Guillaume Paumier's weblog

Candidacies are now open for the 2009 election to the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. A fair amount of people have been asking me if I would be a candidate; the answer is “not likely”.

Pro

I have an intimate knowledge of the Wikimedia movement & entities ; I have been a volunteer for the foundation for years, mainly in the field of communications. I know most of the staff already and as a former board member of Wikimedia France, I have a valuable chapter background. Since the foundation doesn’t seem to plan to hire me anytime soon, I guess I could offer the Foundation the benefit of my experience.

Besides, the current candidacies are of average to low quality. Actually, the only current candidate I would vote for right now would be Ad Huikeshoven, whom I think would be a terrific board member. However, Ad’s statement doesn’t sound like he would really be a community representative, since he emphasizes his background in Auditing. I agree an experienced auditor would definitely be valued on the Board, but in this case Ad should be appointed to one of the “specific expertise” seats of the board. “Community-elected” seats are, well, supposed to represent the community (see Brianna’s very good post for more information about the available slots).

I do have some specific ideas of directions for the foundation’s strategy, among which:

• A better integration of Wikimedia projects with Wikipedia (see my paper & presentation from Wikimania 2007). Increasing the visibility of other Wikimedia projects will benefit both the projects (by attracting new editors) and the general public (by making these resources more visible) in the long run.
• A complete overhaul of the badge-prone “committees” structure and their reorganization into mission-driven workgroups. Most of the committees have proved to become inactive after a while. Workgroups would be managed using SMART(ER) techniques and their achievements would be assessed regularly. This would help the Foundation rely sustainably and scalably on the volunteer community, from an organizational point of view.

Contra

• Now that I’m “only” an unaffiliated Wikimedian, I have some time to write articles again, and I love it. I’m not sure I’m willing to trade that with the unrewarding job a board member has to commit to.
• Some good candidates may declare themselves later, before the deadline.
• I already have some volunteer work underway, such as the Wikimedia documents initiative, which will probably take a lot of time (depending on the amount of people who join to help, of course; but still).
• I’m likely to move and get a new job in the next few months; as a consequence, my timetable may become unpredictable.

In the end, I’m not inclined to be a candidate right now. I believe some good candidates will declare themselves before the deadline; I will be happy to support them, and they will save me the trouble of rethinking my current position.

Logo of Wikimedia Commons

About two years ago, I said “Commons may be the next coolest project, as soon as developers find the time to improve its usability to make it more user-friendly”. Sadly, Wikimedia Commons hasn’t evolved much in terms of usability since then. MIT’s Technology Review recently published an article about improvements to come regarding the management of video content on Wikipedia and Wikimedia websites. I heard a lot of people say: “Good, but what about pictures?” Some technical improvements described by the Technology Review will be useful for both images and videos, such as the media and upload wizard currently developed by Michael Dale. However, Wikimedia Commons still needs many little (or big) features that would dramatically improve its user-friendliness.

Browsing & reusing

1. Automatic localization: Websites such as Wikimedia Commons and meta-wiki host content in various languages and have a multilingual audience. These multilingual wikis should automagically detect the locale of the user’s browser and use it as language of the interface, especially for unregistered users. As for users with an account, their browser’s locale should be set as the default language in their preferences.
2. Usage-centric page layout: It’s all very nice to know that such image is a “retouched picture” or that such diagram was “made using Inkscape”. But I think what most of the users want to know is: how to use the picture (in Wikimedia projects or elsewhere) and how to download it (using the best resolution available). Many people use the right-click-save-as method to save pictures from the Internet. If they do that on Commons, they will only save the low-resolution preview. There should be a big button « Download high-res », as well as snippets of code to embed a file with proper attribution.

Metadata

Full metadata support is the cornerstone of many other features. EXIF is probably the most known type of metadata, but there are also others such as IPTC or XMP.

3. Pull metadata from files on upload: this idea is not a new one, yet it hasn’t been implemented. A fair amount of photographers add a lot of metadata to their files: author, description, copyright information, geotags, keywords, etc. and it is extremely cumbersome to have to redo all the work by hand during the upload.
4. Store metadata in a database to make search and attribution easier, especially: description, license, media type (photo, diagram, map, etc.). It should be connected to the MediaWiki API to allow for easy extraction of these data.
5. Push metadata to files on download: In the field of publishing, storing credit information directly into the file’s metadata is strongly recommended and is a standard practice to avoid losing track of it.

Related open bugs

• bugzilla:6672: EXIF orientation not used (rotation from digital cameras)
• bugzilla:3361: Image author, description, and copyright data saved in EXIF fields
• bugzilla:16956: Show IPTC metadata on image description page
• bugzilla:657: Pull copyright metadata from files on upload
• bugzilla:11484: Include ISO rating in abbreviated exif metadata.

Editing

6. Built-in basic editing features (lossless rotate, crop) and ability to save under another name (i.e. for crops). Similarly, a built-in geocoding feature using OpenStreetMap. Geocoding images means attaching geographic information about the place where the work was made. This may be made easier by the current initiative to integrate OpenStreetMap with Wikimedia projects. And of course it should save the coordinates as metadata.

Rating

7. Some sort of community-managed rating feature; as someone said elsewhere, “Commons is a depository, and depositories are expected to host lots of junk”. A rating feature would allow the best of Commons to be presented first during the search, and junk to be presented last.

Searching

With currently more than 4.6 million files (and counting), it is becoming increasingly important to improve the search features of Wikimedia Commons.

8. An “advanced search” feature similar to flickr’s. It should be possible to search by media type, by license, and to add toggles such as “safe mode” (explicit content) or “personality rights”.
9. Multilingual search: Files on Commons are ordered in hierarchical categories, using English as lingua franca. If you want to find a file, you have to search in English. I imagine it is possible to use some dictionary (coupled to the language detection) to give good results for a search in any language.
10. Google-Images-friendliness. A lot of people use Google Images to find pictures, but images from Wikimedia Commons rarely appear in these results (unless they are used on a Wikipedia page).

Note: All these ideas are given from a user point of view; their technical feasibility has to be assessed by a MediaWiki-literate developer.

I am happy to announce the launch of the Wikimedia documents initiative (WMDOC), which aims at creating and maintaining a centralized set of standardized, up-to-date and localized core reference documents for public relations, marketing and public outreach. It follows the PR material cleanup.

Why? (Learning from the past)

The PR material cleanup showed that many documents about PR, marketing & public outreach were scattered across many wikis; as a consequence, they weren’t regularly updated. Besides, they often looked very different, not sharing any visual identity. Despite the amount of documents, there was no central place where volunteers could easily find the documents they needed to stage an event or to assemble a press kit for journalists. Last, most documents have been created using expensive proprietary software or fonts.

What? (Goals)

The WMDOC initiative’s goal is to maintain a set of core documents such as leaflets, cheatsheets, presentations and one-pagers¹. All-in-one kits with several of these documents will also be offered for Wikimedians who want to stage an event easily. More specific documents such as posters can be created but they won’t be a part of the core set of documents (unless our manpowers allows us to)

How? (Tools & fonts)

In order to allow for maximum flexibility, dissemination and responsiveness, all the documents produced as part of this initiative will be created using open fonts (mainly the DejaVu family), libre software and open formats.

Example of free software:

• Scribus for most of the desktop publishing
• LaTeX Beamer for presentations
• Inkscape for vector graphics.

The matrix

In order to manage the mass of pages and documents, I proposed a naming scheme based on the name of the document and its language. All the existing pages and their translations are now linked from the WMDOC matrix on meta-wiki. It is unlikely that all the documents be translated in as many languages are there are in the matrix; the amount of languages is a consequence of the fact that any language in which a document existed was added to the matrix. Most of the pages linked from this matrix right now are old versions of the documents; they’re in the process of being updated. The code of the matrix was simplified in order to facilitate its modification.

Join us!

The initiative is looking for volunteers with various skills:

• experienced editors who are knowledgeable about Wikimedia projects and have excellent summarization capabilities
• skilled designers and users of Scribus & LaTeX Beamer
• translators to help localize the documents.

To join the initiative, you may leave a message on the talk page of the initiative, join the dedicated group on Identica (!wmdoc) or contact me directly.

Notes & references

Last year, I started to document myself about fundraising. Originally, I did it because: 1. I found the topic very interesting and 2. I intended to use what I would learn to improve Wikimedia France’s management of fundraising (which has been very poor in my opinion, partly because of issues I describe below). Turned out, I eventually left Wikimedia France in January for various reasons, but I figured I’d still share a few thoughts that may prove useful to all chapters. Although this page is mainly Wikimedia-focused, the general principles are universal.

1. Document yourselves

You can’t just improvise fund raising. You’re asking people their money: you have to do your research and behave professionally.

Raising funds is like drawing: it’s not a matter of innate talent. Some rare people are naturally good at it, but most people have to learn and practice regularly in order to be really good at it. The good news is that you don’t need to learn a lot to be good enough to see a noticeable change in your income; it may not follow the Pareto principle, but it’s still good news.

There are many books about fundraising out there. Here’s a list of books I own and I read. They’re short and very good to begin with.

• Fund Raising Realities Every Board Member Must Face: A 1-Hour Crash Course on Raising Major Gifts for Nonprofit Organizations, David Lansdowne, Emerson & Church, 2007.
• How to Write Fundraising Materials That Raise More Money: The Art, the Science, the Secrets, Tom Ahern, Emerson & Church, 2007.
• The Zen of Fundraising: 89 Timeless Ideas to Strengthen and Develop Your Donor Relationships, Ken Burnett, Jossey-Bass, 2006.

If you follow their principles, I guarantee you’ll raise more funds. I recommend you read them in this order. Experiment your newly-aquired knowledge during a few months, adapt it to your organization, and keep learning. I’d be happy to provide more links if needed.

2. Apply what you’ve learnt

Learning is the first step; it’s mandatory but useless if you don’t apply what you’ve learnt to your specific organization, your mission and your message. These books provide you with a variety of tools and with food for thought, but I suggest to take each principle or piece of advice and see 1. if it applies to you (most do) and 2. how you can apply it.

I’ve found the following modus operandi to be very effective: While you’re reading the books, ideas and thoughts about your own organization will pop up in your head. Write them down as you would brainstorm: write everything even if it looks stupid. But focus on discovering and learning and don’t try to apply it right then. When you’ve read several books, your perspective will have changed and you’ll be more knowledgeable about fundraising already. Read the books again, but this time focus on how you can apply what you’re reading to your own organization and mission. During the first pass, you’re in the learning phase; during the second pass, you’re in the thinking/applying phase, and the books are merely reminders.

3. Understand the importance of raising funds

Don’t try to raise funds because you “should” or because “it’s nice”. Raise funds because you need money. You can never be as convincing when you ask as when you’re passionate about a project you know you can’t accomplish unless you collect the needed amount of money.

You may see fundraising as a difficult activity that doesn’t bring in a lot of money. You may consider other means to collect money (such as selling goodies) because you see them as easier ways to earn money. Considering alternate means is good, but selling T-shirts won’t (and shouldn’t) be your primary source of money. Ever.

You’re nonprofits; that means you should rely on donations and grants. If you don’t learn about fundraising, you may not fully understand its potential. During the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin, Liam Wyatt likened the Wikimedia movement to a “Red cross for knowledge”: people will donate to you if you ask the right way. Never underestimate the power of fundraising.

4. Cherish your donors

Thanking your donors one year after they donated is completely unacceptable¹. If you do only one thing, thank your donors and stay in touch. You can’t afford to lose them. When you’ve read a bit about donor relationship management, you’ll understand how foolish this is.

Also, try to walk in your donors shoes (“donor-centric approach”). Why should I give to these Wikimedia folks? Really?

5. Spend your money

The best way to raise funds is to spend your money. Donors don’t give you money so it lingers on your bank account. They give you money so you do things; they want you to accomplish things to make the world better on their behalf. There is no such thing as “waiting for more money before spending it”. If your projects require more money, then raise more money. If you don’t have any projects to spend your money on, you’re in big trouble. Fortunately, my next article will be about just that: how to spend your money.

Notes

Quick facts

The Wikimedia Conference 2009 was held in Berlin, Germany, on April 3rd-5th. It was composed of three tracks:

• a track for chapters, hosted by the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories (T-labs)
• a track for the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, hosted by the T-labs
• a track for MediaWiki developers, hosted at the c-base.

About 55 participants attended the chapters tracks, 10 people the board track and 60 people the developers track. Overall, around 130 Wikimedians attended the conference. Social activities where participants from all tracks could meet were proposed.

The preparation was done on meta-wiki (April 2009 Wikimedia Conference, Chapters meeting 2009) and on mediawiki.org (Project:Developer meet-up 2009). A group was created on identica for quick information.

The preparation and organisation started two and a half months before the conference (mid January).The deadlines were roughly met by the organisation team. All tasks requiring action from the participants were delayed of at least a week, sometimes much longer.

Participants

Representatives from all existing Wikimedia chapters officially approved by the WMF Board attended the meeting: Argentina, Australia, Brasil, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Germany, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Italia, Hungary, the Netherlands, New York City, Norway, Austria, Poland, Sweden, Taiwan, the UK, Serbia and Russia. Several participants expressed their satisfaction about the fact that all chapters were present at the meeting. This was partly made possible by the financial help provided by sister chapters (see Finances below).

Five participants (from Russia, Taiwan, Indonesia and Serbia) needed to get a visa in order to enter Germany. Wikimedia Deutschland provided them with invitation letters to facilitate the process, but the time needed to get these letters was longer than expected. At least one participant had to change his travel arrangements due to this delay, and as a consequence he had to leave the conference early.

A few chapters needed convincing to attend the meeting.

Finance

Besides Wikimedia Deutschland, 5 other chapters provided financial assistance to their fellow chapters in order to help them attend the conference:

• Wikimedia France: 4000,00 €
• Wikimedia CH: 2000,00 €
• Wikimedia Sverige: 1463,25 €
• Wikimedia Polska: 500,00 €
• Wikimedia Italia: 400,00 €

Travel & transportation

Most of the participants needing subsidying for their travel expenses made special efforts to find low-cost flights. Each participant was given three one-day tickets to use public transportation in Berlin. They were also provided with a map and detailed indications on how to reach all the conference locations. Some participants complained that some itineraries were not ideal.

Venue & accommodation

We had some major issues with the venue. Our contact person at the T-Labs wasn’t very accommodating and the conference suffered from the setup of the rooms (although the organisation team did their best to arrange things to minimize the participants’ inconvenience). However, the venue itself was great and the view was outstanding. Some participants complained that the food wasn’t sophisticated enough (especially sandwiches on 2/3 lunches). They seemed satisfied with dinners & the party. Some of them also complained about the accommodation, but mainly about details (e.g. number of keys).

Programme

All the chapters board members & foundation staff members were requested (several times) to provide input about what they wanted to actually discuss and work upon during the conference (Chapters meeting 2009/Brainstorming). This brainstorming was done in a wiki-way; it was supposed to last two weeks, but was extended to three weeks because of the lack of input from the chapters. The involvment of chapters in this brainstorming was uneven; some chapters did not even participate in it, even after several reminders.

When the brainstorming was over, the output was broken down into specific key topics (Chapters meeting 2009/Topics). Identifying these topics was the first step needed to make a draft schedule (draft version of the schedule). Some feedback and complaints were taken in account and a revised schedule was proposed a few days later.

Although all the topics raised during the brainstorming were added to the schedule, some chapters still complained that their wishes weren’t taken into consideration enough. This may be explained by the very different expectations the chapters had. It was suggested to “group” similar chapters for future meetings using thematic self-discrimination.

Schedule

Some participants complained about the “State of the chapters” session and requested more time to present what their chapter was doing. However, lightning talks were precisely the point of this session: the goal was to present an overviewand topics to be discussed during the rest of the conference. Besides, with more than 20 chapters already, it isn’t possible to devote 15 minutes to each chapter (or The conference should last a week, see below).

Many participants felt that there weren’t enough time for informal meetings; most of them expected a Wikimania-like event (with a lot of socializing), whereas the conference was designed as a professional meeting.

Preparation

Many participants felt that the “State of the chapters” session was too short; however, at the same time, their involvment in preparing it was very low. This session was the only one for which a preparation was requested to the participants (Chapters meeting 2009/Preparation), and many of them didn’t do it on time. That prevented the other participants from having a better look at them, and also prevented the organisation team from preparing posters to be displayed in the conference hall with this information (as a support for informal discussion). Some participants prepared their presentation the night before the conference, or even the morning during the others’ presentation.

Volunteers & documentation

A call for volunteers was made on de.wikipedia.org. There wasn’t enough volunteers to take notes for written documentation during the sessions. However, all the sessions used Metaplan boards for moderation / facilitation, and we had a few volunteers who took pictures of the boards. This way we managed to document the essence of all discussions. The photographers also captured some very interesting feelings and moments of the conference.

Facilitation & moderation

The facilitation was one of the topics that received the most criticism from the participants in the satisfaction survey. However, the participants’ comments were very inconsistent: some complained that the moderation was too strong and that they were hindered by the facilitator; they wished the discussions were less formal and done more freely. On the other hand, some participants felt that the moderation should have been stronger. At the same time, some shy participants confided that they liked the method used by the facilitators because it allowed them to really participate in the discussion. A possible explanation to this variety of comments is that Wikimedians and chapters representatives aren’t used to professional methods of management and moderation, and it will take some time for them to get used to it.

Another complaint was that the facilitators didn’t understand the community enough, and that they didn’t have the “wiki” background. It is true that the facilitators didn’t come from the wikimedia community. However, they had some basic understanding of how Wikipedia worked, and they were briefed during hours by the organisation team to make them understand how the Wikimedia universe works, what the relationships between the different entities are (chapters, foundation, community). Their performance was quite good overall given the complexity of the topics involved. A participant also conjectured that it was very difficult to moderate this conference because the participants formed “a group of very individualistic, fiercely independent people”.

Committees

The committees were introduced in Berlin as an opportunity to hold discussions in small persistent groups on specific topics. There was little preparation from the participants before the conference (Chapters meeting 2009/Committees). They met several times during the meeting and mailing lists were created for each of them, in order to foster collaboration. Wikimedia CH agreed to host these lists.

Satisfaction survey

A short satisfaction survey was handed out to all the participants on Sunday morning. The details are publicly available one meta-wiki. The comments were used to build this postmortem.

General tips for future organizers

• Organise & plan early; almost all chapters work with volunteers and it is very difficult to get things done.
• Send individual e-mails & reminders. It takes a lot of time, but it saves even more time: people feel much more compelled to answer individual e-mails than e-mails sent to mailing lists.
• Be prepared to hear complaints: there are so many chapters with various needs, expectations, various levels of development, etc. that it is impossible to satisfy everybody’s wishes.
• Having high expectations is a good thing, because it urges you to organize a good and successful event. However, be prepared to feel frustrated and disappointed when the outcome isn’t what you expected because the participants didn’t play their part.

The conference should last a week

Even if you tried to satisfy everybody’s wishes, you would need at least a whole week for the conference. Many Wikimedians (including chapters representatives) lack a professional background and can’t work with deadlines & management methods. They want more time for presentations, more time for workgroups, more time for informal discussions, more time for social events, and more time for whatever is on the schedule. That just can’t work.