Greetings! I'm excited to be the new Chief Operating Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation and look forward to meeting many of you as I grow in this role. Until then, feel free to reach out to me at janeen@wikimedia.org.
I've been busy supporting the Medium Term Planning team and wanted to send an update on our process.
The Wikimedia Foundation is currently engaged in the process of creating a medium-term plan that will support our 2030 Strategic Direction. This plan is a representation of how we will lead, build, design and serve the global world and provide access to free knowledge.
In the process, we are setting up the Foundation to be more nimble so we can adapt to recommendations coming out of movement strategy. In the past, we have typically planned one year at a time. This new process that we are using will allow us to plan for longer-term goals aligned to knowledge equity and knowledge as a service.
For the next three to five years, the Wikimedia Foundation will focus on these two goals that will support our strategic direction to become the infrastructure of free knowledge:
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Grow participation globally, focusing on emerging markets -
Grow the use of Wikipedia and Wikimedia across the globe. Focus on increasing Wikipedia use in low-awareness or low-use geographies and languages, in order to bring Wikipedia’s use in line with rates of overall internet usage. -
Modernize our product experience -
Make contributor and reader experiences useful and joyful. Move from viewing Wikipedia as solely a website, to viewing the Wikimedia ecosystem as a collection of knowledge, information, and insights with infinite possible product experiences and applications.
To create our medium-term plan, we have been conducting a collaborative process to gather ideas and input from across the Foundation to help us narrow in on a set of key priorities and outcomes that we need to accomplish to achieve our two goals.
The medium-term plan is intended to stay at the strategic level so that it describes what we want to accomplish, without going into great detail about how we are going to accomplish it. This level of focus will allow us to be clear about what the Foundation will achieve in the next several years, while giving ourselves the flexibility to adapt to recommendations from the Movement Strategy process, take advantage of emergent opportunities, and experiment with tactics and strategies.
We will soon be finishing a draft of the medium-term plan to present to the Board of Trustees at their next meeting on March 28th, 2019. After we share the plan with the board, we will be requesting feedback from you and from all parts of the community from April 7-20th. We are looking for your feedback on whether the outcomes we hope to achieve over the next 3 to 5 years are appropriate given the goals of the overall Wikimedia Movement and our strategic direction. We want to know: are these the right “big things” to accomplish in the next 3-5 years? We would also like feedback on whether our overall metrics are appropriate and aspirational enough given our ambitious vision. Are we setting the right targets for how we will measure our progress?
After we receive all comments and feedback, we will make a final round of updates to the our Medium-term plan before publishing it again back on meta at the end of May. In subsequent years, we intend to update the plan on an annual basis to adapt to new information, changes in our environment, and the things we learn along the way.
We hope that you all will provide your insight and thoughts to help the Foundation build this plan and continue to make progress toward our strategic direction.
Thank you,
Janeen Uzzell
Timeline:
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March 28 - We will share the draft plan with the Foundation’s Board of Trustees -
April 6 - Plan published on Meta Wiki -
April 6-20 - Community review and comment period -
April 21-May 10 - Revise plan as needed based on community comments -
May 31 - Publish revised plan on Meta