User:Ajraddatz/Thoughts on stakeholder engagement

At the time of writing this message, there are a number of controversial community consultations happening regarding movement strategy and partial Foundation bans. Earlier this year, the partial ban of Fram on enwiki was met with intense hostility from the community. For the last decade, the relationship between the editing community (the primary stakeholders other than the readers) and the Wikimedia Foundation (the service providing organization) has been littered with examples of conflict and distrust. Superprotect, Flow, Wikidata integration, and VisualEditor are just a few examples that quickly come to mind. Anyone who has followed my comments on Meta or enwiki knows that I am typically sympathetic towards the Foundation; as a steward, I've found the Foundation to be responsive to the needs of our group and our feedback, and I think that most of their ideas are made with the best intentions. But that doesn't change the fact that for as long as I have been a part of this movement, there has been a very ineffective stakeholder/service provider relationship between the community and the Foundation.