Lieber Ting,

vielen Dank für die Information über Deinen Rücktritt und Deine bevorstehende Bewerbung als künftiger GEschäftsführer der Wikimedia Foundation. Du hast meine volle Unterstützung! Es wäre eine grosse Veränderung für die WMF, die ich gerne sehen würde, auch wenn ich nicht zu den grossen Sue Gardner-Kritikern gehöre. Generell denke ich, dass eine Organisation mehrere Phasen durchlebt und nach der Professionalisierung und steif-amerikanisierten Organisation jetzt eine Veränderung gut tut, um uns auf ein neues Level zu bringen.

Viele Grüsse,

Manuel

Am 2013-04-22 15:53, schrieb Ting Chen:

after intensive consideration and some sleepless nights I have decided to apply for the ED job of the Wikimedia Foundation. Due to obvious conflict of interest I will resign from the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, in effect at May 5th.

In the past five years I have worked with you on our first strategic planning, together and especially with the help of the current ED Sue we saw the organization leave its infancy. We saw it grow into the innocent childhood. And yet we are still facing a lot of challenges. And for me the following three are the biggest and most critical for the coming years:

We know that our active editor community is in overall decline. In many ways our community is biased, there is the famous gender gap, but there are also other gaps. Last year on Wikimania in Washington I wondered if I was the only one who noticed that there were almost no African Americans attending the conference, when according to the official census more than half of the citizen of the city is black. When attending community events in Germany I notice every time that I never met a single Turkish migrant there, while about 5% of the German have a Turkish background. We generally failed to attract minority groups to join and actively take part of our community. While the Foundation took a lot of effort to provide technical support for new users we also need, and need to strengthen our effort on the social aspect of this challenge. Technology alone cannot solve social problems. We will be able to resolve some of the problems by carefully and consistently adjusting our policies and rules, other problems need a mind change and a cultural change in the broad society outside of the digital world. To gather and share the total knowledge of the mankind we not only need academic knowledge but also the daily live wisdom. To keep our neutrality we only need to motivate the minority inside of the society to join our community. I believe the ability of our community to adjust itself, I believe the ability of our movement in changing the society, and I believe the Foundation need to play a key role in this process. And I want the Foundation to take this challenge.

While our communities often show a bias in their own geographical regions, we also see a large global bias of our movement and in our projects. For me the revamp of the catalyst program does not mean that the Foundation should give up its global south effort. For me it means that we need to take this challenge with a new approach. Instead of trying to plant seed in the region we should strengthen our effort by providing as much support as we can to the seedlings that are already there. Unlike mature communities like in western Europe or in northern America, small communities in places such as Kenya or Cambodia, but also in regions like China or Uzbekistan see active recruitment of editors as an essential necessity to make themselves sustainable. My believe is that the right approach is to provide support to these communities, instead of trying to build a parallel structure beside of them. In regions of the world, where hunger and poverty is still an acute and real threat to the people, the challenge to establish a culture of sharing is a very big challenge. But nevertheless, where ever I traveled, I also encounter people who are attached and admired by this approach of a society. Knowledge sharing and prosperity, freedom and peace can be a self strengthening positive feedback loop, but as every positive feedback loop, especially at the beginning it is important to have impulses to get the loop started and get stronger, until it can sustain itself. I think the Foundation should play an important role in this mechanism. Because without the part of the world with the largest majority of the human being we are far away from gathering and sharing the entirety of the human knowledge.

The third challenge that I see for the Foundation is to provide a consistent, long lasting relationship concept with the partner groups and organizations as defined in the movement roles document. In the past years the relation between the Foundation and the partner organizations are more defined by things that failed or that may fail. There were quite a few emergency measurements taken to react on crises or to mitigate emerging crises. I believe this cannot be a longtime approach. We need the local communities and the partner organizations to take the first two challenges I mentioned above. And we need to establish a long term, more trustful relation with them so that we can really rely on each other. We need to minimize frictions and turbulence. We need to establish a culture where I am not doing "my" thing, you are doing "your" thing and everyone is doing "his" or "her" thing, but that everyone realizes that we are doing together our thing, on different scales and from different perspectives and on different aspects. We need to build a common understanding where the goals and the strategic plannings be perceived as goals and plannings for the whole movement, not as goals and plannings of part of the movement.

The Board of Trustees decides and approves the strategy, but in many cases the ED play a central role in consulting the board on strategic issues, and in setting up the focus of the Foundation so that the strategy will get executed. As you I worked and thought a lot about the strategy of the Foundation. This is the reason why I want to apply for this job. For me it is the most awesome job of the world.

I did mentioned the sleepless nights before, right? It is not only the excitement that drove me sleepless. It is also the fear. I confess that I do am afraid of the responsibility that the job means. And I know that I lack more skills that are needed for this job than I possess. Among others, I have no management and executive experience at all. What I can count here that comes most near to this is only being the technical lead of a team of around 20 people distributed in two countries, which is certainly not comparable to leading an organization of 150 employees.

Because of this I am most grateful to Sue to have recruited and built up such a strong organizational structure. I know every single one of the C-level leaders and many of the team leads of the Foundation. I can say one by one why I respect their knowledge and their expertise, why I trust their loyalty and why I can rely on them. I know from every single one of them which would be my first request of advice (and for some of them, also the second, third and fourth) from them. And I know from every individual of them, what I would learn from them.

And this is maybe the only thing that is special for me. I have no problem to be critical to myself, to see myself in an honest way and reveal my imperfection and my fail to the whole world. And by doing so, I learn, in a very efficient way, and inspire others to learn.

In my whole live, in private life, in my professional job, in my years with the Wikimedia community, I have consistently tried to be an integrative person that brings different part of the world together than divide them. I believe at this moment of our history it is important than at any time that we have integrative figures all over the critical positions inside of our movement. This is the reason, why I think, despite all the failures I take with me, I should apply for this job.