Hoi, Organising our movement in the format of a federation will not necessarily do what you describe. As you assume that money flows to the places where money is spend, you will not have a federation. A federation is based on equal terms and when money is what keeps everone in line it is not a federation of equals.

When you carve our movement up in parts, it becomes impossible to impose much of what needs to be imposed. New functionality in software is badly needed in places, a discussion on quality does not happen because it clashes with vested interests. The negative impact of the community on innovation is real and when one community gains even more power because of the proposed fragmentation, I doubt if we will ever have this conversation and many others that do not happen.

In a federation, it becomes easier to know who is local. I know the Dutch chapter, they know me and there is not the same fuss for getting a project under way. No committees, just a good common understanding what it is that is proposed and why is sufficient. It is what makes a federation agile. It is for the professionals in the chapter (or the people who volunteer to do this) to be involved in the gruelling aspects of this kind of headache. <grin> translatewiki.net does not fit in any model and why should it? </grin>

When you federate, you will have to do something about fund-raising and fund dissemination. They are two sides to a coin. The problem is very much that we are an internet community and many of the activities have a global scope. I mention Wikimedia Germany and Wikidata, Wikimedia (Scandinavia they work together) and mapping.. the list goes on. When such projects can have a place in a federated model than good but the problems are rife. How for instance do people in India pick up on Maps for instance and outgrow what happens in Scandinavia?? Arguably this is a non-issue when we collaborate but the organisation, funding is often not agile enough to cope.

This idea of federation very much needs a lot of "tire kicking". Even when nothing comes of it, it helps us understand what it is we do and are. We are a movement, not a foundation. The layers of the movement are easily forgotten and they operate best when people have good working relations. I do think that the notion of "150" has its point but given the scope of what we do (it is not convenient to note more than 150 Wikipedias, more than 150 countries..) We have to be clever about this. It is what makes Wikimania so powerful, it brings us all together and work on our mutual relations. After all, you never know what relations you need when. Thanks, GerardM

On 18 March 2016 at 03:22, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

Hi folks,

Now that the dust has settled a bit, I would like to expand on an idea that’s been touched on a few times (most recently, in an editorial by William Beutler [1]): the notion that WMF might be a more effective organization if it limited its own size in favor of focused spin-off organizations and affiliates.

I was very much part of building the current WMF in terms of both size and structure, but I also think recent events underscore the fragility of the current model. WMF is still tiny compared with other tech companies that operate popular websites, but it’s a vast organization by Wikimedia movement standards. With nearly 300 staff [2] (beyond even our ambitious 2015 strategic plan staffing numbers), it dwarfs any other movement org.

I can see three potential benefits from a more federated model:

1. Resilience. If any one organization experiences a crisis, other

independent organizations suffer to a lesser degree than departments within that organization.

2. Focus. Wikimedia’s mission is very broad, and an organization with

a clearly defined mandate is less likely to be pulled in many different directions -- at every level.

3. Accountability. Within a less centralized federation, it is easier

to ensure that funding flows to those who do work the movement wants them to do.

My experience is that growth tends to be self-reinforcing in budgetary processes if there are now clear ceilings established. I think that’s true in almost any organization. There’s always lots of work to do, and new teams will discover new gaps and areas into which they would like to expand. Hence, I would argue for the following:

a) To establish 150 as the provisional ceiling for Wikimedia movement organizations. This is Dunbar’s number, and it has been used (sometimes intentionally, sometimes organically) as a limiting number for religious groups, military companies, corporate divisions, tax offices, and other human endeavors. [3][4] This is very specifically because it makes organizational units more manageable and understandable for those who work there.

b) To slowly, gradually identify parts of the WMF which would benefit from being spun off into independent organizations, and to launch such spin-offs, narrowing WMF's focus in the process.

c) To aim to more clearly separate funding and evaluation responsibilities from programmatic work within the movement -- whether that work is keeping websites running, building software, or doing GLAM work.

Note that I'm not proposing a quick splintering, but rather a slow and gradual process with lots of opportunity to course-correct.

More on these points below.

== Potential test case: MediaWiki Foundation ==

A "MediaWiki Foundation" [5] has been proposed a few times and I suspect continues to have some currency within WMF. This org would not be focused on all WMF-related development work, but specifically on MediaWiki as software that has value to third parties. Its mission could include hosting services as earned income (and potentially as an extension of the Wikimedia movement’s mission).

MediaWiki is used today by numerous nonprofit and educational projects that are aligned even with a narrow view on Wikimedia’s mission. Examples include Appropedia, OpenWetWare, WikiEducator, W3C’s WebPlatform, Hesperian Health Guides, and too many notable open source projects to list.

Among commercial users, it has lost much ground to other software like Confluence, but it remains, in my view, the most viable platform for large, open, collaborative communities. Yet it’s a poorly supported option: many of the above wikis are outdated, and maintaining a MediaWiki install is generally more work than it needs to be.

Building a healthy third party ecosystem will have obvious benefits for the world, and for existing Wikimedia work as well. It may also create a proving ground for experimental technology.

Which work that WMF is currently doing would be part of an MWF’s mandate? I don’t know; I could imagine that it could include aspects like Vagrant, or even shared responsibility for MediaWiki core and MW’s architecture.

== The Wiki Education Foundation precedent ==

It’s worth noting that this spin-off model has been tried once before. The Wiki Education Foundation is an example of an organization that was created by volunteers doing work in this programmatic space in partnership with staff of the Education Program at WMF, who left to join the new org. It is now financially independent, building its own relationships with funders that WMF has never worked with, and achieving impact at unprecedented scale.

LiAnna Davis, who is today the Director of Program Support at Wiki Ed, wrote a detailed response to William’s blog post, which I think is worth quoting in full [1]:

----begin quote---- I worked for the WMF for nearly four years and have worked for the spun-off Wiki Education Foundation for the last two, and I strongly support the idea of spinning off more parts of WMF into independent nonprofits like ours.

As you noted, Wiki Ed is a test case for your proposal, so for readers who don’t know our history: We started in 2010 as a pilot program (called the Public Policy Initiative) within WMF, funded by a restricted grant, to support university professors in the U.S. who wanted to assign their students to edit Wikipedia as a class assignment. The pilot showed the idea was successful, and so we started piloting it in countries as part of the Catalyst project (Arab World, Brazil, and India).

The U.S. program had lingered at WMF without any real organizational support because the U.S. wasn’t a target region. WMF leadership saw its potential, however, and formed a volunteer Working Group of Wikipedians and academics who created the structure of the organization that became the Wiki Education Foundation in 2013. WMF gave us a small start-up grant to get us going, and provided fiscal sponsorship for us until our 501(c)3 status came through (and we could fundraise on our own).

Today, we’re an independent organization, not funded by WMF, and we’ve scaled the impact of our programs incredibly. We’re supporting three times as many students, we’ve developed our own technology to support our programmatic work, and our students are busy addressing content gaps in academic areas on Wikipedia.

So why are we so successful? There are a lot of factors, but there’s one I want to highlight here, because I think it’s a clear difference between when we were at WMF and our current work at Wiki Ed. We have one, very clear mission: We create mutually beneficial ties between Wikipedia and academia in the U.S. and Canada.

The WMF mission is inspiring — but it’s really broad, just like our movement is. When we were doing this same project at WMF, I’d struggle to just focus on the Education Program and ignore the rest of the mission. Whenever I interacted with people outside the foundation (and I did so a lot), people would come to me with ideas to further WMF’s mission that weren’t in my program’s boundaries. I’d spend time trying to help, because I believed in the mission and wanted to help it along. I’m not the only one: I would see this idealism and commitment to the mission repeatedly among my colleagues at WMF. I still see it from the current WMF staff. They’re all there because they believe in the mission. They want to help, and it’s really hard to not try to help with everything, because you can see so many different facets of helping that mission.

Essentially, with a mission as broad as WMF’s, it’s hard for staff to keep a narrow focus. *Everything* can seem mission-related. When your mission is as narrow as Wiki Ed’s, it’s easier to find your focus and keep your attention on developing one area well. This is a key strength of independent organizations — independent, narrower missions keep staff focused and more productive on achieving their small part of the overall Wikimedia mission.

I strongly support more discussion about spinning off other parts of WMF into independent organizations. ----end quote----

== A "Movement Association"? ==

A more radical suggestion would be to spin off work on grantmaking and evaluation. This isn’t trivial -- there are legitimate arguments to keep this work close to other community-facing work WMF is doing. But there are undeniable benefits in greater separation.

When it comes to large annual plan grants, much has been done to ensure that the FDC can operate as an independent body and evaluate each plan on its merits. Ultimately, however, the decision rests with the WMF, which has a much better understanding of its own programs (through the direct relationship with its ED) than of those of affiliates.

Similarly, while WMF has done a fair bit to provide self-service evaluation tools to the movement at large, it’s not clear that its work is always held to the same standard as everyone else’s. A WMF grantee must very publicly report results and success metrics; WMF attempts to do so as a matter of course, but it is not accountable to another organization for failing to do so.

Finally, as was discussed here a lot in recent weeks, WMF itself has no clear accountability to the movement. The Board elections are advisory in nature. There is no membership. Non-elected seats are filled by the Board with little visibility. There is a semi-permanent "Founder’s Seat".

If grantmaking and evaluation responsibilities were increasingly shifted to a "Wikimedia Movement Association", this could gradually allow for true accountability to the movement in the form of membership and democratic, movement-wide decisions to make funding allocations on the basis of evaluation reports (through committees or otherwise).

This may also make the endowment a more compelling proposition than it is today. Yes, keeping Wikimedia’s sites operational indefinitely is a very worthwhile goal. But what if the endowment ultimately also helped to support global, federated work towards Wikimedia’s vision? What if all affiliates -- indeed the whole movement -- were excited and motivated to help grow it?

== Where to go from here? ==

There are lots of open questions in all of this. Should all site-wide fundraising remain inside WMF, for example, with funds being transferred to a movement entity? What’s the dividing line between "development for third parties" (MWF) and "development for Wikimedia" (WMF)? How would staff transition to new organizations? Where should those organizations be based? Should they be distributed, have offices?

An important thing to remember here (a lesson I’ve had to learn painfully) is that big changes are best made in small steps, with room for trial and error.

Implementing this strategy is, I think, a matter of first committing to it as an idea, and then creating coherent proposals for each step, publicly with broad input. First, if there is support for the general idea, I would recommend kicking it around: Are these the right kinds of spin-offs? What are the risks and how should existing affiliates be involved in the process? And so on.

The fact that WMF has just experienced a major organizational crisis should not itself fill us with pessimism and despair. But we also shouldn’t ignore it. We must learn from it and do what reason tells us -- and in my view that is to build a more resilient _federation_ of organizations than what we have today.

Warmly,

Erik

== Notes ==

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-03-09/Op-ed

[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Template:STAFF-COUNT

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

[4] http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-01-10/the-dunbar-number-from-the-g...

[5] Our branding is confusing beyond repair. I don't think there's an easy fix here, and we should just embrace our nutty nomenclature (Wikimedia/MediaWiki/Wikipedia) at this point.

---

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Hello Erik,

I don't disagree with the premise of your argument that an alternative structure of the wikimedia movement would let some parts of the wikimedia movement grow stronger and more effective in delivering a focused impact.

There is no doubt that North America could be self sustaining (people and resources) with loads of thematic organizations, both affiliates and independent. The largest European Chapters would do fine.

The question is whether a Federation would actually strengthen the diversity of the wikimedia movement or would it weaken the global mission?

The important element is a body of people in the wikimedia movement who strongly embrace the diversity of the movement and make it the priority.

Currently there is weak support in the wikimedia movement for global alliances. But the ones that have happened have given the wikimedia movement a sense of unity. Like Wiki Loves Monuments and Art+Feminism.

Right now the central hub of the global movement is WMF. Despite other recent problems. The WMF is doing a great job of regularly communicating about the world wide movement.

There needs to be a successful transfer of the global mission to another body/bodies or there is the risk that local growth will be even more uneven than today.

Additionally, the core sense of a movement could be lost unless there is a strong shared vision. Volunteers and donors contribute to a greater movement because of the its mission.

So,a priority of a Federation would be to foster a strong shared mission.

Sydney

Sydney Poore User:FloNight Wikipedian in Residence at Cochrane Collaboration

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 10:22 PM, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

Hi folks,

Now that the dust has settled a bit, I would like to expand on an idea that’s been touched on a few times (most recently, in an editorial by William Beutler [1]): the notion that WMF might be a more effective organization if it limited its own size in favor of focused spin-off organizations and affiliates.

I was very much part of building the current WMF in terms of both size and structure, but I also think recent events underscore the fragility of the current model. WMF is still tiny compared with other tech companies that operate popular websites, but it’s a vast organization by Wikimedia movement standards. With nearly 300 staff [2] (beyond even our ambitious 2015 strategic plan staffing numbers), it dwarfs any other movement org.

I can see three potential benefits from a more federated model:

1. Resilience. If any one organization experiences a crisis, other

independent organizations suffer to a lesser degree than departments within that organization.

2. Focus. Wikimedia’s mission is very broad, and an organization with

a clearly defined mandate is less likely to be pulled in many different directions -- at every level.

3. Accountability. Within a less centralized federation, it is easier

to ensure that funding flows to those who do work the movement wants them to do.

My experience is that growth tends to be self-reinforcing in budgetary processes if there are now clear ceilings established. I think that’s true in almost any organization. There’s always lots of work to do, and new teams will discover new gaps and areas into which they would like to expand. Hence, I would argue for the following:

a) To establish 150 as the provisional ceiling for Wikimedia movement organizations. This is Dunbar’s number, and it has been used (sometimes intentionally, sometimes organically) as a limiting number for religious groups, military companies, corporate divisions, tax offices, and other human endeavors. [3][4] This is very specifically because it makes organizational units more manageable and understandable for those who work there.

b) To slowly, gradually identify parts of the WMF which would benefit from being spun off into independent organizations, and to launch such spin-offs, narrowing WMF's focus in the process.

c) To aim to more clearly separate funding and evaluation responsibilities from programmatic work within the movement -- whether that work is keeping websites running, building software, or doing GLAM work.

Note that I'm not proposing a quick splintering, but rather a slow and gradual process with lots of opportunity to course-correct.

More on these points below.

== Potential test case: MediaWiki Foundation ==

A "MediaWiki Foundation" [5] has been proposed a few times and I suspect continues to have some currency within WMF. This org would not be focused on all WMF-related development work, but specifically on MediaWiki as software that has value to third parties. Its mission could include hosting services as earned income (and potentially as an extension of the Wikimedia movement’s mission).

MediaWiki is used today by numerous nonprofit and educational projects that are aligned even with a narrow view on Wikimedia’s mission. Examples include Appropedia, OpenWetWare, WikiEducator, W3C’s WebPlatform, Hesperian Health Guides, and too many notable open source projects to list.

Among commercial users, it has lost much ground to other software like Confluence, but it remains, in my view, the most viable platform for large, open, collaborative communities. Yet it’s a poorly supported option: many of the above wikis are outdated, and maintaining a MediaWiki install is generally more work than it needs to be.

Building a healthy third party ecosystem will have obvious benefits for the world, and for existing Wikimedia work as well. It may also create a proving ground for experimental technology.

Which work that WMF is currently doing would be part of an MWF’s mandate? I don’t know; I could imagine that it could include aspects like Vagrant, or even shared responsibility for MediaWiki core and MW’s architecture.

== The Wiki Education Foundation precedent ==

It’s worth noting that this spin-off model has been tried once before. The Wiki Education Foundation is an example of an organization that was created by volunteers doing work in this programmatic space in partnership with staff of the Education Program at WMF, who left to join the new org. It is now financially independent, building its own relationships with funders that WMF has never worked with, and achieving impact at unprecedented scale.

LiAnna Davis, who is today the Director of Program Support at Wiki Ed, wrote a detailed response to William’s blog post, which I think is worth quoting in full [1]:

----begin quote---- I worked for the WMF for nearly four years and have worked for the spun-off Wiki Education Foundation for the last two, and I strongly support the idea of spinning off more parts of WMF into independent nonprofits like ours.

As you noted, Wiki Ed is a test case for your proposal, so for readers who don’t know our history: We started in 2010 as a pilot program (called the Public Policy Initiative) within WMF, funded by a restricted grant, to support university professors in the U.S. who wanted to assign their students to edit Wikipedia as a class assignment. The pilot showed the idea was successful, and so we started piloting it in countries as part of the Catalyst project (Arab World, Brazil, and India).

The U.S. program had lingered at WMF without any real organizational support because the U.S. wasn’t a target region. WMF leadership saw its potential, however, and formed a volunteer Working Group of Wikipedians and academics who created the structure of the organization that became the Wiki Education Foundation in 2013. WMF gave us a small start-up grant to get us going, and provided fiscal sponsorship for us until our 501(c)3 status came through (and we could fundraise on our own).

Today, we’re an independent organization, not funded by WMF, and we’ve scaled the impact of our programs incredibly. We’re supporting three times as many students, we’ve developed our own technology to support our programmatic work, and our students are busy addressing content gaps in academic areas on Wikipedia.

So why are we so successful? There are a lot of factors, but there’s one I want to highlight here, because I think it’s a clear difference between when we were at WMF and our current work at Wiki Ed. We have one, very clear mission: We create mutually beneficial ties between Wikipedia and academia in the U.S. and Canada.

The WMF mission is inspiring — but it’s really broad, just like our movement is. When we were doing this same project at WMF, I’d struggle to just focus on the Education Program and ignore the rest of the mission. Whenever I interacted with people outside the foundation (and I did so a lot), people would come to me with ideas to further WMF’s mission that weren’t in my program’s boundaries. I’d spend time trying to help, because I believed in the mission and wanted to help it along. I’m not the only one: I would see this idealism and commitment to the mission repeatedly among my colleagues at WMF. I still see it from the current WMF staff. They’re all there because they believe in the mission. They want to help, and it’s really hard to not try to help with everything, because you can see so many different facets of helping that mission.

Essentially, with a mission as broad as WMF’s, it’s hard for staff to keep a narrow focus. *Everything* can seem mission-related. When your mission is as narrow as Wiki Ed’s, it’s easier to find your focus and keep your attention on developing one area well. This is a key strength of independent organizations — independent, narrower missions keep staff focused and more productive on achieving their small part of the overall Wikimedia mission.

I strongly support more discussion about spinning off other parts of WMF into independent organizations. ----end quote----

== A "Movement Association"? ==

A more radical suggestion would be to spin off work on grantmaking and evaluation. This isn’t trivial -- there are legitimate arguments to keep this work close to other community-facing work WMF is doing. But there are undeniable benefits in greater separation.

When it comes to large annual plan grants, much has been done to ensure that the FDC can operate as an independent body and evaluate each plan on its merits. Ultimately, however, the decision rests with the WMF, which has a much better understanding of its own programs (through the direct relationship with its ED) than of those of affiliates.

Similarly, while WMF has done a fair bit to provide self-service evaluation tools to the movement at large, it’s not clear that its work is always held to the same standard as everyone else’s. A WMF grantee must very publicly report results and success metrics; WMF attempts to do so as a matter of course, but it is not accountable to another organization for failing to do so.

Finally, as was discussed here a lot in recent weeks, WMF itself has no clear accountability to the movement. The Board elections are advisory in nature. There is no membership. Non-elected seats are filled by the Board with little visibility. There is a semi-permanent "Founder’s Seat".

If grantmaking and evaluation responsibilities were increasingly shifted to a "Wikimedia Movement Association", this could gradually allow for true accountability to the movement in the form of membership and democratic, movement-wide decisions to make funding allocations on the basis of evaluation reports (through committees or otherwise).

This may also make the endowment a more compelling proposition than it is today. Yes, keeping Wikimedia’s sites operational indefinitely is a very worthwhile goal. But what if the endowment ultimately also helped to support global, federated work towards Wikimedia’s vision? What if all affiliates -- indeed the whole movement -- were excited and motivated to help grow it?

== Where to go from here? ==

There are lots of open questions in all of this. Should all site-wide fundraising remain inside WMF, for example, with funds being transferred to a movement entity? What’s the dividing line between "development for third parties" (MWF) and "development for Wikimedia" (WMF)? How would staff transition to new organizations? Where should those organizations be based? Should they be distributed, have offices?

An important thing to remember here (a lesson I’ve had to learn painfully) is that big changes are best made in small steps, with room for trial and error.

Implementing this strategy is, I think, a matter of first committing to it as an idea, and then creating coherent proposals for each step, publicly with broad input. First, if there is support for the general idea, I would recommend kicking it around: Are these the right kinds of spin-offs? What are the risks and how should existing affiliates be involved in the process? And so on.

The fact that WMF has just experienced a major organizational crisis should not itself fill us with pessimism and despair. But we also shouldn’t ignore it. We must learn from it and do what reason tells us -- and in my view that is to build a more resilient _federation_ of organizations than what we have today.

Warmly,

Erik

== Notes ==

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-03-09/Op-ed

[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Template:STAFF-COUNT

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

[4] http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-01-10/the-dunbar-number-from-the-g...

[5] Our branding is confusing beyond repair. I don't think there's an easy fix here, and we should just embrace our nutty nomenclature (Wikimedia/MediaWiki/Wikipedia) at this point.

---

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Hi Erik,

Those are great ideas, and I'm think I can support most of them.

MediaWiki is indeed something we need to invest on much more. Or even re-built it from scratch. It's the base to all our work and the future or our projects. The idea of having an organization that this is 100% of his mission makes sense. Also the idea of hosting MW for others - see WordPress for exmaple. Even the WMF, a big organization with hundreds of developers and tech guys pays to WP in order to host is own blog.

The Education Foundation is also a good example - I spoke a lot with the WMF's education team about the great EDUFund's dashboard and how we can use it around the world, not only in the US. It is a powerful tool that the WMF is not even close or plans to offer to the education teams around the world. While the WMF is also not planning to develop one - why not to support the EDUFund or another chapter in order to make it international? But why we need to go far with the ideas - WikiData is probably the greatest example. But WMDE is not the only one organization that can do things like that.

So yes, we most re-think how we de-centralize some of the foundation\movement work.

Itzik

*Regards,Itzik Edri* Chairperson, Wikimedia Israel +972-(0)-54-5878078 | http://www.wikimedia.org.il Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment!

On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 4:22 AM, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

Hi folks,

Now that the dust has settled a bit, I would like to expand on an idea that’s been touched on a few times (most recently, in an editorial by William Beutler [1]): the notion that WMF might be a more effective organization if it limited its own size in favor of focused spin-off organizations and affiliates.

I was very much part of building the current WMF in terms of both size and structure, but I also think recent events underscore the fragility of the current model. WMF is still tiny compared with other tech companies that operate popular websites, but it’s a vast organization by Wikimedia movement standards. With nearly 300 staff [2] (beyond even our ambitious 2015 strategic plan staffing numbers), it dwarfs any other movement org.

I can see three potential benefits from a more federated model:

1. Resilience. If any one organization experiences a crisis, other

independent organizations suffer to a lesser degree than departments within that organization.

2. Focus. Wikimedia’s mission is very broad, and an organization with

a clearly defined mandate is less likely to be pulled in many different directions -- at every level.

3. Accountability. Within a less centralized federation, it is easier

to ensure that funding flows to those who do work the movement wants them to do.

My experience is that growth tends to be self-reinforcing in budgetary processes if there are now clear ceilings established. I think that’s true in almost any organization. There’s always lots of work to do, and new teams will discover new gaps and areas into which they would like to expand. Hence, I would argue for the following:

a) To establish 150 as the provisional ceiling for Wikimedia movement organizations. This is Dunbar’s number, and it has been used (sometimes intentionally, sometimes organically) as a limiting number for religious groups, military companies, corporate divisions, tax offices, and other human endeavors. [3][4] This is very specifically because it makes organizational units more manageable and understandable for those who work there.

b) To slowly, gradually identify parts of the WMF which would benefit from being spun off into independent organizations, and to launch such spin-offs, narrowing WMF's focus in the process.

c) To aim to more clearly separate funding and evaluation responsibilities from programmatic work within the movement -- whether that work is keeping websites running, building software, or doing GLAM work.

Note that I'm not proposing a quick splintering, but rather a slow and gradual process with lots of opportunity to course-correct.

More on these points below.

== Potential test case: MediaWiki Foundation ==

A "MediaWiki Foundation" [5] has been proposed a few times and I suspect continues to have some currency within WMF. This org would not be focused on all WMF-related development work, but specifically on MediaWiki as software that has value to third parties. Its mission could include hosting services as earned income (and potentially as an extension of the Wikimedia movement’s mission).

MediaWiki is used today by numerous nonprofit and educational projects that are aligned even with a narrow view on Wikimedia’s mission. Examples include Appropedia, OpenWetWare, WikiEducator, W3C’s WebPlatform, Hesperian Health Guides, and too many notable open source projects to list.

Among commercial users, it has lost much ground to other software like Confluence, but it remains, in my view, the most viable platform for large, open, collaborative communities. Yet it’s a poorly supported option: many of the above wikis are outdated, and maintaining a MediaWiki install is generally more work than it needs to be.

Building a healthy third party ecosystem will have obvious benefits for the world, and for existing Wikimedia work as well. It may also create a proving ground for experimental technology.

Which work that WMF is currently doing would be part of an MWF’s mandate? I don’t know; I could imagine that it could include aspects like Vagrant, or even shared responsibility for MediaWiki core and MW’s architecture.

== The Wiki Education Foundation precedent ==

It’s worth noting that this spin-off model has been tried once before. The Wiki Education Foundation is an example of an organization that was created by volunteers doing work in this programmatic space in partnership with staff of the Education Program at WMF, who left to join the new org. It is now financially independent, building its own relationships with funders that WMF has never worked with, and achieving impact at unprecedented scale.

LiAnna Davis, who is today the Director of Program Support at Wiki Ed, wrote a detailed response to William’s blog post, which I think is worth quoting in full [1]:

----begin quote---- I worked for the WMF for nearly four years and have worked for the spun-off Wiki Education Foundation for the last two, and I strongly support the idea of spinning off more parts of WMF into independent nonprofits like ours.

As you noted, Wiki Ed is a test case for your proposal, so for readers who don’t know our history: We started in 2010 as a pilot program (called the Public Policy Initiative) within WMF, funded by a restricted grant, to support university professors in the U.S. who wanted to assign their students to edit Wikipedia as a class assignment. The pilot showed the idea was successful, and so we started piloting it in countries as part of the Catalyst project (Arab World, Brazil, and India).

The U.S. program had lingered at WMF without any real organizational support because the U.S. wasn’t a target region. WMF leadership saw its potential, however, and formed a volunteer Working Group of Wikipedians and academics who created the structure of the organization that became the Wiki Education Foundation in 2013. WMF gave us a small start-up grant to get us going, and provided fiscal sponsorship for us until our 501(c)3 status came through (and we could fundraise on our own).

Today, we’re an independent organization, not funded by WMF, and we’ve scaled the impact of our programs incredibly. We’re supporting three times as many students, we’ve developed our own technology to support our programmatic work, and our students are busy addressing content gaps in academic areas on Wikipedia.

So why are we so successful? There are a lot of factors, but there’s one I want to highlight here, because I think it’s a clear difference between when we were at WMF and our current work at Wiki Ed. We have one, very clear mission: We create mutually beneficial ties between Wikipedia and academia in the U.S. and Canada.

The WMF mission is inspiring — but it’s really broad, just like our movement is. When we were doing this same project at WMF, I’d struggle to just focus on the Education Program and ignore the rest of the mission. Whenever I interacted with people outside the foundation (and I did so a lot), people would come to me with ideas to further WMF’s mission that weren’t in my program’s boundaries. I’d spend time trying to help, because I believed in the mission and wanted to help it along. I’m not the only one: I would see this idealism and commitment to the mission repeatedly among my colleagues at WMF. I still see it from the current WMF staff. They’re all there because they believe in the mission. They want to help, and it’s really hard to not try to help with everything, because you can see so many different facets of helping that mission.

Essentially, with a mission as broad as WMF’s, it’s hard for staff to keep a narrow focus. *Everything* can seem mission-related. When your mission is as narrow as Wiki Ed’s, it’s easier to find your focus and keep your attention on developing one area well. This is a key strength of independent organizations — independent, narrower missions keep staff focused and more productive on achieving their small part of the overall Wikimedia mission.

I strongly support more discussion about spinning off other parts of WMF into independent organizations. ----end quote----

== A "Movement Association"? ==

A more radical suggestion would be to spin off work on grantmaking and evaluation. This isn’t trivial -- there are legitimate arguments to keep this work close to other community-facing work WMF is doing. But there are undeniable benefits in greater separation.

When it comes to large annual plan grants, much has been done to ensure that the FDC can operate as an independent body and evaluate each plan on its merits. Ultimately, however, the decision rests with the WMF, which has a much better understanding of its own programs (through the direct relationship with its ED) than of those of affiliates.

Similarly, while WMF has done a fair bit to provide self-service evaluation tools to the movement at large, it’s not clear that its work is always held to the same standard as everyone else’s. A WMF grantee must very publicly report results and success metrics; WMF attempts to do so as a matter of course, but it is not accountable to another organization for failing to do so.

Finally, as was discussed here a lot in recent weeks, WMF itself has no clear accountability to the movement. The Board elections are advisory in nature. There is no membership. Non-elected seats are filled by the Board with little visibility. There is a semi-permanent "Founder’s Seat".

If grantmaking and evaluation responsibilities were increasingly shifted to a "Wikimedia Movement Association", this could gradually allow for true accountability to the movement in the form of membership and democratic, movement-wide decisions to make funding allocations on the basis of evaluation reports (through committees or otherwise).

This may also make the endowment a more compelling proposition than it is today. Yes, keeping Wikimedia’s sites operational indefinitely is a very worthwhile goal. But what if the endowment ultimately also helped to support global, federated work towards Wikimedia’s vision? What if all affiliates -- indeed the whole movement -- were excited and motivated to help grow it?

== Where to go from here? ==

There are lots of open questions in all of this. Should all site-wide fundraising remain inside WMF, for example, with funds being transferred to a movement entity? What’s the dividing line between "development for third parties" (MWF) and "development for Wikimedia" (WMF)? How would staff transition to new organizations? Where should those organizations be based? Should they be distributed, have offices?

An important thing to remember here (a lesson I’ve had to learn painfully) is that big changes are best made in small steps, with room for trial and error.

Implementing this strategy is, I think, a matter of first committing to it as an idea, and then creating coherent proposals for each step, publicly with broad input. First, if there is support for the general idea, I would recommend kicking it around: Are these the right kinds of spin-offs? What are the risks and how should existing affiliates be involved in the process? And so on.

The fact that WMF has just experienced a major organizational crisis should not itself fill us with pessimism and despair. But we also shouldn’t ignore it. We must learn from it and do what reason tells us -- and in my view that is to build a more resilient _federation_ of organizations than what we have today.

Warmly,

Erik

== Notes ==

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-03-09/Op-ed

[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Template:STAFF-COUNT

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

[4] http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-01-10/the-dunbar-number-from-the-g...

[5] Our branding is confusing beyond repair. I don't think there's an easy fix here, and we should just embrace our nutty nomenclature (Wikimedia/MediaWiki/Wikipedia) at this point.

---

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On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 3:22 AM, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote: <cut>

the notion that WMF might be a more effective organization if it limited its own size in favor of focused spin-off organizations and affiliates.

<cut>

I can see three potential benefits from a more federated model:

1. Resilience. If any one organization experiences a crisis, other

independent organizations suffer to a lesser degree than departments within that organization.

2. Focus. Wikimedia’s mission is very broad, and an organization with

a clearly defined mandate is less likely to be pulled in many different directions -- at every level.

3. Accountability. Within a less centralized federation, it is easier

to ensure that funding flows to those who do work the movement wants them to do.

My experience is that growth tends to be self-reinforcing in budgetary processes if there are now clear ceilings established. I think that’s true in almost any organization. There’s always lots of work to do, and new teams will discover new gaps and areas into which they would like to expand. Hence, I would argue for the following:

a) To establish 150 as the provisional ceiling for Wikimedia movement organizations. This is Dunbar’s number, and it has been used (sometimes intentionally, sometimes organically) as a limiting number for religious groups, military companies, corporate divisions, tax offices, and other human endeavors. [3][4] This is very specifically because it makes organizational units more manageable and understandable for those who work there.

b) To slowly, gradually identify parts of the WMF which would benefit from being spun off into independent organizations, and to launch such spin-offs, narrowing WMF's focus in the process.

c) To aim to more clearly separate funding and evaluation responsibilities from programmatic work within the movement -- whether that work is keeping websites running, building software, or doing GLAM work.

<cut>

== Where to go from here? ==

There are lots of open questions in all of this. Should all site-wide fundraising remain inside WMF, for example, with funds being transferred to a movement entity? What’s the dividing line between "development for third parties" (MWF) and "development for Wikimedia" (WMF)? How would staff transition to new organizations? Where should those organizations be based? Should they be distributed, have offices?

An important thing to remember here (a lesson I’ve had to learn painfully) is that big changes are best made in small steps, with room for trial and error.

Implementing this strategy is, I think, a matter of first committing to it as an idea, and then creating coherent proposals for each step, publicly with broad input. First, if there is support for the general idea, I would recommend kicking it around: Are these the right kinds of spin-offs? What are the risks and how should existing affiliates be involved in the process? And so on.

that all sounds quite reasonable. also what erik writes about organisations is to be expected. at the end it all boils down to money. spending all money available and wanting more money never has been a problem. if there is dissent it was always about who has the say what the money is spent on, and where it is spent. i am convinced if we get the responsibilities right, the dissent will stop, and the output will be better.

sizing organizations and distributing responsibilities on a global scale seems to be a very difficult task, close to the soviet empire's task to plan its next 5 years. one could argue to resolve it via setting a financial targets, just as multinational companies do. two simple long term key performance indicators might already do the trick for the wikimedia movement: first "maximum 50% of the money is spent on persons whose life depend financially on the movement", which is employees, or long term contracting persons, organizations, foundations, enterprises. and second, "50% of the money stays in the country where it is donated." the rest will auto-organize, and auto-change. finding intelligent spending for the rest of the 50% should not be a too difficult task, there is sufficient universities and students around the world who would be happy to compete for this money. the success, means and outcome will change over time, in areas and ways nobody can predict today. the 50% are a made up number, a little bit influenced by public spending of 40% - 50% in many industrialized countries nowadays. it seems people accept such a ratio.

whatever the target is, getting acceptance is not simple. currently the WMF at the same time controls the domain and with it money inflow. at the same time WMF spends 90% of the total money, preferably to its own employees. "growth" is such a natural target, no matter in what area that WMF tries to even increase this percentage. from a WMF perspective it is not bad at all. unfortunately it causes eternal struggle, and damages the movements progress. without it wants to do so, the WMF violates its custodian obligations. to me the most natural split therefor seems to separate "domain ownership" (ownership, some legal protection, set key performance indicators, maybe operations/infrastructure, maybe fundraising), and the rest. leave all processes, budgets, affiliates untouched for a couple of years.

to come back to eriks first step, decide if a split makes sense: yes, i am for it. the challenge i personally hope is addressed: get continuously new persons, new ideas, new content, new software implementations into the movement, from all over the world. WMF will never win the competition for talent and ideas in silicon valley only against the likes of facebook or baby facebooks. so we need to go where others are not, and have a hard time to go. people will follow money, and ideals.

best, rupert

Hi!

On 03/17/2016 07:22 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:

I can see three potential benefits from a more federated model:

1. Resilience. If any one organization experiences a crisis, other

independent organizations suffer to a lesser degree than departments within that organization.

2. Focus. Wikimedia’s mission is very broad, and an organization with

a clearly defined mandate is less likely to be pulled in many different directions -- at every level.

3. Accountability. Within a less centralized federation, it is easier

to ensure that funding flows to those who do work the movement wants them to do.

I strongly agree with you.

== Where to go from here? ==

<snip>

An important thing to remember here (a lesson I’ve had to learn painfully) is that big changes are best made in small steps, with room for trial and error.

I also agree with this too. :) In my candidate statement[1] for the current board election, I outlined a vision where existing affiliates would do some of the technical work that the WMF currently does (or doesn't). Many of the existing affiliates already have legal infrastructure and staff in place, and would require less bootstrapping than an entirely new organization, which should make it easier to test and demonstrate that a federated model will work, and be an advantage to the movement. One downside would be that regional chapters may be less focused (benefit #2) compared to say, an organization specifically dedicated to non-WMF MediaWiki development (I don't like the term third-party).

The fact that WMF has just experienced a major organizational crisis should not itself fill us with pessimism and despair. But we also shouldn’t ignore it. We must learn from it and do what reason tells us -- and in my view that is to build a more resilient _federation_ of organizations than what we have today.

+1.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliate-selected_Board_seats/2016/Nominati...

-- Kunal Mehta / Legoktm