We face the paradox of choice, 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@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@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, June 17, 2022 12:51 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@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@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_sessions,_FY2021-22

Hogü-456
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