On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 5:18 PM, John Vandenberg <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi George, > > The push came about after the IRC office hours. > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2012-01-12
After ongoing review of the IRC thread, on-wiki threads, mailing lists etc... I think the key failure seems to have happened during the IRC office hours, and has no single party at fault. Sue repeatedly stated that her and the Foundation intention was to encourage but not drive the community to a decision. The analogy to the Quaker meetings "So, is this what we're agreed to?" was made, mechanics of community consensus discussed, etc. I think that this was entirely appropriate for Sue to take as a stance, for the Foundation to take as a stance, etc. What seems to have failed is the feedback mechanisms. Let me restate here my opinion that 3-4 days over a weekend is not nearly enough time to frame a question adequately to the total en.wikipedia community, hold a community RFC / discussion / whatever, review and judge the emergent consensus, and proceed. There were a number of people within the en.wp community in the IRC chat who have been around the track a number of times, have (I believe) previously publicly agreed with me on this opinion, and failed to feed that back. There was also a disturbing undercurrent of whether people were or were not being criticized for opposing taking action; The "Oh, no, it's fine to oppose" was stated repeatedly, but more than one nasty exchange ensued which I can only attribute to that. It seems like the outcome of that discussion was that there was rough working majority that doing something was a good idea, and that everyone still standing at the end of it agreed that it was reasonable and practical to do something in the remaining 4 days. The former appears reasonable and accurate and was born out by the eventual short-time RFC on-wiki. The latter... seems to have been an accidental groupthink rather than a reasoned conclusion. It's repeatedly stated for example on-wiki on noticeboards and in Arbcom cases and the like that "IRC is not Wikipedia". In this case, the key inertia for on-wiki action was swung out of this with a presumption on reasonableness of timing that doesn't stand up. The questions of whether it was morally or organizationally "right" to oppose SOPA were fought over a bit (on IRC and on-wiki) but generally consensus is that it's ok, and that a clear overwhelming majority of the community opposes SOPA. The question of whether enough time existed at the time of the conversation to act was asked - and missed, deflected, mis-answered by people who were outside the community, mis-answered by people within the community. It was not well posed, either on IRC or in the following on-wiki discussions, and was got wrong. My message coming out of this - to the Foundation (staff and Board) - is that you cannot and should not trust anyone (and by this I mean ANYONE) who tries to tell you or argue that reasonable, stable, long-term non-divisive en.wikipedia consensus can be got in anything less than about two weeks, and longer is better. Barring emergencies, it would be best for the Foundation to structurally avoid attempting any action without something on the order of that much lead time or longer when community consultation or involvement is required. You run a rather bad risk of source bias, if the right key people happen to be proponents of one particular position, that they will then unintentionally slant the discussion in such a way that makes rushing things seem more reasonable than it really is. This is not good decisionmaking process. -- -george william herbert [email protected] _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
