Heads Up: Direction On The Way (important)

Yes, the sense I'm getting from Philippe and Eekim (though I hope they will challenge me if I'm speaking out of turn) is that much of what we've created here is supposed to be taken forwards by the community.

Personally, when I joined this process that wasn't my expectation at all. I thought it would go something like:

1. The community throws in all their ideas. 2. The community picks the best ones (with "best" including criteria such as achievability, affordability, desirability, etc) 3. The WMF looks at them and picks ones it feels it can work with. 4. The wider community (ie people who never looked at Strat wiki) would be exposed to them to much cheering/booing, probably through postings by Jimmy, Sue et al in prominent on-project announcements. 5. Ideas implemented with WMF blessing/funding/communications and volunteers supporting the implementation.

Well, I appear only to have been right up to part 2. However, I don't feel too bad about that. We were all learning something here; I'm not aggrieved that I misunderstood. I think I have some valid complaints but I'll keep hold of them for now.

So my current thinking on what I'm going to do personally:

1. I really want to do some analysis on the recommendations we have VERSUS the WMF's published priorities document which I linked to above. That's to say; what matches? What did they ignore? What did they explicitly reject? I will start doing that tomorrow. I expect I will have questions for Philippe and Eekim following that exercise.

2. Bring myself up to speed with the Movement Roles Task Force which I'm led to believe has ongoing activity but is something I haven't even looked at yet.

3. I'm going to try and establish contacts for ongoing work for 'social features': I know everyone's not keen on them :o) But they do at least seem to have made it onto the WMF's 'priorities' document so I feel I can find allies for it. I have absolutely no technical insight into how Mediawiki works. However, I can see a route forwards that would be minor changes to the current software as I see it. I want to talk to tecchy types about my ideas and just see what they say; find out if I'm on the right track; find out if they've already been brainstorming.

4. Keep an eye on Strat wiki overall as Eekim has stated on the Village Pump that he wants to see more input on the wiki from WMF staff; I want to be able to interact with them if and when they show up.

I think that'll keep me going for a week.

I'm curious to know what you're planning to do Random as I'd like to keep in touch on here; I'd feel very lonely on the wiki without seeing your name regularly.

Bodnotbod22:29, 24 February 2010

Hi BNB,

1 and 2 are spot on; 3 you might replace with "a Strategy group of community members (say, starting with this task force) looks at them and picks ones that the community can work with." ; 4 is a good idea, and we should plan the next wave of strategy-related announcements (but this requires good crisp suggestions from 3); and 5 you should replace with "Ideas implemented and owned by community members/volunteers, with WMF blessing/support."

This is for strategy for the entire movement.

One of the three strategic priorities for the Foundation is to better support and invest in innovation, including new types of community projects; expanding the sorts of blessing/support currently provided through chapter grant requests -- which gets at parts of your 4 and 5. But there's a lot going on, so the best support will come to projects that are clearly organized and run and know what sort of support they need. [that's equally true when recruiting new contributors.]

Sj15:31, 3 March 2010