User:Schiste/community

As I'm writing it this is not the final version at all. If you read it, and want say something, do it. If you want modify it, do it too.

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