Hello dear all,

the following was one of the documents I created for my ED application. It took me quite some time to create it and thus it was clear for me at the beginning that I would publish it at some time point. I struggled a long time with myself though about when to publish it. I didn't want to publish it as long as I was an aspirant for the position since this seems to me to be unfair to the other candidates. And now that I am out of the run I think it is a good time to do this. Many of you may find your own ideas reflected in it. I think it is not surprising that ideas doesn't come from nowhere but from the interaction of people with each other. I want to thank you all for the thoughts you published here or elsewhere (like on Wikimania or on meta). I didn't change the wording of the text and I know it is quite inappropriate for this forum. And as I said before, since I am out of competition it is quite outdated, what makes it bit of embarrassing. I appologize for that.

Greetings Ting

In 2012 the Wikimedia Foundation conducted a cultural study about itself. As a result it identified its current corporate culture as that of the archetype of an Innocent. And the Foundation decided to transform itself into the archetype of a Sage in the coming years.

For me to be a sage means to speak with wisdom, means people will pay attention to what you say, means own leadership. For me it is a leadership that is different from what is taught in schools. For me leadership does not mean to own a title, an impressive shoulder mark, a reward, or to be claimed an authority. For me leadership means to be able to convince people by wisdom, to let people follow you because they see the benefit by following you.

I would like to lead the Foundation into such an organization. Into a small, in comparison to other world wide operating organizations with similar impact, but highly efficient organization that operates as the core of a movement with strong partners. I would like to describe in more detail about what I mean by this on three most important fields on which the Foundation is working: On software development, on community engineering and on movement leadership.

Software development is a critical component of what the Foundation is doing. The Foundation need to keep improve the usability of its project sites, both for readers and for editors, and it needs to make the knowledge millions of volunteers contributed accessible by as many people as possible. As a board member of the WMF I have repeatedly urged the Foundation to increase the efficiency and organizational maturity of our tech department. For me the most important tasks on the technology side of the Foundation are the following two: Keep step with the contemporary technological and design progress, provide a good and modern foundation for other third party developers so that they can tap on the vast data set collected by the Wikimedia projects, and keep the development as near as possible to the users.

In the past few years we see a dazzling development in communication and IT technology. Almost every year there was a new generation of mobile devices coming onto market and substitutes the older devices in just one or two years. And the currently dominating phones, tablets or even glasses will not necessarily be the dominating models in five or ten years. We saw major companies like Nokia or RIM lost hold on technological trend and thus fall out of the favor of the market in the past five years. Keeping pace with this tremendous development speed is almost impossible for an organization like the WMF.

The Foundation had improved its software development efficiency in the past two years tremendously. Since one year we are using SCRUM as our software development method. Nevertheless I see further potential for improvement, especially with the use of SCRUM. For example the SCRUM method requires the involvement of the customer as part of the project. In theory the customer should be the project owner. For the WMF, the customers are its users (both editors and readers). Use the SCRUM philosophy on the WMF means that users should be given a possibility to be involved in the software development as early and as frequently as possible. For that reason the WMF should build up a test server where it can deploy part of its prototype development and invite users to test and comment the features in a very early phase.

Another possibility to involve users as part of the project is to let users decide part of development priority. Take from the Bugzilla some of most asked feature requests and let users vote on Meta about which one should be resolved at first. Dedicate part of the engineering team on that request and build a project. After the feature is deployed, ask users vote for the next feature to be prioritized. This approach will also improve our goodwill inside of the community.

Another way to keep pace with the technological development is to provide a solid and up-to-date foundation, with which we can give room to the broad developer community the possibility to build on. By that I mean to provide a good set of APIs (application programming interfaces), which can be used by other developers so that they can tap on the data and do their own development. The WMF cannot afford to work on all fronts of contemporary technology. It cannot afford teams working on the desktop front-end, as well as on the mobile front-end and on other forthcoming devices. It should have experts on all these fields, who constantly keep eyes on the newest development, and experimenting with prototypes of these new technologies. But most importantly, they should bring their experience back to the API developers so that these can keep their interface with the newest development. We should let the broad developer community build on this foundation, so that they can create the most modern, most sophisticated applications for each special device. This is also perfectly in accordance with the philosophy of the Foundation, which is to empower people and to free their creative spirit.

A third topic that is for me of a certain priority is to periodically provide a whole database dump of all Wikimedia projects. The reason for this is that nothing lasts forever, starting with organizations like the Wikimedia Foundation and not at last ending with social and political systems in which it is currently embedded in. The WMF need to take care that the human knowledge that is contributed to its projects by uncountable volunteers will even survive the Foundation itself. And there is only one way to do it: to periodically provide and distribute a copy of its database.

Currently, except a very small portion, the main engineering team of the Foundation is based in San Francisco, although for the Foundation distributed teams are not something that is totally new. The Foundation cooperated for example with the Indian team working on localization of the indic languages and worked with the Wikidata team which is mainly based in Germany. Many companies, for example WorldPress, explored distributed developer teams in an extreme way, and very successful. I worked with distributed developer teams in the last five years in different roles. I think WMF should explore more with distributed developer teams. There is a philosophical and a practical reason for the Foundation to do this. The philosophical one is the principle guidance of the Foundation that we are a decentralized movement. And the practical one is that many things, especially related to localization is better done where it is needed: where the users are.

Just as there is an intrinsic conflict inside of the engineering department between the software development and the system maintenance teams (this is not a unique problem for the WMF but actually for all companies that operate both of them) there is an intrinsic conflict inside all WMF projects between the keepers and the builders. The WMF projects collect and keep human knowledge. And at some degree these two tasks are in a conflict of interest. At the beginning of the projects, when the collected content was still few and incomplete, the builders prevailed. When the projects get larger and more prominent, the keepers gain terrain. The WMF need to work out a way to keep the spirit of innovation and at the same time take care of the reliability of the content it is hosting. And it needs to find a way to resolve the conflict between the two aspects in a human and civil way.

I have already mentioned in my resign mail from the board about the problems our projects are facing: The community is biased toward the better educated male population of the world. I believe this bias currently lead to a deadlock with the smoldering conflict inside of the projects: The conflicts and the incivility that it resulted expel users, especially the less vocal and aggressive ones, which stiffens the bias inside of the community. While the bias of the community leads to a more aggressive way of the conflict.

I believe that the Foundation need to address all these problems by doing social engineering on its project communities.

The problems, both the conflict between the keepers and the builders, as well as embrace new communities, welcome new cultures, while keep the value of an existing community is not new and unique for the WMF and its projects. Many societies faced or are facing the same problem. Many had resolved or periled on these problems in the human history.

What is new for the WMF is the phenomenon of online and virtual communities. It is so new that until now there is only very few research works about this topic. Little is known in theory about how online communities evolve and how they transform, which internal and external forces influence their development. The lack of theoretical foundation makes every effort of change a constant try and error. On the other hand, there is no entity in the world that can provide such a rich and detailed and even multiple record on this field as the WMF projects. Cooperation between the WMF and research institute for social science can be beneficial for both sides. The Foundation can benefit from the results of the research institutes so that it can modify rules, provide technical environments to shift its community to be more inclusive and more balanced while the research institutes can benefit from the open and detailed records or even through field studies inside the communities to develop new theories for this modern phenomenon. On a broader way I also believe that the research on the WMF projects and its evolution can provide solutions to many conflicts in the real world. I want, and I believe the WMF can, build up knowledge and become a real sage in this field. There is nowhere in the world that is more prone for this than the WMF.

Except WikiVoyage currently all WMF projects are specialized on academic knowledge. But this is only part of the human knowledge that the WMF promised to collect in its vision. It is like IQ only measures some partial aspect of human intelligence. I would like the WMF to lead and research possibilities to open its projects for other aspects of human knowledge: the everyday knowledge, knowledge that is undocumented, or even be considered cannot be documented. I believe the WMF should also gather these knowledge and should open room for volunteers who are willing to contribute these kinds of knowledge.

The global development is another typical example where the principle of decentralization can apply perfectly. In contrary to the earlier approach I believe the WMF should not by itself try to set foot on the regions that we consider has great potential to develop. This can be done by the local organizations. The WMF should provide guidance and principles, give support to the local organizations to establish a strong and self sustainable infrastructure, educate people so that they gain the skill to plan and run operations, perform controlling and evaluation of the organizations. Out of its experience the WMF also should be able to provide consultation on operational models and activities that are promising. Also here, being a sage means for me the ability to give valuable advices and helps.

For this I believe we need strong local organizations. Until today, most of the WMF partner organizations are weak. Most importantly they are weak on structure. Most of them have a very thin base with only the board as active members, some don't even have an operational board. From such weak organizations one cannot expect strong operational performance. There is no other people out there who can make these organizations and future partner organizations strong, only WMF itself can do this. On the other side, I also believe that strong partner organizations should be more closely aligned to the WMF. It is not enough only to say that the organization supports free knowledge in its bylaw. I believe that the partner organizations should clearly state their recognition of the principles of the Wikimedia movement, their involvement in the strategic planing of the movement and their dedication and contribution to achieve the movement goals. This statement is needed to guarantee that we are working on the same goals and have the same understanding of principles. The alignment is absolutely important for the future operations and for the trust building.

My goal of being the ED of the WMF will be to fulfill the transformation of the organization from an Innocent into a Sage, in this case, even a sage in multiple fields: In technical engineering to guarantee the leading position of the WMF for the future years; in social engineering to transform and develop and motivate our volunteers and fuel our movement and projects; in leading a closely aligned group of strong international organizations to pursue our vision and our mission.