Hi everyone-
Today, we are rescheduling the Naming Convention Proposal community review
planned for May 7 - 21, including tomorrow's live presentation. This
critical part of the Movement Brand Project is designed to share and
review compelling,
unifying naming proposals that would sustain our free knowledge mission far
into the future. [1]
We are incredibly excited to talk NAMES with our communities. We know how
important naming is to the Movement, and together we’ve made considerable
progress on options that would allow us to invite and inspire people to
join us. People join the movements that move them, and we want our Naming
Convention Proposals to be both functional and appealing.
We are particularly interested in “Wiki” as a potential direction, often
suggested by the community and widely used in our Movement. However, there
are significant practical issues with "Wiki" due to the relevant trademark
landscape. We do not want to present to you an option that we could not
make work. The fastest thing to do would be to remove it from the
possibilities, but we hear your preferences and we don’t want to do that.
Instead, we need more time to expand the research and risk evaluation with
our Legal team and the Board to fully understand what opportunities we
have.
We recognize that changing timing may appear to avoid a necessary and
promised discussion. Nothing could be further from our intentions. We want
to meet our commitment to you to present the best options based on the
conversations we’ve had so far, instead of a more limited set of options
that we had to narrow in order to meet our deadline. We want to have more
exploration and clarity on the risks, costs, and rewards of naming changes
to share with you at this critical phase.
Collaborating with our Legal team and the Board, we will work to have more
details to share with you soon. The Project Team will meet with the Board
of Trustees during their May 22nd summit, and will follow up as soon as we
can after.
Yours in branding,
- Zack, Essie, Elena, Samir, Rupika and the entire Brand Project team
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/Wikimedia_brands/2030_moveme…
--
Zack McCune (he/him)
Director of Brand
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>