[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia (Foundation) endowment

[Dariusz Jemielniak]

On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 1:01 PM, Fae <faewik at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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. ;-)
>

I'd assume it goes way beyond basics.


> 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?
>

The thing is, this is guesswork, and also a dangerous one in the sense that
we separate this discussion from our resources (for instance, we have
text-based knowledge bases, are we sure these will be even relevant in half
a century? no way to decide. In terms of access: again, a great leap of
faith is made e.g. in terms of energy resources allowing for a sustainable
development of networks. It is just possible to conceive a scenario in
which we'll have to wind down bandwidth consumption, rather than all go
into a realistic VR). A century-long time horizon makes telepathic data
transfer perfectly viable. Same it goes with hardware to brain porting.
With this perspective, universal connectivity to the net as we know it now
is a very modest assumption. We know that technologies completely changing
our field are behind the corner.


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

And so did e.g. Barber or Huntington, and failed in many of their
predictions just several years after they were made.


> 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.
>

As long as it is not really a strategy creation exercise, but rather an
imagination stimulation and concept brainstorming, I think it is a great
idea. But we should not mistake trying to look way too far beyond what we
can see as great vision. It is guesswork.

best,

dj