Making proposals easier to find / organize / work on
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?