Bod Notbod wrote: > On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 12:23 AM, Noein <prono...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> I've been watching the dialogues between the WMF and this mailing list >> for a while now and most of the conflicts are the same: bad >> communication. This is apparently not due to individuals but institutional. >> > > I think you're wrong. > To paraphrase a common bromide in Finnish, I think he is right, wrong, and grand-daddys long-johns.
> Try to get any sense out of the upper echelons of your phone company, > your gas providers, whoever gives you your electricity. > > The Wikimedia community is huge. The staff relatively small. It's > unthinkable you'd write to AT&T and get a response from the CEO. > Looked at in that light, the WMF is very transparent. The WMF office > would be incapable of turning over every query the wider public has. > We're a community and we should be supporting the office folk in their > roles. They do not have a call centre and nor should they. > I think the big issue is that communication goes upwards, downwards, and laterally, and those are three issues that correctly shouldn't be mixed up, when examining how well we as a whole are doing in the field of internal communication. > However, should you have a question that needs to be looked at by > someone high up, my best recommendation is to be a good community > member. If you have a rep for doing lots of good work on the projects > you will come to the attention of WMF staff and they will communicate > with you because they have to come to know and respect you. > > Absolutely true, but when the information is going downstream, there have been instances where there hasn't been a clear presumption that people in the various communities themselves know what they are doing, as a default, taken as a whole. I genuinely think this is just a learning curve people who have come from more traditional top-down organizations have to pass through; and I have seen very encouraging signs that the staff can learn new tricks, and are gradually "getting it". The big unadressed problem is lateral communication between particular organs. Top-down and bottom-up communication are things that generally tend to have a dynamic that is self-correcting (though sometimes drama-filled). But communication between parts that are nominally on the same level, is not so easily fixed. Chapters are organizing as a conduit for such communication between languages -- though it has to be said at a snails pace, and in fits and starts. On the foundation top level we all know that there is on-going work on how to optimize the advisory committees usefulness. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l