Hi, can someone with knowledge of WMF's thinking expand on this statement from Lila?
"Starting the process for our next strategic planning exercise, which will be different from last time, and focused on improving our ability to react quickly and adjust as necessary to opportunities and challenges."
Is this implying that the entire strategic plan will focus on agility, or that agility will be a priority in the next strategic plan?
Also, how was this decision reached?
Thanks,
Pine
You might be interested in look at projects like
http://schools-wikipedia.org/ and other "subset wikis". When I worked
at One Laptop per Child we distributed a offline Wikipedia slice along
with the XO-1 laptops to many schools and children. We were in fact
careful to curate our offline article/image slice to avoid
gratuitously inappropriate content. We felt this to be an appropriate
thing for OLPC to do, for its audience, *not* something we expected
upstream Wikipedia to do. There are many differences between a
"Children's Encyclopedia" and Britannica! OLPC did not censor links
in any way, so a laptop connected to the internet could see and follow
links to any article/image on Wikipedia (not just articles/images in
our curated offline subset). Often schools deployed their own
content-filtering firewalls on their network connections. We felt
this was a matter best implemented and managed by the school, with
their own local community standards.
Erik and I were spitballing wiki ideas last week, and one of the
things we discussed was ways to make it easier for third parties to
curate wikipedia subsets, as OLPC and the schools project did. It is
certainly already possible, but it could be made easier. If you are
interested in making a "child friendly wikipedia", that is certainly
one way to go at it, and the ground is well trod.
--scott
--
(http://cscott.net)
Thank you for the explanations, Lila, Molly, and everyone else.
Wil, I happen to be waiting on an email right now so I have a few minutes to spare. If you need clarification on anything that has been said in this discussion I am happy to meet you on IRC or have a Skype conversation. I would suggest that this thread is consuming a lot of bandwidth in this email list and we should move the discussion elsewhere. We can also talk on your talk page, although I think your more conversational style is better suited to IRC or Skype.
Cheers,
Pine
Hi folks,
It’s my great pleasure to tell you that Rachel diCerbo is joining us
as Director of Community Engagement (Product), starting today. In this
role, Rachel will manage the community liaison team (Keegan Peterzell,
Sherry Snyder, Nick Wilson, and Erica Litrenta) and ensure that our
technical projects receive community engagement support throughout
their development.
Rachel discovered her love for collaborative communities with
Couchsurfing. When she joined the community in 2005, Couchsurfing was
a small non-profit, with essential functions being filled by
volunteers. This included responding to safety issues: staying at
someone else’s home or hosting a stranger carries risks, some obvious,
some less so. Rachel founded and led the community’s all-volunteer
safety team. She was also a member of the non-profit’s Board of
Directors from 2007-2011.
After volunteering for two years, she joined the organization
full-time as Head of Trust & Safety in 2008. She was responsible for
enacting policies related to incident reporting, profile removal, and
other safety issues, and handled any high level legal issues and
communications related to Couchsurfing member safety. She implemented
training, documentation, and case review processes for her team.
As part of her role, she also directly interfaced with Couchsurfing’s
engineering team and helped scope functionality related to safety &
moderation. The work on the safety team also equipped her well for
working across culture and languages, as issues would often arise
around differing cultural sensitivities. She’s travelled to 38
countries and lived on 5 continents.
Prior to Couchsurfing, Rachel pursued a passion for theater while
temping in various roles for various companies. Her additional
interests include digital rights, women’s rights and safety worldwide,
and scuba diving. In her spare time, she seeks to perfect her pulled
pork recipe, sews, and reads all the things.
Rachel is new to the community, and due to the nature of her role,
she’ll be spending some time just learning how to edit and how things
work in our weird & wonderful world. She’s planning a face-to-face
meeting with her team the week of June 9th and will be attending
WikiConference USA later this week.
Please join me in welcoming Rachel to the Wikimedia Foundation and to
the community.
Warmly,
Erik
PS: Big thanks to everyone who’s been part of the search process, to
the liaison team for doing awesome work in an emerging structure, and
to Philippe, Maggie and Howie for all their work in bootstrapping the
team, and for supporting Rachel as she steps into the role. :-)
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
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Till now I had mixed feelings on the nature of Wikimedia Deutschland. On
the one hand, I was (and I am) very thankful for creating one of the
projects I'm active with, Wikidata, and supporting the one I most attached
to, Wikisource. On the other hand, I was wary of its professionalization
process and I had the feeling that it was developing away (or being led
away) from its volunteering community.
These last days have been a transformative experience for the organization.
I acknowledge that professional workers (including the outgoing ED) brought
a positive growth for the organization thanks to the donors' support and I
hope their great work continues. However it is worth remembering that
donors want to support mainly volunteers's work, and that any organization
growing around the management of funds should have in mind that supporting
the volunteer community and giving them control on how activities develop
and how funds are spent it is crucial to keep trust and develop in the same
direction.
As a member of another organization that also has volunteering at its core,
Amical Wikimedia, I want to congratulate WM-DE for giving this step and for
giving me the chance to increase my trust in WM-DE to the point of joining
them too.
Great days for the Wikimedia movement!
Cheers,
Micru
Lila Tretikov wrote:
>...
> a few of the things I’m looking forward to from you:
>...
> provide feedback and on ... projects and initiatives
> to help make them better, more useful, and lead to
> more successful outcomes....
Samuel Klein wrote:
>... legal work is a significant part of our budget and
> work, and central to our mission, but here was lumped
> in with administration....
How about partitioning the legal budget and publishing expenditures of
both time and money for each partition in case rich political
opponents try to stir up legal trouble in an attempt to drain
resources?