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[Wikimedia-l] Some Updates & Foundation’s 2023-2024 Annual Plan
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Hi everyone,


As I near my one-and-a-half year mark as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, I
intend to continue providing updates here and elsewhere every few months
based on your ongoing feedback. (You can find my note from January 2023
here [1], and all of my past letters on Meta [2]).


My top three priorities have remained consistent: (1) strategy/planning,
(2) leadership, and (3) culture/values. On strategy, Wikimedia Foundation
Board of Trustees Chair Nataliia Tymkiv recently shared the outcomes [3] of
a strategic planning retreat that brought together Foundation leadership
with the Wikimedia Endowment Board and members of the Movement Charter
Drafting Committee. On planning, I will share more below.


On leadership, last Friday, our Chief Product & Technology Officer Selena
Deckelmann reflected on her first six months on the job. Selena named some
of the big issues [4] she hopes to help us all tackle in the years to come.
Thank you to those who have already given her some initial reactions.


Finally, I continue to believe more strongly than ever that culture and
values will be the most sustainable way to make lasting, positive change
together – on this front, the Wikimedia Foundation will complete a refresh
of our organizational values [5] by July.


The main purpose of this letter is to point you to the Foundation’s draft
annual plan [6] for our coming fiscal year (July 2023 through June 2024).
One of the first tasks I named when I started this job was to reimagine the
Foundation’s annual planning processes. Last year’s plan, my first at the
Foundation, was focused on radically changing how we did our work. This
included organizing our work more regionally to better respond to varying
needs around the world, and also leveling up our own performance,
accountability, and internal collaboration. This has put us in a better
position to more meaningfully describe what we can do in the year ahead.


Five quick observations about the draft plan before you hopefully take time
to look at the 17,000+ word document:



1.

Looking outward: Like last year, the plan starts by looking outward and
persistently asking ‘what does the world need from us now’? This question
remains at the heart of the Foundation’s approach to strategy and
planning. Earlier
this year, we shared external trends [7] impacting the mission of free
knowledge, and built on those trends with a well-attended community
conversation about recent advancements in generative AI and what that may
mean for the projects. Your reflections [8] on these trends is probably
the most important way to help make sure we’re all focused on the right
things over the long term.



1.

Anchored in movement strategy: For the second year, the plan is firmly
and unambiguously anchored in movement strategy. Our intention is to
connect the Foundation’s work even more deeply with the Movement Strategy
Recommendations [9] for more rapid progress towards the 2030 Strategic
Direction [10]. This is made actionable in our commitments to advancing
knowledge equity, growing the resource base for community-driven
priorities, and making sure the Foundation’s own effectiveness measurably
improves from learning and iteration.



1.

Our role in Product & Technology: Wikimedia’s people-centered movement
is powered by product and technology delivered by the Foundation and
volunteers. We have tried to more intentionally describe our unique role
as the platform provider supporting communities who are collaborating on a
massive scale. The bulk of this effort, called “Wiki Experiences,”[11]
recognizes that volunteers are at the heart of the Wikimedian process of
sensemaking and knowledge creation, and prioritizes established editors
(including those with extended rights, like admins, stewards, patrollers,
and moderators of all kinds, also known as functionaries) to ensure that
they have the right tools for the critical work they do every day to expand
and improve quality content, as well as manage community processes.



1.

Slower growth and trade-offs: As you will see in the draft plan, an
important driver of multi-year strategic planning will focus on the
structure of the Foundation’s budget, future financial projections, and
possible revenue/product trade-offs. As I shared in my note in January,
given the revenue shortfall from the December English fundraising campaign,
as well as an uncertain global economic outlook, the Foundation is
projecting reduced expenses and slower growth than in past years. Over the
past month, we have made internal budget cuts, prioritizing non-personnel
expenses but also reducing staffing by 5 percent. These difficult decisions
were made to support a more sustainable trajectory in expenses for the
coming few years, and also to maintain our overall funding levels to
movement partners (including more funding in all regions while prioritizing
proportionally larger growth in underrepresented regions).



1.

More granular information about how the Foundation operates. To increase
visibility and accountability [12], this annual plan includes more detailed
financial projections, such as various budget breakdowns of how we allocate
our resources. It also shares more granular organizational information,
such as our department goals, people processes, global guidelines, and
compensation principles. This is meant to complement some of the
Foundation’s recently published Diff posts outlining our approach to pay
visibility [13] and describing how we support a highly-distributed remote
workforce [14]. I hope this level of detail will result in more good-faith
conversations about what is, and what is not, possible to do with the
resources that we have.


Over the next month, all of us at the Wikimedia Foundation look forward to
hearing more from you on the direction we are taking. We have tried to
enable this in whatever form you prefer: on-wiki on Meta [15], project
village pumps, and open calls both virtual and in person [16] that are
being hosted over the coming weeks, many in partnership with global
communities around the world. Your comments, reflections, and provocations
will help improve what we have proposed to do before the Foundation’s Board
of Trustees considers the plan and budget in their June meeting.


I continue to welcome your direct engagement at miskander@wikimedia.org or
on my talk page [17].


Maryana


Maryana Iskander

Wikimedia Foundation CEO


p.s. On a more personal note – in keeping with the tradition of
transparency on additional board roles, earlier this year I shared with the
Wikimedia Foundation Trustees that I am under consideration to join the
board of Yale University, my law school alma mater. The alumni election
process is underway now, and I will let you know the results when they are
finalized.


[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Chief_Executive_Officer/Updates/Year_One_Update

[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Chief_Executive_Officer/Updates#Maryana_Iskander

[3]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_noticeboard/March_2023_Meeting_Outcomes_from_Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_of_Trustees

[4]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Leadership_team/Chief_Product_and_Technology_Officer/Selena%27s_Listening_Tour

[5]
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2023/04/17/we-are-in-this-mission-together-refreshing-the-values-of-the-wikimedia-foundation/

[6]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024

[7]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/Draft/External_Trends

[8]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/Draft/External_Trends/Community_call_notes

[9]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Recommendations/Summary

[10]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017

[11]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/Draft/Product_%26_Technology#Wiki_Experiences

[12]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Principles#Transparency_&_Accountability

[13]
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2023/02/17/wikimedia-foundation-remote-first-and-global-community-of-staff/

[14]
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2023/04/06/wikimedia-foundation-global-guidelines-policies-practices/

[15]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024

[16]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/Collaboration

[17]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/User_talk:MIskander-WMF