How do we develop ideas about long-term changes, prioritize them, and pursue them over time (through obstacles, sets of pro and con contributors, usability studies, &c)?
Discussion of problems and tasks on Wikipedia itself seems like a great idea to me. (though a lot of people do this now on their own blogs, on mailing lists, and elsewhere...) That way the first people to contribute to an idea can facilitate larger open working groups, and not discourage others from jumping in and fixing things.
Some examples of long-term issues that have been at times been hard to persistently make progress on:
What is a model for persistent conversations about key topics, which are not themselves specific proposals but identify areas of importance, priorities, resources, interested parties, potential solutions? How does this build off of Wikipedia:Perennial proposals ? Does this look like policy proposals, RFC discussions with statements & review & background, article growth over time, or something else?
Is there already a place for this kind of meta-discussion? Perennial proposals itself isn't particularly reflective about the proposal-to-perennial-summary process, for instance.
My experience with the now defunct SPC suggests that despite the seemingly good reasons for having small group discussions you actually want public discussions, with good processes for high signal and recognition for consistent contribution rather than barriers to entry. We had a few awesome well-run meetings, but there was no reason for almost any of it that there needed to be barriers to participation, once there was a shared sense of purpose and community around the topics of interest. (there are exceptions when non-public information comes into play, but that is less than 10% of the total; if we can really nail the other 90% the projects will be on a much sounder footing!)
It would be handy to have more talented community mediators for any long-term/long-range discussions. I'd like to see some expansion to the community processes for training and recognizing med-folk... the planning equivalent of neutrality is important if you want to make progress and understand distinct, partly-conflicting sets of priorities.
How do we develop ideas about long-term changes, prioritize them, and pursue them over time (through obstacles, sets of pro and con contributors, usability studies, &c)?
Discussion of problems and tasks on Wikipedia itself seems like a great idea to me. (though a lot of people do this now on their own blogs, on mailing lists, and elsewhere...) That way the first people to contribute to an idea can facilitate larger open working groups, and not discourage others from jumping in and fixing things.
Some examples of long-term issues that have been at times been hard to persistently make progress on:
What is a model for persistent conversations about key topics, which are not themselves specific proposals but identify areas of importance, priorities, resources, interested parties, potential solutions? How does this build off of Wikipedia:Perennial proposals ? Does this look like policy proposals, RFC discussions with statements & review & background, article growth over time, or something else?
Is there already a place for this kind of meta-discussion? Perennial proposals itself isn't particularly reflective about the proposal-to-perennial-summary process, for instance.
My experience with the now defunct SPC suggests that despite the seemingly good reasons for having small group discussions you actually want public discussions, with good processes for high signal and recognition for consistent contribution rather than barriers to entry. We had a few awesome well-run meetings, but there was no reason for almost any of it that there needed to be barriers to participation, once there was a shared sense of purpose and community around the topics of interest. (there are exceptions when non-public information comes into play, but that is less than 10% of the total; if we can really nail the other 90% the projects will be on a much sounder footing!)
It would be handy to have more talented community mediators for any long-term/long-range discussions. I'd like to see some expansion to the community processes for training and recognizing med-folk... the planning equivalent of neutrality is important if you want to make progress and understand distinct, partly-conflicting sets of priorities.