Chapters meeting 2010/Documentation/Strategy walkthrough

Strategy Plan Walkthrough

• long term (2010-2015) plan, announced last year

Eugene

• Strategy wiki http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
  • 2000 content pages
  • 800 proposals
  • 50 languages
  • ~1000 people edited

• LiquidThreads Acitvity
  • 4500 total posts
  • 415 participants

• activity: more volunteers needed
• strategy task force collects all ideas of the other task forces
• difference: movement goals - foundation goals

Sue

• project was announced last year
• since then: a lot of participation (see numbers)

Premise:

• 350M visitors (Wikimedia switched to comscore)
• 100K editors (5 edits a month)
• all numbers have grown organically
  • Europe and North America
  • Global South has to grow
• Strategic plan
  • a virtuous circle around: reach, participation, quality

Numbers (ComScore map 1)

• Canada, Germany, UK and Japan >40% penetration
• US, Europe, South America, Australia 30-40%
• Brazil, Africa, Asia <30%

• mainly mobile services are used in developing countries (e.g. sms-access)
• unfortunately not all mobile services translated
• detailled statistics on some countries will be published (J. Walsh)

• 12 Wikipedias have more than 1K contributors (more than 5 edits a month)
• 31 Wikipedias have 100-1K contributors
• All other Wikipedia have below 100 contributors

mature projects

• Mature Wikipedias
• Emerging Wikipedias
• success-story: russian wikipedia is the fastest growing

• Community health task force:
  • a lot of editors leaving (-> survey)
  • avoid decline, increase diversity
  • bringing in women
  • bringing in "social engineers"
  • bringing in new people in general

• smaller wikipedias
  • goal is to encourage people
  • goal is to grow article count

Discussion:

• quality vs. quantity
• article-count vs. head-count

• 2015 scenario:
  • strong, steady growth scenario: increase reach to 680 million people
  • slowed growth scenario: ~500 million people
  • no growth scenario:
  • or even better: "dramatic" growth: >1000 million people

• Open Questions
  • What will it take to reach more peple in the many parts of the world where Wikimedia is weak today?
  • (Missing)

Theory:

• Priority1: Build the technological and operating platform that enables Wikimedia to function sustainably as a top global Internet property.
  • additional data centres
  • caching servers
  • better performance & reliability

• Priority 2: Strengthen, grow and increase diversity of the editing community that is the lifeblood of Wikimedia projects
  • shelter & support new editors
  • funding to enable coming togethers of editors
• Priority 3: Accelerate impact by investing in key geographic areas, mobile application development and bottom-up innovation.
  • supporting partnerships that expand mobile and offline access
  • Boots on the ground: deploy staff teams in high-potential areas

Chapters:

• relation to media and general public
• events to recruit new editors and "social engineers"
• relations to GLAMs
• supporting volunteers
• representing Wikimedia's agenda
• fundraising

Discussion:

• How can people that are reading articles be motivated/encouraged to write articles?

==

• Budgets are built during the next weeks
• Question: How can WMF help the chapters?

1. Most important part of the presentation/foundation's strategy?
2. What's surprising?
3. What are the priorities of the chapters?
4. How can the foundation provide help?

Answers/Opinions:

• Most important
  • Foundation should help weak areas.
  • Question must be separated:
  • Priority Number 1: Stability of projects
  • Relationship
  • Communities need numbers and statistics: Analytical view on what's actually happening.

• Surprising:
  • Alignment between WMF's and thinking DEWIKI
  • Impact of criticism on wikimedia
  • Limited / No focus on the scope of content
  • Africa: faster growth
  • How can chapters be founded in Africa?
  • relationship with large enterprises weren't mentioned; e.g. cooperation with Telefonica

• Chapters; Priorities & contribution
  • Increasing participation in the sociological (poltical, cultural) content of their community; what does it mean to expand part in a local country
  • Content: main chapters are working to build their own organisations; important to strengthen for long-term
  • Build chapters in other geographies
  • Focus on other projects: e.g. Wikisource & Wikinews
  • India: Support South Asia in general
  • Involve Chapters

• How can WMF provide help?
  • relalationship between Foundation and chapters; equal treatment (e.g. merchandising...)
  • real communication, information & dialogue
  • help to reach our full potential
  • provide kick starts: money, help
  • regional collaboratives of chatpers (e.g. pan-asian)