[Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses

Tue Jun 22 07:32:29 UTC 2004

Erik Moeller wrote:

>Face-to-face meetings are much more productive than IRC simply because  
>real human interaction has a much higher bandwidth than letters in a  
>window on a computer screen. That was obvious at the WOS in Berlin, as I  
>know that some people are still reeling from the whole experience. ;-)  
>Getting Angela to mingle with the French Wikimedia community will benefit  
>the whole project.
>  
>
I disagree with this---meeting with a tiny fraction of the Wikimedia 
community and making decisions at such meetings is detrimental to the 
project.  Real work and decision-making should be done online, in 
public, where everyone can participate.  If people want to socialize in 
person, that's fine, but we shouldn't be making decisions at meetings 
either behind closed doors or at which only a small fraction of 
Wikimedians are present.

And, I don't think calling such meetings "perks" is an overstatement.  
I've observed quite a few non-profit meetings, as well as meetings and 
conferences in academia, and they rarely have much real work being 
done.  They're social and networking events, and the most "real work" 
that gets done is at best finding out about something that you make a 
note of to look up and read later.  The actual real work gets done via 
email or telephone (or both) either before or after the conferences.  H. 
Cheney's recent email indicated he's had similar experiences on the 
non-profit boards he's sat on, so this seems to not simply be my 
personal experience.

-Mark