Talk:Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Sources/Cycle 2/Australian Community

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@JarrahTree: is this what you had in mind? Sam Wilson 07:33, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

The utility needs to be questioned

I appreciate the good faith and logistic input of those who organised this. Thank you.

But it doesn't appear to be at all useful. In a way, this was always the danger emanating from the WMF’s design of this strategy thing: I smelt a rat from the start: that this strategy talkfest is a superficial structure based on the Foundation's fear of being criticised for not consulting communities. It doesn't appear to be designed to extract actionable information from communities; so the only way to make it useful is to steer it towards actionable possibilities on a local level. That means second-guessing what Australia WMians might think, provoking, stimulating in narrower ways, and distilling it all down to something that might gain traction in San Francisco.

The summary statements are so vague and broad-brushstroked that they’re unhelpful to anyone designing a cohesive strategy for the movement. I can't find anything that is remotely actionable by the powers that be. Statements like these, randomly picked, explain the problem.

• "Variant voices need to be heard – divergence from mainstream popular ideas should not be suppressed in the name of political correctness” … what does that mean?
• "The importance of understanding global/regional miscommunication.” Where’s that going?
• "New users should be encouraged where at all possible.” … give me a break.
• "What is our perceived geopolitical context?” … um … well how would the WM movement know how to interpret this? I'll tell you how: "their discussions led nowhere fast on that one".

It would have been better to send around an online questionnaire that asked for priorities to be numerically preferenced, and for specific responses to pointy, specific questions (plus room for personal, typed text). Otherwise you can’t expect a crowd to come up with useful things. I don't sense that there was a triaging, a contextualising in terms of Australians (and perhaps native and second-language anglophones). What else was to be done give the massive, porridgy, anti-strategy mess the WMF spewed out for people to chew over?

What aspects specifically concern the Australian community, and Australia-related themes on en.WP and Commons—that’s what I’d ask before designing a narrower range of stimuli to generate useable response data. And why, oh why, not invite comments from New Zealanders, and possibly the rest of Oceania?

I do not think you should explicitly claim (in the page title) that the responses are from “the Australian community”. When you write “via Wikimedia Australia” … what does that mean? It makes it sound as though the chapter made something like a concerted, organised attempt. Its role should either be specifically explained or the reference removed.

I'm sorry to be negative. It seems that I always play that role. :-( Tony (talk) 08:31, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Your negative role is well established. You are shooting the message and messenger, Tony - this is the 'end of a process. If you havent been there at stage one, then you've missed all the fun. Your comments are noted at this stage, thanks for participating. :JarrahTree (talk) 10:40, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

I want on record this question: how much was the cost to donors in continent-level physical meetings to deliver the insipid nonsense we see listed on the page? How many people were "met" during this process? Tony (talk) 14:49, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Commenting as a volunteer, not staff as I'm not involved in defining the process for this strategy work, was not present at these discussions, don't live in San Francisco or Australia, and stumbled in here on my own time.

Like many others I appreciate valid criticism, and appreciate dissenting voices being expressed. Your concerns seem more generally applicable to the entire movement strategy process, and not specifically to this one particular bit of outreach. Perhaps this isn't the best talk page to get answers to your many questions? I don't think you'll get the attention or satisfaction in this very deep subpage.

I participated in a similar round of discussions, and found the synthesis of that discussion to still be useful (hence why I'm reading this one). I also found it useful to be "in-person" to discuss and share thoughts and ideas. It was far more engaging and thought-provoking than a survey sent to my inbox. Even over a video chat emotions and intensity were clear when folks discussed topics of importance to them. It is hard to take a large group of participants, with an opportunity to provide any sort of 'free text' input, and make sense of it all. And as JarrahTree points out, this is the end of this one event, where the content (and context) of the discussions had will feed further into the process.

@Tony1:, I hope this doesn't come across as argumentative. I'm trying to share my experiences as someone who participated in this cycle in a similar discussion and express the value I felt.

To your direct questions:

How many people were involved is answered on the very page were are discussing. I believe it was 40.

Regarding cost: What number would give you a satisfactory answer? With a critical eye, Too much, it was a bad thing. Too little, not enough outreach was done. The importance and value of doing the large amount of discussion with various groups around the world is grand. I hope we'd agree that spending on such an initiative is a worthwhile endeavor for the movement (we've never had one IIRC). I trust folks are keeping things in budget. :p Ckoerner (talk) 21:15, 30 June 2017 (UTC)

• @Ckoerner: thanks for your comments—and I was certainly argumentative enough to warrant your response. I agree with some of your points: yes, what I'm saying applies to the whole of the "strategy" exercise, which appears to me to be a political band-aid that will go absolutely nowhere. If you really wanted to gather opinions and code them from such a broad, diverse, wordwide community, the structure of the stratagy is guaranteed to fail. Video chat is a much more practical way of interacting with respondents: far cheaper and potentially more inclusive, especially in a country as vast and mostly-empty as Australia. I do not believe the stated 40 is a true record of the actual number (for example, I've been apprised that there was trouble getting people to turn up to planned meetings). Money not well-spent, in my view. Tony (talk) 07:22, 2 July 2017 (UTC)