Thanks for those thoughts, C. Scott. I, for the most part agree, but want to add some context and some thinking around this issue exactly as it has come up a bit. Though involved in the process, the thoughts below are my own interpretation.
For expediency's sake, this process started with the reading team, with a focus on what 'we' as a team should do (the trees). But as we embarked on the strategic process, we quickly uncovered that our primary strategic problems (the forest) were probably not ones we could solve by ourselves. I think artificially limiting ourselves to this footprint would have shut down creative thinking quite a bit and I, at least, felt it was necessary that we understand and have ideas around the larger issues impacting our readers. As a team, collectively identifying the forces that impact our work, whether in our control or not, was incredibly powerful and enlightening.
So, I think you're right that most meaningful strategies we would consider would involve collaboration with (or even ownership by) other teams. For this reason, and others, a very important part of this process is communicating out our findings and our assumptions and then collaborating with other team's as necessary.
For example, *if*, as part of our process, we suspected that the strategy that would impact our readers the most would be to include more videos on the site, *one* of the 'tests' of this strategy would be: is this something we can solve or is this something we could have a meaningful impact on. We would welcome external input on how to answer this. If the answer is 'no', we would tell everyone "hey, this is not going to be 'Reading's' strategy, but we think it is a killer strategy for readers that we would like to support editing/community/etc. on..."
Let me know how that sits. I'm going to be offline until Monday, so expect a delayed response on my part. -J
On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 9:35 AM, C. Scott Ananian cananian@wikimedia.org wrote:
Let's consider one of my pet bugbears: Chinese wikipedia. Our readership numbers are way below what we'd like, and as I understand it, total # of editors and articles is low as well. So obviously a problem for the reading team, right?
However, a solution needs to grapple with the problem of creating content for zhwiki, which would involve language engineering and the editing team. Handling language variants better for reading would be good, too, but (AFAIK) we don't have a single active member of zhwiki on staff (according to https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_engagement/Staff_involvement), and just a single engineer fluent in Mandarin (according to https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/HR_Corner/Languages). [My numbers could be slightly off here, forgive me if so. But clearly we don't have a *huge presence* from zhwiki on-staff, the way we do for, say, enwiki.] So maybe we need to involve HR?
There are politics involved, too: perhaps the solution would involve the Community Engagement team, to try to build up the local wikipedia community and navigate the politics?
My point is that even a narrow focus on increasing page views fails to address the more fundamental issues responsible, which spill outside of the team silo. So a strategy session isolated to the reading team risks either missing the forest for the trees (concentrating only on problems solvable locally), or else generating a lot of problems and discussion on issues which can't be addressed without involving the wider organization. (I rather expected to see the former, but most of the issues currently on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Strategy/Strategy_Process seem to be the latter.)
I think a strategy process probably needs a mix of both near- and far-sightedness. Identifying issues which can be solved by the team itself (better engagement with users, for example), but also having a process for escalating issues that require a more organizational response. The latter seems especially important for a team composed mostly of remote workers, since there aren't the same informal watercooler-talk mechanisms available for building awareness of broader needs. --scott
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