Re John Vandenberg's comments on the Strategic plan
For a while in late 2009 I was quite active on the Strategy project,
and like John Vandenburg I'm one of the hundred or more in the
acknowledgements. I didn't sign up to any of the project teams as I
had some real life stuff going on in early 2010, and the problems with
liquid threads made it very difficult for me to get back in when I
tried to. But looking at the end result and comparing it to my
memories of the project, and also rereading
[[:strategy:Favorites/WereSpielChequers]], I don't think it is fair to
dismiss this as "largely a Wikimedia Foundation business plan". OK
not every bright idea made it into the plan, some of my favourites got
nowhere, and the plan is not exactly as I would have written it. But
there are things that emerged in the final version that I think are
really important and would make a huge difference to the project, for
example [[:meta:Deploy additional caching centers in key locations to
serve growing audiences in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East]],
and much where I can see the roots in Strategy wiki discussions.
So I
wouldn't go quite so far as to describe it as "largely a Wikimedia
Foundation business plan".
If there was another version of this process then I think there are
some lessons one could learn:
1) creating a fresh wiki rather than running it as a project under
meta created some overheads and let in a bunch of banned users
2) I don't think it got enough input from the community, especially at
the point when we were evaluating proposals. I doubt if many proposals
got even 100 supports. I think it could have stayed closer to the
wider community through more signpost reports.
3 Liquid threads was a problem.
4) We should probably have been more ruthless in the early stages at
merging overlapping and contradictory proposals, and referring some
others to individual projects and uncyclopedia
5) As others have mentioned getting consensus on something so complex
is a daunting task, and we don't seem to have evidence for every step
of this in the final stages.
WereSpielChequers
On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Sue Gardner
<sgardner(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
...
Ah, Sarah, I don't think that's particularly fair. Bear in mind we've
just published a strategic plan that 1,000+ Wikimedians helped create.
On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 11:22 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
How cares who wrote what? What matters is who
came up with what and
who thought it was a good idea. I don't know if that information is
available in any easily accessible way, but it will all be on the
strategy wiki if you wish to search for it.
I'm more than a bit disturbed to see my name in the Acknowledgements
at the back of the Wikimedia Strategic Plan, which is largely a
Wikimedia Foundation business plan.
In participating in
strategy.wikimedia.org, I was contributing to the
strategic planning for the *movement*.
I don't think I edited any of the pages relating to this document.
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/2010-2015_WMF_Business_Pl…
Also, I looked for this "188 employees" figure in the strategy wiki
and couldn't see it anywhere.
Was there any attempt to have this document approved by the community?
--
John Vandenberg