On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 1:53 PM, MZMcBride <z...@mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> Theoretical overlap, perhaps. People in the role of "Community Liaison, > Product Development and Strategic Change Management", a title Orwell would > be proud of, are not doing what's being described in this e-mail. The > current community liaisons are really paid advocates and they're tasked > with shilling bad products. This isn't the fault of the people in these > roles, many of whom I know and respect, but we should be honest that their > role is much closer to that of a marketer or public relations person. > You're being a jerk in this paragraph, Max. There is a huge difference in attitude, skills, and experience between marketers/PR people and the Wikimedians that work in the community liason role. The community liasons put in a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to advocate not only *to *the community, but *for it* within the Foundation. They do this quietly, often behind the scenes, and with little praise. If you know and respect these people, the respectful thing would not be to reduce their very hard jobs to a pithy but inaccurate summary for your rhetorical purposes. To come back to the proposal: there's a lot of merit to the idea of a formal community group not paid by the WMF to get deeply involved in understanding the engineering roadmap and advising the Foundation. The list of potential tasks Gryllida made is pretty good. There are certainly staffers who've seriously considered trying to set this up. The only barrier has been time and energy. It's probably best if the community just goes ahead and elects a volunteer group, and then proposes that it work with WMF engineering and product teams. TL;DR: be bold. If you're not proposing setting up something involving money, the only barrier is finding the right people, which will just take time. A gesture of good faith might be to involve one relevant WMF person, like Rachel diCerbo (the new director of the community liasons in product). She's been doing this kind of thing a long time. Steven _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
