Nathan wrote:
... judging by the replies (and lack thereof) to your posts... there is very little, if any, support
That is not a fair assessment. The strategic goals primarily involving new rights to add more content, formulated when the editor base was growing exponentially, are not the most appropriate strategic goals for an editor and administrator base which is slowly declining on the largest projects, and nobody has been saying otherwise in the slightest. There are widespread expressions that the Foundation could be doing a lot more to support volunteers. There have been 64 respondents from about nine people on three continents to http://www.allourideas.org/wmfcsdraft in less than a month, and the resulting ranking is still a good mix of old and new goals.
... for most of your demands.
None of the items on the draft proposal list are demands. I am trying to nurture a discussion of strategic goals. Others have taken issue with less than a handful of the items on the list, but to them I say: why not survey the volunteers as below and find out which ones they think are the most important to them?
On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 8:46 PM, James Salsman <jsalsman at gmail.com> wrote:
Regarding https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2014-01-31#Strategy_discussion
"The Board discussed how they will develop the process for the next strategic plan. The Board would like the strategic planning process to involve input from the community, but the exact process should be flexible. Sue advised that the Board should design the process with the next Executive Director. The Board reflected on the process for designing the previous strategic plan, and questions, such as movement roles, which should be addressed in the next plan. The Board agreed that the next strategic plan need not be a five-year plan in the model of the previous strategic plan, but agreed to settle on the plan's form with the next Executive Director."
- Does anyone contend that the general strategic goals created when
the volunteer corps was apparently growing exponentially are no longer appropriate?
- Is it appropriate to augment current strategic goals which would
allow including more content with goals designed to result in more volunteer time for existing and potential volunteers?
- Do the proposed policy additions listed at
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/advocacy_advisors/2014-February/000395.... cover a sufficient extent of such potential goals for additional volunteer time?
- Is the fact that I proposed such a list the reason that I am now
unable to post to the advocacy_advisors list? If not, what is that reason?
- Is there a more appropriate way to involve the community in making
decisions about the Foundation's general strategic goals than offering pairwise comparisons between random selections from a combined list to active community members to produce a ranking for the ED and Board to work from?
- When creating such a ranking, should the preferences of volunteers
with many contributions be weighted more than those with fewer contributions? Can this question be resolved by producing both unweighted and weighted rankings for the ED and Board to discuss?
Sincerely, James Salsman
On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 3:02 AM, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
There have been 64 respondents from about nine people on three continents to http://www.allourideas.org/wmfcsdraft
I think it's important to point out that the survey you have created there is without context. That is, simply asking which of those things people support *in a vacuum* is not informative. It's also not the question at hand. What you intend to ask is which they would prefer *that the Wikimedia Foundation*, an organization chartered for a particular goal, adopt as action points.
Your survey is grossly misleading through the absence of context.
pb
*Philippe Beaudette * \ Director, Community Advocacy \ Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. T: 1-415-839-6885 x6643 | philippe@wikimedia.org | : @Philippewikihttps://twitter.com/Philippewiki
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