a proposal

a proposal

Thanks for that message, Eekim. That's exactly what I mean by leadership. The Foundation has already created a great platform for collaboration. But over time, that platform has become a tool to empower inflexible people rather than leaders (even incremental changes!). So leadership has to come from the other two things you're talking about. Either having the foundation engage the community and say "this is important enough that we have to find a way", or (if they have the legitimacy) the foundation has to do it themselves.

I've thought about it. I collaborated with some truly insightful and helpful people on the community health task force. (Who are unfortunately near the brink of giving up. But this is the cost of learning about the community problems first-hand.) We did hours of research, reading proposals, and discussion, and the end result was a set of recommendations.

Looking at those recommendations, most of them are changes to interface and tools. I have confidence in the usability team -- making editing easier, making collaboration easier. I hope that eventually they'll make it easier to recognize new users and admins. I even hope that they work on those social networking features that I'm nervous about being misused. But the most I can do is add a supportive voice. I lack the skills and time to help develop it. (Speaking of which, I heard that most of the work is being done by paid staff. I don't think that's a bad thing. Some big changes really do require an investment of money and not just a request for voluntary change.)

The main thing that a regular volunteer like me could work on is this recommendation/proposal. But I doubt I could do it alone, even if I had some supporters on my side. Some real leadership from the foundation would help. They wouldn't need to commit to the details of implementation. We took the details from the best proposals we could find at the time, and the details will need to come from the community. But the foundation would definitely help by committing to the broad principles and ideas. If the foundation stepped up and said "yeah, it's time to improve the consensus building process, and here are three ideas we have", I am confident that the volunteer community could take care of the rest.

As for the involvement of regular volunteers like myself (and soon, you too...), I'm open to suggestions. I say this without a shred of pessimism that I'm stumped as to what I could do. But let's throw some ideas around.

Randomran16:40, 12 June 2010

I hear you about the Foundation, leadership, and community engagement. That's a conversation I've had a lot internally at the Foundation, and it's one I'll continue to have.

As for something that a regular volunteer could work on, of all the Community Health recommendations, I'm surprised you chose that one. That one is the absolute hardest, and I'm not sure it's framed in a way that's even achievable.

I'd like to propose two alternatives that we (and hopefully) others could play with:

Better yet, we can use strategy wiki as a test case. The timing for that is good. How does that sound?

Eekim18:54, 14 June 2010

I'd be interested in working on the demarcation and strengthening of volunteer roles. The thing is, I don't have the tech-savvy to implement some kind of easy identifier. (There are a lot of people who think "what? you can see an admin by looking for a category on their user page, or recognize a new editor by checking their contribution history". But those are not obvious. When people are in a hurry, let alone when people are new, they miss them completely.)

What's the best way to tackle it?

Randomran22:31, 20 June 2010

Cool, this is an interesting one. My suggestion would be to start with the underlying questions and not worry about the tech implementation yet. Figuring out the different roles is a prerequisite anyway, and there may be some non-tech opportunities we can take advantage of.

Surveys, like the Former Contributors Survey Results and the former administrators survey, can be part of the methodology. We learned from the former that our assumptions about recent activity aren't the best measure of whether or not someone is a former contributor. Similarly, I think our current criteria for active contributors is totally wrong. It would be great if we can start fleshing out a taxonomy of contributor types and more accurate ways of determining whether contributors fall under different categories.

If this sounds good, would you be willing to start a Task Force? I'll join, and we can recruit some others to participate as well.

Eekim09:54, 21 June 2010

We can only try :) I'd be happy to give it a shot. As for the task force, here's a few guiding principles/goals, and issues to get us started:

Principles/goals:

  1. The Wikimedia community is hard to navigate, and this partially has to do with cultural norms and invisible roles.
  2. Making roles visible should help newer editors recognize more experienced editors and vice versa.
  3. Recognizing volunteers in good standing can make them feel appreciated and prevent burnout.
  4. Decision-making should remain egalitarian and open.

Issues:

  1. New editors often mistaken any old warning for an official administrator notice that represents community norms.
  2. New editors cannot tell which users are modeling best practices and behavior.
  3. Experienced editors often fail to see an editor's newness, and accidentally WP:BITE the newbies. (Assuming good faith.)
  4. Collaboration is difficult without trust. Editors with positive history will be more collaborative than complete strangers.

(Just my first shot.)

Randomran16:36, 21 June 2010

This is a great first shot. Do you want to start a task force and articulate these principles there? We can call it the Volunteer Task Force or something similar. I'll jump in there.

Eekim22:18, 29 June 2010

Starting a task force is a good idea. Not sure what I'd need to do there beyond just making one page. It should probably have a more well-defined scope than just volunteers in general, otherwise it's likely to retread over the same themes as the community health task force. I'd rather spend more time trying to get to the implementation of an idea than to spend another few months discussing ideas. I think that's what Wikimedia needs now.

Randomran11:36, 30 June 2010

The theory behind the current structure is that, if there's a concrete idea, someone should write it up as a Proposal, and people can self-organize around that. If some thinking among multiple people is necessary to generate a Proposal or other useful documents -- a statement of principles, for example -- than those people should create a Task Force, and these documents should be articulated as deliverables.

In this case, you've already written a concrete proposal about how to start doing this work. So maybe we should start there? If yes, then I've already signed up on that proposal, and I'm willing to go with it. Please be patient with me, though. Lots of discussion going on right now around the Strategic Plan that I need to participate in over the next few weeks. (Hope you can help with that too.)

Eekim16:21, 30 June 2010

Sounds good. Where's the proposal you signed up for? Or did you mean figuratively, and you're waiting for me to create it? I guess I would start by turning the community health recommendation into a proposal?

I'll be around to help with the strategic plan in the meantime.

Randomran21:53, 1 July 2010