Update on the Wikimedia Foundation’s planning process - Wikimedia-l

16 Mar 2019

Greetings! I'm excited to be the new Chief Operating Officer at the
Wikimedia Foundation and look forward to meeting many of you as I grow in
this role. Until then, feel free to reach out to me at janeen(a)wikimedia.org.

I've been busy supporting the Medium Term Planning team and wanted to send
an update on our process.

The Wikimedia Foundation is currently engaged in the process of creating a
medium-term plan that will support our 2030 Strategic Direction. This plan
is a representation of how we will lead, build, design and serve the global
world and provide access to free knowledge.

In the process, we are setting up the Foundation to be more nimble so we
can adapt to recommendations coming out of movement strategy. In the past,
we have typically planned one year at a time. This new process that we are
using will allow us to plan for longer-term goals aligned to knowledge
equity and knowledge as a service.

For the next three to five years, the Wikimedia Foundation will focus on
these two goals that will support our strategic direction to become the
infrastructure of free knowledge:

   -

   Grow participation globally, focusing on emerging markets
   -

      Grow the use of Wikipedia and Wikimedia across the globe. Focus on
      increasing Wikipedia use in low-awareness or low-use geographies and
      languages, in order to bring Wikipedia’s use in line with rates
of overall
      internet usage.
      -

   Modernize our product experience
   -

      Make contributor and reader experiences useful and joyful. Move from
      viewing Wikipedia as solely a website, to viewing the Wikimedia ecosystem
      as a collection of knowledge, information, and insights with infinite
      possible product experiences and applications.

To create our medium-term plan, we have been conducting a collaborative
process to gather ideas and input from across the Foundation to help us
narrow in on a set of key priorities and outcomes that we need to
accomplish to achieve our two goals.

The medium-term plan is intended to stay at the strategic level so that it
describes what we want to accomplish, without going into great detail about
how we are going to accomplish it.  This level of focus will allow us to be
clear about what the Foundation will achieve in the next several years,
while giving ourselves the flexibility to adapt to recommendations from the
Movement Strategy process, take advantage of emergent opportunities, and
experiment with tactics and strategies.

We will soon be finishing a draft of the medium-term plan to present to the
Board of Trustees at their next meeting on March 28th, 2019. After we share
the plan with the board, we will be requesting feedback from you and from
all parts of the community from April 7-20th. We are looking for your
feedback on whether the outcomes we hope to achieve over the next 3 to 5
years are appropriate given the goals of the overall Wikimedia Movement and
our strategic direction. We want to know: are these the right “big things”
to accomplish in the next 3-5 years?  We would also like feedback on
whether our overall metrics are appropriate and aspirational enough given
our ambitious vision. Are we setting the right targets for how we will
measure our progress?

After we receive all comments and feedback, we will make a final round of
updates to the our Medium-term plan before publishing it again back on meta
at the end of May.  In subsequent years, we intend to update the plan on an
annual basis to adapt to new information, changes in our environment, and
the things we learn along the way.

We hope that you all will provide your insight and thoughts to help the
Foundation build this plan and continue to make progress toward our
strategic direction.

Thank you,

Janeen Uzzell

Timeline:

   -

   March 28 - We will share the draft plan with the Foundation’s Board of
   Trustees
   -

   April 6 - Plan published on Meta Wiki
   -

   April 6-20 - Community review and comment period
   -

   April 21-May 10 - Revise plan as needed based on community comments
   -

   May 31 - Publish revised plan on Meta