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

Thu Sep 1 10:06:26 UTC 2005

There's a large tendency within the community to maintain the status
quo, so I don't think any radical changes are going to occur over the
next five years. I think the innovation will come with the uses people
make of our content rather than with the projects or organsation
themselves. Improvements will most likely be in areas we are already
thinking about, such as communication within the organsaition, and
validation of the content, rather than in completely new areas.

==Wikimedia 2010==
*Board and management

The Board has delegated much of their work to people in paid positions
or voluntary "official positions". This has left them with more time
for making higher level decisions including overall strategies and
partnerships with external parties. They are responsible for hiring
new staff, and for communicating the ethos of the Foundation to all
Wikimedia members and to the outside world. The majority of the Board
of Trustees are elected members of the community. They are supported
by a Board of Advisors, made up of people from relevant fields.

The Board keeps a proper minute book, with corporate resolutions. The
bylaws have been legally approved and are easy to find. All legal
paperwork is in order.

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

Positions include the following (whether they're paid, appointed
volunteers, or positions decided by the relevant Special Interest
Groups is something I'm not ready to predict).

CEO
Technical officer
Financial officer
Accountant
Print publishing co-ordinator
Secretaries
Grants co-ordinator
Lawyers
Communication team (including translation)
Business manager
R&D
PR
Advertising and promotion
Chapter co-ordinator

*Budget

The budget is 25 times larger than it was in 2005. Much of the
expenditure is handled by local chapters. Donated hardware from a
large range of sources all over the world has allowed us to keep costs
down. The primary costs on the budget are now special projects, such
as the global distribution of our content in various forms, and the
cost of staff. Hardware costs are still included in the budget, though
these increasingly refer to the cost of managing distributed hardware
that has been donated rather than buying our own hardware. Local
chapter reps liaise with paid technicians in their own area who are
responsible for maintaining the servers in those countries. Financial
records have been improved and are regularly audited.

*Fundraising scheme

Much of our funding comes from public donations, though these are now
smaller than the income we get from grants. We are still finding new
ways to raise money without the need to resort to advertising on the
site. Fundraising occurs not only on our own projects, but as part of
a huge effort across the internet as thousands of other sites
advertise our fundraising drives. Local chapters handle fundraising
efforts at a local level, allowing more and more people to donate
tax-free within their own country. Individual donors have more of a
say in how their donations are spent and are presented with a number
of options during each fund raising drive for what the bulk of their
money will be spent on.

*Philanthropic activity and outreach to get our content widely redistributed

As the first real efforts to distribute our content to those without
internet access are showing signs of success, the focus moves towards
considering how to get content from those people rather than just
distributing it to them. New methods of contribution are being
explored, with the aim of allowing every person on the planet to be a
Wikimedian and not just a reader (or listener - as audio versions
become as popular as the text versions were 5 years ago).

Through partnerships with various publishing companies, the content
from all projects is regularly being printed, or made available in
audio versions. Books are being sold and given away all over the
world, bringing in revenue that allows us to keep expanding our
publishing projects and other philanthropic activities. The first
braille versions are being prepared.

*Projects

Teaching communities are beginning to develop to pass on the skills of
using MediaWiki and of encyclopedic writing. These are led by groups
all over the world who organise training and outreach days to bring
even more people into the Wikimedia community. Universities start to
incorporate this into their courses. Easier methods of inputting
content into the projects are being researched, which is expected to
decrease the need to teach people to use the software.

The projects appear less separated than they once did as automatic
links appear between them and single login allows users to edit across
them more easily. At the same time, users can choose to view only
sections of the projects. Those wanting to focus only on science
articles can view only those, with their own recent changes and own
discussion areas, preventing the problems of the projects becoming too
large to cope with.

*Content objectives

The content is all available under a free license, and simplifications
to the GFDL have made it much easier for people to reuse the content
without violating the license.

Wikimedia is by far the largest content provider in many languages.
Traditional content providers are looking for new models and moving
into niche markets rather than trying to compete with us.

The majority of content is still produced by volunteers, but some is
now donated as a result of deals with external parties, and as a
result of people being paid, though not directly by the Foundation,
for producing content, particularly in weak areas and small languages.

Different modes of viewing the content are available. Users can select
from options such as "show only validated versions", "show only
articles with cited sources", "show only articles approved by company
xyz". Some of these options are only available on external sites, as
co-branded versions by companies who want to add their own methods of
validation to the content. The possibility to view validated versions
has increased the credibility of the projects, which are now accepted
sources at all levels.

*Software objectives

All software used by all projects is open source.

The developers have finally given up telling people MediaWiki is not a
CMS. It is now a CMS, and a blog, and a database, and whatever else
people want it to be. :) The version used on Wikimedia's own projects
begins to be unrecognizable from the versions now being used
elsewhere, both as a result of better Wikimedia branding which makes
our own projects stand out, and as a result of the software being
tailored to each project rather than incorporating all of the features
now available in MediaWiki.

Work into making MediaWiki work better across distributed systems is
ongoing. The interface is fully internationalized in 200 languages.

A consortium of companies using MediaWiki internally and on their own
websites sponsor a team of security reviewers who work alongside the
MediaWiki developers to ensure no stable versions of the code are
released with security flaws. Many other companies using MediaWiki, or
with an interest in the content produced on it, regularly contribute
code, and this is checked by paid staff, leaving volunteers to focus
on the more popular aspects of development.

Efforts to standardise the markup are ongoing, and there is increasing
interoperability between different wiki engines.

*Relationship between chapters and parent organisation

Local chapters are heavily involved in promotion and the formation of
local partnerships. They have increasing independence, and the Board
relies on contracts and mutually-agreed guidelines to ensure the
chapters maintain the goals of the Foundation rather than attempting
to closely monitor their every move. Efforts to improve inter-chapter
communications are still being made, and though better than five years
ago, are still an area the Board is trying to improve upon.

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

Universities are participating to the projects through content
creation and software development. Regular promotional activities
happen at universities across the world. A range of partnerships have
been created, including global ones with the Foundation, and local
ones with local chapters. Informal partnerships are being made
regularly by users of all projects.

*Other (anything we did not think of)

Foundation policies and bureaucracy have continued to expand. These
now cover everything from privacy policies to NDAs to trademark use.

DMCAs are now a regular occurrence. Lawsuits are becoming more
frequent, but the legal team has handled these with no major issues so
far.

That's all for now. I'm off to buy edition 25 of Quarto, Wikimedia's
128 page magazine. ;)

Cofion cynnes,

Angela.