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Question: What is the state of Movement Strategy in this annual plan?
- Answer: For the second consecutive year, the Wikimedia Foundation is anchoring its annual plan in the movement's strategy to advance equity. Our intention is to connect the Foundation's work even more deeply with the Movement Strategy Recommendations in order to make even deeper progress towards the 2030 Strategic Direction. We are coordinating Movement Strategy implementation more centrally through the office of the CEO, with special emphasis on supporting the success of the Movement Charter. You can read more here. KStineRowe (WMF) (talk) 18:30, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Question: How are budget savings being approached and how many roles in the Foundation have been affected?
- Answer: The financial model on which the Wikimedia movement has relied for most of its historic growth (banner fundraising) is reaching some limits. We are making internal budget cuts involving both non-personnel and personnel expenses to make sure we have a more sustainable trajectory in expenses for the coming few years. Despite these budget pressures, we will grow overall funding to movement partners, including expanding grants to: take into account global inflationary costs, support newcomers to the movement, and increase funding for conferences and movement events. Based on projections, we need to reduce expenses by approximately $8 million in the 2023−2024 budget compared to our current run rate. We focused first on preserving funding to grants and movement support and funding inflationary increases in several core operating areas like data centers. Then we worked to identify reductions in non-staffing expense categories like professional services, legal fees, and subscriptions. However, it became necessary to consider staffing expenses, which affected some vacant/unfilled roles and about 5% of occupied roles. KStineRowe (WMF) (talk) 18:37, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Question: Are movement-facing teams disproportionately affected by the budget savings?
- Answer: No. The teams most affected are back-office functions like human resources & finance. There was some consolidation of community facing roles into one team, which allowed us to streamline some communications and facilitation functions. KStineRowe (WMF) (talk) 18:40, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I know this might not be the nicest feedback to hear, but following yesterday's LIVE Conversation I felt disappointed with the second part of the event. I really looked forward to learning about Annual plan, how it was done and unfortunately...event still felt like 2020, pandemic atmosphere of figuring out Zoom technology and what could/should/would be done to interact.
If first part of presentation was compact, tight and fairly well illustrated *(though slides could have been shared and translated in other languages) by account of most, the second part felt like loose, without flow, with speakers taking more time and being stressed + often under-articulated for the too little time they were given. OK it was (1/2) global audience, very few native speakers and possible tech stress...but then this all stretched and took so much time that there was no real interaction beyond chat and 3-4 people saying a bit of something, that actually needs follow-ups for clarity.
Why were there no thematic break-out rooms? Why no parallel thematic/lingual chat streams? It felt overly choreographed and scripted, but under-performed and not really participatory. I have no overview of WMF communication team, but I think having 2-3 part time WMF + Community people (across timezones) who know to plan and handle communication flows in live events with participatory aspirations and proficiency would be really desirable in 2023 for this type of events...otherwise the only added value of LIVE transmission (over pre-recorded) is that 100+ people are boxed into one terrible zoom chat interface in the same 90minutes *(downfall being they are native to over 20 different languages and some stress over this). -- Zblace (talk) 09:07, 28 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
- Hi, Z! First of all, thank you for taking the time to participate in the community engagement meeting, and also - for writing this feedback. It is always good to know what can be made better in the future, and what are the expectations. And since you listed not only what you would like to be improved but also ideas how - it is a really useful feedback, it has been noted for the future. Thank you! NSzafran-WMF (talk) 10:59, 28 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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