds trust again.
Lodewijk
On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 11:28 PM, Lila Tretikov lila@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi everyone,
As promised, here is the blog post we published earlier today: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/02/16/wikimedia-search-future/ . We are also having internal conversations on how we can improve communication and transparency to increase collaboration on ideation with all of you
going
forward.
I hope this helps contextualize the grant agreement and our broader
efforts
while addressing some of the confusion around this topic. As always, I welcome your feedback and discussion and look forward to our ongoing discussion.
Lila
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