Task forces burned out IMHO

My opinion is still the same as it was at the start of this whole project. I think the idiotic "task forces" did bring nothing but an extra buerocracy. The results are inconsistent the same way they would be without the task forces. Creating "Recomendations" pages on various topics at the start of the project would have brought much better result, because of better website accessibility.

I really am feeling bad seeing all the extra buerocracy here, this really makes me contribute less... The same is about the project "Phases" (I-IV or how many they are - I just dont care, I want to see results). Do you think you can make a roadmap here??? You largely miss a point!!! You simply can NOT plan this process and any "open source" process in advance if you want to do your best for it. The only think you can do and you actually continuously have to be doing is monitoring the process and helping the community by giving consultations...

Linux kernel has NO roadmap because it simply can not have one. If it had one it would be good for nothing anyways, so Linus is at least so smart that he does not embarass himself by creating one that would be completely ignored anyways. We just have to take the same approach. No boundaries, just monitor and tweak the process or you are going to greatly limit it or maybe kill it and you will never attract community contributors.

2010-2015 plan is a nonsence. You want to forecast the future for 5 years? Good luck! Strategy has to be continuous improvement. Little steps, solving issues (maybe small ones, but continuously) that suck. Killing bugs that suck. This will attract more people, not producing 5 tons of recommendations that no one will follow because there are too many and the community is not able to prioritize them.

I could continue, but I think this is enough. Hopefully you get the point... For example, I think the collection of proposals and LiquidThreads testing two best outcomes of the whole project until now... unfortunatelly the proposals are somehow "forgotten" now, the collection perios ended oficially with which ever "phase" while it actually again should be continuous improvement prosess that is running on the background.

I do not really agree. A collection of proposals can not be strategy. It only becomes strategy only after someone has read all the proposals, has chosen the most important ones and presented them in a coherent manner. And then I just do not see why the strategy input should be limited to the propoisals - I do care about strategy and was active in the quality TF, but I did not submit a single proposal. If you feel some of the proposals have been unjustly overlooked and should be used for the strategy planning - please bring them up here, we still can consider them and include them into recommendations or whatsoever. But I do not think that looking at the proposals and disregarding all the TF recommendations would be a good idea at this stage.

I feel several proposals have been unjustly overlooked because they were repeatedly excluded in a manner contrary to the stated process rules. Moreover, the recommendations which were approved are not coherent because they in many cases are not operational things to do. Many of them are merely platitudes or abstract wishes without any clear path to implementation. They are also not supported by evidence: There is no way to tell whether the approved proposals are any more likely to have a positive impact than those which were discarded because they were unpopular with the facilitators or the few vocal editors with the perennial axe to grind against anonymous contributions.

It seems to me that at least one of the facilitators is more willing to contradict longstanding Foundation policy than consider the possibility that he may have been wrong to do so.

"several", "not coherent", ? Please be specific.

Which proposals do you feel deserve to be reconsidered.

How would you amend the wording of the proposals to make them more coherent.

I understand your frustration, and I agree that the strategy process has to be constantly updated -- not just with 5 year forecasts. But I think this was a great first step. Like Yaroslav said, a collection of proposals can never be strategy. We needed a better process than the usual "support/oppose a bunch of proposals" mechanism, and we most definitely got it. The task forces looked at the proposals, looked at the interviews, looked at the research, and picked 2-4 areas they should all focus on.

Kozuch, Randomran, Yaroslav, thanks for your words. I know I speak for Eugene as well when I say that one of the great joys of this process is working with smart people. Kozuch, I don't agree, certainly, with some of your conclusions, but I really respect the honesty and thought that you put into them.

The reality of this project as it was started was that it's funded for a finite time period. There's no question that in an ideal world strategy would be an ongoing tweak and massage. I hope that what we're creating here is a process by which the community will be able to continue to work on these things, long after the project's funding has ended.

Eugene and I have been spending some energy lately on transition planning - what should happen with this wiki, and the hundreds of ideas (proposals) that were presented. One thing we're considering and I'm going to propose here - and create a page to work on - is rebranding this space as "futurewiki" or something similar. The idea then can be that we elevate the visibility of the proposals and turn this into a space for gathering support and planning the implementation of those proposals or others that might come in later. Then, this can be a space for dreaming and solving issues, while meta can become a space for dealing with the practical implementation of them.

It's sort of a standard business practice to try to spec out the future... I don't think doing a five year plan is crazy. I do think that having some idea of where we'll be in five years is probably a good idea. From a Foundation/movement resources perspective, I think it makes sense to get together on "who's doing what, when, and how". Obviously the future gets hazy the further out you go.

So, that's my thought on the matter. :)

PS - I would ask, though, that when we discuss this stuff, we discuss ideas and issues, without using pejorative terms. I'm kind of offended by "idiotic", etc. Can we keep it to something more civil, please? :)

Thanks!

I appreciate you took time to reply. The problem of your (and Eugenes) limited timeframe is real one. Hopefully the foundation will be able to hire some staff for a permanent strategy work. All in all, the strategy of course has not been that bad in general, I just tried to point out some broader context. It is really not about "printing" some recommendations that nobody will follow then, I think it really has a broader sence.

Well, an approach of "Strategy has to be continuous improvement. Little steps, solving issues (maybe small ones, but continuously) that suck." may solve some of the problems, but certainly not all of them, and not the big problems [I remember when I encountered Wikipedia of trying to use small, non-confrontational steps, injecting dry facts, hoping that this would sooner or later help turn matters for the better. This met with a concerted effort along the lines of "We are not going to allow any fact into Wikipedia, as this may hinder our ability to write fiction" and matters are just as bad now as they were five years ago, with "Truth, not Verifiability" going as strong as ever]. In that light I recommend reading the interview on Ubuntu: a structured approach is a requirement if the end result is supposed to actually work.

"One of the problems that was seen at UDS, and one that Wikimedia might face, is that volunteers don’t really care about strategy. They want to work on something interesting. They want to be rewarded. They want to feel engaged. Generally, most people who want to be involved with Wikimedia probably don’t want to be involved with strategy."

Trusting in a magic process, with results arising spontaneously out of volunteers, may lead nowhere, or somewhere that you did not want to be.

As to these Task Groups, it is true that they served as a testbed for LiquidThreads (showing this to be abysmal failure; a good illustration of what happens if you allow a software engineer a free hand: trouble and nothing but trouble), but otherwise I suppose it worked as well as might be expected, that is, not as well as might be hoped, but not as bad as might be feared. The results are modest (the recommendation to adopt a Brand Statement looks to me to be the most promising by far, although it is sure to meet with opposition from the many users who see Wikipedia as the platform for Their Very Own Truth). For most recommendations the success or failure will depend very much on the implementation (they could well boomerang and make matters worse). I am not necessarily hopeful about the eventual net effect of these Task Groups, but I certainly would not preclude that some good may come out of them. - Brya 05:35, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Of course, the difference here is that Linux is a piece of software. The Wikimedia movement certainly depends on the existence of computers, but it is not fundamentally a technological effort; it's really just Diderot by other means.

I have some sympathy with Kozuch's points however I draw a much more positive conclusion from it.

This whole process has been breaking new ground. As with Wikipedia, I think given the nature of the collaboration and the medium in which we've done it, the results have been surprisingly good.

Although I sympathise with the assertion that some proposals could get overlooked I don't agree that this will happen. In my own case, this process has made me generate some ideas that - even if they are not pursued further on here - I could actually take to en:wp and perhaps achieve one technical innovation I would find very useful regarding Watchlists. Without this wiki I wouldn't even have thought of the idea.

I think that people who submitted proposals they really believe in, especially if they could be regarded as Mediawiki tweaks or relatively minor innovations, should hang onto those ideas and there's every possibility that they could be introduced to their home project and, after some time, might catch on elsewhere when they demonstrate their usefulness.

I also sympathise with the idea that trying to plan ahead for five years might make some of us look foolish when we look back in the year 2015. But I still think it's an important and valid exercise and one that will prove to have been worthwhile. Sure, some of the stuff that comes out of this will prove not to have worked, other parts won't have the impact we hoped but I'm certain there will be at least one big WIN that will be directly attributable to the Strategy Wiki.

As for "small improvements" being the way to work, well yes... but this process won't stop incremental improvement. That will still be going on. There will still be bug fixes, feature requests, policy development. We can have BOTH a big vision and gradual evolution.