Indeed a lot of text to digest the evening before. I hope I can read it before the meeting starts, sorry that it wasn't sent earlier :(Lodewijk2011/3/23 Jon Huggett <jon.huggett@gmail.com>
_______________________________________________Hi everybodyI've just received the attached from Sue Gardner as input to our work tomorrow.I'm on my way and look forward to seeing you all in Berlin.CheersJonJon Huggett
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Begin forwarded message:From: Sue Gardner <sgardner@wikimedia.org>
Date: 2011 March 23 5:50:20 GMT
To: Jon Huggett <jon.huggett@gmail.com>
Cc: "James T. Owen" <jowen@wikimedia.org>, Arne Klempert <klempert@gmail.com>
Subject: Movement Roles: My input for the process
Hey Jon,
A couple of weeks ago, you sent me some questions to answer for the
MR2 working group. Thank you!
I've answered them -- at great length, I'm afraid. They're attached in
odt and pdf, and pasted in below.
Can I ask you to share them with the MR2 group members, ideally today?
I know you've got a meeting with the group tomorrow, and ideally
people will have a chance to at least scan them prior to the meeting.
I'm CCing James: please let him know if it'd be helpful for him to
provide some printed copies for the meeting.
I'm also CCing Arne so he has this in advance. Not CCing anyone else
on the group, because I'm not sure who they are :-)
Thanks,
Sue
Input for the Movement Roles working group
Created by Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation
Created for Jon Huggett, facilitator of the MR group
March 23, 2011
Purpose of this document: This document was created in response to
questions sent by Jon (in bold below) to Sue, to help in the Movement
Roles working group process. These are my personal opinions only: this
document hasn’t been reviewed or approved by anyone else. This
document is not confidential. Please feel free to share it with anyone
you like, including posting on public wikis. If you want clarification
about anything I’ve said here, just tell me.
1) Goal achievement - the Wikimedia movement strategy has just been
published with some very clear goals ... where is the current set of
Wikimedia groups and entities on target to hit the goals, and where is
it falling short?
Through its year-long collaborative strategy development process, the
Wikimedia movement set itself five key strategic priorities: 1) To
stabilize infrastructure, 2) To increase participation, 3) To improve
quality, 4) To increase reach (readership), and 5) To encourage
innovation.
Quantifying progress towards those priorities isn’t easy: some things
are easier to measure than others, and there is no simple way to set
measures that accurately capture everything we want to do. Having said
that, we were able to create five targets that, although they will not
encompass all our aspirations, should give us a sense of whether we’re
making appropriate progress overall. These targets were set by the
Wikimedia Foundation and approved by the Wikimedia Foundation Board of
Trustees, but we welcome their adoption by other movement players.
1) Increase the total number of people served to 1 billion
2) Increase the number of Wikipedia articles we offer to 50 million
3) Ensure information is high quality by increasing the percentage of
material reviewed to be of high or very high quality by 25 percent
4) Encourage readers to become contributors by increasing the number
of total editors per month who made >5 edits to 200,000
5) Support healthy diversity in the editing community by doubling the
percentage of female editors to 25 percent and increasing the
percentage of Global South editors to 37 percent
Currently, we are making progress on targets 1, 2 and 3. For target 4,
we are currently going in the wrong direction: the number of active
editors is actually falling rather than increasing. We don’t yet have
change-over-time data to tell us how we’re doing with target 5, but
there is no reason for optimism. It is clear that our problem area is
participation and diversity-in-participation. We must continue our
success in readership, and the quality and quantity of information we
provide to readers. But we must redouble our efforts related to
participation and diversity-in-participation, because that is where we
are failing.
2) Goal alignment - some in the chapters have questioned the right of
the Wikimedia Foundation to set goals for the movement ... how well
can the movement align around a shared set of goals, and what should
the movement do or not when chapters are not aligned with goals?
I reject the premise of the question. The Wikimedia Foundation
facilitated and supported a movement-wide strategy development process
involving more than 1,000 participants. Through that process, the
movement set strategic priorities for itself: the Wikimedia Foundation
did not set goals for the movement. I am not aware that any chapters
are unaligned with the strategic priorities of the movement, nor am I
aware that any chapters have set goals or targets that conflict with
the movement goals or the Wikimedia Foundation’s targets. I would be
surprised, actually, if a chapter or its members had a fundamental
disagreement with the strategic priorities: they are extremely
high-level and in my view entirely uncontroversial.
Having said that, as a thought experiment: it’s a reasonable question
to ask what should happen if a chapter set for itself goals that were
fundamentally out of alignment with the goals of the Wikimedia
movement. To pick a ridiculous example: let's say that a chapter
decided its energy would be better put towards housing homeless
people, rather than advancing the mission of the Wikimedia movement.
In that case, I think it’d be incumbent on the chapter to reflect on
whether it really ought to be a Wikimedia chapter. If its goals,
however worthy, were fundamentally different from the goals of the
Wikimedia movement, it probably ought not to be a Wikimedia chapter;
it should probably reconstitute itself as something else.
At this point, it would be up to the chapter to make that
determination, because currently there is no mechanism or body in the
Wikimedia movement with clear responsiblility for overseeing the
activities or practices of international chapters. ChapCom scrutinizes
chapters prior to their approval by the Wikimedia Foundation Board of
Trustees, but ChapCom has no responsibility for overseeing their
activities or practices once they are approved by the Wikimedia
Foundation Board of Trustees. This fact that there is no oversight of
chapters’ activities poses a risk to the Wikimedia movement.
The risk includes, for example, the following:
Risk of a financial or other scandal damaging the reputation of the
Wikimedia movement;
Risk that a chapter would publicly endorse a position in conflict with
Wikimedia values, damaging the reputation of the Wikimedia movement;
Risk that a chapter could be infiltrated by people seeking to monetize
the brand or otherwise conduct activities counter to Wikimedia’s
principles, thus damaging Wikimedia’s reputation;
Risk that an inactive chapter will continue to exist, and will thereby
prevent others in that geography from self-organizing to do good work
that a chapter would normally do;
Risk that a chapter would behave inappropriately in a variety of ways,
damaging Wikimedia’s relationships with schools, governments,
galleries, libraries, museums, archives and other influential players
in that geography and possibly other geographies;
Risk that a chapter will not align around movement priorities, thereby
preventing the Wikimedia movement from collectively achieving its full
potential.
Those risks are all “normal”: meaning, they are risks faced by all
decentralized networks.
However, our risk is heightened by our highly-unusual situation. Most
Wikimedia chapters are run by volunteers, and most of those volunteers
are young. Meanwhile, the Wikipedia brand is world-famous and
extremely valuable, and hundreds of millions of people --who could
potentially be monetized-- visit Wikipedia monthly. The Wikimedia
movement chooses for ideological reasons not to fully exploit the
financial potential of its brand and its readership, but that
potential nonetheless exists, and is very attractive to people who
would like to exploit it. The financial opportunity represented by the
Wikimedia movement, combined with the inexperience of chapters’
boards, makes chapters very vulnerable.
Currently, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is the only
entity with any argument for having oversight responsibility vis-a-vis
the Wikimedia chapters, and its responsibility and authority are
extremely unclear. That’s a problem for everyone: it creates quite
serious risk to the movement.
3) Funding - how best should money flow to align with movement priorities?
Funding should be fairly simple: money should go to support activities
that advance the mission.
Our current funding practices don’t make much sense. Here is the
current situation:
Currently, the Wikimedia Foundation fundraises to support its
activities and to build a modest reserve (which ranges throughout the
year from between three to 13 months’ burn rate: it starts high
post-fundraiser and is gradually used up throughout the year). The
Wikimedia Foundation needs a reserve because the projects are
dependent upon its continued operation: servers need to be bought and
installed, bandwidth needs to be paid for, the 990 has to get filed,
legal threats have to be fought off. The Wikimedia Foundation
fundraises primarily via the annual winter online fundraising
campaign, with those revenues supplemented by foundation grants and
major donor gifts plus an extremely small amount of revenue associated
with business development activities (mainly trademark licensing).
Currently, chapters also bring in donations. In 2010, 12 chapters
acted as payments processors for the annual fundraising campaign in
their geography. Nine of those are in Europe, and represent wealthy
countries with strong charitable traditions. Those chapters signed
agreements pledging to transfer to the Wikimedia Foundation 50% of the
revenues they process, although not all have been able to find legal
mechanisms yet for doing that. Some chapters also conduct other
revenue-generating activities, such as seeking grants or selling
merchandise: 100% of that revenue stays within the chapter.
This current state is neither good nor sustainable. Currently,
chapters get the ability to act as payment processors solely based on
their expression of willingness and ability to comply with the terms
of the fundraising agreement, and they get the ability to fundraise in
other ways by just doing it. The amount of revenue they bring in is
determined by a number of factors including: 1) the wealth of the
residents of that geography, 2) how charitably inclined those
residents are, 3) the appropriateness of online fundraising to those
people and how they tend to give money, 4) the success of the
messaging created by the Wikimedia Foundation, and its applicability
to the people seeing it, 5) the reputation and impact of Wikipedia in
that geography, and 6) any additional messaging created by the chapter
itself, as well as 7) its successful stewardship of past donors. Of
those seven factors, only the last two are controlled by the chapter,
and only one (the chapter’s messaging) has anything at all to do with
the chapter’s ability to design and execute activities that advance
the mission work of the Wikimedia movement.
To call out some specifics: Residents of France, Germany and the UK
give 10 times as much money to charity overall as do residents of
Finland, Austria and Portugal: should those chapters therefore be 10x
wealthier? A resident of Sweden is 10x more likely to donate to
charity than a resident of Lithuania: do the Swedish people deserve a
chapter that’s 10x as rich and effective? The world’s richest country
is the United Kingdom, and the poorest is Somalia: should the people
of the UK benefit from activities and programs and support that is
entirely denied to the people of Somalia?
We want to create a world in which every single human being can freely
share in the sum of all human knowledge. In order to do that, it’s
obvious that money will need to be transferred from
fundraising-receptive countries to pay for activities supporting
countries that are less wealthy, and/or less receptive to fundraising.
In effect, wealthy countries like France, the United States, Canada,
Germany and the UK will need to fundraise to pay for activities in
high-potential but low revenue-generating countries such as Indonesia,
Turkey, Brazil, Armenia, Egypt and Morocco. (“High potential” in this
instance refers to potential for high strategic impact.)
Upshot: here are some guiding principles for fundraising that I think
make sense for us. We should consider adopting these, or some version
of them:
1) Our fundraising activities should aim to achieve the highest
possible overall financial support for the Wikimedia movement;
2) All Wikimedia fundraising activities should be truthful with
prospective donors. We need to tell people what we intend to use the
money for, before they donate. And we need to report how it was
actually spent, afterwards.
3) Funding should be spent on activities that support the mission, and
have shown themselves to be at least somewhat effective in achieving
impact;
4) The Wikimedia movement is international in scope, and donations
should not be assumed to stay in the country of their origin. The
Wikimedia Foundation is a transfer point: it brings in money from
wealthy countries, and uses it to fund activities and initiatives
supporting everyone.
5) Spending decisions should be made on the basis of projected impact,
while acknowledging that much of our work is experimental, and that
experimentation needs to be supported.
I will note here that some chapters have sometimes indicated a desire
to themselves manage where money raised in their geography is spent --
e.g., the French chapter might want to choose to direct money raised
in France to French-speaking African countries, or the Dutch chapter
might choose to direct money raised in the Netherlands to Indonesia.
Practically speaking, this is unworkable and does not scale. An
example: last year the Wikimedia Foundation was asked for money by a
German group which Wikimedia Germany had previously declined to fund.
As a result, the Wikimedia Foundation and the German chapter have now
agreed that the Wikimedia Foundation will consult with Wikimedia
Germany before spending money inside Germany. That’s a good outcome,
but it doesn’t scale to the entire Wikimedia movement: if 30+ entities
are all required to consult each other before transferring money to
multiple geographies around the world, we would have spending
gridlock. The Wikimedia Foundation is the appropriate mechanism for
transferring funding from wealthy (fundraising-receptive) countries to
poorer countries: if the Wikimedia Foundation didn’t already exist
today, we would need to invent it for that purpose :-)
4) Board decision making - where does the Wikimedia Foundation board
have a role in making decisions for the movement, or not, and should
this change?
The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is the only entity with any
claim to be able to make decisions for the entire Wikimedia movement:
it is global in scope and membership, it is majority-elected by the
Wikimedia movement, and is accountable to it. The Wikimedia Foundation
owns the trademarks and the servers, and it pays the bills that enable
the Wikimedia projects to continue operating. It is a unique movement
entity.
Decision-making vis-a-vis editors: The relationship between the
Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees and the projects is fairly
clear. The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees does not get
involved with the day-to-day editorial operations of the projects nor
does it have a track record of making bold or unpopular decisions.
Because of its scope and role, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of
Trustees is in a unique position to exercise global community
leadership, which it occasionally does in a gentle and restrained
fashion. For example, in April 2009 the Board published a resolution
on Biographies of Living People, calling upon the global Wikimedia
community to take several actions related to biographies of living
people, designed to increase the quality of those articles.
(http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Biographies_of_living_people)
I consider this expression of global community leadership by the Board
to be a positive development and part of the ongoing maturation of the
Wikimedia movement. Originally as I understand it global leadership
was solely (and very rarely) exercised by our founder Jimmy Wales.
That was both normal and good in the early days, but it’s neither
ideal nor sustainable: as just one person, Jimmy, of course, cannot
speak every language, be familiar with every culture and be personally
involved with every project. It strikes me as a measure of the
successful maturing of the projects, that today global leadership is
expressed not by a single person but instead by a 10-person board
representing multiple countries, cultures and languages, supported by
an international staff and explicitly accountable to the global
movement.
And I think it works reasonably well. The Wikimedia Foundation Board
of Trustees is in a good position to exercise global editorial
leadership: it has a solid, deep understanding of how the projects
work; it increasingly is supported with performance data and analysis
prepared by the Wikimedia Foundation staff; it has recently wrapped up
a strategy development process with participation from 1,000+
volunteers, and its membership includes a healthy mix of people from
quite different backgrounds.
Sometimes people express anxiety that the Board will be overly
intrusive/interventionist, but I would say the reality is in fact the
opposite. There are very strong checks and balances constraining the
Board's ability to make decisions affecting the global community. They
include: i) the board’s own good judgment and awareness of its own
limitations, both as individuals and a collective, ii) capacity
limitations: they are 10 busy people with limited time together for
formulating interventions; iii) their built-in accountability to
editors via the election and chapter selection processes constrains
them from being too radical, and iv) their lack of direct control over
the Wikimedia movement: There is no obligation on the part of the
community to do what the Board says; if the community disagrees with
positions taken by the Board, it can ignore them. All this IMO
normally results in the Board erring very much on the side of caution,
and tending to survey and interpret community opinion rather than
boldly staking out a position of its own.
This results in a system which, for good and less-good reasons, is
heavily biased towards the status quo. There is very little risk of
the Board making decisions that go beyond its scope. There is however
IMO a risk of the Board failing to make important decisions -- in
effect, failing to be sufficiently brave, bold, interventionist.
Decision-making vis-a-vis the Wikimedia Foundation itself (staff): The
relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees and
the staff is quite clear: the staff report to me, and I report to the
Board. There are three primary mechanisms for the Board to make
decisions that affect the work of the staff of the Wikimedia
Foundation:
1. The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees hires the ED and
evaluates her performance annually;
2. Every year, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees approves the
annual plan, which lays out for the coming year strategic priorities,
programmatic goals and targets, revenue targets, a spending plan and
activities plan. The process of developing the annual plan begins with
the board being consulted for its priorities each winter, and
concludes with final approval of the plan in June;
3. The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees engages in wide-ranging
discussions at its face-to-face meetings and on its mailing list and
wiki. At any time, the Board of Trustees can request the ED to carry
out a decision it has made via those discussions, by passing a
resolution to that effect. For example, both the Controversial Content
project and Movement Roles II grew out of discussions among Board
members and the ED on the mailing list and in person.
The Board is supported in decision-making by information provided to
it by the staff, primarily in the form of the monthly reports and the
annual report. These reports include information on project
performance, financial performance, staffing and programmatic
activities. The Board also sometimes commissions from the staff,
and/or is offered, special reports on particular topics.
Decision-making vis-a-vis chapters: I believe the relationship between
the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees and the chapters is fairly
unclear, and I believe that lack of clarity is a significant problem
for the movement, if only because it's stressful and painful for
everyone.
It is clear that the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees does not
have 100% oversight of the chapters: the chapters are legally
independent entities. It is also clear that the Wikimedia Foundation
Board of Trustees does not have zero oversight of the chapters: it is
the Wikimedia Foundation Board that grants --and can therefore also
revoke-- chapter status.
In recent years, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has taken
significant steps to increase the linkages between it and the
chapters, to increase its accountability to chapter organizations, and
to enable chapters to have a voice in the Wikimedia Foundation’s work.
For example, in April 2008, it granted the chapters the ability to
select two board members for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of
Trustees. Several years ago, it began to stage one of its board
meetings in conjunction with the chapters meeting, each year in
Berlin. It is currently sponsoring and leading the Movement Roles 2
process aimed at clarifying roles-and-responsibilities among movement
players, and it has ensured significant chapter participation in that
process. In sum, IMO, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has
worked hard to create linkages and feedback loops, to ensure good
relationships and strong accountabilities that should enable it to be
taken seriously as a good-faith partner in decision-making.
However, I am not sure that the chapters acknowledge the Wikimedia
Foundation Board of Trustees as having a legitimate role in
decision-making that affects the chapters. And honestly, this troubles
me. All organizations benefit from and are strengthened by mechanisms
that support accountability and legitimacy, and currently chapter
organizations are accountable to no-one outside their geography. If
their actions and activities affected only people in their geography
this might be fine, but of course they do not: the entire Wikimedia
movement is interrelated, and the activities of individual entities
have implications and repercussions for the broader movement.
Some chapters seem to take great pride in remaining independent from
and unconnected to the rest of the Wikimedia movement. Some don’t
publish activity reports or share information, they don’t participate
in movement-wide discussions such as the strategy project and the
Movement Roles project, and they don’t comply with the requirements of
chapter agreements and fundraising agreements that they willingly
signed. This past winter, a chapter board member told me his chapter
has no obligation to report lack of compliance to the Wikimedia
Foundation: that “if you wish to enforce the contract, it is up to you
to monitor it.” That kind of talk baffles me. Our job is to work
together to advance the Wikimedia mission, and I find some chapters
–not often, but sometimes-- bizarrely hostile and antagonistic, rather
than aiming to be good collaborative partners in our shared endeavour.
5) Other movement-wide decision-making - the Wikimedia movement has
evolved a set of decision-making bodies (e.g. Chap Com) and processes
that may not scale well ... which decision-making processes need to be
improved now and in the future to make them more effective, more
efficient and more responsive?
This is not a comprehensive answer, but there are two areas that leap
to mind for me here.
1) Meta-level community decision-making.
For the most part, editorial decision-making in the Wikimedia projects
works really, really well. The projects have done an excellent job of
developing, in a decentralized fashion, community decision-making
mechanisms (such as Arb Com) that work. 99% of the time things
function smoothly and good outcomes are achieved. Having said that, I
think there are two gaps, areas where good robust decision-making
mechanisms are missing: i) Community (editorial/behavioural) issues
that extend beyond a single project in a single language, and ii)
Community (editorial/behavioural) issues inside a single
project/language-version, that cannot be resolved internally by that
project and that are damaging other projects.
An example of each:
i) A community issue that extends beyond a single project in a single
language would include for example the decline in active editors that
was discovered and publicized in the Editor Trends Study released in
March 2011. This is an important issue that is affecting most projects
in most languages. Currently, there is no mechanism for the affected
projects to come together to discuss the issue, and to make decisions
about how to handle it. This leaves the Wikimedia Foundation as the
only entity with any scope to address this very serious problem. But,
the Wikimedia Foundation has limited ability to influence the
community.
IMO the Wikimedia movement as a whole would benefit if there were a
Volunteer Council type entity, visible and accountable to the global
community, charged with the responsibility of investigating major
issues such as the decline in active editors, and recommending changes
to the community or to the Wikimedia Board, based on its
investigations. I know people are highly uncomfortable delegating that
kind of authority to others, and I understand that. It seems to me
therefore that constructing a body with only authority to recommend
(not decide) would resolve that concern, while still going some
distance to solving the problem.
ii) A community issue inside a single project/language version, that
cannot be resolved internally inside that project, and which is
hurting other projects. An example of this might be if Wikimedia
Commons were routinely deleting images used by multiple language
versions of Wikipedia, or if the English Wikiversity were harboring
trolls attacking English Wikipedia, or the Spanish Wikinews were
regularly publishing libel-filled articles. Currently, there is no
mechanism for projects to exercise any oversight over each other --
indeed, there is enormous resistance to the idea. That resistance
makes sense: the basic principle that decisions should be made by
people who care enough to show up and work hard is a good one. But
small projects in particular are vulnerable to being taken over by
problematic editors: we know that some projects tolerate destructive
behaviour because they feel they have no choice.
IMO the Wikimedia movement as a whole would benefit if there were a
group of trusted volunteers, visible and accountable to the global
community, charged with the responsibility of investigating
cross-project problems, and recommending solutions.
A note here: in my experience Wikimedia community members in general
tend to be either conflict-seeking or conflict-averse: there isn’t
much middle ground. Many, many editors have told me they stopped
editing on a particular topic to avoid conflict, or they seek out
topic areas that no-one cares about in order to avoid conflict, or
they have a strong opinion about a particular policy issue but don't
say it in order to avoid conflict. Good, constructive community
members tend to back away from nasty disputes. I understand why they
do that, but it has the effect of ceding the ground to conflict
seekers and extremists. I think good Wikimedians have a responsibility
to ensure difficult disputes get resolved properly, and I think they
would be likelier to do it if they felt asked to do it on behalf of
other editors who trust and will support them.
2) Oversight of chapters (and potentially future trademark-using
organizations/associations).
I noted elsewhere in this document that there is no body with
responsibility for overseeing and assessing chapter performance. I
think this is a serious problem for the Wikimedia movement: i)
Chapters could become effectively defunct/inactive but nonetheless
continue to exist for many years, thus denying others the opportunity
to participate in chapter work, and denying the rest of the Wikimedia
movement the benefits of the work of that chapter; ii) Chapters (noted
elsewhere to be run mainly by volunteers with little organizational
experience) could make mistakes that harm the Wikimedia movement,
which oversight could avoid or more quickly fix; iii) Oversight
implies reporting/transparency, which offers the possibility for
chapters to learn from each other, thereby accelerating each other’s
development; iv) Oversight furthers accountability and therefore also
legitimacy; and v) In the absence of agreement with regard to
oversight and assessment, the Wikimedia Foundation itself
uncomfortably acts as overseer: this is awkward and non-ideal, and
strains relationships between the Wikimedia Foundation and chapters.
IMO the Wikimedia movement as a whole would benefit if there were a
global group charged with responsibility for overseeing and assessing
chapter performance. Such a group could perhaps include a Wikimedia
Foundation staff member responsible for monitoring compliance with
chapter and fundraising agreements, as well as perhaps representatives
from the Board of Trustees and/or audit committee, and chapters
themselves. This group would have the authority to recommend to the
Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees revocation of chapter status
and/or sanctions against chapters.
6) Peers - some other volunteer-based global organizations have
avoided national chapters (e.g. Mozilla), de-emphasized them (e.g.
Creative Commons), or worked hard to globalize them (e.g. Medécins
Sans Frontières) ... what would you most like to understand about
peers?
I would love to hear lessons learned from peer organizations: traps
they fell into and warnings they would give us. Jon, I know you’ve
done a lot of work in this area (helping international non-profits
structure themselves to support their mission activities) -- it
strikes me that this is something you could just do yourself for the
group, verbally or in writing. I think it would be a real missed
opportunity if we didn’t explicitly ask you, as part of this process,
to share what you know from other organizations.
7) Legitimacy - the vast majority of Wikimedians do not affiliate with
any specific entity, chapter or group ... if there are 100,000 users
making 5+ edits a month, as far as we can tell, only ~1-2% is a member
of a chapter or group ... does this mean that we either need to make
groups more relevant to individuals, or entities less important in the
movement, or both?
The beauty of Wikipedia is its frictionlessness. If someone wants to
make a contribution (e.g. by fixing a typo), they can just do it: they
don’t need to seek permission or give us their real name or fill out a
form. That’s why Wikipedia works --- because it empowers people to
edit, without making them jump through a bunch of hoops first. And the
editors (collectively) are the most valuable people in the Wikimedia
movement, because they are the folks directly creating the service for
our readers. The chapters, the Wikimedia Foundation and other groups:
all exist to support the work of good editors.
So IMO, if we measure our success as a movement based on how many
editors are involved with groups (e.g., are chapter members, voted in
the Board of Trustees election, read the Wikimedia Foundation’s
monthly report card), that puts the cart before the horse. It forces
editors to adapt to organizations, whereas we should aspire to do the
opposite. I believe that an editor should be able to work productively
and helpfully on Wikipedia without ever needing to know anything about
the Foundation, the chapters or any of our other groups. Editors
should be able, if they choose to, to have zero communication with the
groups supporting the movement, and zero knowledge of them.
(That doesn’t mean the Wikimedia Foundation and the chapters don't
want to communicate with editors. We want to communicate with at least
some people some of the time, because knowing what editors want and
need is essential for us to fulfil our responsibilities. I am just
saying we shouldn’t measure our collective success based on our
ability to persuade editors to care about, or know about, what we’re
doing.)
So, I do not believe that Wikimedia groups need to become more
relevant to individual editors.
Whether entities need to become less important to the movement is a
different question, and I guess I can only say it depends what the
entity’s contribution is.
The Wikimedia Foundation’s contribution to the movement is critical,
even if only because the Wikimedia Foundation buys the servers and
pays the bandwidth bills. The projects literally would not continue to
exist if the Wikimedia Foundation and its work disappeared tomorrow:
that makes the Wikimedia Foundation indispensable. Additionally, I
believe that the Wikimedia Foundation has a critical role to play in
collecting and making available global performance data and analysis
about the projects: work such as the Editor Trends Study published a
few weeks ago. And, I believe it has a critical role to play in being
a kind of clearinghouse for experimentation in activities designed to
improve our impact. Some activities it will lead itself, others it
will fund. In both cases, it should act as a central point for people
for documentation of best practices and lessons learned. I believe the
importance of the Wikimedia Foundation to the movement should grow, as
the capacity of the Wikimedia Foundation grows. I also believe we will
need to earn that importance by being transparent, accountable, and
effective in our activities.
The chapters currently have a great deal of influence over the
Wikimedia movement: i) Apart from the Wikimedia Foundation, they are
the only entity that currently has the right to use the trademarks;
ii) Many act as payment processors during the online fundraising
campaign, and historically have been allowed to retain a significant
amount of cash derived from the fundraiser to spend in their
geography; iii) In April 2008, the chapters were granted the ability
to select two (of 10) board members for the Wikimedia Foundation Board
of Trustees; iv) Chapters stage an annual meeting alongside the Board
of Trustees meeting, each April; and v) Chapters have access to a
special “internal” wiki and mailing list, which gives them privileged
access to Wikimedia Foundation Board and staff members. Given that
influence, it is important to note that only one-fifth of the world's
online population currently resides in a geography where there is a
Wikimedia chapter, which means that four-fifths of the world's online
population have no ability to benefit from chapters' influence over
the movement as a whole. Until the entire online population has access
to a chapter, it is perhaps difficult to justify the disproportionate
influence granted to a person in, for example, Norway, at the expense
of a person in, for example, Turkey -- particularly given that
currently, chapters' influence in general disproportionately accrues
to people in wealthy European countries.
It’s also worth noting that the chapters currently do not have a
shared, common mission statement covering their work. I find that
problematic. It’s my understanding that one deliverable expected to
come out of the Movement Roles process is a mission statement that
applies to all chapter organizations. I think this is badly needed,
and I strongly encourage the MR group to develop such a mission
statement as part of its work.
As noted above, I am concerned about entities that I feel are
currently “missing from our table.” Our strategy calls for
upwards-prioritizing the Global South, and yet we are currently a very
Global North-focused movement. The Wikimedia Foundation is located in
the Global North; only one in five staff members has ever lived in the
Global South; nine out of 10 Board members live in the Global North,
and 26 of 30 chapters are in Global North countries. Both the Board of
Trustees and the Wikimedia Foundation staff have taken steps in the
past two years to open themselves to Global South involvement, and I
think those steps have had some good effect. But I believe that to the
extent that the chapters aspire to be an important player in the
movement, and to have legitimacy as such, then they too need to
grapple with this problem. I am not sure what the right answer is. But
I do think it involves the global Wikimedia movement making a
concerted effort to create room at the table for Global South voices,
immediately, and at least for the forseeable future. Currently we are
not doing that: for example, I have been disappointed at our inability
to make much room for Global South participants in the MR process
itself. One simple idea to mitigate the problem would be to create
let’s say a council of Global South Wikimedians, and automatically
grant that council the same rights and privileges as chapters
representatives -- e.g., give the members access to the internal wiki
and mailing list, attendance at the chapters meeting and participation
in the Board member selection process, Movement Roles and other
similar processes. This wouldn’t solve the problem, but it would at
least be a short-term hack that would likely serve a mitigation
function, and it would be better than the current state.
I also think that we need to have a mechanism for allowing the easy
development of casual, loose movement entities: basically,
organizations that are affiliated with Wikimedia, support some
particular aspect of our work, are “friends of,” etc. I am thinking of
entities like the McGill and U Michigan campus associations, and the
student ambassador clubs. It should be really easy for people to
express affiliation with Wikimedia without needing to get deeply
involved in our work. It seems to me that “friends of” status could
also work for entities that don’t want to become chapters for reasons
particular to their cultural or legal context, and/or for chapters
that can’t or don’t want to adhere to the chapter agreement
requirements.
Jon, I realize I’ve written an awful lot here -- sorry! To make it
easier for you & the MR group, let me try to recap quickly my
recommendations for the group. In no particular order:
1) I recommend that the MR group officially ask you (Jon) to share
your experiences with other global non-profit networks, and to share
your personal views on how the Movement Roles challenges should get
resolved, based on your experience.
2) I recommend the MR group create high-level guiding principles to
govern movement fundraising, and secure agreement for them. I’d be
happy to have the group use the ones I wrote above as a starting
point, and refine/revise from there.
3) I recommend that the MR group craft, and secure agreement for, a
mission statement covering all chapter organizations.
4) I recommend the MR group consider the question of whether to
create, or endorse the creation of, an entity visible and accountable
to the global community, charged with the responsibility of
investigating major cross-project or cross-language issues such as the
decline in active editors, and recommending changes to the community
based on its investigations. If the MR group chooses not to act on
this recommendation, I would ask how it believes
cross-project/cross-language issues should best be resolved: whose
responsibility is resolution, and what is the mechanism for achieving
it.
5) I recommend the MR group consider the question of whether to
create, or endorse the creation of, a global group charged with
responsibility for overseeing and assessing chapter performance, with
the authority to recommend to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of
Trustees revocation of chapter status and/or sanctions against
chapters. If the MR group chooses not to act on this recommendation, I
would ask how it believes chapter performance should be monitored:
whose responsibility is it to monitor, and whose responsibility to
sanction where necessary.
6) I recommend the MR group consider the question of whether to
create, or endorse the creation of, a temporary council of Global
South Wikimedians, and automatically grant that council the same
rights and privileges as chapters representatives -- e.g., give the
members access to the internal wiki and mailing list, attendance at
the chapters meeting and participation in the Board member selection
process, Movement Roles and other similar processes. This wouldn’t
solve our problem, which is a general movement-wide lack of Global
South participation, but it would at least be a short-term mitigating
hack, and better than nothing. If the MR group ends up not choosing to
do this, I would then ask how it believes Global South voices should
be represented at our movement tables, and who is responsible for
making it happen.
7) I recommend that the MR group recommend the establishment of a
“friends of” type status to make it really easy for people to express
affiliation with Wikimedia without needing to get deeply involved in
it. MR should create a mission statement for these groups, that makes
it clear how they differ from the chapters.
8) I recommend that the MR group release, as part of its final work, a
statement reaffirming the mission of the Wikimedia movement, and
calling upon all players to work together harmoniously and
productively in pursuit of our common goals. I am sometimes baffled by
the infighting and hostility expressed by movement players: I think it
would be great for this process to remind everyone that we’re on the
same team, and here for the same reason :-)
Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation
415 839 6885 office
415 816 9967 cell
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