Lethargy, indecision, internal strife, and an abiding commitment to self-enrichment and constant bureaucratic growth? Isn't that what every maturing community with more than a handful of participants grows up to be? :P
The strategy process is certainly not except from these flaws. Why would it be? They are endemic across the movement throughout it's history and seen at all levels today. But the strategy process is, like many other processes, attempting to operate in a good faith manner and it is definitely trying to take the movement in a better direction that it has travelled so far (from an organisational standpoint). It consists of smart people, working together in a good faith manner to effect positive change within the movement.
For people like yourself who are dubious about the processes merits I think you should still engage. Ensuring that it has the right focuses doesn't necessitate prolonged engagement with the process. You don't need to go through the slog of coming up with solutions necessarily, just make sure someone will.
Regards Seddon
On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 2:35 AM Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
I think questioning the strategy for sustaining the movement's projects is worthwhile, particularly as part of the strategy discussion. I'm not sure if sniping on this list is as fruitful.
I considered Fae's question as well; not just the mechanical "do we need an archive site" that seemed implicit, but the fundamental question of whether new action needs to be taken to ensure the Wikimedia projects can be preserved. I hadn't considered that the strategy process would abrogate the core promise of these projects, that worthwhile content would be largely preserved to make that worth perpetually available to others.
If that's truly in question I find it hard to imagine what else the strategy discussion could find as a substitute. I haven't engaged in the strategy discussion for lots of reasons, but one is that I long ago acquired a deep skepticism of movement bureaucracy, whether within the projects or without. The entire edifice seems to have adopted the worst attributes of bureaucracy - lethargy, indecision, internal strife, and an abiding commitment to self-enrichment and constant bureaucratic growth.
All that rescues the movement is the persistent desire of its contributors to add, improve and conserve and the simple demand that the bureaucracy - if it does nothing else - keep the lights on and stay out of the way. If that changes, then perhaps we will need the Internet Archive to step in after all.
PS: Thanks, Seddon, for your thoughtful reconsideration of your earlier post. To muddle the words of Michelle Obama, always go high. You can't go wrong.
On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 7:49 PM Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Well, I think perhaps Fae's question may be considered more generally.
Fae
is knowledgeable about the structure of the Wikimedia movement as well as the WMF, and I think it might be best to work from the assumption that their core question is probably more along the lines of whether (and how) the current long-term strategy development process will, in fact, make recommendations that are in line with ensuring that there will be (at minimum) a publicly accessible archive of the Wikimedia projects.
The movement strategy process is very broad, and contains a lot of
diverse
ideas about how the movement/WMF/chapters/other entities/projects can be improved, maintained, developed and supported. I'm pretty deep in the strategy stuff, and as far as I know, at this point there's no clear path to maintaining (or dissolving) any of the existing structures; more to
the
point, there's no guarantee that the final summary recommendations of the combined strategy groups will continue to support the current WMF mission statement - that is, the part that says " [t]he [Wikimedia] Foundation
will
make and keep useful information from its projects available on the internet free of charge, in perpetuity."
I don't think that's really a bad question to ask - in fact, it may be
one
of the more important ones. I hope I am not presuming too much, but I think Fae is saying that this is something that is really important and valuable, and that continuity/perpetuation of that particular aspect of
the
mission statement should be a recommendation that gets included in the final reports - regardless of which entity assumes responsibility for it
or
who pays for it.
Risker/Anne
On Tue, 14 May 2019 at 18:03, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
The Internet Archive, incidentally, already seems to maintain copies of Wikimedia projects. I don't know to what degree of fidelity.
Additionally,
the WMF's core deliverable is already to provide and sustain access to
its
projects. It has an endowment for that purpose already. Other websites
and
media that might have ephemeral access due to their nature as
short-term
tools need the IA to be preserved, but the WMF's projects seem to
occupy
a
different space. It's sort of like asking if the Library of Congress
needs
to invest in some external project to preserve and organize its collections. No, that is its actual raison d'etre. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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