I see, it sounds like you're less genuinely interested in what this team is doing, but rather trying to look for arguments why WMF would be wasting money. I'm not sure if that is a terribly constructive approach to start a conversation. Thanks for being open about it at least. Given this, and the fact that you're not interested in thinking about what good metrics would be to make such determination, before jumping to conclusions - I don't think I'll be a good conversation partner for you, and I'll let this thread be. 

Lodewijk

On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 1:36 PM MZMcBride <z@mzmcbride.com> wrote:
On Jun 17, 2022, at 9:08 AM, effe iets anders <effeietsanders@gmail.com> wrote:
> How would you propose to measure 'output' in a somewhat objective way? It is of course easy to identify that our own pet projects don't get the attention we feel they deserve, but given that the priorities of the WMF are so much broader than those of you and me personally, that may not be entirely fair.

I'm not sure we need an objective measure of output, per se. Lots of measures could be sufficient. If "pet" projects—by which I assume you mean projects that community members are interested in—are not being worked on, then what is being worked on instead? That's essentially my question. (The Phabricator link you provided shows a massive backlog and maybe three or four tasks currently in development.)

I'm developing a thesis that Wikimedia Foundation Inc., with a budget of over $150,000,000 USD per year, "has bloated to become unwieldy, unaccountable, and it has little to show for the hundreds of millions of dollars it has wasted and continues to waste." I think the design team is potentially a good case study for this, but first I need to better understand the inputs versus the outputs. I can see the inputs pretty clearly, about 25 staff members and a couple million dollars of donor money being spent per year. What are the outputs for this recurring investment? Is the site user experience improving due to this investment? Are we publishing a lot of useful design research due to this investment?

> Especially if you consider that the changes that the WMF comes up with often meet a lot of pushback from the community.


This framing suggests that Wikimedia Foundation Inc. should be pursuing its own agenda and priorities that may not align with the needs or wants of the Wikimedia community. I think that's entirely the wrong framing. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. should be serving the community's needs and we seem to have drifted, over many years, very far from what was an established truth. This is partially what I mean by a lack of accountability.

> (as a sidenote: it turns out that the team has been roughly this big for a while now)

Sure, though if we conclude that too much donor money is being spent per year on, for example, design resources, it just means the problem has compounded over the course of many years to be even larger. We could be talking about $6M or $8M or more. That's a lot of money to spend and I'm struggling to understand what the return on investment is.

MZMcBride
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