Oliver wrote:
"The Foundation I would return to is not an organisation with a flat
structure. In fact, it could be an organisation that looks a lot like
this one, because I don't believe reporting lines or titles have as
much of an impact on dynamics as we think they do. What *does* have an
impact is how we recognise the value of emotional labour, how we
recognise our implicit biases and advantages, and how honest we are
with each other: not just in terms of what we *say* but in terms of
how we *listen*. In other words, the litmus test for me is: what
happens when the socially and politically weakest person in the
organisation has an idea?"
---
My thoughts:
It was always clear that Oliver was a genius, both analytically and
sardonically superior to most of us. We always had a leg up on him
though, because he said some wacky and reckless things as a young lad
as part of his relentless diatribes.
It has been an enormous privilege to watch him turn into a genius of
culture and people as well. To see someone so smart apply the same
rigor and ferocious focus to thinking about an entire systems (rather
than only where they fit in it) and all of its links (especially those
weakest or most vulnerable), is just phenomenal.
It also makes me sad, because we've lost him. His only kindness was
leaving just as he was clearly going to surpass us all in both
intelligence and humanity.
Bye Oliver. Keep your head way up.
-Jake Orlowitz (Ocaasi)
The project formally know as the Knowledge Engine was frequently referred
to as a "moon shot" in November 2015 by a number of my fellow board
members. This terminology I believe accurately highlighted the size,
expense, and risk that this proposal was.
How we have described the KE to our movement has been significantly
different. All efforts appear to be to minimize what was proposed. And
efforts to explain it at all have only occurred after greater community
understanding became inevitable.
I find it disappointing to see the ED and some board members try to deny
and downplay the plans that previously existed. While the ED has recently
apologized for the lack of transparency, this was brought to her attention
many times before, and thus I am not convinced her apology will result in a
change in her approach.
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
Dear all,
I am leaving the Wikimedia Foundation to take up a job as a Senior
Data Scientist at an information security company. My last day will be
on 18 March.
After 12 months of continual stress, losses and workplace fear, I no
longer wish to work for the Wikimedia Foundation.
While I appreciate that the Board of Trustees may take steps to
rectify the situation, I have no confidence in their ability to
effectively do so given their failure to solve for the problem until
it became a publicity issue as well as a staff complaint.
I wish the movement and community the best of luck in building a
fairer, more transparent and more representative governing structure.
All the best,
Oliver Keyes
Of these last 5 years, Wikimedia Foundation
Dear Fellow-Wikipedians/Wikimedians,
Could the German Federal Press Conferences serve as a model to improve communications between WMF officials/bodies and the community (and the public at large)?
Unlike in other countries, where governments face the press at their own will, choosing topics and interlocutors as they please, in Germany the press-conference takes place three times a week, according to a regular schedule, and is hosted and moderated by an independent association. Participants on the government side are usually a spoke-person of the Chancellery (Bundeskanzleramt, roughly equivalent with a Prime Minister's Office) and of all the ministries. On the other side, the press-conference is open to journalists based in Berlin who regularly cover German federal politics. Since last year (?) the entire press-conferences are video-taped and made available on Youtube by a team of journalists for everyone to watch [1].
I wonder whether this might be a viable approach to improve communications by the WMF BoT and management with regard to various stakeholder groups.
The ingredients would be:
- Regular information and Q&A sessions with the participation of official spoke-persons of the WMF BoT and WMF Management (i.e. professional communicators) on the one hand and a number of more or less regular participants acting as multipliers with regard to the community as well as journalists regularly covering WM-related issues on the other hand.
- Interval: to be decided. Every two weeks might be reasonable. It seems important that these information and Q&A sessions take place on a regular basis at the same interval, no matter how many burning issues are around at any given time. As the information and Q&A sessions have a clear time limit, this obliges everyone to focus on the most burning issues at any given time.
- The information and Q&A sessions are hosted and moderated by an independent entity according to a pre-established set of rules.
- The spoke-persons have to respond to every question asked, choosing between three options: answer the question directly if they can; explain why they aren't able or willing to answer the question; send the answer later by email to the participants if specific information needs to be gathered first.
- If the answer is deemed insufficient or too imprecise by the person who asked the question, they are allowed to dig deeper by asking a further question.
- The Q&A sessions are recorded, so that everyone interested is able to keep up with the main issues raised within the movement and the official stance taken by the BoT and/or WMF management as well as the critical questions raised by those closely following the issues.
Personally, I believe that this might smoothen out communications with the community and have some potential to scale - even with regard to non-English-speaking communities thanks to multipliers. Drama might not be avoided, but at least it would be given a clear frame and be somewhat detached from individuals by focusing more on roles. Furthermore, transparency and accountability would be increased, serious problems may be spotted earlier, and misunderstandings would more easily surface.
Any thoughts about pros and cons?
Beat
[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/Nfes2005/videos
_____________________________________________________
Beat Estermann
Coordinator OpenGLAM CH Working Group
http://openglam.ch<http://openglam.ch/>
Berne University of Applied Sciences
E-Government Institute
Brückenstrasse 73
CH-3005 Bern
beat.estermann(a)openglam.ch<mailto:beat.estermann@openglam.ch>
Phone +41 31 848 34 38
Second Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon - 1/2 July 2016 - Save the date<http://make.opendata.ch/wiki/event:2016-07>!
An interesting article in Fortune:
http://fortune.com/2016/02/19/buzzfeed-metrics/. "One of the biggest
challenges in online publishing, Nguyen says, is the continual process of
re-evaluating what criteria the company should be looking at in order to
gauge its effectiveness in reaching an audience, a process that BuzzFeed
calls “re-anchoring.” In effect, it’s an almost scientific approach of
checking to see whether the thing being measured is actually the thing that
is most important."
While WMF seems to be focused on pageviews for fundraising reasons (and I
would guess that this is also the thinking behind WMF Communications
increasing its staff and budget for social media), I hope that we can
explicitly include off-wiki uses of Wikimedia content in our measures of
impact and success.
Pine
I would hope that the Board is now planning an executive transition for
WMF. I would like to ask the Board to be transparent about this, including
making timely posts to this mailing list and proactively posting documents
and timelines on Meta and Commons.
I would hope that people skills, communications skills, and cultural fit
are high on the list of priorities for the next executive.
I also hope that the current Board members will thoughtfully consider
whether it's in the best interests of the Wikimedia Foundation and the
larger Wikimedia movement for them to continue as Board members. By human
nature, people are suited to different roles, both in work and in volunteer
leadership capacities. It seems to me that Lila and at least some Board
members have interests, skills and abilities that could be beneficial in
other organizations or in different roles in the Wikimedia movement. Having
the courage to change is far from the end of the world; Arrnon did it, a
number of staff members are doing it, and I hope that Lila and at least
some Board members will follow their example so that in the long run
everyone will be in places that are good for them.
Also in the long run I hope that the Wikimedia Foundation and our volunteer
community will emerge strong, resilient, healthy, and vibrant.
Pine
Why we’ve changed
I want to address some of the many questions that are coming up in this
forum. From the general to the very concrete, they all touch on the fact
that many things about the WMF have been changing. We are in the thick of
transformation, and you all have the right to know more about how and why
this is occurring. This is not a statement of strategy, which will come out
of the community consultation next week. This is the ED’s perspective only.
After 15 years since the birth of Wikipedia, the WMF needs to rethink
itself to ensure our editor work expands into the next decade. Recently we
kicked-off some initiatives to this end, including aligning community
support functions, focus on mobile and innovative technology, seeding the
Wikimedia Endowment, re-organizing our internal structure, exploring
partnerships and focusing on the most critical aspects of our mission:
community and technology. We started this transformation, but as we move
forward we are facing a crisis that is rooted in our choice of direction.
The choice in front the WMF is that of our core identity. Our mission can
be served in many ways, but we cannot do them all. We could either fully
focus on building our content and educational programs. Or we can get great
at technology as the force multiplier for our movement. I believe the the
former belongs to our volunteers and affiliates and that the role of the
WMF is in providing global support and coordination of this work. I believe
in -- and the board hired me to -- focus on the latter. To transform our
organization into a high-tech NGO, focused on the needs of our editors and
readers and rapidly moving to update our aged technology to support those
needs. To this end we have made many significant changes. But the challenge
in front of us is hard to underestimate: technology moves faster than any
other field and meeting expectations of editors and readers will require
undistracted focus.
What changed?
When Jimmy started Wikipedia, the early editors took a century-old
encyclopedia page and allowed anyone to create or edit its content. At the
time when creating knowledge was still limited to the chosen few, openly
collaborating online gave us power to create and update knowledge at a much
faster rate than anyone else. This was our innovation.
As we matured, we encountered two fundamental, existential challenges. One
is of our own doing: driving away those who would otherwise join our
mission through complex policies, confusing user experiences, and a caustic
community culture. The other is external and is emerging from our own value
of freely licensed content: Many companies copy our knowledge into their
own databases and present it inside their interfaces. While this supports
wider dissemination, it also separates our readers from our community.
Wikipedia
is more than the raw content, repurposed by anyone as they like. It is a
platform for knowledge and learning, but if we don't meet the needs of
users, we will lose them and ultimately fail in our mission.
Meanwhile, in the last 15 years revolutionary changes have taken hold. The
rate of knowledge creation around the world is unprecedented and is increasing
exponentially <http://qpmf.com/the-book/welcome-to-hyper-innovation/>. User
interfaces are becoming more adaptive to how users learn. This means we
have a huge opportunity to accelerate human understanding. But to do so
requires some significant change in technology and community interaction.
So let’s begin with technology: Many at the WMF and in our community
believe that we should not be a high-tech organization. I believe we
should. With over half of our staff fully committed to delivering product
and technology, it is already our primary vehicle for impacting our mission
and our community. In fact we constantly see additional technology needs
emerging from our Community department to help amplify theirs and our
community work.
What do we need to do in light of the changes I described above? We need to
focus on increasing productivity of our editors and bringing more readers
to Wikipedia (directly on mobile, and from 3rd party reusers back to our
sites).
When we started, the open knowledge on Wikipedia was a large piece of the
internet. Today, we have an opportunity to be the door into the whole
ecosystem of open knowledge by:
-
scaling knowledge (by building smart editing tools that structurally
connect open sources)
-
expanding the entry point to knowledge (by improving our search portal)
There are many ways to alleviate the manual burdens of compiling and
maintaining knowledge currently taken on by our editing community, while
quickly expanding new editing. We made significant strides this year with
our first steps to leverage artificial intelligence
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/11/30/artificial-intelligence-x-ray-specs/>
to remove grunt work from editing. But that is just a start. Connecting
sources through structured data would go much further and allow our editors
to easily choose the best media for their article and for our readers to
recieve content at their depth of understanding or language comprehension.
Wikipedia is the trusted place where people learn. Early indicators show
that if we choose to improve the search function more people will use our
site. We are seeing early results in use of Wikipedia in our A/B testing of
search
<https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/First_Portal_Test.pdf>
, but we have a long way to go. We want people to come directly to our
sites -- and be known as the destination for learning -- so that eventually
we can bring our readers into our editing community. And without community
support none of this will be remotely possible.
Which brings me to the community. Over time the WMF has grown, with an
opportunity of becoming a complementary, mutually empowering partner with
the community. We need each other and we share one focus: humanity.
Reaching and sharing with people across the world is our common goal.
In the past year we managed -- for the first time since 2007 -- to finally
stem the editor decline. But that will not be enough. We need to find ways
to re-open and embrace new members instead of the hazing we conduct at
least in some parts of the site today. We must treat each other with
kindness and respect. Technology is not the main reasons for rampant new
editor attrition. It is how we talk to each other that makes all the
difference.
Without tackling these issues we artificially limit our growth and
scalability. And we will continue to reject those whose ideas are new or
different, the most vulnerable members of our community. In this, the
Gender Gap is the “canary in the coal mine”. Women are the first to leave
contentious and aggressive environments and are less likely to remain when
they encounter it. They are less likely to run in elections because of rude
and aggressive treatment. Yet in editor surveys and in our latest strategy
consultation, Gender Gap has been considered a low priority. I disagree.
Over the past two years I have actively pushed funding to improve
anti-harassment, child protection and safety programs; work in these areas
is ongoing. We are actively exploring some tangible approaches that -- I
hope -- will turn into concrete outcomes
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Harassment_workshop>. In the latest
research this year the number of female editors shown some growth.
What does this mean for the WMF?
In the past 18 months -- and thanks to hard work of the people at the WMF
and our community supporters -- we have made significant structural
changes. We have organized around two core areas: technology and community.
We have made changes with an eye on improving our relationships between the
volunteer community, the chapters and the WMF, including the creation of
structures that should vastly improve the WMF's responsiveness to
volunteers. We began adopting best industry practices in the organization,
such as setting and measuring goals and KPIs. We’ve given managers a lot of
responsibilities and demanded results. We’ve asked for adjustment in
attitude towards work, our responsibilities and professional relationships.
We prioritised impact and performance so that we can provide more value to
our communities and the world.
This has not been easy.
In practice this means I demanded that we set standards for staff
communication with our community to be professional and respectful. It
meant transitioning people, shutting down pet projects, promoting some but
not others, demanding goals and results to get funding. This level of
change is necessary to set up our organization to address the challenges of
the next decade.
All of this means stepping away from our comfort zones to create capacity
for building programs and technologies that will support us in the future.
It is a demanding and difficult task to perform an organizational change at
this scale and speed.
I believe that in order to successfully serve our community and humanity,
the WMF has deliver best-of class technology and professional support for
community. This will ensure we are delivering significant impact to
volunteer editors and opening avenues for new types of contributions. This
requires that we choose the route of technical excellence for the WMF with
support and encouragement from our community partners. Without this
empowerment, the WMF will not succeed.
The world is not standing still. It will not wait for us to finish our
internal battles and struggles. Time is our most precious commodity.
Lila
SarahSV wrote:
>
>... how does a tech organization nurture and support its unpaid
> workforce of mostly writers and researchers?
I remain convinced that http://wikimedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_review can
solve this problem through a new spinoff such as WikiEd Foundation,
but that's still probably at least a year off.
I've just received this from someone called billinghurst:
"Please stop this rebuttal of people's statements. Their opinions are as
valuable, if not more valuable than yours as statements. Your name is
appearing too often IMNSHO."
I thought I was bringing a sorely under-represented perspective to the ED
discussion on this list and wasn't aware I'd said or done anything
inappropriate here. I sincerely apologise if I have, but I'll need a bit
more guidance if that's the case. I see a lot of rebutting going on here. I
thought civil rebuttal was how rational argument progressed. But I've been
wrong before.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: billinghurst <billinghurstwiki(a)gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 4:04 AM
Subject: Shared list
To: ahcoleecu(a)gmail.com
Please stop this rebuttal of people's statements. Their opinions are as
valuable, if not more valuable than yours as statements. Your name is
appearing too often IMNSHO.
- b
Hello everyone,
Of the many issues, real or perceived, currently under discussion, one of them is the matter of strategy: of the Wikimedia Foundation and of the movement in general. I’ve been editing Wikipedia since November of 2004 and have noticed that the general points of tension have revolved around who has authority or responsibility to do what. I will explain what I mean by that.
There is no one “strategy.” Or rather, strategy has different components to it, and it is important to note and understand these different components because they have their own histories and associated arguments. There is no possible way I can capture every nuance of this, but when we say “strategy” we should think of at least three things: content strategy, program strategy, and product strategy.
Content has, almost exclusively, been a prerogative of the communities of the various Wikimedia projects, and not that of the Foundation. [1] English Wikipedia, for example, argues bitterly over what is notable, what is not notable, and what should and shouldn’t be deleted on a given day, but the Wikimedia Foundation is not involved in that. While the Wikimedia Foundation does fund content creation initiatives from time to time, it does not decide, for instance, which monuments are worthy of Wiki Loves Monuments, or which artists should be the focus of Art+Feminism. I’m not pointing this out because it’s remotely interesting, but because it’s so widely agreed upon that the WMF has no editorial authority that we don’t even need to talk about it.
There are other areas that we do need to talk about; not necessarily to devise a master plan, or to draw lines in the sand, but to at least understand who thinks what and where our opinions diverge. This brings me to my second point: programs. I am referring to initiatives to get more people involved in the Wikimedia projects, to build bridges with other organizations, to make Wikimedia as much a part of the offline world as the online world. The Wikimedia Foundation did some of the original programs in the late 2000s, with mixed success. Chapters came along and also came up with programs; GLAM, for instance, was developed outside of the Wikimedia Foundation. Over time, the Foundation decided that it was not so interested in running programs directly as much as they were interested in funding others to carry them out and serving as a sort of central hub for best practices. As far as I can tell, as someone who has served on the board of a Wikimedia chapter for almost five years, there seems to be a general consensus that this is how programs are done. This operating consensus was arrived at through a combination of the Wikimedia Foundation’s “narrowing focus” and by the enthusiasm of chapters, groups, and mission-aligned organizations to carry on outreach work.
Then there is the product strategy, which is the most contentious of them all. By “product” I am referring to the subset of technology that readers and editors interact with on a day-to-day basis. The sacred workflow. (Much of the arguments about technology are out of my depth so I won’t be commenting on them; they also include rather arcane infrastructural stuff that I don’t think most Wikimedia users or contributors care about.) All of our arguments, from the usability initiative to the present day, have focused on: who is in charge of the user experience? I have heard different things; one perspective holds that “the community” (usually not further specified) gets to make the final decision, while I have also heard from some that technological matters are purely the prerogative of the Wikimedia Foundation. [2] I am not sure what the present-day company line is but I suspect it’s somewhere in the middle.
I do not know what the “true” answer is, either. There is a lot to be said for treating the user experience as products to be professionally managed: there has been tremendous study in the area of how to design user experiences, and Wikipedia is notorious for being difficult to edit as a newcomer. With this in mind, the Wikimedia Foundation did the best it could, with limited resources, and despite some successes managed to create some ham-fisted products that did not address the needs of the users and—at worst—threatened disruption. This has gotten better in time; the visual editor, for example, has made tremendous progress on this front. But not every issue is settled. What about the products that need substantially more improvement before they can be used at large? What about things that we should be working on, but aren’t, or are doing so at a glacial pace because we are being stretched too thin? And now that WMF grantees can develop code for deployment in production (such as MediaWiki extensions), what is the relationship between these projects and the overall product strategy of the Wikimedia Foundation? On the Reading half of the equation, who gets to decide how content is presented, and how are these decisions made?
I am sure we each as individuals have answers to these questions, but we do not have a common understanding, whatsoever, the same way we generally understand that the Wikimedia Foundation does not do editorial policy, or that the Wikimedia Foundation generally avoids doing on-the-ground program work the same way chapters do. We do not even agree on how much the Wikimedia Foundation should focus on the software product aspect as opposed to other aspects.
Nor do I think we will arrive at this conclusion through developing a grand strategy and an overall movement framework. We’re big and decentralized, and we need to accommodate opportunities where they exist. Exhaustive planning documents do not lend themselves to that. And it is unlikely we can all come to a happy solution that accommodates everyone and everything.
This is why it is up to the Wikimedia Foundation to define its own role within the movement. My hope is that they do so by actively seeking out the needs of the entire movement, since they are in the unique position where they can support a large share of the movement. But it will need to define its role in the development of products—whether they be editing products, or products that present Wikimedia content. Whether it will seek to control the presentation of content or merely advise on the community’s own decisions. The most feasible way forward I see is that the Wikimedia Foundation decides what it is best suited to do, set its own boundaries, and call on the rest of the movement to fill in the gaps. This will help the Wikimedia Foundation focus its work: by explicitly saying “no” to some things and determining they are not within their remit, it opens the doors (through grant funding or some other mechanism) for other people or groups to do things that they are best suited to do. With programs being handled by non-WMF entities and some software development (including my own work at WikiProject X) being handled outside of the Foundation, this is possible.
The Wikimedia movement is a broad movement, and it would not be practical to come up with a movement-wide strategy. However, the Wikimedia Foundation specifically should try to define its own role with respect to software and call on the rest of the movement to fill in the gaps based on its needs.
Respectfully,
James Hare
[1] I’m not counting their rare interventions—for legal purposes—as editorial control.
[2] I honestly do not remember who said it or when. My point is not that someone out there has (or had) a heretical (or righteous) opinion, but that people have very divergent opinions on this.