Thank you for the reflections, Yaroslav, Specific replies inline below.
Pine, thank you for the invitation; actually, this video was done in preparation for my panel session at the Wikipedia 15 celebration, which will also be live-streamed later in the day. Eugene will be one of my panelists, and we will certainly dig into these issues! Please bring your own reflections and questions (and feel free to send them ahead of time so I can try to incorporate them into the main panel discussion).
To Yaroslav's points:
On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 7:51 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
On 2016-01-12 04:21, Pete Forsyth wrote:
And beyond this video -- what do those who participated in the last round (or those who have observed it) think the important lessons are? How should we be moving foward?
I did not watch the video, but I did participate in the community process and still have an iron barnstar sent by Philippe - my children are still impressed.
Very cool -- I hope the barnstar becomes a treasured family heirloom :) It sounds like it was well deserved. And I hope you do watch the video -- based on your comments below I believe you will find Eugene's design goals and reflections very interesting.
1) It was good that the process was structured from the very beginning:
there was a pre-process which helped to shape the task forces.
Agreed
2) There was little to not at all coordination between different task
forces. Not sure it was necessary, since it was pure brainstorming, but still wanted to mention.
It seems to me (and Eugene or Philippe might correct me here) that the expectation was that "coordination" would happen somewhat organically, since it was hosted on a wiki. I did browse a number of the task forces at the time, and commented on a few, and some others were doing so as well. Perhaps there could/should have been a more focused effort to get cross-pollination, though?
3) It was not clear (at least not to me) what would happen beyond the task
force round. I tried to ask around but never got a satisfactory answer. May be I just asked wrong people.
Again from my own, somewhat limited perspective: I believe the intention was for volunteers to play a stronger and more central role in the synthesis of the Task Force outcomes into a final Strategic Plan. Since this was the first time this was attempted, it's not surprising to me that this wasn't fully realized. I think a second iteration of this could be much more successful, as it could be informed by what worked well and what didn't the last time.
4) There was a bit too much noise (compared to signal), and organization in
the task forces was a bit chaotic - for example, in the task force I was mainly active at somebody was (or claimed she was) appointed the task force coordinator, but she disappeared after a week and never came back, so that I took on the coordination myself and delivered some summary to the second round - but nobody ever talked to me about this.
Ah, noise vs. signal -- always an issue in a community that values openness and inclusion! But again, perhaps there are ways to improve on the process so that it's easier to navigate toward the "signal."
5) It is good that Liquid Threads died. They should not be ever used again
for such process.
I'll leave my opinion on LT (and Flow) aside for the moment, but I do agree that using a discussion technology that was unfamiliar to a core set of constituents led to some confusion, and may have discouraged participation. (However, it's also possible that it encouraged some participation by those who were NOT familiar with wiki page discussion, and may have found threaded discussion a little easier to deal with.)
6) Despite some deficiencies I listed above it was definitely fun to work
on the strategic plan, and also I had an impression we are really shaping things up, not merely rubber-stumping some pre-determined ideas. And that was indeed a community-driven process, and I mean the whole community, not just the English Wikipedia.
I agree strongly with this, and am especially glad to hear that it was fun!
Speaking for my own perspective, I started working for WMF during the process, and because of that I did not participate deeply -- I was in a transitional state between "volunteer" and "staff" and lacked a clear perspective in that time on how to appropriately use my voice. But I observed the process very closely, and talked a lot with Eugene and others about it. I do think it was a valuable exercise in helping both the WMF and community members see across languages, country borders, and project borders, and in learning to listen better to one another and develop a fuller understanding of the big picture. I believe the resulting plan was strongly reflective of common sentiments within our community; and even if imperfect, it's the first (and maybe only) time a document has really attempted to do that, and I think it did an admirable job.
I remain hopeful that some day we will see a "Strategic Planning 2.0" effort that draws heavily on these lessons. I am increasingly of the opinion that volunteers should lead the effort to make that happen; and it might make sense to fully separate two ideas: * A strategic plan for the movement * A strategic plan for the Wikimedia Foundation
-Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]]