Talk:Affiliations Committee/Liaisons

Thanks for setting this up, I'm curious to see how it develops. There was a time when the mantra was "just ask Cary first", it's been a while. ;) --Nemo 11:16, 29 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I second Nemo's comment: it's a great move—although brave and ambitious. I have five queries/suggestions to members—especially, I guess, to Bence and Gregory:

Languages spoken by members. I wonder whether another column could be inserted overleaf in the table listing liaison portfolio allocations, displaying the language capabilities of each member (on the 1–5 scale we're used to)? This might be useful not only to those who might seek help from you, but could suggest future allocations among members in the first place.
Coordination with grantmaking staff. Will there be regular contact with grantmaking staff about this new function? After all, they too aim to have advisory contact with affiliated individuals and groups.
Skill-set of members. I'm struggling to find a list of skills that members need. No doubt it's somewhere. Will that list now be updated in the light of this new function (interpersonal skills, experience in providing written and/or oral advice, relevant knowledge as suggested in the grey boxes; and to what extent is strenthening/widening AffCom's language coverage a criterion?
Explicit encouragement about modes of communication. One of the hardest things is to "break the ice"—to encourage Wikimedians in affiliated groups to come forward and ask in the first place. Perhaps you might explicitly point out in one of those grey boxes above the table that contact is possible variously by email, skype-type, skype-audio, etc, according to the preferences of seekers and each particular member. Perhaps a link to email addresses could be included in the table as a friendly gesture—the first one I tried was four clicks away.
Gender. Hey, it's guy city here. One of the WMF's priorities is to address the ongoing gender crisis: recruiting some women members would be a very good move for a whole bunch of reason, especially if you're going to have more contact with people out there.
Scheduled review and lessons learned. Will there be a review and report of this function, in, say, six or 12 months' time?

Nice page design. Tony (talk) 14:51, 29 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hey Tony, thank you so much for your thoughtful comments as always. Your thinking is quite aligned with our internal discussions, and adds to them in certain places.

I think we'll have to think a bit how much extra information we can add to the page, but it is important to note that the liaisons will be reaching out directly to their affiliates and will let them know about their contact details and languages spoken. (This information is mostly available at Affiliations_Committee/Members about the languages, and the main AffCom page about some of the contact methods, perhaps they can be integrated here without increasing clutter too much.). In any case, we tried to balance language skills with potential or perceived conflicts of interests and cultural sensitivities, which means that we cannot fully map our language skills to the native languages of each affiliate at this point.

I also think it makes sense to think a bit about the skill-set we will be looking for when selecting new members. Our old requirements are listed for example Chapters_Committee/Call_for_Candidates_2013. We are currently looking to add about two new members this summer, in addition to the regular selection of half of the Committee at the end of the year.

Also, we are very aware of the lack of gender diversity in our membership. Being an all male committee, it is difficult for us to know what measures would work best in attracting non-male members, and might be afraid that some intuitive steps might in fact be counterproductive. We have received some helpful advice from Maria (a former member of the Committee), and are of course interested to hear more advice. If you know of any Wikimedian who might be a good Affcom candidate, please encourage them to apply or reach out to us. If they sign up on our talk page, we will let them know when applications are open.

I am quite confident that we have a good working relationship with Asaf in the grants team (who is an invited observer and adviser on our mailing list) and we'll see how the relationship evolves.

At this point we do not have scheduled a formal review, but I am sure it will be on the agenda of AffCom's next annual meeting, which will likely happen in April 2015. --Bence (talk) 15:37, 29 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Lovely idea, affiliate liaisons. Always happy to see AffCom go from strength to strength and just wanted to add my congratulations. Bishdatta (talk) 18:34, 29 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Куратор Wikimedians of Bashkortostan User Group[edit]

Sorry, who curated Wikimedians of Bashkortostan User Group? --Рөстәм Нурыев (talk) 18:40, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]