Hey Chris,
I think that saying this happened because of the recommendations remains a
fair statement but for sure there are some caveats with that. I don’t want
to speak for the entire org but I'm also pretty confident in saying that
there are a lot more than just two recommendations with work having started
or about having work spun up on. Infrastructure and Financial
sustainability, User Experience, Safety and Inclusion work are all things
aligned with work the foundation is doing and that are in step with the
strategy recommendations.
With the WMF’s planning process for 2020-21, I think it is fair to say it
was done with both eyes firmly on what was working its way through Phase 2
of the strategy and we aligned or are aligning plans with what came out
back in May. In this instance improvements to infrastructure and in this
case APIs, data interfaces etc. have been present throughout that and were
the output from two separate working groups during phase 2. The
recommendations of those two working groups aren't moving forward in
isolation either and the WMF is looking to improve its API infrastructure
in a much broader sense and that work is also getting up to speed as we
move into the next financial year.
The reason for that is that we must keep in mind that the strategy process
has gone on for nearly 4 years and the phase we just completed has been
going on for nearly two years now. The recommendations we have today have
grown from that entire 4 year body of work and the whole process has had a
huge influence on the WMF and what goals it is working towards.
Although sometimes many of us might think it, the organisation doesn’t work
in a silo and with that comes the reality that planning timelines don’t
align. I know that if the strategy had come out and the WMF had just sat on
its hands for 16 months until June 2021, waiting for another cycle, before
it started any of the work contained within the strategy, I would have had
a very strongly raised eyebrow and I think there would have been
frustrations from many people. Given that it makes sense that the WMF has
been actively preparing, readying itself and laying the groundwork to get
straight to work in implementing those recommendations.
Seddon
On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 1:43 PM Chris Keating <chriskeatingwiki(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
It's interesting that of all the strategy
recommendations, two are so far
being implemented. One is the Universal Code of Conduct, which has at least
had plenty of discussion and publicity, that even precedes the strategy
process. The other is this, which hasn't been particularly prominent
before, but the WMF seems to have a team working on it just a couple of
weeks after the final recommendations were published.
So while doing this is one of the strategy recommendations, it doesn't seem
that is is now happening *because of* the strategy recommendations....
Chris
On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 10:46 AM Gergő Tisza <gtisza(a)gmail.com> wrote:
You can find some more discussion at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Re…
As I mentioned there, the premise of the recommendation is that the
movement needs new revenue sources; in part because the 2030 strategy is
ambitious and requires a significant increase in resources, in part
because
our current lack of diversity (about 40% of the
movement's budget is from
donations through website banners, and another 40% from past banners via
email campaigns and such) is a strategic risk because those donations can
be disrupted by various social or technical trends. For example, large
tech
companies which are the starting point of
people's internet experience
(such as Facebook or Google) clearly have aspirations to become the end
point as well - they try to ingest and display to their users directly as
much online content as they can. Today, that's not a whole lot of content
(you might see fragments of Wikipedia infoboxes in Google's "knowledge
panel", for example, but nothing resembling an encyclopedia article). Ten
years from now, that might be different, and so we need to consider how
we
would sustain ourselves in such a world - in
terms of revenue, and also
in
terms of people (how would new editors join the
project, if most people
interacted with our content not via our website, but interfaces provided
by
big tech companies where there is no edit
button?).
The new API project aims to do that, both in the sense of making it
possible to have more equitable arrangements with bulk reusers of our
content (who make lots of money with it), and by making it easier to
reuse
content in ways that align with our
movement's values (currently, if you
reuse Wikipedia content in your own website or application, and want to
provide your users with information about the licensing or provenance of
that content, or allow them to contribute, the tools we provide for that
are third rate at best). As the recommendation mentions, erecting
unintentional barriers to small-scale or non-commercial reusers was very
much a concern, and I'm sure much care will be taken during
implementation
to avoid it.
Wrt transparency, I agree this was communicated less clearly than ideal,
but from the Wikimedia Foundation's point of view, it can be hard to know
when to consult the community and to what extent (churning out so much
information that few volunteers can keep up with it can be a problem too;
arguably early phases of the strategy process suffered from it). This is
a
problem that has received considerable attention
within the WMF recently
(unrelated to API plans) so there's at the very least an effort to make
the
process of sharing plans and gathering feedback
more predictable.
Also, the pandemic has been a huge disruption for the WMF. Normally, by
this point, the community would have been consulted on the draft annual
plan, which is where new initiatives tend to be announced; but that has
been delayed significantly due to so many staff members' lives being
upheaved. Movement events where such plans are usually discussed had to
be
cancelled, and so on.
(Written with my volunteer hat on. I was involved in the strategy process
and helped write the recommendation snippet Yair quoted upthread; I'm not
involved in the API gateway project.)
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Seddon
*Community and Audience Engagement Associate*
*Advancement (Fundraising), Wikimedia Foundation*