Wikimedia’s “Open” Strategy Planning Session
September 25, 2009 by Raj Sheelvant
Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia has grown without a strategy. But Barry Newstead in the HBR article titled “Inside Wikimedia’s Open-Source Strategic Planning” says that there are some strategic issues that needs to resolved. Now they are ready to tackle strategic questions like “How to prioritize growth initiatives that involve reaching every single human being? How to make ever increasing amounts of knowledge freely sharable? How to cultivate a healthy, growing and diverse community of contributors? How to enhance quality of knowledge? How to ensure Wikimedia has the resources and capabilities to sustain its work in perpetuity?” Now is a good time to tackle these issues. But what’s unique is that the board of directors is going to go into the strategy session that is ‘open’ to the world. This mean, according to Barry Newstead, Wikimedia strategic planning process will be blogged pretty much as it happens. Their goal is to tap into ‘crowd’ expertise, perspectives and creativity for the benefit of Wikimedia’s strategy. Their biggest challenge, which Barry concedes, is how might one develop a strategy that could provide direction to such a complex and connected organization without losing the voice of its millions of community stakeholders? Barry writes that they are going to use the following core principles as a guide:
• Anchor on the vision: Wikimedia has a powerful vision (“a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all human knowledge”) that serves as a touchstone for the strategy process
• Do it the Wiki way: Open, transparent and evolving deliberations that trust in the constructive spirit of diverse volunteers to bring powerful expertise and perspective
• Use the best of nonprofit strategy know-how: Drive dialogue and decisions from facts and rigorous analysis of options; Focus on the most critical decisions that will drive large scale impact; tackle questions that require “values” choices explicitly
• Presume good faith: People are engaging with Wikimedia in the best spirit of volunteerism and contribution to social good and will act with the best motives
• Learn and change: Try stuff, If it doesn’t work stop, and try something else
This is unique and exciting! Will Wikimedia be able to exploit the “wisdom of the crowd” to achieve you strategy? The problem with involving the ‘crowd’ is the noise that it generates. How will they ferret out the right ideas from multiple substandard ones? How will they identify if a ‘bizarre’ feedback is actually an ‘out of the box’ creative solution? On a small scale these issues are manageable but by opening up to a large crowd, they have magnified the scale and I think this might become a management challenge. Their past in being a pioneer in open collaboration definitely qualifies them to succeed in “Open” Strategy Planning. We will have to keep our fingers crossed…
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