On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 10:21 AM, Luis Villa lvilla@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 2:34 PM, Rogol Domedonfors domedonfors@gmail.com wrote:
The 2015 Call to Action identified the need to Support innovation & new knowledge * Integrate, consolidate, and pause or stop stalled initiatives. * Create spaces for future community-led innovations and new knowledge creation. * Facilitate and support new models and structures for knowledge curation. * Strengthen partnerships with organizations that use or contribute free content, or are aligned with the WMF in the free-knowledge movement.
Yet no-one at WMF seems tasked with driving innovation in the community. I have started a Meta page for Innovation at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Innovation to stimulate discussions.
I'm going to respond more on-wiki, but tl;dr: I disagree strongly that "no one at WMF seems tasked with driving innovation". Several groups are tasked with supporting community innovation:
- For individual innovation, we've assessed hundreds of projects and
funded dozens through the IEG grants https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG, and are hiring an additional organizer to help turbocharge this process even more.
- For more established and successful innovations, we help with evaluation
through L+E, further funding (through PEG), and mature programs support (both through programs we've brought in-house like Education and Wikipedia Library, and through FDC grants).
As part of maturing my department, we're still discussing what a formal "innovation pipeline" might look like (should there be someone who owns this in its entirety, for example?) but it's completely wrong to say we're not already doing this.
[I do think it's true that we're not particularly focused on creating new forms of things from scratch, as Rogol's talk page
Sorry, Rogol's comments on his meta Innovation page.
suggests, but my experience is that innovation is more effective when it comes from the community and is then supported by WMF, rather than the other way around.]
I should also add that Advancement/Partnerships and Engineering also do innovation-related work - no one in either department has a title like "Director of Innovation" but both of them are working on things like partnerships with third-party data sources.
Luis