The first ProleWiki book club happened 12th February at 8PM UTC, and it was conceived and led by RedCustodian, with @CriticalResist helping set it up, and Clover helping with the reading.
It was a great success and signs that ProleWiki is starting to become an organic entity, because this is perhaps the first time that a major decision was made without my contribution to it, because I was not directly involved in the conceiving to the execution of the book club.
More than 2 years ago, when ProleWiki was merely 2 months old, I made some comments (some very idealist) on the direction of social ownership of ProleWiki:
We hope that in about a year or so, ProleWiki is able to exist without me individually and becomes a valuable resource to revolutionaries from all over the world, socially owned by all contributors.
It took way more than a year, but we finally have an expression of this goal, which is a somewhat big decision being taken without my contribution. I think this is pretty symbolic of the direction of our organization, which is slowly, but steadily growing.
Even though some big decisions are still directly in the hands of CriticalResist and myself, especially administrative ones, ProleWiki couldn't have maintained an unity among its editors without some level of democracy inside our server. Editorial decisions about the content of our wiki is no longer a decision solely made by the administration, and the administration promotes a culture of consultative democracy in most of the bigger decisions of our project.
As an important disclaimer, I should add that the administration does not hold up democratic values merely because we hold up an ideal and we are noble defenders of democratic centralism. Democratic centralism works, and it gives integrity to an organization. When decisions are discussed previously, sometimes exhaustively, the chances of disagreements are close to a minimal, and only in a free criticism environment can discussions happen until their exhaustion.
Wouldn't it have been better to have done the book club event at Matrix instead? I think it would've caused some activity to flourish in the Lemmygrad Matrix channels.
Absolutely, unfortunately Discord is still more convenient than Matrix (roles, custom emojis, integration with MediaWiki, and few other things, especially bots)
The majority of people use Discord, so that's a major reason why we won't focus solely on Matrix, but we're open to it, that's why we have a chatroom there. However, we focus on Discord, but I respond to messages in Matrix whenever I see them. Since the overwhelming majority of editors and sympathizers of ProleWiki are on Discord, it's reasonable that we prioritize developing our community there instead of on Matrix.
Ideally, we could have a Matrix server for us and an account associated with Matrix. ProleWiki could also have its own Lemmy, can you imagine that? Editors would be given an account where they could interact with others, share links, request and discuss articles, about 20 to 50 editors from all over the world interacting and discussing in public view.
We can dream very high, but we are lacking in numbers for such organization. We only have 2 managers at the moment, me and Critical, and there is just so much we can do. There are some editors specializing in certain tasks, such as Clover and Deogeo on agitprop, let's hope we'll have someone associated with ProleWiki interested in developing things like this in the future.