Delphine Ménard wrote: ... ... ... Well, instead of going to bed I brainstormed a bit so apologiye if some of the ideas are not that perfect. Some are better WMF in 10 years. There is first a supervisory board consisting of voted representatives of the projects, local chapters, and a president and second the management. The supervisory board only makes fundamental decisions and controls the management. Regularly all actions (finance, hardware, relations...) are done by the management. It is adviced to act as transparent and to delegate as much as possible to volunteers and local chapters. The management is paid (at least partly) and can hire other people for specific tasks. The Foundation coordinates fundraising schemes and grants but most of the money is collected by the chapters who pay the foundaten if needed (and vice versa). We'll have a lot of money ;-) Beside central server issues most projects are driven by local chapters. There are several local projects with other content providers and redistributors of content produced in Wikimedia projects. First campaigns against lack of literacy have been started. Lobbying against exaggerated copyright and patenting keeps going on. There are several projects collecting free knowledge but we decided not to collect free art of any kind (this is done by Ourmedia). Times when everything had to be wiki only are over. MediaWiki finnaly split up into a modularized set of components for collaboratively editing text ("old school wiki"), editing media, managing structured data and archiving non-mutable objects. Servers are still regularly getting slow because of growing usage but as there are multiple server farms not every project is affected in the same way. Local chapters are independent organisations that have a contract with the Foundation. Most of the projects and partnerships are organised by local chapters (almost 30 of them in 5 years) that regularly meet. The Foundation gives general guidelines what kind of projects and partnerships are welcome and which are not. Only partnerships with special organisations are directly with the Foundation - for instance: * Internet Archive * Creative Commons Initiative * United Nations Beside a loose cooperation with United Nations there is no partnership with any gouvermental or mainly political organisation. * Wikimania organisers don't know who to invite as keynote speaker because we already had Lawrence Lessing, Tim-Berners-Lee, Dalai Lama... * WMF has already beed nominated for Nobel Peace Prize but will only get it in one of the next years because there are still wars at too many places and ecocide goes on, so there are also other problems but free knowledge - sad but true but we do our best. Greetings, Jakob

The board has at least 7 members. One of them is Jimbo, 2 are appointed by the pre-existing board, 2 are elected by the projects community, 2 are elected by the chapters. None of them are paid. A full office with the following positions, all of them paid (those are in no particular order, **means those people work under the one above *) *chief executive officer **sales manager (selling services to for profit companies) **secretaries to answer the phone and deal with daily stuff *grants manager *fundraising and sponsor officer *chief financial officer **accountant *chief technical officer **developpers and technical team *philantropic activities and lobbying officer *press/PR officer **outside press agency (just to write the press releases, translate them, send them out etc. not to talk to the press) *chapter coordinator *legal officer **outside legal company (lawyer firm, à la Ally Mc Beal) *translation coordinator **outside translation company The point in having external companies is simple, if they're not good, we change, and we've got a good chance that those will work with WMF for little money, since WMF will be so big and known. (for roles, see more below) I don't know how much the budget is, but it's huge, and twice a year WMF issues a budget update (past expenses, previsional budget for next half year). The past expenses budget is very detailled (every single cable is accounted for, or almost), the previsional leaves room for unexpected things. The budget consists of an overall wmf budget and chapter budgets, those are coordinated towards the greater goal of sustaining the projects. There's one *overall buget* and sub-budgets for specific projects (not Wikimedia projects, more like "Hardware project" or "Print project"...) 2 fundraising drives a year aimed at individuals. Each of these fundraising drives is based on specific budget needs, possibly the little projects described above. The rest of the money (and the bigger part of it) comes from grants and big sponsors, and from selling services. Fundraising is closely coordinated with chapters. The philantropic activities/lobbying officer acts with governments/organisations both to make sure content is available (see content below) and stays free, and to make sure it reaches the right people. I see this as one of the main things to develop to reach WMF's goal of "make it available to the greater numbers". In the long run, we will not just be sustaining our projects, but many other projects designed to bring our content to the greater numbers. Projects live their own life, the foundation is here to make sure no legal, technical etc. threats endanger them. The WMF will then be strong enough, and have enough political power and weight to ensure the collaboration of world wide organisations and governements to give content to the projects. Talking to the national libraries, international organisations (ESA, UNESCO, EU etc.) to make their content available, maybe buy content to make it free, in short, make sure that content that should be free is free, and content that is already free stays free. I have no clue, but basically, the developping team makes sure the software scales and the projects can continue growing. the WMF acts as an umbrella organisation for all chapters. Major deals with international companies and institutions are made by the WMF and are brought to the local level through the chapters. Chapters take care of local deals with local institutions and local companies. Information flows both ways. Press and PR will be a large part of how the rest of the staff/team is seen and what image the Foundation and the Wikimedia projects give to the outside world. Partnerships are chosen so they can help the WMF reach a larger audience, both in readers and sponsors. I imagine advertising for fundraising drives in major newspapers, grand press conferences etc. Well, we did not think of it, so I don't know :-). Delphine -- ~notafish

There's a large tendency within the community to maintain the status quo, so I don't think any radical changes are going to occur over the next five years. I think the innovation will come with the uses people make of our content rather than with the projects or organsation themselves. Improvements will most likely be in areas we are already thinking about, such as communication within the organsaition, and validation of the content, rather than in completely new areas. ==Wikimedia 2010== *Board and management The Board has delegated much of their work to people in paid positions or voluntary "official positions". This has left them with more time for making higher level decisions including overall strategies and partnerships with external parties. They are responsible for hiring new staff, and for communicating the ethos of the Foundation to all Wikimedia members and to the outside world. The majority of the Board of Trustees are elected members of the community. They are supported by a Board of Advisors, made up of people from relevant fields. The Board keeps a proper minute book, with corporate resolutions. The bylaws have been legally approved and are easy to find. All legal paperwork is in order. *Staff (the positions, the roles, whether they're paid or not) Positions include the following (whether they're paid, appointed volunteers, or positions decided by the relevant Special Interest Groups is something I'm not ready to predict). CEO Technical officer Financial officer Accountant Print publishing co-ordinator Secretaries Grants co-ordinator Lawyers Communication team (including translation) Business manager R&D PR Advertising and promotion Chapter co-ordinator *Budget The budget is 25 times larger than it was in 2005. Much of the expenditure is handled by local chapters. Donated hardware from a large range of sources all over the world has allowed us to keep costs down. The primary costs on the budget are now special projects, such as the global distribution of our content in various forms, and the cost of staff. Hardware costs are still included in the budget, though these increasingly refer to the cost of managing distributed hardware that has been donated rather than buying our own hardware. Local chapter reps liaise with paid technicians in their own area who are responsible for maintaining the servers in those countries. Financial records have been improved and are regularly audited. *Fundraising scheme Much of our funding comes from public donations, though these are now smaller than the income we get from grants. We are still finding new ways to raise money without the need to resort to advertising on the site. Fundraising occurs not only on our own projects, but as part of a huge effort across the internet as thousands of other sites advertise our fundraising drives. Local chapters handle fundraising efforts at a local level, allowing more and more people to donate tax-free within their own country. Individual donors have more of a say in how their donations are spent and are presented with a number of options during each fund raising drive for what the bulk of their money will be spent on. *Philanthropic activity and outreach to get our content widely redistributed As the first real efforts to distribute our content to those without internet access are showing signs of success, the focus moves towards considering how to get content from those people rather than just distributing it to them. New methods of contribution are being explored, with the aim of allowing every person on the planet to be a Wikimedian and not just a reader (or listener - as audio versions become as popular as the text versions were 5 years ago). Through partnerships with various publishing companies, the content from all projects is regularly being printed, or made available in audio versions. Books are being sold and given away all over the world, bringing in revenue that allows us to keep expanding our publishing projects and other philanthropic activities. The first braille versions are being prepared. *Projects Teaching communities are beginning to develop to pass on the skills of using MediaWiki and of encyclopedic writing. These are led by groups all over the world who organise training and outreach days to bring even more people into the Wikimedia community. Universities start to incorporate this into their courses. Easier methods of inputting content into the projects are being researched, which is expected to decrease the need to teach people to use the software. The projects appear less separated than they once did as automatic links appear between them and single login allows users to edit across them more easily. At the same time, users can choose to view only sections of the projects. Those wanting to focus only on science articles can view only those, with their own recent changes and own discussion areas, preventing the problems of the projects becoming too large to cope with. *Content objectives The content is all available under a free license, and simplifications to the GFDL have made it much easier for people to reuse the content without violating the license. Wikimedia is by far the largest content provider in many languages. Traditional content providers are looking for new models and moving into niche markets rather than trying to compete with us. The majority of content is still produced by volunteers, but some is now donated as a result of deals with external parties, and as a result of people being paid, though not directly by the Foundation, for producing content, particularly in weak areas and small languages. Different modes of viewing the content are available. Users can select from options such as "show only validated versions", "show only articles with cited sources", "show only articles approved by company xyz". Some of these options are only available on external sites, as co-branded versions by companies who want to add their own methods of validation to the content. The possibility to view validated versions has increased the credibility of the projects, which are now accepted sources at all levels. *Software objectives All software used by all projects is open source. The developers have finally given up telling people MediaWiki is not a CMS. It is now a CMS, and a blog, and a database, and whatever else people want it to be. :) The version used on Wikimedia's own projects begins to be unrecognizable from the versions now being used elsewhere, both as a result of better Wikimedia branding which makes our own projects stand out, and as a result of the software being tailored to each project rather than incorporating all of the features now available in MediaWiki. Work into making MediaWiki work better across distributed systems is ongoing. The interface is fully internationalized in 200 languages. A consortium of companies using MediaWiki internally and on their own websites sponsor a team of security reviewers who work alongside the MediaWiki developers to ensure no stable versions of the code are released with security flaws. Many other companies using MediaWiki, or with an interest in the content produced on it, regularly contribute code, and this is checked by paid staff, leaving volunteers to focus on the more popular aspects of development. Efforts to standardise the markup are ongoing, and there is increasing interoperability between different wiki engines. *Relationship between chapters and parent organisation Local chapters are heavily involved in promotion and the formation of local partnerships. They have increasing independence, and the Board relies on contracts and mutually-agreed guidelines to ensure the chapters maintain the goals of the Foundation rather than attempting to closely monitor their every move. Efforts to improve inter-chapter communications are still being made, and though better than five years ago, are still an area the Board is trying to improve upon. *Relationships with the outside world (PR, partnerships, etc.) Universities are participating to the projects through content creation and software development. Regular promotional activities happen at universities across the world. A range of partnerships have been created, including global ones with the Foundation, and local ones with local chapters. Informal partnerships are being made regularly by users of all projects. *Other (anything we did not think of) Foundation policies and bureaucracy have continued to expand. These now cover everything from privacy policies to NDAs to trademark use. DMCAs are now a regular occurrence. Lawsuits are becoming more frequent, but the legal team has handled these with no major issues so far. That's all for now. I'm off to buy edition 25 of Quarto, Wikimedia's 128 page magazine. ;) Cofion cynnes, Angela.