Talk:Towards a five year plan 2013-18
Draft Five year plan 2013-18 - April 2013
How much depth are we looking for?
"It should have enough detail that an external person looking at the document would understand the rationale behind the targets. The targets should, however, not be too detailed."
Who should we consult and involve?
Our feeling that this should be as wide as possible; members, community, donors, fellow open knowledge organisations and contributors. We will use the blog, Twitter, Facebook, geonotices / talk page notices, email lists, Signpost, and the village pumps of the relevant language Wikimedia projects.
What is the process?
'The process started with a situational analysis asking questions like;
- What are we good at now? What aren't we good at now?
- What assets do we have?
- Where are we within the "ecosystem" of other open-knowledge, cultural, and educational institutions? What do we have a natural advantage in vs what could easily happen without us? '
We then held a day workshop where over thirty people discussed the issues and shared their ideas.
The Timetable
| 8 February 2013 | Agreed overall method |
| February/March | Staff drew up plan for enactment |
| 23 March 2013 | In-person workshops for community held in London despite snow. |
| March/April | Survey and March 23rd reports published and shared with stakeholders |
| April/May | Volunteer co-ordinator, staff and trustees attend wikimeets and special meetings to discuss options |
| April/May | First draft shared on UK wiki with call for comments |
| 8 June 2013 | Second draft brought to annual conference. |
| June/July | Third draft open for consultation. |
| July 13.14 | Signed-off by Board |
Following this process the CE with staff support synthesised the ideas from the consultation so far and draft six of the previous five year plan to create the April draft.
How often should it be reviewed, by whom and in what ways?
Once completed an annual review should be about right to monitor how we are progressing with a more substantial review at least 18 months before the next five year period starts. The annual plans can have more detailed targets that are monitored against the 5 year plan. We will also seek to create a three year business plan to anticipate day to day growth.
Risks
- That we never come to a conclusion.
- That there are too many competing ideas and the document becomes unmanageable
- That there is no buy-in from a broad range of interests, just a small group dominate the debate.
Comments on the draft five-year plan
Some initial thoughts
- The targets seem to be mostly the sort of thing we should be targeting.
- It isn't really a plan. It is a collection of targets. A plan would give some idea of some of the actions that will be taken.
- The "International communications" bit says "Working to build international links with organisations within the movement and outside." but then the targets just relate to organisations within the movement. No mention of organisations outside the movement. Is that deliberate?
- The "membership and communications" bit mentions three different types of in-person meeting - quarterly members meetings, six-monthly fora and wikimeets. I can guess at the distinction between them but some additional clarity would be nice.
- A lot of the stuff in the "technical innovation" section actually seems to be about outreach. Maybe it should be in the "outreach" section.
Yaris678 (talk) 17:55, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
- thanks for the feedback. One specific point I can comment on is "international links within the movement and outside" as this is an area where GLAM related work will come up. It is difficult to publicly name potential partners before you've started working with them, better in my view for the plan to discuss the sorts of international collaborations that the UK chapter might get involved in. As your GLAM organiser I'm rather hoping the community will say that in the next five years we want more things like Picturing Canada and the collaboration with Indian editors re Tipu's Tiger. But it would be good to hear from people as to what sorts of partnerships you do and don't want us to get involved in. Jonathan Cardy (WMUK) (talk) 18:23, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
Governance
This seems to miss out our current short term plans for GovCom and the A&R committee, both simple improvements to governance.
A commitment to external regular audit, peer review and built-in spot checks would be useful in the longer term.
There may be an opportunity here for WMUK take the lead in establishing, sharing and promoting best practice for governance for other organizations within the Wikimedia community and in UK charity, particularly those that are nearby in terms of technology focus or open knowledge focus. Improvement around serious risk reporting, top level public key performance indicators and how whistle-blowing, where appropriate, is made a public process would be another useful set of governance related commitments. --Fæ (talk) 07:28, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
This page is rather confusingly laid out
I find this page very confusing, with both the draft and the comments on the draft all being mixed up on the talk page. If no-one minds I propose to copy the current draft text over to the main page, and to put what is currently there onto a separate 'background material' subpage. We can then have what visitors will expect - the text on the page and the discussion on the talk page. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 09:26, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
- Done. Comments can continue below :) --MichaelMaggs (talk) 09:34, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
Annual reviews
To ensure the vitality of the plan over the 5 year period it would be best to embed within it the requirement for an annual review of progress, and probably also the need for an annual publicly-available report. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 10:46, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
Need for targets to be S.M.A.R.T.
Many of the items listed as 'targets' are not actually targets at all, but but are aspirations and general statements of intent. At the end of the 5 year term, it's important in my view that the board can review how the charity has done, which requires that everything listed as a target should be specific and objectively measurable. Likewise, at each annual review, the board will need to have some objective measures against which to review progress to data against the plan. That's not possible with statements of aspiration and intent.
Good corporate practice, which I think we should follow, suggests that business plans should have goals that are S.M.A.R.T. In other words, every goal should be looked at critically to make sure that it is:
- S: Specific
- M: Measurable
- A: Attainable
- R: Relevant
- T: Time-bound
Most of the draft goals seem to comply with A,R and T, but not with S or M. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 10:41, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
- Lots of people seem to think that making targets fit the SMART criteria will automatically improve them. This has not been my experience. For example, if we try too hard to make a target measurable we might end up changing it into something that invites gaming.
- Specificity is definitely a good thing. But sometimes it needs to be developed as we go along, as in agile software development. Agile is a good analogy because it isn't saying that we want to be vague forever, it is saying that some things can be specified in quite a fluffy way at first and then tightened up when we see how other aspects pan out.
- A good example of gaining more specificity in this context is Jonathan asking if people want more things like Picturing Canada and collaboration with Indian editors re Tipu's Tiger. This helps him to get more idea of the sort of international collaborations people value. As he is developing his new projects he will hopefully keep the community informed and respond to comments.
- In case my point on specificity isn't clear... getting into the details of Jonathan's projects is probably too specific for a five year plan... but elaborating on the sort of projects we value probably isn't too specific and nor elaborating on how we intend to discuss projects in future.
- Yaris678 (talk) 12:11, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
education section
- I'd be cautious about 'digital divide' as a term - the primary issue in the digital divide is not one of access to technology but one of skills, and use.
- Why "An annual conference is held for 11+ education professionals." instead of broader education?
- What are the aims of the education outreach? Improved articles, new editors, new content (articles, commons material, etc.)? I can imagine many outcomes which could have metrics to provide some measure of success
- Why "up to 50" ? I'd prefer to see some measures than an (arbitrary?) target number
- Do we want to say something about formal v. informal possibilities? E.g. schools v. coder clubs (or football clubs for that matter)
- Wikimedians in Residence - are these intended to be paid positions? By us or unis (or split?) Presumably this ties in to the current JISC partnership? 194.83.164.22 12:46, 8 June 2013 (UTC) ( user:sjgknight struggling to login)
Suggestion: hackathons & tech meetups
Just a suggestion: the tech suggestion could recognise tech events as a strategic goal as well as tech development. Jarry1250 (talk) 14:12, 8 June 2013 (UTC)