James! Thanks for this case in point.
The free knowledge ecosystem includes hundreds of thousands of devs around the world. Most don't think to collaborate with us or through our codebases, most who do bounce off of current systems, and those who stay still have a hard time getting
code reviewed or fit into a roadmap, or small grants.
But W also have more genuine, unqualified goodwill than any technical project I know. Few doors for technical collaboration or future-creation would be closed if we only learn how to ask and welcome the result.
So instead of asking "which tools should we try to test + implement, if we can figure out how to configure it" or "which of these independent proposals seems worthy of a one-time grant" (like any startup or website or grantor out there, limited
by the time of the few people setting it up), we should Be Bolder.
Sketch in broad strokes what we need and want to see, commit to working together to make it so, look for partners who want to collaborate with us in making the best ecosystem on the planet. E.g.
— what open graph database will scale to support general knowledge graphs 10 and 100x our current size? The whole planet needs one. Whatever we migrate to next
should be a community that joins us to reach that
goal.
— what discourse tools can support our wide ranging and intense discussions, constantly tested by our active (once rare, but increasingly possible and important in a networked world) collabs and consensus-building across language divides?
There are So. Many. Other areas where the ecosystem of open tools is scattered, loving, and small, and focus by and with us could elevate the possible into the commonplace.
— embedded annotation, like Hypothesis
— simultaneous editing, like Etherpad
— embedded synchronous discussion, like IRC or Brave Talk
— content translation flows
— visualizations w embedded data, like OWID
— media editing, like videowiki
— format conversion + transcoding
— working with file formats of existing and emerging fields of knowledge-worl
— book creation
— course creation
— script creation
— data reconciliation, like OpenRefine
Most of these ideas have approaches (open tickets in Phab) with some depth, with internal and external champions, and with potentially modest implementations that could be distributed if that ever became a burden. But these opportunities are
sitting unresolved because a) they don't fall under the goals of any existing initiatives, and b) we've built anti-infrastructure: a system that makes contribution from the edges hard or risky. Lots of tickets opened by people offering to do the work note
that they want some sort of confirmation that the result could be adopted or implemented, before they commit months of effort to it.
Our internal models for priority and focus need to consider the broader picture of the technical ecosystem we could empower and uplift, and need to register the value of working with and committing to other entire networks (including having
many times more people solving these issues alongside us). Otherwise we are not providing the infrastructure needed by our own editing networks, not to mention the rest of th free knowledge ecosystem.
🌍🌏🌎🌑
I have not found getting funding from the WMF for projects easy. VideoWiki for example has mostly been funded by WikiProjectMed / personally funded. Our first grant application since fully taking on the effort
was declined and our programmer working on the project has thus moved on. Our experience has been similar regarding our collaboration with Our World in Data. We have gotten the interactive graphs
working on our own site and offered to work on doing the same for Wikipedia (plus making them multilingual). Jumping through hoops to meet WMF requirements will; however, cost about 1,000 USD. WikiProjectMed has never received funding from the WMF and as
a much much smaller NGO cannot cover these programming expenses for the movement.
James
We face the
paradox of
choice, the lull of peace, and the fog of distributed bureaucracy.
~ With great possibility comes disfocus. (and a few things with focus!)
~ With no clear challenge or adversary, we've become comfortable fussing over small changes... Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and companies race to enclose derivatives of our work. This peace is coming to an end.
~ Our central overhead costs are quite high. So high^ that it seems to baffle everyone involved, each believing the bureaucracy must be caused by some other part of the system, outside of their or their org's control.
Our projects are already a global standard for multimodal collaboration at scale, we should embrace that and rise to meet it. Building some of the world's best free, mulitilingual, accessible tools for is within our remit, experience, and budget.
[Discourse raised a total of $20M over its lifetime. we could support + spin out free-knowledge free-software layers like that every year.]
Let's practice working together, focusing on a few things each year that can change not only our projects but the world, honoring existing work and aggressively shedding anything we are doing that others are alreay doing almost as well.
SJ
^ Up to 10-to-1 in some areas, plus delays of years inserted into otherwise continuous processes. This ratio can slip into the negative if one includes opportunity cost, or funded work that displaces or drives out comparable voluntary work; or
that demands thousands of hours of input for little result.
🌍🌏🌎🌑