On Tue, Jan 23, 2024 at 12:03 PM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:

We have plenty of roadmaps, but no vehicle to reach our destination.

Seven years ago, we were discussing our Strategy for 2030. We used thousands of volunteer hours, thousands of staff hours and millions of dollars to build a really well-balanced strategy. There we concluded that "By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge". We also made some recommendations to improve the User Experience (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Recommendations/Improve_User_Experience) and claimed that we wanted to Innovate in Free Knowledge (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Recommendations/Innovate_in_Free_Knowledge).

cool summary, galder! there is one sentence in there:

Build the necessary technology to make free knowledge content
accessible in various formats. Support more diverse modes of
consumption and contribution to our projects (e.g. text, audio,
visual, video, geospatial, etc.).

the result is not so satisfying, i'd say. alone on this list, the only discussion which comes out of such a sentence is we should put mp4 on commons or not? really? of course i am exaggeration a little. but galder has a point that wikipedia was disruptive 20 years ago and not so much curently. admitted, it is kind of natural that an innovative company looses the power to innovate over time, this is not necessarily true for volunteer organisations. lodewijk showed it by launching a foto competition which turned out to be the biggest one on this planet. it attracted people who were not in the movement before, with ideas which we did not have in the movement before. with the example in content space, there is no reason to believe that approach would not work for technical innovation as well. money is no problem, hosting is no problem, global reach and glory is not an issue. we could create some "wiki loves new tech" competition, and, say, pout 100 million into a five year program to do this, what you think? use for example the price money to productize stuff, and not care too much if 9 out of 10 ideas fail. one out of ten will be good enough to disrupt.

rupert