2013/8/24 Romaine Wiki romaine_wiki@yahoo.com

It is possible to have one location where everything is organized and arranged, but WMF is an international organisation to support the world wide Wikimedia movement. I think it would be good to have WMF deeper inside the world wide community, both digital and physical. I think it is healthy not to focus on one location, but to have an office more inside the Wikimedia movement, at least one on each (largely populated) continent.

For local communities WMF is far far far away, while localizing WMF would bring WMF and communities more together.

Romaine, I think a lot of people would agree with you, but I insist you to analyse the trial to create offices in India, Brazil and Middle East. This plan has changed and here is the very short explanation:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sue_Gardner/Narrowing_focus#We_plan_to_c....

I think a big mistake here was to try to make 3 offices, instead of focusing in one and make it really well. Don't forget that WMF is a small growing organization learning what to make with the lots of money it can make through a very successful crowdfunding model. So I strong believe we should focus on the learnings of these cases. But with the conservative nature of the (always) active volunteers, I think such trials generally will be condemned by the community as a whole, hence by those in charge of taking decisions. Hence don't expect too much innovation(*) with the actual state of the things.

Also this will depend a lot on who will be the next executive director. If you have a person with a better work experience on the global south, things can change. Otherwise it will continue in the spirit "hey, we are cool, global and a charity organization, let's make something for the poor".

If we divided WMF role in two aspects, a technological side and a community one, and if would make sense to have a community support not only through grants, maybe it could be a good idea to have this second office focused in the community in another physical place. But I think right the strategy of focusing now in the technology, otherwise the *site* Wikipedia can die if it doesn't follow the web development (which is really fast!), which we is clearly not happening.

We also have to be very clear on what we are thinking about a community. Wikimedia has a huge online community and a smaller involved in offline activities. Wikipedia is a site, and its strategies should focus on the online community, which is what keeps the site running. It doesn't make sense to spend so much resources (people and money) with very qualified professionals (sometimes with nothing to do with the offline community) from the Bay Area to go to far distance places to "support" the community. The cost-benefit is not justified for the goals the organization should achieve in the short time to survice, as learned recently.

(*) This was also noticed in the narrowing focus "It [the WMF] needs to reduce emphasis on experimentation and discovery, and increase emphasis on execution and delivery; it needs to restrict itself to its own core work rather than pinch-hitting for others, and it needs to shift from a focus on developing movement structures, to encouraging and supporting activities that directly advance the Wikimedia Foundation's mission."

And this non-innovative nature of the organization can only hopefully change depending on the profile of the next executive director. If it is a business minded person, it'll continue as it is. But there are other professional profiles which could change this scenario.

Tom