What do we agree on?

I would like some clarification from Eekim and/or Philippe about what we're trying to achieve in terms of the recommendations.

I had assumed, perhaps completely foolishly, that all the recommendations from the TFs would be going to the board. But the nature of this conversation thus far gives the impression that what we have is the 'long list' and that we're now being encouraged to reduce this to a short list.

My preference would be that the WMF board gets to see all of them. OK, I know that's a lot of recommendations, however my feeling is that the TFs put in a lot of work to get their recommendations out and I would feel a little heartless being part of a process that now essentially kicks them to the kerb.

Along a similar line of thinking, the recommendations have already been part of a distillation of hundreds of proposals, many of which have already withered on the vine... in part that was bound to happen due to the sheer number of them, very few of us could be expected to give them all due care and attention; the point I make now is that I fear that we're perhaps moving into yet another process of shelving ideas.

Personally I would prefer the WMF to be presented with a broad range from which to choose and to which they can apply their insider-knowledge in terms of feasibility, staffing requirements, funding and so on. To put it another way, I would rather see the WMF's meeting end with "OK, we've run out of time and we still have 50% of the recommendations to discuss, so we'll meet again on..." rather than "well, this meeting didn't take long, I guess the Strategy Process wasn't very successful at generating ideas, huh?"

So I would like to hear some direction from Eekim and Philippe about what they want us good members of the Strategy Task Force to be achieving in this context.

The Board has the same access to the wiki that all of us have, and I can assure you they've been pointed to the recommendations. :)

But yes, we're now asking for some synthesis on the recommendations to get us to a point where we determine which are practical, which are realistic, which are low hanging fruit, etc.

Proposals have not, repeat not, withered on the vine. They continue to be a major source of discussion for people here on the wiki and also in our meetings offline. I hope to bring a couple of ideas here soon to see what people think about them and so we can chart how best to get started on the proposals.

Nobody has said the strategy process isn't successful in generating ideas; quite the opposite. From the Board to the staff to outside observers, we've consistently heard people being impressed with the work of the task forces and individuals on this wiki. In some ways the number of ideas is almost overwhelming.

Thanks for the clarification Philippe.

In general terms I think I find all the recommendations achievable. Certainly some require greatly more effort than others but I don't recall reading any aghast and thinking "this will never work!" or "this is outrageously expensive!" or other such damning exclamations.

I'm not sure any of my favourites strike me as low hanging fruit; I still have the fault of having a parochial en:wp mindset but even with that we are talking about changes effecting a substantial community of people. The old image of steering an oil tanker comes to mind; I think almost any change will take some time and effort to gain traction. That would only become more true as I try and get my head around applying it to multiple projects. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I find any of them impractical or unrealistic.

All of which kind of leaves me back where I started, with the list I've submitted to this discussion and not quite knowing if there's anything else I can contribute currently. I guess I'll kick back and wait for more input from other folk :o)

I guess we could start by identifying recommendations that tries to achive simmilar goals.

I think for example that all of the following has in common that they wants to bring Wikimedia to the masses (labels taken from the summary on the recommendation page)

• Movement roles - Investing in chapter development
• Movement roles - Establishing a Chapters Network
• Movement roles - Promoting real life events
• Movement roles - Enable nonmembership structures such as university departments to serve in the chapter role
• Movement roles - Enable volunteers to form Regional Working Groups as a sub-Chapter status
• Offline - Schools
• Local Languages - Outreach
• China - Promote the Wikimedia movement and involve the public at large

And the following aims in one way or the other at improving the contributor experience, and to make more potential contributors able to contribute.

• Community health - Volunteer recognition
• Community health - Improve consensus-building processes
• Community health - Demarcate and strengthen volunteer roles
• Community health - Tools for community health
• Community health - Social networking features
• Quality - Global WikiProjects
• Quality - Senior Editors
• Local Languages - Stimulate creation of local content
• Local Languages - Localization and internationalization of the MediaWiki software
• China - Lift the obstacles for participation

Note that each of these recommendations might try to achive other, different goals as well. But I have tried to find the similarities.

A valid exercise, Dafer.

Philippe has asked us for "synthesis". I've looked up the definitions and one is "the combination of ideas into a complex whole".

So perhaps we're supposed to stop thinking of them as individual recommendations but more than grouping together similarly themed recommendations we're supposed to merge them in such a way that we still have a lot of detail.

I'm a little wary of attempting to draft something along those lines. I'm struggling to articulate why. Part of it is that I feel there should be an interim step; I would like to see the WMF discuss them as individual recommendations and then return to us with ones they favour and encourage us to work on them, perhaps then to produce one large strategy document suitable for fitting on one page.

Without that interim step I fear we'll essentially end up either just doing a cut 'n' paste job where we stitch them all together (hopefully with some degree of finesse but) leaving us not much further forward. Alternatively we'll find ourselves being somewhat ruthless in editing out parts of the recommendations so that we have something more streamlined. I guess that could work, however I feel I'm reaching the point at which I say "I lack the authority to do that". Any kind of editing exercise is going to involve an implicit assertion that "I know better than the Task Force that drafted this recommendation".

All having worked correctly the TFs will have researched their data and worked collaboratively to present something fairly focused. If we're going to chop stuff out I guess it behooves us to know the data each TF used. OK, that should be in the recommendation already but... sigh.

Perhaps I just lack confidence. I'm reluctant to be the one that wields the scissors. I feel the need to defer to a higher power. Yet I'll be the first one to complain if the WMF seems to take a deeply authoritarian approach :o)

So, all that said, I think I'll step back and wait to see if anyone is willing to take all this in hand in some forceful way and I'll just try and support that as best I can.

I feel unsure about what we are supposed to do as well. I also feel that I am very unable to judge the relative importance of the different strategies. All I can do is to analyse the strategies and find agreements/disagreements.

Probably everone else feels the same, because there hasn't been any real new progress on this discussion page yet, only summaries of what has been done before and not any synthesis. So what probably is needed now is clearer guidlines about what we are supposed to do.

Yes. The other thing that concerns me is that it appears that TF members may not know of the discussions here. I wonder if many of them have assumed that their work is done. If that's the case I would feel bad removing any TF-created content without the people that drafted that content here to argue for its retainment or at least to guide the decision-making.

I agree.

I think we are expected to provide concise recommendations which serve as a kind of summary to the long elaborated recommendations of the Task forces. We can also indicate what we expect from WMF concerning various recommendation groups.

I am also a bit at a loss as to how we can say "this should go into the final strategy document" and "this shouldn't" (insofar as I have actually understood what's asked of us. I like the "themed" approach provided by Dafer, as it brings some perspective into recommendations that would be "cross taskforces", and I find the notation system a god way to try and weigh the different recommendations. But a a notation system, in my opinion, will only work if we have lots of people weighing in, as for example, my notation would be completely different from that of Bodnotbod :). I'm thinking maybe we want to work in a mindmap kind of way, trying to start with a taskforce and trying to map all the recommendations of all the taskforces in relation to that taskforce. This should help us show the different links between different recommendations. To some extent, I suppose that a recommendation that finds itself "linked" to many other might organically take more weight than one which is extremely specific and doe snot relate to anything else.

What we can do of course is to go and ask for specific feedback (rating the TF proposals) in our communities, but this would require some time, preparation, and also we need to present concisely what is expected to be rated - the sum of all TF recommendations is too big for mone persone to read, and the summary of topics is too short to make any judgement. Also, we have translation issues (if we want to avoid systemic bias etc).