Making proposals easier to find / organize / work on
Earlier in this process, Jimmy Wales was describing his role to the Advocacy Agenda Task Force. He said his main role was to say the same five things a thousand times over. I'm starting to feel this way, and I'm hoping some of the longer time participants in this process will help me with this.
This whole process is not about authorizing, certainly not from the Foundation. It's about empowering. The Foundation doesn't have to vet everything that everyone wants to do. That's simply not how Wikimedia works, nor is it how it should work. The Foundation's goal (which I hope is shared by many) is to support and encourage people to do what's good for the movement.
The idea behind this whole proposal process is not to get consensus around a few items and then all work on them together. The goal is to get people to connect their ideas to the strategic priorities, and then encourage people to do what compels them. In some cases, people might be compelled to work on stuff that falls relatively low on the movement priorities, but is still valid and important. In other cases, people might choose to spend time on something that ranks higher on the priorities, even though they're more interested in something else. Both are great.
The role of all of us should be in designing a space that encourages action. That's the intent behind what Philippe is proposing, and I hope that others will help figure this out.
Some of these proposals might require the Foundation to participate in order to happen. Similarly, other proposals might require the participation or buy-in of other organizations. From that perspective, it behooves people to make those proposals as strong as possible, to show the impact of those proposals, and to get as much energy behind them as possible. The Foundation will participate in this process -- I suspect that they're already working on many of the things proposed -- but they will not get in the business of vetting and approving everything.
Let's continue to put our energy around thinking about what we can do without needing to get some official blessing.
Thanks for that, Eekim. I definitely agree we want to get more action going. But there's no empowerment if it's left to the community to implement the proposals. 5 people sign up for a proposal, and in all their excitement they get to work on it. 3 hours later, their work is reverted, because other people say "where's the consensus for these changes"? And when a discussion happens, maybe the original 5 grow to an total of 15 supporters, but there are 10 people in opposition. With no consensus, nothing changes, except you've now wasted 5 people's time.
Bringing people together and encouraging them to do something is a nice thought... but it's not empowering. It would be like asking a few Barrack Obama supporters to get together in a room, and start working on health care reform as a group of 12 people. There's a ton of procedural hurdles that you have to navigate to get anything done, and it's not empowering to ask people to pretend that they don't exist.
I see your point, Randomran - but I think it's safe to say that "working on something" could also include building consensus. For instance, let's say those five people want to work on something.... four of them can bang out code and review, and one of them work on the consensus side of it. I don't think they'd necessarily all be working a single track.
There can definitely be four people who are ready to code it and actually do the hard work of implementing it. But it's all kind of pointless if there is no authorization. And the way Wikimedia is set up, you get authorization through consensus. Even Jimbo runs into problems (perhaps rightfully so) when he wants to make any sort of change.
I respect that we're trying to build a base for change. But the Foundation has to acknowledge that you can't do anything without getting consent (root of consensus) from the community... and that it's very hard to get that consent. Jimbo is one of the few people who can just do something without that consent, and even then he runs into problems (perhaps rightfully so).
I'd really like to find a way to improve how proposals are made, discussed, and implemented. But we already have a place where proposals go to die.
While there are lots of good reasons not to fork the articles - we will quickly end up with an unuseable patchwork of alternative articles each from a different point of view.
I think it would be beneficial to encourage people to fork the page layout. Let a million Main Pages bloom - one for each project, but all accessing the same articles.
Have a site where users (even anonymous IP users) can download scripts to customise and tweak the page (the Wikipedia App store). Track which are most popular and tweak the main page guided by that.
What do you think? Worth creating a proposal?
It may or may not be worthwhile to try to start a process based on
- "This whole process is not about authorizing, certainly not from the Foundation. It's about empowering ... encourage people to do what compels them."
but in as far as that would work it would have nothing to do with strategy. By its very nature, strategy must be implemented (in some way or another, and there are a myriad ways) top-down.
Empowering people leads to people doing what they want to do, which mostly was going to happen anyway, leading to the already known results (varying from very good to pretty horrible, depending on the field of knowledge, and existing prejudices). As a process, it is the exact opposite of strategy. - Brya 06:34, 23 May 2010 (UTC)
This is what has bothered me most about this whole Strategy Wiki. To much discussion of what the community ought to do when we have no influence on that.
What the strategy and the foundation can do:
- figure out what we would like to happen
- identify the tools needed to make that easier
- getting (training, employing) people to kick start the process
- monitoring what happens and tweaking the tools to get rid of any roadblocks that appear in practice.
- abandon that approach if it just doesn't work and try something else.
So to repeat my question: Does anyone think it worthwhile to develop a public API for viewing and editing the content so that folks can more easily develop alternative ways of our viewing and editting our data?
It's a neat idea to figure out what people would really like to do. But I can already tell you what the results will be. You can either have proposals with divided support, but lots of attention. Or you can have proposals with full support, but limited attention. We already know how most proposals die on the other projects.
We don't need a better interface for making proposals. What's going to make it possible for any of these proposals to actually be tried and implemented?