Veronique, thank you for publishing the plan, and for your work on it.
Phoebe writes:
I would like to encourage everyone to be sure and actually read this plan closely; "continued growth" turns out to mean nearly doubling the staff next year, and doubling the budget -- rather surprisingly dramatic growth. There is a lot of change that is planned for here, and many of these changes relate to areas that community members do work in.
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Personally, I would love to see some serious community discussion of this plan both here and at Wikimania next week.
Yes, next year's planned growth is dramatic. I wish that this were being done more slowly, though I understand the desire to move decisively and effectively.
I also hope we have good public discussions, and have heard it suggested that we make time at Wikimania for large-group discussion and feedback about this and the strategy.
I do think there are more risks inherent in this sort of growth than are listed in the 'potential risks' section -- for instance, "inability to acculturate new staff due to aggressive growth" -- and we should be alert to these risks to avoid them.
The most dramatic change proposed may be the addition of many community-focused staff roles, including 3 proposed hires focused on chapter relations and development, 5 focused on community development, and 1 focused on translation coordination... I believe that these are meant to aid and facilitate the work being done in the community rather than replacing it, but preparing for this sort of change will involve a level of active collaboration between staff and community.
There are also tantalizing comments in the plan about such new initiatives in - 'staff and volunteer development' - 'awards and grants' - 'community outreach and volunteer convenings' - a 'stakeholder database'
which I expect people would like to hear more about. (will this database let me find community members in Portugal interested in wikisource and library outreach?)
Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com writes:
Milos and myself will talk in Gdansk about the need to improve technical support for our smallest projects (think Hindi, Malayalam... hundreds of million people will benefit..).
I hope that many of us will take part in such discussions! This is one of our greatest opportunities for improvement.
What I am also looking for is improved support for projects like the recent Indonesian contest. They have set the standard for a competition involving universities. They doubled the number of active editors and 60% of them is female.
Yes. See above re: awards and grants. The Swahili contest was similarly successful (though not in terms of gender ratio; lessons to be shared!)
If there is one thing that I find problematic, it is that the WMF office can be observed to operate a dual role; it is the world wide office for the Wikimedia Foundation and it behaves very much like a chapter. If there is one thing I would appreciate it would be if these two activities are separated. This would imho be best realised with the creation of an USA chapter.
I agree. I know that Wikimedia NY has had some success, but would like to see a national chapter form.
SJ