[Foundation-l] Priorities and opportunities

[Erik Moeller]

2009/9/16 Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com>:
> Putting aside the unnecessary bad faith and challenges to the
> foundation's integrity:   I find this all exciting - planning for
> significant tech budget support, possible major sponsorships (I've
> always hoped we would one day find multiple sources for long-term
> in-kind support of servers and bandwidth), &c.  I would simply like to
> see more open discussion of what our perfect-world tech dreams are,
> and how to pursue what sorts of sponsorships.

Thanks, Sam. I find the discussion of the last few days symptomatic of
the problems we've begun to brainstorm about with regard to the
signal/noise ratio, healthiness and openness of this particular forum.
(And by openness I mean that a forum that is dominated by highly
abrasive, high volume, low signal discussions is actually not very
open.) I do want to revisit the post limit question as a possible
answer, but let's do that separately.

The thread did surface some topics which are worth talking about, both
in general and specific terms, and I'm taking the liberty to start a
new thread to isolate some of those topics. For one thing, I think
it's always good to revisit and iterate processes for defining
priorities, and for achieving the highest impact in those identified
areas.

Developing more sophisticated processes both for short-term and
long-term planning has been precisely one of the key focus areas of
the last year. Internally, we've begun experimenting with assessment
spreadsheets and standardized project briefs, drawing from the
expertise of project management experts as well as Sue's specific work
in developing a very well thought-out prioritization system at the
CBC. Publicly, we're engaged in the strategy planning process -- the
associated Call for Proposals is a first attempt to conduct a
large-scale assessment of potential priorities. (I hope that with
future improvements to the ReaderFeedback extension we'll be able to
generate more helpful reports based on that particular assessment.)

Ideally, the internal and public processes will converge sooner rather
than later. For example, I posted a project brief that I developed
internally through the strategy CfP:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Volunteer_Toolkit

I believe this one was submitted by Jennifer:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Volunteer_Management_practices_to_Expand_Participation

And this one by Tim:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Directed_community_fundraising

The next phase of the strategy planning process, the deep-dive task
forces, will be an interesting experiment in serious community-driven
planning work, complemented by the research conducted with the help of
our partners at The Bridgespan Group. All of this will become part of
the institutional memory of the Wikimedia movement, and hopefully
we'll continue to raise the bar in our thinking, planning, and
collaboration.

- - -

Of course separately from setting priorities, there's the critical
need to improve our ability to execute upon those priorities. This
includes the further development of project pipelines, more systematic
volunteer engagement, additional internal HR support, additional
hiring of staff to address key capacity gaps, etc. I'm thrilled by how
far we've come, and to be able to have supported, and continue to
support, an unprecedented large-scale initiative like the usability
project. I'm well-aware that there continue to be key priorities that
we aren't executing as effectively as we could.

The first thing many partners, donors and friends say when they visit
Wikimedia Foundation is how astonishing it is that an operation of
this scale can function with so little funding and staff. The truth is
that by any reasonable measure of efficiency and money-to-impact
ratio, we're achieving wonderful things together, and that's easy to
forget when looking at issues in isolation. (Yes, it would be
wonderful to have the full-history dumps running ASAP. Hm, it would be
nice to have the full-history dumps for some other top 50 content
websites. Oh, right, they don't provide any.)

But I don't measure our success compared to other organizations. The
most important question to me is whether we are continually raising
the bar in what we're doing and how we do it. The most recent
Wikimania was the most thoughtful and self-aware one I've ever
attended, with deep, constructive conversations and very serious
efforts of everyone involved to re-ignite and strengthen our movement.
There are elements of groupthink, but also very systematic attempts to
break out of it.

There are great opportunities today for anyone to become engaged in
helping to shape the future of what we do, and to accomplish real
change in the world as a result. Ultimately we all have to make a
choice how we spend our time -- how we spend our lives -- but I hope
we're creating a legacy that will fill us with pride and joy, and
inspire others to do the same.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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