User:Alecmconroy/Letter to new leaders part 2

Specific issues that are facing the movement now in 2011

More pressing

There are some crisis-tunities facing us. Mentioning these is in no way a criticisms of the past boards or leadership-- these are just some of the things our movement faces.

• The global community engagement problem -- there's little investment in the foundation beyond its role to host a project.
• The Mediawiki problem-- we use MW even when we shouldn't.
• The quality problem-- on quality-based projects like WP, some articles aren't good and don't seem to be getting better.
• The deletion problem -- deletion of legal, good-faith content is inherently demoralizing.
• The conflict problem -- edit wars are inherently demoralizing
• The geographic diversity problem -- our editor population does not reflect the geographic diversity of the "internet-connected world" to the extent desirable.
• The demographic diversity problem -- our editor population does not reflect the demographic diversity of "internet connected world" to the extent desirable.
• The content diversity problem-- a few reference books isn't "all the world's knowledge"
• The new project problem-- the new project process has stalled.
• The 'hard line' question-- what kinds of projects and content are never ever appropriate to be Foundation-hosted?
• The language problem-- our global community must learn to intelligently form consensus without a single common language
• The catastrophic collapse problem-- infrastructure instability could still lead to severe disruption under some scenarios

While WM _data_ is increasingly redundant, our actual service is still quite centralized and reliant on a few key bottleneck central servers. Collapse of the foundation, a decline its funding, or damage to the US internet infrastructure could all still pose a potential threat to our movement.

Strong recommendations

• We need a movement name anyone can use without prior approval
• Make elections a priority. Hold regular elections, even when there are no candidates.

other

• During the year, let projects fundraise directly for development
• Make enwp 'non-special' within reason (give US a chapter even if informally, roll elections into one). No huge deal, but we need to avoid being perceived as over-focused just on english.