[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] WMF Global Development - year in review and road ahead

Tue Jul 26 19:16:44 UTC 2011

Good job.

On Sat, Jul 23, 2011 at 2:41 AM, Barry Newstead <bnewstead at wikimedia.org>wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> Below is a note I've prepared that takes a look at the year past and
> the year ahead for the Wikimedia Foundation's Global Development team.
>
> An editable and formatted version can be found at
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Global_Development_year_in_review_and_road_ahead,_2011
>
> Barry
>
> ----
>
> Year in review and road ahead
> Barry Newstead
>
> I just passed my first anniversary since I joined the Wikimedia
> Foundation and we created the Global Development team. It has been a
> year in which we have put the team in place and built our
> understanding of the opportunities and challenges we face in achieving
> our goals.
>
> Why we exist
>
> At the heart, the Global Development team’s role is to help the
> community to grow and thrive in places where we have not yet achieved
> our movement’s potential.  Places where the approach that worked in
> the Global North has not yet taken hold in sufficient numbers. At a
> time when Wikimedia’s editor community (dominated by Global North
> editors) is slowly ebbing and readership on the personal computer is
> plateauing, we need to be proactive in working to create strong
> communities in the Global South, where more than half of Internet
> users live today and an overwhelming share of future Internet users
> will come from.  It isn’t clear what specific programs will work, but
> it is imperative that we work hard everyday alongside the community to
> try new things and help scale up efforts that are promising.
>
> The foundation has set clear goals in our strategic plan to reach 1
> billion readers by 2015 and to increase the number of active editors
> to 200,000 with 37% from the Global South.  The Global Development
> team will play an important role in catalyzing and supporting
> communities to reach these goals.
>
> The Past Year for the Global Development team
>
> (1) Building a diverse team
>
> When I started, we were a small team of 4 with Jay, Moka, Kul and
> myself.  We had very limited capacity and the team had a range of
> foundation-wide responsibilities.  Over the year, we have built a
> diverse (and I’d say very talented) team to fulfill roles that I see
> as vital.  We have a mix of experienced Wikipedians on the team and
> folks who bring valuable new capabilities to tackle the new challenges
> we face.  I’m particularly happy that we have a team that has a lot of
> experience globally and brings diverse perspectives to the table.  I’m
> also glad that most of the recruiting work for me is finished, as I’m
> ready to focus more time on getting results in our priority areas.
> Our team will grow a bit in 2011/12, but it will focus mostly on
> filling in the team in India and Brazil.
>
> (2) Executing effectively
>
> While we were building the plane, we were flying it too!  We had
> important accomplishments and I’m happy that all of these involved
> close partnership with the community around the world and other teams
> within the foundation. Some of the highlights include:
>
> * Wikipedia’s 10th Anniversary celebration was a great success with
> events in over 200 locations, many of which received special edition
> T-shirts and buttons that help to bond our world-wide community.  We
> also garnered incredible media coverage that underscored the important
> role of Wikipedia in the public imagination.  I see this initiative as
> a model for an initiative catalyzed by the foundation and made reality
> by the community in innovative and effective ways.
> * We launched our India catalyst initiative with efforts to help build
> the community via visits by Jimmy and myself along with support for
> community work on outreach. We met and introduced many people to
> Wikimedia at meetups in many cities. We had amazing media coverage of
> all of our (community and WMF) activities that added momentum to our
> work.  I’m also happy that we launched our first program in June - the
> India Education Program.
> * Our grants program more than doubled with a wide range of chapters,
> like-minded groups and individuals, implementing initiatives large and
> small aimed at contributing to the Wikimedia vision. In addition, we
> continue to provide support for Wikimania and will be supporting a
> large contingent of Wikimedians from over 20 countries to attend
> Wikimania in August.
> * In close partnership with community developers, we invested to
> improve the tools available for offline projects with the integration
> of OpenZIM into the collections tools and a usability upgrade for the
> Kiwix reader.
> * For the first time, we have the internal capacity to start
> understanding how we, as a movement, are doing and we put that
> capacity to work with our first systematic survey of the global editor
> community.  The survey was available in 22 languages (thanks to the
> volunteer translator community) and was completed by over 5,000
> editors - an amazing sample!  We also embarked on a research effort to
> understand the needs of mobile users in India and Brazil.  Results of
> this work will be published soon and are already informing our mobile
> decision making.
> * We worked closely with chapters involved in fundraising to resolve
> some difficult issues regarding international funds transfers and we
> improved the fundraising agreement. There is more work to do on this,
> but we made a lot of progress and I’m happy that we are entering the
> new fiscal year with few problems relating to funds transfers.
> * We also managed to improve our joint compliance regarding chapter
> agreements.  This puts the relationship between chapters and WMF on a
> stronger footing.
>
>
> Not a bad year for our little team, though there have definitely been
> bumps in the road.  Two areas I would say we didn’t get the job done
> are:
>
> * We did not make as much progress on our mobile work. Mobile is a
> huge priority for WMF and for Global Development in particular.  We
> struggled to determine our strategy and then get resources aligned
> behind the strategy.  I take responsibility for this and have been
> acting aggressively to get us off to a fast start in 2011/12, both
> through additions to the team, greater focus and attention from Kul
> and me, efforts to accelerate discussions with partners, and close
> work with our Mobile Engineering team to quickly strengthen our mobile
> portfolio.
> * We didn’t get our new online store launched.  We made amazing
> progress on improving our merchandise and putting the building blocks
> in place, but we didn’t get it launched.  We expect to launch in July
> and I’m excited to see what the community thinks.
>
>
> The year ahead
>
> Our team starts the new fiscal year with a lot of momentum across the
> board...and a lot to do.  We have signed up to tackle two critical
> foundation-wide goals for 2011/12: Reverse the editor decline and
> dramatically increase mobile.  We aim to contribute significantly to
> the goal of returning our active editors per month to 95,000 by June
> 2012 and to increasing mobile page views to 2 billion. These goals are
> both part of the five-year strategy...and we need to get moving on
> them.
>
> Global Development’s efforts to reverse the editor decline revolve
> around our work with the community in the Global South and the scaling
> of the Public Policy Initiative into the Global Education program.  In
> the next few months, we will expand the India Education Program,
> launch additional programs in India, get started on work in Brazil,
> support the launch of education programs in new geographies and make
> grants to chapters and like-minded groups with a focus on editor
> community health and growth.  Our communications team will support
> this effort with media and communications work that highlights
> “contribution” starting in India with an [Edit] India campaign.  Our
> research team will capture insights from the editor survey and will
> begin to generate insights from our own data to help identify
> opportunities and challenges.
>
> On the mobile end, we are beginning now to approach mobile operators
> and handset makers to improve the prominence of Wikipedia in their
> offerings. We would like to secure deals where mobile operators offer
> Wikipedia access for free (no data charges) to their customers. We
> think this will help advance our vision significantly and introduce
> millions of new people to Wikipedia.  In partnership with the Mobile
> Engineering team, we plan to invest in creating applications for the
> major operating systems and in developing features that enrich the
> experience and, critically, create ways to contribute.
>
> In addition, you will see other important work happening on the Global
> Development team:
>
> * We have doubled our grants budget again to $600,000 and Asaf Bartov
> will be working with chapters and other groups/individuals (with an
> emphasis on the Global South) to develop grant programs that achieve
> the goals laid out in our strategic plan.  Specifically, we plan to
> start tracking the change in active editors in the geographies where
> we make grants over the next year.
> * We will continue to build on our initial work on offline projects
> through continued efforts to improve the tools available and through
> partnerships to increase the distribution reach.  By the end of
> 2011/12, we aim to double the number of deployments of offline
> Wikipedia around the world.
> * We will be supporting Wikimania in Haifa with a $100,000 grant to
> support the conference as well as funding ($130,000 from our own
> budget plus a contribution of $30,000 from Wikimedia Germany) to
> support scholarships for over 70 attendees. We will also provide
> support for Wikimania 2012 in Washington, DC.
>
>
> The Year Ahead for me
>
> My first year was a great learning experience and I feel I’ve got a
> clearer sense of the opportunities challenge ahead. My greatest
> challenge this past year was the sheer breadth of the Global
> Development portfolio.  I constantly had to juggle a range of
> activities and for much of the year, people were relying on me to
> handle issues since we didn’t have our team in place.  This gave me a
> good perspective into the needs and expectations of our team, but also
> left me feeling a bit unfocused.  My goal for 2011/12 is to focus more
> of my time on the top priority areas of growing the editor base in
> India and Brazil, and implementing our mobile strategy.
>
> For me, success in 2011/12 will mean:
>
> * Mobile partnerships that reduce the cost of accessing Wikipedia to
> zero (or close to zero) and market Wikipedia on the mobile in key
> countries in the Global South covering over 500 million mobile users
> * Wikimedia’s mobile services to include quality apps on Android,
> Windows, iPhone and Blackberry; first set of contribution tools
> integrated into the mobile offering; our mobile site works well on a
> wide range of phones
> * Strong growth in the India editor community with clear results in
> terms of editor growth from WMF’s India program activities
> * Shift in Brazilian editor community toward healthy indicators,
> return to growth in the editor community and a successful launch of
> WMF’s Brazil team in the second half of the year
> * The Global Development team functions cohesively as a group and
> partners well with the community, other WMF teams, chapters and our
> partners.
> * Staff on the Global Development team grow professionally and see the
> impact of their work.
>
>
> The year ahead promises to again be a busy one for the Global
> Development team and we’ll be partnering with many groups in the
> Wikimedia movement.  We will be moving forward with a clear purpose of
> meeting our goals, learning along the way and collaborating with a
> wide range of groups and individual in the movement.  Onwards!
>
> --
> Barry Newstead
> Chief Global Development Officer
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
> the sum of all knowledge.  Help us make it a reality!
>
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>
>
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-- 
Oops, my karma ran over your dogma.