Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2013-2014 round2/Wikimedia Foundation/Proposal form

Proposal by Wikimedia Foundation to support its annual plan with Template:Usamountrequested/2013-2014 round2/Wikimedia Foundation.

Please leave your comments about this proposal here on the discussion page or return to the community review page. Thank you for reviewing this proposal.

Thank you for this proposal

Thank you for submitting a complete proposal form by the proposal submission date! We realize that you put a lot of effort into creating this proposal, and many of us are looking forward to reviewing it in-depth. Wikimedia Foundation's proposal will be considered by the FDC in Round 2 2013-2014, provided Wikimedia Foundation remains eligible throughout the course of the FDC process.

Please do not make any changes to your proposal at this time without requesting those changes first here on this discussion page, so they may be reviewed and approved by staff. We will consider changes that greatly enhance the readability of your proposal or correct important factual errors or broken links, but you need not worry about making minor corrections to your proposal form if you notice them after the deadline. The FDC will be looking at the substance of your proposal rather than focusing on the language used, and so these types of minor changes are usually not needed. This is also done to ensure that any changes made to a proposal are really intended by the organization submitting the proposal. Thank you for your cooperation, as this helps keep the proposal process fair and consistent for all organizations.

Please monitor this page for questions and comments from the community, FDC members, and FDC staff. Engagement during this part of the proposal process is important, and will be considered by the FDC along with other inputs into the proposal process. Follow up questions from FDC staff should be expected early next week and community review will continue until 30 April. Staff proposal assessments will be published on 8 May 2014 and linked to from your proposal hub page.

Please contact us at any time if you have questions about your proposal or the review process. We are here to support applicants throughout the process.

Best regards, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 18:50, 2 April 2014 (UTC) (on behalf of FDC Staff)

Context material

• Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan
• [Wikimedia-l] WMF FDC Proposal: we invite your participation

Questions and comments from Pine

Thank you for making this proposal public. I have only spent a few minutes with this report but I like what I see so far. I apologize if I missed answers to these questions when I skimmed the report.

A general comment: I think the four "crucial initiatives" were well chosen, and I'm especially glad to see EE and Mobile as separate "crucial initiatives".

More specific questions:

• Can you break down the cost increases for current staff more specifically into categories for increased cost of living, merit pay, and increased benefit costs? Please also verify that increased benefit costs were included in the cost of living figure.

The cost of living increase is 2.1% and the merit pay increase is 3%. Increase benefit cost are 0.8% which are not included in the cost of living figure. Gbyrd (talk) 19:24, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

• What is being done to keep medical costs at a reasonable level of inflation? For an organization the size of WMF I think that medical benefits would be a significant expense.

Medical benefits are a significant expense which is budgeted at $2.6 million. The increases in medical cost are managed by our HR team, using a combination of partnering with an insurance broker to keep our cost increases as low as possible and a wellness program. Gbyrd (talk) 19:24, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

In civil countries with more effective and less expensive healthcare systems, like Canada and Europe, such costs are included in the general state revenue. Considering WMF is an organisation with a global scope, it would be useful to have a global overview of welfare/taxation-related costs, though they're different from an accounting perspective. Concretely, it's hard to say how relevant a 2.6 M$ figure when I don't know how much is spent over taxation etc. (directly or indirectly) in other countries. --Nemo 22:07, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

• Has there been any consideration of moving any WMF facilities to less expensive locations?

WMF does look at lower cost locations when adding new facilities, such as a data center. Our average space cost are currently below market for San Francisco. Gbyrd (talk) 19:24, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

• Has there been any consideration of reducing travel expenses for WMF employees such as by encouraging more virtual meetings?

WMF has been adding more virtual meeting spaces, which are used frequently. As for travel cost, even with the growth in staff, we are only budgeting an 11% increase in travel cost. Gbyrd (talk) 19:24, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Relatedly, we're still missing WMF data in Wikimania 2013/Budget. Transparency is important for community-driven activities like Wikimania to be continually self-assessed. --Nemo 22:07, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

• What benefits have been achieved from the "narrowing focus" initiative?

Thanks for the question. Narrowing focus came out of a realization that we were spreading ourselves too thin. We had global programs staffed by one or two people – charged with solving massive problems. It came out of a desire to do a few things very well, instead of give an inadequate amount of attention to every problem. The conversation also centered around what work should WMF take on and what work should be left to partners or to the community generally. As a result, some programs were discontinued and staff was reassigned to priority projects. It meant that we had more people working on fewer things. We have now been operating under this more narrow focus for a year and a half. It seems like we now have a better understanding of what resources it takes to have a global program or tech initiative succeed. We either fully commit those resources or we don't do it at all. We can always be better at living up this this, but I think it was an important reorientation. --Lgruwell (talk) 16:38, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

• Where does the education program fit, since it doesn't seem to be a "cruicial initiative" even among the "non-technical movement support" initiative which includes "grants, evaluation, legal support and communications"? If the education program isn't a "crucial initiative" then should it be discontinued per the "narrowing focus" initiative?
• Does WMF intend to start a new 5-year strategic planning process involving the community in 2014? How are the expenses for that budgeted?

This question will be largely answered by the new executive director. We did not want to commit a new E.D. to a process that might not be in line with his or her thinking on strategic planning. That said, the C-Level staff and the WMF board have had conversations about whether or not a 5-year strategic plan makes sense for the WMF. There is a general feeling that a 5-year plan may be too long of a time horizon – given how quickly technology changes – and that a more iterative approach to strategic planning may be more effective. Funding for strategic planning ($300,000) is included in the Governance budget in the "Other" category. --Lgruwell (talk) 16:58, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

• I frequently hear that WMF lawyers are working at full capacity and I'm aware of one project that was cancelled apparently due to inability to budget adequate support time from Legal. Would it make sense to hire at least one more attorney or paralegal?

Hi Pine. Thanks for your question. I'm not aware of the specifics of the case to which you refer and I unfortunately do not have recollection of it. You are right however that we are working at full capacity, often late and on weekends. That said, I think we are fine with present staffing this year, though it will be tight. The communications department is being transferred to a C-level position, so I will no longer need to spend time supervising that department, giving me more time for legal issues. Also, we are fortunate to have a privacy fellow (paid for by Georgetown U Law Center) and another fellow hired this year who will give us additional support. We lost a wonderful in-house pro-bono attorney when she took a General Counsel position, and she gave us great support. We will miss her and her expertise. That said, I do not expect us to do many community consultations this year since most of the work is done (terms of use, privacy policy, and trademark policy); these consultations have traditionally involved time-intensive efforts for the lawyers. So overall - in light of the shift in my responsibilities and the unlikelihood of the need for more intensive consultations - I am hopeful that our present team size will be able to address the priority legal work this coming fiscal year. Thanks again for your interest. Geoffbrigham (talk) 18:00, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

• IEG's budget is expanded significantly to $500,000 in this proposal. IEG's annual spend has been much lower in the past. How does WMF intend to expand the number or budget of proposals that are successful in earning funding recommendations from IEGCom?

Hi Pine, thanks for asking about this. This budget is not for IEG alone, but for all our individual grants, apart from scholarships ($200,000) - the $500,000 includes IEG, the Travel and Participation Support program (which we intend to redesign this coming year) and other grants campaigns to increase the participation of, and support to, individual contributors. In IEG's case, we're considering the grants spend across two rounds in the same fiscal year as well as potential extensions (we budgeted slightly differently last year because of the pilot round), but are essentially sticking to the spend we know is feasible given our experience with the last two rounds (i.e. two rounds of a $150,000 each and 2 rounds of potential extensions of $50,000 each; this comes up to $400,000). We've put aside $50,000 for Travel and Participation Support (we run this in partnership with WMDE and WMCH; our contribution towards this is staying steady), and another $50,000 for potential grants campaigns we run this next year as an experiment around supporting individuals at scale through micro-resources and micro-grants. We're looking forward to thinking about this more intensively with you in the following months :-) ASengupta (WMF) (talk) 20:25, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

• Could you explain how it's reasonable for WMF's spending growth rate to be significantly exceeding the growth rate of active editors?

WMF is only one of many movement entities working on this issue. A portion of our budget is for spending on the retention and growth of active editors, but it is not a measure that I see applies to our overall budget. Gbyrd (talk) 19:24, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

• Could you be more specific about what the 14 new Software Engineers will do?

Yeah, to a point. Our work in eng/prod overall is very iterative, of course, and the below is subject to internal and external feedback, real world experience and the final budget amount. At a high level, we're not currently planning to build a whole new development team (at the scale of the Flow or VisualEditor team). Here are a few goals that have informed the plan:

• We're considering a small (roughly 2 person) effort focused on mapping-related infrastructure which is a shared need for lots of projects, esp. mobile. This would be similar to our current search infrastructure effort (also a 2 person effort), delivering the basics (e.g. robust, scalable OpenStreetMap tiling service) but not yet a huge amount of new functionality, rather, enabling other teams to then leverage this in building features/products (e.g. a map-based "nearby" view for mobile). Underlying hypothesis here is that with the shift to mobile overall, we'll want to leverage geo-related functionality more consistently across the board as part of new contributory funnels. We also know it's high on the community's wishlist.
• We're planning to get more of our teams ready for multi-device development while maintaining the current high velocity of the mobile team. This likely will translate to significantly adding to the mobile team's bench strength overall so that experienced experts from the team can spend more time with teams like VisualEditor, Flow, etc. to get those products to be fully mobile-ready. In addition, we're also intending to increase the size of the iOS and Android app teams to 3 engineers each, respectively, as we are making a small bet that apps can play a bigger role in editing and reading than they do today. The apps will relaunch in a few weeks, so that'll give us some good early indicators of whether that's a good bet to make.
• We're intending to put more effort towards a service-oriented architecture for our technology platform. This means building out dedicated services for new needs (e.g. a URL-to-citation service for VisualEditor) and potentially taking parts of MediaWiki today and more loosely coupling them to the core application. In the long term, this shift (which will have lots of implications across the board) will enable us to build new functionality more quickly, by reducing the degree to which the MediaWiki core application has to be modified to deliver it.
• We'll augment existing teams with stronger operations support, which sometimes has been a bottleneck in the past.
• We're considering a dedicated effort to overhaul the API documentation, with an eye to a parallel development/documentation effort (probably including a clean-up/redesign of https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php ).
• We're considering two ScrumMaster hires to reduce the need for engineers to spend time on process-related responsibilities. We'll likely experiment with giving this shape in a small group dedicated to improving team practices.
• We're likely going to add an engineer to the existing work on admin tools.

HTH, --Eloquence (talk) 06:52, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

• I have heard that code review is a bottleneck. What is being done to address this?
  • Hi, we have put a significant effort in retrieving and visualizing data from our code review queues, in order to know where are the bottlenecks. See how long is the review queue over time and specific data of each repository of wikitech:Key Wikimedia software projects. The intake of patches to be reviewed keeps being high, the general queue keeps growing, but the median time to review patches is decreasing. An interesting combination that we are looking at. These new graphs will help us finding pockets of old patches with inactive reviews, repositories where reviews take significantly longer to be resolved, and therefore teams that either need to change something in their processes or simply need help digesting the volume of contributions they are getting. Analyzing these bottlenecks and proposing a plan to address them is one of the main goals of the Engineering Community Team.--Qgil (talk) 19:48, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks (:

Pine

Role of the appendix

Grants:APG/Proposals/2013-2014 round2/Wikimedia Foundation/Proposal form/Ongoing work areas: what is this thing? Why is it a subpage of this proposal? If it's not integral part of your proposal, can you please consider moving it elsewhere? Do other entities do such a thing too? It's 100 KB and it doesn't seem to contain anything of use or that I don't know already, so I don't plan to read it unless its scope is clarified. Thanks, Nemo 18:08, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your question! This appendix is designed to give the FDC and other readers a better understanding of what the money will be spent for, explaining many activities that the main annual plan only mentions briefly or not at all, and providing lots of concrete data that help to get a sense of the volume of activity going on in each work area. As stated in the box on the top right of the main proposal page and on top of the appendix page itself, it is part of the Foundation's FDC proposal along with other supplementary material. The inclusion of this supplementary material was approved by FDC staff in advance - I understand that they are fine with entities including such additional content if it helps the purpose of the proposal document, and that this has already been done by other entities previously. It appears that you would strongly prefer to read everything in one page, and we could ask the FDC staff if they are OK with moving or transcluding the appendix content on the main proposal page like for the Board Q&A, but I'm not sure if this would really make it more readable and I also prefer not getting too hung up on such formal issues.

It's interesting that you haven't read the document yet but already assume that it doesn't contain useful information. I have no doubt that you know part of it already, but I'm also certain that some of the data hasn't been published before. What's more, even the information that is already public is scattered among many, many pages on various wikis, and not everyone might have the time and inclination to read all of them, in fact I guess that there are very few people besides you and me who have done so ;)

Regarding the size, yes, we are at several hundred kB for the proposal and appendix now, but it's also about a budget of sixty million dollars. I'd like to observe that this proposal still contains far less words per budget dollar than the other proposals, even including the appendix.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 22:06, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

No, I didn't ask it to be merged/transcluded. Yes, I was gifted with a supernatural intuition for what is worth reading (there are millions books out there and only one life for me to read). Ok for the precedents; still not clear to me if the appendix is supposed to be reviewed/approved too. --Nemo 22:12, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

Greetings, Tbayer and Nemo:

We just wanted to clarify that many entities do submit supplementary documents as subpages of their FDC proposals, and that this has always been accepted as part of the proposal process. In this same round, for example, WMFR has also submitted several supplementary documents as subpages of its proposal, and these documents will be reviewed and considered by the FDC along with its proposal form. Furthermore, the FDC does also review and carefully consider documents related to each organization or its plans (such as a strategic plans or an annual plans) as part of the proposal process, whether or not those documents are included as subpages of the proposals.

As Tbayer mentions, they did consult with FDC staff before including this large supplement to the proposal, and we did confirm that this document could be accepted as part of the proposal process. The FDC will be reviewing this supplementary document along with WMF's proposal.

Thanks to both for the clarifications about the appendix offered here. Cheers, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 00:20, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

Request for minor correction edit

I'm requesting permission from the FDC staff to edit this page, in order to fix some broken links in the following pattern: [[:meta:Wikilegal|Wikilegal]] --> [[:m:Wikilegal|Wikilegal]]. (Nemo: we'd rather keep the "[[m:.." prefix in because it makes it easier to reuse the content on other wikis; also, it's not a report per se in the sense of the usual monthly and annual WMF reports about activities conducted in a certain timespan, so the category you added isn't suitable. I'll leave it to the FDC staff to categorize this page as they see fit.) Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 21:41, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

I think the category is correct, it's rather the page being in the wrong place probably. ;) See above. --Nemo 22:01, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

Hello, Tbayer: Thank you for making this request. The corrections to these links are approved, and you may go ahead and make the approved changes now. We will categorize the Appendix to show that it is part of your proposal form, just as we would do for any other supplementary proposal documents. We will apply some categories to the Appendix that are consistent with the other proposal documents. Cheers, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 23:47, 3 April 2014 (UTC)