The members of the chapters are volunteers, so free to simply walk away any time they choose. Shove too hard and you have no chapter. Who wins? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jennifer Pryor-Summers Sent: Sunday, April 14, 2019 7:10 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Reviewing our brand system for our 2030 goals
Fæ
I don't think that the chapters are in a position to dictate to the Foundation in the way you suggest. To take the UK chapter, with you are probably most familiar, last year some 42% of its income came as a block grant from the WMF, the figures for the preceding years being 54% and 47%. When half of your income comes from the Foundation, then when push comes to shove, you do what they tell you to.
JPS
On Sun, Apr 14, 2019 at 1:54 PM Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Most Chapters and many other Affiliates are registered legal organizations. In some cases, like the one you quote, the organization is a registered charity and has several years of submitting accounts and reports as that entity.
Names can be changed but this would be a legally meaningful decision by each board, and each board should be free to make their own decision on the necessity of the change and agree their budget for changing, not simply because some unnamed marketing consultant gave some expensive advice to the WMF about "branding". There is zero verifiable statistical evidence to back up claimed benefits apart from vague hand waving to pie charts in presentations about 'markets' for which nothing is explained about the self-selected sample space, and for which there are no reported credible tests.
If the true drivers behind this change are because WMF senior management believe that the WMF is a competitor for Facebook or YouTube (as was in one of the marketing presentations), then the problem is their perception of the mission of the WMF, not the name "Wikimedia".
Fae
On Sun, 14 Apr 2019 at 09:45, Ed Saperia edsaperia@gmail.com wrote:
Maybe there’s an easy way to just test this? A chapter could start
calling itself e.g. Wikipedia UK in its comms for a year and see if there’s any noticeable difference?
Sent from my iPhone
On 14 Apr 2019, at 01:47, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Apr 13, 2019 at 2:29 PM Rebecca O'Neill <
rebeccanineil@gmail.com>
wrote:
I agree Galder!
I would like to respond to Phoebe's comment on not wanting to draw
people
to the *Wikimedia* movement is not true of the Irish experience. We
have
some idea of an editing community that aren't interested in getting involved in our user group (and probably never will be), so we are
very
keen to draw people to volunteering as Wikimedians not just as
editors.
Presenting our group as something more than people who are experienced Wikipedia editors is very important to us, and anything that makes
that
message easier would be of huge benefit to us.
Dear Rebecca, Thanks for this. Let me try to explain my thinking a bit more... I too want people to join Wikimedia New England, which is the group I'm currently running. And in general, I want a thriving and healthy
ecosystem
of affiliates. But I want that to be true because the work that
chapters,
affiliates and the Foundation itself does is meant to be enabling for
the
larger goal of making free knowledge available, and specifically for improving and sustaining Wikipedia and her sister projects.
Everything that the groups do - from building the technical/legal infrastructure side, to training new editors, to providing a friendly geographic or topical face to Wikipedia, to doing outreach, to
supporting
existing editors - is a means to an end. It is not the end itself. We
do
this multivarious work because we recognize that there are many, many effective ways to contribute in a project as complex as ours, and that participants can sometimes best find a home in ways that are not
directly
editing. But equally: there are of course other means to this end of building free knowledge that have nothing to do with the Wikimedia
group/
structure, most notably the thousands of independent volunteers who
work
largely alone to maintain and build the projects, and upon whose work
we
all depend. Groups, and the Foundation, are important! But they are
not, in
themselves, the end goal.
So where does this leave us with rebranding? I admit I haven't read
all of
the comments/analysis. But, to my mind, there's a cost to rebranding:
the
several hundred person-hours that have already been put into this discussion, if nothing else. For the benefit to outweigh the cost, we
need
to imagine what will happen to increase participation in building free knowledge as a result. If we are "Wikipedia New England" or "Wikipedia Ireland" et al, will our groups be more effective -- for instance,
with an
easier to understand name, will new people join our trainings, perhaps becoming Wikipedia editors? Will more cultural institutions reach out,
and
be more amenable to releasing images? If the Foundation is the
Wikipedia
Foundation, then how does this improve the infrastructure that the Foundation provides, exactly?
If the answer is that this change will definitely increase
participation in
the projects and free knowledge generally, through the mechanism of the various groups being more recognizable and thus reaching a bigger
audience,
then the proposal is worth seriously considering. But if it is hard to imagine - and I admit I do find it hard to imagine that the name of the Foundation is the thing standing in our way to wider Wikipedia participation - then it doesn't seem worth the cost.
-- Phoebe
-- faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
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