Hello dear all,
From 2008 on until recently the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) had seen a staggering growth to fulfill its mission, and it had pulled a great deal of the resources, in money, but as well as in talent, manpower and volunteer's effort of the movement.
From the beginning hosting of the Wikimedia projects was the core competency of the WMF. A big part of the WMF budget and staff is dedicated to the operation of the servers. Meanwhile the main server farm is moved from Tampa, Florida to Ashburn, Virginia.
In the last years the WMF had evolved to the main development party of the MediaWiki software. The software and product development had drawn many resources and talents from around the world to San Francisco. Many developers were relocated to join the WMF team.
With the increased prominence of especially Wikipedia the WMF and its projects were facing more and more legal challenges in the past years. Law suits from around the world were reported since 2005. Because of this the WMF had expanded its legal team.
To improve its role as the leader of the movement and to settle the disputes between the WMF and chapters about the processing and distribution of the funding the WMF had evolved since 2010 into a grant making organization.
All in all the WMF is without doubt the center peace of the movement and claims four fifth of the expanses of the entire movement.
The recent dispute about the URAA motivated massive content deletions on Wikimedia Commons highlights the problem of this strong centralized approach.
In basic, the storage solution of the Wikimedia projects is still a very classical approach with two central database centers, both of them located in the US. This approach had repeatedly induced conflicts about what content can be stored and what cannot. It does not reflect the international character of the projects and had repeatedly induced critics on the Wikimedia projects to be US biased and it is, measured on today's storage technology, outdated. Even though currently the US law is one of the most liberal in relation to freedom of speech it does has its bias. The US copy right law for example is meanwhile one of the most restrictive and backward looking copy right laws in the entire world. Another example of the potential hazardous result of this approach are the image files that are currently stored in the individual projects. For example on Chinese Wikipedia images that are free according to the Chinese and Taiwanese copy right laws are stored directly there, and not on Commons. These images are nevertheless not free according to the US law and are stored in servers that are located in the US and distributed from there. This poses potential problems for all parties that are involved here: for the Foundation, for the project, for the community that is curating these images and for the users that are using these images.
In a larger sense the problem is not constrained to the file repositories, but also to the content. Even though the Foundation had increased its legal department and had tentatively tried to work out an approach to support its community in legal conflict basically it is still working with the old strategy: In case there is a legal case in a foreign country the Foundation will avoid the call of the court while the Chapter will deny any responsibility for the content. This leaves in the end all potential hazards to the volunteer who contributed the content. In case of a court suit he is probably the one that have the worse legal support and had to take the charge privately, even if he handled legally and in good will.
In my opinion, since the technology is ripe, it is time for the movement as a whole and WMF especially to seriously consider the approach of a distributed hosting. Files and contents that let's say are legal in the EU but not in the US should be able to be stored on a server located in the EU and distributed and operated from there. Files and contents that are legal in PRC and Taiwan and may violate copy right law in the US should be able to be stored in a server say in Taiwan or Hongkong and be distributed from there into the world. This approach is meanwhile technical viable and is used by almost all major international internet providers today.
This also means that the chapters, as far as there is one, should be able to take the responsibility for the content and the hosting of those servers in their country. They should be obliged to provide legal consultation and defense to the community, which means a distribution of the legal defense from a central point into the world, to the chapters and directly to the communities. Indeed the legal consultation and protection of the community is in my opinion one of the most missed duty of the chapters and the Foundation to the movement.
Every country, that meets a certain standard of freedom of speech, freedom and media and freedom of justice is a potential place to set up such a server and in which the chapter can be entitled to claim the responsibility of the content that is stored there. There are meanwhile pretty many renowned independent organizations that provide such standards and measure the status of a country against these standards, like Reporters sans frontières, Human Rights Watch, etc.
Also software and product development can be done distributed. Many commercial companies do this successfully, many open source projects do this successfully. The WMF is not unfamiliar with distributed software development. One of the most prominent developer of the WMF, Tim Starling is for example never relocated to San Francisco. Also in the past decades many important impulses came from outside of San Francisco, the last one is WikiData, initiated and developed by Wikimedia Deuschland (WMDE). Wikimedia Serbia had offered in the past to hire developers in Belgrade because the people there are well educated, talented and the wage there is low. I believe there is no necessity to concentrated all developers at one place. Fore sure distributed developer teams need certain trainings, standards, communication skills and procedures to be able to doing well. But it is possible, it is even meanwhile industrial standard. It is meanwhile a backward looking approach to draw and concentrate developers at one place.
From organizational view it makes more sense to have these distributed developers organized by the chapters (as far as there is one) instead of let them work as contractors for the Foundation, which also means an organizational decentralization of the software and product development.
For me personally there are some life experience that makes me an absolute supporter for the decentralization.
I was born 1968, the year which marks the climax of the darkest period of the Chinese history, the Cultural Revolution. In the year when I was born Chine was experiencing the worst political purge since Stalin's death in the whole world. At that time, no one could imaging, that from the boys and girls that were born that year in China, millions will go to North America or Europe to study there and work there and live there. No one could imaging that some of them will go back to China because they know that China will provide them better chances for work, research and life than in North America and Europe. 1988 I traveled with the train throw Soviet Union and crossed the no man's land of Berlin Wall, and at that time no one in the whole world could imagine that less than four years later there will be no Soviet Union any more and the Berlin Wall will fall.
Those experiences tell me not to trust any fortune teller and future researcher. I won't bet that USA will not turn into a dictatorship within my life time, and I won't bet that Central and West Africa won't turn into the most prosperous and most liberal region of the world in my life time. However unprobable this looks like. Because of that I don't trust one central prominent hub, because however strong and well developed and well organized, it is the single point to fail.
Decentralization, on any aspect, only works if the parties are aligned. One of the darkest hour of my board chair's personship was by an interview with an Austrian television. Together with me a chair's person of a chapter board, a volunteer and a researcher of Wikipedia were interviewed. When the reporter came to the topic of gender bias and Foundation's effort to balance it he at first addressed the question to the chapter chair's person. And the person answered: Well, for our chapter this is not a topic, we concentrate our work on article quality. And for the next few seconds before the question is addressed to me I was feverish thinking about an answer which would not sound like I support and agree with him but also don't like as if we will publicly take out a dispute about what is the movement goal.
I think this should not happen. And if the movement really want to be organized decentralized, we cannot afford such things to happen. It made me sad to see that WMDE and WMUK published their strategic planning for the coming years, each by themselves. I think it should be a strategic planning with all organizations, agreed by all organizations and all organizations will work together on those goals, together.
I think there should be a charter for all organizations in our movement, signed by all organizations that want to join us, that set up standards, set up things like working together on strategies and working together on goals. Unfortunately, and I do blame myself partly for this, that despite the movement roles work group, despite some other tries afterward, we were not able to set up such a charter. And I think that one of the goals for a movement strategic planning should be set up such a charter in the next few years.
So, if we decentralize the hosting, the software and product development, the legal and the movement organizations, where is the place of WMF?
I imagine the WMF as the United Nations of Wikimedia. I can see a lot of people now wrinkle their nose and say: What? that ugly and useless bureaucracy? And I will tell you: No, I am not thinking about that ugly and useless bureaucracy, I am thinking about that organization that concentrated and coordinated the world's effort to eradicate smallpox, I am thinking about that organization that set up standards to preserve the world's heritages, the organization that coordinates and develops standards for civil air and sea traffic that makes an smooth and safe international travel possible. So, I am imagining an organization that coordinates the movement resources, that set up and safe guard standards, but not dominating the movement. And all in all, despite the 40 and plus partner organizations, there are still more volunteers that don't have an organization to support them, and there are still much to do for the Foundation. Especially, I still see the WMF as the leader of the partner organizations and the movement.
Looking back into the history I believe it is necessary for the Foundation to have the last six year's growth. The Foundation had learned a lot from this and it had repeatedly set up standards for the movement, despite all the grudging and all the disputes, looking back, it is good to have those standards set up. All organizations inside of the movement are profitable from those standards.
But the growth of the WMF had more and more extincting the growth of the partner organizations inside of the movement. Its dominance and its feeling responsible for everything inside of the movement began to take the air away from the other organizations, its concentration at one place had always been felt as an alienation and is becoming more and more a problem. A good captain of see knows when the wind turns and he need to change the sail setting and course to cope with that change, for the Wikimedia movement now is the time.
I want to repeat one sentence I said earlier: I see the WMF as the leader of the partner organizations and the movement. I want to emphasize that I want to see the WMF as the strong leader of the partner organizations and the movement. The strong leader because he is wise and experienced, not because he is a dictator; the strong leader that knows that every member in his team has something that they can do better than himself and knows to use those abilities in benefit of the group, and not the one who dominates the team.
Greetings Ting