after intensive consideration and some sleepless nights I have
decided to apply for the ED job of the Wikimedia Foundation. Due to
obvious conflict of interest I will resign from the Board of Trustees
of the Wikimedia Foundation, in effect at May 5th.
In the past five years I have worked with you on our first strategic
planning, together and especially with the help of the current ED Sue
we saw the organization leave its infancy. We saw it grow into the
innocent childhood. And yet we are still facing a lot of challenges.
And for me the following three are the biggest and most critical for
the coming years:
We know that our active editor community is in overall decline. In
many ways our community is biased, there is the famous gender gap,
but
there are also other gaps. Last year on Wikimania in Washington I
wondered if I was the only one who noticed that there were almost no
African Americans attending the conference, when according to the
official census more than half of the citizen of the city is black.
When attending community events in Germany I notice every time that I
never met a single Turkish migrant there, while about 5% of the
German
have a Turkish background. We generally failed to attract minority
groups to join and actively take part of our community. While the
Foundation took a lot of effort to provide technical support for new
users we also need, and need to strengthen our effort on the social
aspect of this challenge. Technology alone cannot solve social
problems. We will be able to resolve some of the problems by
carefully
and consistently adjusting our policies and rules, other problems
need
a mind change and a cultural change in the broad society outside of
the digital world. To gather and share the total knowledge of the
mankind we not only need academic knowledge but also the daily live
wisdom. To keep our neutrality we only need to motivate the minority
inside of the society to join our community. I believe the ability of
our community to adjust itself, I believe the ability of our movement
in changing the society, and I believe the Foundation need to play a
key role in this process. And I want the Foundation to take this
challenge.
While our communities often show a bias in their own geographical
regions, we also see a large global bias of our movement and in our
projects. For me the revamp of the catalyst program does not mean
that
the Foundation should give up its global south effort. For me it
means
that we need to take this challenge with a new approach. Instead of
trying to plant seed in the region we should strengthen our effort by
providing as much support as we can to the seedlings that are already
there. Unlike mature communities like in western Europe or in
northern
America, small communities in places such as Kenya or Cambodia, but
also in regions like China or Uzbekistan see active recruitment of
editors as an essential necessity to make themselves sustainable. My
believe is that the right approach is to provide support to these
communities, instead of trying to build a parallel structure beside
of
them. In regions of the world, where hunger and poverty is still an
acute and real threat to the people, the challenge to establish a
culture of sharing is a very big challenge. But nevertheless, where
ever I traveled, I also encounter people who are attached and admired
by this approach of a society. Knowledge sharing and prosperity,
freedom and peace can be a self strengthening positive feedback loop,
but as every positive feedback loop, especially at the beginning it
is
important to have impulses to get the loop started and get stronger,
until it can sustain itself. I think the Foundation should play an
important role in this mechanism. Because without the part of the
world with the largest majority of the human being we are far away
from gathering and sharing the entirety of the human knowledge.
The third challenge that I see for the Foundation is to provide a
consistent, long lasting relationship concept with the partner groups
and organizations as defined in the movement roles document. In the
past years the relation between the Foundation and the partner
organizations are more defined by things that failed or that may
fail.
There were quite a few emergency measurements taken to react on
crises
or to mitigate emerging crises. I believe this cannot be a longtime
approach. We need the local communities and the partner organizations
to take the first two challenges I mentioned above. And we need to
establish a long term, more trustful relation with them so that we
can
really rely on each other. We need to minimize frictions and
turbulence. We need to establish a culture where I am not doing "my"
thing, you are doing "your" thing and everyone is doing "his" or
"her"
thing, but that everyone realizes that we are doing together our
thing, on different scales and from different perspectives and on
different aspects. We need to build a common understanding where the
goals and the strategic plannings be perceived as goals and plannings
for the whole movement, not as goals and plannings of part of the
movement.
The Board of Trustees decides and approves the strategy, but in many
cases the ED play a central role in consulting the board on strategic
issues, and in setting up the focus of the Foundation so that the
strategy will get executed. As you I worked and thought a lot about
the strategy of the Foundation. This is the reason why I want to
apply
for this job. For me it is the most awesome job of the world.
I did mentioned the sleepless nights before, right? It is not only
the excitement that drove me sleepless. It is also the fear. I
confess
that I do am afraid of the responsibility that the job means. And I
know that I lack more skills that are needed for this job than I
possess. Among others, I have no management and executive experience
at all. What I can count here that comes most near to this is only
being the technical lead of a team of around 20 people distributed in
two countries, which is certainly not comparable to leading an
organization of 150 employees.
Because of this I am most grateful to Sue to have recruited and built
up such a strong organizational structure. I know every single one of
the C-level leaders and many of the team leads of the Foundation. I
can say one by one why I respect their knowledge and their expertise,
why I trust their loyalty and why I can rely on them. I know from
every single one of them which would be my first request of advice
(and for some of them, also the second, third and fourth) from them.
And I know from every individual of them, what I would learn from
them.
And this is maybe the only thing that is special for me. I have no
problem to be critical to myself, to see myself in an honest way and
reveal my imperfection and my fail to the whole world. And by doing
so, I learn, in a very efficient way, and inspire others to learn.
In my whole live, in private life, in my professional job, in my
years with the Wikimedia community, I have consistently tried to be
an
integrative person that brings different part of the world together
than divide them. I believe at this moment of our history it is
important than at any time that we have integrative figures all over
the critical positions inside of our movement. This is the reason,
why
I think, despite all the failures I take with me, I should apply for
this job.
