Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan for FY 15-16

[Risker]

On 30 May 2015 at 17:03, Sam Klein  wrote:

> 
>
>
> > And also a little addition (from [1]):
> > «The FDC would like to encourage the WMF to share more data in
> > advance, and to do so publicly as much as possible.
>
>
> Very much agreed.
>
>
>
> > The Board may need to adjust the
> > calendar of FDC work, but allowing for a comprehensive review by a
> > committee from the community (such as the FDC) rather than the
> > Wikimedia Foundation itself is essential, especially in light of the
> > minimal feedback from the community on the public pages.
> >
>
> What do you think would be a reasonable sort of review?
>
> Lila has mentioned the idea of moving towards updated plans every 6 months,
> with detailed reports every quarter.
>
> I would welcome an FDC-style review of the 'latest published biannual plan
> + report', on any timescale that works for the FDC, assessing the same
> things that it does for all annual plans.  A review of that sort in April
> or May would be timed well to influence the 'Annual Plan' discussion, even
> if it was a review of the published plan & report as of January, rather
> than the draft plan developed in April.   How would current FDC members
> feel about this?  Can we find a way to do this without obliging the current
> FDC members to do more work?  [considering that there are others with
> similar experience in the movement]
>
>
> Speaking only for myself and not for the FDC as a whole, I don't think
that the FDC has the level of expertise or frankly the amount of time
required to review the Annual Plan of the WMF, with its budget being 10x
the size of the largest chapter, and its range of activities equally more
extensive than anything else that the FDC looks at.  As a rule of thumb,
most members are spending on average between 15 and 30 hours reviewing each
submission now (including historical information), and the WMF plan by
itself would probably require at least 100 hours to really understand if
the FDC was given the same amount of information by the WMF that it expects
of the other entities seeking funds.  My brief review and analysis of this
very high level plan (including reading and cross-referencing related
documents/emails) took pretty much all the volunteer time I had between the
time it was published onwiki to the time I posted my comments - and that
was only one member, not a committee response.

Instead, I think the WMF is due for a serious third-party, impartial,
expert review of its Annual plan, with the report going directly to the
Board of Directors for its consideration. This is pretty standard amongst
many non-profits, and with its international scope and its considerably
expanded budget, it's time for the WMF to start getting this level of
feedback. It may also prove useful to demonstrate that the plans have been
reviewed by an external body when seeking out new partners and new sources
of income or endowment.  I do believe that community review is also very
important to assist in identifying priority topics, significant gaps in the
plan, and synergies amongst the entire WMF family of organizations,
projects, and volunteers.

I personally do not think that the current draft plan really explains where
the WMF leadership wants the WMF to go, or where it sees itself a year down
the road, let alone two or three years from now. While I am well aware of
the need to continuously evaluate progress against goals and to reassess
whether or not those goals are appropriate, there does not seem to be a
well-articulated long-term vision in this plan. Instead there is the
suggestion that the organization may change course quite significantly, and
that projects intended to take 3 or 4 quarters to accomplish might get
shelved before completion.



Risker/Anne
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan for FY 15-16

[Samuel Klein]

On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 1:04 PM, Pine W  wrote:

>
> 1. What is meant by "excellent goals and plans" is open to interpretation
> and dependent on context. For example, an "excellent" annual plan for a new
> user group will look much different than an "excellent" annual plan for
> WMFR or WMF, and I'm not sure that there is a canonical set of criteria for
> what constitues an "excellent" plan.
>

That is true.  And different plans will excel in different ways (clarity,
focus, effectiveness, leverage, foresight...)
It might help to invite people to suggest plans that they have found useful
or instructive (in their context), and compare what each gets right.


> 2. Can we have the review of the WMF plan in July that you proposed, plus a
> separate community discussion that attempts to help everyone including WMF
> to come up with a list of suggested attributes for "excellent" annual plans
> and a list of suggested ways of streamlining planning processes while
> increasing the quality of plans? This might be a good follow up discussion
> from WMCON. WMF would be a peer and partner of this process, and I think it
> would be great if the FDC could lead this discussion.
>

Since Wikimania is in July this year, perhaps we could do this there:
public review & discussion of the WMF plan, and using that as a point of
departure to continue the discussion of planning from WMCON.

Sam
<%2B1%20617%20529%204266>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] While Election committee counts the votes...

[Anders Wennersten]

I believe the Ukrain case well illustrates a key characteristic of this 
election - the high participation rate from the middle and small sized 
communities. It looks like we have we had voters from 184 wikis 
participating, an amazing number!


As greg already pointed this is probably related to the Board clear 
statement for the election, the high number and diversity of candidates 
and active encouragement from local communites and local affiliates.


And for the original question from Milos. Yes I agree we should try to 
collect more data on the health of our communities. And participation 
rate in election can be one of these indicators. And then it tells us, 
we have vibrant communities among the middle and small sized projects, 
but people from these extremely rarely participate in lists like this. 
This list I find mainly engage people from our  biggest communities, 
especially English, and in this election actually the participation rate 
from enwp was  lower then the mean participation rate


Anders



attolippip skrev den 2015-06-01 00:14:

There were only 9 votes from Ukrainian community in 2013, I believe

So this year we just made sure that our community REALLY knows about the
elections, thus we:

- translated the candidates statements into Ukrainian
- prepared a short table with the essence of these statements in Ukrainian
and posted it in the Village pump [1]
- created a list of everybody eligible to vote from Ukrainian Wikipedia and
sent them a message with invitation to vote and with the links to read more
about the candidates via talk pages
- and just talked :)

[1]
https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%96%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%96%D1%8F:%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%B1%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8_%D0%92%D1%96%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%BC%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%96%D0%B0-2015

Best regards,
antanana
ED of Wikimedia Ukraine

2015-06-01 1:00 GMT+03:00 Johan Jönsson :


2015-05-31 22:57 GMT+02:00 Milos Rancic :


... it would be good to talk a bit about the state of our community
and movement.

Initially, I was quite positively surprised by the fact that this will
be the best WMF Board elections ever in the terms of turnout of
voters. It will beat 2007 elections and it will be likely 2.5 times
better than previous one.

I would really like to know what's so different than in 2013. Also, if
this is the sign of the community health, how come that we are now
better than we were at the peak of our movement?


There's a fair chance the difference says far more about the amount of
effort spent getting the word out about the election, than about how much
the movement cares about it compared to previous elections.

//Johan Jönsson
--
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan for FY 15-16

[Amy Vossbrinck]

Sent from my iPhone

> On May 30, 2015, at 4:01 PM, Samuel Klein  wrote:
> 
> @Garfield - I would love to hear what sort of community feedback you are
> hoping for; and what you would ideally get out of it.
> Was this past week's input helpful?  Are you looking for additional
> feedback over the coming weeks?
> 
> 
> Liam writes:
>> It would be good if the WMF would *try to set a good example* by following
>> the rules that it sets for others, itself.
> 
> This is not only good, but necessary, if we want any sort of coordination
> of planning and strategy across the movement.
> 
> This year's plan was much later than expected — the first draft shared a
> week ago — motivated by recent changes in senior staff and plans,
> particularly shifts in engineering and the creation of the community
> engagement department.  As all have noted, this leaves little time for
> public or board feedback, and less for dialogue about that feedback.  I
> suspect a draft plan 2 months earlier would have been very useful *all the
> same*, even knowing it was bound to change due to the reorganization.  This
> highlights a basic problem with having static annual plans in a quickly
> changing environment.
> 
> I thought we would move away from the 'static annual' planning model this
> year, and this still seems to be the intent, just delayed.  I hope the
> current plan draft will be the last to follow the old model, and plan
> updates will become more flexible and frequent this year.  In that case, we
> can still aim to get public and expert thoughtfully, say by mid-July,
> specifically inviting input from affiliates and community projects that
> have excellent goals and plans.  Then this feedback can guide the
> implementation of the plan from July on, and guide the development of any
> mid-year update of the plan.
> 
> 
> Regardless of the deadline mentioned on the publication page, the Board is
> discussing the plan at its monthly meeting on June 11, and will review a
> summary of community feedback as of June 9.  [The board approval vote is
> indeed at the end of June, but by the time the board meets to review that,
> it is an up-or-down vote with no time for revision.]
> 
> 
> Pine writes:
>> It does make sense to me that there would be at least a month between
>> publication of the full draft plan, including the documentation requested
> 
> More data & detail is needed, even for this draft.  But given how late
> everything was, I appreciate that things were published for the community
> as soon as they were available, despite being in a draft state.
> 
> 
>> I think that the WMF audit committee or the WMF Board might be in a better
>> position than the FDC to do a thorough review of the plan, including
>> holding public Hangout meetings in which the plan is discussed, much like
>> how government legislative bodies review proposed budgets in public.
> 
> A fine idea. Let's try it and see how it works: a public discussion,
> inviting a set of voiced participants & making a stream available to all,
> even if some invitees cannot make it.  The third week of June would fit the
> current compressed schedule.   Such a public discussion would also be a
> chance to make [more] connections between WMF planning and movement
> strategy.
> 
> Sam
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] While Election committee counts the votes...

[Denny Vrandečić]

25% turnout is amazing!! Thank you, and congratulations to WM UA,
particularly given the political situation at home.

I also collected a few thoughts about the elections here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Denny/Thoughts_Board_Election_2015

Thanks to the Election Committee and everyone else out there getting the
word out, fellow voters, and fellow candidates!



On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 5:34 PM James Alexander 
wrote:

> On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 3:20 PM, James Alexander  >
> wrote:
>
> > Ukraine has done great this year! Your work clearly paid off, currently
> > 11.74% of the eligible users on ukWiki have voted (making it one of the
> > highest % wikis, and the highest if you only count medium/large wikis
> some
> > of the smaller ones get an advantage when % is factored in). It also
> > accounts for 2.58% of the total votes compared to less then 1% (.99%) of
> > the whole electorate.
> >
> >
> Mea Culpa: For the record I was double counting many of the eligible voters
> here (we had an old voter list that was also being counted). The correct
> numbers for ukWiki would be just over 25% of eligible voters voting and
> 2.61% of the total votes (still .99% of the electorate).
>
> We will certainly be releasing more detailed results for projects with
> results and in the post mortem.
>
> James Alexander
> Community Advocacy
> Wikimedia Foundation
> (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] While Election committee counts the votes...

[James Alexander]

On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 3:20 PM, James Alexander 
wrote:

> Ukraine has done great this year! Your work clearly paid off, currently
> 11.74% of the eligible users on ukWiki have voted (making it one of the
> highest % wikis, and the highest if you only count medium/large wikis some
> of the smaller ones get an advantage when % is factored in). It also
> accounts for 2.58% of the total votes compared to less then 1% (.99%) of
> the whole electorate.
>
>
Mea Culpa: For the record I was double counting many of the eligible voters
here (we had an old voter list that was also being counted). The correct
numbers for ukWiki would be just over 25% of eligible voters voting and
2.61% of the total votes (still .99% of the electorate).

We will certainly be releasing more detailed results for projects with
results and in the post mortem.

James Alexander
Community Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation
(415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] While Election committee counts the votes...

[Gregory Varnum]

There were a lot of factors that went into the vote turnout. Some of it we
should be able to build on going into the next election, others are likely
snapshot moment in time factors that we may not be able to capture again.

James has pointed out a number of key technical considerations, and there
were additional barriers we are asking the developer staff to look into
that will hopefully make the next one even better. Clearly the work that
Philippe and James putting into preparing for this year's election paid
off, now we need to set the cycle again for improvements to continue based
on what we learned this year. Some of those have already been entered into
Phabricator.

My colleagues on the elections committee have also done a fantastic job
this year, and brought a lot of unique ideas on how to get out the vote.
There are a lot of ideas we are still discussing and will be capturing in
our committee post mortem report. It also seems likely that we will be
discussing the idea of a standing committee as a possible method of
continuing work on these efforts, and removing some of the time hurdles
this committee faced.

There is also reason to believe that people in general are just more aware
of what Wikimedia is vs. Wikipedia (press around new ED, NSA case, SOPA
blackout, etc.) - which certainly could have been a catalyst in other get
out the vote efforts. Also, the affiliates have increasingly done a good
job of engaging their core audiences in the community elections. The board
was also very engaged this year in helping get out the vote, and recruit a
diverse set of candidates. The diversity of candidates may have inspired
more attention from communities that do not typically vote.

I believe the committee is indeed interested in trying to provide as much
data as reasonably possible to help with these discussions, and the
requests made are helpful to us figuring out what to share. I want to
encourage folks to share their ideas, comments, and concerns on the
community post mortem page - that is our best chance at having a broad
community discussion that is maintained in the easiest way for volunteers
working on future elections to see:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015/Post_mortem

The committee's ideas and discussions will be documented on the committee's
post mortem page. That will likely begin in a more noticeable way once the
vote counting concludes:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015/Committee/Post_mortem

-greg (User:Varnent)
2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee

On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 6:20 PM, James Alexander 
wrote:

> Ukraine has done great this year! Your work clearly paid off, currently
> 11.74% of the eligible users on ukWiki have voted (making it one of the
> highest % wikis, and the highest if you only count medium/large wikis some
> of the smaller ones get an advantage when % is factored in). It also
> accounts for 2.58% of the total votes compared to less then 1% (.99%) of
> the whole electorate.
>
> James Alexander
> Community Advocacy
> Wikimedia Foundation
> (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur
>
> On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 3:14 PM, attolippip  wrote:
>
> > There were only 9 votes from Ukrainian community in 2013, I believe
> >
> > So this year we just made sure that our community REALLY knows about the
> > elections, thus we:
> >
> > - translated the candidates statements into Ukrainian
> > - prepared a short table with the essence of these statements in
> Ukrainian
> > and posted it in the Village pump [1]
> > - created a list of everybody eligible to vote from Ukrainian Wikipedia
> and
> > sent them a message with invitation to vote and with the links to read
> more
> > about the candidates via talk pages
> > - and just talked :)
> >
> > [1]
> >
> >
> https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%96%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%96%D1%8F:%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%B1%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8_%D0%92%D1%96%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%BC%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%96%D0%B0-2015
> >
> > Best regards,
> > antanana
> > ED of Wikimedia Ukraine
> >
> > 2015-06-01 1:00 GMT+03:00 Johan Jönsson :
> >
> > > 2015-05-31 22:57 GMT+02:00 Milos Rancic :
> > >
> > > > ... it would be good to talk a bit about the state of our community
> > > > and movement.
> > > >
> > > > Initially, I was quite positively surprised by the fact that this
> will
> > > > be the best WMF Board elections ever in the terms of turnout of
> > > > voters. It will beat 2007 elections and it will be likely 2.5 times
> > > > better than previous one.
> > > >
> > > > I would really like to know what's so different than in 2013. Also,
> if
> > > > this is the sign of the community health, how come that we are now
> > > > better than we were at the peak of our movement?
> > > >
> > >
> > > There's a fair chance the difference says far more about the amount of
> > > effort spent getting the word out about the election, than about how
> much
> > > the movement cares about it compared to previous elections.
> > >
>

Re: [Wikimedia-l] While Election committee counts the votes...

[James Alexander]

Ukraine has done great this year! Your work clearly paid off, currently
11.74% of the eligible users on ukWiki have voted (making it one of the
highest % wikis, and the highest if you only count medium/large wikis some
of the smaller ones get an advantage when % is factored in). It also
accounts for 2.58% of the total votes compared to less then 1% (.99%) of
the whole electorate.

James Alexander
Community Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation
(415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur

On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 3:14 PM, attolippip  wrote:

> There were only 9 votes from Ukrainian community in 2013, I believe
>
> So this year we just made sure that our community REALLY knows about the
> elections, thus we:
>
> - translated the candidates statements into Ukrainian
> - prepared a short table with the essence of these statements in Ukrainian
> and posted it in the Village pump [1]
> - created a list of everybody eligible to vote from Ukrainian Wikipedia and
> sent them a message with invitation to vote and with the links to read more
> about the candidates via talk pages
> - and just talked :)
>
> [1]
>
> https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%96%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%96%D1%8F:%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%B1%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8_%D0%92%D1%96%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%BC%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%96%D0%B0-2015
>
> Best regards,
> antanana
> ED of Wikimedia Ukraine
>
> 2015-06-01 1:00 GMT+03:00 Johan Jönsson :
>
> > 2015-05-31 22:57 GMT+02:00 Milos Rancic :
> >
> > > ... it would be good to talk a bit about the state of our community
> > > and movement.
> > >
> > > Initially, I was quite positively surprised by the fact that this will
> > > be the best WMF Board elections ever in the terms of turnout of
> > > voters. It will beat 2007 elections and it will be likely 2.5 times
> > > better than previous one.
> > >
> > > I would really like to know what's so different than in 2013. Also, if
> > > this is the sign of the community health, how come that we are now
> > > better than we were at the peak of our movement?
> > >
> >
> > There's a fair chance the difference says far more about the amount of
> > effort spent getting the word out about the election, than about how much
> > the movement cares about it compared to previous elections.
> >
> > //Johan Jönsson
> > --
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> > 
> >
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] While Election committee counts the votes...

[James Alexander]

A couple comments inline from a technical election process (not commenting
on much of the rest not because I'm not interested but just for simplicity
right now given other work :) ).

James Alexander
Community Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation
(415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur

On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 1:57 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:

> ... it would be good to talk a bit about the state of our community
> and movement.
>
> Initially, I was quite positively surprised by the fact that this will
> be the best WMF Board elections ever in the terms of turnout of
> voters. It will beat 2007 elections and it will be likely 2.5 times
> better than previous one.
>
> I would really like to know what's so different than in 2013. Also, if
> this is the sign of the community health, how come that we are now
> better than we were at the peak of our movement?
>


While I think there are probably lots of things that contributed to the
increase (and completely separating them can be difficult) I do think there
are a couple specific things that helped a lot. This was a goal Philippe
and I had for the election process very very early on (it was even one of
our annual goals) and so we've been focusing on trying to set up pieces of
it for much of the year many of which seem to have worked well. There is
still an enormous amount of things we could do better both from things that
were out of our control (timing for the start of the process and technical
issues) and things that we've learnt more about (some of the translation
work for example) but I think much of it has had some dramatic improvement.


   1. There has been an amazing group of volunteers, led by Greg Varnum as
   coordinator, on the election committee this year. It was both bigger then
   it has been in the past (many more people willing to server) and more
   active. This has allowed us to move much faster and have better
   conversations given the short time schedule at times.
   2. One of the big issues that was seen both in the last election and, to
   be honest, in previous ones was the difficulty (even for experienced
   voters) in just 'getting' to the voting process.
  - In the past you had to vote from your local wiki, so you had to
  follow a link to the meta pages, learn about the candidates, and then go
  BACK to your home wiki and go directly (by typing in the page) to the
  specific SecurePoll voting page to start the process. Of course sometimes
  that meant you were typing in a vote page that wasn't even in
the language
  or script you were used too and confused a lot of people. It also caused
  problems because basically every step you make someone go through causes
  drop off (sometimes significant).
  - This year we pushed very hard for some improvements to SecurePoll.
  Some were less visible such as an interface for creating the election (so
  it wasn't as error prone being created by a manual xml file in the past)
  and logs when messages were changed so that we knew if someone, for
  example, changed what 'name' was shown for a vote option (not that it's
  happened in the past, but in theory it could have and we had no log).
  However 1 in particular was, I think, huge: With the coming of SUL
  unification Tim Starling helped us to set it up so that we had a global
  list of voters and everyone could vote directly from Meta. This means we
  could give every single person a link, the same link, that went
directly to
  the voting system (where the committee also put brief summaries and
  pictures of each candidates along with links to their statements and
  questions). That means that, unlikely 2 years ago or previous elections,
  the banners and emails and voting boxes all linked DIRECTLY to the vote
  system rather then meta and requiring them to bounce around after that.
   3. We also spent a lot of effort this year trying to ensure that all of
   the summaries and voter information was translated into at least 17-18
   languages. There is still a lot that could be done better on this front
   (especially if we can give the committee more time then was given this
   year) but I still think it was much better overall in most cases then it
   has been in the past.

...
>
> And two more precise requests:
>
> 1) May Election committee give unified data for all previous
> elections? If possible, structured by countries and projects. Output
> of all democratic elections assume presenting data according to area.
> It's legitimate to know that voters from country X voted for candidate
> Y. It gives a clue of what's going on inside of the movement
>

I know both the committee and I definitely want to put out as much data as
possible about the results. Some of it I'm already putting together (such
as votes by project, eligible users by project, percentage voting etc) as
well as graphs and data comparing this year to 2013. Votes by country could
be tougher... in theory 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] While Election committee counts the votes...

[attolippip]

There were only 9 votes from Ukrainian community in 2013, I believe

So this year we just made sure that our community REALLY knows about the
elections, thus we:

- translated the candidates statements into Ukrainian
- prepared a short table with the essence of these statements in Ukrainian
and posted it in the Village pump [1]
- created a list of everybody eligible to vote from Ukrainian Wikipedia and
sent them a message with invitation to vote and with the links to read more
about the candidates via talk pages
- and just talked :)

[1]
https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%96%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%96%D1%8F:%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%B1%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8_%D0%92%D1%96%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%BC%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%96%D0%B0-2015

Best regards,
antanana
ED of Wikimedia Ukraine

2015-06-01 1:00 GMT+03:00 Johan Jönsson :

> 2015-05-31 22:57 GMT+02:00 Milos Rancic :
>
> > ... it would be good to talk a bit about the state of our community
> > and movement.
> >
> > Initially, I was quite positively surprised by the fact that this will
> > be the best WMF Board elections ever in the terms of turnout of
> > voters. It will beat 2007 elections and it will be likely 2.5 times
> > better than previous one.
> >
> > I would really like to know what's so different than in 2013. Also, if
> > this is the sign of the community health, how come that we are now
> > better than we were at the peak of our movement?
> >
>
> There's a fair chance the difference says far more about the amount of
> effort spent getting the word out about the election, than about how much
> the movement cares about it compared to previous elections.
>
> //Johan Jönsson
> --
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] While Election committee counts the votes...

[Johan Jönsson]

2015-05-31 22:57 GMT+02:00 Milos Rancic :

> ... it would be good to talk a bit about the state of our community
> and movement.
>
> Initially, I was quite positively surprised by the fact that this will
> be the best WMF Board elections ever in the terms of turnout of
> voters. It will beat 2007 elections and it will be likely 2.5 times
> better than previous one.
>
> I would really like to know what's so different than in 2013. Also, if
> this is the sign of the community health, how come that we are now
> better than we were at the peak of our movement?
>

There's a fair chance the difference says far more about the amount of
effort spent getting the word out about the election, than about how much
the movement cares about it compared to previous elections.

//Johan Jönsson
--
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[Wikimedia-l] While Election committee counts the votes...

[Milos Rancic]

... it would be good to talk a bit about the state of our community
and movement.

Initially, I was quite positively surprised by the fact that this will
be the best WMF Board elections ever in the terms of turnout of
voters. It will beat 2007 elections and it will be likely 2.5 times
better than previous one.

I would really like to know what's so different than in 2013. Also, if
this is the sign of the community health, how come that we are now
better than we were at the peak of our movement?

Then I made my personal community health check: the size of the
gzipped file of the discussions on this list [1]. And I was surprised
again to realize that this is the *worst* month since December 2004
(it's not likely that we'll pass192KB of the August 2012 in the next
few hours) in the sense of quantity of communication.

At the other side, the list is not quiet, which makes things a bit more odd.

If we just compare quantity of communication vs. quantity of topics,
it would be easy to conclude that there are less deep and less heated
discussions, which basically means that although we've become more
civilized, we care much less about Wikimedia.

However, turnout of voters says something completely different. I am a
bit puzzled and I don't have the idea what doesn't fit, except to
complain that somebody messed up with Universe constants.

So, any idea? But, please, something sensible, not things like "We've
become more mature".

And two more precise requests:

1) May Election committee give unified data for all previous
elections? If possible, structured by countries and projects. Output
of all democratic elections assume presenting data according to area.
It's legitimate to know that voters from country X voted for candidate
Y. It gives a clue of what's going on inside of the movement.

2) Besides very intuitive (not to say pseudoscientific, dilettantish)
methods of making conclusions that "something is good here" or
"something is bad there", we don't have any systematic way for
gathering and analyzing data about the state of our community and
movement. I think that the responsibility of the Board is to find a
way to, for the beginning, quantify whatever could be quantified in
relation to the community and movement traits. And to inform the rest
of us periodically. (To be more clear: this is not ED's job, this is
Board's job; it's not about running the projects, but about running
the movement.)

[1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan for FY 15-16

[Pine W]

Hi Sam,

That all sounds good. A couple of quick points:

1. What is meant by "excellent goals and plans" is open to interpretation
and dependent on context. For example, an "excellent" annual plan for a new
user group will look much different than an "excellent" annual plan for
WMFR or WMF, and I'm not sure that there is a canonical set of criteria for
what constitues an "excellent" plan.

2. Can we have the review of the WMF plan in July that you proposed, plus a
separate community discussion that attempts to help everyone including WMF
to come up with a list of suggested attributes for "excellent" annual plans
and a list of suggested ways of streamlining planning processes while
increasing the quality of plans? This might be a good follow up discussion
from WMCON. WMF would be a peer and partner of this process, and I think it
would be great if the FDC could lead this discussion.

Thanks,
Pine
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan for FY 15-16 (Ido)

[ido ivri]

> From: Samuel Klein 
> To: Dariusz Jemielniak , Wikimedia Mailing List
> 
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan for FY
> 15-16
> Message-ID:
> <
> caatu9wlhkf44ogkagyq2_-j1n_8kpwrturnok5+dkh4bhsa...@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> @Garfield - I would love to hear what sort of community feedback you are
> hoping for; and what you would ideally get out of it.
> Was this past week's input helpful?  Are you looking for additional
> feedback over the coming weeks?
>

I'm Echoing Sam's callout for the level of feedback;
The annual plan, in its current structure, is fairly high-level. I find
most of the goals to be agreeable, but am looking for more details about
the following:

1) How the increase in staffing is translated into aggressive goals
(especially in areas like community engagement, engineering, communications
- where staffing has increased significantly)

2) On the other end of the scale, what current areas of operation will be
discontinued / significantly reduced in scope - this is also a part of a
good workplan.

--Ido / [[user:Alleycat80]]


"There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary,
and those who don't."
(unknown)
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