[Foundation-l] Volunteer Council - some thoughts after a discussion on Wikimania

Sun Aug 3 03:44:20 UTC 2008

Thank you for the report, Lodewijk.

effe iets anders wrote:
> I believe that for the initial members, we don't need popular
> wikipedians, we don't need icons, we need stable and available people,
> who are willing to cooperate and compromise, who are willing to
> coordinate and communicate, who are willing to share and listen to the
> community. What we need is a wide variety of volunteers. Not per se in
> gender and nationality, or even language, but more in opinions and
> ways of thinking. We need some people who are active in the chapters,
> but also who are not so active there, we need a technical volunteer,
> we need someone involved with wiki approval policies perhaps, we need
> someone who is active in the stewards corner, some people who are
> speaking a non-english language and many other criteria. We will most
> likely not be able to create a full variety, but my personal belief is
> that we should try to work this out as much as possible.
>   
This makes a lot of sense to me. I would even say that variety of 
opinions is not so much what you're describing as variety of experience. 
A variety of opinions is rarely something we lack, but often different 
experiences are missing. There are so many ways to be involved in 
Wikimedia, none of us can really touch all of them. Being able to hear 
from them, so we know when a particular interest is affected, would be 
valuable. Knowing which people to talk to when you want to get the 
perspective of that experience also helps. And as you mention, sometimes 
the differences are around languages or projects, but more often they 
arise as we specialize within the larger universe of whatever project 
we're working on.

--Michael Snow