Topic on Talk:Special Interest Groups

Is the expectation that SIGs would be granted some authority (and by whom)? Is the expectation that SIGs decide and enforce issues within their scope? Would that be the rule, or the exception?

This is going to depend on the SIG I think. For example, the Wiki Replicas Special Interest Group will have authority in that it will inform the work of the Cloud Services team.

We lack central governance for the Wikimedia FLOSS projects, so there is no unified central authority to appeal to to designate powers to SIGs broadly. Authority by "doing" is certainly possible.

I don't think the question of SIG's having authority is directly answerable. SIGs are not meant to be a model for command and control or lack of it. They are a format for collaboration. Some of the important parts of the SIG model at the moment: agreement to publish public minutes so that ongoing and future conversations can benefit from historical openness, a place to document public groups of specific focus in case there is a shared area of concern, a designated point of contact to reach the self-defined group, and regular and expected meetings for internal and external collaborators.

This:

• SIGs could be thought of as a mixture of a "Committee" and "Task Force".

May be confusing I think.

SIGs are not an embodiment of authority other than natural authority. A SIG with Bryan and I that is focused on something we both are de facto driving would have authority. A SIG over something we are not in turn would not. We would struggle to express our reasonable stakeholder interest I suspect. I think that leans into "SIGs with authority over their scope of interest" are the rule, in that otherwise it gets hazy on direction. Informational and user-group oriented SIGs are useful and especially for social issues make sense to me. In this case, the idea of stakeholder is not at all tied to authority in the common way, but the format and surfacing of issues is worthwhile and I imagine the group would be self-selecting for derived value.

The model is held to different standards in various organizations, but in essence it's more of a guide on how to run a court proceeding than it is an edict on the powers and authority of a judicial branch of government. That's a clumsy inch deep analogy but it's the one I can think of right now :)