[Foundation-l] Official Wikimedia roadmap?

[Erik Moeller]

Without wanting to overburden the Board of Trustees which I am sure is  
already working at their personal limits, I'd like to suggest that we  
create an official Wikimedia roadmap for the next 3 years.

When working on the fundraising pages, I could not find a good, officially  
sanctioned "future activities" page on meta or elsewhere (if I missed  
something, please let me know). I think that this, together with a well- 
written mission statement, would be quite important to educate people  
about what Wikimedia is about. This could address many common criticisms  
(Wikipedia is not reliable etc.) and hopefully put to rest the  
misconception that Wikimedia and Wikipedia are essentially the same  
project.

What I am thinking of is a document roughly with three columns:

Quarter   Projects               Technology            Financial
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Q4/2004   - Launch Wikinews [*]  - MW: Database schema - Quarterly
          - German Wikipedia CD    redesign              fundraising

with each of these items linking to detailed project pages. This could  
then be combined with some prose that outlines our vision for future  
projects and needs.

I want us to become better aware of the interdependencies between and  
financial needs of our projects, otherwise we might run into some serious  
trouble when e.g. we start some well-intended offline edition without a  
solid peer review process in place.

There's a problem with this, however, in that the board would have to  
decide *now* which projects it thinks will be executed in the future, even  
if there has not yet been a vote or a full feasibility study on these  
projects. In order to address this problem, I added a "[*]" above, which  
would then be resolved to

  [*] Tentative. There is consensus among board members that this
      [[m:Category:Proposed projects|proposed project]] is a good idea
      worth pursuing, but no extensive community review has happened yet.

Hence, I would suggest that the roadmap essentially would reflect the  
board's collective bias on the various proposed projects.

What are your thoughts on that? We could try to write this together on  
Meta, but the Board would at least have to provide a rough "consensus  
paper" to base it on (e.g. which projects the board definitely wants to  
do, which technology needs it definitely sees etc.). After some community  
work, it would then be handed back to the board for editing and the final  
stamp of approval.

Regards,

Erik