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This is the second essay of my four-part series on Wikimedia strategy. My first essay, published last week, introduced the movement and discussed some of its impending challenges.

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Last June, just as the Wikimedia strategic planning process was wrapping up, my friend and long-time Wikipedian, Phoebe Ayers, expressed strong concern over the Wikimedia Foundation’s planned growth. The Foundation had said that it planned to grow from 40 employees to almost 200 by 2015, and to go from $15 million to $50 million in annual revenues, representing an annual growth rate of about 40 percent.

Phoebe wrote:

I personally find this level of growth fairly shocking, and potentially ill-considered, but then I have always been nervous about Foundation growth, and about the WMF taking leadership in historically community-driven areas. I worry about the continued ability of community members to get involved in Foundation work (itself a marker of community health), the health of the office itself under such brutal growth, and the financial sustainability and wisdom of such a plan, given that I think we ought to be building an endowment for the long term.

The advantage of our open process was that we had transparently discussed most of these operational questions several months earlier. A Task Force of volunteers focused on financial sustainability had thoroughly reviewed these issues with the help of research culled by both The Bridgespan Group and volunteers. The Task Force had recommended not to pursue an endowment strategy, at least not initially. The research also showed that nonprofits similar in scope and values, such as the Mozilla Foundation, were already larger than the Foundation had proposed to grow five years from now.

Thanks to this work, I had answers to all of Phoebe’s operational questions. I felt especially good about these answers, because they were based on work that the community had done, not some star chamber of “experts.”

But something still gnawed at me. Part of it was that the questions were coming from Phoebe, a thoughtful, highly-respected community leader who, as it turned out, would be elected to the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board a few weeks later. If Phoebe were still bothered by the plan this late in the game, then we were probably missing something.

And we were. The thing we were missing was deep, community discussion around fundamental questions of roles, leadership, and power. We had attempted to have these discussions, but they never picked up steam. I think the reasons for this are pertinent to the larger issues, and I want to discuss both here. Fortunately, it’s never too late to have a discussion, and this is a good opportunity for me to express some thoughts perhaps more strongly than I would have during the strategic planning process this past year.

Power

A wiki is a do-acracy. Things get done, because someone decides to do it. No one has to wait for permission, because the tool itself grants that permission. Anyone and everyone can click on the Edit button and change a page’s content. A wiki is an empowering space that invites participation and trust.

Space matters.

In addition to being a do-acracy, a wiki is an open community. That means that the people who do the work are the people who show up. Collective intelligence theory suggests that if you have a large, diverse group of people and a good participatory process, then the group will act in smart ways.

The challenge is in designing a “good” participatory process and making sure the “right” group shows up. Every group comes with its own power structure that is largely a product of the relationships within. For various reasons, people will listen to one person more than another. It could be because that person is the most knowledgeable, or the most convincing, or simply the most popular. Ideally, the group affords the “right” people power for the “right” reasons, but that’s not always the case.

Social matters.

Then there are the structures that are imposed. They include things like process, governance, culture — in other words, institutional structures. On the surface, Wikimedia’s structure looks very different from traditional organizations. It’s open, it’s bottom-up, it’s flexible, and technically, no one is in charge.

When you look a little deeper, however, it starts to look startingly familiar. There are hierarchy, committees, and titles. There are administrators and stewards. There is a long list of policies, including one called WP:NOBUREAUCRACY. Despite this formal policy prohibiting bureaucracy, there is also the formal position of “bureaucrat,” which comes with its own set of handy acronyms (WP:BUR, WP:CRAT, and WP:BCRAT).

If it sounds a bit Dilbertian, that’s because it is. These structures evolved over time through self-organization rather than imposition, but they are structures all the same, and they end up defining some of the power relationships in the group.

Structure matters.

When I first started working on Wikimedia strategy, I was surprised by how culturally engrained these structures were in the projects. In my previous experiences with wiki communities — including those in the enterprise — I often found people who were on the cutting edge of organizational thinking. These were people who felt stifled by existing structures, and who were anxious to explore other ways.

Many of the long-time Wikimedians I know are like this. Today, however, they seem to be the exception, not the rule. One of the original Wikipedia principles was, “Ignore all rules,” and while it remains one of Wikipedia’s Five Pillars, it’s the one that’s least evident in the culture today. Wikimedia seems to be all about rules.

My best explanation for this is that most people who come to Wikimedia are drawn more by the notion of free knowledge than by open collaboration. Over 80 percent of Wikimedia contributors are single men in their teens and 20s — in other words, students. They are immersed in some of the most rigid institutional structures in our society — schools — and they have little experience outside of that. When they organize, they naturally draw on what they know — structure.

Self-organization requires flexibility and trust. When power is embedded in rigid structures, movements die. You need to convert rigid structures into provisional ones. You can do this by focusing on creating inviting, empowering spaces and building trusting, social relationships. In other words, you need to shift power away from structure and into space and social.

This is hard, and it’s only one step. If culture is reinforcing rigidity, then the culture itself needs shifting. Space and trust play a huge role in facilitating this shift, but at the end of the day, people have to model these new behaviors, and they have to do it an open, transparent way.

Leadership

Action is a form of leadership. So are creating space, building trust, and modeling positive behavior. Anyone can do any of these things, but some are in a better position to do some of these things than others.

One of the amazing things about the strategic planning process was the number of Wikimedians who approached me — both on the wiki, over email, and in person — and apologized for not participating more actively. People in the community felt ownership and responsibility over the process and the plan, and that sometimes resulted in guilt from people who couldn’t participate more actively, guilt that was largely misplaced.

All of those who were busy improving articles, engaging in healthy debate, welcoming new editors, or simply exhibiting kindness to someone else in the community, were doing more for the movement than those of us working on strategy. They were leading by modeling.

The strategy project was important and is already having a meaningful impact on the movement as a whole, but at the end of the day, it would have been meaningless without the community’s regular day-to-day work and play. Our goal was to complement these efforts by building alignment. I was grateful for every person who spared a moment engaging on strategy, and I was even more grateful for the people who chose to give by continuing to do their thing in an open way. Both were necessary.

Action is a form of leadership, and it’s something that the community as a whole is already very good at. It’s particularly important for volunteers to be leading in this way.

But action can also be a detriment to creating space and to building trusting relationships, especially in the hands of a certain kind of power. The instinct to do can sometimes get in the way of building trust and Shared Language, two critical prerequisites to effective collaboration. There is a fine balance between all of these things, and the Wikimedia Foundation in particular needs to be careful to lean in the direction of space and social.

The Foundation’s Role

One form of social power is the ability to make people feel like they belong. I love how community members proudly identify themselves as Wikipedians. They can do this with confidence, knowing that others in the community will acknowledge them as peers. It’s social, not structural power, and it rests in everyone’s hands.

On the other hand, if you were to ask the people who work at the Wikimedia Foundation whether they think of themselves as Wikimedians, most of them would say no. It’s both ironic and ridiculous. These are people who care just as passionately about the mission as anyone else, and who work their butts off every day in pursuit of it. However, most of the staff perceive editors as being the true community, and no one from the community ever tells them otherwise. They haven’t been acknowledged as community members, and so they don’t feel like they belong.

(If you are an editor, and you want to do something simple and powerful for the movement as a whole, pick a staff member, and write on their user page or send them an email. Introduce yourself, thank them for their work, and welcome them to the community. I think you’ll be surprised by how much that means to them, and how much it ends up affecting you. Afterward, don’t stop there. Welcome and acknowledge others in the movement. It makes a huge difference.)

There is a double irony at work here. The first is that technically, the Foundation controls the movement’s identity. It owns the trademarks, which means it also has the legal right to control whether and how people use the identity. This control can prevent blatant misuse of the identity, but it can also be unintentionally disempowering.

The second irony is that many people seek structural acknowledgement from the Foundation, when what they actually want is social acknowledgement. This is largely a cultural artifact, and it is even more pronounced outside of the U.S., where structural power is more engrained.

For example, it means so much to people when Jimmy Wales, Wikimedia’s founder, visits them, even though it has no real structural significance. There is nothing that people can’t do structurally for the movement that requires Jimmy’s blessing. His acknowledgement is purely social, but it is also hugely empowering, and it’s one of the reasons that Jimmy’s role as ambassador is so important and vastly underappreciated. The same holds true for everyone who works at the Foundation.

There’s something else that Jimmy does that’s powerful and underappreciated. He listens. There is nothing more empowering than having people who take the time to listen to you.

The Wikimedia Foundation, as an organization, could do a better job of listening to the community as a whole. There are people within the organization who are great listeners, and they tend to have great relationships with others in the community. But this act of deep, authentic listening is not yet part of the organization’s DNA.

It’s not a matter of intent, it’s a matter of priority. The Foundation as a whole tends to prioritize action over all other things. That can be an outstanding trait, but only in balance with other, more social things: Listening, inviting, welcoming, storytelling. Doing these things well means slowing down, and slowing down is counter-intuitive when you want to get things done.

The Foundation recognizes all of this, at least intellectually, and it’s starting to do some great things. It needs to keep moving in this direction, perhaps more aggressively than it already is. I want to point out two things I think it’s doing particularly well right now.

The first is storytelling. The Foundation is in a unique structural position to share stories about the movement, because when it speaks, others are likely to pay attention. Furthermore, the Foundation is in a unique position to act as a bridge, giving a voice to those in the community who are not widely heard, such as the readers and donors.

The Foundation’s communication team, led by Jay Walsh and Moka Pantages, has done a remarkable job of not only modeling good storytelling, but doing it in a collaborative way. For example, they are using the organization’s blog as a shared space for the community to tell its own stories, such as Wikimedia Netherlands recent partnership with the Dutch National Archives to donate over 1,000 images to Wikimedia Commons, or the combined efforts of Chapters from Israel, Switzerland, and France to send 20 Israeli students to do humanitarian work in Benin and Cameroon.

They’ve also sponsored efforts such as Jelly Helm’s videos series, which gives us a beautiful snapshot of the people behind Wikimedia:

The other remarkable demonstration of community leadership right now is the 2010-2011 fundraiser. Every year, the fundraiser has gradually become more of a Foundation / community partnership, but it’s largely because the community has pushed, while the Foundation has dragged. This year, it’s the other way around, thanks to Philippe Beaudette, who has created a beautiful space for community participation and ownership. He’s started the process early, he’s invited the community to co-create the fundraiser rather than simply “give feedback,” and he’s listened. Sage Ross has dubbed it the “fundraiser that you can edit,” and what could be more apropos than that?

In organizing the fundraiser this way, Philippe isn’t just raising money more effectively. (I think he’s going to blow through last year’s total. No pressure, my friend.) He’s making the community partners in that role, and he’s building their capacity. He’s also creating a bridge between editors and donors, who are critical, but largely invisible community members. For comparison, there are about 93,000 active editors (people who have edited more than five times in a month) in the Wikimedia community. Last year, almost three times that number from all over the world donated an average of $33.

Creating space, listening, and co-creating means slowing down, doing more by doing less. It’s counter-intuitive, and it’s challenging, but it’s beautiful when done right. The Foundation is getting better at this, but it has a long way to go.

Movement Roles

There were two fundamental reasons why the movement roles discussion failed to take off during the strategy project. First, we were trying to do too much. It would have been better to slow down and facilitate a deeper conversation around a few, high priority questions. Second, we did not expend enough effort in creating the space. We could have organized a face-to-face meeting, or we could have traveled more aggressively in order to talk with community members face-to-face.

In other words, we spent more time worrying about coming up with a plan than we did on creating a space and building relationships.

That said, we accomplished a ton, and we still set a high bar for how to create space and facilitate collaboration. But the point isn’t to set a bar, it’s to keep raising it.

The Board recently initiated a new Movement Roles Working Group that is attempting to address some of the issues that weren’t thoroughly discussed in our process. I’m worried that that group, while well-intentioned and seeded with marvelous people, is repeating many of the same mistakes that we did.

My advice to this group would be to focus less on solving all of the problems, which simply isn’t going to happen. Focus instead on bringing the right people into the room and on building trust. Building trust will have far more impact on communication, coordination, and collaboration than any process or tool.

Sometimes, it takes more than an invitation. Right now, the makeup of the group is somewhat predictable. It needs to be more inclusive of other members of the movement, especially editors. That may mean pro-actively seeking these people out and making it convenient for them to participate.

My advice to everyone else: Be aware of the system. As I said earlier, the best thing you can do is to route around the barriers, and make things happen. But as you’re doing this, know also that you are connected to something much, much bigger, a complex mish-mash of people all over the world, all working toward the same beautiful goal:

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.

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Next week, I’ll talk about being bold. My first essay, published last week, introduced the movement and discussed some of its impending challenges.

Categories: Stories
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I’ve recently noticed some worrying anomalies with how I handle myself on some of my client projects. I pride myself on my ability to channel my passions into my work in a professional manner. I believe that people should care tremendously about their work, but that they should also keep it together. I’m usually pretty good at doing both.

Not so this past July.

One of our many strategy discussions at Wikimania 2010 in Gdańsk, Poland. Photo courtesy of Ralf Roletschek.

I was in Gdańsk, Poland for Wikimania, the annual gathering of the Wikimedia movement. I was there to close the open strategic planning process that I had been leading for the past year.

The Wikimedia Foundation Board had scheduled a brief champagne toast at the start of its regular board meeting to celebrate the successful completion of the process. It was 9am, and I was already exhausted. I had already been up for five hours, thanks to jetlag and the 20 hours of daylight common to summers in northern Europe. But I was a pro, and this was going to be easy. All I had to do was raise my glass, thank the board and my team, sip some champagne, shake some hands, and head back to the conference.

I blame Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner for what ensued. Rather than share a few token words of thanks, Sue movingly sang our praises in an obnoxiously heartfelt way. Listening to her speak, I started to reflect on all that had happened over the past year, about the people with whom I had worked, and about what we had set out to do and what we had accomplished.

After her toast, I asked to say a few words, and as I began to speak, this strange salty substance began to cloud my vision. I mindfully acknowledged this unusual emotional response, took a few deep breaths to collect myself, and proceeded to bawl like a baby.

Obviously, the circumstances were responsible for this unusual display of emotion — the jetlag, the oppressive heat and humidity, Sue’s speech, and the booze (James always gets the good stuff) to name a few. However, my feelings toward the project and the community may have played a tiny factor as well.

In all seriousness, what people may not understand is that, for me, this wasn’t simply another job, nor was it simply about the scope of the challenge. Yes, it was an opportunity to help the world’s most incredible free knowledge resource find its way into the future. Yes, it was unprecedented in scale, in scope, and in openness, and as Sue liked to say, it was likely to fail — exactly the kind of odds that get me excited.

Those things were obviously appealing. However, what made this project so special to me were the people and the principles that Wikimedia and that wikis in general represent, and the role they’ve played in my work and my life.

I’ve been an active participant in the wiki community since 2002, when Chris Dent and I first created PurpleWiki. I’ve learned so much from the community and developed so many deep friendships over the years, I relished the opportunity to give something back through this project. And so I did. And in the process, I still managed to get more than I gave. That is the insufferable way of communities that care and that collaborate at scale — you always get back far more than you could ever give.

My job was to create a space where people could co-create and align around a meaningful, useful, movement-wide strategy for the next five years. I had strong opinions on specific topics, but I focused most of my energies on tending that space.

The story of how we designed and maintained that space is an important one. I’ve already given some talks about it, and I’m currently trying to synthesize the whole thing into a nicely written paper. Now that the planning process is over, however, I also want to share some thoughts on the strategy itself, including some things that still need fleshing out.

Every Wednesday for the next four weeks, I’ll write about a different challenge that the Wikimedia movement currently faces. This week, I’ll start by describing the movement itself. In doing so, I hope both to set the stage for the stories to come and to give people a sense of why I care so much about this community and its principles.

The 10,000 Meter View

Most people know Wikimedia through its flagship project, Wikipedia, the amazing, free and open, collaboratively-authored encyclopedia. Wikipedia is actually one of ten Wikimedia projects, and each project itself is an aggregate of many individual language projects.

There are over 250 language versions of Wikipedia, the oldest and largest of which is English, which has over three million articles. The different language versions are not mere translations. They all consist of their own independent communities with independently authored articles and their own unique cultures.

All the different language versions of the 10 main Wikimedia projects add up to over 700 projects in the Wikimedia universe. Collectively, Wikimedia is the fifth most accessed web property in the world, with about 400 million unique visitors a month around the world. For comparison, here are some basic statistics about the top five web sites:

The area of each bubble represents the number of employees in each organization. If you’re having trouble finding the Wikimedia bubble, it’s because it’s practically nonexistent compared to the other ones. Look for the tiny dot on the X-axis at around the 350 million visitor mark.

As you can see, something here is amiss. The other web sites have several orders of magnitude more money and employees. If you extended this picture to the top 10 web sites, you’d see a consistent trend. Facebook is doing an impressive job of maximizing its resources compared to the sites ahead of it, and yet it’s still using several orders of magnitude more resources than Wikimedia ($300 million vs $10 million in annual revenue; 1,200 vs 35 employees).

What could possibly be going on here? The simple answer is that viewing Wikimedia through an organizational lens is misguided, because Wikimedia is a movement, not an organization. (There is a subtler, more complex answer around simplicity and innovation, which I’ll explore in a later post.)

Put another way, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Facebook all represent tools that a whole lot of people just happen to find useful. Wikimedia represents an enormous community and an even bigger network that has come together for a common purpose. That community is responsible for its tremendous success.

“Imagine a World…”

This community articulated its purpose several years ago, resulting in the following vision statement:

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.

This is a beautiful example of a strong vision statement. It’s big, hairy, and audacious, and it’s clear, compelling, and concrete. It also offers a clear starting point for strategy development.

For starters, consider the part about “every single human being.” As a simple indicator for how close Wikimedia currently is to achieving this goal, I’ll use the number of unique visitors accessing Wikimedia on the Internet every month — 400 million.

Four hundred million people is an impressive number, but it’s also only six percent of the world’s population. We have a long way to go before reaching 100 percent. The natural follow-up question is, how do we accelerate the reach of Wikimedia over the next five years? A closer breakdown of this number offers some clues.

The following map shows Wikipedia’s reach as a percentage of the online population in each country:

The obvious conclusion from these numbers is that Wikipedia is reaching lots of people in the Global North and relatively few people in the Global South. If the goal is to accelerate reach over the next five years, it makes sense to focus on increasing penetration in the Global South. Indeed, this was articulated as one of Wikimedia’s five main movement priorities.

The harder question is how to achieve this.

China and India jump out as high potential opportunities. The two countries represent a third of the world’s population, the percentage of their population with online access (both via the Internet and mobile) is rapidly growing, and Wikipedia penetration in those countries is currently very low.

Both countries also have some very unique challenges. The Chinese government censors Wikipedia content and actively endorses competing services, such as Baidu and Hudong.

Both countries — India in particular — have extremely heterogeneous cultures, which complicates outreach. On the other hand, most Indians access and edit English Wikipedia as opposed to the many native Indian languages, such as Hindi. Increasing usage in India may require focusing on making English Wikipedia a more multicultural community as opposed to promoting the many Indic language Wikipedias.

As this is a movement strategy, it’s also important to identify the specific roles that different players could play. Simply identifying these regions as movement-wide priorities will hopefully galvanize those already on the ground in those countries. Furthermore, all of this analysis centers around Wikipedia. Other Wikimedia projects, such as Commons (the free multimedia repository), may be more culturally suitable in these regions than Wikipedia, which is ultimately a Western concept. Again, the hope is that making this opportunity explicit will galvanize people who work on these projects to think about ways to increase their reach in these countries.

Foundation and Chapters

Then there’s the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia Chapters.

The Wikimedia Foundation was founded in 2003, about a year after Wikipedia was created. Its purpose was to serve as the steward for the projects and to keep the servers running. For many years, the Foundation’s primary contribution to the movement was to employ Brion Vibber, Tim Starling, and Mark Bergsma, three of the key maintainers of the open source MediaWiki software and the servers. Beyond this critical, but minimal role, the Foundation mostly floundered, which was fine, because the community, for the most part, was unaware that the Foundation even existed.

As Wikipedia became popular, new needs arose, such as the ability to promote and represent the projects to the press. It quickly became clear that locals were best suited to meet these emerging needs. The movement began to formulate the notion of Chapters, regional entities that would be independent of the Foundation. In 2004, the first (and to this day, the most successful) Chapter — Wikimedia Deutschland — was created.

Today, there are almost 30 Chapters around the world, mostly centered in Europe. I met many Chapter participants throughout the course of the strategic planning process, and interacted with many more online. They are predictably passionate and engaged, and they are doing many great things. They are also largely young and inexperienced in the things that are expected of Chapters — fundraising, outreach, and movement-building to name a few. They will need to build capacity over the coming year if they are to fulfill their potential for the movement over the next five years. These Chapters are in many ways in a similar place as the Foundation was in before Sue Gardner became Executive Director in 2007.

Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner.

Under Sue’s leadership over the past three years, the Foundation has become a 50 person, $15 million organization. The staff includes a small, agile fundraising team, a creative outreach department, and most of the core developers of the MediaWiki software.

Given the current state of the Foundation and the Chapters, what role should they play in increasing penetration in the Global South?

The Foundation’s purpose is to support the movement. By necessity, it must focus on small, high impact investments. Its biggest point of leverage is the technology. Improving the user experience of the tool, for example, will have an across the board impact, including in the Global South.

Its other opportunity is to invest in community capacity. For example, investing in the professionalization of existing Chapters will compound the impact, because the Chapters will then have significantly more capacity. Local Chapters could play a huge role in increasing penetration in the Global South, and there are already Chapters (or similar entities) in India, Brazil, and Indonesia, three potentially high-impact regions.

It’s fairly clear how the Foundation and the stronger Chapters can help regions where there is already some local activity. However, it’s not clear how to support regions where there is nobody already there to support.

Put another way, is it possible to catalyze a grassroots movement from the top-down?

I think the answer to that question is yes, although it is rife with challenges. I’ll explore these in greater detail next Wednesday in a post on community and power.

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Corrections

I had a brain fart in my original post, and referred to the many languages spoken in India as “dialects.” This is totally incorrect, and I’m not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that. Many thanks to Gerard Meijssen for correcting my mistake.

The Wikimedia Foundation was founded in 2003, not 2002. Thanks to Tim Bartel for the correction.

Finally, my bubble chart on the top five web sites had a mislabelled Y-axis. It’s in millions, not thousands. Thanks to Scott Foehner for the correction..

Categories: Stories
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I was blown away by the response to yesterday’s news that Grantsfire was becoming a Foundation Center project. I’ve always felt that Grantsfire was somewhat of a skunkworks project, so it was exciting so see so much interest, and it’s personally exciting for me as one of the initiators of the project.

Grantsfire is a story about a ragtag group of busy individuals who cared passionately about social change, who had a good idea and no time to do it, and who did it anyway. I want to share that story, and I want to offer a challenge to all grantmakers moving forward.

The Data Problem

To understand the premise behind Grantsfire, try answering the following questions:

• Which U.S.-based foundations invested in climate initiatives in 2009?
• How much was invested and in which specific areas?
• Who received these grants?

Substitute “climate initiatives” for any social change initiative, and your answers are probably the same: “I don’t know.”

Here’s the dirty little secret. Nobody really knows.

One of the huge problems in the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors is the lack of good data on grants. The Foundation Center spends millions of dollars every year attempting to collect this data, but it takes at least a year to aggregate and scrub. That’s not a knock on the Foundation Center. Data collection is a hard problem, and the way that foundations do their reporting makes it even harder. Without this data, people can’t even get to the harder and more important problem: Making sense of the data.

So people try to apply bandages. Affinity groups, for example, spend a huge portion of their time surveying their members, trying to collect this data themselves. Program officers often rely on word-of-mouth from their grantees to learn about other foundations in their space.

Why does all this matter? Good, real-time data allows people to make good decisions in real-time. It helps foundations fund strategically, and it helps both foundations and nonprofits work collaboratively. Simply seeing where the money is being invested opens up opportunities for collaboration and smart followership.

Grantsfire Is Born

From left to right: Gavin Clabaugh, Eugene Eric Kim, Jason Ricci, Eugene Chan, and Patrick Collins. Missing Katrin Verclas and Michael Gilbert.

Katrin Verclas (then of N-TEN, now of MobileActive), Eugene Chan (then of Community Technology Foundation of California), and Gavin Clabaugh of Mott Foundation first conceived of Grantsfire in 2005 as part of the short-lived Innovation Funders Network. They were inspired by a proposal that Michael Gilbert made in 2004.

Michael’s proposal was simple and brilliant. Grantmakers should publish the grants they make in real-time on their web sites. If they used a standard format, anyone could aggregate and analyze that data. Michael suggested using RSS, which is a standard used across the web for syndicating information.

Katrin, Eugene, Gavin, and Michael discussed the idea, and decided that there needed to be an additional layer of structure over RSS that was grant-specific. Katrin had heard about something called microformats that she thought could be useful. She wanted to get some feedback on that idea. So she gave me a call.

Microformats are a clever way of structuring data using standard HTML, which is the language that all web sites use to present information. The advantage of using microformats is that you can use any standard web design program to generate them. There’s no need to learn a new language or use special tools.

I told Katrin that using a microformat was a smart choice. It lowered the bar for publishing structured data even further. I also told her that I thought that the overall idea was brilliant, but that I was too busy to do anything more than offer advice here and there.

A few weeks later, I found myself at the Community Technology Foundation of Californias offices in San Francisco with Katrin and Eugene, mapping out a schema for grants data, which we dubbed hGrant. A few months later, I found myself at TAG in Baltimore meeting with Eugene, Gavin, Patrick Collins, and Jason Ricci.

Patrick had just joined the Hewlett Foundation as its CIO, and he also loved the idea of Grantsfire. (He has a saying which explains how all of us suddenly found ourselves involved in this project: “If you want to get something done, ask a busy person.”)

Jason “working” at one of our meetings hosted by the Community Technology Foundation of California.

Jason was a successful product designer who wanted to build an open source grants management tool. The synergy between the two ideas was obvious, and he wanted to participate. Jason is irascible and impatient. He’s also one of the nicest, most genuine people I know, and despite his pragmatism, he’s also an idealist. He, more than anyone, is the reason Grantsfire is where it is today.

Based on our discussions, I pulled together a spec and wrote a quick demo to show how easy it was to publish and parse hGrant. Eugene, Gavin, and Patrick scraped together about $15,000 from their combined budgets, and Jason and his developer (Keith Grennan) wrote the first aggregator. In the meantime, Gavin and Patrick drummed up additional resources to implement the spec at Mott and Hewlett. Total time from our last meeting to a working prototype with live data? Six weeks.

It took us about three months working in our limited spare time to take a good idea and make it real. We thought the road to transforming the sector was just around the corner. We felt justifiably high.

Then we got stuck.

The Adoption Challenge

“Never confuse a clear view with a short path.” –Paul Saffo

From day one, we felt that our biggest challenge would be adoption. Our first goal was to eliminate technical barriers as an excuse. We felt we had done that. Our next step was to overcome the cultural barriers. We were optimistic. We thought that our rapid proof of concept, our large collective network of connections, and having two major foundations on board so quickly would galvanize others to participate. We started fundraising and evangelizing.

One of the first questions we had to grapple with was, “Are you competing with the Foundation Center?” Our answer was no. We saw our work as naturally complementing the Foundation Center, and in private, we all thought that the natural future home for this work was the Foundation Center. Our goal was real-time data, and we were willing to sacrifice certain things to get rough numbers quickly. We saw the Foundation Center’s value in a world of openly available data as cleaning it up and making sense of it. We wanted to make it easier for the Foundation Center and anyone else to do just that.

Furthermore, we released the code under an open source license. Anyone could take our code, run it,, and modify it. We didn’t want to assume that ours had to be the only aggregator. Our goal was to catalyze change and to maximize the potential for emergence.

While we generated lots of interest, we weren’t able to raise the funds we needed to really sell the concept. We had three people on our team from foundations, and one person with significant fundraising experience, so the odds should have been in our favor. This was the first time I was personally involved making a grant pitch to foundations, and I found it grueling and frustrating. In the meantime, we all continued trying to convince foundations to adopt the spec and make their data available.

We ran into three main barriers:

• The people who were most excited by the idea tended to be the least empowered to make that decision within their organization. These included CIOs and communications people.
• Many people felt that they were already doing their part by publishing their 990s or giving their data to Foundation Center, and they didn’t see the value in making their data publicly available in real-time.
• Fear.

Many people didn’t understand the technology, and they naturally didn’t want to mess with something they didn’t understand. Many more were scared of the implications of this kind of transparency, which in fairness, are not simple or straightforward. And frankly, many people were simply afraid of looking stupid. In their eyes, it was better to do nothing than to risk failure.

We kept running into brick wall after brick wall, and we hadn’t raised the money to sustain our energy. A few of us, including me, essentially dropped off the project. Everyone else kept trucking along, including Jason. I was surprised by that, because Jason was probably more frustrated than any of us. I hadn’t realized how stubbornly persistent he was, and how much he believed in the importance of our work. We also acquired more valuable talent along the way, including John Soulsby, Kristen Barrali, and Casey West.

Breakthroughs and a Gauntlet

Starting in late 2008, we experienced three breakthroughs. First, Gavin managed to secure a grant from Mott to push Grantsfire forward. It was the first significant funding we had received, and Jason was tasked to manage the project.

Second, Jason became the CIO of Energy Foundation, where he was given the opportunity to implement his original vision of an open source grants management tool. (Watch out for it. It is spectacular. Energy Foundation is already using it, and it will release it to the world later this year.) Not having to deal with startup hours and the grind of product management enabled him to refocus his energies.

Third, Brad Smith became president of the Foundation Center. I have not had the pleasure of meeting Brad, but by all accounts, he is someone who gets it.

I don’t know the exact details of how Grantsfire became a Foundation Center project, and so that’s not my story to tell. I will say that the experience seems to have been very positive, and I am personally thrilled that this happened. Foundation Center is the right home for this work, and I hope they understand the value of why we designed it the way we did. Furthermore, our adoption strategy has always centered around eliminating excuses. We’ve now eliminated the question of whether to give it to Grantsfire or the Foundation Center (which was always a red herring anyway). Now the answer is, give it to the Foundation Center.

I feel blessed to have been included in this project and to have had the opportunity to work with such a remarkable group of people. That said, the work is not done. At the end of the day, foundations still need to commit to publishing their data openly and in real-time. It’s shameful that it hasn’t happened already, especially considering the comparable transparency of our financial markets.

And so, I’d like to offer the following challenge to all of the foundations listening: Have an open conversation about this. Your concerns are complex and real, and they need to be addressed. But don’t fall into the trap of analysis paralysis either. Grantsfire offers a simple, straightforward way to do some good and improve the sector. Take that first step, and support the work that the Foundation Center will now be doing.

Categories: Stories
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Monitor Institute’s Future of Philanthropy Workshop

Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of participating in the Monitor Institute’s gathering on the next 10 years of philanthropy. Representatives from institutional and individual philanthropy along with folks like me came together to talk about how philanthropy can adapt to the rapidly changing world.

In the afternoon, we broke out into teams. Our task was to come up with an innovative way of addressing a specific challenge. At the end of the day, we would vote on the most viable ideas. The winner would walk away with applause and chocolate.

Making Followership Sexy

I ended up with a great group of folks: Lance Fors of Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund’s, Bob Hughes formerly of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Mayur Patel of Knight Foundation, Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy, and Kelvin Taketa of Hawaii Community Foundation.

After some discussion instigated and facilitated by Monitor consultants Gabriel Kasper and Edward Wexler-Beron, our group decided to focus on followership. Specifically, we wanted to dispel the notion that leadership is about doing something first or by yourself.

The most prominent example of this was Warren Buffett’s decision on June 25, 2006 to give away most of his fortune (about $30 billion) to the Gates Foundation, esentially doubling its already massive endowment. Why not give his fortune to his own foundation? Buffett explained:

I came to realize that there was a terrific foundation that was already scaled-up — that wouldn’t have to go through the real grind of getting to a megasize like the Buffett Foundation would — and that could productively use my money now.

…

If you think about it — if your goal is to return the money to society by attacking truly major problems that don’t have a commensurate funding base — what could you find that’s better than turning to a couple of people who are young, who are ungodly bright, whose ideas have been proven, who already have shown an ability to scale it up and do it right?

You don’t get an opportunity like that ordinarily. I’m getting two people enormously successful at something, where I’ve had a chance to see what they’ve done, where I know they will keep doing it — where they’ve done it with their own money, so they’re not living in some fantasy world — and where in general I agree with their reasoning. If I’ve found the right vehicle for my goal, there’s no reason to wait.

Buffett’s decision went a long way into making followership sexy, but in some ways, it seems strange that this announcement made news at all. In finance, this stuff is de rigeur. As Sean explained in a great blog post, investors follow the “smart money” all the time. For a variety of reasons, this has not been true in philanthropy. We wanted to change this.

The Smart Money Award

Our idea was simple. We would create the Smart Money Award, recognizing outstanding examples in philanthropy of followership.

We felt it important to make cash part of the award, so we tapped into the vast financial resources at the table (our wallets) and managed to scrape together $50. We wanted a nice certificate, so we recruited Lynn Carruthers, our graphic facilitator, who did an outstanding job under extreme duress.

We needed an outlet for publicizing the award, and so everyone around the table committed to blogging about the winners.

We needed a process for deciding who would get the award, and we decided that initially, we would do.

Finally, we needed an inaugural recipient. This was the fun part. There were a lot of great stories of followership in the room, and we rapidly converged on a winner… the Kellogg Foundation for its pledge last year to spend $16 million on the Buffett Early Childhood Fund:

Sterling Speirn, Kellogg’s president, says he saw no reason to start from scratch when a good approach to advocacy and education was already in place.

The Kellogg Foundation accepts the inaugural Smart Money Award from our team.

Or as Anne Mosle, Kellogg’s vice president of programs, stated, “We don’t believe we have to lead everything.”

We made our pitch — one of ten teams to do so. Anne and several others from Kellogg were there, and they graciously and enthusiastically accepted the award.

After votes were counted, not only were we the winner of the competition, several people had thrown in some cash with their votes. Total amount: $50, just enough for our next award!

Working with these guys on the Smart Money Award was a ton of fun. Everyone was sharp and committed. Not only did we align quickly, but we weren’t satisfied with simply making a pitch. It was a simple idea with a potentially powerful impact, and we all believed in it.

So we did it. And we’re going to keep doing it. After all, we have another $50 to give away.

If you have stories of great followership in the philanthropic sector that you think we should know about, email them to smartmoneyawards@gmail.com. We’ll consider them for the next award

Update

April 5, 2010: Here’s Sean’s post on the Smart Money Award.

Categories: Stories
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How is collaborating face-to-face different from collaborating online?

In attempting to answer this question, it’s easy to make generalizations. You can’t develop trust online. You can’t develop meaningful relationships online.

The problem is that actual experience contradicts these generalizations. Trusting, meaningful relationships are possible online. Online collaboration can be just as effective as face-to-face, and at times, moreso. Well, if this is the case, then what’s the value of face-to-face collaboration? Why do we need it, especially in a down economy when the cost of convening starts seeming like a luxury?

I’ve put together a 10-minute slidecast that explores these questions and articulates the real differences between online and face-to-face collaboration. (Hit the play button to watch.)

Elaborating on the Nuances

I had two intentions in creating this presentation. First, I wanted to counter some of the myths about online collaboration. Second, I wanted to articulate a framework for how to think about these different modes of interaction. That framework boils down to three points:

Artifacts are critical for effective collaboration. We use them all the time in face-to-face collaboration, and they usually work the same way face-to-face as they do online. For example, the best online brainstorming tools apply the same principles as the best face-to-face brainstorming processes using a whiteboard or Post-Its. Online collaboration is unique in that every interaction results in an artifact. That doesn’t make it inherently better, as the default artifact isn’t necessarily the best. But, this property leads to the second point, which is that…

Online enables scale. Because you’re working in a medium that is inherently replicable and shareable and where geographical limitations do not apply, you can potentially reach a much larger audience. The key word is potential. Actually attaining scale online is a huge challenge, and how you frame that goal is critical. Size, for example, may not be as important as diversity.

Face-to-face buys you attention. You cannot guarantee people’s presence (in the metaphysical sense) online, and that makes it hard to tackle certain types of problems. Getting that level of focused attention is possible, but the cost of doing it online is higher. This is the most important point, and understanding the nuances of it determines whether or not your collaborative strategy will be effective.

This slidecast is a good example of all three things. If I had given this talk without the aid of the slides, it may have been hard to visualize certain things such as the Tic-Tac-Toe exercise. This would have held true if this talk were delivered face-to-face as well. The slides as artifacts made a critical difference in communicating the ideas.

Because it’s recorded and available online, it allowed me to make it available widely and get feedback from a variety of sources, some of them unexpected, all of them appreciated. I heard back from about ten people and got detailed feedback from three. If this were face-to-face, I would have incurred additional costs in the time and resources required to arrange meetings, deliver the presentation, and listen to the feedback. Since it’s online, the only additional cost is the cost of listening, which I will gladly pay.

Attention is the tricky factor. Because it’s available anytime, the ten people who gave me feedback were able to watch the slidecast on their own schedule. Because of the nature of their feedback, I can be fairly certain they paid attention while watching it.

According to my statistics, in the three days it’s been online, the slidecast has been viewed almost 200 times. However, how many of those people were paying close attention? Of those who were, how can I get their attention long enough to get their feedback?

If I were delivering this presentation to a room with 200 people, I could be fairly certain that I had their attention. Or, I could use various tricks to get their attention, and I would have instant feedback as to whether those tricks worked. The effort required to accomplish a similar effect online is much, much higher, and the results are less certain. If it were critical for me to get a known group of 200 people to watch, pay attention to this presentation, and give me feedback afterward, in the end, the cost of gathering those people in a room might actually be lower than delivering this presentation online. Figuring out whether or not that’s the case is the hard part.

Finally, I don’t want to understate the important, emotional benefits of face-to-face interaction, the power of being in another person’s presence, the power of touch. Ultimately, that’s what being human is all about. However, the impact of that physical presence in the context of collaborative processes is often overstated. Hopefully, my slidecast helped demonstrate this.

The perfect collaborative strategy for solving really hard, really big problems ideally leverages face-to-face and online interactions. This framework offers clues on when to leverage which mediums.

Categories: News, Stories
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Happy New Year, everyone! Welcome to the new decade!

This morning, I eschewed my usual routine of checking my email as soon as I woke up. I wanted to dictate how I kicked off the New Year. I wanted to be proactive, not reactive. So, I went for a run. It felt good. Now I feel strong and in control, and my mind is clear. I’m ready to take on this new year, this new decade, this ongoing adventure.

Maybe the next few days or even the next few weeks will be like today. Maybe they’ll be even better. Or maybe, I’ll return to my old habit of rolling out of bed and checking (and often responding to) my email first thing in the morning.

Martin Heidegger contended that technology was insidious because it made us forget our essential humanness. In this day and age, that’s an easy contention to understand.

Your Inner Circle

Back in 2008, my girlfriend told me that you are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with. I thought a lot about that claim and whether it applied to my own life, and I was troubled. When I really thought about it, I was fairly certain I was spending most of my time with people I didn’t want to be spending time with.

I decided to take a look at some hard numbers. I used a tool called mail-trends on both my personal and work email accounts to see whom I was emailing the most.

I was reasonably happy with the numbers from my personal email, but I was distraught by the results of my work email. I interacted a lot with my clients, which was a good thing. (I love my clients!) However, I was also receiving an inordinate amount of email from people whom I didn’t want to be talking to. Worse, I was sending just as much email back to these same people. To top it off, I found that I often didn’t get around to responding to people whom I did want to be talking to.

It would have been easy to blame email for these woes, so naturally, I did. After all, email is designed to focus your attention on your inbox, and by default, it doesn’t place any barriers around that inbox. You end up ceding your attention to the people who email you the most, whether you like it or not.

One year ago today, I resolved to change this.

I did okay — not as well as I would have liked, but better than usual. Awareness made a big difference. I did some obvious things, such as emailing and calling people I wanted to talk to. I also made some structural changes. For example, I started the Blue Oxen Barnstars podcast, which was a great excuse for me to talk to people I wanted to talk to.

I also made some changes to how I managed my email inbox. I recently ran mail-trends again, and saw that my email situation improved a lot this past year. But it’s still not where I want it to be. At times, I wonder whether I want to be on email at all.

Tools As Space

A few months ago, Jelly Helm wrote a provocative post, where he said he was feeling “over” social media. He asked, “How does the screen/Interpipe enhance our humanity? How does it detract from it? How can it add more joy to our lives? When does it take away joy?”

Environment matters. We know this from situational psychology, which has shown over and over again that our surroundings can dictate our behavior. If we understand and acknowledge this, then one path toward transformation is to change that space. Life coach Martha Beck has suggested that your living space is a reflection on your life and that the room that gives you the most anxiety is an indication of the part of your life that needs the most work. Her solution? Revamp that room!

Digital tools are simply another form of space, but it’s a space that has magical properties. The notion of distance still exists, but its properties are completely different. When Chris Dent and I started Blue Oxen Associates, we spent a grand total of one week in the same room together over the course of two years. This past year, I spent more time with Philippe Beaudette than with anyone else, and he lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

I like to work late into the night, and through the power of Identi.ca, I get to watch some of my friends half-way around the world wake up and start their day. I wish I could be in the same room as them, but these small, seemingly trivial connections make them feel less far.

Digital tools have magical properties, but unless those properties are properly harnessed, they are largely potential. Magic does not, by default, make our lives better.

As designers, we need to think about what makes digital tools meaningful spaces. Tools have affordances that encourage us to behave in certain ways.

Facebook is one of my favorite tools in the world. Many of the people I want to be engaging with — regardless of context — are on it. More importantly, most of these people are actually engaging on it. They are not simply passive participants. The typical long-tail curve of participation does not seem to apply on Facebook. At last month’s PARC panel on technology-mediated social participation, Facebook’s in-house sociologist, Cameron Marlow, said that the average Facebook user posts 25 comments a month. That is a stunning participation rate for an online community.

Good tools encourage certain types of behavior, but they don’t mandate it. They might make it very hard to choose, but in the end, we still have a choice.

How we choose to leverage tools so that they help make our lives more meaningful is up to us. Sometimes, it means walking away. I have friends who have chosen not to be on Facebook, and they seem quite happy with that choice. Jelly’s solution was to prune his list of Facebook friends. (I wonder if it helped?)

We still have a lot to learn about the digital medium and how it affects our ability to be human. I am not a determinist, but I am an optimist. I don’t believe that tools are inherently good or bad, but I believe that they can be marvelous, sometimes in transformational ways. I am excited by this possibility. But to harness that potential, we need to work at it, and we need to maintain a constant level of self-awareness. I truly believe that self-awareness is the secret to good living, and that this truth spans across time, space, and tools.

Categories: Stories
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Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of finally meeting Beth Kanter in the flesh at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, where she is serving as a visiting scholar.

I’ve known of Beth and her work for years through the tight-knit nonprofit technology community, where she is a superstar. I’ve followed her on her blog, on Twitter, and on Facebook. I’ve referred her to others, including donors.

I’ve heard people say over and over through the years that you can’t build trust over the Internet, that you need to meet people face-to-face in order to truly trust them. Well, I trusted Beth before I ever met her. I even trusted her enough to refer her to others. The question is why?

Why is trust so important? How do you build it? And what role does technology play in building trust?

Driving in the Developing World

Driving in Kano, Nigeria.

Some of my biggest epiphanies about trust have come in my work in developing countries, where cultural differences have helped highlight how much good collaboration depends on trust. One of the best examples of this is how we drive.

Driving in Nigeria is like a traffic jam without the standstill. People weave in-and-out of traffic at full speed. Some of the roads have painted lines and dividers, but as far as I can tell, they are purely decorative.

In the U.S., we are taught to drive defensively. In Nigeria, they learn to drive skillfully. You can’t afford to wait for an opening or hope that someone will wait for you to complete a lane change or a turn, because they won’t.

Last November, my Nigerian colleague, Yahaya Hashim, came to Los Angeles for the ILA conference. As an L.A. native, I took it upon myself to show him the local surroundings in my car. As I drove, I was surprised to see Yahaya flinching on several occasions. While driving in L.A. may intimidate those from other cities, it should have been a piece of cake for a Nigerian. After seeing him flinch while taking an ordinary right turn, I finally asked him what was wrong.

Dr. Yahaya Hashim of dRPC.

As it turned out, I was turning right at the same time as a car in the opposing direction was turning left. I turned into the right-most lane, and the other car simultaneously turned into the lane to my left. Neither of us thought much of it. I trusted that the other car would not try to go into my lane. Yahaya, coming from a different world and world-view, did not share that trust.

In the U.S., we trust that people will obey driving rules. We trust that the water served to us in restaurants is potable. We trust that the change that we receive from stores is not counterfeit. We trust that our buildings and bridges are sturdy and safe. Imagine what it would be like if we didn’t trust in all these things.

Trust is empowering. It is the underpinning of successful groups, both large and small. Trust frees us to do things that would otherwise not be possible. It’s hard to appreciate the importance of trust… until it goes away.

Building Trust

How do we gain trust in the first place? To some extent, I think that most people Assume Good Faith until proven otherwise. (In fact, cooperation theory suggests that this is the best strategy for working with others. Not coincidentally, it is a core principle for the Wiki community. More on this later.)

Good faith is bolstered by other things. I had never met Beth before last Thursday, but I trusted her because my friends and colleagues trust her (trust by proxy). I trusted her because she is transparent with her work, and I’ve had a chance to evaluate it first-hand (trust by transparency). I trusted her even more after breaking bread with her, listening to her smart questions, and discovering how delightful she was (trust by relationship-building).

During my Packard Foundation talk, I stressed the importance of relationship-building for building trust and catalyzing collaboration in networks. Beth tweeted:

a lot of trust in networks is built over food and drink

Valdis Krebs responded:

even more is built over task/work/project

It’s important not to lose sight of this. First, trust is contextual. You might trust that a person is a good friend, but that doesn’t mean that person is a good roommate, a good partner, or a good colleague.

Second, trust is built through experience. The more you work with people, the more you see people fulfill their commitments, the more you trust them.

When I design workshops, I jokingly promise, “No trust falls!” I actually like trust falls. I love creating experiences where people learn to recognize the importance of trust. The problem is, I could fall backwards into someone’s arms a thousand times, and that won’t make me trust that person any more if he or she has repeatedly flaked out on me. Breaking bread with someone might convince me that he or she is a good person, but it tells me nothing about whether that person is an effective, competent worker.

Three Lessons

I think there are three lessons here.

First, Assume Good Faith. Society works because we trust people we don’t know. If you are constantly second-guessing people you have to work with, you will not have an effective working relationship.

Second, Relationship-Building Matters. You are more likely to trust people you know. Building relationships is an important and underappreciated strategy for catalyzing collaboration in networks.

Third, Work Matters More. Good faith and strong relationships are rendered meaningless if you don’t do your work.

Note that none of things require face-to-face interaction. In fact, you could make a strong argument that in some situations, online interaction is a better way to build trust. If I walk into a storefront, and the storeowner is smiling and looks friendly, I might be inclined to trust him or her. But looking friendly is a poor reason for trusting someone. I would have a much better reason to trust a merchant on eBay with a perfect rating and thousands of comments raving about how good he or she is.

Categories: Stories
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Today, The New York Times wrote about our work with the Wikimedia Foundation.

Noam Cohen speaks at Wikimania 2009. Photograph by Beatrice Murch.

Noam Cohen, who wrote the article, is someone who deeply understands the Wikimedia movement. (He has more edits on Wikipedia than I do.) In past articles about Wikipedia, he’s ably and concisely captured the different nuances, which is not easy.

I’m not sure he had the opportunity to do that this time. It’s a short article, and the point he’s making is somewhat subtle. Or maybe I’d just like to think that, since I’m featured in the piece. Regardless, I’d like to at least expand on my part of the story. At best, I’ll be able to clarify some points (or at least give my opinion about them). At worst, I’ll tell some entertaining stories about how I ended up in the article.

Last week was Wikimania, which is the annual gathering of Wikimedians from all over the world. This year’s conference was held in Buenos Aires, Argentina. As anyone who has ever traveled for work knows, unless you are planning to take some time off, you don’t generally have time for sight-seeing. I knew that this trip was going to be particularly tight, as it was going to be our first opportunity to discuss the Wikimedia strategic planning process in person with the wider community.

Given these constraints, I decided to focus on two non-work items: Eating Argentinian beef, and seeing the Madres de Plaza de Mayo march. One of my best friends, Sarah, has studied and worked with the Madres for practically her entire adult life, and I wanted to pay my respects to their moving cause while I was there.

So last Thursday morning, when Noam first approached me about the strategic planning process and asked me if I would set aside some time to talk to him, I responded, “Do you want to go see the Madres this afternoon?”

He gamely agreed. That afternoon, he, I, and Philippe Beaudette, the strategic planning process’s brilliant facilitator, set out to the Plaza de Mayo. Along the way, we had a long, engaging conversation about our backgrounds, about the strategic planning process, and about Wikimedia in general.

Noam turned out to be a well-meaning provocateur. He asked hard-hitting questions, some of which seemed to be out of left field, but he was also fair. I really enjoyed chatting with him (which made me nervous; I’m not sure if that’s a good thing when talking to a journalist), and we ended up talking long after our walk.

The Mothers of the Disappeared march at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. Photograph by Eugene Eric Kim.

Noam opens his article with an off-the-cuff remark I made while watching the Madres. I was a bit put off by the tourist spectacle at the Plaza de Mayo, even more so because I was actively participating in it. I also learned something about the Madres I didn’t know before. In the mid-1980s, they had split into two factions. A small faction had decided to work actively with the government (and accept a monetary settlement) to bring attention to its cause. The remaining Madres had decided never to accept any help from the government until it fully admitted its wrongdoing.

It was clear to all bystanders that these two factions were not friendly with each other. When we learned the reason for this, we all nodded our heads in understanding. “Money changes everything,” I said to Noam.

And therein lies the point of Noam’s article. “Professionalization” means that, among other things, money is involved. And money is often a signal that things are about to change.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In this case, it’s a necessary thing. The Wikimedia projects have long surpassed what is possible without significant resources. Technical infrastructure is the most obvious need, and many would argue that there are many others. The question is what, and how much? The project is lucky to have a large, grassroots community of individual donors and a growing base of foundation donors. Does the supply meet the demand? Or, could supply even be surpassing demand?

Blue Oxen Associates principal, Eugene Eric Kim, at Wikimania 2009. Photograph by Beatrice Murch.

This is a critical question for the strategic planning process, but while we explore it, we’re also living it. The reality is that the Wikimedia Foundation and its network of chapters already exist, that these organizations all have a budget, and that our work is currently part of that budget.

That brings me to my rather cryptic quote at the end of Noam’s article: “It is important to me that my participation have a beginning and an end.”

I don’t want to assume that where Wikimedia currently is at is where it necessarily wants to be. We’re in the midst of a great experiment. We will deliver what is expected of us, but we are going to make mistakes along the way. The question in my mind is not so much how well we do this time around, but how well the community learns from this process and what it does with that learning afterward.

Bureaucracies form to help movements scale, but the nature of bureaucracy is to seek self-sustenance, which sometimes comes at the expense of the original mission. As one of the “professionals” involved in this whole endeavour, I don’t want to be a part of that. The key to avoiding this trap is to stay self-aware, to constantly ask ourselves the kinds of questions that Noam asks in his article.

Categories: Stories
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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.

Categories: Stories
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When I tell people that I’m in the collaboration business, most people stare politely and expectantly, waiting for me to explain what that means. Collaboration encompasses many things, and to really be in the business of improving collaboration, you have to address all of those things, both individually and in relation to each other. It’s not only possible to deal with all the different aspects of collaboration, it’s necessary if you want to improve. However, it helps to have a model for thinking about collaboration.

I recently created a three-minute slidecast our definition and model of collaboration:

As is evident here, we’re starting to experiment with slidecasting and other mediums for communicating our ideas. I welcome your feedback about the model itself and about the slidecast.

Categories: Stories
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