[Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation in 5 years - Giant brainstorming - a game with rules.

Sun Aug 28 01:37:00 UTC 2005

Delphine Ménard wrote:

> [...] it is sort
> of a giant brainstorming to see where everybody thinks the Wikimedia
> Foundation should be in 5 years from now.
...
> You're free to say anything that goes through your
> head. Your ideas should go on this list.
...
> However, THIS IS NOT TO BE DEBATED. 
...
 > ==WMF in 5 years==

Well, instead of going to bed I brainstormed a bit so apologiye if some 
of the ideas are not that perfect. Some are better WMF in 10 years.

> *Board and management
> *Staff (the positions, the roles, whether they're paid or not)

There is first a supervisory board consisting of voted representatives 
of the projects, local chapters, and a president and second the 
management. The supervisory board only makes fundamental decisions and 
controls the management. Regularly all actions (finance, hardware, 
relations...) are done by the management. It is adviced to act as 
transparent and to delegate as much as possible to volunteers and local 
chapters. The management is paid (at least partly) and can hire other 
people for specific tasks.

> *Budget
> *Fundraising scheme

The Foundation coordinates fundraising schemes and grants but most of 
the money is collected by the chapters who pay the foundaten if needed 
(and vice versa). We'll have a lot of money ;-)

> *Philantropic activity and outreach to get our content widely redistributed
> *Projects
> *Content objectives

Beside central server issues most projects are driven by local chapters. 
There are several local projects with other content providers and 
redistributors of content produced in Wikimedia projects. First 
campaigns against lack of literacy have been started. Lobbying against 
exaggerated copyright and patenting keeps going on. There are several 
projects collecting free knowledge but we decided not to collect free 
art of any kind (this is done by Ourmedia).

> *Software objectives

Times when everything had to be wiki only are over. MediaWiki finnaly 
split up into a modularized set of components for collaboratively 
editing text ("old school wiki"), editing media, managing structured 
data and archiving non-mutable objects.

Servers are still regularly getting slow because of growing usage but as 
there are multiple server farms not every project is affected in the 
same way.

> *Relationship between chapters and parent organisation
> *Relationships with the outside world (PR, partnerships, etc.)

Local chapters are independent organisations that have a contract with 
the Foundation. Most of the projects and partnerships are organised by 
local chapters (almost 30 of them in 5 years) that regularly meet. The 
Foundation gives general guidelines what kind of projects and 
partnerships are welcome and which are not. Only partnerships with 
special organisations are directly with the Foundation - for instance:

* Internet Archive
* Creative Commons Initiative
* United Nations

Beside a loose cooperation with United Nations there is no partnership 
with any gouvermental or mainly political organisation.

> *Other (anything we did not think of)

* Wikimania organisers don't know who to invite as keynote speaker 
because we already had Lawrence Lessing, Tim-Berners-Lee, Dalai Lama...
* WMF has already beed nominated for Nobel Peace Prize but will only get 
it in one of the next years because there are still wars at too many 
places and ecocide goes on, so there are also other problems but free 
knowledge - sad but true but we do our best.

Greetings,
Jakob