Hi Everyone --

We wanted to give you an update on where we were with the strategy process and provide some more avenues for feedback and participation.

When we last spoke, we had presented an initial draft of our strategy along with some details of the process we are using. This did not get the feedback that we had hoped for[1]. We considered this feedback and came up with some conclusions that we've used to move forward:

1. The strategic problem itself was too broad and unclear to be a suitable foundation for discussion or specifics. 2. The process is difficult to understand if you haven't been immersed in it. 3. Strategy is hard and collaborative strategy, particularly with a large group of distributed stakeholders, is harder.

In response to these conclusions, we've done the following:

1. Simplified and pared down our scope and made our strategic problem more accessible and actionable. 2. Changed our communications plan to focus more on the outcomes of the strategic process (what we're proposed we do v. how we came to these ideas) with the belief that this will be easier to discuss. 3. Moved forward with the process to get to more specific plans and most importantly start the process to reverse engineer them to see if they will be effective. We also made a video to explain where we are and have started a process to gather input on design from the community.

We'd like to ask for your help in the following way:

1. Please review this page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Strategy/Strategy_Process/Testing for details on how you can provide feedback become more involved in the process. We're also very happy to recieve feedback on the process itself and on the strategic options we are reverse-engineering.

- The Reading Team

[1] Our favorite was something along the lines of "It sounds like you put all of the buzzwords into a bag, shook it up, and poured it out on a table" -- this was good.