Remarks regarding [[Task_force/Recommendations/Community_health]]
I think that collaborating with NASA and similar groups is a fantastic idea. I think we need to assume that, for the most part, the Wikimedia Foundation is generally not the right group to be doing this. In her February letter to the board, Sue Gardner stated that the Foundation will not be prioritizing content partnerships.
That means that some other entities need to do that. Wikimedia Chapters are the most obvious groups to do this. But it also raises some larger questions worth discussing: If the Foundation itself is not going to be negotiating partnerships, what can it do to support groups that will be?
It also raises the interesting question of territory- chapters have traditionally guarded their national borders rather zealously - this falls into an area with no national chapter...
The goal should remain to foster cooperation. I for one am disappointed at the lackluster approach Wikimedia takes towards real world partnerships. NASA currently coeperates with dozens of other web 2.0 companies including youtube, the internet archive, and scribds...
I don't see the benefit in avoiding real-world collaboration, especially when NASA (among other agencies) has so much to offer from a nearly license-free standpoint.
We're going back-and-forth here. The Foundation isn't avoiding real-world collaboration at all. Witness the recent Telefonica announcement as an example, or the recent Subject-Matter-Improvement Pilot Program, which is a partnership with university public policy initiatives to improve the quality of some articles.
The Foundation only employs 35 people. It's responsible for the up-time of the servers, protecting the brand, improving the software, and many other things. So it has limited resources to take on other projects. Just to give you an example of how underresourced the Wikimedia Foundation, Facebook recently announced that it has one million users for every developer. For comparison, the Wikimedia Foundation has 30 million users for every developer.
Three years ago, the Foundation was even smaller. One of the reasons that Wikimedia Chapters emerged was to specifically take on the task of content partnerships. The Chapters agreement with the Foundation allows it to use the Wikimedia brand so that it has the power to make these kinds of partnership deals. There are probably ways to improve the Chapters agreement, and there may be ways to empower other people to do the same. We should definitely have a conversation about it.
Here's my point. I totally agree that a partnership with NASA would be wonderful. The point of doing a movement-wide strategic planning as opposed to simply a Foundation strategic-plan is to also answer the question, "Who should do it, and how can they be further empowered?" The answer cannot always be, "The Foundation should do it," because that's not realistic.
So the question, at the end of the day is, who might take this on? Chapters? What's preventing this from happening right now, and how could this be resolved?
Those are the questions I had in mind...and being that this is the "Strategic planning" wiki, I was hoping that someone could answer them...