[Foundation-l] Our values

[Florence Devouard]

Hello,

In the past few months, the WMF has adopted officially a vision 
(tagline) and clarified its mission statement.

The difference between the two is that the vision is the dream, what we 
are trying to do, even if that seems impossible. This is the long long 
long future.
The mission is the more practical path we decide to follow to reach our 
vision.

Currently, you may find our vision 
here:http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vision

and the mission there:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission

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A next step for a non-profit is to define its values. Values are the 
driving force in a nonprofit.

Before you tell me "what's that boring stuff and why on earth would it 
be useful for", let me explain :-)

Values represent the core priorities in the organization’s culture, 
including what drives people's priorities and how they truly act in the 
organization, etc.

I'd like that we establish four to six core values from which the WMF 
would operate. These values would not only be the values glueing us all 
together (such as free culture, commitment to diversity etc...), but 
should also be the values YOU, as an editing community, want the WMF to 
have toward the community, the readers, the staff, etc...

The more we expand the staff, the more chance there is that part of the 
staff joins WMF with no single idea of our values. So the more it 
becomes important for us to make sure the staff understand our values 
and respect them. As such, writing down them will help.

Same for chapters. Until now, we consider that a chapter sharing most of 
its mission statement with WMF one is a "like minded" organization. But 
will it always be true in the future when we have 200 chapters ? How 
will we identify and check that chapters are really on the same "foot" ?

Even without going as far, we might meet a problem sooner than we can 
think of, if a big company just decide to create a BIG encyclopedia for 
free, which, for whatever reasons, would get good ranks on some search 
engines.... in this case, what would be important to us ?
Probably, it will be important that we explain to the world what is 
truely important to us. What is truely important are values.

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I would like to ask you to have a look at the value page on meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Values

And add more suggestions there, or different phrasings. Values can be 
expressed by keywords, or by sentences. Either are fine, as long as they 
express what is important to us.
Or comment on some of the keywords already there.


Be careful to notice the difference between our preferred values and the 
true values (those actually reflected by members behaviors). In this 
case, just put a note (''we are not very good on this, but I think this 
value would be very important to us to follow).


The current values were defined with the help of the advisory board 
member, during the board retreat immediately before Wikimania.
More on this here: http://advisory.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meeting_August_2007

Thanks to all for your help.


Anthere