Thread:Workgroup types (8)

Yay, I'm understanding. I think my problem was that workgroup is defined much more narrowly than I first thought. Here's an example of how I now understand the difference between a "Workgroup" and a group that's working on a project. The newly established Workgroup:Learning_design is a workgroup because its charge is to oversee the development and use of pedagogical templates. Pedagogical templates are a core WE resource that impact nearly all of Wikieducator, thus necessitating that the group that oversees them needs to work under some sort of guidelines/policy/oversight. And because the "Workgroup" is called learning design, if other learning design resources come along, this would be the group to manage them. OK, I didn't see that bit before. In contrast, the Learning_Design Project is focused on learning about learning design, and creating and implementing potential resources/ideas to help the process of creating learning environments. It is this project/group that could potentially devise a new community-wide resource that would be passed to the learning design "Workgroup." This project/group evolves as interest ebbs and flows.

Workgroup has such a broad meaning that I think more needs to be said in the definition, in particular that this document refers only to the "Workgroup:" namespace. I think the definition could subsume the "types" section. Here's a suggestion.

Workgroup refers to a group of WikiEducators working together to achieve a common community goal: the development of guidelines, policies, and technology-related changes that will have a community-wide impact. Workgroups are organized in the "Workgroup" namespace. A Workgroup can be initiated by any member of the WikiEducator community and will be established as needed for the specific purposes of the Council in accordance with the Open Community Governance Policy.

I think, in conclusion, I agree with Peter that community groups are not the kind of "Workgroups" we are talking about. What's needed are groups to help govern, to be stewards and shephards, to draft policy and guidelines, in many cases initiated by the community and always with much community input.