There's a large tendency within the community to maintain the status quo, so I don't think any radical changes are going to occur over the next five years. I think the innovation will come with the uses people make of our content rather than with the projects or organsation themselves. Improvements will most likely be in areas we are already thinking about, such as communication within the organsaition, and validation of the content, rather than in completely new areas.
==Wikimedia 2010== *Board and management
The Board has delegated much of their work to people in paid positions or voluntary "official positions". This has left them with more time for making higher level decisions including overall strategies and partnerships with external parties. They are responsible for hiring new staff, and for communicating the ethos of the Foundation to all Wikimedia members and to the outside world. The majority of the Board of Trustees are elected members of the community. They are supported by a Board of Advisors, made up of people from relevant fields.
The Board keeps a proper minute book, with corporate resolutions. The bylaws have been legally approved and are easy to find. All legal paperwork is in order.
*Staff (the positions, the roles, whether they're paid or not)
Positions include the following (whether they're paid, appointed volunteers, or positions decided by the relevant Special Interest Groups is something I'm not ready to predict).
CEO Technical officer Financial officer Accountant Print publishing co-ordinator Secretaries Grants co-ordinator Lawyers Communication team (including translation) Business manager R&D PR Advertising and promotion Chapter co-ordinator
*Budget
The budget is 25 times larger than it was in 2005. Much of the expenditure is handled by local chapters. Donated hardware from a large range of sources all over the world has allowed us to keep costs down. The primary costs on the budget are now special projects, such as the global distribution of our content in various forms, and the cost of staff. Hardware costs are still included in the budget, though these increasingly refer to the cost of managing distributed hardware that has been donated rather than buying our own hardware. Local chapter reps liaise with paid technicians in their own area who are responsible for maintaining the servers in those countries. Financial records have been improved and are regularly audited.
*Fundraising scheme
Much of our funding comes from public donations, though these are now smaller than the income we get from grants. We are still finding new ways to raise money without the need to resort to advertising on the site. Fundraising occurs not only on our own projects, but as part of a huge effort across the internet as thousands of other sites advertise our fundraising drives. Local chapters handle fundraising efforts at a local level, allowing more and more people to donate tax-free within their own country. Individual donors have more of a say in how their donations are spent and are presented with a number of options during each fund raising drive for what the bulk of their money will be spent on.
*Philanthropic activity and outreach to get our content widely redistributed
As the first real efforts to distribute our content to those without internet access are showing signs of success, the focus moves towards considering how to get content from those people rather than just distributing it to them. New methods of contribution are being explored, with the aim of allowing every person on the planet to be a Wikimedian and not just a reader (or listener - as audio versions become as popular as the text versions were 5 years ago).
Through partnerships with various publishing companies, the content from all projects is regularly being printed, or made available in audio versions. Books are being sold and given away all over the world, bringing in revenue that allows us to keep expanding our publishing projects and other philanthropic activities. The first braille versions are being prepared.
*Projects
Teaching communities are beginning to develop to pass on the skills of using MediaWiki and of encyclopedic writing. These are led by groups all over the world who organise training and outreach days to bring even more people into the Wikimedia community. Universities start to incorporate this into their courses. Easier methods of inputting content into the projects are being researched, which is expected to decrease the need to teach people to use the software.
The projects appear less separated than they once did as automatic links appear between them and single login allows users to edit across them more easily. At the same time, users can choose to view only sections of the projects. Those wanting to focus only on science articles can view only those, with their own recent changes and own discussion areas, preventing the problems of the projects becoming too large to cope with.
*Content objectives
The content is all available under a free license, and simplifications to the GFDL have made it much easier for people to reuse the content without violating the license.
Wikimedia is by far the largest content provider in many languages. Traditional content providers are looking for new models and moving into niche markets rather than trying to compete with us.
The majority of content is still produced by volunteers, but some is now donated as a result of deals with external parties, and as a result of people being paid, though not directly by the Foundation, for producing content, particularly in weak areas and small languages.
Different modes of viewing the content are available. Users can select from options such as "show only validated versions", "show only articles with cited sources", "show only articles approved by company xyz". Some of these options are only available on external sites, as co-branded versions by companies who want to add their own methods of validation to the content. The possibility to view validated versions has increased the credibility of the projects, which are now accepted sources at all levels.
*Software objectives
All software used by all projects is open source.
The developers have finally given up telling people MediaWiki is not a CMS. It is now a CMS, and a blog, and a database, and whatever else people want it to be. :) The version used on Wikimedia's own projects begins to be unrecognizable from the versions now being used elsewhere, both as a result of better Wikimedia branding which makes our own projects stand out, and as a result of the software being tailored to each project rather than incorporating all of the features now available in MediaWiki.
Work into making MediaWiki work better across distributed systems is ongoing. The interface is fully internationalized in 200 languages.
A consortium of companies using MediaWiki internally and on their own websites sponsor a team of security reviewers who work alongside the MediaWiki developers to ensure no stable versions of the code are released with security flaws. Many other companies using MediaWiki, or with an interest in the content produced on it, regularly contribute code, and this is checked by paid staff, leaving volunteers to focus on the more popular aspects of development.
Efforts to standardise the markup are ongoing, and there is increasing interoperability between different wiki engines.
*Relationship between chapters and parent organisation
Local chapters are heavily involved in promotion and the formation of local partnerships. They have increasing independence, and the Board relies on contracts and mutually-agreed guidelines to ensure the chapters maintain the goals of the Foundation rather than attempting to closely monitor their every move. Efforts to improve inter-chapter communications are still being made, and though better than five years ago, are still an area the Board is trying to improve upon.
*Relationships with the outside world (PR, partnerships, etc.)
Universities are participating to the projects through content creation and software development. Regular promotional activities happen at universities across the world. A range of partnerships have been created, including global ones with the Foundation, and local ones with local chapters. Informal partnerships are being made regularly by users of all projects.
*Other (anything we did not think of)
Foundation policies and bureaucracy have continued to expand. These now cover everything from privacy policies to NDAs to trademark use.
DMCAs are now a regular occurrence. Lawsuits are becoming more frequent, but the legal team has handled these with no major issues so far.
That's all for now. I'm off to buy edition 25 of Quarto, Wikimedia's 128 page magazine. ;)
Cofion cynnes,
Angela.