Strategy

The original Wikipedia strategy may have been little more than 'produce 1000 Nupedia drafts in a year', but it has developed significantly over time.

Background

When the first elected Trustees took their seats on the Board, there were a variety of discussions about where the Foundation should set its sights.

• Early discussions: mailing list threads from Anthere and Angela from late 2004 were often about related topics
• Strategic goals: a few open meetings about goals, and some discussions on the wiki (1), ensued

The Mission and Vision statements were revisited in 2006/2007 to help lay uniform foundations for future work. The idea was for this to happen at least once a year, though we seem to have skipped 2008 – hence our 2009 strategy planning.

In late 2006 there was also an internal discussion of strategy with facilitated meetings of Board members and others, resulting in a few one-year planning documents. These do not seem to be public, though many resulting conversations are.

Strategic planning 2009

As of May 2009, A formal process of strategic planning is being planned for the coming year. Threads about how to proceed have been floated on foundation-l, and three one-year contracts to facilitate the process have been posted. The strategic planning process focuses on finding actionable strategies for the Wikimedia Foundation/Movement, answering what and how questions concerning participation, reach (outreach) and quality. Wikimedia strategy doesn't coincide with Wikipedia strategy.

Levels of planning

• How do we plan for next year, or a few-year financial crisis?
• How do we prepare for the next magnitude of contribution (1M active contributors)?
• How do we prepare for the next magnitude of content (a major people or books/citations project might involve tens of millions)?

Areas of focus

Communication

• How do we combine Planet Wikimedia, Twitter and similar updates, and non-minor edit summaries from central pages into a central exchange of wm updates and project highlights?
• How do we communicate new announcements across projects? unified randomized sitemessages. js banners with info.

Preservation

• What does it mean to be an archive of knowledge? Of revision histories and metadata? How central/essential is this? How many copies are needed to keep stuff safe?

Scope and project creation

• What areas of knowledge are worth covering? Why are some not - or is this only a matter of time? How do we decide, expand, modify?

Setting effective goals

Define timelines and actions, help groups crystallize what they want to do in a way that allows them comparison with other major initiatives, a definition of needs, and structured review over time.

process

Working groups

Working groups have limits on size to be effective, but can define subgroups, or nongroup methods for organizing ideas, priorities, feedback, submissions, or advisors

Open questions : where is there scarcity? Is there a limit to how many elements or suggestions a given group can identify and elaborate?

Are there limitations on who can participate? What is the role of committed work-group members vs. contributors?

Document production

An important end goal is a set of clear documents and processes for pursuing the major goals, communicating/sharing work in progress, indicating availability/interest, and defining project definitions or needs.

Timeline

The suggestions so far have been to have a fixed-timeline process to supplement the many less structured processes that help guide strategy.

Questions: who have been thinking about these core questions to date? What are the core questions in other people's minds?

Note that there are more dead projects than alive... the Usability project looked for related initiatives last year and found lots that were no longer active. (past studies had been posted but without followup, or had ended with a main page redesign and little more.)

core groups

Reach, Quality, Participation : these have always been key goals, but without specific definitions.

How can we compare where it makes sense to commit energy? To what extent is energy transferable from one topic to another?

What sorts of partnerships and collaborations are important? To what end are they important?

Vision: how are Wikimedia goals and processes guiding the work of others in the world? How can or should this change?

Meta topics: org structure, communication, sustainability (and other topics noted above?)

Preliminary topics: historical work, existing structures, scale of activity.