On Jun 17, 2022, at 9:08 AM, effe iets anders <effeietsanders(a)gmail.com> wrote:
How would you propose to measure 'output' in a
somewhat objective way? It is of course easy to identify that our own pet projects
don't get the attention we feel they deserve, but given that the priorities of the WMF
are so much broader than those of you and me personally, that may not be entirely fair.
I'm not sure we need an objective measure of output, per se. Lots of measures could be
sufficient. If "pet" projects—by which I assume you mean projects that community
members are interested in—are not being worked on, then what is being worked on instead?
That's essentially my question. (The Phabricator link you provided shows a massive
backlog and maybe three or four tasks currently in development.)
I'm developing a thesis that Wikimedia Foundation Inc., with a budget of over
$150,000,000 USD per year, "has bloated to become unwieldy, unaccountable, and it has
little to show for the hundreds of millions of dollars it has wasted and continues to
waste." I think the design team is potentially a good case study for this, but first
I need to better understand the inputs versus the outputs. I can see the inputs pretty
clearly, about 25 staff members and a couple million dollars of donor money being spent
per year. What are the outputs for this recurring investment? Is the site user experience
improving due to this investment? Are we publishing a lot of useful design research due to
this investment?
Especially if you consider that the changes that the
WMF comes up with often meet a lot of pushback from the community.
This framing suggests that Wikimedia Foundation Inc. should be pursuing its own agenda and
priorities that may not align with the needs or wants of the Wikimedia community. I think
that's entirely the wrong framing. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. should be serving the
community's needs and we seem to have drifted, over many years, very far from what was
an established truth. This is partially what I mean by a lack of accountability.
(as a sidenote: it turns out that the team has been
roughly this big for a while now)
Sure, though if we conclude that too much donor money is being spent per year on, for
example, design resources, it just means the problem has compounded over the course of
many years to be even larger. We could be talking about $6M or $8M or more. That's a
lot of money to spend and I'm struggling to understand what the return on investment
is.
MZMcBride