[Foundation-l] 2010-11 Annual Plan Now Posted to Foundation Website

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
When you consider the source of much of the donations, you will find that
they have been coming mainly from the United States. Chapters are becoming
more and more active in fundraising. The Dutch chapter for instance plans on
professionalising its operations and fundraising staff has the highest
priority. It performed much better, one of the reasons is that IDEAL, a
payment method for the Internet in the Netherlands, was implemented. I am
sure that with increased support from the WMF not only but also the Dutch
will raise substantially more money this time around.

When you ask for an endowment, you indicate an opinion that the current
levels of support for our projects suffice. I do not share that opinion and,
I am happy to find indications in the planning that this opinion is
supported in the plans for 2010/11. Milos and myself will talk in Gdansk
about the need to improve technical support for our smallest projects (think
Hindi, Malayalam... hundreds of million people will benefit..). Some of it
is hard core language support and some are changes to operating projects in
order to raise traffic and usability for readers.

The WMF has defined in its strategy that certain types of activity are left
to the chapters. GLAM related activities come to mind. This means that the
chapters will seek funding for exactly such projects. In the case of the
Dutch chapter a project is planned about monuments and a GLAM conference is
also in the planning stages.

What I am also looking for is improved support for projects like the recent
Indonesian contest. They have set the standard for a competition involving
universities. They doubled the number of active editors and 60% of them is
female. This is the kind of ratio that compares well with the division of
the genders in universities in Indonesia. This project only involved
universities in Djakarta, next year could be a national competition.. When
you consider that the Indonesian Wikipedias are among the fastest growing
projects, I would even consider this a strategic choice.

If there is one thing that I find problematic, it is that the WMF office can
be observed to operate a dual role; it is the world wide office for the
Wikimedia Foundation and it behaves very much like a chapter. If there is
one thing I would appreciate it would be if these two activities are
separated. This would imho be best realised with the creation of an USA
chapter.
Thanks,
      GerardM


On 30 June 2010 02:33, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 4:16 PM, Veronique Kessler
> <vkessler at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > The 2010-11 Annual Plan and Questions and Answers have just been posted
> > to the Foundation website
> > (
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports#2010-2011_fiscal_year
> ).
> > The plan was approved by the Board last week.
> >
> > The 2010-11 plan differs from previous years in that this plan is rooted
> > in the five-year (2010-2015) Wikimedia Strategy which has been developed
> > collaboratively over the past year.  In 2010-11, we have planned
> > continued growth over previous years reflecting continued and increased
> > investments to serve our mission and increase our impact.
> >
> > The 2009-10 year is projected to exceed revenue targets and to be
> > underspent in expenses primarily due to underspending in the first
> > quarter of the 2009-10 fiscal year.
> >
> > Veronique
>
> Thank you Veronique for posting this! I appreciate your continued
> diligence in making material available to us.
>
> I would like to encourage everyone to be sure and actually read this
> plan closely; "continued growth" turns out to mean nearly doubling the
> staff next year, and doubling the budget -- rather surprisingly
> dramatic growth. There is a lot of change that is planned for here,
> and many of these changes relate to areas that community members do
> work in.
>
> Personally, I would love to see some serious community discussion of
> this plan both here and at Wikimania next week.
>
> -- phoebe
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>