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Earlier this year, the board of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the free onlince encyclopedia Wikipedia, decided to substantially reform its governance structures (see “Contours of Future Wikimedia Governance: More Centralized, More Diverse“). Two issues were key in this reform: allowing for greater diversity of potential models of affiliation, in addition to the established model of national chapter organizations, and centralizing fund raising and dissemination in a newly formed body termed “Funds Dissemination Committee” (FDC).
Over the last two months, Wikimedia moved forward in both regards. First, the former “Chapters Committee” was officially transformed into the “Affiliations Committee” for making recommendations to the Foundation’s Board of Trustees on the recognition and approval of Wikimedia movement affiliates. Such affiliates need not only be traditional chapter organizations but can also be thematic organizations or user groups, as is explained on Meta-Wiki:
While chapters support and promote the Wikimedia projects in a specified geographical region or country (for example, Wikimedia Argentina), thematic organisations will support and promote the Wikimedia projects in a specified thematic field or focus area (for example, Wikipedia Astrophysics Editors). User groups, on the other hand, will be loose associations of local volunteers, highly variable, but still within the overall mission of supporting and promoting the Wikimedia projects (for example, a WikiProject Stroopwaffle).
The Affiliations committee has already developed guidelines for the creation of each of these three potential affiliate models (see, for example, the “Step-by-step Thematic Organization creation guide“). Interestingly, the previously discussed idea of “Movement Partners” – like-minded organizations that actively support the Wikimedia movement’s work – has not been implemented so far.
Second, on November 15, the FDC published its first recommendation to the board of how to allocate funds to eligible entities within the Wikimedia Movement, i.e. mainly Wikimedia chapters. Several points in this recommendation are remarkable:
- The proposal of Australian chapter, while acknowledging its pioneering role in working with Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM), was rejected entirely due to “compliance aspects of previous grants, and gaps in the present proposal with regard to alignment and metrics”. Also in the case of the French chapter, the FDC recommends to allot only $94,000 instead of the $961,109 that were applied for. If the FDC wanted to state examples, it did; however, the FDC left a door open in allowing both chapters to apply again in a second round of proposals.
- The largest chunk of funds – with about $4.5 million more than one third of the total amount of $11.14 million – goes to the focal Wikimedia Foundation Headquarters, with one FDC member opposing the decision. Seemingly, this FDC decision was the only one that was not made unanimously. Moreover, the FDC did allot exactly the amount of funds the Wikimedia Foundation had applied for, while in many other cases it reduced the amounts.
- In the case of the oldest and by far largest chapter organization in Germany, the FDC recommends full funding, less Wikimedia Chapters Association (WCA) membership fees, leading to a total amount of to $1.79 million. Eliminating membership fees for the WCA is a delicate decision, since the WCA was founded by Wikimedia Chapters in the run-up to the establishment of the FDC as a counterweight to the Wikimedia Foundation – even though both sides publicly assert each other of their reciprocal support. Explaining the elimination of WCA membership fees, the FDC argues that the WCA “is not yet a legally incorporated entity, and may apply for FDC funding for start-up staffing and other expenses.”
The recommendations by the FDC are set to be approved by the Board of Trustees by December 15, 2012.
As far as the community of Wikipedians is concerned, both these recent developments in terms of broadening the scope of potential affiliates and of reforming funds dissemination have not dampened calls for further democratizing the formal Wikimedia organization. On Meta-Wiki, a lenghty page is devoted solely to discussing the different avenues for Democratizing the Wikimedia Foundation. Topics in the current “initial brainstorming” phase include the ‘Board Mystery‘ (“The board is a very mysteriously functioning body, nobody knows how it works or what it does.”), term limits for board members (“They can be limited to 2-3 terms, even if re-elected.”), and referenda on movement-wide decisions (“Do we need to improve or clarify the process for global votes?”).
Probably, the current changes in Wikimedia governance let the genie of governance reform out of the bottle. Wikimedia’s organizational structures have been revealed as contingent and open for change. I think it is safe to predict that the establishment of the Affiliations Committee and the FDC will have been just the beginning of a series of governance changes in the near future.
(leonhard)
Today I learnt from the blog of Wikimedia Germany about plans to merge the two wiki-based collaborative travel guide projects Wikitravel and WikiVoyage into a new Wikimedia project such as Wikipedia or Wiktionary, governed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Denis Barthel from Wikimedia Germany describes the history of the two projects as follows (my translation):
Wikitravel.org went live in July 2003 with the goal to collaboratively create a travel guide under an open license. Today, Wikitravel features 19 different language versions with up to 26.000 travel guides. In 2006 the founders decided to sell the trademark “Wikitravel” to the firm Internetbrands to put Wikitravel on more solid grounds. Internetbrands provided for hosting and guaranteed independence of the community with regard to contents. First problems arose when Internetbrands decided to run ads on the site. This decision led to a debate on principles and eventually to a fork: the German community refused to work in a commercial environment. As a result, WikiVoyage emerged, carried by a German-based association. WikiVoyage hosts the bigger stock of German articles (~12.000 compared to ~5.000 at Wikitravel) and a very active and well organized community. Furthermore, there is an Italian version with a shared database for images similar to Wikimedia Commons and “Locations”, some kind of WikiData for locations.
Currently, the Wikimedia Communities are debating whether accepting a merger of these two communities as a new Wikimedia project is both feasible and desirable. And while the majority seems to support the inclusion of the newly merged project into the family of Wikimedia projects, several concerns are raised: Read the rest of this entry »
Last weekend the board of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the free onlince encyclopedia Wikipedia, met in Berlin to decide on recommendations for restructuring (see “Wikimedia Governance: Showdown on the Board” and “Redrawing the Borders of Wikimedia Governance“). Three important things happened at and around the board meeting.
First, Wikimedia executive director Sue Gardner’s recommendation to centralize fundraising and funds dissemination was largely followed. Only four local Wikimedia chapter organizations – Germany, France, UK and Switzerland – will be allowed to process donations on their own when received via the main Wikimedia project pages such as Wikipedia language versions. A new funds dissemination committee (FDC) will decide on how the funds will be distributed and the whole process will be evaluated in 2015.
Second and probably more importantly, the Wikimedia foundation increases the diversity of potential models of affiliation, previously discussed under the label “movement roles”: Read the rest of this entry »
Earlier this year, Wikimedia executive director Sue Gardner proposed to centralize fundraising activities and to move beyond geography-based chapter associations as the primary means of organizing (see “Redrawing the Borders of Wikimedia Governance: Turning the Money Screw“). Her move has inspired severe criticism and respective responses by prominent chapter organizations such as Germany, Italy and several chapters of Spanish-speaking countries. Specifically Wikimedia Germany, the largest chapter in terms of both members and fundraising, invested heavily in a detailed counterproposal entitled “Wikimedia’s culture of sharing: Remarks on common goals, localized fundraising and global action“.
A good impression of the intensity and the front lines of this debate is provided by the comments on a blog post by Wikimedia board member Stu West, where he explained “Why [he] supported the Board letter on fundraising“. The discussion thread also nicely illustrates the challenge of transnational governance, when West is accused of being US-centric:
There is a world outside the U.S. where people act according to different standards and think and decide differently. Our movement has to pay tribute to this fact.
After two months of discussion, Gardner has recently presented a revised version of her recommendations and asked the Foundation’s board to decide on it. The most controversial clause of her initial proposal is still part of her final list of recommendations: Read the rest of this entry »
We are late with posts on the issue that dominated the web over the last couple weeks, namely the two bills in the U.S. congress on SOPA and PIPA. Even Wikipedia, for the first time in its history, decided to join the protest blackout on January 18 to protest against the bills. (Which was, by the way, also exemplifying the difficulties of Wikimedia making decisions involving the community due to the absence of accepted and routinized participation structures within Wikimedia governance, see also “Redrawing the Borders of Wikimedia Governance“).
Nevertheless, this might not be all that much of a problem. Because if NYU’s Clay Shirky is right, SOPA and PIPA will come back with new acronyms but similar content. But see for yourself in Shirky’s 15 minute TED talk on the issue:
(leonhard)
Two days ago, Sigrid and I have submitted a paper on community governance in the realm of Creative Commons and Wikimedia to this year’s Academy of Management Annual Meeting. Today, I have learnt about major upcoming changes in governance of the latter of our two cases. Wikimedia is at the brink of abandoning its decentralized and geography-based network of Wikimedia chapters and replace it with a much more centralized network of different types of movement organizations.
Logo of the Wikimedia Foundation
The current governance structure of Wikimedia, the formal organization behind the global community of volunteers responsible for Wikipedia, had emerged comparably unplanned. The focal Wikimedia Foundation itself was founded two years after Wikipedia had been launched as a side-project of the quality-controlled “Nupedia“. And while Wikipedia had been transnational from the very start with versions in German, Catalan, Japanese, French and Spanish only two months after its launch, the Foundation was not. The first local Wikimedia branch in Germany was founded independently from Wikimedia headquarters and only formally recognized as a formal Wikimedia chapter after the fact. Following the German example, so far 38 membership-based chapter associations have been founded and formally recognized. Together, these chapters nominate two members to the Foundation’s Board of Trustees.
With the exception of two US chapters in New York City and in the District of Columbia, all these chapters are related to countries. One of the main reasons for tying local chapter organizations to countries is a financial one. Many Wikimedia chapter organizations such as the German, the Polish or the Swiss chapter receive tax exempted donations. This is one of the big advantages of local chapter organizations and even a rationale for founding them as grassroots organizations in the first place. The same time, however, this also restricts the flow of funds within the organizational network. Donations to the German Wikimedia chapter, for example, cannot easily be transferred to the focal Wikimedia Foundation in the US due to legal restraints.
Before the Wikimedia Foundation was established as the organizational carrier for Wikipedia and its sister projects, the Wikipedia trademark as well as the server infrastructure had been owned by the start-up company bomis.com, which ran an ad-funded search engine mainly targeting a male audience. Wikimedia was founded over two years after Wikipeda and only after a substantial part of the Spanish Wikipedia community had started a Wikipedia-fork named “Enciclopedia Libre Universal” to prevent Bomis from including advertisments in Wikipedia. Bomis then handed on all Wikipedia-related intellectual property to Wikimedia.
In projects using open or free licensing standards such as Wikipedia (Creative Commons By-Share-Alike license) or Linux (Gnu General Public License) a “fork” is always a (mostly: latent) option. In a way, the mere possibility of a fork should secure that an organizational carrier is attentive to the needs and positions of the community, whose contributions the project depends on. Of course, forking is also a way to resolve conflicts within communities, for example between sub-communities with different priorieties as the case of BSD Unix.
In the case of Wikimedia, choosing the organizational form of a non-profit foundatiofn allowed for community participation and tax-exempt donations (see “The Importance of Clear Boundaries for Community Participation“); but most of all it was a signal to the community of volunteer contributors that their content will not be exploited by a private enterprise. It is all about trust. Read the rest of this entry »
In spite of its regular portrayal as “anarchic”, “anything goes” was never true for Wikipedia. Beginning with the list of principles issued by its founder, Jimbo Wales, a continuously growing number of rules guides contributors to and hence development of Wikipedia. One of the most prominent rules is the aim of delivering a “Neutral Point of View” (NPOV). Other important rules deal with notability. While the NPOV is debated with regard to every single article, Wikipedia’s several “notability guidelines” try to resolve the question which information ought (not) to be included in the free online encyclopedia in the first place. Over the years, long lists of conventions have emerged for all kinds subjects. Regarding people, for example, the English Wikipedia lists in detail the notability criteria for members of different professional groups – ranging from Academics over Criminals and Diplomats to Entertainers (including actors, comedians, models, etc.).
But notability guidelines or, as they are called in the German Wikipedia “relevance criteria” (“Relevanzkriterien”), share the problem of all taxonomies, namely a certain degree of arbitrariness; an arbitrariness that makes them particularly prone to being criticized and challenged. In the English Wikipedia debates about notability even led to the formation of two antagonistic camps: The “Association of Deletionist Wikipedians” (ADW) sails under the banner of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and his famous quote:
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
The opposite camp assembles around the “Association of Inclusionist Wikipedians” (AIW), which goes even back to the old Romans for their motto:
“The motto of the AIW is Conservata veritate, which translates to, ‘with truth preserved.’ This motto reflects the inclusionist desire to change Wikipedia only when no knowledge would be lost as a result.”
While both “associations” exist since 2004 and their dispute seemed to be rather settled, recent controversies about “relevance” in the German Wikipedia demonstrate that and how such rules may still be re-negotiated: Read the rest of this entry »
For this year’s Wikimania (26-28 August, Buenos Aires) I submitted an abstract of a paper comparing transnationalization processes and community relations of Creative Commons and Wikimedia. In this series I present some work in progress.
While the now famous online-encyclopedia Wikipedia was founded shortly before Creative Commons in 2001, its organizational carrier – the Wikimedia Foundation – was founded about half a year after Creative Commons had formally launched its first set of alternative copyright licenses in December 2002. Both organizations share the fundamental vision of creating and promoting a global “commons” of freely available digital goods. Wikimedia hosts a framework of hardware (webspace and bandwith), software (the wiki-engine “MediaWiki”) and legal rules (copyleft licenses) for several projects of commons-based peer production such as Wikipedia, Wikibooks or Wiktionary. Creative Commons, in turn, delivers a set of open content licenses to – not only, but also – legally enable and foster such commons-based peer production projects as put forward by Wikimedia.
Interestingly, independent from one another, both organizations very soon after their foundation started to transnationalize by developing a transnational network of locally rooted organizations. In a way, this strategic coordination of legally and financially independent organizations resembles what is called “strategic networks” in the realm of business research (see, for example, Gulati, Nohria and Zaheer 2000). Their strategies of building such an organizational network were however quite distinct. Read the rest of this entry »
For this year’s Wikimania (26-28 August, Buenos Aires) I submitted an abstract of a paper comparing transnationalization processes and community relations of Creative Commons and Wikimedia. In this series I present some work in progress.
A few days ago, Wikimedia, the organization behind Wikipedia and its sister projects, announced the results of its most recent community vote: All contributors who had made at least 25 edits to any Wikimedia project prior to March 15, 2009 were invited to vote on the proposal to license Wikimedia material so it is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA), while retaining dual licensing with the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). This proposal is in line with earlier statements of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who repeatedly stated that “Wikipedia, had it been founded after Creative Commons, would have certainly been under a Creative Commons license” (see, for example, his speech at an iSummit party in December 1 2007 in the video below) The proposal was accepted by a solid 75.8 % majority (see results page). Read the rest of this entry »
