[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation Mid-Year Presentation to the Board of Trustees

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 12:34 PM, Chris Keating
<chriskeatingwiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks for this - very interesting :-)
>
> For me, the most reassuring part is at the end. (It feels a bit odd
> highlighting this, given the amount of cool stuff in the report, but I
> suppose it's cool stuff I already knew about). I am very glad to hear that
> these issues are on peoples' minds and I think identifying them is a really
> helpful step

I hope you will accept that I am not talking to you personally. Just want to
clarify a few things to people who share similar attitudes to save a
bit of time...
I will put "you" in scare quotes throughout, just to emphasize I am not talking
to you personally, But to the "you" of the attitude.
.
>
> Everybody at all levels of the WMF needs to stop spending
> social & political capital accidentally, or on stuff that doesn't
> matter;

To be blunt. Again, to help you acclimatize "you". No this is *not*
how we tend to operate here. "You" may think it should be that way.
But can "you" honestly argue with the results? This not my private
view on this issue. It isn't set in stone either. There is a metaphor
that is quite central to our movement and ones even remotely
like it. It is that we are "herding cats". Any number of our people
will explain that to "you".I'll do it, if "you" send me a personal E-Mail.
But it is such fundamental short hand that I would be wasting
space and peoples time explaining it here.

> ● We need to stop surprising the community: we need to
> acknowledge that time works differently for volunteers, and
> they need lots of advance notice for everything. Overtransparency has never
> harmed us, but lack of transparency
> has;

That is one thirds + 1/6th right. The volunteers are always ahead of
"you", and surprising them *will* fail. "You" will be surprised that they
know much more about what "you" suggest, because they have
all been there, done that, and have the T-Shirt. Or a whole
suitcase full of them. The governance side does need to learn
to be honest (or transparent). And it has to stop thinking it *can*
take the community by surprise.

> ● Internally in the organization we need to shift from the
> assumption that our scarcest resource is money, to the
> acknowledgement that it's time. We need to get better at
> conserving energy, focusing and saying no;

Focusing on saying "maybe" gets much better results in the
long run, and lots of less time gets wasted.

-- 
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]