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

Mon Aug 29 10:46:29 UTC 2005

==WMF in 5 years==

*Board and management

The board will be made of 9 people. Jimbo, 4 elected by editors (amonst all editors), 2 elected by chapters boards (amongst their board members), 2 named by the current board (amongst or not amongst editors). Turn every 2 years by half.

The president and the chair are two different people.

They are not paid, but are reimbursed of their costs, both direct and indirect (which mean if they have to work part time to have a decent life and get some sleep sometimes, they should receive tokens of presence to compensate, or any relevant system we can think of). Getting sleep or being able to buy a new computer so as to keep in touch with the community should not stay the privilege of the officers, unless you guys want the board to be only chosen within upper middle retirees.

The entire board meets twice a year in meat space at least.

In 5 years, they are no more supposed to work on a daily basis (?), but are responsible of deciding of the strategic goals of the Foundation, create or delete departments, define roles and name (hire) the officers and generally speaking control the big principles are respected.

*Staff (the positions, the roles, whether they're paid or not)

Part of the staff will be paid and part volunteered. A chief executive may exist or the role be occupied by the one person on the board (with help of several secretaries, people to answer the phone or deal with horrible OTRS).

Departments and positions will be

·        Finance 

o       with at least a chief financial officer and an assistant

·        Technical 

o       Hardware. The hardware officer will probably have several assistants under his orders, depending on the number of servers and world locations.

o       Wiki Software : it is not obvious what this person will be, since the software is itself independent. I see him as someone rather exploring the future of the software.

o       Business technical : the person will take care of all the business opportunities we should work on (such as feeds)

·        Fundraising

o       Separated from finances (though obviously working closely with him). Work closely with Communication Department as well.

·        Legal

o       Due to the variety of situations, may not have one coordinator, but be constituted of a team of experts, with a group of coordinator. There should be experts in all countries where we have a DB center hosted.

o       Plus help from at least one pro-bono firm in the USA.

o       Will recover different activities (trademarks management and contract use, is different from a legal threat for an insulted editor)

·        Grants department

o       One coordinator, plus a collection of regional experts. High coordination with local chapters required.

·        Press

o       A coordinator assisted by several persons in charge of each project promotion (or special project promotion). The press coordinator is not here to do interviews, but to organise the press team, handle the interviews of the others, improve our press coverage. The press department will in 5 years cover a good part of Asia and Africa. High coordination with local chapters required.

·        Publishing/printing/pressing

o       A director of publication, in charge of printing/pressing of our content, as well as helping with its distribution. Will need assistants, as well as local coordinators. High coordination with local chapters required.

·        Communication/Public relation

o       One officer in charge of our public image and communication. This is a different job than Press, though both obviously work hand in hand. The guy helps the Fundraising department find the best messages to drain pockets. He works on the Foundation website to ensure all information is relevant, sufficient and updated (so this guy will basically bug every department to get the information). He coordinates the newsletter. Work with the Press department for press releases. Tells Jimbo when to put a tie and when not (right, you get the idea I am sure). The communication is not ensured by an external company, or only partly, as they do not fully understand our concept.

o       Lobbyists might assist here

·        Chapter office

o       Two different officers. One will be in charge of communication/information between the different chapters, while the other one will directly work with the Finances departement for the common budget. 

·        Event coordinator

o       Wikimania is done once per year. It requires an organiser, who can choose himself his team. It might be a temporary office rather than permanent. 

·        Ombudsman

o       This one will address complaints, from within and without the Foundation, about acts or practices which might appear abuses of authority. This one should exist well before 5 years ! (but do not abuse her patience)

The translation departement will exist. Translations will be done by volunteers and external firm hired.

The research team still exist and expended, but is not part of the WMF departement proper.

In 2005, the role of business development was taking care of by Jimbo. 5 years later, due to the size of the organisation, Jimbo is no more sufficient to coordinate all this.

*Budget

Budget is done once per quarter for micromanagement, with a one year plan and two-three year plan for strategy. The board is mostly interested in the yearly and more budget, but oversees once per quarter whether the quartely budget is respected or not. It may change the management according to these results, or suggests adjustements.

The management works thanks to quarter and yearly budget, and has to do a very detailed report of all funds used once a quarter (as well as detailed report of activity, successes and failures, and expected activity for the next quarter). The management must try to alert the board when expected expenses are rocketing.

Detailed budget for example means the public will know which travels by who were done and generated expenses (two levels of details will be provided). The Finances department will work closely with the Communication department to ensure reports are satisfactorily.

We have at the same time a general budget and a detailed per chapter budget. But we are still fighting to convince the german tax office that german donators are giving to the common good.

In 5 years, we can bear a control by a tax office
 we now have external check of our finances and financial reports, and all is well (hopefully).

*Fundraising scheme

The Fundraising Department coordinates the scheme. In 5 years, at least 20 local chapters exist, and most raise their own money. Thanks to a lot of lobbying and being well known now, it is possible to have a bit of money circulate between chapters and Foundation, but not much yet. So managing money from fundraising is still a bit of a mess.

Fundraising does not stick to a very fluttery message any more, but explain exactly what the funds will be used for (and give appropriately links to informative and colorful pages). It is also possible to give for specific actions (this is actually mandatory in some countries, so we now avoid illegal fundraising).

We had a least one serious control by the tax department in one country, to check our collected money and how we use it, and it has been a tough time

We are now in the top 10 websites and get supports from many different big companies. The more diverse, the more independent we succeed to stay. No company got an exclusivity. We are still not doing any advertisement, which makes us a real exception. We succeed to make at 10.000 dollars from our cafeshop (at least, a bit more than we do right now). Generally, fundraising are used to pay for hardware, while grants let us quite free to pay the other things

*Philantropic activity and outreach to get our content widely redistributed

We have a good publishing scheme, which allow us to get some money back from any book or DVD sold and to directly put some of the funds in a special pocket for philantropic activity. This is publicly mentionned (in campaigns such as “5 wikireaders bought = 1 full encyclopedia in an african school “, with of course, pictures and interviews from one school and some kids). This is not done directly by the Foundation, but the publishing department made contacts with some local organisations to know best what is needed, helped set up some publishable version and ensured the funds are used efficiently and in a transparent way.

We now make abundant use of charities that promotes intellectual progress and education, in particular at the regional scale (such as OSI).

*Projects

We have a couple of new projects, such as wikiversity or wikidata. We also have a full map project, with a gis incorporated in the wiki. Wikibooks is now as big as Wikipedia. Wikispecies has been closed and Wikiquote is not very active due to repeated legal issues. Wikidata is the big hit of the moment, with academics so excited they now promote our projects. Major organisations use wikidata to host their information and now publish realistic graphs, such as global warming evolution over eras, or population growth estimates by 54 different methods.

Thanks to new technologies, any reader can become a listener and hear a voice read him an article to him (yeah, automatically !)

Several Wikipedias in african languages are now over 100.000 languages. Wikinews in french finally has more than 5 contributors.

Most of this happened thanks to the contributors of course :-). The Foundation brought help through funding (such as the free GIS) or promotion (in Africa). It also helped by lobbying major organisations. Help was also brought by simply explaining people why information should be free during big events, presentations or interviews.

*Content objectives

The projects are still open to editing by anyone, even anonymous. However, on most projects, there is now a link over each article linking the “last approved version” Some projects have chosen to display by default the approved version, and the editor has to change reading mode/editing mode. Each article displays a link to all wikireaders published including that page. 20 languages wikipedia are now considered first prime. The other languages are still growing and improving.

Jimbo is still trying to push his 1.0, but only the press is regularly talking about it. 

*Software objectives

The software got very complicated with all the new features, so it is possible to use a simple or advanced version. Readers in reader mode do not see all the scary complicated editing features, but only the basic ones. The features enabled are different depending on projects. We now have a wiki/blog and a wiki/GIS

We are still waiting for single login, but maybe we just stay just to see if it will ever happen (the second Foundation is watching carefully that the feature is never developped so that we keep dreaming).

*Relationship between chapters and parent organisation

Local chapters have the rights to use funds for themselves as long as the uses are fully transparent and in compliance with our most important rules. For the other issues, and in particular  future of a wikicouncil, my crystal ball is very smoky here. Joker.

*Relationships with the outside world (PR, partnerships, etc.)

The bigger we are, the more loved and hated we are. Some big organisations try to damage our images through sneaky changes of our content (to make them false), through legal lawsuit for various reasons and active lobbying in the press and such. Some attacks happen when some fear we set up a monopole. We work doubly to maintain our public image and make some good partnerships, very diverse, and avoiding highly controversial partners. We stick very much to transparency and do not try to hide things from the press.

* Legal

We had several lawsuits. One was related to the concept of freedom and brought us much advertisement :-)

On the other hand, we lose an incredible amount of time and energy with complaints from people featured in the encyclopedia.

We now have good policies for logos and trademark uses.

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