Strategic Planning update

Theo10011 is a bureaucrat and administrator at Wikimedia's Strategic Planning Process.

The Wikimedia Foundation's Strategic Planning Process began as a major initiative in July 2009, designed to provide an outlet for the community to formulate a five-year plan that will shape the direction of the Foundation and its projects. Community members, consultants, staff members and benefactors were invited to come together to contribute in a single forum, task forces were established to formulate recommendations, and everyone involved was invited to write proposals and provide recommendations. Eugene Eric Kim and Philippe Beaudette served as facilitators (see also Eekim's earlier Signpost article: The challenges of strategic planning in a volunteer community); they developed and nurtured the Strategic Planning Process over the next few months. The Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit strategy consulting group, facilitated the interviews and provided consulting for the process along with Eugene on behalf of his consulting firm, the Blue Oxen Group.

As a result, there were close to 900 proposals, 14 task forces, a repository for statistics gathered for the process, and a specialized community to discuss and influence the direction of all Wikimedia projects. Editors were invited to vote on proposals and provide feedback, and a task force comprising some of the authors of the proposals finalized the recommendations based on their proposals. The strategy wiki also served as a testbed for two relatively new software features - the LiquidThreads talk pages and the feature for rating the proposals. After many passionate discussions, debates and brainstorming sessions—some of which occurred face-to-face at the recent Wikimania in Gdansk—we finally had a road-map for where the Foundation will proceed over the next few years.

Broad groups of people were enlisted to discuss and refine these ideas. Bridgespan conducted interviews with many different specialists, such as Ward Cunningham (the inventor of the wiki) and the late political scientist Howard Zinn, and comparisons were made with the business models of similar organizations, such as the Mozilla Foundation.

The Priorities outlined five specific areas of focus:

achieving continued growth in readership;

focusing on quality content;

increasing participation;

stabilizing the infrastructure;

encouraging innovation.

The Foundation will focus on the Global South to achieve its growth in readership for the next decade—particularly India, Brazil and the Middle East. It will increase the quality of the content by focusing on more collaborations with cultural institutions, increasing inter-project collaboration across different languages and projects, and establishing quality baseline and reader-submitted rankings to judge the 'quality' metric. To increase participation, the Foundation will focus on increasing entry of new editors into some of the mature projects, and achieving higher retention rates among all editors. To stabilize the infrastructure, there will be a target of 99.99% uptime for site availability with secure offline copies of all projects, along with regular measurements of site performance in different parts of the world. The Foundation will nurture more community-oriented campaigns as well as internal Wiki related gadgets, tools, and extensions for use in all the projects, and will provide up-to date archives of public data to researchers.

At this stage, we want to circulate these priorities as widely as possible and to encourage those who supported them to view them and complete a survey that will provide metrics for comparison on what we want to achieve. Sue Gardner sent out an email recently asking community members to provide feedback to the Movement Priorities through this survey. It is intended to give a target range and provide a benchmark for the priorities, and will be available until August 15. The "Movement priorities", targets, and measures of success are located at Strategic Planning Movement Priorities. The process is ongoing, and all community members—existing and new participants in the Process—are invited to read them and provide feedback. The finalized strategy plan will be presented to the Board for approval in late August.

Although the Strategy Process is nearly finalized, there is still room for discussion along with a repository of facts and figures for the community to examine. Above all, there is now a place for the community to discuss the direction that it is going to take. As a member of the strategy wiki, I would like to acknowledge all the support provided by Eugene and Philippe. Without their tireless guidance and continued support, this process would not have been possible; so, thank you guys.

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How is the survey being advertised? I've only seen it here. Espresso Addict (talk) 14:16, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It has also been announced on Foundation-l [1]. Regards, HaeB (talk) 14:31, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If a broad range of comments are truly desired, then much wider advertisement is necessary -- this seems to target those who've already participated. Espresso Addict (talk) 15:37, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

About "repository for statistics gathered for the process": If the wiki has a page where these statistics are gathered, a link would be very nice, or at least a few examples (a question left open in the Newsroom discussion [2]). Did this refer to things like strategy:Former Contributors Survey Results (PDF there)? Regards, HaeB (talk) 02:55, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I am so sorry Haeb, I must have overlooked your tag in the article. Its called the Wikimedia-pedia(I didnt pick the name) its accessible from the left-side menu on the strategy wiki. I added the link in the article as well. Thanks.--Theo10011 (talk) 09:57, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I had seen the "Wikimedia-pedia" in the side bar and clicked through a few entries, and since they happened to be mostly about qualitative aspects, I thought it might refer to something else. But looking at more entries, there is obviously a lot of statistical data there too. Regards, HaeB (talk) 07:27, 12 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I took part in the Strategy process. For a couple of months or so I was extremely active and then I had to bow out for health reasons. I just wanted to share an observation.

Many of the proposals submitted were very specific; they wanted a particular feature to be available in the interface or they wanted a particular direct action to be taken by the WMF or, perhaps, just by someone, anyone.

The next phase saw task forces formed around more general categories of proposed activities; a valid task of such forces was to try to distil the thoughts behind a number of specific proposals and think about what the general sentiment was behind them. The specific became more general.

Then, finally, the task force findings were put before the WMF. I had dropped out of proceedings by this point so I have no knowledge of the process there, but what appears to have resulted is something even more, and much more, general in nature.

When I first saw the strategy outcomes I was rather disappointed. Where an individual proposal that someone had submitted long ago could be very exciting (focused, actionable), the broad statements of intent seemed to me rather harder to think of in terms of direct results. The individual proposals were pleasingly binary; either this proposal for a feature would come about or it would be rejected - it was binary. What came out finally is more like a spectrum; the WMF would move in such and such a direction and success will presumably be measured in somewhat lengthy reports.

So I feel rather mournful about all those specific proposals that kind of just got left behind.

This sounds like a criticism of strategy. It's not meant to be. Now that time has passed I see what happened as rather inevitable. The WMF could scarcely be expected to evaluate 900 small scale actions and has, of necessity, taken a broader view.

I hope that people who submitted feature requests or had ideas for small projects carry on pushing their ideas whether that be submitting a feature request through Bugzilla or talking to their local chapter.

I had a feature request I wanted to see and the thought is still with me. I intend to put it to the community in the next week or so. If it had not been for the strategy process I may not have thought about it for so long. --bodnotbod (talk) 19:43, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! Although I think the article does quite a good job in informing the reader about the strategy project, the question on what did/will happen to the proposals was one that I would have liked to answer in more detail if there had been more time. Your comment is illuminating in that respect. Regards, HaeB (talk) 07:27, 12 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I was also involved in the early stages, but didn't sign up for any of the 2010 task groups as I had some real life commitments in the first half of this year. I've got a concern that the hosting of this on a separate wiki rather than as a project on meta has reduced community involvement, and left it more vulnerable to trolls. Some proposals were simply trying to reverse decisions on individual projects rather than strategic thinking for the whole foundation. That said there is some great work there and a lot of things I agree with, though I'm concerned that the strategy might fossilise and needs to be kept under review. The problems with liquid threads also limits involvement - I've only got a domestic broadband connection so have pretty much given up on the strategy wiki. Ϣere SpielChequers 13:33, 13 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"The finalized strategy plan will be presented to the Board for approval in late August." - What was the source for that? I was under the impression that the board would vote to approve the plan in the fall (October or so), and this month only the "priorities" part would be presented for approval. Sue Gardner said on August 16 that "What remains to be done is the finalization of the measures of success, which will happen over the next six or so weeks. At that point, there will be some final wordsmithing, and the result will be brought to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees for approval." Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:11, 19 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]