Hi everyone,

I'm delighted to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation's Annual Plan for FY18-19 is now on Meta[1]. 

This year, we have organized our efforts around three goals that focus on making critical improvements to our systems and structures to ensure that we’re better positioned for our coming work against the strategic direction[2]. The Foundation’s goals for this year should not only move us closer to knowledge equity and service, but will prepare us to execute against the 3- to 5-year strategic plan which we intend to develop this year in order to guide the Foundation’s work into the future. 

As you’ll see, we’ve made some changes to the structure of this year’s annual plan. This year’s plan is organized around three goals for the Foundation’s work in the year to come. By restructuring the Annual Plan, we have written a plan for the whole Foundation,  rather than an aggregation of plans from all of our departments and teams. In this sense, we’re seeking to become a better-integrated institution, rather than a collection of teams and departments with disparate goals.

We’ve also reduced the overall length of the published Annual Plan. We wanted to make sure that the focus and goals of our work don’t get lost in the details. Of course, we know that many community members enjoy reading the particulars of our planned work, so you can still access the details of departmental programs through links to their descriptions on Meta or MediaWiki.org. These links will provide interested readers with detailed departmental programs, which describe the specific and detailed program goals, impact and outcomes. This change does not sacrifice the depth and rigor of our planning process, but rather, it is meant to keep the Annual Plan lean and focused while allowing interested readers to dive deep into the details.  

Finally, we’ve expanded the planning framework we instituted last year for cross-departmental programs to all of our programs across the Foundation. This allows us to clearly link a program’s resources to outcomes and measures. As such, we’ve presented the Annual Plan budget in terms of our investments in the three defined goals rather than in terms of our internal organizational structure. 

Thank you all for your support over the past year. I'm really looking forward to your feedback on this year's proposed plan during the open comment period -- a reminder it runs through May 15th. 

Thanks! 

Katherine

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2018-2019/Draft 

[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017