Talk:Product Principles/Flow

Provided the understanding I currently have of this document accurately represents how it's been intended [1], I – as a new member of the Foundation and the Foundation's product team – would find it helpful for this document 1) to link to some of the thinking that supports these assertions [2] to speak to how we understand our relationship with our communities. What words do we use to describe our relationship(s)? "We" and "with" "for" and "them", "community" and "communities," etc. Although, maybe "2)" is better reserved for Product Principles/Process? cc @Whatamidoing (WMF)

(The above is a response to a question that came up during 4-Feb-2019's Community Relations Specialists/Audiences/Meetings with Product and discussed during 11-Feb-2019's, that resembled, "As someone who is new to the Foundation (that's me, Peter) what do you think of this document?" Posting here for posterity.)

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1. I understand this document as an effort to establish shared expectations and understanding among Foundation and community members about how we, together, develop products.

2. Assertion: "...strategy's assessment that we play a vital but poorly understood role in the knowledge ecosystem"

@ELappen (WMF) FYI! Peter, I do think your first point is correct and Elena has written an introduction that we recommend gets added to clarify things further.

For 1, linking to other resources, I'd invite you, yes you!, to help make it better. Much of the implied content comes from the movement strategy reports, but if you know a specific claim you think should have a link or cite, please help add those.

For 2, more directly describing the roles and framing of the community and staff, I think the larger product guidelines that this will/is a part of speak to that writ large. Thats being finalized on office, and should help give more depth to that point. In terms of who "we" is, in general it is meant to respresent (originally) the Wikimedia Audiences department, and as we merge it with the Product Guidelines context, it will take on a larger sense of "staff".

Total sidetrack: For communities vs. community, specifically, I tend to prefer to think of and refer to our communities pluralistic-ally, as its never been clear to me how people working on different wikis in different languages with different policies and tools who never interact constitute a single community, in any traditional sense of that word. I tend to think we have multiple communities in a single movement.