Thanks for this - very interesting :-) For me, the most reassuring part is at the end. (It feels a bit odd highlighting this, given the amount of cool stuff in the report, but I suppose it's cool stuff I already knew about). I am very glad to hear that these issues are on peoples' minds and I think identifying them is a really helpful step

Everybody at all levels of the WMF needs to stop spending social & political capital accidentally, or on stuff that doesn't matter;

● We need to stop surprising the community: we need to acknowledge that time works differently for volunteers, and they need lots of advance notice for everything. Overtransparency has never harmed us, but lack of transparency has;

● Internally in the organization we need to shift from the assumption that our scarcest resource is money, to the acknowledgement that it's time. We need to get better at conserving energy, focusing and saying no;

From: liamwyatt(a)gmail.com Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2012 09:57:27 +0000 To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation Mid-Year Presentation to the Board of Trustees On 3 March 2012 10:34, Chris Keating <chriskeatingwiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: I too agree that this was a very interesting reading. Much of it I knew from being an avid reader of the Signpost but it's very good to be able to see an overview like this. I appreciate the honest about the failure of the Indian Education Program (slide 37) and learned a lot from the Technology section (slides 9-22). I, like Chris, found the three points on slide 56 (quoted above) under the heading "stop doing this" to be very enlightening. There are also some related points on the subsequent slides (under the leading "start doing this") that are also related, which include: ●Assign other resources to explicitly earning social & political capital for the org, so it can be spent on editor retention; ●Actively monitor the bank balance (social & political capital); ●Assess community views and factor them into the total cost of projects before green-lighting. In some cases, community opposition will be a dealbreaker; ●Develop easy routinized methods for assessing community sentiment (RfCs, polls) in multiple languages, and routinely dedicate resources to community input-seeking and facilitation of discussions (TOU, AFT); ●Better support editors along language lines and activity lines (e.g., page patrollers, ArbComs, OTRS workers): find out what they need and give it to them; In all the focus on reversing the downward trend of new-user retention (which I wholeheartedly agree with, don't misunderstand me), I've been feeling a bit like the WMF has seen the existing community as "the problem" rather than part of "the solution". I think that these points that Chris and I have quoted are pertinent because they seem to be aimed at trying to reverse that feeling. They argue for the WMF to dedicate resources specifically to support the existing community, to make their work easier, and to take the time to bring the community along with changes rather than announcing 'surprises'. But most of all, I'm interested in the repeated phrase "social and political capital". If I read the text cynically that phrase could look manipulative, but I don't believe that to be the case. Rather, I'm pleased to see that the WMF is overtly addressing the fact that *trust* is the most valuable form of currency in a volunteer project - and that Chapter-WMF-Community trust levels have been less than ideal lately... So - I look forward to seeing this proactive effort to build "social and political capital" with the existing community put into practice :-) After all, there's no point in increasing the number of new users if the existing community is so frustrated that they're unwilling to train and acclimatise the newbies. However, on a different note, I note with interest (though not surprise) that it seems the exec have decided that the recent fundraising debates between Chapters-WMF have already been concluded and that the decision for the WMF to centrally manage all future fundraising is now a *fait accompli*: - From slide 28 "Collaborated more closely with *remaining* payment processing chapters to improve their donors' experience" and "Improved experience for donors in several countries where chapters processed payments last year". - From slide 40 "*Reposition* the grants process as a core funds dissemination mechanism for the movement with strong community ownership and tight accountability" [*my emphasis*] Finally, a question. Slide 31 says that in the future the WMF will run "Worldwide convenings of highly active contributors in mature Wikipedias". I know the noun "a convention" and I know the verb "to convene" but I don't recognise the noun "a convening". What is it? Is it the same as "a conference"? -Liam wittylama.com/blog peace, love & metadata _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l