On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 12:06 PM, Sue Gardner <sgard...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > Hi folks, > > For several years now, people have occasionally floated the notion > that there should be a permanent Wikimania oversight committee – > basically, a group of people responsible for giving some coaching and > guidance and oversight to the local planning team each year. Over the > years, support has been offered each year by people like Phoebe, James > Forrester, Delphine (Delphine both in her staff role and as a > volunteer) and SJ … but there has never (AFAIK) been a formal > oversight committee. I think there probably should be.
Hello Sue and all, Good timing -- we just had a long conversation about this in the #wikimedia open meeting this afternoon. There were quite a few participants, including several past wikimania organizers. Quick summary of that discussion: * there is definite interest in an ongoing Wikimania (oversight, governance, guidance) (body, committee, group) (we talked for quite a while about those various names and their different connotations) * there are a few potential roles that people see for such a group: ** 1) collecting and writing better documentation about the conference, including best practices for organization and what has happened in the past ** 2) answering questions from Wikimania organizers about past practices, helping coordinate who to ask about various aspects ** 3) providing oversight to the overall wikimania process -- for instance making sure that a bid jury is called and the bids are submitted in time (like elections) ** 4) providing oversight/governance as the conference progresses -- for instance, getting regular reports about the conference. Along with this, the org team would have someone to report to if, say, a venue burns down or some other catastrophe happens. These ideas are roughly in order of how much controversy they generated among discussion participants. I think we all pretty much agreed that we need better conference documentation, and a loose community group of past organizers and interested participants can provide such documentation. Here's a start: Conference handbook: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania/Handbook -- let's write the big book of Wikimania Conference checklist: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania/checklist -- make sure you have everything you need Conference community: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania/community -- a start at a community group, w/ interested participants. We discussed however that for any oversight/governance functions we might need a more formalized structure and perhaps a formal mandate. This seemed like a Board-level issue to several people (including me). We also discussed that there's not a good process for proposing and forming community committees that would interact with the Foundation on various issues. What do you all think? best, Phoebe _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
