PortlandWiki talk:Council

Necessary?

This seems a bit too top-down to me. Most wikis take cues from Wikipedia in that the entire community is allowed and encouraged to help craft policies and structure. Besides, at this stage, we need all the help we can get in this task. If others agree, I recommend this page be either deleted or tagged as a "rejected proposal", and the link on the main page removed. -kotra 10:21, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Imo, it seems to me that this wiki is meant to be so local, something like a council could actually be of benefit... but perhaps instead of "council" it could actually be perhaps more of a community forum. I dunno. It seems policy /could/ be solely discussed and created on wiki and still work, but face-2-face might somehow facilitate a more enlightened policy. But again, whose to say? Michael

I think deciding policy in a face-to-face way, while it has some benefits, is worse in the end because our community of contributors will have less confidence in a policy that they could never have any say in, or have access to the reasoning that lead to them. At least with an open and transparent system (like on-wiki), anyone can have their say and can read what the discussion was that lead to the policy, thereby (usually) seeing the wisdom in the policy. Also, I think policies can be stronger and wiser when more voices can offer their views; when one or two people decide rules they often forget crucial details and consequences. A council would be more efficient and easier in the short run, but I think in the end, anyone should be able to help craft our policies. -kotra (talk) 00:32, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Certainly it seems policy formation should be open to everyone. Online policy formation does seem like the way to have the most participation. Michael (talk)

Oh, I just found out that the council concept came from Bloomingpedia (see this diff). I don't think it was an actual proposal or plan to have a PortlandWiki Council, it just came from a cut/paste job from Bloomingpedia. So I've removed the mention of it from the front page... and it sounds like from us here that the idea is probably rejected anyway so I've added a mention of that here (at PortlandWiki:Council). -kotra (talk) 05:48, 22 December 2009 (UTC)