Hi,
in response to my appointment as Chief Research Officer of the Wikimedia
Foundation, I have put together a page describing this role, as well as
a potential larger Wikimedia Research Team that I want to form. Please see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research_Team
for details. To the Board: The proposal is largely unchanged from the
version I sent you, but it includes a note about what I call
"semi-official titles". I suggest therein that members of the Team can,
internally, use certain titles like "WRT Survey Coordinator." Please -
and that goes for non-Board members as well ;-) - let me know how you
feel about this idea, I think it could help reduce the impression that
the "Chief Research Officer" holds special authority over the other
members, and generally motivate people to join and work in certain roles.
The page includes a list of individuals I'd like to invite to join the
team; if you feel that anyone is missing from that list, please add
them. I will extend personal invitations soon, but if you see your name
on the list right now, please do indicate if you're interested (just
strike through or remove your name if you're not). Of course, if you
yourself are interested and not listed there, feel free to add yourself
to the list of members right away. There's no application procedure --
we can always deal with problems as a team if there are any.
I'm copying this to wikitech-l, as I want to encourage the developers to
take a look at the above page. I want to ensure you that at no point
will anyone try to tell volunteers what to do, or what code to accept,
and any assignment to developers paid by Wikimedia will have to be made
by the Board: the Team only gives recommendations. I also absolutely
want to encourage any interested developers to join; if there are any
conflict of interest issues, we can deal with them as they arise. I have
mainly not listed developers in my list of proposed members because my
intuition is that most of them are too busy to get involved, but I'd be
happy to be proven wrong on that count.
I'm sure that some of you will be skeptical about the usefulness of a
systematic research effort: In the open source world, code is everything
and words are often considered meaningless. However, I believe strongly
that analysis should precede implementation, and that volunteer
development can be combined in useful ways with targeted, task-oriented
coding. The Research Team also has other roles, but see the page on Meta
for details.
All best,
Erik