Coordination meeting are meetings that occurs during the elaboration of potential project. This meeting often happened in informal basis. Not all meeting happened are successful, but as lesson learn WMID would like to have them in record. Several meetings that end up becoming a successful project actually a result of a lot of coordination meetings, including the unsuccessful ones.
At the beginning of the Wikimedia Cipta Jakarta project, there was no plan to single out the coordination meeting as a sub-project. As the project rolling we started to identify that activities happening inside the Wikimedia Cipta Jakarta actually divided into three categories: Writing Class for Public, Project Classes (limited participant), and Coordination Meeting (reserved meeting from 2 people to 4 to exchange ideas or project possibilities within informal setting).
The meetings goal are to:
To identify volunteers to initiate and organize project
Coordination meeting for Wikimedia Cipta begin in the early December 2010, approximately 50 meetings happens during the course of December 2010 to 2011. These meetings consist of:
Recruitment.
Project directors
Central administration
Specialist for training in project classes
Project discussions possibilities and preparation
Training and pre-project classes
Location survey
Supporting other open source community (Firefox launching)
The coordination meetings are second biggest funded activity after project infrastructure, yet we feel this meetings are crucial as the part of project embryo. It is very successful when it comes to volunteer meeting and capacity building, but it is failed during specialist recruitment to do training. The professional aren't interested.
We learn this meetings are necessary to build in chemistry and to sync one's goal to meet reality. Sometimes their ideas considered "great" but also many time "unrealistic" given the time one willing to commit to do it. Other time people simply to afraid to commit to anything and the meeting went well without having any result.
We also learn that although this meeting is announce wide and hard through wikipedia volunteer channel i.e. village pump, mailing list, WP ID site notice, not many people are interested from internal community. Projects identify as "meeting its goal" are project run by individual from external circle (outside community) after they are being embedded by the movement value, limitation, and introduce to project standard.
