Reward merits
More than a novel idea. Incentives for your workforce must be aligned with your strategy. If they are not, people may be motitvated to execute tactics that are completely detremental to strategic success. They may execute those tactics brilliantly and be rewarded for doing so, but because they are not aligned with the strategy, they contribute nothing to strategic success.
For discussion sake, if one does view Administrator tools as a merit reward, then our RFA process should 100% aligned with our strategic goals. In other words, how well has the candidate contributed to the advancement of those goals--expansion of content, improvement of quality and diverse contributor growth. Today, our RFA criteria is so ill-defined, ad-hoc and whimsical that almost any reasonable behavior will succeed, and any marginal behavior (even if it is furthering strategic goals) will cause no end of angst. I suspect there are a great many Rewards in the WP realm that reward behavior that IS NOT aligned with the overall strategic goals of the project.
In any strategic endeavor, workforce incentives must be aligned with the strategy for strategic success.
I generally agree with your post. I don't agree with the demand for "100% align[ment]" with WP's goals, because I think it is illusory to believe that anything humans do could be 100% free of self interest, and I for one wouldn't want to be part of such a totalitarian system, but I agree that improving that alignment would be worthwhile. However, that seems to be the subject for a different topic.
More to the point of this discussion is the question to which degree adminship is perceived as a merit reward. What interests me even more than the average perception is the variance, because I think part of the problem is that the perception is very different from editor to editor. If an admin who believes (even subconsciously) that adminship is a merit reward clashes with a non-admin who believes it isn't, there is conflict in the air. (I am speaking from my own experience; I learned that the hard way when I was closing "articles for deletion" discussions.) This is another area where people's understanding needs to be aligned. SebastianHelm 03:19, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
I don't believe I was advocating that the WP community demand 100% alignment, but rather that the community should recognize that failure to align incentives (even percieved ones) with strategic goals has consequences. Aligning 1000s of volunteers so that their tactical actions are consistent with and do not impede strategic goals is difficult as best. That said, if basic processes such as RFA, Deletion, Dispute resolution, etc. are not designed to function with strategic goals in mind, then strategic alignment is near impossible. As a community, our processes must be aligned with all our strategic goals in a harmonizing manner and as a community, we must accept the fact that what might seem to be a perfectly acceptable tactic actually impedes overall strategic progress. Even the activity and discussion that would be necessary to harmonize community processes with strategic goals would in itself be an aligning activity. My overall point being that our strategy should be driving our tactics and that our incentives, whatever they may be, must be aligned with that stategy.