Wiki NYC had a board meeting yesterday Saturday 1 July 2017 from 10-6pm at Ace Hotel on 28th Street. I am writing to describe the mood and focus of it. The significance of this meeting is that it is the first board reflection on our first year after having a significant budget, and looking forward to having confirmed funding for the next year, and for being together after various challenges and confirming that we all support each other personally and for our shared organizational goals.
The attendees were
- Lane Rasberry
- Richard Knipel
- Abhishek Suryawanshi
- Esther Jackson /li>
- Jim Henderson
- David Goodman
- Pete Hess
- Ann Matsuuchi
- Ximena Gallardo C.
- Megan Wacha
- Sherry Antoine
- Chuck Bell (guest facilitator for strategic planning)
- Alice Backer
Richard, Pete, Jim, and David have been supporting the development of the NYC Wikipedia chapter since 2007. They are the base of chapter organization and have participated in whatever has happened in the past 10 years. Ann, Ximena, Megan, Abhishek and I have been around Wiki NYC for about 5 years. Alice, Sherry, and Esther have been involved for about 2 years. Chuck was coming as an outsider to help discuss nonprofit governance, but as he has supervised my work at Consumer Reports, he has followed Wiki NYC activities since 2012. I like that the chapter has a committed base to keep it stable. I like that it has attracted various professional participants who bring their expertise to the group and also leverage the chapter to advance their fields of knowledge. I like that it is open enough that newer professionals join our group and find participation useful. At this point we have 11 people who serve on the board, but a pool of about 30 people who actually participate in some organizational governance, and maybe 100 people total who ask about matters of chapter organization. For each of the past three years, Wiki NYC has presented about 100 public events a year with about 2000 attendees a year. Perhaps there are 1500 people who have attended at least 3 Wiki NYC events. I enjoy spending time with the chapter organizers, and our event participants, and the guests who come to our programming. Many people around me say the same things. Participation in Wiki NYC to me is highly positive, encouraging, and friendly, and the organization means a lot to me.
It seems evident to me that Wiki NYC is an organization at the center of many people’s hopes and good wishes. While the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco develops the software and keeps the website operational, they do not touch the content of Wikipedia or participate in person to person conversations about how experts can share their information in Wikipedia. This Wiki NYC chapter focuses on that – we approach all sorts of organizations and ask them to integrate whatever information they have into Wikipedia. While software can act at scale to help people engage with the website, Wiki NYC facilitates the human interactions which lead people to leverage the online platform to deliver their information to Wikipedia’s large and relevant audience. I share information from Consumer Reports on Wikipedia. At this board meeting, the attendees advocated for better relationships between Wikipedia and NYC’s museums, libraries, universities, professional societies, research institutes, community organizations, foundations, and scientific academies. The mood at the meeting was that Wiki NYC is uniquely positioned to assist centers of information with distributing their information on Wikipedia. The organizations with the highest quality content generally have insufficient audience reach, while Wikipedia has great audience reach but needs higher quality information. Collaboration seems mutually beneficial.
Chuck Bell is a programs director at Consumer Reports and has acted as a liaison between CR and various nonprofit partners. Among other appointments, he is on the board of Nonprofit Quarterly, a magazine which presents journalism and research about the cultural of nonprofit organization. These and other experiences have made him a witness to all sorts of nonprofit management styles, and he began the board meeting by asking everyone tough questions about what Wiki NYC should try to accomplish and what objectives are a lesser priority and ought to be postponed until the chapter develops in other directions first. Wiki NYC has casually developed governance plans in the past, but this facilitated conversation was more serious and helped everyone more fully understand that Wiki NYC has a history of higher impact than typical other nonprofit organizations. Many individuals and organizations are looking to the collective Wikipedia editing community in NYC, and Wiki NYC is providing the service of convening these conversations so that individual contributors can advance their own good works.
We talked about the chapter’s budget. Although Wiki NYC had been operating since 2007, it only had its first significant funding for 2016-17 and in the amount of about $70,000. Prior to this, the chapter had organized events whenever we had donors to provide space and catering. What changed over time is that in 2007, the Wikimedia Foundation had a budget of less than $1,000,000 for everything it does. Even at that time Wikipedia among the 10 most popular websites in the world, and now 10 years later, Wikipedia has been a thought and opinion leader for 10 years which is an entire generation of global human thought. Having one billion regular readers is an almost unimaginable capture of attention, and all of us feel highly encouraged that Wikipedia is promoting nonprofit values without advertising and in the service of the community rather than any corporate interest. In 2017 the Wikimedia Foundation had a budget of about $80,000,000, so if they can give a little cash to a volunteer community group to get greater access to whatever information the top institutions in NYC have to share, then it is worthwhile for them to support outreach in this city. For 2017-18 they provided $80,000. There are other Wikimedia community organizations in the United States, but for example, the next largest community group is in Washington DC. NYC has a population 10 times that of DC and the NYC chapter has at least 10 times the participation from individuals and institutions, and is 10 times as productive. In the United States there really is no competition with NYC as a city with cultural influence. It is nice to do wiki in the United States, and it is nice to do wiki in NYC. The opportunities here are exciting.
Most of the money that Wiki NYC gets goes to lowering the barriers for individuals to engage with Wikipedia. When we had no money, local Wikipedia editors had to meet irregularly and in changing locations. Space in NYC is very expensive, and it can be stressful to have everyone change their schedules monthly and make different travel plans to attend every meeting. When we got a budget, we rented some space in Midtown at a cool nonprofit organization. Although we got offers for free space elsewhere, when we accepted offers from bigger organizations they always made overtures to receive favors from us as Wikipedians and otherwise try to influence us. An advantage of us paying a little money to a small nonprofit organization is that they are chill, we can talk to them human to human instead of human to organizational entity, and with them being a smaller organization they cement the Wikipedia culture of keeping our conversations and attitudes at the level of individuals rather than corporate process. Wiki NYC did just have a board meeting about governance, and we did plan the chapter bureaucracy, but part of the bureaucracy that we want to project is a push against hierarchy, corporate privilege, and more regulations. For now, it makes sense for us to create more rules about permitting fewer organizational entanglements in the future.
At the same time, Wiki NYC does have some commitments to supporting a lot of high profile institutions in NYC. Wiki NYC has had significant collaborations with lots of local organizations whose members, supporters, and people contribute to Wikipedia. Organizations which have done multiple instances of programming with Wiki NYC include Consumer Reports, the Met, MoMA, various CUNY schools, METRO, New York Botanical Garden, various NYU departments, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, various Columbia University departments, New York Academy of Medicine, New York Academy of Sciences, Rockefeller University, Brooklyn Public Library, the Guggenheim Museum, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York Public Library, the United Nations Youth Assembly, Touro College, and Center for Architecture and Design. I know that I am missing some organizations, and besides these, many other organizations have experimented with single events and single programs.
A challenge that Wiki NYC faces for the future is how to help all of these organizations understand what their engagement with Wikipedia is doing for everyone’s mutual benefit. Generally, organizations wish to engage with Wikipedia in order to deliver their content to a larger audience. For example, medical students might want to post content to Wikipedia in order to share health information with people who are seeking it online. It is becoming more unthinkable with each passing year, but in 2007 for example, most organizations did not consider communication in the Internet to be a way to share information. Even among those organizations which said that they did want to publish online, few actually did, and even the ones that were doing online publishing were doing it in an immature way that is quite different from how things are done now. The Wikipedia article on any given topic is usually the most requested, published, accessed, and consulted source of information on that topic. However, Wikipedia has its own challenges in communicating its impact. Whereas Facebook and Twitter, for example, have interfaces which assist professional communication managers in understanding all sorts of audience metrics about what people in those platforms are doing, Wikipedia currently has no such interfaces in common use. Wiki NYC has piloted various communication strategies. Typically, if an organization partners with Wiki NYC to share information, then in return, Wiki NYC tries to provide that organization with a report of the audience who accessed their content in Wikipedia and of how the audience responded to it. This is tedious work and some of the money which Wiki NYC gets from the Wikimedia Foundation goes to making it easier for the chapter to provide these reports as a negotiating tool to persuade expert institutions to judge how Wikipedia can help them share information.
All of the people who attended this board meeting have their own reasons for joining. Something that we all have in common is that we all care deeply about making information more accessible, and that we all have seen the power of Wikipedia to make large amounts of high quality information available to people who start using it immediately. I feel like Wiki NYC has a bright future of success in front of it. A comment that came up in the board meeting was that we want to “Make Wikipedia as democratic and accessible as the New York City Subway”, in the sense that Wikipedia is a public amenity which everyone uses while they are doing whatever else is important to them. We are still determining what we ought to do to be more effective but I do feel encouraged about ongoing successes and fun times.