I have been working on collaborations with a couple of groups including ECGPedia (http://en.ecgpedia.org/) and TRIP Database ( http://www.tripdatabase.com/). Both are fairly well known sites and share our values. They are both interested in working with us in some manner. Is this something I could offer them? Right now ECGpedia is offer us 2000 ECG images and TRIP Database is looking at linking to our high quality medical content thus increasing our exposure.
So happy to see all the helpful responses!
So, it seems like I only have two mode of communication: "Verbose and clear" or "Brief but confusing". My email starting this thread was brief, let's try the other style.
Executive Summary:
The Wikimedia Movement is a really big deal that is exploding beyond the confines of WMF servers. As that happens, what do we want to call the movement that includes all the projects with our value set, regardless of their current hosting situation?
Right now, the de facto name is 'The Wikimedia Movement'. If we don't like that name, for trademark reasons or for aesthetic reasons, we need to speak up now or forever hold our peace.
Non-Summary:
Here's the whole train of thought that led to this thread:
1. Wikimedia is a movement.
We're a movement with identifiable values. This movement has become very, very successful.
2. The movement is older than the WMF
We're not the first people to realize knowledge is good. Our ancestors include proud figures like the public literacy movements, public education movements, the public library movement, the public university movement, some of the public broadcasting movement, the free software movement and far more than could be listed.
Our movement's 'basic value' of universal access to information has been saving the world for a long time. We ARE something very new and very exciting-- but we are also the heirs to a proud heritage of great world-changing accomplishments.
3. The movement is bigger than the WMF-hosted projects.
Our movement doesn't just stop when you leave wikimedia.org. Our movement and our influence extends far beyond the mere borders of our own offices and our own server farms.
In particular, there are now a large number of Mediawiki projects hosted on third-party ISPs. Often these third-party-hosted projects share our values, our userbase, even our software stack.
They are accomplishing our mission for us-- they are an unrecognized 'part' of our very own movement.
Everyone probably has their own favorite third-party-hosted projects-- for example, I'm really excited by how science is using the Mediawiki model. We could spend a lot of time talking about all the exciting new things that people are doing on third-party-hosted projects using the technology originally developed for WMF-hosted projects.
There are lots of projects online that share our values PERFECTLY. They do work we'd be proud to call our own. This number is already in the dozens, probably in the hundreds, and may soon be in the thousands.
3b. The Frontiers of Innovation
It's only been ten years, but "massive collaboration to create free information" is no longer a crazy idea-- it's now seen as one of the most successful authorial models ever discovered. Wikipedia won.
But while we've been busy conquering over the encyclopedia world, our "new project policy" has been, effectively: "If you have a new project idea, just go somewhere else and do it. When you're bigger and we're bigger, we'll reconsider things. "
For a while, people proposed new projects and argued over their merits, but we never signed off on them. At this point, new projects really don't even get discussed with us anymore.
New project creators haven't stopped creating amazing things, of course-- they've just stopped bothering to ask us for help, because they know we don't do new projects right now.
"Be Bold" stops at the edit level for us-- project organizers and extension developers have to go through a no-win battle of red tape if they want to get their talents utilized. So instead, they just go to third-party hosts. No red tape, no argument, freedom to innovate, perfect. But no ties to Wikimedia either.
Unfortunately for us, this means that much of the "exciting, cutting-edge innovation" isn't happening on WMF-hosted projects anymore. The most technologically advanced wikis are the ones that aren't hosted by committee.
The frontier of innovation are the small projects hosted by third-parties. Once a project has too many readers and too many vested contributors, it simple cannot be as agile. If you have to convince an executive to use a feature, you won't bother building it. If you only have to convince yourself, you start seeing features that are only a single night of coding bliss away from actual use.
A existing project already used by millions simply cannot "out-innovate" a brand new project that has nothing to lose by trying new things. We _need_ the brand new, 1-day-old projects to be "part of" our movement-- they get the new users, they're where the excitement is, and they're the ones most likely to find out something interesting and useful, something a million-reader-project COULD use.
4. The opportunity for new projects
Currently, third-party-hosted projects are seen as something completely and utterly separate from us. They are not seen as "part of" us. Nor are WMF-hosted projects and our third-party-hosted cousins seen as "part of" some larger movement. Instead, there's a arbitrary psychological disconnect between the two groups.
When a third-party-hosted project does something great, no one notices that it's really another part of our larger movement that's working to do something inspiring and world-changing.
It never even occurs to most readers that third-party-hosted projects are "part of" anything. They're just going to a website, and, maybe the website is "similar to" us in some vague cosmetic or technical way. But readers aren't noticing the web of ideological threads that connects all the free information projects.
It would be good to point out to all of us that these third-party-hosted projects are really 'part of' us, our movement at least.. They share our most basic values, our editor communities overlap, our missions overlap-- the difference is just who pays the bills for the hosting-- if you make us pay, you're part of the movement.
Right now, if a WM-like project can pay its own bills and host itself, it might not be considered "part" of the movement, regardless of how WM-like it is. This is a missed opportunity, akin to 'penalizing' projects that can pay their own way.
If we want new innovation and new projects and more active users, where should we look?
We start with the many WM-style projects that are already out there!
We start with the projects that are already succeeding and accomplishing our mission for us, without us even asking them to! Projects doing our job without us leading them and without our foundation having to give them any financial or technical support.
5. How do you identify Wikimedia Movement projects?
As wikis become cheap and more powerful, everyone starts to wants one. Ask a room of geeks for a show of hands of who has a personal Mediawiki install, and you'll see lots of hands. Mediawiki is on-track to become the Apache of the 2010s.
The vast majority of these 'projects' won't match our values, they won't even pretend to. But like needles hidden in the haystack, there will be tons of projects that do claim ideological affinity for our values and report an intellectual kinship to us. There will be even more projects that don't explicitly claim this affinity, but which admit to having it once asked. It's up to us to try to identify them all and make sure they get a 'connection' to the larger movement.
5b. Manual Identification isn't getting any easier
It's only 2011 and the task of identifying third-party-hosted projects that share our values is already quite daunting.
As Mediawiki become cheaper, faster, and more-standardized, the task of identifying third-party projects that share our values will become mindboggling-- akin to asking someone to "find me every website run by an Objectivist".
There was a time, in the early 90s, when you could still have manually listed "Websites Espousing Objectivism". For now, we can still manually list "Mediawikis that share Wikimedia's Values".
Now, It would be impossible to find every website that espouses Objectivism. There are just too many websites, there are just too many objectivists, there are just too many objectivists who run websites for the answer to be compiled. The list would be too long for any human to read, nor could any one human read all the languages included in the list.
This was unfathomable in the days before Apache's dominance, during a time paleotechnologists refer to as "The Gopher Age". So it's kinda unfathomable now that every human online might one day each have a dozens or hundreds Mediawikis, each infinitely customizable, each fully automated to share information with friends' Mediawikis, each capable of applications we've never even dreamt of.
But platform shifts have happened before, and it can happen again-- in fact, it will happen again. The dominance of Mediawiki as a platform is already happening, and indeed, its happening was, sorta, "the plan" all along.
If our movement unexpectedly fails and we don't become "something really really special", then I guess we could console ourselves with the knowledge that we can still manually count all the Mediawiki installs that legitimately share our values.
But let's plan for success. Let's plan that the current trends continue, that mediawiki DOES become the next big platform, and that our job is to make sure that ALL our movement rides out that paradigm shift intact, without getting lost in the crowd of sites that might share our software without sharing our values.
6. The Top-Down Approach for identifying the Wikimedia Movement
One approach to identify everybody is to just pick a trusted authority and let them identify who's who.
A central authority-- the foundation or its designates-- could try to formally identify which projects OFFICIALLY share our values. They can ask the community to generate nominations, they can perform investigations, they can hold public discussion, they can debate in private. They could hold a poll, they could schedule a global vote. A select committee could write a recommendation and vote on it, the staff could review the recommendations and write their own evaluations of the recommendations. The final affiliation could at last be certified by a vote of by the board at one of its regular meetings.
A top-down process will be time-consuming for all parties. The negative result of a top-down process would be either an explicit rejection or an indefinite maybe-- outcomes that would needlessly demoralizing a potential ally. The positive result of a top-down process would be a very formal, explicit endorsement from the very heart of our organization-- potentially very dangerous to us if we ever unwisely endorsed a bad-faith actor.
7. The Top-Down Approach is a bottleneck.
To give any kind of 'formal endorsement', we are going to have to do some pretty intense investigation.
We have to screen for bad faith actors, which is a huge deal already just at the edit level and the RFA level. We have to decide "how close" in ideology is "close enough". We have to "trust" the editorial judgement of the already-established project's admin and editor community. We have to assess the character of their organizational leadership, make sure they're not fraudulent or criminal.
Projects will have to undergo a lot of scrutiny to become "Formal WMF affiliates". They will have to be well-established already, and they will have to convince a group of WMF appointees that they should be endorsed.
This top down process means we'll have to reject many, many potentially good-faith projects, simply because they're too new or perhaps a little too different, or perhaps not tied to a trustworthy organization.
A top-down approach means we will, of necessity, turn away most good-faith projects that say they want to be "part of" us. If the foundation is deciding, we'll have no choice-- to endorse a brand new, wholly-unknown entity would not be prudent.
8. The Top-Down Approach, operating by itself, will exclude the bulk of the Wikimedia Movement
Top-down doesn't scale, and thus it will be unable, by itself, to fully identify the entire diversity of the movement.
The best evidence of this fact is the status quo. Right now, the top-down approach does not even exist. Thus, we are, in effect, currently excluding absolutely all third-party-hosted projects from our movement, regardless of their success or values. This has been the status quo for our existence.
We have had about ten years, but our central authority hasn't developed such a method yet. That isn't their fault-- it's just the nature of central-authorities-- there's only one of them, so they tend to be quite busy with more pressing matters.
Board members, foundation, its staff, and its designates-- they're all one-of-a-kind-- so they don't scale. They can't reasonably spend time evaluating a project unless there's a clear pragmatic reason to do so-- these people are busy, few, and they are mindful and considerate of the fact that they're working on the donor's dime.
They can evaluate a few dozen potential affiliates, not hundreds or thousands. And that's how many mediawikis are coming.
Even if we WANTED to have a very liberal and a very expansive view of the movement, a top down approach still couldn't identify the full scope of movement, with all its unique parts, large and small. We're too big, and we're getting bigger all the time.
Wikipedia was a spark that set alight to the whole planet , and the Wikimedia Movement is spreading across borders of language and nation.
No central group of people could identify it all. Right now, a central group wouldn't have time to intelligently investigate the trustworthiness of all our potential allies. I think soon, a central group won't have the time to even speak aloud the names of all our potential allies, not that any one group of people could pronounce all those names.
There are six billion+ people out there, and it looks like the huge bulk of them are going to be getting internet technology in the foreseeable future.
In the time it takes to formally investigate just one "potential formal ally" to see if they're trustworthy and share our values, how many new projects are being created that also share our basic values but are too small or too independent to merit a top-down evaluation?
When that number is >1, then top-down approach alone can never keep up.
9. The top-down method has its place, but not for "Informal Alliances"
When we want to share resources in a big way, we do, in fact, need a top-down method to make a considered opinion. If we want to share foundation money, we definitely need foundation approval. If we want to provide large-scale developer efforts or large-scale hosting or some other significant resource-expenditure from the foundation, then we absolutely do need the 'responsible parties' to evaluate that choice.
But "informal alliance" just isn't such a case. These projects don't want our money, they don't want our hosting, they don't want anything from us.
Rather, it is we who want THEM to recognize their kinship with us. We want THEM to help promote our values and contribute to our projects. We want permission from THEM to include their work as 'part of our efforts', even though WMF itself had no hand in their work.
10. Sketching a bottom-up method for identifying the movement.
If the top-down approach isn't perfect for "informal alliance", what would a bottom-up approach look like?
To me, the very first step of a bottom up approach would be the third-party-projects themselves just stepping forward and saying "We think we're part of the Wikimedia Movement, we think we share it's values!".
Call this arrangement "Self-Identified Alliance". Consider it seriously.
"Self-identified alliance" is the easiest, most efficient, and least-risky way for us to start identifying the entirety of the Wikimedia movement.
Under this scheme, our foundation and community don't have to do any evaluations at all, but nor do we have to take any risks. Similarly, under "self-identified alliance", third party projects wouldn't have to risk rejection in order to express common membership with us.
No red-tape, no official ties, just the overlapping community saying "We share The Wikimedia Movement's values, let's put the badge for that in our site's footer".
Pretty boring and non-controversial at this at this stage, really. Except for the precise choice of movement name, "Self-identified Alliance" s simple, easy, and devoid of conflict.
A culture of "Self-identified alliance" would get us a LOT of positives. Suddenly Wikimedia isn't just 'the foundation that hosts Wikipedia', suddenly and visibly it's a global movement. Insiders already know this, of course, but the sooner the rest of the world knows it, the better.
For most third-party-projects, self-identified alliance is really all that needs to happen. MOST don't need any resources, most don't need a top-down evaluation.
They just should be able to acknowledge, in some simple ways, that they're "part of" the Wikimedia Movement. Alternatively, we could say they are "part of" an unnamed movement which is larger than the Wikimedia Movement, something that the Wikimedia Movement is but a small part of. Whatever terms and brands are used, those ideological ties across projects need to be built.
11. The benefits of alliance are great
Once a project is "part of" us in some way, we get to 'brag' about them like doting grandparents-- when they succeed, their successes are our successes. When they fail, well, everyone has to find their own path in life.
Most of all-- if a third-party-project does something mindblowingly amazing that the whole world talks about, let's make sure we can actually include that accomplishment when we talk to our donors about why it's important they support our movement.
If Proteopedia does something amazing right now, when it's "not part of us", people might say "Wikimedia is losing it-- the cutting edge stuff isn't happening at Wikimedia, they missed the boat, they're yesterday's news.
But if Proteopedia is "part of us" and does something amazing, then people will say "Wow! Wikimedia is breaking out of its old shell and expanding into exciting new fields and new hosting arrangements".
To those of us on the inside, it's not a competition-- if a third party project with our values does something great with our technology, that's a credit to us all, and one less thing we have to do using foundation funds.
Self-identified alliance will help the readers in the rest of the world understand that we see things that way. When Proteopedia scores, our whole team gets a point, regardless of who physically hosted the project.
12. A community-based approach for identification
Eventually the community could develop some method for identifying those projects that should be allies. Some community process could recognize "self-identified members" as "mutually-identified members"-- where both communities recognize the shared values. This could be used for moderate collaboration across projects, like access to share user logins, shared user space, shared templates, interwiki linking, etc.
Whatever a "community-designated alliance" would entail, the main point is that it wouldn't have to involve that same full endorsement from our foundation of a top-down approach-- the kind of endorsement that might be embarrassing if a promising project turns out to be untrustworthy. Community-identified alliances would be free to make mistakes-- they wouldn't be the full for-life weddings of top-down formal affiliation. A community-based alliance could be limited, pragmatic collaborations-- simple things designed just to avoid unnecessary duplication of work, avoid username collisions, avoid template forking, etc.
And of course-- both the "self-identified alliance" process and "community-designated alliance" processes would be great "feeders" for the "top-down process". if we do want heavy-duty resource sharing, the earlier alliances and discussions will help us making the best possible decision.
13. A Future of Status Quo
Suppose we don't make any new alliances at all. A few top-down board approved new projects, but that's it. What happens to us?
New third-party-hosted projects will continue to grow, but they won't have a connection to us. Projects that share our values but not our hosting will notice each other. They will also notice how beneficial cross-project collaboration is, as we've already noticed with Commons and interwiki linking. They will also notice the benefits of cross-project alliances, just as we now are.
They will start forming alliances and partnerships with each other that don't necessarily include us.
If enough time passed, they would form their own organizations and pick a name to express their common value set-- a name that means, essentially "Wikimedia Movement values but without any common hosting or common authority"
If enough time passes without us giving these third-party projects a collective name, it's inevitable some name for them will emerge. If we're lucky, the name will recognize a kinship to us or otherwise be connected to our existing organizations. That would be a good thing.
If we're unlucky, the name might ignore us all together, viewing WMF as a dinosaur too big and too old to evolve. This would be bad.
If we're really unlucky, the third-party projects might actually 'define themselves' in opposition to us-- the collection of projects that are like WMF-projects but DIFFERENT and BETTER in some important way. This would be very bad, especially if it were true.
14. Wikimedia is a movement.... but with a trademarked name.
So you start with self-identification. The straightforward approach in a normal movement would be just to tell people: If you think you're part of us, just say "Part of the Wikimedia Movement".
Normally, that's all there is to it. No one asks permission from a non-profit corporation to be part of the Free Speech Movement or the Civil Rights Movement or a Christian Movement or a Buddhism Movement-- instead, they just stand up and say "I'm part of the X movement".
But "Wikimedia" is a trademark owned by the foundation. Historically it's been used only for the foundation-hosted projects. And indeed, there are good reasons we might want to preserve the limited use of that mark and not encourage its use for self-identified alliance.
But in the same breath, let me add, for anyone who still thinks we don't need a name for self-identified alliance-- trademark law is very, very weak. If most of the third-party projects all started using the current de facto movement name, aka "The Wikimedia Movement", we COULD NOT, in practice, stop them from doing that.
Sure, the trademark laws would be on our side, but we can't realistically sue an allied movement that shares our values and userbase once it picks its name. Bigger entities than us, with far stronger profit motives than we have, have tried far harder than we are willing to-- in order to sue a genie back into its bottle. It doesn't work for them, and they're rich and ruthless. We're poor and bleeding-hearty-- it definitely wouldn't work for us.
Trademark law can stop one or two bad-faith troublemakers, certainly. If a large group of good-faith projects that shared our values just started self-identifying themselves as "part of the Wikimedia Movement" in some way, in practice we'd be absolutely helpless to force the to stop-- the most we could do is ask nicely for them to stop, and even that might not work, depending on how much time has passed in this imaginary scenario.
So, if we don't want these third-party projects to call themselves "Part of the Wikimedia Movement", we need to think up a better name for them to use.
Left to their own devices, they'll pick a name, and there's nothing stopping them from picking "Wikimedia Movement" if they wanted to, except perhaps for our sincere request for them not to use that name in that way.
15. "The ______ Movement" -- the movement any project can claim to join.
So, if we don't want to use Wikimedia Movement as a name, then what would be better?
We want a name anyone can use with no prior approval. Regrettably, this means we also want a name that bad-faith actors can use, even though we will frown on it and deny the validity of such use.
We want a name that represents "membership", not mere "opinion". "We like Wikimedia" is not enough-- we really need investiture and identification.
16. While we're on the subject, about the name "Wikimedia"....
As an aside, Wikimedia is a really lousy movement name anyway-- it that gives us nothing new. Most people in the wider world STILL don't know it. The word "Wikimedia" tells us almost nothing about our values. It was a fine 2003 non-profit-corporation name, but it's not an inspiring or informative movement name.
There's plenty of room for improvement if we do indeed want to reserve the historical usage of Wikimedia for just WMF-hosted projects. Just know that the wider movement name is going to be the popular one-- if we pick a movement name other than Wikimedia, eventually we'll probably want to change the foundation name to match it once that new name achieves recognition.
So, this really is the kind of question that comes in 16 chapters and needs to be considered by our finest minds. It's fundamentally a branding question-- the identities of the allies will work themselves out on their own without our help. But do we want their brand to include us? Do we want to include them in our brand? Do we want to make a new brand that includes us both?
This question might wind up being unimportant in some futures where mediawiki doesn't become dominant. But in the most likely scenario, the one that was planned for and appears to be playing out right now, this question is extremely critical. We could be picking the name of our entire movement when we pick a name to give to third-party-hosted projects with our values. Under some scenarios, future people might not know the name "Wikimedia" but they will know this new name movement name. (if, indeed, we pick a different name)
17. Coda-- The new challenges of a Movement
"Wikimedia is a Movement" may be the most brilliant and enlightening phrase I've ever heard about our projects.
It's hard to imagine that there was a time, very recently really, when I had never thought of it in precisely that way. Yet as soon as I read "Wikimedia is a Movement", I instantly recognized it was true, and indeed, it had always been true.
Just as we have to think about article-level issues and project-level issues and foundation-level issues, now we have grown to the point that we really have to think about movement-level issues.
Right now, the main problem at the movement-level is that we're arbitrarily excluding third-party-hosted projects for no particular reason-- we just haven't figured out how to include them yet.
But in general, this insight-- that we're a movement, this brings up a whole new paradigm of thinking about things.
For example, we want to avoid movement schisms, where half the movement somehow feels no allegiance to the other half. We want to avoid movement dilution, where as the movement spreads, new parts no longer feel any tie to the epicenter of the movement.
Right now, projects still number in the hundreds, not hundreds of thousands. Self identification + bottom up + top down ought to get it all if we act now.
But what we want to avoid is sort of what happened to the Christianity movement-- common groups with common values and a common history nevertheless became split apart, forming into a thousand little denominations that recognize no central authority, with no universally-recognized "original denomination" and no inherent organizational ties to each other, just the shared memory of a distant common founding.
That model may have been a good fit for a religious movement, but it's not a good plan for us. We do want to diversify and expand at insane rates, but we want to keep our shared connections intact during this expansion.
The very first step to keeping a movement coherent is to recognize either a central authority or a central creed. Then, everyone in the movement can agree on something. More importantly, every the movement can know everyone agrees on something. And, best of all, everyone in the movement can know what that something is that they all agree on. Most importantly, they can all know they all agree on that they are all part of the same bigger something-- the movement.
My working proposal for the "unifying doctrine", the 'creed' of our movement, is not particularly original nor particularly inspired:
"We believe in the same values as the WMF-hosted projects"
That's all. It's very rough and it says almost nothing.
But the tiny something that it does say is very, very important to get said-- we and the third party hosted projects that share our values ARE connected, we are 'part of the same thing' and together we are 'part of something larger'.
"Just because your hosting isn't with us doesn't mean your project isn't with us."
(If anyone wants, we could create an organizationally-neutral 'creed'-- something that referenced only values, not our specific organization by name. But there's no need for that-- the movement is 9 years past creation, not 900 years-- everyone knows we're the original epicenter and we're very non-controversial. )
The third-party-hosted projects didn't pick their hosts out of any anti-WMF sentiment. They didn't "schism" as a statement of 'apostasy' or anything ridiculous like that. The third-party-hosted projects love us as much as the WMF-hosted projects do. They just didn't need to wade through our red tape to get funding or hosting, so they didn't.
For most such projects, all they need to rejoin the rest of the movement is permission to say "I'm part of the movement!". Let's make sure we give it to them, before they grow in number to the point that they start forming their own organizations and their own movements to meet their own needs, leaving us as the ones 'outside' the mainstream body of movement.
No need to panic, we're still a looong way away from anything like that being possible... But internet life moves pretty fast, and summers only come once a year.
If you had front row seats for the rise of Apache and the dominance of the web, go look at look at Mediawiki development right now, and you'll get a real sense of deja vu. What the developers are building right now isn't meant to host a half dozen project-types for WMF, it's poised to become THE next platform for serious non-commercial knowledge-sharing.
The future of our movement is that most of our projects will not have any need for our direct funding or our direct hosting. But they will need community and leadership-- and we happen to have a great community and some amazing leaders.
In the very near future, wikihosting will be free or so-close-to-free that nobody notices the difference. Free hosts can provide everything we do technologically, but they can't provide a guiding vision or a unifying dream.
Thus far in our history, the 'unifying force' has been gravitational-- the sheer mass of a successful Wiki makes it hard to escape. The amount of resources required to host a successful project initially meant few groups tried to start new projects, and the new projects had to be rather small. The resource drag of a Mediawiki meant that you couldn't just take a huge section of our content and successfully move it elsewhere-- the weight was too great, the engines for change were still too weak.
That time is ending. We can no longer count on our own mass to hold the movement together. Successful third-party-hosted projects are successfully "blasting off" from our movement, and they are successfully 'escaping' our gravity.
Going forward, we need a stronger glue to hold us together. "We'll give you free hosting" isn't an incentive anymore-- much of our movement won't need free hosting, and indeed, many will welcome the perception of editorial independence that third-party-hosts provide. As these projects form, we must not let them slip away from core of our movement through our carelessness-- if projects truly want to leave, let them. Most don't.
The Wikimedia Foundation's greatest asset is that it sits at the epicenter of the Wikimedia Movement.
If we arbitrarily define-away third-party-hosted projects from being part of us, the center of our own movement will shift away from us, and one day we will find that WMF is not longer the hub at the center of our own movement, but a dinosaur on the periphery.
The next wave of innovation is coming and it is likely to first hit the projects we do not host. When the bright start that is a hird-party-hosted project explodes and becomes visible to the world, the wider world should see entire constellation of the Wikimedia Movement at work, not just a single, random, isolated bright star going nova.
Alec
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org