Strategic Planning/WMF Strategic Plan: Fit to WMAU

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===Make technology investments to guarantee the permanence of projects and support ongoing growth.===
===Make technology investments to guarantee the permanence of projects and support ongoing growth.===


====Build new data centers with automatic failover features to reduce the likelihood of outages and ensure the continued operations of the site in the case of catastrophic events ====
*'''Build new data centers''' with automatic failover features to reduce the likelihood of outages and ensure the continued operations of the site in the case of catastrophic events. 

*'''Deploy additional caching centers''' in key locations to serve growing audiences in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

*'''Deploy additional caching centers''' in key locations to serve growing audiences in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

*'''Improve stability and security''' by resourcing to eliminate single points of failure, apply critical upgrades, and implement disaster recovery plans.
*'''Improve stability and security''' by resourcing to eliminate single points of failure, apply critical upgrades, and implement disaster recovery plans.

Revision as of 20:08, 7 May 2011

Below are the line items from the WMF Strategic Plan as a bunch of headings. Add text with your thoughts as to whether there is potential for WMAU to do something in this area.

Stabilise Infrastructure

Make technology investments to guarantee the permanence of projects and support ongoing growth.

  • Build new data centers with automatic failover features to reduce the likelihood of outages and ensure the continued operations of the site in the case of catastrophic events. 

  • Deploy additional caching centers in key locations to serve growing audiences in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

  • Improve stability and security by resourcing to eliminate single points of failure, apply critical upgrades, and implement disaster recovery plans.
  • Manage the MediaWiki release cycle to ensure it meets the evolving needs of readers and editors.

  • Develop clear documentation and APIs to enable developers to create applications that work easily with MediaWiki. 



Expand public awareness and support for the Wikimedia movement.

  • Spread information about Wikimedia’s mission, vision, values and practices. Help people better understand our work, and motivate them to help us do it.
  • Grow the number of Wikimedia donors, to ensure steady, robust support.
  • Increase capacity to safeguard the movement's reputation and support the advancement of legal conditions that enable unimpeded access to information online, worldwide.


Build internal capacity to better support the movement and achieve its strategic goals.

  • Increase capacity by adding new staff to catalyze, support and partner with community members. 



Increase Participation

Encourage the health and growth of Wikimedia communities and the projects they sustain.

  • Develop new features and tools, such as a rich-text editor, enhanced navigation, and social functionality, to make editing easier and more fun.

  • Support the recruitment and acculturation of newer contributors by encouraging a welcoming environment on the Wikimedia projects, as well as supporting community leaders who are eager to serve as recruiters, guides and mentors for newer volunteers.

  • Encourage diversity by conducting outreach among groups that have the potential to bring new expertise to the projects, as well as by supporting leaders from underrepresented groups in their efforts to cultivate new members from within their communities.

  • Support offline and social events to increase community cohesion and commitment to the projects.

  • Create products and services that support affiliation and excellence among Wikimedians.



Expand Wikimedia’s global footprint through catalytic investments and chapter support.

  • Design and deploy catalyst teams to pilot activities spurring growth in readership and editing in the high-priority areas of India, Brazil, and the Arabic-speaking areas of the Middle East and North Africa.

  • Support Wikimedia chapters with financial or other assistance to enable them to serve their local Wikimedia communities effectively, and contribute to the health and growth of the overall movement. A priority will be pursuing outreach to expand and increase diversity in the contributor base. 

  • Facilitate community efforts to create organizational models and structures that support the Wikimedia projects.
  • Support volunteer initiatives that fuel the growth of communities and projects around the world, including meet-ups, public outreach activities and other volunteer innovations.


Improve Quality

Support our volunteer community through technology improvements to article assessment, by community members, readers and experts.

  • Develop improved tools for near real-time assessment of information additions and changes by experienced Wikimedia community members.
  • Systematically collect input from readers and subject-matter experts to perform both surface and depth reviews of the largest possible number of articles.



Provide support to the Wikimedia movement in the development of institutional partnerships and alliances.

  • Provide project funding for efforts to connect Wikimedia projects with the work of institutions of culture and learning.
  • Give global visibility to these efforts through our communication channels. 

  • Develop and maintain documentation of best practices, blueprints, standards, and metrics associated with institutional partnerships.


Provide excellent service to our audience through clear quality labeling and the development of highly effective response systems.

  • Develop clear and concise quality labeling to support readers.
  • Support development of first-responder systems that empower community volunteers to consistently and effectively address hot-button issues.

Increase Reach

Enhance the quality of the core user experience regardless of geography.

  • Build additional caching centers in key locations to manage increased traffic from Latin America, Asia and the Middle East, as well as to ensure reasonable and consistent load times no matter where a reader is located.

Invest in mobile products to broaden the movement’s reach to connected populations.

  • Develop partnerships with mobile providers and entrepreneurs that offer users who do not own expensive smartphones wide access to Wikimedia’s mobile products.

  • Invest in technology improvements that enhance mobile features, functionality and access.

Invest in offline products to broaden the movement’s reach to populations who will remain disconnected from the Internet.

  • Create new offline products and partnerships with the capacity to distribute versions of Wikimedia’s projects to large numbers of readers with limited connectivity at low or no cost.

Encourage Innovation

Increase access to information that drives community, decision-making and action.

  • Implement a web analytics tool to provide mission-critical information to the Foundation and the movement as a whole. 

  • Provide better information about the movement to enable everyone to better support it, by developing and publishing diverse measures of the health and growth of Wikimedia communities and projects. 

  • Foster a healthy community of researchers interested in analyzing Wikimedia, provide access to relevant data, and highlight important questions to be addressed.
  • Conduct regular reader and editor surveys in order to take the pulse of the community and identify pressing issues or concerns.
  • Develop standards for the development of staged experiments and A/B tests.


Support the infrastructure of networked innovation and research.

  • Develop clear documentation and APIs so that developers can create applications that work easily with our platforms.
  • Ensure access to computing resources and data for interested researchers and developers, including downloadable copies of all public data.
  • Continually improve social and technical systems for volunteer development of core software, extensions, gadgets and other technical improvements.


Promote the adoption of great ideas.

  • Develop clear processes for code review, acceptance and deployment so that volunteer development does not linger in limbo.
  • Organize meetings and events bringing together developers and researchers who are focused on Wikimedia-related projects with experienced Wikimedia volunteers and staff.
  • Showcase and recognize the greatest innovations of the Wikimedia movement, and create community spaces dedicated to the exploration of new ideas.
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