Critical issues presentations/Everything the Wikimedia Foundation does, in 18 minutes

From Wikimania 2016 • Esino Lario, Italy
Submission no. 216
Title of the submission

Everything the Wikimedia Foundation does, in 18 minutes

Author of the submission
  • Tilman Bayer
Country of origin

United States of America

Topics

Governance

Keywords
  • Foundation
  • Community
  • Transparency
Abstract

This talk is primarily for Wikimedians who may already have heard and read a lot about individual activities and work areas of the Wikimedia Foundation, but would like a clearer picture of the organization’s structure overall, and a better sense of what its more than 250 employees are doing every day. How is WMF organized internally? What are the mechanisms to ensure it works efficiently and achieves its goals? How can one follow the work in specific area, and get involved?

The Foundation publishes a lot of information on its work, and in recent years Wikimania has alwys offered many opportunities to learn about the many different projects directly from the teams that are working on them. This rather preposterously named talk will instead present a concise overview over what the Foundation does as a whole, by attempting to:

give a quick overview over the departments and teams of the Foundation, and what they work on

explain how teams set goals, implement them, and check on what was achieved

give a glimpse at the normally invisible routine work that is behind the published outcomes

explain what opportunities to get involved

Time: The goal is to keep this overview seriously concise, but the presentation could still benefit from a longer slot, e.g. having 25 or 30 minutes plus 10 minutes of discussion.

Note to reviewers: This submission is based on a similar one submitted to last year’s Wikimania (by myself, so no plagiarism ;) It received very positive feedback from the then program committee and was accepted, but I withdrew it in favor of another presentation that I had submitted. (Likewise, I have submitted another critical issues presentation this year and will likely hold only one of them based on the feedback.)

Result

Accepted as reserve

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