On 2/29/16 2:42 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
Pete,
Can you help me figure out how Jimmy and the board could have "assumed" that there was community discussion and consultation about the Knowledge Engine project when James Heilman
- had started a board discussion in mid-October specifically to point out
that there was no community discussion and consultation,
Actually, although some of all this stuff is really complicated and nuanced, as it involves judgment calls and normal human misunderstandings, speaking for myself only and not the rest of the board, this one is super easy.
From the Wikimania board meeting until James emailed me (before he
emailed the board) I hadn't given much thought to community engagement. Why? We weren't presented with a Google-competitor search project at that meeting but rather a plan to work on search and discovery that was ambitious but in-line with our overall tech budget - and the first year was all we really looked at in depth, and it seemed like good first steps to explore ideas.
So, as I have said, there didn't see anything unusual or controversial about the concepts being presented to us about the evolving ideas around improving search and discover, and I simply assumed that there was community discussion and consultation
In mid-October, before he emailed the board, James wrote me with a huge misconception - that we had a secret project to build a Google competing search engine. Of course we didn't have such a project We had a few emails back and forth in which I explained that was not the case.
We went back and forth in pleasant emails discussing the situation and as a part of that I said: "I am always in favor of more community consultation." I went on to discuss a bit that I didn't think we were at the point where a full-scale community consultation (like the one that legal did on revising the terms of service) was necessary for a mere $250,000 grant. But I was supportive of consulting the community.
- had offered to write an article for the Signpost about the project to
inform the community,
- was told by his colleagues on the board that the idea of a Signpost
article was not welcome?
I've tried to find this in my email records and have no record of it. I don't know when this offer was made nor who responded. If James knows, and wants to share the board emails with me directly, that would be appreciated.