The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees met in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and had a long and serious discussion about controversial content in the Wikimedia projects. (Why? Because we’re the only major site that doesn’t treat controversial material –e.g., sexually-explicit imagery, violent imagery, culturally offensive imagery– differently from everything else. The Board wanted –in effect– to probe into whether that was helping or hurting our effectiveness at fulfilling our mission.)
Out of that agenda item, we found ourselves talking about what it looks like when change is handled well at Wikimedia, what good leadership looks like in our context, and what patterns we can see in work that’s been done to date.
I found that fascinating, so I’ve done some further thinking since the meeting. The purpose of this post is to document some good patterns of leadership and change-making that I’ve observed at Wikimedia.
Couple of quick caveats: For this post, I’ve picked three little case studies of successful change at Wikimedia. I’m defining successful change here as ‘change that stuck’ – not as ‘change that led to a desirable outcome.’ (I think all these three outcomes were good, but that’s moot for the purposes of this. What I’m aiming to do here is extract patterns of effective process.) Please note also that I picked these examples quickly without a criteria set – my goal was just to pick a few examples I’m familiar with, and could therefore easily analyze. It’s the patterns that matter, not so much the examples.
That said: here are three case studies of successful change at Wikimedia.
- The Board’s statement on biographies of living people. Policies regarding biographies had been a topic of concern among experienced Wikipedians for years, mainly because there is real potential for people to be damaged when the Wikipedia article about them is biased, vandalized or inaccurate, and because our experience shows us that articles about non-famous people are particularly vulnerable to skew or error, because they aren’t read and edited by enough people. And, that potential for damage –particularly to the non-famous– grows along with Wikipedia’s popularity. In April 2009, the Board of Trustees held a discussion about BLPs, and then issued a statement which essentially reflected best practices that had been developed by the Wikipedia community, and recommended their consistent adoption. The Board statement was taken seriously: it’s been translated into 18 languages, discussed internally throughout the editing community, and has been cited and used as policies and practices evolve.
- The strategy project of 2009-10. Almost 10 years after Wikipedia was founded, the Board and I felt like it was time to stop down and assess: what are we doing well, and where do we want to focus our efforts going forward. So in spring 2009, the Wikimedia Board of Trustees asked me to launch a collaborative, transparent, participatory strategy development project, designed to create a five-year plan for the Wikimedia movement. Over the next year, more than 1,000 people participated in the project, in more than 50 languages. The resultant plan is housed on the strategy wiki here, and a summary version will be published this winter. You can never really tell the quality of strategy until it’s implemented (and sometimes not even then), but the project itself has accomplished what it set out to do.
- The license migration of May 2009. When I joined Wikimedia this process was already underway, so I only observed first-hand the last half of it. But it was lovely to watch. Essentially: some very smart and experienced people in leadership positions at Wikimedia decided it made sense to switch from the GFDL to CC-BY-SA. But, they didn’t themselves have the moral or legal right to make the switch – it needed to be made by the writers of the Wikimedia projects, who had originally released their work under the GFDL. So, the people who wanted the switch launched a long campaign to 1) negotiate a license migration process that Richard Stallman (creator of the GFDL and a hero of the free software movement) would be able to support, and 2) explain to the Wikimedia community why they thought the license migration made sense. Then, the Wikimedia board endorsed the migration, and held a referendum. It passed with very little opposition, and the switch was made.
Here are nine patterns I think we can extract from those examples:
- The person/people leading the change didn’t wait for it to happen naturally – they stepped up and took responsibility for making it happen. The strategy project grew out of a conversation between then-board Chair Michael Snow and me, because we felt that Wikimedia needed a coherent plan. The BLP statement was started by me and the Board, because we were worried that as Wikipedia grew more popular, consistent policy in this area was essential. The license migration was started by Jimmy Wales, Erik Moeller and others because they wanted it to be much easier for people to reuse Wikimedia content. In all these instances, someone identified a change they thought should be made, and designed and executed a process aimed at creating that change.
- A single person didn’t make the change themselves. A group of people worked together to make it happen. More than a thousand people worked on the strategy project. Probably hundreds have contributed (over several years) to tightening up BLP policies and practices. I’m guessing dozens of people contributed to the license migration. The lesson here is that in our context, lasting change can’t be produced by a single person.
- Early in the process, somebody put serious energy towards achieving a global/meta understanding of the issue, from many different perspectives. It might be worth pointing out that this is not something we normally do: in order to do amazing work, Random Editor X doesn’t have any need to understand the global whole; he or she can work quietly, excellently, pretty much alone. But in order to make change that involves multiple constituencies, the person doing it needs to understand the perspectives of everyone implicated by that change.
- The process was carefully designed to ask the right people the right questions at the right time. The license migration was an exemplar here: The people designing the process quite rightly understood that there was no point in asking editors’ opinions about something many of them probably didn’t understand. On the other hand, the change couldn’t be made without the approval of editors. So, an education campaign was designed that gave editors access to information about the proposed migration from multiple sources and perspectives, prior to the vote.
- A person or a group of people dedicated lots of hours towards figuring out what should happen, and making it happen. In each case here, lots of people did lots of real work: researching, synthesizing, analyzing, facilitating, imagining, anticipating, planning, communicating.
- The work was done mostly in public and was made as visible as possible, in an attempt to bolster trust and understanding among non-participants. This is fundamental. We knew for example that the strategy project couldn’t succeed if it happened behind closed doors. Again and again throughout the process, Eugene Eric Kim resisted people’s attempts to move the work to private spaces, because he knew it was critical for acceptance that the work be observable.
- Some discussion happened in private, inside a small group of people who trust each other and can work easily together. That’s uncomfortable to say, because transparency and openness are core values for us and anything that contradicts them feels wrong. But it’s true: people need safe spaces to kick around notions and test their own assumptions. I know for example that at the beginning of the Board’s BLP conversations, I had all kinds of ideas about ‘the problem of BLPs’ that turned out to be flat-out wrong. I needed to feel free to air my bad ideas, and get them poked at and refuted by people I could trust, before I could start to make any progress thinking about the issue. Similarly, the Board exchanged more than 300 e-mails about controversial content inside its private mailing list, before it felt comfortable enough to frame the issue up in a resolution that would be published. That private kicking around needs to happen so that people can test and accelerate and evolve their own thinking.
- People put their own credibility on the line, endorsing the change and trying to persuade others to believe in it. In a decentralized movement, there’s a strong gravitational pull towards the status quo, and whenever anyone tries to make change, they’re in effect saying to hundreds or thousands of people “Hey! Look over here! Something needs to happen, and I know what it is.” That’s a risky thing to do, because they might be perceived in a bunch of negative ways – as naiive or overreacting, as wrong or stupid or presumptuous, or even as insincere – pretending to want to help, but really motivated by inappropriate personal self-interest. Putting yourself on the line for something you believe in, in the face of suspicion or apathy, is brave. And it’s critical.
- Most people involved –either as participants or observers– wanted more than anything else to advance the Wikimedia mission, and they trusted that the others involved wanted the same thing. This is critical too. I have sometimes despaired at the strength of our default to the status quo: it is very, very hard to get things done in our context. But I am always reassured by the intelligence of Wikimedia community members, and by their dedication to our shared mission. I believe that if everyone’s aligned in wanting to achieve the mission, that’s our essential foundation for making good decisions.
Like I said earlier — these are just examples I’ve seen or been involved in personally. I’d be very interested to hear other examples of successful change at Wikimedia, plus observations & thinking about patterns we can extract from them.
Sue Gardner's Blog 
http://standingoffandon.blogspot.com/2010/11/sue-gardners-recent-blog-entry.html
Gah. I replied, but WordPress ate it.
Amgine, thanks for your comment. I’m interested that people seem to be blogging about my post, and writing me e-mails about it. That’s great, but I’d encourage people to reply directly here, as well :-)
Comments, feedback, and opinions about WMF-sponsored projects and activities reside in a far-flung diaspora for the simple reason that the host of any one discussion venue exercises editorial control over which discussion points are aired, and which are baleted. It’s not a feature limited to WikiCulture. One will find editorial control even at the most free-wheeling of discussion forums.
I don’t begrudge Sue Gardner the right to review and moderate the discussion here, but it would be helpful to know what her criteria are for accepting or rejecting comments, opinions, and critical feedback.
I wrote a Comments Policy for you Moulton, and a few other people who had been asking :-)
To say in brief what I wrote there: for at least a small section of one of your top examples of “changes which stuck”, it does not partake of more than one of your patterns of change. For that singular example your prose is so inappropriate/inaccurate as to be misleading, even dishonest.
I’m unwilling to generalize from that single example, but in my opinion it is an anti-pattern of “change that stuck”.
I completely agree the strategy project was not a net positive. It seems a lot to me like one of the project leaders, who has boasted about how he’s such a good administrator but “sucks at content” is a huge part of the problem. I have several questions about the decisions he has made outstanding which have uncharacteristically yet to be addressed. However, I haven’t seen any of the Foundation leadership even attempt to address any of the questions concerning administrator attrition yet. Why not?
I think that in saying “it is an anti-pattern,” Amgine, you are in fact generalizing from that single example, aren’t you? :-)
And I think that generalization is incorrect. The strategy project has been a massive endeavor. There were lots of working groups, and lots of ways to participate in addition to working groups. I’m not personally really familiar with the work of the offline group, but I can say that some of the working groups were not super-successful, and some were. The Movement Roles working group, for example, found ourselves unable to resolve the roles-and-responsibilities questions inside the working group mechanism. So that work continues in a new project called Movement Roles 2, that’s being run by Arne Klempert, with support from Austin Hair, Jon Huggett, and others. I wouldn’t consider that a failure: I would consider it a good course-correction. What we initially tried to do didn’t work, and so we evolved it into something that would have a greater chance of success.
On the whole, I’d say that aspects of the strategy project were highly successful, and aspects were not. But the project as a whole, in my view, was clearly effective. It seems obvious to me that we’ve got more alignment as a movement today, than we had before the project. That was the goal, and in my view it was accomplished.
Well, my English usage must be #fail.
“…but in my opinion [this specific example] is an anti-pattern of…” IOW: it shows a bad solution to a problem, and does not follow the ‘patterns’ you described. (which, in my opinion, are not 100% useful as patterns. Have you looked at Human Behavioral Patterns and the Anti-Pattern Catalog?)
(this may be a re-post, as I seem to remember this in my e-mail yesterday)
Interesting. I suspect that the steps are neccessary but not sufficient for success. You would need to consider some failed initiatives too to see what not to do.
I had been following the license change proposals for months before the big anouncement, getting frustrated because I couldn’t work out what was happening but tantalised by glimpses behind the curtain which told me something was up. I had contributed and commented on the GFDL rewrite wiki run by the free software foundation and googled creative commons mailing lists and yet I was completely taken by surprise when the plan was announced, and completely in agreement with your proposal. You had indeed anticipated all my questions and issues.
I participated in the Strategy wiki too. Coming up with a couple of proposals and editing some pages, including some of the central ones like Emerging Strategic Priorities. I was again frustrated because I could see the discussions going round in circles. We had agreement on the fundamental objectives but we were making no progress on picking out specific proposals to prioritise. When the strategic priorities was announced the list was a surprise to me but, again, a pleasant one as it pretty much matched what I would have picked.
The pattern there seems to be that of listening to what people were calling for and, equally important, which bits no one seemed excited about then coming up with a synthesis that reflected the issues the users considered important integrated with a plausible budget and programme turning it from a wish list into a plan.
Two other enormously significant changes have been initiated in the last year. One was to double the number of employees, the other was to change the fund-raising strategy to put much less emphasis on chasing large donations from US foundations. Both came from you with little consultation beforehand. For the both of these the existing editors have been a little nervous but willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and wait and see what happens because you seem to know what you are doing budgetwise and because the direction you are taking us alligns with our wish list. We want to be independent of the fat cats. We want to have cool new software to play with. We want to increase the number of editors among underrepresented groups. we really don’t want the whole enterprise to implode like enron. You tell us your plan will achieve this. Ok then.
The other massive change to have happened is Wikipedia going mainstream. As the number and quality of articles has risen so our reputation has risen too but so too has the level of expertise required of contributors. If you don’t have access to a decent reference library then, for many articles, you are not qualified to make a significant contribution. Even formatting changes require a level of expertise in the templating system greater than I have ever aquired. Meanwhile other wikis have grown up where contributions can still be made without the same level of expertise. These days I contribute more on Appropedia and Open street maps, though I still check my wikipedia watchlist from time to time. What does this change teach us?
Hoping to see you when you are in London for GLAM
Thanks filceolaire. It’s a good useful comment — I’ll just respond to a couple of things.
You’re right that the fundraising strategy and staff growth didn’t come out of direct consultation with the community. But I’d hate for anyone to conclude that those decisions were made without consideration of how they’d affect the whole of the movement. Two things: 1) The board was involved with both decisions, both formally and informally .. and I consider that a form of consultation with the community, since the board is part of the community, and is accountable to it. And 2) The fundraising strategy in particular was a direct response to everything I’ve heard from the community WRT revenue generation since I started. It’s one of those happy situations where the ideal path forward is fairly obvious to everyone, and I was pleased we could make it happen.
The second thing I’d say is that if you are drifting from Wikipedia because it’s easier or more fulfilling for you to contribute to other projects, that’s bad for Wikipedia, and we would want to know more about why so we can redress whatever’s failing for you. You should feel free to send me a note about that, and/or we can talk in London :-)
Thanks,
Sue
OK. See you.
“Because we’re the only major site that doesn’t treat controversial material –e.g., sexually-explicit imagery, violent imagery, culturally offensive imagery– differently from everything else.”
What’s the line? “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains”? We’re apparently running scared from the prospect of being spotted without our fetters and offending our Masters.
I loved the way you all came to the proper resolutions to problems imagine or not to a concrete answer. I to believe things to be a certain way, even if, that’s not the way they are done, but you challenged that and made it work. I have never done Journalism, but would consider a place like yours with the openess and straight forward approach to handling situations. Sincerely, Tom tc