Hi Selena,
thanks a lot for sharing, very useful.
Best
Yaroslav
On Fri, Apr 14, 2023 at 1:54?AM Selena Deckelmann <sdeckelmann@wikimedia.org>
wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I joined the Wikimedia Foundation on August 1 of last year in a newly
> created role as the Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO). (For the
> first few weeks, some of the staff called me C3PO as they got used to the
> new title :) The role was created to bring both the Product and Technology
> departments back under a single accountable leader for the first time since
> about 2015. Like Maryana
> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Chief_Executive_Officer/Maryana%E2%80%99s_Listening_Tour>,
> I decided to spend the first few months of my time at Wikimedia listening
> and learning. Although I come from the open source technology field, and
> have worked with volunteers and communities in prior jobs, it felt
> important to start here with curiosity and openness about what’s working
> well and what needs to change.
>
> Since then, I have met one on one and in small groups with more than 360
> people, who spoke with me from 38 different countries. I also attended 22
> large and small convenings and events which included about 3,150 people.
> This includes members of the Foundation’s product and technology teams,
> other Foundation staff, editors, functionaries, affiliates, movement
> organizers and open internet partners. I tried to approach every
> conversation with curiosity, openness, and eagerness, letting go of any
> preconceptions I may have had (intentionally embracing beginner’s mind
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin>) about the Foundation, the
> Wikimedia projects, and communities worldwide that contribute to creating
> and sharing free knowledge. I can confirm that I quickly found myself awash
> in details, experiencing a firehose of information from all sides! My
> husband and two young children have also learned a lot more about this
> movement in the last six months than you might expect.
>
> To provide myself with some structure, I asked everyone the same kind of
> questions about: (1) the impact our product and technology organizations
> have had on the movement and/or the world in the last five years, and what
> people were most proud of; (2) the current vision and strategy and if they
> will take us where we need to go; and (3) the most promising opportunities
> that people see in our work, and what is needed to realize that potential.
>
> I want to thank everyone who took the time to share with me, and I’ve
> included some direct, anonymized quotes in this letter from the
> conversations I had. And I want to confirm that the listening continues — I
> will create more spaces in the year ahead for dedicated conversations about
> some of the important topics I have highlighted below. I will also be
> posting this letter to Meta.
>
> Pulling in the same direction: More visible and shared metrics
>
> On a page of the first notebook I had for my onboarding, I quoted a person
> who said they just wanted "meaningful common goals." This was a theme
> repeated over and over — a clear desire from everyone to do work together
> that was linked by common purpose, and with all the volunteers that have
> created all Wikimedia projects. I got to hear so many different voices, and
> I heard the details from every side — what’s working, what hasn’t been
> working for a long time — some of the problems we face are over ten years
> old. People shared what’s missing, what’s extra, who’s fighting to be heard
> and who’s feeling lost at sea.
>
> "I think there are lots of promising opportunities to incentivise people
> to pay off technical debt and make our existing stack more sustainable.
> Right now there are no incentives for engineers in this regard."
>
> "Are we really having impact?"
>
> How can we unite behind meaningful common goals? And which metrics matter
> the most? We have so much data, but we really need lodestar
> <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lodestar> (or some refer to this as north
> star) metrics across the whole Foundation, a system for reviewing and
> reflecting on what we learn from them, and then a way to connect those
> metrics with the day to day work everyone is doing.
>
> To get at that, we’re doing two main things — one is deepening our
> understanding of volunteer activities and the health of the volunteer
> communities. This will be through working closely with volunteers using
> existing processes and sharing what we’re learning, as well as qualitative
> and quantitative research workstreams, including reviewing existing
> research of volunteer activities and typical work profiles. The other is
> working to establish a set of Foundation-wide lodestar metrics. Shared
> metrics help everyone understand how we’re measuring success across the
> Foundation, and we’re sharing these publicly as part of our Annual Plan.
> Over time, we plan to bring our measures of success for important
> initiatives to communities for conversations and debate to help everyone
> align what success might look like. Shared metrics and data will empower us
> to make more effective and better decisions, along with collaboration with
> those who are working on changes and those who may be directly affected by
> them.
>
> What does our open source strategy look like for today’s world?
>
> "I strongly believe that Wikipedia will be obsolete by 2030 if we don’t
> fix MediaWiki now."
>
> What is our open source strategy?
>
> We have to make some harder choices about what it means to be an
> open-source organization, and shift the conversation to resolve historic
> debates that prevent us from making important, strategic choices.
>
> Two big areas to resolve are:
>
> -
>
> What is our strategy for MediaWiki support? Today there is a tug of
> war about whether we should support MediaWiki for third-party users, even
> though their use cases have diverged significantly from those of Wikimedia
> projects. I’m planning a MediaWiki convening in late 2023 to begin tackling
> this issue.
> -
>
> What is our strategy for third-party re-use of Wikimedia content?
> There are a lot of nuances around rate limiting and updating the existing
> API policies in line with our values around open access. How can we
> coordinate more across the Foundation and technical volunteers to build
> greater understanding and alignment? Wikimedia project content also has
> become a cornerstone of artificial intelligence (AI) products. Wikipedias
> have long used machine learning (ML) to improve content and detect
> vandalism. How can we help support the use of ML and AI that is a public
> good? We have started some conversations
> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/Draft/External_Trends/Community_call_notes>
> about this but need to go further.
>
>
> What will it take to have impact at scale?
>
> "Before we can think about strategy, we need to answer ‘do we want to
> change this culture to work with a unified strategy, or do we want to
> change the strategy methodology to work with a decentralized culture? Or
> some combination thereof?’"
>
> What is our strategy for scaling that will allow us to have the most
> impact with limited resources?
>
> Today we support over 750+ distinct Wikimedia projects, with over 300 of
> those including language versions of Wikipedia, Wikisource, multiple
> language versions of Wiktionary, and many other free knowledge projects.
>
> What is an efficient and responsible way to steward the limited resources
> we have towards Wikipedia and/or the sister projects? And similar to the
> earlier conversation about Foundation metrics – we must do this in a way
> that can have an impact on our mission of bringing free knowledge to the
> whole world.
>
> Some of the big questions that came up included consolidation of projects
> and the technology underpinning them where it makes sense, and from a
> prompt given to me by the Commons community – how can we think even bigger,
> and question elephants in the room, which in part would be to examine the
> long-standing and seemingly unquestioned assumption that MediaWiki is the
> best software to solve all problems we face. And if we do solve big
> problems in different ways, what does that look like? What can we learn
> from projects like WikiLearn, which uses free software not made by the
> Foundation, as well as people and organizations outside our movement? This
> is definitely a multi-year, rich problem space to explore.
>
> Everyone’s relationship with English Wikipedia, including the Wikimedia
> Foundation’s
>
> "For various reasons, the Foundation and some parts of the communities are
> stuck in an uneasy relationship where the Foundation admires but fears the
> communities’ power, like a beautiful but dangerous animal – the tiger might
> attack you – and the communities, not least English Wikipedia, distrust the
> Foundation."
>
> My experience so far has been that we have a very contentious relationship
> with English Wikipedia. The Foundation raises most of the revenue to
> support a global movement from English Wikipedia, and it’s often where
> volunteers raise most of the concerns and objections to the Foundation’s
> work.
>
> It's painfully affecting volunteers and staff that are trying to maintain
> content and code, and make important improvements to all the websites, as
> with the launch of Vector 2022 this year. It has made product and
> engineering teams very conservative in their approach to rolling out
> features, making each change take 12 or 18 months, or years!, to get
> valuable features to users. And it impacts our ability to collaborate with
> communities on and off English Wikipedia on big goals like knowledge equity
> and the movement strategy recommendations. As Yoda noted
> <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fear#L>, fear is the path to the dark
> side. This is a bummer, and I’d like it to change.
>
> So how do we break this cycle? What I’m doing now is directly engaging.
> Today, for example, I participated in an office hours session to talk about
> Vector 2022. Some of the product senior leadership in the recent past have
> specifically avoided talking directly with people on English Wikipedia, and
> this approach will no longer be applied. Engaging human to human is the
> best way I know to help resolve some of the mystery, fear and anger that
> are present. However, that will absolutely not fix what’s wrong here. We
> need systemic solutions. Today, there’s no way to make lasting and mutually
> binding agreements with volunteers, and that isn’t a sustainable way to
> create and maintain infrastructure software. My hope is that, with a more
> open and direct approach to engage and also through the work of the
> Movement Charter Drafting Committee, we will chart out a path for more
> lasting, productive collaboration.
>
> Being more intentional, and also clear, in our technical support for
> volunteers
>
> "We lack clear governance and communication for most of our tech
> components, squandering a lot of the opportunities we have for more and
> better participation from long-time and new volunteers."
>
> How can the Foundation be more intentional about our relationship with all
> volunteers?
>
> Today we have few and incomplete policies about what volunteers can do in
> technical spaces. We need to chart clearer boundaries, and move more toward
> rational and practical policy instead of precedent guiding our work.
>
> Similarly, the technical spaces where the Foundation "stays out" have felt
> ad hoc, which led to volunteers stepping in to do important work. The
> Foundation needs to exhibit better accountability in maintaining essential
> services (e.g. 2-factor authentication), and to be explicit about the
> technical tasks that it is definitely leaving for volunteers to own.
>
> Finally, we really need to embrace a product development model that’s more
> collaborative and efficient. This calls into question feedback tools like
> RfCs, and takes into consideration movement "technology council" proposals.
> What will really make us better together? I’m really interested in finding
> an answer to this question.
>
> Three Priorities for the Coming Year
>
> What I have identified above are complex issues that cannot be solved in a
> single year. We all need to take a multi-year view, especially in order to
> define the precise issues that need to be solved more carefully.
>
> For now, you have seen the draft annual plan priorities for the
> Foundation’s Product/Tech teams and they include:
>
> - *Volunteers*: We need closer connections, with a focus on making all
> time spent volunteering fulfilling and productive. I will continue to talk
> directly to volunteers, on-wiki and in person. I am making a shift in our
> Annual Plan to support the work and improve the experience of "editors with
> extended rights" (inclusive of admins, stewards, patrollers, and moderators
> of all kinds, which are also known as functionaries). The work done by this
> group on mis- and dis-information and on enforcing our Universal Code of
> Conduct is crucial to the functioning of all Wikimedia projects. Success
> requires that we are able to have metrics to guide our progress, identify
> ways of measuring the health of communities, and that we do this work hand
> in hand with volunteers.
> - *Maintenance*: Staff and volunteers have both identified that we
> have far too many unfinished technical migrations. This means that we
> continue to support both old and new tools and ways of doing our technical
> work. This increases the workload of everyone, without necessarily adding
> features or improving our technical systems overall. Challenges include
> issues with Foundation staff and volunteer community decision making,
> accountability for that decision making and the best projects to pursue,
> and, on the Foundation's side, a desire to not cause upset among
> volunteers. As a result, we have many abandoned or poorly maintained tools.
> We must be able to choose maintenance and technical migration areas for
> prioritization, and then be ok with not doing work on others in order to
> complete some of these big projects. For example, we have big work to do on
> our data infrastructure, which is aging and made up of more than 40
> distinct and fragile systems supported by a tiny team. We also have big
> work to do on MediaWiki to ensure it can support our projects for the next
> 20 years.
> - *Decision making*: From the very start of my time with the
> Foundation, a common theme that kept coming up was the confusion that
> internal teams had around decision making structures and accountability. I
> heard stories about teams being indefinitely stuck, unclear decisions from
> the past, and an inability to make and keep a decision. I view decision
> making like lifting weights: you get good at it by doing it, incrementally
> and consistently, over a long period of time. To start, I am making
> decisions around the structure and organization of the Product and
> Technology teams within the Foundation in order to make decision owners
> more clear, direct and transparent. We’re collaborating better together
> internally, and raising long-standing unresolved issues between teams in
> order to resolve them, one by one. As I look ahead, clarity of decision
> making and how we align our work towards our three objectives will be a
> core part of how I organize teams.
>
> In addition, I believe that decision making and achieving lasting positive
> results needs to be rooted in data. We will identify essential metrics to
> evaluate progress and assess impact on the three objectives of our work.
> This allows us to stay focused on our most important goals, make
> adjustments as needed, and track our progress over time.
>
> I am committed to promoting transparent and accountable decision making at
> all levels of management and individual contributor leadership. As I wrote
> earlier in this letter, I also welcome ideas on how to build well-defined
> processes for engaging with communities and making decisions that endure.
> These changes to how we make decisions will allow us to move more quickly,
> be more responsive, and create a larger impact for our goals over time.
>
> What’s Next
>
> During my listening tour, some staff asked me an "elephant in the room"
> question: why should they trust me? Given the number of different
> executives who have come to the Foundation and left within a year or two,
> skepticism about yet another new leader is high. My answer was: I believe
> the problems we face, as a Foundation and volunteers striving to bring free
> knowledge to the world, are complex puzzles that cannot be solved by one
> person, and I’m committed to a multi-year approach to collaboratively solve
> them together.
>
>
> Success requires more than a product roadmap. We need deep and effective
> collaboration between the Foundation and all volunteers and communities,
> shared ways to learn and be successful together, and constant adaptation to
> changes in the internet and world, so we can solve the big puzzles we face
> together.
>
> Trust is built over time and through consistency, so I don’t ask for trust
> as I begin my work. I ask that people be open to working closely together,
> learning as much as we can about the important problems we face, and that
> we regularly review our work in a data-informed way.
>
> I would like to be direct about how difficult I know some of these topics
> are, even for a discussion. But it is our job to tackle the most difficult
> questions, especially where inaction due to fear has led to stagnation and
> demotivation amongst both our staff and communities. This is not going to
> be a quick turnaround. None of these issues will be a quick or easy fix.
> Building and improving systems will be a lot of work, and will take a lot
> of patience. But the payoff for solving each of these puzzles will be that
> we’re able to engage more fully, and maybe even more joyfully, in our work.
>
> My listening tour was an invaluable opportunity to get candid information
> about what exactly is working, what isn’t, and what ideas everyone has for
> creating something great together. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but
> I’m encouraged by the energy and enthusiasm and I know we’ll be able to
> tackle this together.
>
> Next time you’ll hear from me is August to share the outcomes of community
> discussions related to annual planning
> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024>,
> and where I think we’re going to have impact in the coming year. In the
> meantime, I want to share a few questions that I’ll be returning to
> regularly: Are there examples of big issues that we've tackled well as a
> movement? Where would you suggest I draw inspiration? What's worked well?
> These are the complex issues that will guide my priorities over the coming
> years. What elephants am I missing?
>
> As I shared when I joined
> <https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/XO27SCB2UKZ6H6YRKFZLBR4URFW2VPGW/>,
> I came to work for the Wikimedia Foundation because free access to
> knowledge is the most important thing I can be doing right now. Our work
> empowers the people who have knowledge to share. By involving youth, women,
> and underrepresented identities to contribute their unique knowledge, we
> will continue our journey to share the sum of all human knowledge. And this
> kind of mission cannot be accomplished by any one person alone; we are
> called to – and I feel strongly committed to – collaborate and truly be in
> this mission together.
>
> -selena
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines
> at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> Public archives at
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> To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
thanks a lot for sharing, very useful.
Best
Yaroslav
On Fri, Apr 14, 2023 at 1:54?AM Selena Deckelmann <sdeckelmann@wikimedia.org>
wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I joined the Wikimedia Foundation on August 1 of last year in a newly
> created role as the Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO). (For the
> first few weeks, some of the staff called me C3PO as they got used to the
> new title :) The role was created to bring both the Product and Technology
> departments back under a single accountable leader for the first time since
> about 2015. Like Maryana
> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Chief_Executive_Officer/Maryana%E2%80%99s_Listening_Tour>,
> I decided to spend the first few months of my time at Wikimedia listening
> and learning. Although I come from the open source technology field, and
> have worked with volunteers and communities in prior jobs, it felt
> important to start here with curiosity and openness about what’s working
> well and what needs to change.
>
> Since then, I have met one on one and in small groups with more than 360
> people, who spoke with me from 38 different countries. I also attended 22
> large and small convenings and events which included about 3,150 people.
> This includes members of the Foundation’s product and technology teams,
> other Foundation staff, editors, functionaries, affiliates, movement
> organizers and open internet partners. I tried to approach every
> conversation with curiosity, openness, and eagerness, letting go of any
> preconceptions I may have had (intentionally embracing beginner’s mind
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin>) about the Foundation, the
> Wikimedia projects, and communities worldwide that contribute to creating
> and sharing free knowledge. I can confirm that I quickly found myself awash
> in details, experiencing a firehose of information from all sides! My
> husband and two young children have also learned a lot more about this
> movement in the last six months than you might expect.
>
> To provide myself with some structure, I asked everyone the same kind of
> questions about: (1) the impact our product and technology organizations
> have had on the movement and/or the world in the last five years, and what
> people were most proud of; (2) the current vision and strategy and if they
> will take us where we need to go; and (3) the most promising opportunities
> that people see in our work, and what is needed to realize that potential.
>
> I want to thank everyone who took the time to share with me, and I’ve
> included some direct, anonymized quotes in this letter from the
> conversations I had. And I want to confirm that the listening continues — I
> will create more spaces in the year ahead for dedicated conversations about
> some of the important topics I have highlighted below. I will also be
> posting this letter to Meta.
>
> Pulling in the same direction: More visible and shared metrics
>
> On a page of the first notebook I had for my onboarding, I quoted a person
> who said they just wanted "meaningful common goals." This was a theme
> repeated over and over — a clear desire from everyone to do work together
> that was linked by common purpose, and with all the volunteers that have
> created all Wikimedia projects. I got to hear so many different voices, and
> I heard the details from every side — what’s working, what hasn’t been
> working for a long time — some of the problems we face are over ten years
> old. People shared what’s missing, what’s extra, who’s fighting to be heard
> and who’s feeling lost at sea.
>
> "I think there are lots of promising opportunities to incentivise people
> to pay off technical debt and make our existing stack more sustainable.
> Right now there are no incentives for engineers in this regard."
>
> "Are we really having impact?"
>
> How can we unite behind meaningful common goals? And which metrics matter
> the most? We have so much data, but we really need lodestar
> <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lodestar> (or some refer to this as north
> star) metrics across the whole Foundation, a system for reviewing and
> reflecting on what we learn from them, and then a way to connect those
> metrics with the day to day work everyone is doing.
>
> To get at that, we’re doing two main things — one is deepening our
> understanding of volunteer activities and the health of the volunteer
> communities. This will be through working closely with volunteers using
> existing processes and sharing what we’re learning, as well as qualitative
> and quantitative research workstreams, including reviewing existing
> research of volunteer activities and typical work profiles. The other is
> working to establish a set of Foundation-wide lodestar metrics. Shared
> metrics help everyone understand how we’re measuring success across the
> Foundation, and we’re sharing these publicly as part of our Annual Plan.
> Over time, we plan to bring our measures of success for important
> initiatives to communities for conversations and debate to help everyone
> align what success might look like. Shared metrics and data will empower us
> to make more effective and better decisions, along with collaboration with
> those who are working on changes and those who may be directly affected by
> them.
>
> What does our open source strategy look like for today’s world?
>
> "I strongly believe that Wikipedia will be obsolete by 2030 if we don’t
> fix MediaWiki now."
>
> What is our open source strategy?
>
> We have to make some harder choices about what it means to be an
> open-source organization, and shift the conversation to resolve historic
> debates that prevent us from making important, strategic choices.
>
> Two big areas to resolve are:
>
> -
>
> What is our strategy for MediaWiki support? Today there is a tug of
> war about whether we should support MediaWiki for third-party users, even
> though their use cases have diverged significantly from those of Wikimedia
> projects. I’m planning a MediaWiki convening in late 2023 to begin tackling
> this issue.
> -
>
> What is our strategy for third-party re-use of Wikimedia content?
> There are a lot of nuances around rate limiting and updating the existing
> API policies in line with our values around open access. How can we
> coordinate more across the Foundation and technical volunteers to build
> greater understanding and alignment? Wikimedia project content also has
> become a cornerstone of artificial intelligence (AI) products. Wikipedias
> have long used machine learning (ML) to improve content and detect
> vandalism. How can we help support the use of ML and AI that is a public
> good? We have started some conversations
> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/Draft/External_Trends/Community_call_notes>
> about this but need to go further.
>
>
> What will it take to have impact at scale?
>
> "Before we can think about strategy, we need to answer ‘do we want to
> change this culture to work with a unified strategy, or do we want to
> change the strategy methodology to work with a decentralized culture? Or
> some combination thereof?’"
>
> What is our strategy for scaling that will allow us to have the most
> impact with limited resources?
>
> Today we support over 750+ distinct Wikimedia projects, with over 300 of
> those including language versions of Wikipedia, Wikisource, multiple
> language versions of Wiktionary, and many other free knowledge projects.
>
> What is an efficient and responsible way to steward the limited resources
> we have towards Wikipedia and/or the sister projects? And similar to the
> earlier conversation about Foundation metrics – we must do this in a way
> that can have an impact on our mission of bringing free knowledge to the
> whole world.
>
> Some of the big questions that came up included consolidation of projects
> and the technology underpinning them where it makes sense, and from a
> prompt given to me by the Commons community – how can we think even bigger,
> and question elephants in the room, which in part would be to examine the
> long-standing and seemingly unquestioned assumption that MediaWiki is the
> best software to solve all problems we face. And if we do solve big
> problems in different ways, what does that look like? What can we learn
> from projects like WikiLearn, which uses free software not made by the
> Foundation, as well as people and organizations outside our movement? This
> is definitely a multi-year, rich problem space to explore.
>
> Everyone’s relationship with English Wikipedia, including the Wikimedia
> Foundation’s
>
> "For various reasons, the Foundation and some parts of the communities are
> stuck in an uneasy relationship where the Foundation admires but fears the
> communities’ power, like a beautiful but dangerous animal – the tiger might
> attack you – and the communities, not least English Wikipedia, distrust the
> Foundation."
>
> My experience so far has been that we have a very contentious relationship
> with English Wikipedia. The Foundation raises most of the revenue to
> support a global movement from English Wikipedia, and it’s often where
> volunteers raise most of the concerns and objections to the Foundation’s
> work.
>
> It's painfully affecting volunteers and staff that are trying to maintain
> content and code, and make important improvements to all the websites, as
> with the launch of Vector 2022 this year. It has made product and
> engineering teams very conservative in their approach to rolling out
> features, making each change take 12 or 18 months, or years!, to get
> valuable features to users. And it impacts our ability to collaborate with
> communities on and off English Wikipedia on big goals like knowledge equity
> and the movement strategy recommendations. As Yoda noted
> <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fear#L>, fear is the path to the dark
> side. This is a bummer, and I’d like it to change.
>
> So how do we break this cycle? What I’m doing now is directly engaging.
> Today, for example, I participated in an office hours session to talk about
> Vector 2022. Some of the product senior leadership in the recent past have
> specifically avoided talking directly with people on English Wikipedia, and
> this approach will no longer be applied. Engaging human to human is the
> best way I know to help resolve some of the mystery, fear and anger that
> are present. However, that will absolutely not fix what’s wrong here. We
> need systemic solutions. Today, there’s no way to make lasting and mutually
> binding agreements with volunteers, and that isn’t a sustainable way to
> create and maintain infrastructure software. My hope is that, with a more
> open and direct approach to engage and also through the work of the
> Movement Charter Drafting Committee, we will chart out a path for more
> lasting, productive collaboration.
>
> Being more intentional, and also clear, in our technical support for
> volunteers
>
> "We lack clear governance and communication for most of our tech
> components, squandering a lot of the opportunities we have for more and
> better participation from long-time and new volunteers."
>
> How can the Foundation be more intentional about our relationship with all
> volunteers?
>
> Today we have few and incomplete policies about what volunteers can do in
> technical spaces. We need to chart clearer boundaries, and move more toward
> rational and practical policy instead of precedent guiding our work.
>
> Similarly, the technical spaces where the Foundation "stays out" have felt
> ad hoc, which led to volunteers stepping in to do important work. The
> Foundation needs to exhibit better accountability in maintaining essential
> services (e.g. 2-factor authentication), and to be explicit about the
> technical tasks that it is definitely leaving for volunteers to own.
>
> Finally, we really need to embrace a product development model that’s more
> collaborative and efficient. This calls into question feedback tools like
> RfCs, and takes into consideration movement "technology council" proposals.
> What will really make us better together? I’m really interested in finding
> an answer to this question.
>
> Three Priorities for the Coming Year
>
> What I have identified above are complex issues that cannot be solved in a
> single year. We all need to take a multi-year view, especially in order to
> define the precise issues that need to be solved more carefully.
>
> For now, you have seen the draft annual plan priorities for the
> Foundation’s Product/Tech teams and they include:
>
> - *Volunteers*: We need closer connections, with a focus on making all
> time spent volunteering fulfilling and productive. I will continue to talk
> directly to volunteers, on-wiki and in person. I am making a shift in our
> Annual Plan to support the work and improve the experience of "editors with
> extended rights" (inclusive of admins, stewards, patrollers, and moderators
> of all kinds, which are also known as functionaries). The work done by this
> group on mis- and dis-information and on enforcing our Universal Code of
> Conduct is crucial to the functioning of all Wikimedia projects. Success
> requires that we are able to have metrics to guide our progress, identify
> ways of measuring the health of communities, and that we do this work hand
> in hand with volunteers.
> - *Maintenance*: Staff and volunteers have both identified that we
> have far too many unfinished technical migrations. This means that we
> continue to support both old and new tools and ways of doing our technical
> work. This increases the workload of everyone, without necessarily adding
> features or improving our technical systems overall. Challenges include
> issues with Foundation staff and volunteer community decision making,
> accountability for that decision making and the best projects to pursue,
> and, on the Foundation's side, a desire to not cause upset among
> volunteers. As a result, we have many abandoned or poorly maintained tools.
> We must be able to choose maintenance and technical migration areas for
> prioritization, and then be ok with not doing work on others in order to
> complete some of these big projects. For example, we have big work to do on
> our data infrastructure, which is aging and made up of more than 40
> distinct and fragile systems supported by a tiny team. We also have big
> work to do on MediaWiki to ensure it can support our projects for the next
> 20 years.
> - *Decision making*: From the very start of my time with the
> Foundation, a common theme that kept coming up was the confusion that
> internal teams had around decision making structures and accountability. I
> heard stories about teams being indefinitely stuck, unclear decisions from
> the past, and an inability to make and keep a decision. I view decision
> making like lifting weights: you get good at it by doing it, incrementally
> and consistently, over a long period of time. To start, I am making
> decisions around the structure and organization of the Product and
> Technology teams within the Foundation in order to make decision owners
> more clear, direct and transparent. We’re collaborating better together
> internally, and raising long-standing unresolved issues between teams in
> order to resolve them, one by one. As I look ahead, clarity of decision
> making and how we align our work towards our three objectives will be a
> core part of how I organize teams.
>
> In addition, I believe that decision making and achieving lasting positive
> results needs to be rooted in data. We will identify essential metrics to
> evaluate progress and assess impact on the three objectives of our work.
> This allows us to stay focused on our most important goals, make
> adjustments as needed, and track our progress over time.
>
> I am committed to promoting transparent and accountable decision making at
> all levels of management and individual contributor leadership. As I wrote
> earlier in this letter, I also welcome ideas on how to build well-defined
> processes for engaging with communities and making decisions that endure.
> These changes to how we make decisions will allow us to move more quickly,
> be more responsive, and create a larger impact for our goals over time.
>
> What’s Next
>
> During my listening tour, some staff asked me an "elephant in the room"
> question: why should they trust me? Given the number of different
> executives who have come to the Foundation and left within a year or two,
> skepticism about yet another new leader is high. My answer was: I believe
> the problems we face, as a Foundation and volunteers striving to bring free
> knowledge to the world, are complex puzzles that cannot be solved by one
> person, and I’m committed to a multi-year approach to collaboratively solve
> them together.
>
>
> Success requires more than a product roadmap. We need deep and effective
> collaboration between the Foundation and all volunteers and communities,
> shared ways to learn and be successful together, and constant adaptation to
> changes in the internet and world, so we can solve the big puzzles we face
> together.
>
> Trust is built over time and through consistency, so I don’t ask for trust
> as I begin my work. I ask that people be open to working closely together,
> learning as much as we can about the important problems we face, and that
> we regularly review our work in a data-informed way.
>
> I would like to be direct about how difficult I know some of these topics
> are, even for a discussion. But it is our job to tackle the most difficult
> questions, especially where inaction due to fear has led to stagnation and
> demotivation amongst both our staff and communities. This is not going to
> be a quick turnaround. None of these issues will be a quick or easy fix.
> Building and improving systems will be a lot of work, and will take a lot
> of patience. But the payoff for solving each of these puzzles will be that
> we’re able to engage more fully, and maybe even more joyfully, in our work.
>
> My listening tour was an invaluable opportunity to get candid information
> about what exactly is working, what isn’t, and what ideas everyone has for
> creating something great together. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but
> I’m encouraged by the energy and enthusiasm and I know we’ll be able to
> tackle this together.
>
> Next time you’ll hear from me is August to share the outcomes of community
> discussions related to annual planning
> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024>,
> and where I think we’re going to have impact in the coming year. In the
> meantime, I want to share a few questions that I’ll be returning to
> regularly: Are there examples of big issues that we've tackled well as a
> movement? Where would you suggest I draw inspiration? What's worked well?
> These are the complex issues that will guide my priorities over the coming
> years. What elephants am I missing?
>
> As I shared when I joined
> <https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/XO27SCB2UKZ6H6YRKFZLBR4URFW2VPGW/>,
> I came to work for the Wikimedia Foundation because free access to
> knowledge is the most important thing I can be doing right now. Our work
> empowers the people who have knowledge to share. By involving youth, women,
> and underrepresented identities to contribute their unique knowledge, we
> will continue our journey to share the sum of all human knowledge. And this
> kind of mission cannot be accomplished by any one person alone; we are
> called to – and I feel strongly committed to – collaborate and truly be in
> this mission together.
>
> -selena
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