[Foundation-l] Reporting & communication (was: Wolf Mountain MediaWiki Appliances Released)

Fri Jul 28 09:37:51 UTC 2006

On 7/28/06, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> > And although you might disagree, I have no reason you are not Hardware
> > Officer either. I know Delphine calls herself "the former" Chapter
> > Officer (and now Chair of LCCom). Danny thinks himself GrO still,
> > Elian resigned, as for other officers, I have no clue.
>
> Right now tech. committee has the authority (even more of that!) than
> I did before.
> I still handle the work of 'hardware officer', but I guess I did that
> before we even invented officers.
> And if you want formal hierarchy, then I guess Brion is our chairman ;-)

/me notes "the bureaucracy and hierarchy of WMF is as complicated as
... some christian denominacions which claim their apostelic
traditions

> > Related to a certain website, I would like to know the exact contact
> > Wikimedia Officers or their successors concerning updates of reports
> > from each field. Is there any latest chart of the Wikimedia Foundation
> > Organisation?
>
> I'm sure those reports might be called quite voluntary - at least I
> did them before to describe our activities (then someone thought it
> was good idea to use them as semi-official documents).

You makes a good note. Let me explain here our situation in general.
Currently _all_ editors of its are voluntary, and I understand
committees' members are too, say, it is mundatory for none of us to
edit / update the website (IIRC the resolution which demanded
periodical reports from committe(s) has been pending, so no binding
for us). It's one pole of our world. The other pole is that it is the
official website of the WMF, and external people, including donors
visits that. And the most of informatiom provided to them on that site
is outdated. We are sustained by those good people but they might know
nothing in details for what they contributed to the Foundation. And as
far as I know, many of them believe they donate for hardware purchase.
It would be good to inform them how their former donations were used.

That is why I think Report on Budget and Hardware purchase, those two
items would be crutial parts of that website. But not only hardware,
but also other activities are matters, as far as the Foundation budget
is spent for those. Or it was done under the name of WMF. Other kinds
of reports are therefore informative and helpful to develop the
Foundation's and consequently our own activities on the projects.

Formerly Quarto provided its readers quarterly reports but it hasn't
been issued since last year. A report twice a year  (it's currently
just my personal thought, I need to discuss this idea on Comcom lter)
for example might be easiler to make than quarterly ones, and more
visitor-friendly than webpages not undated through about one year.

>
> > Or we can say "the officers are still in office, unless
> > they resigned"
>
> Or we can say - we have community of nice guys who do stuff. Titles
> are nice, but they're not tags that make us act in some specific
> ways. :)

Yep. And our currently potential problems are, so I presume, 1) there
is no particular community on that [and perhaps it would be one reason
most of its editors are inactive] and 2) many people who have an
account on that seem to tend to think they need titles or tags alike
to make a significant contributions [and it makes a sense in some
cases; but personally some people seem to take it too a big deal, as
if even they are disqualified to make a draft for updating. The tag
"Official" might scare them].

> > Um, however, as for Hardware, I think we need to argue with whom and
> > on what a comcom member should talk to get a new update? <g>
>
> We already discussed that, didn't we? :)

So we expect you remember other present and important issues clearly,
including the informally proposed Houserule for Wikimania?

-- 
Aphaia
aka
Kizu Naoko
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com