We face the paradox <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox> of
choice <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice>, the lull of peace, and
the fog of distributed bureaucracy.
~ With great possibility comes disfocus. (and a few things with focus!)
~ With no clear challenge or adversary, we've become comfortable fussing
over small changes... Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and
companies race to enclose derivatives of our work. This peace is coming to
an end.
~ Our central overhead costs are quite high. So high^ that it seems to
baffle everyone involved, each believing the bureaucracy must be caused by
some other part of the system, outside of their or their org's control.
Our projects are already a global standard for multimodal collaboration at
scale, we should embrace that and rise to meet it. Building some of the
world's best free, mulitilingual, accessible tools for is within our remit,
experience, and budget.
[Discourse raised a *total *of $20M over its lifetime. we could support +
spin out free-knowledge free-software layers like that every year.]
Let's practice working together, focusing on a few things each year that
can change not only our projects but the world, honoring existing work and
aggressively shedding anything we are doing that others are alreay doing
almost as well.
SJ
*^* Up to 10-to-1 in some areas, plus delays of years inserted into
otherwise continuous processes. This ratio can slip into the negative if
one includes opportunity cost, or funded work that displaces or drives out
comparable voluntary work; or that demands thousands of hours of input for
little result.
🌍🌏🌎🌑
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 8:45 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
galder158(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
Or, maybe, just making Wikimedia a non-obsolete
environment. I'm sure the
money can go to that effort.
------------------------------
*From:* Felipe Schenone <schenonef(a)gmail.com>
*Sent:* Friday, June 17, 2022 12:51 PM
*To:* Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
*Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design staff
I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with the solution. If Wikimedia
is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with it,
there's
probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a community process to
decide it, because as you say, reducing funding efforts or saving
indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or even desirable,
considering the alternatives.
Here are some ideas:
* Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers.
* Funding of external developers and libraries on which MediaWiki depends.
* Funding of open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, to not stray too
far the original intentions of donors and volunteers.
* Funding of other non-knowledge altruistic projects (like buying land for
a natural reserve). I'm sure the funding team could rethink and generalize
the campaign to justify this use for future donations.
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 4:47 AM <tim.herb(a)gmx.de> wrote:
The question of you is important. The Wikimedia Foundation hired a lot of
people in the last years and I do not see so big change in the output. It
is a question that is from my point of view relevant for different areas at
the Wikimedia Foundation. I dont support a too big focus on efficiency that
needs a lot of metrics to measure and to create these metrics needs then a
lot of staff. What is needed and what not is not easy to measure. With
increasing available resources the staff will probably increase. This is an
usual behaviour of humans that they try to use resources if available and
do not only allocate them for the future or say no and try to reduce the
needed resources if not neccessary. From my point of view the Wikimedia
Foundation should reduce the Fundraising acitivities and try to reduce in
the next years the yearly expenses or pay at least attention that they do
not increase further. The salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are
currently from my point of view in relation to Germany based NGOs high. I
think interesting documents to get an overview about the work of the
Wikimedia Foundation are the quaterly tuning sessions.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_tuning_ses…
Hogü-456
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