2012 Five Year Plan/First draft/Counterproposal

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Draft 2012 Five Year Plan Jon's Proposal Version 2 · Tango's Counter Proposal

This is a counter-proposal to Jon's draft five year plan. Please feel free to edit it and discuss it on the talk page. --Tango (talk) 17:04, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Wikimedia UK's vision, mission, values and priorities are:

Vision

Free knowledge for all

Mission

Wikimedia UK’s mission is to help people and organisations work together to build and preserve open knowledge to share and use freely.

Our values

1. Making knowledge freely available to everyone is a good thing.
2. Knowledge which is under free and open source licenses is more useful because of the ways it can be reused and shared and because it enables diverse groups of people to work together.
3. A large group of volunteers working together can achieve a more diverse and comprehensive and balanced corpus of knowledge than any smaller group working on it's own.
4. Wikimmedia UK recognises the cultural and linguistic diversity of communities across the UK and will support and value the contribution of Wikimedians on all wikimedia projects in all the languages available

Our principals

1. To value the contribution of volunteers
2. To encourage, involve and engage volunteers
3. To recognise that the contribution of volunteers is central to the activity of the organisation
4. To be transparent and open
5. To promote the value of free and open licences
6. To have respectful and professional working relationships internally and externally
7. To promote an open approach to learning and knowledge

Priorities

The objective of Wikimedia UK (WMUK) is to encourage and promote access to, use of and contributions to free and open content, particularly the content hosted on the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) Wikis.

To do that we want to make WMUK a vibrant active organisation helping to make WMF content better - more content, better quality, used by more people in more ways.

Our top priorities over the next five years fall into two categories. The first category of priorities is programmes to recruit and train and encourage volunteers to edit and contribute and find new ways for our content to be used and reused.

This objective depends on developing our infrastructure. We are a very young and rapidly growing charity and need to make sure we develop the necessary infrastructure to enable us to efficiently pursue our charitable objectives in the long-term.

Programmes

Partnerships with cultural institutions in the UK

• Large national Galleries and Museums
• Large national archives and libraries
• Universities
• Schools
• Local galleries, Libraries Archives and Museums
• Local authorities
• Professional institutions (not just PR; engineers too)
• Quirky little institutions run on a shoestring by enthusiasts.
• Membership organisations (why isn't there a boy scout badge for editing wikipedia?)
• Organisations of ethnic and language groups.

We will start with training sessions to show interested members of these groups how they can work with Wikimedia. Our objective over the next five years is to make editting and contributing to Wikipedia and the wikimedia projects an integral every day part of the work of all of these organisations with Wikimedians not just partnered-with but integrated-into these groups.

Outside the UK we will work to support groups in other countries to create similar links to institutions in their countries.

Software tools

Work with our partners in other Wikimedia chapters and free software projects to develop new tools to enable use of and collaborative production of our content.

Projects which are already in hand:

• WYSIWYG editing
• Improved discussions
• Wikidata repository of facts for reuse everywhere
• Online video editing and subtitles

Possible new projects:

• Feedback tools for our partners to use to monitor their contributions and how they are used.
• Tools for online editting of animated diagrams.
• Editing from a mobile.
• The wikipedia bible app - every translation of the bible plus the latin, greek and hebrew originals (all from Wikisource), with summaries of expert commentary from wikipedia.
• Archive of data needed to fork the Wikimedia projects (just in case)
• Something else entirely

New project

To work with our volunteers and cultural partners to come up with a new major project to expand free culture.

Possible projects

• Free school textbooks for kindergarden to A level
• Oral history project to record our grandparents while they are still around
• Something else entirely

Infrastructure

1. Financial stability and sustainability
2. A large and engaged membership
3. Strong and transparent governance

This infrastructure needs to be maintained by collecting comparative data on both Wikimdeia projects as the impinge on the United Kingdom and on the impact of WMUK on those projects. This information will be anonymised and made publicly available. Such information will include:

1. Percentage of Wikimedia editors editing in the UK who are members of WMUK
2. Percentage of Wikimedia edits done by members of WMUK

The operational definitions will be the subject of ongoing development by the community and resources will be allocated to automating the collection of data. This data will be used to evaluate both specific projects organised by WMUK and the development of WMUK as a whole. These evaluations will in turn be used to inform the community as regards future development of activities and programmes.

Financial stability and sustainability

Wikimedia UK is a young and rapidly growing charity. At the moment, we are reliant almost entirely on the WMF annual fundraiser for our operating funds. We do not consider this to be a sustainable situation, since it involves a significant concentration of risk. We therefore need to diversify our revenue.

Currently, our financial planning involves an annual budget, which includes a small reserve for contingencies during and after that year. We fundraise to meet that budget with very little thought more than one year ahead. To ensure financial stability, we need a longer term outlook with our finances. The introduction of recurring donations, via direct debits, at the last fundraiser was a good first step in that direction, but we need to go further.

Targets

[TODO: Fill in the X's below]

By 31 January 2014:

1. Have no more than 85% of our revenue coming from the WMF annual fundraiser (recurring donations set up during WMF annual fundraisers), or any other single source (currently X%)
2. Have at least 50% of our WMF annual fundraiser revenue be from recurring donations (currently X%)
3. Have a reserve sufficient to cover 6 months of full spending beyond the next financial year (current X months)

By 31 January 2016:

1. Have no more than 70% of our revenue coming from the WMF annual fundraiser, or any other single source
2. Have at least 70% of our WMF annual fundraiser revenue be from recurring donations, including at least 30% from recurring donations set up in previous fundraisers
3. Have a reserve sufficient to cover one year of full spending beyond the next financial year

By 31 January 2018:

1. Have started an endowment fund with invest returns equal to at least 5% of our annual budget.

A large and engaged membership

It is a fundamental value of Wikimedia UK and the whole Wikimedia movement that volunteers are at the centre of everything we do. If we are going to increase our programme work then we need to:

1. increase the number of volunteers actively involved in our work
2. provide relevant information to our members about the effectiveness of their activities and the activities of the organisation as a whole
3. ensure that our volunteer members can successfully hold the Board of Trustees to account.

Targets

By 31 January 2014:

1. Develop a system for tracking the work of our volunteers so that we know who is doing what and can support them appropriately and can mobilise volunteers effectively.
2. Have at least 150 members attend the 2014 AGM.

By 31 January 2016:

1. Have at least 100 volunteers actively participating in the programme work of the charity.
2. Have at least 250 members attend the 2016 AGM.

By 31 January 2018:

1. Have at least 200 volunteers actively participating in the programme work of the charity.
2. Have at least 350 members attend the 2018 AGM.