Something in Oliver's departure email caught my eye:
* "Because we are scared and in pain and hindered by structural biases and hierarchy, we are worse at our jobs." (quoted with Oliver's permission)*
And that got me thinking. WMF, an organization that was built with the open and community-driven principles - why have we became the classic example of a corporate multi-level hierarchy? Should we mimic a living organism rather than a human-built pyramid?
This may sound naive and wishful, but could we have a more flat and flexible team structure, where instead of having large teams with sub-teams, we would have small self-forming teams "by interest". For example, someone decides to dedicate their 20% to building support for storing 3D models in wiki. Their efforts are noticed, the community shows its support, and WMF reacts by increasing project resourcing. Or the opposite - the community questions the need of a project, and neither the team nor WMF can convincingly justify it - the project resources are gradually reduced.
An organism reacts to the change of its environment by redistributing resources to the more problematic areas. Would small, flexible, and more focused teams achieve that better?