Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2017-2018/Mid-year review

The 2017-18 Annual Plan Mid-Year report

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We are pleased to present our progress against the Wikimedia Foundation FY17-18 Annual Plan. Our FY17-18 Annual Plan is a continuation of the Foundation’s work as described in the 2016-2018 interim strategic plan, in which we focus on Reach, Communities, and Knowledge.

Below you will find a financial overview and status updates on each of the program goals of our FY17-18 Annual Plan. The report is organized around our "cross-departmental" programs, our programs funded with "funds available for a specific purpose", and our departmental programs. All financial information and program status reports refer to the period of July 1, 2017 to Dec 31, 2017.

Each goal has a green, yellow, and red status indicated, which mean the following:

  • Green - The goal has on schedule or has already been achieved
  • Yellow - The goal is behind schedule but in progress
  • Red - The goal is significantly behind schedule, has been canceled, or is no longer relevant
  • Blue - The goal has been substantially changed

Financial Summary

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"Funds available for a specific purpose": are funded from our surplus and are used for specific and non-recurring investments.

Consolidated report (Jul 2017 - Dec 2017)
Actuals Budget Variance
REVENUE
Revenue and Other Income 70,407,928 54,697,100 15,710,828
PROGRAM EXPENSES
Personnel 13,872,935 15,168,652 -1,295,717
Non-Personnel
Data Center Expenses 2,143,230 2,025,706 117,524
Grants 1,245,354 1,479,046 -233,692
Outside Contract Services 1,136,204 1,337,322 -201,118
Legal Fees 619,746 493,843 125,903
Travel & Conferences 722,225 979,827 -257,602
Other expenses 1,630,318 2,124,375 -494,057
Sub Total Program Expenses 21,370,012 23,608,771 -2,238,759
NON PROGRAM EXPENSES
Personnel 4,523,693 4,167,560 356,133
Non-Personnel
Donation Processing Fees 2,386,181 1,968,000 418,181
Outside Contract Services 819,995 1,062,426 -242,431
Legal Fees 194,374 184,002 10,372
Travel & Conferences 176,171 218,628 -42,457
Other Expenses 1,351,561 1,555,271 -203,710
Sub Total Non-Program Expenses 9,451,975 9,155,887 296,088
TOTAL ANNUAL OPERATING EXPENSES 30,821,987 32,764,658 -1,942,671
FUNDS AVAILABLE FOR A SPECIFIC PURPOSE
Wikimedia Brand and Identity 174,274 425,000 -250,726
Movement Strategy 403,412 403,412 0
Office Move - 1 Montgomery 543,696 696,532 -152,836
TOTALS FUNDS AVAILABLE FOR A SPECIFIC PURPOSE 1,121,382 1,524,944 -403,562

Year over year change in spending

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The year over year change in grant spending is due to a budgeted change in the timing of when the grant expenses will be recorded. For the entire FY17-18 (Jul 2017 - Jun 2018) grant spending is projected to increase as compared to FY16-17.

Year-over-year change (Jul 2016 - Dec 2016 vs Jul 2017 - Dec 2017)
Actuals FY17-18 Actuals FY16-17 Y-o-Y Change
Accounts
Revenue and Other Income 70,407,928 62,112,570 8,295,358
Accounts
Personnel 18,396,628 16,231,010 2,165,618
Data center 2,143,230 1,246,667 896,563
Grants 1,248,354 2,724,972 -1,476,618
Donation Processing Fees 2,386,181 2,290,434 95,747
Outside Contract Services 1,956,200 1,451,224 504,976
Legal Fees 814,120 591,557 222,563
Travel and Conference 898,395 614,767 283,628
Other Expense 2,978,879 3,004,736 -25,857
TOTAL 30,821,987 28,155,367 2,666,620
Wikimedia Brand and Identity 174,274 0 174,274
Movement Strategy 403,412 0 403,412
Office Move - 1 Montgomery 543,696 0 543,696
TOTALS FUNDS AVAILABLE FOR A SPECIFIC PURPOSE 1,121,382 0 1,121,382

Cross-departmental programs

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Community health

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Program Name Goals Status Description of progress, changes, and milestones/metrics
Segment 1: Anti-harassment tools Goal 1: The Community Tech team’s Anti-Harassment Tools project has four focus areas: Detection/Prevention, Reporting, Evaluation of harassment cases, and Blocking.
 
The annual plan was set before the Anti-Harassment Tools team was fully built out. We planned on hiring all members by April, with May and June serving as onboarding ramp-up months, but the developers began in late June/early July, meaning our Q1 was mostly focussed on onboarding and some small projects. The team is operating smoothly and efficently now, but are a little behind all the (aggressively set) objectives and milestones set in the Annual Plan. The contents of the Annual Plan are still true, but we will likely slip on some of the exact objectives.

Both milestones are on track. We have measured the baseline of English Wikipedia administrator confidence for handling disputes: 39.3% of admins say they 'usually' or 'almost always' have the skills or tools to intervene or stop cases of harassment. Development of our first administrator tool will be complete in February and we are on target to complete the other two tools by July.

Segment 2: Policy and Enforcement Growth Goal: The Support and Safety team’s Policies and Enforcement Growth project will examine strengths and weaknesses in existing community behavioral policies and enforcement processes, then translate these findings into structural improvements and pilots of new approaches.
 
This work will build off the research currently underway on noticeboards and reporting. By looking at one of the movement's oldest and most-used behavioural problem reporting spaces, AN/I on the English Wikipedia, we will show trends, successes, and failures that can be used by all communities in designing better processes. Work over the fall included a 138-person in-depth qualitative survey and a multi-faceted quantitative analsysis looking at how the board has been historically used. These results will be released in March, and the methodology used will be shared with community to empower deeper community-led analysis of the many other processes in use on our projects.
Segment 3: Research on harassment Goal: In the next fiscal year, we will continue research work on harassment and abuse detection and deliver empirical insights and new models to better characterize toxicity in Wikimedia discussion spaces.
 
This goal was started in Q2 and will continue into Q3.
Segment 4: Community Health Legal Defense Fund Goal: By providing the volunteer community and Wikimedia Foundation staff with robust tools for detecting, reporting and evaluating harassment, we will enable them to patrol Wikimedia communities more effectively and be able to identify and block harassing users. This in turn will create stronger, more effective, inclusive and diverse communities, benefitting current and future editors alike. We won’t eliminate harassment 100 percent, but we can pare it way down with a more streamlined approach.
 

New readers

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Program Name Goals Status Description of progress, changes, and milestones/metrics
Segment 1: Awareness Increase awareness and understanding of Wikipedia, leading to more readers.
 
  1. Awareness campaigns are running on track and have been completed in Iraq and Nigeria. The campaign in Hindi for India is expected to launch in Q3, with a campaign in Mexico following that in Q4. We have initial reports published on each project page on meta, and are working with analysts to have a deeper understanding of the impact of these campaigns on readership.
  2. An Inspire campaign is currently running to support communities in raising awareness where they live. Following the campaign, we will award a round of grants to support this work. Banners are running in 147 countries, inviting readers and editors to submit their ideas for how to raise awareness where they live.
  3. The Partnerships & Global Reach team has launched training with the GSMA through a program called MISTT. This program involves on-the-ground digital literacy training for new internet users, accessing the internet for the first time on mobile phones, and we're tracking it to see if it will be possible to roll it out in other countries. We are also exploring potential opportunities to syndicate Wikipedia content.
Segment 2: Offline Support offline access to Wikipedia, allowing people with limited or no internet access to read.
 
  1. Offline support has been extended on both Android and mobile web platforms. On Android, this is more robust offline reading lists and first steps into offline article packs. Next steps are to run a campaign in Nigeria specifically promoting offline functionality to understand if this is a compelling featureset for those users that warrants further investment. On the mobile web, we have added a button to allow readers to download individual articles to PDF. The feature is seeing consistent usage since its deployment on Chrome for Android, but conversion is low.
  2. We have changed the Inspire campaign to support raising awareness rather than offline support.
  3. We are advising Kiwix on grants to develop their products and strategy. They have just completed a grant to build a dedicated Wikimedia app and are now working on another grant to improve the UX of all of their products, with a focus on rewriting their desktop app. Beyond that, we're also investigating if distribution of fully offline solutions is a viable, valuable strategy through pilots the remainder of the fiscal year.
Segment 3: Affordability Address affordability of Wikipedia as a barrier to usage, allowing more people to read Wikipedia more
 
  1. This objective is canceled due to the sunset of the Zero program.
  2. We are following the Partnerships & Global Reach team's signing a Wikipedia by SMS in Iraq. We hope that this is successful and leads to the same service being implemented in New Readers target countries.
  3. Performance improvements have been ongoing, with the major push currently paused for further consideration as it would be achieved through significant archtectural changes.
  4. This is complete. The experience on proxy browsers has been improved, and QA for these browsers is integrated into deployment of new features.

Privacy, security, and data management

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Program Name Goals Status Description of progress, changes, and milestones/metrics
Segment 1: Legal (Privacy, Security, Data Management) Goal 1: Through improvements to our organizational security posture, the Foundation ensures the high-quality protection and security of our infrastructure and data
 
On track (confidential)
Segment 2: Privacy and Data Management (Technology) Goal: Support teams and departments as needed
 
On track
Segment 3: Privacy and Data Management (Office IT) Goal: To develop a clear and consistent process in ensuring data is secure (including: Data Retention, Security Training and adhoc requests regarding NSA lawsuit)
 
Due to the most recent developments of the NSA Lawsuit OIT has supported data requests needed for Legal to continue the case - this has re-calibrated our OIT operations to accommodate requests. We have also worked on creating an analysis of data in certain regards. Details, however, remain Private and Confidential -- in regards to NSA Case. See Legal. OIT continues Security Training for OnBoard staff.

Structured Data on Commons

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Program Name Goals Status Description of progress, changes, and milestones/metrics
Segment 1: Database Integration N/A
 
Developing the database storage layer and MCR is going more slowly than anticipated as staff resourcing for the program was not as robust as anticipated. However, we are progressing, and we expect to complete MCR before it is needed to display structured data on Commons. The first piece of MCR code, inserting a new database layer, was deployed in production.
Segment 2: Search integration and exposure N/A
 
Search has been working on determining advanced search requirements and measures; and beginning work on prefix- and full-text search in ElasticSearch on Wikidata in preparation for the Structured Data on Commons program. We are also waiting until MCR is sufficiently ready so that we can start using it to test and prototype things.
Segment 3: Data input and migration N/A
 
Based on user research, informal interviews, group discussions, and the expertise of our GLAM and Community Liaison teams, we've created user stories for 11 user types. We've created wireframes for inserting structured file captions into upload wizard, and are working on wireframes for the file and search pages. At the same time, we've been finishing development of the MediaInfo extension. We created and are maintaining a roadmap of all SDC product development.
Segment 4: Programs N/A
 
Conducted surveys of GLAM Commons contributors' workflows, wants and needs and completed the GLAM stakeholder interview research report. That research allowed us to develop a list of painpoints for GLAM projects, and a plan completing that work. The GLAM and Commons stakeholder groups are advising Structured Data on Commons, and continue to be developed. We are in progress for develping training materials related to SDC and Wikidata.
Segment 5: Community Liaison N/A
 
Built Structured Data on Commons portal on Commons. Created focus group of Commonists. Facilitated several on wiki consultations, irc hours, and newsletters. Conducted investigation of critical volunteer-maintained Commons tools that will need to be updated for SDC. Assisted Research team with identifying Commonists to interview.

Funds available for a specific purpose

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Wikimedia brand and identity

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Program Name Goals Status Description of progress, changes, and milestones/metrics
Segment 1: Brand Following a discovery process, build a brand strategy and underlying architecture that helps the Wikimedia movement and projects reach their goals and fulfill potential. We need to create this strategy with our global community in a way that supports the durability of Wikimedia, and near-term goals of movement members. We will continue to allow and seek out uses of the brand that align with our goals, and ensure the trademarks are protected as we expand brand awareness. At the same time, we will continue to stop and prevent uses that have the potential to damage the brands and trademarks.
 
We have completed the discovery process for the first phase of this work, redesigning the Wikimedia Foundation website. In that project we have outlined the requirements for a new site, properly designed as a communications channel for Foundation and movement work for three major audiences. This is the first step in creating a user-centered "front door" to the Wikimedia projects.

Due to capacity reduction on the team and new projects including support for the efforts to open up the block of Wikipedia in Turkey, the Wikimedia identity work has been postponed until Q3. We are currently begining the work to scope this effort and contact partner agencies. This should include a review of the brand architecture that will support the directions outlined in the movement strategy.

Segment 2: Trademarks We will continue to allow and seek out uses of the brand that align with our goals, and ensure the trademarks are protected as we expand brand awareness. At the same time, we will continue to stop and prevent uses that have the potential to damage the brands and trademarks.
 
We continue to maintain our trademark registration, enforce against trademark infringement, and process trademark permission requests.
Segment 3:Partner Brand Usage Following a discovery process, build a brand strategy and underlying architecture that helps the Wikimedia movement and projects reach their goals and fulfill potential. We need to create this strategy with our global community in a way that supports the durability of Wikimedia, and near-term goals of movement members. We will continue to allow and seek out uses of the brand that align with our goals, and ensure the trademarks are protected as we expand brand awareness. At the same time, we will continue to stop and prevent uses that have the potential to damage the brands and trademarks.
 
Ongoing: We have regular meetings with reusers of Wikimedia Content and regularly discuss attribution.
Accounts Actuals Budget Variance
Outside Contract Services 174,274 425,000 -250,726
Subtotal 174,274 425,000 -250,726

Movement strategy

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For detailed description of our process and progress please see the, Wikimedia Strategy Movement meta page.

Accounts Actuals Budget Variance
Grants 18,182 0 18,182
Outside Contract Services 340,906 395,000 -54,094
Travel and Conferences 39,570 8,412 31,158
Other Expense 4,754 0 4,754
Subtotal 403,412 403,412 0

Office move - 1 Montgomery

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Program Name Goals Status Description of progress, changes, and milestones/metrics
Foundation Headquarters Office Relocation The WMF offices will be relocated by October 1, 2017. Between July and October 2017 we will need to effectively implement an office design, as well as plan for a smooth move to 1 Montgomery, San Francisco, CA, while insuring minimal disruption of staff.
 
Goal Achieved. Team met all milesstones for design, drawings, purchasing, and move implementation with minimal disruption to productivity and business by hard target date of 10/1/2017.
Accounts Actuals Budget Variance
Outside Contract Services 99,324 66,000 33,324
Other Expense 444,372 630,532 -186,160
Subtotal 543,696 696,532 -152,835

Departments

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Community Engagement

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Program Name Goals Status Description of progress, changes, and milestones/metrics
Program 1: Resourcing Communities Goal 1: Empower and enable community organizers: Ensure community organizers worldwide - particularly our diverse set of leaders - have access to the skills and resources they need to pursue ideas, address the problems they see, and ultimately to grow, diversify, and build the Wikimedia movement.
 
Through community-led grantmaking, we have made 244 grants to community organizers and project leaders in 65 countries. These grants enabled organizers to reach 52,470 participants, including 21,198 new editors to our projects, and creating or improving 1,578,109 pages content. These grants are often accompanied by mentorship and coaching that connect community organizers to knowledge and strategies. More stats: [1] The CR team is also seeking to build a more cohesive and impactful events ecosystem, where more diverse participants are able to participate in events, and organizers receive more support on the backend.
Goal 2: Share decision-making power about movement funds: Provide a transparent, participatory process for disseminating movement funds.
 
Through several rounds of grants this year, our committees are making decisions about movement funds, as planned.
Program 2: Gender Diversity Goal 1: Map gender diversity work to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the work currently being done to increase gender diversity on the Wikimedia projects
 
65 interviews completed in 29 countries across 26 language wikis. 7 main themes have been identified across interviews and shared by Rosiestep at WikiWomen Camp (July, Mexico City), Wikimania (August, Montreal), and Diversity Conference (November, Stockholm). In-depth analysis of the data is currently underway with a launch of a report and map/visualization targeted for March (International Women's Day).
Goal 2: Pilot interventions in 1-2 language communities/projects to improve gender diversity
 
The mapping work did not surface clear priorities for pilots so we decided to use WikiWomen Camp as a space to understand what projects community members are interested in pursuing and what type of support they need. WikiWomen Camp 2017 brought together 40 participants for the second ever conference focused on gender diversity (the first one was in 2012). A number of ideas were seeded amd discussed and are currently at different stages of development. Some have already been funded through grants (Chinmayi and Rohini received a Project Grant for their Community Toolkit for Great Diversity project) or are being organized without WMF support (Whose Knowledge is working on organizing a photo campaign around missing women on Wikipedia, Ravan has launched a WikiWomen initiative in Iraq). Initial discussions are underway for a Global Support Group focused on leadership development, policy change, and harrasment issues. In coordination with the Global Reach team, we are pursuing joining the EQUALS partnership, a network of organizations focused on bridging the digital gender divide. Hopefully this will lead to more partnerships between wikimedians and local orgs working on gender issues -- giving them the support many have been been unable to find in their local wikimedia communities.
Program 3: Community Capacity Development (CCD) Goal 1: By inviting our communities to self-assess their different capacities according to suggested guidelines, we will create and maintain a community capacity map, helping to surface recurring needs and developing trainings and materials that will reach broader audiences.
 
The Community Capacity Map (m:CCM) has been launched on-wiki and announced on all major community mailing lists. It will take a while for orgs and groups to fill it up, and Asaf continues to follow up with groups to invite them more directly to do so.
Goal 2: By stepping in to build specific capacities in specific communities that are stalled or struggling in those capacities, WMF is assisting those communities to overcome development obstacles and resume organic growth and development.
 
Work is proceeding apace, and including a major investment in India during the entire month of September, multiple tutorials at conferences and events (CEE, Estonia, Romania) as well as smaller investments in remote mentorship elsewhere. A plan to visit Brazil was cancelled due to internal conflict and engagement by other groups at WMF. Additional capacity building is being planned for the rest of the fiscal year.
Program 4: Community leadership development & mentoring Goal 1: Bolster community leadership development through peer leadership academy: In 2017-18 we will continue to support scalable training and peer exchange styles of learning events and products in order to develop community leadership and peer mentoring.
 
We expect to meet or exceed our objectives for goal 1:

Learning Day Events: By the end of FY17-18, we will have provided 300+ community leaders’ engagements for direct leadership development activities across Goal 1 and 2 of this program. More specifically, we aim to organize pre-conference events for over 100 community leaders to engage in training and peer mentoring on critical learning and resource topics for core programs and community development strategies. We supported Learning Days for nearly 100 Wikimania participants and are scheduled to do the same at Wikimedia Conference in April nearly doubling the number of engagements throuh our direct preconference Learning Days.

Goal 2: By supporting strategic learning online and at international, regional, or thematic events, we will enable healthy program and community development. Through developing leadership and peer mentoring, and support for better managing movement learning resources, we promote the use of evaluation for learning and improved decision-making to better Wikimedia projects and communities.
 
We expect to meet our objectives for goal 2 as slated for Q3 and Learning Day Workshop Kits & Evaluation Curriculum for training of trainers:

The capacity development that happens at regional conferences is very similar to development that takes place at Wikimedia Conference and Wikimania. We frequently get invited to conferences to host workshops like those at Learning Days. In November, we supported engagement in the strategy workshop at the Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2017 with about 60 participants. We expect to also provide support to affiliate development and learning & evaluation content at Wiki Indaba in March 2018.

Evaluation Curriculum: We are on target to also make reach our goal of building a more accessible evaluation curriculum, with specific workshops targeted for train-the-tariner expansion in the thrirda quarter for implementation at and in follow-up to Wikimedia Conference Learning Days.

Program 5: Learning products: Community Engagement Insights Goal 1: This year L&E seeks to improve the CE Insights survey. For the 2017-2018 CE Insights survey, we will use exploratory research to determine what improvements can be made to the CE Insights survey process to better reach our Wikimedia community audiences (community leaders, editors, volunteer developers). In 2017-18 we aim to increase completion and response rates by at least 10%.
 
We have consulted internally about our sampling strategies in order to increase our alignment to metric definitions and population distributions. We have revisitied the editor as well as the community leader population frames in order to ensure broadest coverage for our targetted sampling. The number of survey items have been greatly reduced this year (from about 250 items last year to 60% that amount this year). It is hoped that these improvements along with increased communications will increase our response rates this year.
Goal 2: Community Engagement Insights aims to use surveys to increase the Foundation's understanding of communities' needs as well as gather data that measures the outcomes of Foundation's work. The CE Insights survey will be complete and data compiled and published in May 2018.
 
The questions are about to undergo pilot testing to ensure their quality before translation and launching the survey in March. Data analysis and reporting are to follow by the end of Q4.
Program 6: Learning infrastructures: Wikimedia Resource Center Goal 1: To better connect communities to (a) information about Wikimedia Foundation and movement initiatives and activities To improve the curation and navigability of movement learning resources for programs and community engagement and to maintain and develop further the community leaders’ knowledge about program and community development strategies, best practices, and available resources, Learning & Evaluation staff will guide the Wikimedia Resource Center (WRC) to the next phase of development.

and

 
In Q2, we piloted the new version of WRC. Although we only saw one community resource added this first quarter, we got relevant feedback on pain points experienced in adding resources and seeing oneself reflected in the current audience groups identified. During Q3 and Q4 we will continue working to identify and add key navigation patterns and resources for GLAM and Education initiatives and working to recruit resources and increase visibility of the hub.
Goal 2: (b) access to peer-guidance and peer mentorship. Develop basic infrastructural supports for connecting people to community-developed learning resources and mentors as an expansion of the Wikimedia Resource Center.
 
Developed a user template for the Wikimedia Resource Center that anyone can use to add their profile on the WRC. In Q1 we completed the mapping of community leader pathways to content in the Wikimedia Resource Center and began encouraging community content submissions to the hub. We were not able to fully complete the build for our next steps in pilotting the "meta:Connect" gadget within the scope of the intern hours in Q1, while the gadget it designed, we still need a form built along with appropriate curation tags in order to make the alpha user friendly. We are currently searching for a technical design intern to help complete the work for implementation and testing the solution for connecting community leaders in the hub and have already surpassed our target to add a minimum of 20 program leader profiles to the WRC resource and expect to do similarly in recruiting resources by end of fourth quarter. We continue to explore a way of filtering searches for program leaders by categories and expect to reach our target of supporting at least 5 opportunities for experienced program leaders to mentor other peers at movement conferences.
Program 7: Community programs infrastructure Goal 1: Improve the ability of program leaders to implement programs and of prolific contributors to access resources through targeted technical interventions.
 
Outcome 1: The Programs and Events Dashboard is the main focus here, increasing the adoption and usage of the tool; The Education team secured a maintenance contract with Wiki Education for the current fiscal year and is exploring the future of the tool with the wider Community Programs and Community Tech teams; Adoption milestones (90% usage) and trends (increase QoQ) have not yet been tracked/verified, nor has the video orientation been done yet; Conversations are ongoing in Q3 and likely to extend into Q4 for the Mediawiki extension depreciation to be completed.

Outcome 2: The Wikipedia Library now offers access to 100,000 academic journal titles through our developing Library Card platform. 100% of English language partners are available for signup on the platform (while translatewiki is being set up for non-English partners); most of which will soon be accessible directly through the Library Card using proxy software (pending final negotiations with a leading proxy software provider). Time for application approval has been decreased from 3 weeks to 1 week. 60% of partners are signed on for proxy access and 20% for automatic bundle access, once implemented. Outcome 3: Research from the Structured Data on Commons Project has allowed for us to develop a list of painpoints for GLAM projects, and a plan completing that work. Our stakeholder group for advising Structured Data on Commons is in the process of being developed, but is not completed. We are in progress for develping training materials related to SDC and Wikidata.

Program 8: Community programs capacity Goal 1: As a result of support activities, program leaders in Education, GLAM and TWL will more effectively implement outreach and content-building programs, while prolific contributors will have improved access to educational resources, leading in all three groups to an increase in quality content on our projects.
 
Outcome 1: Education team is on track to serve global program leaders, and has participated as planned in movement and regional events (exception for WikiArabia because of illness of team member); Team support has been reviewed in Q2/Q3 via the recent Perception Survey and Report (with recommendations for improvement in current and future work), and updated best practices are being documented through a Case Studies campaign; Systematic peer mentoring has shifted since the Education Collaborative has disbanded and a new thematic education user group is still awaiting formal approval; Exploring more proactive regional support and capacity building in emerging communities (recent example of Asia trip in Q2, looking contextually at needs and opportunities).

Outcome 2: Our publisher outreach has yielded 6 new partners, 3 of them with significant collections of non-English content. We added content-leaders ProQuest and SpringerNature to our collection after 4 years of pursuit and pitching. The basis for a new metrics platform has been created, with publishers now able to see their metrics via a dedicated and regularly updating tool. Outcome 3: Some updates to the GLAM documentation portal have consistently gotten stuck in conversation/collaboration with community members, and deprioritized in exchange for focus on Wikidata + Structured Data on Commons documentation. Case studies are on track for completion, in collaboration with the Education team. New milestones focus on develoing better community around Structured Data in the GLAM space.We added content-leaders ProQuest and SpringerNature to our collection.

Program 9: Community programs institutional and professional outreach and partnerships Goal 1: Increase awareness and readiness among targeted professional communities to collaborate with the Wikimedia movement.
 
Outcome 1: The education team has continued monthly newsletter production featuring community contributions and co-managed social media accounts; Team has participated in regional education events in Asia, and online forums with aligned partners (Internet Society); The team has supported education community members to attend local outreach opportunities and helped with follow up; Targeted support has been provided to several new program pilots (involving new local institutional partnerships) underway with user groups in Palestine, Ghana, and Nigeria.

Outcome 2: Wikipedia Library run two campaigns: #OAbot and #1Lib1Ref. OABot, in its first year, added 2000 free-to-read links alongside paywalled versions of sources in Wikipedia Citations. It motivated and engaged the open access community, while building out a micro-contribution platform for further additions at OAbot.org. #1Lib1Ref, in its third year, grew by 70% and generated well-over 5,000 new references while captivating librarians around the world. The campaign was spread around social media in nearly 40 countries, with thousands of posts about #1Lib1Ref going out to millions of people. Wikipedia Library branches expanded to 23 total, run by a diverse group of branch coordinators who pitch partners, attend conferences, share updates for the Books & Bytes newsletter, and make a regional impact with their outreach. A new Star Coordinator campaign twice recognized a quarterly standout who makes outsized contributions to the language branch and its activities. The Wikipedia Library User Group, now up to 178 members, held a half-dozen meetings faciliated by TWL staff, leading up to the election of an 8-person steering committee. The Wikipedia + Libraries Facebook group is up to 1,389 members. Outcome 3: Though the GLAM community has had an increasing number of partnership support opportunities (including advancing relationships with regional coalitions, like the Association of Research Libraries, Linked Data for Libraries - LD4L): the relationship with the major identified international bodies has been slow, and a campaign for GLAM is unlikely during this year. Instead of a campaign, developing a strategic series of capacities to allow for a more advanced campaign when ICOM/IFLA/UNESCO are ready. Additional work is being done to advance relationships with the CC-GLAM community.

Program 10: Training modules Goal 1: To promote the use of existing, and creation of new, training modules, and work to integrate them into community processes.
 
Internationalization of the training modules encountered a significant software problem in the dashboard for which workarounds are being sought. Collaborating with Community Resources on printable safety resources for event grantees. How-to documentation for training modules was made available on Meta in Q1 17/18.
Program 11: Community collaboration in product development Goal 1: The goal is to increase the awareness and participation of Wikimedia communities in our product development projects. A higher quantity and diversity of participation through our planning and development process will result in a better common understanding, a better collaboration, and better products.
 
100% of Community Liaisons support requests from Audiences team have been resourced so far. Our increased scope including Technology is being put in practice supporting Community Liaison requests from the Cloud Services and the MediaWiki Platform teams. According to our periodical surveys, product managers are overall very satisfied of the support received. The task of finding tech ambassadors for the top 25 Wikimedia projects is progressing very well. Community Engagement and Audiences have agreed on a framework of collaboration to complete the Technical Collaboration Guidance, which we hope to complete during this fiscal year.
Program 12: Onboarding new developers Goal 1: Our goal is to achieve a sustained increase of new developers contributing to Wikimedia projects, clearly departing from the current stagnant trend. For this, we will focus our developer outreach in selected projects ready to receive new contributors, helping them to improve their documentation, support, and activities for newcomers. We will explore new groups, new geographies, and new approaches to increase the diversity of our technical community and respond better to the technical needs of our movement and our users
 
We have started publishing our New Developers report as planned, including qualitative and quantitative data and lessons learned. We have started the improvements on MediaWiki.org documentation. We have launched a pilot test for a new Wikimedia Developer Support channel. So far, we have applied the lessons learned to the hackathon at Wikimania 2017, our plans for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2018 and the organization of the Google Code-in, Google Summer of Code and Outreachy developer outreach programs. It is too soon to register changes in our onboarding and retention metrics, and it is likely that the activities of this program will continue in the next fiscal year.
Program 13: Department-wide program: Community Committee and Functionary Support Outcome 1: Learning & Evaluation will energize and enable the AffCom to support affiliate development through facilitation support and administrative support for affiliate recognitions and renewals, proactive compliance monitoring, and supporting the derecognition process when necessary. We will help AffCom further develop in leadership capacity, working, with some added administrative support, to properly monitor affiliate development through their reports and to support the committee to design and advance cohort strategies to help support the onboarding and healthy development of new user groups. Specifically, we will work to design some social infrastructures for connecting leaders across new user groups to provide AffCom guidance and collegial support one another as they develop as new organized groups. In addition, in 2017/18 the staff liaisons will support the committee to review affiliates strategy and models in line with the movement strategy process and to develop clear expectations, protocols, and responsibilities for effective AffCom internal leadership for movement partnering, reporting, and storytelling about our affiliates network.
 
While we were a bit late in hiring, we have now onboarded our new Monitoring & Evaluation Strategist who is already working to implement the new report monitoring system. The AffCom continue to explore issues of the current affilaite ecosystem and models and are working toward drafting their thoughts for the board as a white paper. While the committee has discussed potential channels for community conversations, efforts to do so have taken a back seat as the committee focuses on some critical points of conflict and their strategic work needs. Still, it is an open conversation and likely effort to be initiated before the end of the fiscal year.
Goal 2: Arbitration Committees, Checkusers, OTRS administrators, Oversighters and Stewards: These international groups have assigned staff liaisons within the Wikimedia Foundation’s Support and Safety team to offer them ad hoc support for emerging issues when major programs are not being conducted. However, access to Wikimedia Foundation support is not even across all groups, particularly where language barriers and cultural distance have prevented the organic development of working relationships. By the end of this fiscal year, each group will have clarity on its assigned liaison and an effective method for reaching out. Non-English Arbitration Committees will be aware of avenues of staff support, including the opportunity for regular consultation.
 
Support for functionary groups with existing liaisons is on schedule and the survey reaching out to all non-English ArbComs is set to launch in Q3. (Milestone 2 originally defined Q2.)
Goal 3: Election Committee: The standing Election Committee has a self-stated goal of improving elections processes in this elections off-year so that the next election cycle will function more smoothly and with greater diversity. They will achieve this, with Support and Safety team assistance.
 
The committee created a retrospective report for the last election, incorporating feedback received from Board Governance Committee, Election Committee, election candidates and the community. Preparing for the 2019 cycle and building on its report, the committee worked on conceptual improvements.
Goal 4: Grants Committees: Participatory grant committees ensure a diverse group of movement stakeholders are represented in funding decisions. As a result there will be shared responsibility, increased community engagement throughout the grants process, and trust built. For more info on this program’s goals and outcomes, see Resourcing Communities.
 
Grant committees for APG/FDC, Simple APG, Conferences, Wikimania, and Project are all operating as planned. Many program officers have recruited new members throughout the year to build out the committees, and we strive for diversity.
Goal 5: Ombudsman Commission: Increased visibility into the work of the Ombudsman Commission amongst our international communities will result in a more broadly diverse pool of candidates from which the group may be constituted, thus increasing opportunities for representation across the movement and improving awareness of the OC as an avenue of support for volunteers.
 
Piloting earlier and more far-reaching OmbCom recruitment efforts for the 2018 commission resulted in the biggest and most diverse pool of qualified applicants in the group's history.

Community Engagement financials (Jul 2017 - Dec 2017)

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Accounts Actuals Budget Variance
Personnel 2,325,036 2,418,178 -93,141
Grants 1,245,354 1,479,046 -233,692
Outside Contract Services 173,909 174,255 -346
Travel and Conference 246,668 285,363 -38,695
Other Expense 593,697 751,797 -158,099
TOTAL 4,584,665 5,108,638 -523,973

Technology

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Program Name Goals Status Description of progress, changes, and milestones/metrics
Program 1: Availability, performance, and maintenance Goal 1: We will maintain the availability of Wikimedia’s sites and services for our global audiences and ensure they’re running reliably, securely, and with high performance. We will do this while modernizing our infrastructure and improving current levels of service when it comes to testing, deployments, and maintenance of software and hardware.
 
Highlights:
  • Modernizing Puppet configuration management: upgrading to puppetDB to version 3.2 or newer was pushed to Q3 and is currently underway.
  • Thumbnail infrastructure replaced with Thumbor
  • Updated to jQuery3
  • Established performance testing infrastructure that can be extended to enable performance testing on commit
  • Decision on how to proceed when HHVM no longer supports PHP5 was made in Q2 and completed in early Q3
  • Stood up a new data center in Singapore (EQSIN)
  • Wikidata has it's own dedicated database section with dedicated resources
  • Migrated the majority of developers to Node.js framework

Postponements:

  • Help for Audiences to set up tooling to compare Marvin's performance with the mobile site
  • Performance review of VisualEditor
Program 2: MediaWiki Goal 1: We will strive for a refreshed, performant core platform by bringing renewed focus on MediaWiki.
 
Highlights:
  • Developing a tool to rename almost all of MediaWiki core’s 1,700 classes, will finish in Q3
  • Various improvements including continuous integration, code coverage analysis, and extension management
  • Developed a sandbox for external commands run by MediaWiki core, will be deployed in Q3
  • Removing use of PHP serialization in revision storage, will be complete in Q3
Program 3: Addressing technical debt Goal 1: Wikimedia developers are able to create and release new features that integrate cleanly with the rest of the technical stack in a reasonable amount of time.
 
Highlights:
  • Defined what it means to be a code steward and the “Technical Debt Project Manager” role
  • Will continue conversations to find stewards for orphaned code
Program 4: Technical community building Goal 1: We will expand and strengthen our technical communities, focusing on understanding their needs and measuring the progress and outcome of our efforts. In particular, we will focus on three traditionally underserved communities: tool and bot developers; API and data consumers; and third-party users of our software.
 
Goals are all completed (or still on track) for first half of the year, with the exception of 'forming a WMCS Documentation Special Interest Group' which was postponed.

Highlights:

  • Created tutorial content for common issues to be used as an example of "featured article" quality
  • Participated in MediaWiki Stakeholders Group, several third-party developer conferences, Enterprise MediaWiki Slack team (NASA), and a monthly US Federal Government MediaWiki meeting.
  • Research interviewed 8 Technology teams about their audiences, how they communicate with them, and how they measure their adoption of the team’s technical platforms and resources. In Q3 work will continue to complete a report and an audience map to help Technology identify potential KPIs related to adoption, as well as common interaction patterns and effective audience engagement strategies used by different technology teams.
  • Workshop proposal has been accepted at Web Conference 2018 (April in Lyon, France) to bring together the Wikimedia research community; we've secured 6 speakers and call for proposals is ongoing.
Program 5: Scoring Platform (ORES) Goal 1: In the next fiscal year, we’ll create a dedicated team to further develop ORES and related technologies to balance efficiency and accuracy with transparency, ethics, and fairness.
 
Highlights:
  • Expanded counter-vandalism measures
  • Various outreach achieved: universities, open collaboration workshops, conferences and keynotes.
  • In Q3: ORES extension refactoring and continuing to expand counter-vandalism support
Program 6: Streamlined service delivery Goal 1: We will build a new production platform for integrated development, testing, deployment, and hosting of applications. This will greatly reduce the complexity and speed of delivering a service and maintaining it throughout its lifecycle, with fewer dependencies between teams and greater automation and integration. The platform will offer more flexibility through support for automatic high-availability and scaling, abstraction from hardware, and a streamlined path from development through testing to deployment. Services will be isolated from each other for increased reliability and security.

Wikimedia developers, as well as third-party users, benefit from the ability to easily replicate the stack for development or their own use cases.

This work also represents an investment in the future; although this will not yet significantly materialize within FY17-18, this project will eventually result in significant cost savings on both capital expenditure (through consolidation of hardware capacity) and staff time (by streamlining development, testing, deployment and maintenance).

 
A tasks were declined as out of scope for this team in Q1: Define functional tests for Mathoid running on the staging Kubernetes cluster and defining a method for monitoring and reacting to those tests.

Highlights:

  • Extended a new service delivery platform with a design for pod-level monitoring and service-level alerting - monitoring standard metrics of CPU & memory usage, IO operations, etc.
  • Created scaffolding (of Helm charts) to setup services for either personal development or production deployment
  • Completed push phase of the production variant of build and release pipeline
Program 7: Smart tools for better data Goal 1: Make Wikimedia data easily available for both the Foundation and the different Wiki communities by providing better tools, infrastructure, and access to data for editors, communities, and Foundation staff.
 
We have launched a new UI for wikistats (currently alpha) https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2.</> This tool will come to replace our community's main source of metrics. We also launched a new set of public apis for editing data and a new datastore (only WMF) for denormalized edit data called data lake. We have launched http://superset.wikimedia.org</> a UI for data consumption directed to WMF Product Managers. We have also developed a new backend for eventlogging in hadoop that allows us to scale our UI metrics collecting system.
Goal 3: Wikimedia Cloud Services users have easy access to public data.
 
Highlights:
  • Labs users have access now to mediawiki application data through the new labs replicas which are couple orders of magnitude faster than older ones.
  • Lauched clickstream datset that shows how users (collectively not individually) traverse wikipedia. We have launched eventstreams, a new way for our users to consume recent changes to wikipedia pages

Stalled:

  • We had to postpone our work regarding better bot identification in pageviews to Q4
Objective 3: Experiments with real-time data and community support for new datasets available
 
Lauched clickstream datset that shows how users (collectively not individually) traverse wikipedia. We have launched eventstreams, a new way for our users to consume recent changes to wikipedia pages
Outcome 4: Users see improvements on data computing and data quality.
 
We had to postpone our work regarding better bot identification in pageviews to Q4
Program 8: Multi-datacenter support Goal 1: We will improve availability and performance for our users, while also minimizing the impact from fail-over testing and catastrophes. We will do this by expanding our multi-data center capabilities to serve requests from multiple data centers simultaneously.
 
A few tasks started in Q1 have stalled:
  • Install and use mcrouter in deployment-prep (partially finished in Q2, will continue in Q3)

Highlight:

  • Created a new job queue and documented metrics and common operational tasks
Goal 2: Backend infrastructure works reliably across data centers.
 
Program 9: Growing Wikipedia across languages via recommendations Goal 1: Use machine learning to build recommendation algorithms that can help editors identify what to edit, in order to close the content gaps on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects
 
Highlight:
  • Finished creating a canonical way for structuring Wikipedia articles, to help newcomers and experienced contributors for 160+ languages, which resulted in a new section recommendation system
Program 10: Public cloud services & support Goal 1: Empower volunteers to create technical solutions to the problems of on-wiki communities with a minimal investment of time and low friction for transferring maintainership from one individual to another.
 
A couple tasks are still in progress: writing a report for the funders and fundraising for WikiCite 2018.

Highlights:

  • Ran the annual Toolforge developer survey
  • Converted all 'labs' branding into Toolforge or Cloud Services
  • Wrote a series of blog posts highlighting Tools developed and maintained by our technical community
Program 11: Improving citations across Wikimedia projects Goal 1: In the next fiscal year, we will conduct research aiming to: improve the user experience of editors and readers around sources and citations; quantify citation coverage across Wikimedia contents, identifying gaps and areas of low citation quality; help contributors identify topic areas of Wikimedia projects in greater need of sourcing work so that citation quality gaps are addressed. We will leverage our network to establish new formal collaborations and answer research questions related to the coverage, quality and accessibility of citations across Wikimedia projects. We will also continue to lead the WikiCite series, which started in 2016, in order to help align community and technical efforts related to citation data and infrastructure.
 
A couple tasks are still in progress that will continue into Q3: writing a report for the funders and fundraising for WikiCite 2018.

Highlights:

  • Published a dataset that represents structured metadata and contextual information about every reference ever added to an English Wikipedia article
  • Published a 2017 activity report from WikiCite
  • Hosted sessions at 3 conferences
  • Wrote a 2018-2020 vision document to ensure the sustainability of outreach efforts
Program 12: Grow contributor diversity Goal 1: Design and test socio-technical solutions that can help increase contributor diversity in Wikipedia
 
This goal was finished in Q1 and there isn't any additional work to be completed at this time.

Fundraising tech

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Program Name Goals Status Description of progress, changes, and milestones/metrics
Product Program 7: Payment processor investigation and long-term strategy

Note: Program was originally included in Audiences' (Product's) section the in Annual Plan. This work was moved to Technology.

Goal: Evaluate several options through Q1 and Q2. We plan to choose our mix of options by the end of Q2 and begin executing on them in Q3.

The following options are not a complete list and could happen in parallel:

  • Support of the SmashPig donations payment initiative
  • Fewer processors that offer more payment options (lower maintenance but higher fees)
  • Changes to countries and payment options with low ROI.
  • Remain at current functionality with no planned expansion
 
We spent Q1 and Q2 looking at the cost of integrations and our campaign portfolio. We decided to cut some payment options and adjust our campaign schedule. We are planning to finish our ingenico integration in Q3. We also plan to work on recurring donations at some time between Q3 and 4. Finally, we are scoping and starting work on a feature we refer to as "contribution tracking". This last feature will allow us to scale better in the comnig years, and allow us to take down parts of our backend while allowing emails and campaigns can continue. We will start this work in Q4 and it will be a major part of next fiscal year.
Product Program 8: Donor retention

Note: Program was originally included in Audiences' (Product's) section the in Annual Plan. This work was moved to Technology.

Goal: Bring dedupe to a volume and quality level that can produce a measurable benefit for Wikimedia’s Foundations and Major Gifts team during the English Campaign.
 
We timeboxed dedupe work to Q1 and Q2. We made some major improvements in the Major Gifts workflows as well as the automatic process. We are now at a quality level where Donor Services can work on manual merges of our database. When they complete this work, our email campaigns will be far more responsive to donors. We will also be able to do deeper dives in donor retension and general analytics.

Technology financials (Jul 2017 - Dec 2017)

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Accounts Actuals Budget Variance
Personnel 5,510,710 5,751,092 -240,382
Data Center 2,143,230 2,025,706 117,525
Outside Contract Services 272,929 309,472 -36,542
Travel and Conference 142,511 243,894 -101,383
Other Expense 317,197 412,910 -95,713
TOTAL 8,386,578 8,743,074 -356,496

Audiences

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Readers

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Program Name Goals Status Description of progress, changes, and milestones/metrics
Program 1: Make knowledge more easily discoverable Goal 1: Maintain our search systems and improve the relevance of search results.
 
  • Implemented advanced search methodologies and improved search by researching and deploying machine learning to re-rank search results
  • Added eight language specific analyzers and added seven better fallback languages. In Q3, we'll work on phonetic matching
Goal 2: The user experience of search on desktop is old and may significantly impede the ability of users to find content quickly and easily. To combat that, we will improve the user interface of search on desktop to help users find what they’re looking for.
 
  • WDQS work has continued and is on track with the release of Wikidata Query Service Full-Text Search, and Category Search via dumps for select wikis using SPARQL on WDQS.
  • The Wikipedia.org portal page updates (statistics and translations) is now fully automated, requiring only that a human to confirm the weekly update and push it into production during a dedicated SWAT timeframe (every Monday).
  • When the Discovery Department was dissolved, as part of the re-org of 2017, some specific objectives were deprioritized, mainly: wikidata descriptions and page images to desktop search, and further experiments to the wikipedia.org portal
Goal 3: As part of the Discovery team, maps can help visitors to discover new, interesting, and relevant information within the Wikimedia projects.
 
We have been investigating various options to support the maps project and are sizing our commitments accordingly. At minimum, we have been supporting existing functionality as well as security and operations.
Program 2. Improve the Encyclopedia Experience
Outcome 1: Users have better experiences when interacting with articles across mobile and desktop Web platforms, measured through a combination of metrics focused on user retention, pageviews, and time spent on page (Audience H) Goal 1: Enable readers to gauge the quality and reliability of an article prior to reading
 
Target: Distinguish visually between pages with significant issues and pages that have less significant issues or have none at all. Work has begun in Q3 by planning discussions with the communities and estimating technical work. The project will continue through the end of the year.
Goal 2: Build on existing work creating better metrics to generate a more nuanced measure of learning
 
Target: at least 1 new KPI relating to knowledge consumption in our reading reports. Work on a visit frequency metric has stalled at a near-complete phase, but we are collecting data and will have more than year's worth by March.

•  In addition to the above target, we expect a new metric of "page previews" to be available by the end of the fiscal, which will track page previews at a resolution equivalent to that of pageviews.

Goal 3: Increase learning for all users by providing articles that load quickly in various settings
 
Target: Integrate at least two new services for article rendering on mobile web. The goal here has changed, since the mobile website overhaul has been put on pause while we evaluate broader technology upgrades in partnership with Technology.
Goal 4: Provide a smoother reading experience by improving the ways that users can flag articles of interest for later consumption
 
Target: Improve rendering functionality for PDF creation and book tool. We have improved the print styles for mobile and desktop for pdf rendering and print, sunset the decrepit OCG service and are working on an improved pdf rendering service. We have also launched a PDF rendering workflow for the mobile website, currently deployed to Google Chrome browsers on Android devices. Additionally, Android has improved its reading list functionality, iOS will be releasing theirs shortly, and we are introducing account level synching so that users switching devices or re-installing apps will not lose their saved pages.
Goal 5: Improve the end-user reading experience by applying a cohesive design language across multiple screen sizes
 
Target: Through qualitative testing, evaluate the effect of increased responsiveness of the mobile website for larger screens. We have released a responsive version of our mobile site on desktop, but it is not going to be tested this year.
Outcome 2: High-affinity readers ( audience G) benefit more from engaging with our sites, and are better aware of Wikimedia's apps. Goal 1: Iterate and improve new app features that drive reuse and learning by high-affinity readers
 
Target: Develop and deploy a push notifications service for more direct app messaging to users. Deliver at least one type recurring/regular notification for each app platform. Beta test notifications for mobile and/or desktop web. After a notification pilot on iOS, we opted to invest in a synchable reading list infrastructure instead of push notifications infrastructure. While we did not hit our target around notifications, the reading list synching ability, the most asked for feature of our apps will launch later this year. We also made substantial improvents to one of our deepest features, nearby articles ("places") on iOS and mproved our feed with an "on this day" item and customizability of our feed.
Goal 2: Run a targeted awareness campaign on wiki based on specific feature use or behavioral indicators that apps can optimize for (iOS)
 
Target: Raise awareness of the apps and their specific user value as measured by install volumes. We are not going to run a targeted reader campaign on wiki this year as our focus will be on contributors in the following fiscal.
Goal 3: Continue to improve accessibility of the apps
 
Goal 4: Increase engagement and retention by pushing content to users based on relevance, timeliness, interest, and/or preferences (RI/iOS/Android)
 
Target 1: Convert existing “pull” app notifications to use “push” notification infrastructure. As mentioned above, we moved away from this specific target following a short notification pull pilot on iOS. Instead we focused on improving our stickiest feature, the feed, as well as improving one of our deepest features, nearby articles ("places") on iOS.
Target 2: Maintaining core metrics and positive user feedback and reviews while broadening user base. Our core metrics are steady and our usef feedback has never been higher. On iOS, the app climbed __ rating points and was designated an "Editor's choice" app, due to its features, polish and attention to accessibility. However, our user base is not broadening. On Android it is slowly shrinking. We believe this is the result of normal user churn coupled with 0 awareness drives-- generally most app install traffic is driven by banners on the website, paid ads, or virality and we have none of these at scale.
From Contributors Program: "Increase device support for editing Goal 1: Collaborate with Reading to create new mechanisms by which to contribute edits with lower context or in small ways on mobile devices (Audiences B1, G)
 
Target: 4. The quantity of mobile contributions of a specific contribution type on a specific wiki with community approval increases. 10% of non-bot wikidata description edits now come from our apps, despite this being a bare-ones, MVP product. The % varies significantly from wiki to wiki between ~5-25% (except english, where it has not rolled out). Throughout, we have achieved a very low reversion rate.

Contributors

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Program Name Goals Status Description of progress, changes, and milestones/metrics
Program 3: Increase device support for editing Goal: Support content contribution on mobile devices
Program 4: New editor success Goal: Improve the new editor experience
 
Goal was to get to prepare to hand off work to Audiences Community Engagement teams, so they can do informed experiments toward retaining more new editors in medium sized Wikipedias (originally we were planning on a CDP, but this is informing Annual plan of Product and perhaps CE instead, so for now, updating here). This team has accomplished 5 workshops in total, to focus on 4 of the 11 findings in the research reports, brainstomed and evaluated many concepts to arrive at a set of tactics and strategic focuses that we recommend working toward our goal of retaining more new editors in medium sized wikipedias. Please see details attached in comment.
Program 5: Increase current editor retention and engagement Goal 1: Recommend where new and tenured users can contribute
 
This goal was premised on the idea that additional staff from a merger with Language team would add significantly to Collaboration team's capacity. Because the planned merger was never completed, the goal was canceled.
Goal 2: Give better ways to monitor contributions
 
We graduated the New Filters for Edit Review out of beta on Recent Changes in Q1; they are now standard on all wikis.
Goal 3: Provide better workflow and communication experiences
 
This goal was canceled to enable Collaboration Team to focus on Maps during Q3 and Q4
Program 6: Community Wishlist Goal: The Community Tech team works on features and fixes that support Wikimedia’s most active contributors.
 
7 of the 10 wishes for 2017 were completed by end of year, with Global preferences still in development. In Nov-Dec, a new Community Wishlist Survey prioritized 10 new wishes for 2018.
Program 7: Payment processor investigation and long-term strategy This program was moved to the Technology plan, see report in that section.
Program 8: Donor retention This program was moved to the Technology plan, see report in that section.
Program 9: Team Practices and Organizational Development
 
The team responsible for this program was reorganized to be integrated into other teams of the Foundation. This is no longer a program
Program 10: Wikidata Goal: Continued support for funding and development of Wikidata
 
Outcome 1: Continue to assure the technical and social sustainability of Wikidata (software and community) as the central, structured knowledge data base for the Wikimedia movement and beyond. This will help users detect and fix data quality issues more easily, help institutions contribute in a productive way to Wikidata and are part of the community, and help more users write queries -- on schedule

Outcome 2: Continue to increase the reach of Wikidata into the Wikimedia projects. We aim to significantly increase the instances of data uses from Wikidata by Wikimedia projects. We will achieve this by removing barriers for editors on Wikipedia and enabling new kinds of data to be collected within Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons — thereby making Wikidata more useful to the other projects. -- Wiktionary integration and list generation are behind schedule to do other commitments.

Audiences Financials (Jul 2017 - Dec 2017)

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Accounts Audiences
Actuals Budget Variance
Personnel 5,468,441 5,616,722 -148,281
Outside Contract Services 107,191 209,415 -102,224
Travel and Conference 191,744 247,659 -55,915
Other Expense 178,202 252,960 -74,758
TOTAL 5,945,579 6,326,756 -381,178

Communications

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Program Name Goals Status Description of progress, changes, and milestones/metrics
Program 1: Share our culture Goal 1: Engage our audiences, particularly in places we have underserved. Explain our values and be accountable to them. Integrate with activities happening across the movement. Attract project and movement participants. Improve talent retention and recruiting.
 
Program 2: Lead the narrative Goal 1: Position Wikimedia as a leader in the conversations and policies that are key to our vision’s growth and durability. Ensure that the public discourse around Wikipedia, the Wikimedia movement, and the Foundation is correct and understood. Clarify misinformation or misunderstandings that appear in global media.
 
Due to significant changes in the political climate, there have been more opportunities to position our values publicly though they also have less effect on actual policy. The ongoing search for team leadership and transition of Communications Director have also reduced our capacity to pursue new opportunities and support other departments in joining the discourse.
Program 3: Connect and amplify Goal 1: Ensure that we are reaching organizations and people who can help spread our mission, find collaboration partners and organizations that will help amplify our work, and build buy-in with other communities and organizations who can support the Wikimedia mission.
 
Program 4: Build awareness Goal 1: Develop repeatable systems for promoting community messages and explaining Wikimedia projects to new audiences in lower awareness regions. Adapt media approaches to work across distinct cultures forming best practices for community marketing.
 

Financials (Communications)

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Accounts Actuals Budget Variance
Personnel 544,266 696,906 -152,640
Outside Contract Services 397,282 470,000 -72,718
Travel and Conference 22,207 40,537 -18,330
Other Expense 13,551 25,373 -11,822
TOTAL 977,307 1,232,816 -255,510
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Program Name Goals Status Description of progress, changes, and milestones/metrics
Program 1: Defense of content & communities Goal 1: Strong defense of the Foundation, content, and communities
 
We continued to support litigation that affects the Foundation, content, and communities.
Goal 2: Favorable laws and judicial precedent for the Wikimedia movement
 
We continued to support litigation that set favorable precedent for the Wikimedia movement.
Program 2: Transparency Report Goal 1: Publication of the transparency report twice a year to provide information to users about how we protect user data and community control of project content. We hope that increased awareness of these efforts will help community members feel safe contributing to the projects, even about controversial topics.
 
We published the transparency report available at transparency.wikimedia.org, and distributed the first-ever print edition at Wikimania 2017 and other events.
Program 3: Fellowship Program Goal 1: A class of fellows each semester who provide high-quality legal research
 
We had 5 Legal Fellows for the summer, and 3 Legal Fellows for the fall.
Goal 2: Promotion of Wikimedia movement values to the broader legal community
 
On schedule
Goal 3: Strong relationships with law schools and similar academic programs
 
On track
Program 4: Promoting free culture Goal 1: Licensing that allows the public to contribute to and reuse content
 
The goal of upgrading text to Creative Commons 4.0 has been delayed due to staffing transitions. The team will reschedule the goal for a future point.
Program 5: Public policy Goal 1: The Wikimedia Foundation articulates positions on all public policy issues that are critical for the Wikimedia mission and operations of the Foundation
 
We wrote public statements, delivered talks, and submitted written comments on key policy topics, including a statement in the US on a proposal to weaken protections for platforms, a response to reserach by the European Commission on removals of illegal cotnent, and joining efforts to encourage specific reforms to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Goal 2: Local Wikimedia communities are empowered to work towards policy change
 
Hosted public policy meetup with Wikimedians and other organizations at Wikimania 2017.
Goal 3: The Wikimedia Foundation supports Wikimedia communities around the world in resisting government censorship efforts, and increasing people's ability to access and participate in the Wikimedia projects
 
On track (confidential)
Program 6: Trademarks Goal 1: File, maintain, and defend trademark registrations worldwide.
 
We register, maintain, and defend project trademarks to protect against improper use.
Goal 2: File, maintain, and defend domain name registrations.
 
We register, maintain, and defend domain names.
Goal 3: Facilitate mission-aligned community and external uses of Wikimedia. marks through our trademark policy and by granting trademark licenses.
 
We advised community members and others on the application of our open Trademark Policy, with a goal of supporting the communities’ work in furtherance of their mission. We reviewed requests to use trademarks and drafted licenses when uses furthered or promoted the mission.
Goal 4: Send cease and desist notices and file complaints in response to trademark infringement.
 
On track (confidential)
Non-Program 1: Training Goal 1: WMF employees and contractors have the legal knowledge they need to effectively do their jobs
 
We continued to create and conduct staff training on legal policies and procedures.
Non-Program 2: Board support Goal 1: The General Counsel serves as the Secretary of the Board of Trustees and together with other members of the legal team, supports the Board in the fulfillment of its duties.
 
We supported the August and November Board meetings, assisted with onboarding for new Board members, and provided additional advice on legal matters.
Non-Program 3: Copyright clearance Goal 1: Legally compliant media produced
 
On track (confidential)
Non-Program 4: General Legal Advice & Support Goal 1: Organizational legal compliance, best practices, and risk mitigation achieved
 
On track (confidential)
Segment 1: Legal (Privacy, Secruity, Data Management) Goal 1: Through improvements to our organizational security posture, the Foundation ensures the high-quality protection and security of our infrastructure and data
 
On track (confidential)
Goal 2: The Wikimedia Foundation provides clear communications with members of the communities and public regarding our privacy practices
 
We responded to privacy-related inquiries from users and donors.
Goal 3: The Wikimedia Foundation continues compliance with best practices for privacy
 
On track (confidential)
Goal 4: The Wikimedia Foundation continues compliance with best practices for data management
 
On track (confidential)
Segment 1: Legal (Community Health) Goal 1: As appropriate and to the extent possible, the Wikimedia Foundation will support users who face significant harassment, and work to keep harassers away from Wikimedia sites.
 
On track (confidential)
Segment 2: Privacy and Data Management (Technology - Analytics) Goal: Support teams and departments as needed
 
On track (confidential)
Segment 2: Privacy and Data Management (Technology - Security) Goal: Support teams and departments as needed
 
On track
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Accounts Actuals Budget Variance
Personnel 753,464 819,355 -65,891
Outside Contract Services 47,567 106,585 -59,018
Legal Fees 814,120 677,845 136,275
Travel and Conference 42,435 46,623 -4,188
Other Expense 83,984 131,553 -47,569
TOTAL 1,741,571 1,781,961 -40,390

Finance, Administration, and Office IT

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Program Name Goals Status Description of progress, changes, and milestones/metrics
Non-Program 1: Foundation Headquarters Office Relocatoin The WMF offices will be relocated by October 1, 2017. Between July and October 2017 we will need to effectively implement an office design, as well as plan for a smooth move to 1 Montgomery, San Francisco, CA, while insuring minimal disruption of staff.
 
Goal Achieved. Team met all milesstones for design, drawings, purchasing, and move implementation with minimal disruption to productivity and business by hard target date of 10/1/2017.
Non-Program 2: Accounting and Procurement Operations: Maintain our commitment to the Annual Audit, Form 990 filing and other compliance reporting. Improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our business and accounting operations for Finance and Administration, and provide administrative and business operations services to our budget owners, leadership, and teams.
 
While we have reduced the required business days for our accounting close through several system and process improvements, other workflows and system improvement milestones have been extended due to finance and other departmental resource constraints. Primarily we started the initial assessment and inventory of business workflows. We made incremental improvement on the back end accounting process as a result of the implementation of a purchasing module within our accounting system. This reduces the redundancy in our procure to pay approval workflow and resulted in reduction of payables processing time. Also the travel team had evolved Travel offsite request/booking from a “self service” to “full service” process which creates efficiency and enables staff to concentrate their effort on programmatic work.
Non-Program 3: Internal Financial Management Process Goal 1: Manage thorough planning, organizing, controlling and monitoring financial resources in order to achieve WMF’s Annual Plan budget and objectives
 
All activities have been completed and outcomes achieved. Foundation management has access to live financial results, automated reporting, and dynamic financial forecasts.
Non-Program 4: Annual Plan Process Improvement - Programmatic and Non-programmatic Goal 1: An effective planning process allows the Wikimedia Foundation to plan, organize and refine its work to enable a higher impact.
 
All milestones have been completed on time. The annual planning process has been refined to facilitate the development of detailed programmatic plans based on industry best practices that will be condensed into a more focus Foundation Annual Plan. The annual planning process includes improvements in CDP planning, multi-year planning, and measuing outcomes.
Program 5: Community Finance Goal 1: Elevate our communities’ ability to effectively utilize resources toward the mission and vision
 
This Program has been slightly modified as have defined the outputs that will support our Outcomes 1 and 2. For the remained of the year, we will focus on a challenge that many of our affiliates face: the capability to receive and use movement funds. Finance is working with Legal and Community Resources teams to define the problem and identify long-term solutions.

Milestones 1, 2, and 3 have been completed.

Program 6: In-Kind Donation of Depreciated Machines (PILOT) This initiative will use depreciated laptops not fully functional with the standard Foundation tools but completely functional for WMF Projects. Laptops will be redeployed for communities not able to afford them. This program offers a value add to engage with the Wikimedia program, thus extending the Foundation’s resources to enable communities with little or no resources to engage with Wikimedia projects.
 
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Non-Program 7: Continuous Information Systems Improvement Goal 1: Realized cost savings for phone services by switching from on-site Primary Rate Interface (PRI) to a cloud Voice over IP (VoIP) provider, which can be used for other activities.
 
Prior to our Office Move, we were able to substantiate this cost-saving direction for our VoIP systems. But due to the need to prioritize operationalizing a new internal networking system amidst other projects implemented during the move, this project was changed. We maintained our pre-existing phone system and contracts (AT&T).
Goal 2: Improved retention and destruction capabilities for emails through software services.
 
This project looks at elevating our current Google tier (Non-Profit BASIC) to Google Enterprise. A third party assessment is needed to confirm necessity. OIT is currently identifying consultants to perform this assesment.
Goal 3: Enhanced security measures, to reduce our security vulnerabilities.
 
This project is the SIEM (System Information Event Monitoring) project. With the arrival of our new Director of Security, the revival of this project has been discussed.

Finance & Administration financials (July 2017 - Dec 2017)

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Accounts Actuals Budget Variance
Personnel 1,363,564 1,306,984 56,580
Outside Contract Services 53,324 217,000 -163,676
Travel and Conference 42,877 58,650 -15,773
Other Expense 1,497,629 1,575,579 -77,949
TOTAL 2,957,393 3,158,213 -200,819

Advancement

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Program Name Goals Status Description of progress, changes, and milestones/metrics
Non-Program 1: Online Fundraising The online fundraising team will raise $68.8 million while educating readers about our movement.
 
We are on track to hit the annual revenue goal ahead of schedule in Q3 this year. At the 6 month mark, we raised $64 million.

In the Q2 English campaign, we improved messaging to include more information about our movement along with our regular donation asks. We highlighted more than 90 community members through banner quotes and photos.

Non-Program 2: Major Gifts and Endowment In conjunction with the Online Fundraising team, raise the annual operating budget and to grow the Wikimedia Endowment to help support our future..
 
On track- We raised $8 million in donations and pledges for the annual fund and have raised $1.5 million for the ENdowment. Additionally, we have secured five planned giving commitments for the enodwment. WE also helped to produce the annual report and have held three cultivation events.
Non-Program 3: Fundraising Operations Raise official budget by supporting Online campaigns (banner & emails) and Major Gifts with payment processing and operational tools.
 
All teams supported are on track to hit their annual goal. Q2 campaigns (France and Big English) had a stable payment platform and we have started the tactical aspects of reprioritizing campaigns and methods based on ROI and maintenance effort. We have also developed a Central Notice product roadmap, alongside an extensive analysis of user needs and potential uses for this tool.
Program 1: Partnerships for Reach: Asia Increase the awareness and readership of Wikimedia projects in India and Indonesia, covering both native languages and English
 
  • Community was informed about the proposed India Partnerships plan.
  • Plan to hire a country consultant for Indonesia to work on the Indonesia plan. Based on the 6-month refocus plan, this program area has been deprioritized giving attention to Partnerships for Knowledge (Project Tiger) in India.
Program 2: Partnerships for Reach: Latin America Increase the awareness and readership of Wikimedia projects in targeted Latin American countries (Mexico and Brazil) in Spanish and Portuguese respectively.
 
  • Worked with Wikimedia MX supporting awareness related projects, specificially the Metro ticket campaign (5M Wikipedia branded tickets on the CDMX subway system) and the partnership with the Mexican Ministry of Culture promoting cultural heritage (in process to sign).
  • Creation of Mexico partnership plan in process, as part of 6-mo plan.
  • De-prioritized work in Brazil.
Program 3: Partnerships for Reach: MENA Increase awareness and readership of Wikimedia projects in Nigeria and Egypt in English, Arabic, and native languages.
 
  1. Signed MOU with ONEm (a global private platform that enables Mobile Operators to provide a new channel for users to experience services on traditional voice and SMS). By using #Wiki, users can access Wikipedia free of charge via SMS text messages. The pilot is now in the testing phase with Asiacell Iraq (*possible reach 11 million), with the intent to scale up to be offered in Nigeria with MTN in the next 6-8 months.
  2. In discussions with The Guardian Group regarding a partnership in Nigeria. The Guardian is a highly reputable and respected online, print, and media platform with a reach of 6 million people, and growing fast. We are exploring having a section in their printed newspapers to show Wikipedia content (articles) on locally relevant content to increase awareness and readership.
Program 4: Partnerships for Knowledge Targeted increase of locally relevant content in native languages through partnerships that encourage content creation by building awareness about popular topics needed in native languages.
 
Launched Project Tiger in November in partnership with Google, CIS, and Wikimedia India chapter. The pilot project aims to encourage Wikipedia communities to create locally relevant, high qualoty articles in Indic languages by distributing resources (laptops and internet stipends) to select active editors in need of support; providing editors with a list of the most highly searched for topics in India to drive content creation; implementing a 3-month writing contest; and providing prizes to winners, including a 3-day capacity development training for the winning community. To-date, we have conducted a needs assessment, signed on 10 languages communities to particpate in the project, land aunched a community-wide call for applications for the resources (laptops & internet stipends). In consultation with community leaders, the project will reserve at least 10 laptops and 20 internet stipends for women Wikimedians to ensure there is diversity among recipients.

The writing contest will launch on/by Feb 15 and will run until mid-May.

Program 4: Partnerships for Communities Communities and affiliates across our movement should know how to effectively connect to and work with the Partnerships and Global Reach team at the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation and the communities we serve should collaborate to identify and triage potential partners that have the capacity and means to advance our mission.
 
  • Affiliates in Latin America, Africa, Middle East, and India, are fully aware of P&GR efforts and identify Regional Managers as bridges with WMF. WikiIndaba and Iberocoop communities worked together with regional managers on the "letter to Katherine" and "Carta de Buenos Aires" and their responses.
  • Regional managers continue to lead Partnerships track @ WMCON, working with WMDE on different capacity building workshops and trainings for WMCON 2018, following successful track in 2017.
Program 5: Wikipedia’s Awareness and Usage Research Get a better understanding of Wikipedia awareness and usage in emerging markets, especially within our target countries. Gathering this information will help us define and prioritize our efforts with building partnerships, community initiatives, and product direction.
 
Conducted phone surveys and coordinated with analytics to measure impact of the Zero launch in Iraq (pre and post measurements of awareness, page views, and unique devices). Awareness among Asiacell subscribers jumped from 18% to 28% after the launch of Zero and the release of the marketing campaigns.
Program 7: Wikipedia Zero: conducting impact assessment and focusing partnerships to target countries To be strategically consistent with our prioritization for programmatic activities in our target countries (also part of the New Readers program), we will focus Wikipedia Zero activities in Nigeria, Egypt, and Indonesia.
 
In FY 17, launched a Wikipedia Zero partnership in Nigeria with Smile. We coordinated with Comms on assisting Smile with their PR work, and also provided some announcments of the launch on our Wikimedia Facebook page.
Program 8: Public policy to support New Readers We will work together with Legal, Communications, and specific Wikimedia communities concerned to protect and improve the policy environment upon which the Wikimedia initiatives depend. We will investigate and engage in initiatives to increase access to knowledge in the priority regions identified by the New Readers program. Additionally, we will empower the Wikimedia communities to further these goals.
 
  • Have worked with Policy team on all relevant matters around net neutrality and zero-rating that have impacted Wikipedia Zero strategy (blog posts and public policy forums/conferences).
  • Collaborated on Foundation's Access strategy, identifying policy partnership opportunities that would facilitate increase of reach and addressing affordability and technical barriers (i.e. policy work towards offline solutions and dicreasing data costs).
  • Engaged with stakeholders with overlapping missions (Internet Society - ISOC, Alliance for the Affordable Internet - Web Foundation, Berkman Klein Center) to work on access-focused collaborations to bring new readers (i.e. Chapterthon with ISOC - "connecting digital schools" challenge with Wikimedia affiliates).


Advancement financials (July 2017 - Dec 2017)

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Accounts Actuals Budget Variance
Personnel 1,336,929 1,473,048 -136,119
Donation Processing Fees 2,386,181 1,968,000 418,181
Outside Contract Services 618,045 721,022 -102,977
Travel and Conference 79,669 151,025 -71,356
Other Expense 88,457 188,115 -99,658
TOTAL 4,509,281 4,501,210 8,071

Talent & Culture

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Program Name Goals Status Description of progress, changes, and milestones/metrics
Program 1: Diversity & Inclusion Goal 1: As an organization focused on global projects, diversity and inclusion is critical not just for our projects, but also for staff. Although there is strong overall diversity, WMF still has challenges in some departments. FY16-17 has focused on putting diversity and inclusion programs and data in place.

Extend diversity & inclusion programs, create a “brand” for it, share externally:

  • Ongoing support and creation of internal D&I
  • Ongoing Recruiting programs to ensure diverse candidate pools
  • Ongoing hiring manager training on D&I
  • Ongoing review of staff & candidate diversity data
  • With Communications, publicly describe our interest in D&I
 
Milestones:
  • ERG & Alliance event support - DONE, with more in FQ3-4
  • Recruiting best practices - first iteration done, with more in FQ3-4
  • Update external hiring page - DONE Publicly share EEO data - FQ3
  • Data review - DONE with more ongoing quarterly Continued stories on staff - FQ4
  • Manager training - Drafted and to be run FQ3
  • Additionally setting up inclusion training at leadership levels in the foundation for FQ3, and sourcing long term partners for ongoing diversity & inclusion projects for next FY. Ongoing efforts to train hiring managers initially is showing results in more diverse candidate selection.
Program 2: Leadership Development Goal 1: We need to grow leaders at all levels of the organization. We need to train a new generation of problem solvers.
  • Establish a shared understanding of expectations at all levels of leadership: extend the leadership framework to directors and managers
  • Integrate leadership framework and accountabilities into performance reviews
  • Train leaders in succession planning
  • Deliver Wikilead, our leadership development program, to a new cohort
  • Deliver one module of Wikilead for C-levels
 
Milestones:
  • Rollout leadership framework - C Team DONE, Directors done FQ3, Managers start FQ3-4
  • Next generation of ongoing manager training launched - Development conversations rolled out, with next iteration in FQ3-4
  • Train managers in succession planning - initial training started with more in FQ3-4
  • Completed Wikilead cohort - DONE
  • Additionally started work to expand performance management to incorporate leadership framework, to encourage more accountability, starting with the C Team. Annual reviews and training set for FQ4.
Program 3: Values Goal 1: We need to integrate our values into the employee lifecycle and how we work day-to-day.
  • Create a culture where we live and act within our values
  • Integrate values into recruiting, cultural orientation, performance reviews, managing, promotions, and cause for letting someone go
 
Milestones:
  • Values added to hiring process - first iteration done, with more in FQ3-4
  • Cultural orientation and performance - DONE
  • Values added to terminations process - FQ3-4
  • Additionally conducted individual interviews with 40+ staff to better understand their employee lifecycle experiences, to more carefully plan and craft next iterations to processes and practices, for both this and next FY.

Talent and Culture financials (July 2017 - Dec 2017)

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Actuals Budget Variance
Personnel 846,316 953,569 -107,253
Outside Contract Services 82,315 96,999 -14,684
Travel and Conference 24,669 28,292 -3,623
Other Expense 200,166 346,606 -146,440
TOTAL 1,153,466 1,425,466 -272,000

Office of the Executive Director financials (July 2017 - Dec 2017)

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Note: The Office of the Executive Director did not include any programs in the Annual Plan, and therefore does not have program status reports here. A Financial report is provided for informational purposes.

Actuals Budget Variance
Personnel 247,901 269,325 −21,424
Outside Contract Services 203,635 95,000 108,635
Travel and Conference 105,616 96,412 9,204
Other Expense 8,995 25,788 −16,793
TOTAL 566,147 486,525 79,622