[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia (Foundation) endowment

[Fae]

On 18 March 2013 11:28, Dariusz Jemielniak <darekj at alk.edu.pl> wrote:
...
> I honestly don't believe that anyone with some basic understanding of
> principles of organizational strategic planning would dispute that.
> However, I entirely agree with Fae that we need a powerful, long-term
> vision (and I believe that making all knowledge universally accessible is
> quite good in this respect, and also appealing to donors for endowment).

As I have a MBA specializing in international strategy, hand in hand
with a couple of decades as a consultant, I would count myself as
having a basic understanding. ;-)

> In other words, I completely do not understand why you insist that in spite
> of a long term vision we also need a 100-year spanning strategy. But let's
> assume we do: could you give examples of goals, say for year 10, year 20,
> year 50?...

I suggest you step away from the technology component before this
becomes a mantra. Given a span of 100 years, assumptions become rather
large. We can start to assume that within one or two decades,
*everyone* on the planet is data-connected, we can assume that
language barriers break down or become irrelevant, we can assume that
connection and hardware costs become vanishingly small and we can
assume that engagement with human knowledge is fully immersive.

Developing a strategy would require some big thinking of scenarios:
* Does Wikimedia get subsumed into a new ecology of open knowledge
organizations?
* Does "operations" become irrelevant as it will be naturally factored out?
* In a future of cheap as chips access, does "access" mean
socialization and education?

Classically, one might bounce around environmental scenarios such as
religious division, hyper-connection social instability (meme
threats), population crisis etc.

It's a big talk, and above was mentioned spending 5 years on this.
Consider how darn slow us unpaid Wikimedia volunteers are to nit-pick
our way forward, thinking of how we take longer than a year+ to reach
some conclusions is not unreasonable, and it is not as easy as saying
"quote examples" as if this was a discussion short-cut.

Thanks,
Fae
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