On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 9:21 AM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2009/9/16 Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com:
Putting aside the unnecessary bad faith and challenges to the foundation's integrity: I find this all exciting - planning for significant tech budget support, possible major sponsorships (I've always hoped we would one day find multiple sources for long-term in-kind support of servers and bandwidth), &c. I would simply like to see more open discussion of what our perfect-world tech dreams are, and how to pursue what sorts of sponsorships.
Thanks, Sam. I find the discussion of the last few days symptomatic of the problems we've begun to brainstorm about with regard to the signal/noise ratio, healthiness and openness of this particular forum. (And by openness I mean that a forum that is dominated by highly abrasive, high volume, low signal discussions is actually not very open.) I do want to revisit the post limit question as a possible answer, but let's do that separately.
The thread did surface some topics which are worth talking about, both in general and specific terms, and I'm taking the liberty to start a new thread to isolate some of those topics. For one thing, I think it's always good to revisit and iterate processes for defining priorities, and for achieving the highest impact in those identified areas.
Developing more sophisticated processes both for short-term and long-term planning has been precisely one of the key focus areas of the last year. Internally, we've begun experimenting with assessment spreadsheets and standardized project briefs, drawing from the expertise of project management experts as well as Sue's specific work in developing a very well thought-out prioritization system at the CBC. Publicly, we're engaged in the strategy planning process -- the associated Call for Proposals is a first attempt to conduct a large-scale assessment of potential priorities. (I hope that with future improvements to the ReaderFeedback extension we'll be able to generate more helpful reports based on that particular assessment.)
Ideally, the internal and public processes will converge sooner rather than later. For example, I posted a project brief that I developed internally through the strategy CfP: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Volunteer_Toolkit
I believe this one was submitted by Jennifer: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Volunteer_Management_practices_t...
And this one by Tim: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Directed_community_fundraising
The next phase of the strategy planning process, the deep-dive task forces, will be an interesting experiment in serious community-driven planning work, complemented by the research conducted with the help of our partners at The Bridgespan Group. All of this will become part of the institutional memory of the Wikimedia movement, and hopefully we'll continue to raise the bar in our thinking, planning, and collaboration.
Of course separately from setting priorities, there's the critical need to improve our ability to execute upon those priorities. This includes the further development of project pipelines, more systematic volunteer engagement, additional internal HR support, additional hiring of staff to address key capacity gaps, etc. I'm thrilled by how far we've come, and to be able to have supported, and continue to support, an unprecedented large-scale initiative like the usability project. I'm well-aware that there continue to be key priorities that we aren't executing as effectively as we could.
The first thing many partners, donors and friends say when they visit Wikimedia Foundation is how astonishing it is that an operation of this scale can function with so little funding and staff. The truth is that by any reasonable measure of efficiency and money-to-impact ratio, we're achieving wonderful things together, and that's easy to forget when looking at issues in isolation. (Yes, it would be wonderful to have the full-history dumps running ASAP. Hm, it would be nice to have the full-history dumps for some other top 50 content websites. Oh, right, they don't provide any.)
But I don't measure our success compared to other organizations. The most important question to me is whether we are continually raising the bar in what we're doing and how we do it. The most recent Wikimania was the most thoughtful and self-aware one I've ever attended, with deep, constructive conversations and very serious efforts of everyone involved to re-ignite and strengthen our movement. There are elements of groupthink, but also very systematic attempts to break out of it.
There are great opportunities today for anyone to become engaged in helping to shape the future of what we do, and to accomplish real change in the world as a result. Ultimately we all have to make a choice how we spend our time -- how we spend our lives -- but I hope we're creating a legacy that will fill us with pride and joy, and inspire others to do the same. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
I'm encouraged by taking the positives out of the earlier discussion and moving forwards.
I have a specific question regarding the CTO role which has been floating around not yet completely defined. Brion announced the impending opening a while ago now and the formal definition of the job role (and possibly title, I suggest it's more of a CIO role than CTO per se) was to follow.
As operational technical concerns are a credibly large part of the overall concerns people have about strategy and execution, can you tell us if there's a defined timeline on the new CTOish role being formalized, announced, etc?
Thanks.