[Wikimedia-l] Education Program Re: Quarterly reviews of high priority WMF initiatives

[LiAnna Davis]

Hi Tom,

I'll answer it, since it was my section and my comments.

On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 9:21 PM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga <
tom at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Hi Frank,
>
> I just saw now this report. Can you explain this line bellow, please? I
> didn't get it.
>
> "Strategic direction in Brazil didn't work; Tom reporting to Jessie,
> disconnected from our work. Unclear lines of authority for decision-making;
> classes ended up as not particularly successful. Also, narrowing focus
> shifted Tom and Oona's efforts to finding a home for the Brazil program
> rather than expanding classes."
>

The context was this slide:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikipedia_Education_Program_Mid-Year_Review_May_2013_slides.pdf&page=17

in which the Brazil education program didn't achieve the goal we set for
number of classes. My comment was that we at WMF made a strategic error in
how we set goals for the Brazil (and India) education programs. You,
Jessie, and Oona set annual goals within the Catalyst team for the Brazil
education program, and then we set different goals measuring different
things for the Education team for the Brazil education program. So the
Brazil education program was caught between meeting the annual plan goals
for either the Catalyst team (which is where your budget came from and who
you reported to) or our team. Obviously, having two different sets of goals
from two different departments was a bad idea. It looks like you failed if
you look at our slides, but in reality you were working toward your
Catalyst goals and not ours, so you shouldn't be held accountable for our
goals. We learned from this mistake and did not set numeric goals for the
Brazil program in our proposed plan for next year; that's something the
Brazil team should set, not us.


>
> I also would love to know who wrote this "We anticipated focusing the
> majority of our efforts on Global South programs" and I would love to know
> if Brazil is included in this focusing of efforts. If this includes Brazil,
> that is false.
>

That's also mine, and the comment is in the context of how we set the goals
for growth from the 79 in Spring 2012 to 150 in Spring 2013. We focused the
majority of efforts on growing the number of classes in the Global South
programs, while keeping the number of classes in the US and Canada programs
around the same. As you can see here:
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program_Summary_Information
we had 7 classes in Egypt and 5 classes in Brazil in Spring 2012; the goals
as you can see from the slide I linked to above showed targeted growth in
the Arab World, Brazil, and Egypt, while maintaining the same number of
classes in the U.S. and Canada. It is not false that we anticipated growth
in the program coming from the Global South, but (as I said above), you can
see pretty clearly that setting goals for programs run by other teams
doesn't work.

LiAnna



>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Tom
>
> On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 12:22 AM, Tilman Bayer <tbayer at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
>
> > Minutes, pre-prepared notes and slides from the mid-year review
> > meeting of the Wikipedia Education Program team have now been posted
> > in a similar format at
> >
> >
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_reviews/Wikipedia_Education_Program/May_2013
> >
> >
> --
> Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
> "A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful
> than a life spent doing nothing."
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>



-- 
LiAnna Davis
Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
http://education.wikimedia.org
(415) 839-6885 x6649
ldavis at wikimedia.org