Dear Fellow-Wikipedians/Wikimedians,
Could the German Federal Press Conferences serve as a model to improve communications
between WMF officials/bodies and the community (and the public at large)?
Unlike in other countries, where governments face the press at their own will, choosing
topics and interlocutors as they please, in Germany the press-conference takes place three
times a week, according to a regular schedule, and is hosted and moderated by an
independent association. Participants on the government side are usually a spoke-person of
the Chancellery (Bundeskanzleramt, roughly equivalent with a Prime Minister's Office)
and of all the ministries. On the other side, the press-conference is open to journalists
based in Berlin who regularly cover German federal politics. Since last year (?) the
entire press-conferences are video-taped and made available on Youtube by a team of
journalists for everyone to watch [1].
I wonder whether this might be a viable approach to improve communications by the WMF BoT
and management with regard to various stakeholder groups.
The ingredients would be:
- Regular information and Q&A sessions with the participation of official
spoke-persons of the WMF BoT and WMF Management (i.e. professional communicators) on the
one hand and a number of more or less regular participants acting as multipliers with
regard to the community as well as journalists regularly covering WM-related issues on the
other hand.
- Interval: to be decided. Every two weeks might be reasonable. It seems
important that these information and Q&A sessions take place on a regular basis at the
same interval, no matter how many burning issues are around at any given time. As the
information and Q&A sessions have a clear time limit, this obliges everyone to focus
on the most burning issues at any given time.
- The information and Q&A sessions are hosted and moderated by an independent
entity according to a pre-established set of rules.
- The spoke-persons have to respond to every question asked, choosing between
three options: answer the question directly if they can; explain why they aren't able
or willing to answer the question; send the answer later by email to the participants if
specific information needs to be gathered first.
- If the answer is deemed insufficient or too imprecise by the person who asked
the question, they are allowed to dig deeper by asking a further question.
- The Q&A sessions are recorded, so that everyone interested is able to keep
up with the main issues raised within the movement and the official stance taken by the
BoT and/or WMF management as well as the critical questions raised by those closely
following the issues.
Personally, I believe that this might smoothen out communications with the community and
have some potential to scale - even with regard to non-English-speaking communities thanks
to multipliers. Drama might not be avoided, but at least it would be given a clear frame
and be somewhat detached from individuals by focusing more on roles. Furthermore,
transparency and accountability would be increased, serious problems may be spotted
earlier, and misunderstandings would more easily surface.
Any thoughts about pros and cons?
Beat
[1]
https://www.youtube.com/user/Nfes2005/videos
_____________________________________________________
Beat Estermann
Coordinator OpenGLAM CH Working Group
http://openglam.ch<http://openglam.ch/>
Berne University of Applied Sciences
E-Government Institute
Brückenstrasse 73
CH-3005 Bern
beat.estermann@openglam.ch<mailto:beat.estermann@openglam.ch>
Phone +41 31 848 34 38
Second Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon - 1/2 July 2016 - Save the
date<http://make.opendata.ch/wiki/event:2016-07>!