Reading/Strategy/Kickoff

The Reading department met Wednesday, August 5, 2015 to kickoff its strategy process. Notes follow below. We are seeking feedback as we move forward.

Feedback
Right now we are looking for answers to the following three questions. Please provide your feedback on the discussion page by Tuesday, September 8, 2015.

Please see the notes below for further context about these three questions. A review of the current state strategy below may be helpful in generating feedback about a potential strategic position for the future.

Horizon: 2-5 years
 * 1) What should the WMF Reading department's winning aspiration be?
 * 2) Where should the WMF Reading department play in order to fulfill the winning aspiration?
 * 3) * In which user segment(s)?
 * 4) * On which distribution channel(s)
 * 5) * What types of product(s)?
 * 6) * Across which geographies?
 * 7) * In which part of the knowledge consumption value chain?
 * 8) With the where-to-play choices in mind, what should WMF Reading do to succeed?

About the process
Conventionally, strategy setting tends to center around debate and runs the risk of data being cherry picked to support positions. In contrast, the approach that we will be using allows people to propose strategic positions, reverse engineer the necessary conditions by asking "what would have to be true for the plan to work?", constructing tests by which those necessary conditions will be validated, and then, based on validation, choose a strategy.

The process is based on the following five questions: The process is an iterative "cascade". The answer to question 1 begs question 2. And the answer(s) to question 2 must be logically consistent with the answer to question 1. And so on and so forth through question 5. In practice, as answers are generated for each of the five levels of the cascade, the previous question-answer set needs to be revisited to ensure consistency.
 * 1) What is our future winning aspiration? This is defining the expected outcome.
 * 2) Where will we play? This is about defining target segments, channels, products, geographies, and unit's position in the value chain, as well as ruling out places to play.
 * 3) How will we win? This is about defining the tangible things we'll need to do to achieve our goals.
 * 4) What capabilities must we have? This is about defining the competencies we need to succeed and identifying existing strengths that can be leveraged.
 * 5) What management systems do we need? This is largely about defining the sorts of metrics systems we'll need to track success.

This process can be used at different levels of an organization: an organization itself, departmental, and so on.

Current state strategy
To set context for this future-oriented strategy setting process, here's the current state strategy.

Winning aspiration

 * Promote learning from open knowledge
 * Create more engaging interfaces to Wikipedia
 * Find more articles and go deeper into topics
 * Support different types of content (photos, media, graphs)
 * Make content freely available outside Wikipedia (APIs)
 * Attract potential editors and donors
 * Achieve goals without upsetting community
 * Protect content creators (legal)

Where we play

 * Product: most visible project: online version of encyclopedia (reference category)
 * Customer segment: online information seekers
 * Geography: everybody in the world
 * However, North American in network architecture and UX/feature bias (n.b., some network architecture hosted outside of North America)
 * Channel: primary channels of online consumption
 * Desktop web
 * Mobile web
 * Apps
 * Syndication
 * Dumps

How has this succeeded?

 * Free, good product, with many languages and popular channels (slow follower in adopting new channels)
 * Scalable operation (mass market, not heavily personalized, community content creation, efficient distribution model)
 * Strong search engine placement
 * Neutral point of view and generally established trust (community edited, non-profit)
 * Permissive (CC0) content licensing (external use)
 * Fundraising predominantly based on small donor model

What capabilities have enabled success?

 * Low cost, high quality content generation
 * A remarkable community
 * Anti-vandalism and quality control
 * Efficient and cost effective distribution
 * MediaWiki + caching
 * Operations/site-up
 * API/Dumps
 * Tech community (open source)
 * Online fundraising
 * Legal protection of editors

What management systems have been necessary?

 * Fundraising management
 * Community engagement
 * Multi-jurisdictional legal capabilities
 * Technical operations management
 * Software development

Broad vision
From a by WMF Executive Director Lila Tretikov, here is the broad vision for the future."From Wikipedia and sister projects to an open Source library of all Knowledge""A knowledge engine where users, institutions, and computers around the world contribute and discover knowledge on Wikimedia every day, on every platform, in their own language."What does this mean for Reading? It will need to get specific.

From the same presentation by Lila, there's a note about a performance gap that needs to be addressed to arrive at the future state, and the high level way to address this gap is to strengthen capabilities, focus resources, and innovate new solutions. This Reading strategy setting process is a systematic means of getting more specific.

Call to action FY 2015-2016
From the same presentation by Lila, here's the FY 2015-2016 call to action. The Reading strategy process is partially about addressing some of the bullet points, while setting the stage for how Reading will operate in the future.

Strengthen Technology & Execution

 * We will define our commitments - and deliver on-time and on-budget.
 * We will make our decisions based on data.
 * We will improve our process for community input and allocate dedicated technical resources to community requests.
 * We will update legacy architectures and deliver mobile-ready infrastructure and services to support structured data, user security, and a simplified user experience.

Focus on Community & Knowledge

 * We will integrate across community engagement functions to improve communication and results.
 * We will create a central, multilingual hub for community support.
 * We will have a working plan to support emerging users and communities.
 * We will improve our measures of community health and content quality, and fund effective community and content initiatives.

Experimentation & New Knowledge

 * We will integrate, consolidate, and pause or stop stalled initiatives.
 * We will create spaces for future community-led innovations and new knowledge creation.
 * We will facilitate and support new models and structures for knowledge curation.
 * We will strengthen partnerships with organizations that use or contribute free content, or are aligned with the WMF in the free-knowledge movement.