Blog Entry

We’ve been blessed with amazing clients and projects throughout the years, and I’ve long wanted to write more about this work. Today, I want to talk about one of our clients: The Wikimedia Foundation.

I’m leading a year-long strategic planning process for the Foundation. We’re trying to figure out where Wikimedia should be in five years. That question is hard enough, but there was an even harder question that we needed to answer first: Who’s “we”?

The obvious answer would be the Foundation itself, which consists of about 30 employees and which is paying for this work. Organizational strategic planning is a fairly well understood challenge, and for such a small organization, it’s a process that would take a few months at most.

But this does not seem to be the right answer. The Foundation is the steward of a huge international movement that represent millions of people. It was was founded in 2003, two years after the Wikipedia project started. At that point, the English Wikipedia already had over 100,000 articles, and the German Wikipedia had over 10,000. Wikipedia was already an international phenomenon, with thousands of contributors all over the world.

Today, there are ten Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. These are driven by tens of thousands of volunteer contributors and are governed independent of the Foundation. Wikipedia itself consists of versions in almost 300 different languages. Over 10 million people visit Wikimedia projects every day.

Additionally, there are the Wikimedia Chapters, an international network of organizations that support the Wikimedia movement at a local level. There are currently 24 chapters all over the world.

Finally, there are those who don’t already use or contribute to any of the Wikimedia projects. The Wikimedia vision is a world in which every human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. As much of a phenomenon as Wikimedia has become in its almost nine years of existence, it still has a long way to go before it covers the sum of all knowledge and before every human in the world has access to it.

The right answer to the question, “Who’s ‘we’?”, is, “All of the above.” Believe it or not, having such a broad set of stakeholders does not in and of itself make the Wikimedia strategic planning process unique. Far from it.

What’s unique is that we have the opportunity to do this as an open community process, where anyone and everyone contributes to the planning process. We can do this for two reasons:

1. Because our core community is schooled in the art of mass collaboration in a way that no other group of this size is.
2. Because the stakeholders in this process are committed to doing it this way.

This latter reason cannot be overlooked. Collaboration does not happen without intention, and it’s not sustainable unless there is commitment.

Furthermore, there is an inherent tension between movements and the organizations that emerge to steward them. Strategic planning is typically a top-down process. We’re trying to facilitate it as a bottoms-up process. Committing to mass collaboration generally means giving up control. Top-down organizations don’t like giving up control.

I’ll describe our process in more detail in future posts. For now, feel free to follow along by visiting the strategic planning Wiki.

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