[Foundation-l] Lowering the idea contribution barrier (and regarding strategic planning)

Mon Jun 1 21:07:40 UTC 2009

I totally agree with that and its one of the major reasons the WMF exists in
the first place. We've basically described the division of labor - the
community comes up with a plethora of ideas and donates money and then WMF
synthesizes, refines and implements them, fully in coordination with said
community. The problem is that if we limit community participation to
hard-to-use tools then the same people that come up with just a few ideas
will select only among the ideas that they thought up. It wouldn't be a
broad enough search. It hasn't been a broad enough search.

On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/6/1 Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu>:
>  I'm not convinced such a way of gathering ideas would actually result
> in anything useful happening. Brainstorming (which is basically what
> you are describing a tool for) is a very useful way of getting ideas,
> but you then need a way to implement them. Democracy isn't a good way
> of working out which ideas to give further consideration to - one
> person saying "this will never work because of XYZ" (where XYZ is a
> serious problem) outweighs dozens of people saying "this is a great
> idea" (but not giving any way to overcome XYZ). The strategic planning
> process will hopefully involve things like the process you describe
> for getting ideas, but it also involves small working groups that are
> able to go through the ideas and work out what ought to be done.
>
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