[Foundation-l] 4 wishes for Year 2007

[florencedevouard]

Hello community


Yet another year is over. We’ll soon celebrate our 6 years of existence.
Wikipedia has made an amazing transformation, growing from a grassroots 
effort to a global resource. A unique community-driven, non-commercial 
top 10 website, letting people share their knowledge, culture and 
resources with neighbours near and far.
Wikipedia is just one piece of the Wikimedia movement. Other projects 
are growing. Wikicommons, our common repository of media documents, has 
experienced an amazing growth and celebrated its first million of 
documents. WikiSource is a effort aimed at unearthing primary sources to 
unlock historical information, further academic research and add 
credibility and depth to publicly available information. WikiBooks is 
the future of learning – up to date, readily accessible text books that 
lets students around the world learn, inside and outside the classroom. 
WikiNews, Wiktionary and Wikiquote are all growing, thriving examples of 
the power of the community to bring new information to new audiences 
everyday.

The global impact of Wikipedia and the other project opens the door to a 
growing set of responsibilities and challenges for the Wikimedia 
Foundation and the community behind it.

Year 2007 will be placed under two major priorities: Sustainability and 
reliability.
Two minor priorities will be: Outreach and recognition as a charitable 
organization.

Whilst there has been no formal “vote” to decide so, it seems to be the 
consensus emerging from discussions during the board retreat, 
discussions during the board meetings, discussions whilst preparing the 
fundraising. So, roughly, it seems these four words, sustainability, 
reliability, outreach and recognition, will lead the coming months. It 
does not necessarily mean other directions will not be pursued, but we 
will really try to push along those lines and I hope very much you will 
agree these directions are indeed important and will help.

I want to explain a little bit more about these four directions.

Sustainability.
Sustainability for the organization and the projects it support. 
Sustainability require a new level of dedication to both organizational 
and technological infrastructure.

The board retreat in Frankfurt in October 2006, has revealed deficits at 
the organizational levels were a major issue.
The bylaws needed to be fixed, as they did not reflect the reality of 
the organization structure. This was done in November. Issue closed.
Board expansion was planned and first step implemented, with the 
addition of Oscar, Mindspillage and Jan-Bart. Next step will occur at 
the next board members election in june 2007.
An advisory board was set up, future members were suggested by the 
community and many contacted. Most of the ones contacted agreed to help 
and several of them are already helping the board on various issues. 
Angela Beesley, formely board member, has agreed to help chair that 
advisory board. More information on this will be provided during January 
probably.
Committees and workgroups are not working very well (big 
understatement). There are many people willing to help, but few 
coordinators, and we are losing a lot of time and energy to identify and 
channel goodwill. This is a major issue to work on in the coming months, 
and of course an issue for which community input (your input) will be 
critically important.
In the past few days, with the discussion over the matching donations 
issue, and in the past as well, some ask why volunteers are not involved 
more in the Foundation activity. There are various reasons, ranging from 
“the Foundation does not communicate sufficiently on its needs” to “the 
community does not show enough interest”, as well as “you can not always 
count on the availability or willingness of a volunteer to do the job”, 
or “a volunteer is not accountable” etc…
There is much to discuss on this list.

Staff. Most of you do not realize that, but the deficit of staff is 
really a big issue. Various positions have been envisionned in November 
and December, but we are waiting January and the end of the fundraising, 
to really discuss that in depth and see what we can do, according to the 
cash we have available. We need in particular more developers and more 
people working in the office on administrative tasks, as well as divers 
experts, which hopefully we could get pro-bono. I must say that it is 
unlikely the global community will be involved much in these decisions, 
simply because the people working on these tasks on a daily basis are 
the ones more likely to know what is needed.
One of the most needed position and likely to be hired soon is an office 
manager. We absolutely need to get some of the daily administrative 
tasks fully taken in charge, and to relieve ourselves from this burden. 
I saw a discussion this morning, stating that there was no need for an 
accountant, that this could be done by a volunteer, just as so many 
associations do. Now, wake up guys ! We are no more an association 
running with 10 000 dollars a year and 10 checks to issue per month. We 
are running an organization of over 2 millions dollars, with thousands 
of unique donations, purchasing servers per hundred lot, receiving 
hundreds of emails per day, legal requests every month. This can not be 
done by a volunteer when (if) he has 2 hours free during the week end.
Executive director. The search of an executive director is also one of 
our urgent and important tasks. This is currently ongoing.

On financial sustainability, there is a lot to say. This has been a hot 
topic in the past few days with the matching donations system. I did not 
comment much myself, but I read all the comments made on foundation-l, 
offered privately, and the ones in languages I could understand on 
village pumps. All I can say is that we hear your feedback and we’ll 
take it into account in the next fundraisings. It is likely we’ll have 
more fundraisings this year. We also need to get new sources of money to 
be able to go on. Hopefully, the new executive director will have 
creative ideas on this as well. Setting up an endowment is such a 
solution, and a first step for this are the audit results and a suitable 
bank (which is under way). Other needs involve making use of our “big” 
contacts, setting up an investment strategy and generally managing the 
funds. Other directions involve making more “business”, either as 
services (datafeed) or products (DVDs). As of today, we simply do not 
have the infrastructure to do that.
There is not much to say on the topic right now, but I just wanted to 
mention how big an issue it is for the board.

Related to financial sustainability, the audit completed on our first 
three years of operations will be a major asset in the future. Such an 
audit is essential to get big donations and grants. It required a lot of 
effort in the past months, and hopefully the path in front of us is less 
steep. We’ll go on getting our financial statements audited every year 
and as much as possible, we’ll try to implement the various 
recommendations given by the auditors to ensure our organization is as 
clean, transparent, fair as the public would like it to be. This will 
involve setting up many policies and guidelines at the administrative 
level, which will be invisible to you, but important for our long-term 
sustainability. I invite you to read again the financial audit document 
where a list of suggested procedures to implement is listed.

Sustainability of course also is technical. Decisions in that direction 
involve more developers, hiring a chief technical officer, and having a 
tech summit to work on mediawiki.

On the legal side, an important and quite urgent topic is related to our 
trademarks and domain names. By securing our trademarks, we ensure long 
term fruitful use of them, and decrease the risk of abuse by third parties.

Reliability.
Whilst not all our projects or all our languages are not in a “mature” 
phase, we believe a major issue on which we must dedicate time, energy 
and probably money, is related to reliability. Content quality, not 
quantity, is the measure that matters.
I could quickly cite some issues: the non-vandalized version feature. 
The reviewed version feature. Guidelines to avoid spamming by small 
companies. Guidelines to avoid uncontrolled modifications by PR 
agencies. Issue of rampaging external links toward myspace and youtube 
:-) Mandatory sources etc…
In most part, it is in community hands, but the Foundation (and the 
chapters) can help, either the development of technical features, or 
favor contacts between communities and academics/experts etc…

Outreach
It is regularly discussed. Pushing the envelope on global reach is 
critical. We must continue to extend our boundaries in terms of 
providing knowledge as well as a voice to those who’ve never had them 
before. Not much to say on this issue. I think it a very important 
issue, unfortunately often falling behind other more pressing issues. 
Hopefully, we’ll find time and energy to work further on this.

Recognition
This comes from a very simple observation. For many, Wikimedia projects 
are web 2.0 websites, similar to other websites such as myspace or 
youtubes. People tend to confuse us with commercial projects, even 
wikipedians themselves sometimes, who fear we will “sell” the projects 
to big companies.
We are not a commercial product. We provide free knowledge (… or 
content… or educational content…) for everyone. Our goal is not to make 
money. Our purpose is to help humanity be more informed, knowledgeable.
Not only are we confused with commercial companies sometimes, but big 
charitable organizations do not recognize us as a charity, which greatly 
limit the support we might get from them. I would consider as a goal for 
year 2007, to change this.

Note that the blocks are not independent one from another.
To be recognized as an important charity, we must show we are a stable 
and solid organization. We must show we are trustworthy as a resource. 
And we must show we try to go beyond boundaries of wealth, language and 
copyright.
To be able to reach everyone, we must be organized and relevant.
To be reliable, we need good foundations.

So, we can build the tower with the four blocks. First sustainability. 
Second reliability. Third outreach and fourth recognition.

Hopefully, that’s what we will succeed doing in 2007. Together.

Happy New Year

Anthere


Some links:
* http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/What_we_need_the_money_for (what 
we need the money for)
* http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/fr (live list of donations)
* http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_2006_Mgmt_Letter.pdf (audit)
* http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_2006_fs.pdf (financial 
statements)
* http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolutions (passed resolutions)
* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_retreat (board retreat)