Julian Bond wrote this on 19 March 2008:

It's a wiki. Get in there. If somebody in the community doesn't like it, the change will get rolled back. If you want to discuss the change, there's the mailing list and the skype chats. Start discussing it.

Jim Meyer wrote on 19 March 2008:

Good communication in distributed efforts is hard and takes work. Here's some guidelines which have worked for me in the past. Some might apply here. Your mileage may vary.

My assumptions

• I'm ignorant. You're not. This simple philosophy leads me to ask questions and perfect my understanding. Usually. =]

• Talk and collaborate in chat; propose and discuss in email; collect and document in wiki.

For me, this means

• Feel free to make a new wiki page. When you're ready, share it via persistent messaging to give everyone who should know and care the chance to do so and to preserve your reasoning in the archives.

• Feel free to make minor changes to an existing wiki page. You may wish to share that with the author(s) of that page or the group at large.

• Be reticent to make major changes to a wiki page without first discussing it with the author(s) and/or the group at large. What seems obvious to you might not be true and may already have been considered before you got there.

Pros and Cons of Modes of Communication

• Wikis collect information well but distribute it poorly. They make it easy to see the current view of a document and are great for initiating a proposal or collaborating on a document. They don't usually notify people of new documents or changes unless the person signs up for that and actively monitors it. This places the burden of notification on the author/editor.

• Ephemeral messaging (e.g. IM, IRC, Skype, etc.) is great for conversation and collaboration, but poor for information collection and distribution. They give you fast, interactive access to a collection of people and tighten the feedback loop. They are not usually archived or shared with people who weren't there at that moment. This places the burden of collecting information and action items on one or more of the participants.

• Persistent messaging (e.g. mailing lists, newsgroups, etc.) is excellent for distribution and historical archives, but is poor for collection of information. I  can read my email and newsgroups at my convenience and have a semi-complete picture of things; I can read the archives to understand why we arrived at a decision. It's a pain to have to search for the five emails that collectively define what we decided.