Hello dear all,
the following was one of the documents I created for my ED application.
It took me quite some time to create it and thus it was clear for me at
the beginning that I would publish it at some time point. I struggled a
long time with myself though about when to publish it. I didn't want to
publish it as long as I was an aspirant for the position since this
seems to me to be unfair to the other candidates. And now that I am out
of the run I think it is a good time to do this. Many of you may find
your own ideas reflected in it. I think it is not surprising that ideas
doesn't come from nowhere but from the interaction of people with each
other. I want to thank you all for the thoughts you published here or
elsewhere (like on Wikimania or on meta). I didn't change the wording of
the text and I know it is quite inappropriate for this forum. And as I
said before, since I am out of competition it is quite outdated, what
makes it bit of embarrassing. I appologize for that.
Greetings
Ting
In 2012 the Wikimedia Foundation conducted a cultural study about
itself. As a result it identified its current corporate culture as that
of the archetype of an Innocent. And the Foundation decided to transform
itself into the archetype of a Sage in the coming years.
For me to be a sage means to speak with wisdom, means people will pay
attention to what you say, means own leadership. For me it is a
leadership that is different from what is taught in schools. For me
leadership does not mean to own a title, an impressive shoulder mark, a
reward, or to be claimed an authority. For me leadership means to be
able to convince people by wisdom, to let people follow you because they
see the benefit by following you.
I would like to lead the Foundation into such an organization. Into a
small, in comparison to other world wide operating organizations with
similar impact, but highly efficient organization that operates as the
core of a movement with strong partners. I would like to describe in
more detail about what I mean by this on three most important fields on
which the Foundation is working: On software development, on community
engineering and on movement leadership.
Software development is a critical component of what the Foundation is
doing. The Foundation need to keep improve the usability of its project
sites, both for readers and for editors, and it needs to make the
knowledge millions of volunteers contributed accessible by as many
people as possible. As a board member of the WMF I have repeatedly urged
the Foundation to increase the efficiency and organizational maturity of
our tech department. For me the most important tasks on the technology
side of the Foundation are the following two: Keep step with the
contemporary technological and design progress, provide a good and
modern foundation for other third party developers so that they can tap
on the vast data set collected by the Wikimedia projects, and keep the
development as near as possible to the users.
In the past few years we see a dazzling development in communication and
IT technology. Almost every year there was a new generation of mobile
devices coming onto market and substitutes the older devices in just one
or two years. And the currently dominating phones, tablets or even
glasses will not necessarily be the dominating models in five or ten
years. We saw major companies like Nokia or RIM lost hold on
technological trend and thus fall out of the favor of the market in the
past five years. Keeping pace with this tremendous development speed is
almost impossible for an organization like the WMF.
The Foundation had improved its software development efficiency in the
past two years tremendously. Since one year we are using SCRUM as our
software development method. Nevertheless I see further potential for
improvement, especially with the use of SCRUM. For example the SCRUM
method requires the involvement of the customer as part of the project.
In theory the customer should be the project owner. For the WMF, the
customers are its users (both editors and readers). Use the SCRUM
philosophy on the WMF means that users should be given a possibility to
be involved in the software development as early and as frequently as
possible. For that reason the WMF should build up a test server where it
can deploy part of its prototype development and invite users to test
and comment the features in a very early phase.
Another possibility to involve users as part of the project is to let
users decide part of development priority. Take from the Bugzilla some
of most asked feature requests and let users vote on Meta about which
one should be resolved at first. Dedicate part of the engineering team
on that request and build a project. After the feature is deployed, ask
users vote for the next feature to be prioritized. This approach will
also improve our goodwill inside of the community.
