[Wikimedia-l] Reflecting on my listening tour

[Selena Deckelmann]

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
,
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
) 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
 (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.

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Selena Deckelmann joins as Chief Product & Technology Officer

[Selena Deckelmann]

Hello!

I’m so excited to join you all, and I am grateful to Maryana and the many
people I’ve met on my journey to today’s announcement. Thank you for this
opportunity to introduce myself!

My grandfather was a TV repairman and I grew up watching him tinker and fix
things, but college was when I decided to explore electronics and
computers. I started college thinking that I would play jazz violin and
maybe get a chemistry degree! A year later, I’d learned about the Internet
which resulted in skipping classes to install Linux from floppy disks, and
landing a job at a help desk.

My first programming language was TI-Basic
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-BASIC>, and my second was C++. I spent
many years with Perl (I’ve had dreams in Perl!), SQL
<https://www.reddit.com/r/SQL/comments/doukj2/is_sql_considered_codingprogramming/>
and later Python, and I’ve dabbled with wikis, including Federated Wiki and
MediaWiki. I admire Ursula Franklin
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin> and love her book The Real
World of Technology.

As I explored computers back in college, I felt compelled to share. The
experience didn’t feel complete if I was alone. I vividly remember the
people I connected with – who mentored me, who I wrote software with and
who just listened. My love for the internet, its freedoms and
connectedness, came from discovering a world of knowledge freely shared
beyond anything I had imagined before.

During my interviews with Wikimedia, I felt that strong connection again. I
heard each person share their reasons for joining this movement and their
hopes for its future – often in the form of very challenging questions!

In the last few years, I’ve worked on problems at the intersection of
Mozilla’s mission to help create an internet for the benefit of
individuals, and its business. Very recently, this work resulted in
shipping Total Cookie Protection, making several major changes to the UX of
Firefox and launching a small advertising business called Firefox Suggest,
designed with lean data practices from the start. I loved doing this work
because of the difficulty of it, how intensely those involved had to work
to understand one another and the communities they served, and that my
pragmatic optimism had a part to play in getting things shipped.

I also reflected on this moment in my own life: I grew up in Montana
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana>, where I attended public school. I
love talking about, reading about
<https://www.caseyjohnston.net/ask-a-swole-woman-archive/2021/10/23/how-do-i-even-get-started-with-lifting-weights>
and sometimes doing weightlifting. I’m hapa
<https://www.janm.org/exhibits/hapa-me>, and I met the Chinese part of my
family as an adult. I think privacy and freedom
<https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2175406> are
intimately connected, and that exercising freedoms is a good way to keep
them. I’m married to a high school teacher, and I have two kids who love to
crash video meetings, including my interviews with the Wikimedia
Foundation.

All of that, together, is why I’m joining the Foundation. Wikipedia is the
promise of collaboration on the internet and the movement for free
knowledge made good on, in practice not in theory. I believe that Wikimedia
projects have successfully demonstrated a model that produces trustworthy
knowledge, and have created a home on the internet that the world
profoundly trusts. I want to help make and ship things to advance free
knowledge using the skills I have, while also continuing to learn from this
ever expanding community of people all around the world.

I plan to follow Maryana’s lead, and will start by meeting many people to
really understand what we collectively need to create a global, equitable
and inclusive future for free knowledge.

Although I will  join officially in August, I would love to hear from
anyone interested in sharing directly with me at sdeckelm...@wikimedia.org.

-selena


On Mon, Jun 13, 2022 at 10:09 AM Maryana Iskander 
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> When I started in January, I  shared with you that one of my top
> priorities
> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Chief_Executive_Officer/Maryana%E2%80%99s_Listening_Tour/My_Incoming_Priorities>
> coming to the Wikimedia Foundation was to actively step in and support the
> Foundation’s product and technology teams while we recruited executive
> leadership of these mission critical functions with a new Chief Product and
> Technology Officer.
>
> I am delighted to introduce you to Selena Deckelmann, who will be joining
> the Wikimedia Foundation on August 1. She is based in Portland, Oregon in
> the United States.
>
> Selena is currently the Senior Vice President at Mozilla, where she has
> been for the last nine years. She leads the Firefox organization of more
> than 400 people responsible for all Firefox product and technology
&