[Foundation-l] Community project?

Wed Dec 6 07:40:00 UTC 2006

Further to many discussions and mails (especially the wikicouncil one)
I noticed once more there's not enough communication between the
different projects. In fact each project develop his own tools or
robots and many would be useful to every community, but because of
this lack of communication they mostly remain used only by the
original project.

Since I noticed that i was thinking of creating a new
project/community/whatever the name will be, in order to centralise
tools and robots.

Few days ago, on the main project where I contribute we had a little
problem, and I went to some other wikipedia IRC channels to ask how
it's going on there project and what do they think about our problem,
and even if they had solutions to propose. It happens that was really
constructive, and so if we create a new project/community/whatever the
name will be, why can't we expand it to a "big interactive FAQ" too. A
place divided in three parts. First one for the robots, second one for
tools, and the last one for the "FAQ".

As I was thinking about this project I though of making something
wider. One of the biggest lack in communication between projects, it's
about the board and the Wikimedia Foundation. Few really know about
it, they know it exists but not how it works etc... I know if they
want there are mailing lists, but wouldn't it be more effective to
publish once a month a summary of Foundation activities?

They're already some stuff set up to do this, but I think 1) it's not
enough 2) Nothing really coordinate it. So that would be a part of
this project/community/whatever the name will be.

== Goal ==
Precision of the goals:
*Create an active group of person creating bridge between the communities
*Spread informations about meta. and the foundation to other communities
*Create somewhere to concentrate tool creation and improvement.

== Organisation ==
That's the hardest part of the reflection. How could it be organised?
Composed only with elected members? That would "secure" the content
but this kind of project/community/whatever the name will be needs
many active members from a lot of different projects, moreover
elections would give a lot of work. Volunteers, it would be easier to
have plenty of members, but anybody could come and do stuff in his
way. So I though of a solution between those two. We set the project
up, and when it's done we inform the main projects of the creation of
this. Then they would have x weeks to sign up to the project, at the
end of these time, they choose coordinators which would keep the
project clear and correct.

== Project organisation ==
There would be some "official" pages, mainly updated by coordinators .
And anyone who wants to add something, would do it on a sub page or
talk page, and if it's ok, it's added.

== Conclusion ==
I don't know what people will think about this project. I do think it
would be on one hand really useful but on the other it will need a lot
of work, especially on the beginning. For the beginning we could
launch it on incubator, and once it has proved it's useful we can
import it on meta.

Finally, what do you think about it? In what I explained, what are
your ideas to improve it? Would you like to participate?

Thanks for your answers. All of this is on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/community

-- 
schiste