Thread:Thinking about communication process (2)

Hi Alison,

Apology for the delayed response -- lots on my plate at the moment and preparing for an international trip.

I agree -- the charter should include a section on how the group will communicate. Rather than specify specific technologies, we can think about the criteria / checklist of requirements for the communication strategy, for example, we could specify that work group communications should:


 * Be transparent -- i.e any member of the community must be able to read and access the communications
 * Be open -- i.e. that any member must be able to contribute to the discussions. This also includes a requirement to use open file formats, in other words contributors should not be required to purchase non-free software in order to participate in the discussions.
 * Be licensed as free content (i.e. CC-BY, or CC-BY-SA or published under a public domain declaration)
 * all discussions are conducted in the same place, with clearly identified links to where the discussions are taking place.

I think the charter should also specify a suggested time line with reasonable and achievable target dates. In addition, I think their should be regular communications on the main list about progress -- possibly a short report -- maximum of one page on progress against the suggested timeline.

I also think the charter should include a very brief reflection on the skills / experience of the workgroup --- this is not to restrict participation of members who may not necessarily have relevant or appropriate experience --- but rather a mechanism to identify if a workgroup has any skills gaps so that we can recruit additional skills from our community.

I like the idea of having a bash at developing a charter for this workgroup --- this will help us identify the requirements for a charter. Incremental learn-by-doing --- the wiki way :-).

Cheers