Wikimedia Foundation

From BlueOxen

We're leading the Wikimedia Foundation's open community strategic planning process aimed at maximizing the social impact of the Wikimedia movement world-wide over the coming years. The project will run from July 2009 until July 2010, and will draw upon the experiences and knowledge of a wide range of contributors including Wikimedia volunteers, specialists providing pro bono support, Wikimedia staff and board members, and an external strategy consulting firm. The strategy will be primarily developed through wikis and other online tools, and all planning outputs will be publicly available for review and free re-use.

The project will lead to (1) a paper outlining a five-year vision for the Wikimedia movement; and (2) a five-year strategic plan for the Foundation, which is part of the movement.

Contents 1 Workshops 2 Process 3 Evaluation 4 Background 5 Related Projects

Workshops

• Wikimedia Foundation Staff Meeting (October 2009)
• Wikimania 2009
• Wikimedia Foundation Board Meeting (August 2009)
• Wikimedia-Bridgespan Workshop (August 2009)

Process

See Facilitating Convergence for high-level principles.

The first two weeks will be devoted to creating the space for this process. We will model the larger process starting with the project team. Questions include:

• Do we use Meta? We absolutely must use a Wiki for at least some piece of the process.
• Do we use the foundation mailing list? Yes.
• What other tools do we use, and what constraints do we have? (For example, will we only use Open Source tools?)
• How do we chunk this? What are our milestones?
• How do we include stakeholders who are not active contributors?

There are two things that will happen within (and beyond) the space. People will have the chance to express themselves wherever they want whenever they want. We can't control this, nor do we want to control this. However, we can create guidelines for how to get ideas attention. As a general principle, if you take the time to synthesize ideas, your idea will have a better chance of gaining attention. The PEP process is a very good model for this.

There will be facilitated processes for this. Initially, we'll want to go through an inquiry process where we're collecting and synthesizing questions.

A big focus will be on capturing the community's knowledge.

• Build on what's already been done. This is not the first time there's been a strategic conversation. Capture and refactor what's already been said.

Evaluation

How can we track our progress and evaluate our overall success?

• Community engagement. We want a representative segment of the movement's stakeholders to participate in our process. Things to measure could include:
  • Wiki participation. Who's editing the Wiki? Can we trace the contributions that lead to the final documents?
  • Email participation. Who are we engaging with over email? We're trying to avoid a mailing list specific to the project, although there are existing public mailing lists we can track. More interesting would be to track...
  • Backchannel engagement. Who are we individually engaging with over email? How about in person or over the phone? (We could use CiviCRM to help track this information.)
  • IRC participation. Who's showing up to office hours? What percentage of those folks are also participating elsewhere?
• Quality of the final deliverables. How the heck do we measure that?
• Community trust.

The metrics we use to evaluate our own progress could potentially be applied to the entire community to get a better sense of how they work. For example, I'd like to know what percentage of contributors to Wikimedia's Meta Wiki are active Wikipedians. How evenly distributed are the different language Wikipedias on Meta?

See Forge:Analytics for a starting point of what can be done.

Background

On April 28, 2009, the board resolution for the strategic planning process was announced (email archive).

More information was posted (email archive) the following day, including thoughts on community working groups.

More discussion on the Wikimedia Strategy page.

Related Projects

On March 17, 2010, Phoebe Ayers pointed me to Institute of Museums and Libraries Services' wiki, which they're using for strategic planning.