[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikimedia-l] The new narrowed focus by WMF

[Mark]

I suppose I'll put in a positive word for what I see here so far. It's 
interesting because I was arguing, during the expansion of the WMF, for 
some things vaguely along these lines, but I had assumed that battle was 
lost by now.

Two things in particular I like:

1. The Wikimedia Foundation should not become some kind of overarching 
NGO, but should look at what we actually do better than other 
organizations, and partner with other organizations (or even leave it 
entirely to them!) in other cases. The strength of grassroots-driven 
organizations is that they have a necessary but limited bureaucracy and 
legal apparatus, which keeps the servers running, handles legal matters, 
gets money where it's needed, but mostly stays out of the way. I'm very 
skeptical of professionalization of such organizations, where the 
professional staff takes the lead in big, costly initiatives (nonprofits 
of that kind start looking more like a bizarro-world version of 
corporations, complete with highly paid executives and big org-charts 
and that kind of thing).

2. I'm hugely skeptical of the "Westerners bring enlightenment to the 
third world" style of philanthropy, which has a quite bad history, tying 
into colonialism and Christian missionaries. So I think it's a very good 
direction to have efforts in the Global South driven by people and 
organizations actually from there, rather than from a San Francisco 
office. It doesn't appear that this propose would rule out those being 
local Wikimedia chapters, or funded via the FDC process, just that the 
efforts wouldn't operationally be run from the US-based headquarters. It 
would also be nice to partner more with existing organizations: goals 
like, "educate rural Indians" are not new goals, and many organizations 
actually based in India, with longer histories, have much more knowledge 
about the sticking points than we do.

Plus, decentralization of operations and dissemination of funds to 
support decentralized operations seems rather in keeping with the 
general Wikimedia spirit.

-Mark


On 10/18/12 3:27 PM, David Gerard wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Theo10011 <de10011 at gmail.com>
> Date: 18 October 2012 13:48
> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] The new narrowed focus by WMF
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>
>
> Hi
>
> Sue Gardner started working on this document on Meta a couple of weeks ago
> - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sue_Gardner/Narrowing_focus The
> document outlines some rather big changes in the priority for WMF and
> future responsibilities it will agree to keep. I am surprised by how little
> attention this is getting from the larger community. There are comments but
> mostly from the same individuals on Meta, little to none from some of the
> most active voices and the larger English Wikipedia community.
>
> This is the new direction being considered by the WMF, to basically abandon
> or cut back on majority of activities from the last few year. Here are some
> points-
> 1) No more Fellowships.
> 2) No more direct work in the developing markets (aka Global South- India,
> Brazil, MENA)
> 3) No more support for International events, and cutting back on Wikimania
>
> Instead of these, things like Editor engagement, Mobile and FDC/grant
> making are being made priorities for WMF in the future. A large majority of
> editors have had no interaction with grants and are unlikely to have so
> with FDC as well, same with some of the mobile initiatives like Wikipedia
> Zero which are limited to certain developing markets. A lot of these
> changes will have a lasting impact, its not just relevant to those
> interested in governance issues. Some of the implications are - Fellowships
> would be removed all together, little to no spending on Hackathons,
> possibly GLAM camps and other international events all together, less
> spending on Wikimania and scholarships, the work in India and Brazil will
> be moved away from WMF completely for a "partner" organization to take over
> with a grant from WMF. If you do find some time, please consider taking a
> look and commenting on these developments before they are approved.
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sue_Gardner/Narrowing_focus
>
> Regards
> Theo
>
> The document has some interesting quotes -
>
> "The Wikimedia Foundation is not a think tank or a research institute.
> We're not an advocacy organization or a lobbyist, and our core mission
> isn't to keep the internet free and open. We are not a general educational
> non-profit. (We are a website, or set of sites, and everything we do needs
> to be understood through that lens.) We don't just reactively "support the
> community"—responding to requests from editors and doing what they ask us
> to do. Our purpose isn't to provide MediaWiki support for third parties
> (but it's in our interest to ensure that a healthy third party ecosystem
> develops around MediaWiki). We're not, ourselves, content creators. Our
> purpose is not to ensure the chapters grow and develop, nor is it to
> support the chapters in their growth and development: rather, chapters are
> our partners in supporting editors and other content creators.
>
> The Wikimedia Foundation is not the only fish in the sea of free knowledge;
> not everything that needs to be done must be done by the Wikimedia
> Foundation, and it's not our job to do work that other individuals or
> entities are better positioned or mandated to do, however important that
> work may be. When we try to do work that more properly belongs to other
> individuals or groups, we imperil our ability to get our own core work
> done, and we arguably make it less possible for other entities to do what
> they're supposed to be doing."
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