Wikimedia CH/Information Technology Strategy

Information Technology Strategy of Wikimedia CH.

Document status: "release candidate".

Any proposed feedback is very welcome!

The Vision

The Vision is the beacon that lights our way when we have a doubt about general directions.

The proposed Technological Vision(s) of Wikimedia CH are:

Information Technology supports the activities of the Swiss Wikimedia chapter, of the communities, and of the Free and Open Movements.

― proposal #1 by 🍕 bozz

Information Technology empowers Swiss activities to promote Knowledge in Freedom.

― proposal #2 by 🐧 madbob

Technology and Know-how are enablers in the strategy of Wikimedia CH and in this vision this concept is extended to support the communities, the Free and Open movements and the society in general.

― proposal #3 by 😎 ilario

The Mission

• Support Free and open knowledge (knowledge as service).
• Support Wikimedia movement in general.
• Support Wikimedia activities in Switzerland from volunteers
• Support Wikimedia CH staff and board, to be able to offer a useful, trustful and reliable service.
• Reduce technical risks and protect privacy and personal data, for a safe space.

Origin of this Document

In September 2022, Wikimedia CH finalized a discussion about the concrete need to have an Information Technology Strategy plan that reflects Wikimedia CH's five-year Strategy.

At this stage, the Wikimedia CH CEO Jenny Ebermann, together with Ilario Valdelli, Innovation programme lead, involved the external consultant Valerio Bozzolan in this processing, as already involved since 2019, as developer and system administrator for the WMCH server fleet.

About an Information Technology Strategy

An Information Technology Strategy is a plan indicating how an organization should use technology to fulfill its mission and achieve its goals with limited resources and with consistency on the vision of the organization. The document usually includes information on the organization's current technology infrastructure and resources, as well as plans for future digital initiatives. It addresses issues such as potential information security topics and data management. This document is aligned with the Wikimedia Ch strategy.

This document is aligned with the Wikimedia CH programmes: Education, Community, GLAM, Outreach and the most recent one, Innovation.

Scope

This document is intended for the staff and for leadership and decision-making bodies within Wikimedia CH, including Board, executive management, relevant future department heads, external consultants, future committees.

The document should be used when one of the following is needed: guidelines for technological decisions (evaluate software adoption, dispose of something…), to understand how to solve some technological problems, to understand how WMCH can better and better support technological needs of Wikimedia communities.

Information technology (IT) is the use of computers (and other devices) to create, process, store, retrieve and exchange all kinds of data and information.. This definition includes many things, so, this Strategy covers limited aspects, since the goal is to allocate limited resources on what is important for WMCH.

Examples of scopes covered by this Strategy:

• activities of Wikimedia CH of the staff, of the board and of volunteers
• technical activities on the servers owned by Wikimedia CH, the network to serve these servers, internal databases, software as services
• relationship with vendors who operate software services for WMCH (including bug triage, technical requests, )
• software development for the internal infrastructure of WMCH.
• approved software support for the community (on high-priority projects approved by the ).
• relationship between software developers for WMCH innovation programs
• laptops, PCs and IT equipment provided by WMCH over a value of 500 CHF

Examples of topics that cannot be covered by this document:

• assistence on home Internet connection
• assistance on mobile phones

Historical Context

2013, Wikidata 8th birthday.
From left to right:
Sir. Nigel Shadbolt · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) · Magnus Manske · Sir. Tim Berners-Lee

2016, fundraising campaign "This is Wikipedia", by Victor Grigas for Wikimedia Foundation, focused on technological awareness.

2021, Swiss app COVID Certificate verifier, focused on data protection.

These extraordinary situations have impacted this Strategy. Reading this section can be helpful to have more common context of understanding.

1991 - the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) is established in Lugano, Ticino. It had been the first supercomputing center that widely used GPUs in a supercomputer. For many years it's machine, Piz Saint, has been one the most powerful supercomputer in the world. Currently it is one the main partner of LUMI consortium who developed and manage the third most powerful supercomputer in the world.

2008 – the Deputy Director of Wikimedia Foundation started inventorying the solutions and tools that were internally in use. This starts the Wikimedia FLOSS-Exchange, to share software that can be adopted, studied and improved by other chapters without license restrictions. The list mentions Ubuntu, OTRS, Open Office, Mailman and Firefox as in use by Wikimedia Foundation.

2013 – the innovative ProtonMail service started in Switzerland, by CERN researches. ProtonMail becomes a popular tool to protect personal communications since «Swiss privacy laws are very stringent, which prevents global organizations from asking for permission to intercept messages sent». In 2022 the ProtonMail user estimation consists in 70 millions of users. The headquarters is still in Geneva.

2013 – Wikidata is operational for the first time on all languages in which Switzerland is active. It will then become the largest CC0 collaborative dataset of the known universe.

2014 – in Bern, the Research Center for Digital Sustainability is founded with the support from the association CH Open. The center deals with key topics like Open Data, Linked Data, Smart City, Open Government, Blockchain, Public Procurement and Open Source Software. Among innovative projects, there is the Lernstick educational system, focused on security, while lowering IT costs.

2014 – The European Commission published an Open source software strategy. The document is renewed for 2020-2023 with emphasis on the sharing and reuse of software solutions and knowledge. To improve information security, the European Commission launch the EU-FOSSA project. This starts particularly prolific events for improving the quality of software in use in Europe.

2016 - launched Quad9 (Q52063654), Switzerland-based organization operating a worldwide privacy-friendly DNS server. Since 2021, Quad9 is suggested as default in systemd, making this Swiss service famous across major Free operating systems.

2018 – the Wikimedia Foundation Technology page is published. It has a focus on designing and building the Open Source technology that powers Wikimedia projects. It helps NASA and it grows a volunteer developer community.

2018 – the document ActivityPub is released by the World Wide Web Consortium. This consortium is the most recognized and authoritative entity to indicate web standards, directed by the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. This innovative document encourages a web where small decentralized social networks (like Mastodon) can start, cooperate and being able to compete with big ones.

2019 – as part of the COVID-19 emergency management, the Federal Office of Public Health of Switzerland released their COVID-19 dataset with a Wikipedia-compatible license, allowing public and transparent analysis.

2020 – New York City and NASA banned schools from using Zoom, citing privacy and security concerns. More organizations like the Internet service provider GARR Consortium begin to massively deliver more ethical communication services, to national education systems and neighboring countries like Switzerland.

2020 – the goal "Digital Technologies serving people and the planet" is proposed as 18th entry in Sustainable Development Goals.

2021 – the Swiss mobile application COVID Certificate is one of the first government apps in the world released as Open Source, and to be released in the ethical app store called F-Droid. The app is produced by the Federal Office of Public Health, with a software company based in Zurich.

2021 – the Wikimedia Movement started the implementation of the Movement Strategy. Relevant principles focus on being inclusive and protect privacy and security of Wikimedia participants, also online. Censorship and surveillance are highlighted factors that put in danger the Wikimedia's existence.

2022 – the Swiss Army bans popular messaging platforms, including WhatsApp. In order to keep data inside Switzerland, the adopted solution is an open source app with its datacenter in Zurich.

2022 – Elon Musk acquired Twitter for $ 44 billions. This and additional controversial statements caused, in one week, 800.000 users deactiving their Twitter account. This condition led to exponential adoption of decentralized technologies, like Mastodon. Wikimedia CH adopted Mastodon too.

2022 – Switzerland public authorities were involved in the FediGov initiative, as a way to decrease dependency to social networks based in United States or China. Mastodon and other ActivityPub social solutions are adopted as a solution.

2022 – the city of Genève becomed a case-study, migrating thousands of public employees to Nextcloud, allowing a deprecation of Microsoft Office 365, Dropbox or Google Drive. The purpose of the city is to «achieve digital sovereignty» and «remain in control over the data by storing it in Switzerland». France also migrate 35,500 teachers and students to the same open solution.

2023 – Swiss experts contributes to the Open Source in Environmental Sustainability document. «Openness must be recognized as a key indicator for sustainable development.»

2024 - Switzerland established a federal law with mandatory requirements for open source software within public sector bodies. The implementation is expected to serve as a model for other countries.

Method behind this Document

Method behind this document

• Identification of key stakeholders

  To ensure that the technology strategy is relevant and responsive to the needs of the organization, key stakeholders are identified and involved in the process. These stakeholders included staff members, board members, volunteers, donors, clients, and other individuals who had a vested interest in the organization's technology infrastructure and use.

• Needs assessment

  A needs assessment is conducted to understand the current state of the organization's technology infrastructure, resources, and capabilities. This included interviews with staff members and reviews of existing documentation. These assessments helped to identify the organization's technology strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges, which were taken into account when developing the strategy.

• Expert consultation:

  To ensure that the technology strategy is informed by the latest trends and best practices, expert consultation was sought from IT professionals and other experts in the field. These experts provided valuable insights into the current state of technology and the potential for future developments, which were also considered in the strategy.

• Alignment with organizational goals

  The technology strategy is developed with a clear focus on aligning it with the organization's mission and goals, including the Movement Strategy.

• Review and revision

  In order to be revised regularly and easily, the document allows collaborative review on well-known platforms (as wiki page). This ensures that it remained relevant and responsive to changes. Substantial changes are reported to the CEO and to the board to reach maximum consensus, approval and awareness of the update.

• Usefulness and reuse

  The document is structured in a way that it can be easily reused and adapted by other organizations. Other organizations can use it as a starting point for their own technology strategy development, adapting it to suit their specific needs and circumstances. This practice is encouraged technically using a wiki, easily to be copied. The practice is also encouraged legally, using the same libre license of Wikipedia, who allows to copy, adapt, distribute changes for any legal purpose, also for commercial purposes, as long as you don't create additional restrictions to your users.

• Language method

  The document is designed to be accessible, understandable, and useful for staff members, board members, volunteers, investors, and all important key stakeholders within our organization. The document avoids the use of technical jargon and long, complicated phrases or wall of texts. This also help people with attention disorders, and contributors to the document translation.

Technological Directions

The followings are the Technological Directions of the Technology Strategy of Wikimedia CH.

The Directions explain long-term goals to a wide public, including but not limiting to current and future staff members, board members, contractors, and friendly newcomers.

Important: Recall that this is still a draft.

Thank you for any fix!

1. Technology as support for Free Knowledge

This point may seem trivial but it is really the first beacon that can illuminate Wikimedia CH in some crucial decision phases involving Technology.

Wikimedia CH has technological responsibilities and is committed to have a positive impact on Free Knowledge and Volunteers. Especially, the organization should not have a negative impact on local communities in Switzerland.

The organization must go for Technological choices that do not obstruct Free Knowledge in general. This also means the organization should sustain proactive projects to support Free Knowledge and Volunteers in general.

Practicals:

✅ Our main stakeholders are Wikimedia volunteers.

✅ Wikimedia CH should support technological initiatives that encourage the creation and dissemination of Free knowledge, especially on neutral and uncontroversial topics and especially when the community proposes privacy-friendly tools (like online events, tools, etc.)

✅ Wikimedia CH can just follow Wikipedia in most ethical principles. For example, in never requesting unnecessary data from volunteers (unless required by law, etc.), to both protect the participants and the organization itself.

✅ Wikimedia CH should be able to support technological needs by the local community, such as being able to help on broken community tools, or being able to help on community components that need a bit of professional maintenance (like wikis, bots, very advanced templates, etc.) or support bold ideas of interest to WMCH (as new prototypes to sustain a community need, etc.)

❌ We must not support technological initiatives designed to push content that is incompatible with Wikipedia, in Wikipedia, etc. - legally, or technically. We must not support technological initiatives that encourage the infringement of the copyrights of volunteers, or who sabotage their credits, etc.

Context:

Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Innovate in Free Knowledge

Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Identify Topics for Impact

Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Coordinate Across Stakeholders

2. In Wikimedia, the User is never the Product

In Wikimedia we love to use technology, without being used and controlled by it.

Whereas a volunteer or a staff member may very well decide to use whatever tool in private; when we communicate and collaborate in the public, we need additional efforts to maximize neutrality and reduce outside interests over users and their data. Most popular technology has important conflicts of interest. These potential conflicts can be declared, to be discussed, and reduce their impact.

A tool can be controversial when the behind company is multi-national, focused on user-tracking for advertising purposes. It is particularly controversial, especially when normal people can confuse a company as an official Wikimedia partner.

Protecting volunteers from these risk is challenging for a wide range of technology consumers. Wikimedia CH and advisory committees should be enabled for this kind of professional help.

Practicals:

✅ When evaluating software or services, ethical concerns (like license terms) must be considered.

✅ Sometime, a 100% Free, Open, Ideal, Ethical, independent solution is an utopia. In these cases, it's still important to discuss problems, openly, with a positive collaborative approach, without bias, to help others in a similar position to understand desired workflows and current limitations in Open solutions.

✅ If we invest on a non-Open solution, we can dedicate resources for on a Open solution in long-terms. That is the bold creative space where the Wikimedia movement has always had a big impact on the world.

✅ Wikimedia Foundation is a good partner and we have other good ethical partners. They don't resell user interests to private advertisers, they sustain strong privacy / anonymity etc., they are nonprofit organizations with core interest in Free knowledge.

✅ An event may require for some reasons to have an email or a phone number or similar neutral and standard technologies.

✅ We take care that proposed software solutions carefully protect data of volunteers and donors (inspecting terms of service, etc.)

❌ It is important not to advertise a specific email vendor or a specific phone number vendor etc. since we are not here to take volunteers and turn them into customers of a specific service provider.

❌ Just to avoid doubts about this direction: volunteers must be able to join the Wikimedia movement without the requirement to be a particular customer - for example - without the need to be a customer of Google, of Microsoft, of Apple, of Amazon, of Facebook/Meta, of Twitter, etc. Premising we are grateful to every piece of Internet that helps in connecting Wikipedia to billions of people; we are committed to reduce misleading similarities and proximity between the goals of Wikimedia projects and conflicts of interests of private companies.

❌ Some organizations promote specific services only if the related company is a clear official sponsor of some kind. While this sometime has sense, looking for official sponsorship could be even worse in some other cases. Sometime, a clear separation is just the best solution.

Context:

Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Provide for Safety and Inclusion

Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Increase the Sustainability of Our Movement

3. People creates services. IT processes support people.

Information technology supports people to help them to create great services. If people avoid tools and processes of the information technology, there is to investigate the reason because the technolgy can help them to imrpove their work.

The IT services must assure a realiability and an availability to mantain safe and efficient the whole organization, starting from volunteers and arriving to the staff.

Context:

Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Increase the Sustainability of Our Movement

Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Improve User Experience

4. Managing Risks to increase Security

Information technology is a critical aspect in any organization because it affects daily work, from tools to IT equipment.

A security issue or a data breach are big risks for any organization. The IT can monitor and manage the systems security to prevent and mitigate risks. Premising that security is a larger field where the IT is just a part of it.

Documenting the components of the IT Infrastructure, tools, servers, access levels, and have procedures, help in mitigating the risks, and be ready when needed.

Context:

Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Invest in Skills and Leadership Development

5. We communicate with Open Standards

Often, we land in a different nation and we are disoriented by the different type of electrical outlets of our devices. This is something we remember as we travel, and then we forget.

The point is: fortunately, there are standards, and they are few, and they prevent the proliferation of many other practices.

The organization is committed to adopt Open Standards, especially those oriented towards re-adapting a material; thus we avoid read-only formats.

In addition, the use of open standards helps the integration of different systems. Open standards are well documented, well-known and reduce the risks to be dependent and locked on a single specific company.

Practicals:

✅ Internally we may sometime work on closed formats, but in the public we must prefer Free File Formats accepted by Wikimedia Commons

✅ When a format is not available for Wikimedia Commons, when like to create documents in Open Formats such as ODT, ODF, ODP, PDF etc. and the List of open file formats.

❌ We avoid to release a document just as read-only. For example, we avoid to release something just in PDF, since it does not encourage to adapt that document or fix mistakes. The original file can be published in other ways, like Wikimedia Phabricator File Drop, Internet Archive, wikimedia.ch, etc.

❌ We avoid to share files only using the historical Microsoft DOC/DOCX default format. This could create problems with Wikimedia Commons, but also with the LibreOffice community, who reverse engineered that format for years, coming to the conclusion that it cannot be "a standard". Better to "Export as ODT" and also as PDF. Directly collaborating on a wiki is also a possibility that doesn't necessarily have to be encouraged, but should not be discouraged since it's a technical tool that legally enables collaboration, has a history of contributions, already has an author credit, and (with all the limitations) already generates a fairly interoperable format.

Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Invest in Skills and Leadership Development

Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Increase the Sustainability of Our Movement

Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Manage Internal Knowledge

6. Technology respects Environmental Resources

As repeated also by authoritative local sources in Switzerland and by international frameworks, humanity must mitigate Climate Change manage with everyday concrete individual actions, as well as with long-term plans.

Along with many other disastrous risks to humanity, Climate Change is one of the prominent ones that will lead humanity to fight for basic resources. In short, Climate Change will impose a change in human priorities, to put survival of humanity at any cost, even at the expense of Free Knowledge, even at the expense of archives, libraries, museums and places of science preservation.

Practicals:

✅ Technological choices must consider the minimization of waste of resources such as mineral resources, water resources, energy resources; to minimize other waste directly related to these.

✅ We try to study software that could aggressively consumes computer resources (such as CPU utilization) without any clearly constructive purpose.

✅ We try to identify if a software has internal behavior or strong trade secret protection mechanisms that prevent independent researchers from studying its environmental impact.

✅ We support software designed to respect and optimize hardware resources of a computer with maximum efficiency, and these solutions should be preferred.

✅ We are committed to review our service providers in order to ask for a positive energy impact.

❌ We discourage waste of hardware resources, such as consumption of technology that does not legally or technically allow repair.

❌ We try to avoid unsustainable software projects such as "computer mining" activities. They are essentially a waste of finite energy to create a profit for those who consumes most electrical energy for computer computation; energy that could be used for other scientific purposes.

❌ We discourage consumption of disposable technology. For example, badges in pure aluminum found on clothes in some stores, designed to be thrown away immediately after the article is purchased.

Context:

Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Increase the Sustainability of Our Movement

7. Technology for Open Decisions and Safe Spaces

Sometime on the Internet or on the television it seems there is a fast track for junk information or disrespectful behavior.

The good thing is that the majority of people do not make this use of the Internet, however, a minority can be quite effective in generating a majority of cases.

The direction is to use technology in a way that encourages a Safe Space for collaboration. By Safe Space we mean a place where it is possible to discuss a topic in a gentle way and with proactive proposals, avoiding unrelated negative comment about persons (avoiding flames, etc.). Wikipedia is an example where a single anonymous IP address can add a reference and enhance an important article, if the user does so constructively.

Creative spaces should be protected from trolls, but still open from useful feedback. We promote friendly environments where there is room to open discussion, there is room to understand each other, there is room to say thank you, and room to forgive each other.

Practicals:

✅ We use technology in a responsible way, assuming that everything we write or say can honestly be saved somewhere forever and that a bad comment sometimes sticks around for a long time. One more reason to be kind.

✅ It is especially important to be careful when we process personal data. Note: a person's real name, or link to their nickname can also be a personal data. Sometimes, to protect volunteers, it's best not to ask for data unnecessarily.

✅ Technology should be used in a way to help newcomers to understand what is the most appropriate collaborative style, and what are the rules for living together. In short: be nice.

✅ We clean our personal devices so that outdated and potentially privacy threatening information is deleted

✅ For example, the Universal Code of Conduct is a great tool that should be linked, explained and discussed to newcomers and new staff members etc.

✅ It really helps to assume that the person in front of you has experience and is right, to be able to understand the opinion of others without preconceptions. This avoids so much frictions.

✅ To support the decisions of Board and the Staff, we support a Technical advisory committee.

❌ If we spend most of our time using a technology to criticize other volunteers instead of thanking them for the good parts, there could be a big problem.

❌ Sometimes it is not possible to stop a behavior. For example, an unpleasant comment from an anonymous user on a social can be difficult to be stopped quickly. So, it's also important to distance ourselves publicly from bad behaviors, to better help any offended person not to feel alone.

❌ The goal is not to scold a person when a rule is not understood. The goal is to work on mutual help and empathy to advance Wikimedia Projects, taking the best of the different opinions.

❌ Questions such as "Was a technical committee involved? What was their opinion?" Should not be missing from written minutes of a meeting, about the adoption of an tool.

Context:

Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Ensure Equity in Decision-making

Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Provide for Safety and Inclusion

8. Public as Default

This dedicated section is needed because not everything is related to copyright. Some topics are not related to creativity rights, but are still related to approaches that should be public and open by default, as much as possible.

Some interesting reasons against a "private by default" strategies are: closing useful documents is a major barrier to Free knowledge but also to collaboration. Closing a "knowledge base" almost certainly destine it for rapid obsolescence. Closing "internal guidelines" often enforces negative gatekeeping principles, and so on.

It can happen to start a documentation about a technology (think about a user manual of a tool) and then it can happen to complain that nobody updates that manual again. When that happens, probably it means: it should be more easy to find documents, and it should be more easy to edit them.

Another interesting facet: sometime we like to use chats, and private email messaging etc., but when most decisions are held in private places, it's difficult that other people could ever understand something in our processes. This is also a problem from a communication point of view, if from the outside of the organization it seems that the staff is not porous with the board, or with the outside world. This may be not a current problem in our organization, but it's a frequent Wikimedia stereotype and it deserves our attention.

Premising that Wikimedia CH is a very fortunate chapter that works mostly remotely, so these steps might be more intuitive than for other organizations.

Practicals:

✅ There are good reasons to keep stuff private, but these reasons deserve a strong and clear explanation, since private documents are usually useful to be archived, not to collaborate on them.

✅ This also applies to drafts of new documents, drafts of new documentation, etc. - don't be afraid to announce a draft as a draft, to attract early useful feedback.

✅ Having public discussions on general topics is a good general direction. This does not mean making everyone talk over us. This just mean: we want to allow other people to (at minimum) be curious and listen. Otherwise, we can hardly receive positive constructive feedback in time.

✅ Good reasons for closing an information: legal problems, problems with protecting a personal data, etc.

❌ Bad reasons for closing an information: afraid of feedback, afraid of looking bad, afraid of sharing a draft. Wikipedia is a good example of an incomplete project that was never designed to be published only when completed.

✅ We do our best to design a safe infrastructure, by design, and not by obscuring its components. We really believe in the Kerckhoffs's principle and in the Claude Shannon's maxim: "one ought to design systems under the assumption that the enemy will immediately gain full familiarity with them". We document our knowledge in public places. We enable an open discussion over our procedures, since we are surrounded by well-intentioned volunteers who may have more expertise than we do on how to correct a problem.

✅ We do our best to keep also technical documentation as much public as possible (for example, how our websites work, etc.) since this is the main way to avoid gatekeeping, info obsolescence, and mitigate maintenance and protection issues. This is also the only way we can enable collaboration to new technical talented contributors.

✅ Most of the technical infrastructure of WMCH heavily relies on famous, stable, widely adopted Open Source software that have public documentation and public configuration notes. The hope is that our public documentation can help others, and can reduce frictions, costs and dependencies.

✅ We are totally grateful to those who report security issues in an ethical and responsible way.

✅ We believe in the Linus's law. We encourage a public discussion over our public procedures.

❌ One person should not get caught up in the fashion of "publishing everything" if one is unable to distinguish what is personal data to be protected, and what is not, etc.

❌ One person should not get caught up in the fashion of "publishing everything" if one is unable to distinguish what is personal data to be protected, and what is not, etc.

❌ A climate of hiding problems can cause a feeling of false security with potential damage to the organization.

❌ We don't believe in obsolete Security through obscurity stereotypes. We don't hide keys under a secret doormat.

❌ It is no fun to report a security problem to possible attackers, and then last to report it to those affected. We appreciate those who report security issues to administrators first and responsibly, in order to collaborate on security fix proposals, to then be able to publish the original problem to help similar parties. Wikimedia CH has yet to study a thank-you program, but we will certainly take care of reports from responsible security experts, with respect and full thanks for your help in the Wikimedia Movement.

Context:

Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Manage Internal Knowledge

Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Ensure Equity in Decision-making

Wikimedia CH Staff Experience

The following statements are drawn with the help of the staff of Wikimedia CH. These are not verbatim transcripts. These statements are intended to be a summary, to learn more about professional individuals working in Wikimedia CH to sustain the Wikimedia Movement.

The questions are not reported since the intention was to build a monologue about: one's role in the global movement, internal strengths and weaknesses of the organization, and external external opportunities and threats.

Important: Recall that this is still a draft.

Thank you for any fix, especially if you are an interviewed WMCH staff member! Thank you!

The interviews were conducted in December 2022.

To see the current staff of Wikimedia CH:

https://wikimedia.ch/about/staff-members/

Tip: experiences are listed in this manner: male names last, then alphabetically.

GLAM programme

WMCH GLAM Lead

WIkimedia CH has the current GLAM programme lead since August 2022.

The GLAM lead thinks internal processes deserve clearer definitions. This is true for newcomers but also to speedup routine tasks. For example, the yearly budget page, or the grant process deserve improvements in their process definition. Also, having a shared calendar of activities, showing some tasks of each team member, can be useful, not to control people but to get an overview of how we work.

Tech solutions can probably be explored to better share our work and cooperate. Some organizations use Slack together with Asana. Wikimedia Foundation uses Phabricator. It's a matter of looking around, with the goal to improve our work.

About internal administration, every organization knows that is a risk if bills are not paid on time. I am not saying that this is a problem of Wikimedia CH but we can mitigate this potential problem working on our processes and tools.

The GLAM lead reminds that, at the beginning of her work, routine processes were rather complicated. This is a risk since it's easier that something unexpected can happen and create more problems.

People has expectations from WMCH but often we cannot answer all demands. We work in an NGO. Some of us need to follow lot of projects. Anyway, the number of our team members do not necessarily scale as the projects number increases. With these conditions it may happens that our work is not professional enough. At peak times some coworkers may feel overwhelmed and the risk is a vicious cycle of little happiness and few results. Sharing these issues is important.

The Wikimedia movement should be a cooperation of NGO organizations, working on humanity, freedom of knowledge, and working to be relevant and useful to the community.

---

To explore more about GLAM program:

https://wikimedia.ch/en/programmes/glam/

Business Intelligence & Finance management

WMCH Business Intelligence & Finance Manager

The Business Intelligence & Finance Manager for Wikimedia CH shares her experience as professional, external to Wikimedia volunteers.

The primary document, in which volunteers access and have benefit from the production of the finance management, is the Wikimedia CH Expense Report, also part of the Wikimedia CH Annual Report.

Income diversification has been a challenge. An eye is kept on Germany that is a quite unique system, with an extraordinary number of donors and members. It is not clear whether their situation is reproducible in Switzerland. Anyway Wikimedia CH in 2021 achieved a sufficient number of donations to be independent from Wikimedia Foundation.

From her professional point of view, she described that separation between volunteer association and paid works should be set with clear boundaries.

One of the weaknesses of Wikimedia CH is the preparation of a campaign donation. The potential donor does not receive a confirmation of the donation via e-mail. Such blockages slow down the effectiveness of the team working on Fundraising. Platforms like the donation platform, and the bank system, also have poorly interoperable interfaces, and it is difficult to calculate how much time the staff waste in the integration.

Another weakness is probably the internal communication that could be more efficient. As an aspect of that, Wikimedia CH adopted Office 365 but it's not that easy to know who has access to a specific document, how to allow/deny access restrictions, etc. and ambiguity about this can be a danger.

The Wikimedia ecosystem also give great room for improvement. For example, Meta-wiki is a tool that is not very designed to publish complex documents as a Financial Report. Every year the platform has not much improvements and we have to deal with the same problems.

She hopes more training for the staff, to master at least 60% of each tool. Other tools, instead, just need software improvement so as not to slow down operations.

---

To learn more explore the public WMCH Annual Reports:

https://donate.wikimedia.ch/en/official-reports.html

Education programme

The Education Manager for Switzerland, started since 1 August 2022.

The education manager describes her commitment in involving projects like OpenEdu and Wikidata, with communities like Wikimini.org and DicoAdo.org. There is a growing need for training on Wikidata because it is a tool that people like, it is promising, and it still has great room to contribute. This does not only concern data scientists, computer scientists; but surely they too are often unfamiliar with Wikidata, and that's a shame, because they are the perfect target audience.

The technological goal is to improve Wikimedia platforms to reach new people, but also doing outreach in person into schools, and reach talented students. One challenge was to bring Wikimini to the Swiss-German community, even if it was designed mostly to cover the French-community. She notes that the Klexikon community is instead in German and founded by Wikimedia DE and this project would also deserve more attention to our German-speaking communities.

She highlights internal communication problems that could be addressed to improve reactivity, avoid delays. Some problems are related to the software suite, for instance, Microsoft Teams, which is problematic for many invited to the calls, on different aspects.

She shares some concerns on SharePoint were coworkers take a long time to find things they didn't create. One wonders if with another platform things would improve the situation. A tool should encourage documenting materials not necessarily one's own. Objects should be more easily found. Better connectable with each other.

One of the main challenge, also technical, is the alignment of the outputs of our different programs, such as GLAM, Education, Innovation and Community. In the Annual Plan, every project is supposed to have the same format, but they are not unified.

Wikimedia CH has the opportunity for growth, but there are risks without enough processes, such as on-boarding and off-boarding processes. Lavinia particularly focuses on her on-boarding, which was full of willing people but a very slow and unclear process. We should avoid to have different persons joining with different information.

The contact list of Wikimedia CH should be technically improved, in order to allow more internal members to have access to them, or at least know their existence. At the moment most of them are hided in SalesForce. Every program should not create their own contact list, sometime from scratch. The communication between the programs is essential since a partner can join as GLAM but then can slide in the Education field. Shared communication should be internally supported, also technically.

There is a general fear of communicating things too early, for fear that the project may receive negative feedback and be discontinued. This can be both a solution but a problem, since we are in a community where early involvement is crucial. Wikimedia CH has a newsletter that works, but the bridge between that and the real community is not obvious and somehow narrow. We need a more open and more direct communication with the community, in a safe creative space for project proposers.

---

To explore the field of Lavinia Malo, visit the Education project:

https://wikimedia.ch/en/programmes/education/

French community management

WMCH Community Liaison French-speaking Switzerland

The Community Liaison for the French-speaking part of Switzerland on behalf of Wikimedia CH since 2017.

She loves to contribute to art-related projects, and explore the potentials of Wikidata. Some of the collaborations of her involves the National History Museum, Wikimedia Commons. The challenge is to convince GLAM to upload useful materials to Wikimedia Commons, and useful data to Wikidata, learning the rules while receiving as little friction as possible.

GLAM see strengths from the Wikimedia world in terms of: Data Visualization projects, meeting volunteers, meeting content contributors. Some GLAM desire to receive support on logistical aspects and she is committed to help them.

She has worked for the following projets: Journée suisse des archives, WikiNeocomensia (with Amandine Cabrio and Gilliane Kern), dicoado (with Vivian Epiney), Ludopaedia, WikiDroitsHumains, WikiEtatVaud, #1Bib1Ref, NoircirWP, Memoriav and WikiRomandie. And also organised several editathons (including in swiss universities).

Since 2021, she is Creative Commons certificated and has trained several people on this subject. She has also trained people on Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikibase.

One of the challenges is helping GLAM in finding the more relevant educational project. This is useful to both bring GLAM closer to the Wikimedia world, and help educational tools to be more palatable for different contexts and produce better results. Another challenges is the clarification of the differences between GLAM but without creating a separation.

Thinking about weaknesses, she describes the need to work on formal procedures. Describe how things work and how to handle specific GLAM requests can bring great benefits to Wikimedia CH.

There are some stereotypes that are certainly threats. For example, new Wikipedians are difficult to be involved. At the same time, some of these new Wikimedians find some long-term Wikipedians as unpleasant. For instance, when doing workshops, you create a page, and your contribution can be cancelled almost in minutes. This can be frustrating. This friction may be caused by the lack of mutual understanding, and here we have the opportunity to do more, by better explaining the projects and reduce this friction.

A technical problem is the lack of communication between language communities. It's not so easy to both discover new initiatives and communicate them, for example when one initiative could be relevant to another specific thematic community in German speaking languages. Wikimedia CH deserves to work on that too.

---

To discover her work, explore the Community programme:

https://wikimedia.ch/en/programmes/community/

Outreach & Communication Management

WMCH Outreach & Communication Manager

The biggest available communication tools are the Wikimedia CH newsletter, and the official website.

About the website, it's powered by the Open Source tool WordPress. About web statistics, the world adopted Google Analytics but instead we migrated to Matomo - that is open too. That's to say: if you have content suggestions, or privacy tips to improve our communication tools, you can talk to her to find an open door.

The complete management of these tools are delegated to an external agency and she handles the day-by-day implementation requests.

She is particularly joyful when describing the progresses of the Newsletter. The Newsletter is a powerful tool. The challenge is, not being just a summary about the activities and the achieved goals, but also giving value to the work of others.

When people discovers Wikipedia on their own, they can somehow damage it, also in good faith, starting with borderline contributions about their company. To avoid early mistakes, Wikimedia CH has educational paths covering hot-topics, like the declaration of your conflict of interests and "paid editing".

Wikipedia is not like the Swiss National Library with well-defined projects. Wikipedia is like a never ending story. That's why we need everyone help to communicate, educate, overcome personal small mistakes, collaborate, reach a neutral point of view and join the beautiful Wikimedia movement in long-terms.

About Wikimedia CH. One example. If your laptop explodes, you get it new in the same day by postal package. This is extraordinary. Our goal should be to create internal procedures as beautiful as our Swiss Post Office.

For example, we can improve our on-boarding process, improve our documentation, and better clarify our roles to the public.

---

If you want to explore this topic, you can join to the newsletter:

https://wikimedia.ch/en/newsletter/

Accounting management

WMCH Accountant

The accountant for Wikimedia CH shares her experience as professional, external to Wikimedia volunteers.

She has experience both as a external freelance and, since 2021, as a member of the staff of Wikimedia CH.

She describes her commitment to keep Wikimedia CH operational. Improving the donation system is important, since it's the main entry point for donors who believe in the values of the movement. The donation platform deserves improvements, to be able to enable income diversification.

Her responsibilities on Fundraising remained constant before and after her contract transition. The challenge is to involve different people who have different expectations and use Wikimedia projects in different ways. We know that there is no advertising and the movement just work thanks to donations. Donors expect a lot and the relationship with them is important.

Some years ago Wikimedia CH adopted CiviCRM. Then WMCH migrated from CiviCRM, because of our lack of a technical support figure. Now we use a mixed combination of technologies, like SalesForce and RaiseNow. Thinking about the weaknesses of the current configuration, she highlights the little inter-compatibility between the database and these donor platforms.

---

To explore this topic, try the Donation page.

https://donate.wikimedia.ch/en/index.html

Community programme lead

WMCH Community Lead in Switzerland

The Community Lead specifies that he did not start as a volunteer so his view can better help to get an external perspective.

Part of the background of Maurus comes from a seminar in Austria.

One of the strengths of Wikimedia CH is having internal staff who are very willing to solve IT problems that are not necessarily their responsibility, like individual computer installations, etc. Unfortunately this is also a weakness, since it's not so clear who should be contacted to fix something, for example if there is a major problem. Some of these problems need to be reported in internal ticket systems that are not intuitive. There is room for improvement on training, as well as in everyday IT assistance.

He shares some notes about the community department, that could have a central solution to collect IT problems. This could be useful to describe problems related to file storage, file stats, individual files, individual platforms - like SharePoint and have more knowledge about our tools.

One of the main challenges described by him is the support to Wikipedians. How to keep them happy with the projects, how to keep them active for as much as possible. Switzerland must help in this vision, detecting talented people and have clear tools to support them in the best way.

It's true that Wikimedia CH depends by people who are in 7+ years in the organization. Anyway there is still room for improvement about processes, best practices, or having a tech team.

---

To support him in his commitment to the Community, you can share this page:

https://wikimedia.ch/en/programmes/community/

German community management

WMCH Community Manager German-speaking Switzerland

The German community manager shares his experience as an active volunteer on Wikimedia projects since 2004. Now Community Manager for German-speaking Switzerland, for Wikimedia CH.

When Wikipedia started, he reminds how it was difficult to explain Wikipedia to other people. Explain the ideals, explain how it works, explain how to contribute. However, today it is still difficult to explain some internal mechanisms such as Meta-wiki. Meta-wiki is a project where you need to find information but the categorization system is not intuitive. People still need to deal with categories and ask for help.

He describes the ability of being independent and have the freedom to collect and make decisions as an important current strength in Wikimedia CH.

Internally, there is room for improvement about having a Wikimedia CH internal knowledge base, to find solutions, fix problems quickly, without the need to troubleshoot a problem twice, or reinventing the wheel.

One of the risks is the deal with different events, different user groups, different kind of volunteers and members. There is the need to set a clear definition of what is being done as a volunteer, and what it's not. It's a risk if less then 1% of incomes comes from membership fees. This can be increased, working on attracting new members. This is also useful to reach new prolific relationships. SalesForce is an example of a problematic platform, when you quickly need to understand who is a member and who is not. Our tools should be able to have a contact information, to implement follow-up, that now are difficult.

He mentions the German Wikipedia community, who is particularly careful to paid editing on Wikipedia. Newcomers should be attracted from Wikimedia CH in order to help them in understanding how the projects work, how to follow the rules, how to declare conflicts of interest, with their companies for example. This is crucial to break a vicious cycle in which Wikipedia simply seems to be a social network where it is difficult to make your own page; instead of being an encyclopedia in which to improve the culture around you.

---

You can support him in his commitment to the German-speaking Community, sharing this page:

• (German) https://wikimedia.ch/de/programmes/community/

Fields of Action

The following are concrete Fields of Action respecting the general Directions of this Strategy.

This information is the result of the daily work of the technical department of Wikimedia CH, following the considerations and the concerns from the interviews with the staff.

Important: Recall that this is still a draft. Not approved.

Continuous First Level Assistance to Staff

Staff during various interviews repeatedly made explicit the need of more assistance. Often this kind of assistance was done by willing and helpful staff members, but it cannot be enough. Staff deserves a form of professional 1st level assistance, so, to have a single point of contact to receive general problems, also about a specific personal computer.

This means this kind of assistance should have advanced communication skills, to be able to communicate with people with different skills (not necessarily technical skills), and be able to help these people to triage a potential technical issue, to file and follow-up the most specific bug request, or feature request in the most appropriate area (some time related to a fundraising supplier, some time related to the supplier of personal computers for the staff, some time in charge of the webmaster, some time in charge of a volunteer, etc.). It must also be able to recognize what is neither a bug nor a feature, and is simply a misuse of a tool, to still find an human safe space for personal training, decreasing technological frustrations.

Example goals:

• being able to receive technological issues (but not necessarily technical) from staff members, for example related to working devices (e.g. working laptop, etc.) or generic software in use by staff for working reasons
• being able to collect and process generic problem reports and enrich them with technical details, in order to be able to escalate the problem to the most appropriate technical software manager (e.g. reaching 2nd or even 3rd level of support)
• being able to have a support that (even if it cannot solve problems directly) it can help to describe what the real root problem is, in order to still allow advancements and enable a potential resolution

Example use cases:

a Staff member today has a problem with WordPress https://wikimedia.ch/ not printing a specific article from the administration panel. A central 1st Level Technical Support can be contacted, to figure out whether it is a problem with the computer, the printer, or WordPress. After the root problem is identified, in case the problem is with the website the Tech Support can describe a technically appropriate report suitable for the attention of the webmaster; in case the problem is with the printer, the Tech Support can help the user directly with drivers; or can help the user to contact whoever should be in charge for possible replacement of office hardware equipment. Etc.

Fortunately this is a frequent enterprise need and there are vendors who provide 1 Level Assistance on end users' computers, on a wide range of operating systems between Linux, Microsoft Windows or macOS. Often, these interventions are paid in packages of hours per month. So the organization's leaders can collect some estimates and allocate a budget.

---

Notes on conflicts of interest:

There are no conflicts of interests in this suggestion since, for example, Valerio Bozzolan is not the right person to do personal assistance on Microsoft Windows, macOS, etc.

Internal Trainings

It is not trivial for any general person to fully understand complex topics like:

• security practices
• copyright and licensing
• GDPR and data protection
• Wikimedia project internals
• software and hardware ethics

Each one of these areas deserve internal training for the staff, but also to volunteers - including but not limiting to like board members.

This is a non-exclusive list of concrete and already-existing certification programs that can be evaluated for recommendation / offering at least to the staff and board members:

• International Computer Driving Licence
• Creative Commons Certificate for Open Culture/ GLAM

  Goal: learning technical details of Creative Commons licenses for GLAMs

• feel free to suggest more useful certifications!

---

Notes on conflicts of interest:

There are no known conflicts of interest on proposing these certifications. For example, Creative Commons is a non-profit like-minded organization, independent from Wikimedia CH. Their certification is not targeted to Wikimedia CH but to the wide public.

Continuous Support for the Infrastructure

As already mentioned, Wikimedia CH handles a lot of services and some of these are in-house, delivered from servers in Switzerland. This is an highly privacy friendly situation for our Switzerland communities, users and stakeholders.

The challenge is, Wikimedia CH is expanding and is trying to provide various more-or-less internal utility tools, and, is also trying to help various communities such as Wikimini or DicoAdo, in reducing their economic expenses by internalizing their tools.

The problem that is arising, is the risk of not being able to keep up with all the potential technical problems, including ordinary maintenance and security updates.

Wikimedia Foundation has multiple internal staffs to cover these needs. Wikimedia CH currently has no member in charge of this on an ongoing basis. Most of this technical work is done professionally sporadically, and also sporadically on a voluntary basis, and this situation is not ideal.

This is an indicative non-exhaustive list of fields that surely deserve a continuation in Technical Assistance.

There was an attempt to describe the following practical information:

• Current Situation: even if for obvious reason most technical problems are not predictable - therefore it is to be understood as a row recent average
• Survival Mode: minimal situation expressed as "minimum time needed to avoid probable major regressions"
• Evolve Mode: optimal situation expressed as "minimum time needed to evolve this project in a more professional quality for the organization"

Project and info	Main needs	Situation average current situation	Survival Mode minimum suggested time	Evolve Mode suggested professional time
Main website https://wikimedia.ch/ Skills: WordPress	error reporting to upstream support	to be clarified (complete support already covered)	to be clarified	to be clarified
Fundraising Tools/Members Database	developments to be agreed upon better integrations error reporting to upstream support	to be clarified (support already covered)	to be clarified	to be clarified
Matomo privacy-friendly surveys Skills: PHP, Linux	apply security updates verify backups	0-2 minutes /week	15 minutes /week	1 hour /week
LimeSurvey privacy-friendly tool for surveys Skills: PHP, Linux	apply security updates verify backups	2 minutes /week	30 minutes /week	1 hour /week
Zabbix monitoring Internal health checker	monitor issues adjust alarms	0-1 hour /week	1 hour /week	2 hours /week
Argo Wikimetrics	routine maintenance improve documentation	0-1 hour /week	30 minutes /week	2 hours /week
Cronos Calendar Skills: Lua, PHP	present to the community hand over to the community follow community requests	0-20 minutes /week	1 hours /week	4 hours /week
Servers management Skills: Linux	rationalize services apply security updates proactively take care (e.g. thanks to Zabbix alarms) improve documentation	0-2 hours /week	4 hours /week	2 days /week
Dicoado Skills: MediaWiki, Linux	assure migration completion apply security updates (keeping MW and server up to date) bug fixes enabling multilingual possibility	0-15 minutes /week	0-4 hours /week	1 day /week
Wikimini Skills: MediaWiki, Linux	handle known security issues upgrade to stable hardening skin fix	0-4 hours /week	1 day /week	2 days /week
Cassandra	project handover documentation fix	0-1 hours / week	1 hour /week	2 hours /week
Spot Activities Skills: full-stack	last minute problems sysadmin fixes to our general infrastructure	2-4 hours /week	4 hours /week	8 hours /week
Tech Strategy (example of Spot Activity)	produce the document	0-4 hours /week	1 days /week	2 days /week
Overhead Time not invested in a concrete technical area. It is better if it is little But if it is not foreseen, it leads to burnout.	work organization / planning meetings / calls / mails switch from one task to another unexpected troubleshootings	0-1 hour /week	1.5 hours /week	2.5 hours /week

Context

The current professional technical operators mainly involved in the above elements are:

• for WordPress: there is an external consultant (note that the time needed is not expressed here since this is a topic already covered continuously - but feel free to edit this document to share some info)
• for Fundraising Tools / Database: there service provider itself is the only entity who can give assistance and follow our developments. But it's unclear whether they can implement our development requests with our current contract (note that the time needed is not expressed here since this is a topic already covered continuously)
• for the rest of the hardware sysadmin activities: we have a Switzerland provider who very thoroughly and competently takes care of hardware things and problems. We have minimum response times per contract (note that the time needed is not expressed here since this is a topic already covered continuously)
• for the rest of the services and in-server software sysadmin activities: Valerio Bozzolan (working for an external company)

Challenge

We do not have enough human working hours to cover these needs. Note that since 2023 Valerio B. was also allocated on the Technological Strategy but the company he works for does not authorize allocating to WMCH for more than 12 hours a week (at best of company emergencies and other factors that reduce this time budget).

Concerns:

There is currently not enough human working time to pursue such intensive one-shot projects such as a Technological Strategy, as well as keeping up and running the Wikimedia CH infrastructure, with concrete impact on the continuity of communities like DicoAdo and Wikimini. So there is great margin for improvement to cover all technical needs, known and unexpected.

Potential solutions include:

Find an extra part-time sysadmin consultant (taking into consideration training, handover, ...); somehow convert an already existing part-time sysadmin resource to full-time; etc. or more destructive solutions, such as suppressing projects to balance workload (probably easier but not suggested).

---

Notes on conflicts of interest:

In the current situation (without changing anything) there are no known conflicts of interest. When Wikimedia CH activates for example Valerio Bozzolan (the person who wrote the majority of this section), he has a fixed salary not tied to Wikimedia CH and he has no financial benefit from increasing or continuing this collaboration. The company he works for has a totally separated core business (software house in the food sector).

In proposing to increase the current working hours for WMCH, in fact Valerio B. proposes to be hired internally - just because there is probably not another way compatible with the company in which he currently works. Changing position can become a conflict of interest if a future inter salary proposal would be higher than the past one (which for reasons of max. transparency it's declared here: ~30K EUR gross annual salary).

There are technical interests in welcoming an extra external system administrator for Wikimedia CH to better cover needed maintenance, updates, migrations, security fixes, etc. Premising that Valerio has no other person to recommend (all the people he knows well are already employed elsewhere) and so there are no known conflicts of interests in a potential review of external applications, premising that there is technical interest in being more than one technical person.

Practicals

We are not a software-oriented company, but we are actually surrounded by software, and we need more people who can have enough creative space to implement all the Wikimedia CH programs involved in the Innovation field, like:

• Incubator
• Pit-stop
• Factory
• (and Tech community)

The general field of action is: take care of new and existing software needs, so that the project can have enough creative space to evolve in a positive way, and not simply survive.

• Incubator: When a new project lands the Incubator program, we can examine needed resources to cover not just the entire prototyping process, but also user documentation, technical documentation, and basic security maintenance and backup in medium-long terms.

Sufficient documentation is usually enough for taking care of a possible complete handover, but also setting aside time to tell the internal workings of the project to the technical community is very useful to actually enable any potential concrete handover. Verify that the prototype does not then require a rewrite in medium-terms, for example requiring to adopt non-esoteric technologies, and expressly under a free license to avoid copyright problems or the impossibility of independent maintenance.

• Pit-stop: when an already-existing project lands, assure there are enough resources to basic maintenance in long-terms, including backup integrity checks, infrastructure documentation, team documentation (who has access to what), and assess whether there is a possibility of having an external security review.

These are definitely things that the community alone usually never achieve, in any professional level.

• Factory: avoid to compete with WMF, but complete the gap.

The goal is to be able to support long-term tools for projects, at least in the scope of Switzerland. The service should be complementary to the ones offered by Wikimedia Cloud / Toolforge or other services by Wikimedia Foundation and other like-minded organizations. In order to allow collaboration and easy adoption, we should be as much transparent as possible, and better communicate what we can offer, as well as what the Factory program cannot offer.

Adopting more Open and Neutral Tools for Volunteers

Premising that many organizations have a very complex internal infrastructure which is often best not changed with a superficial intention of diminishing the negative impact of something;

First of all, it is important that what is external, and therefore what comes out of Wikimedia CH and should reach volunteers (and vice-versa), that external material should be shared with the triangle of: Open Standard, Open Format, and Open Tools.

So, it doesn't matter what internal tool Wikimedia CH currently has to collect internal documents. The technological focus of Wikimedia CH should be: work to have tools to better communicate externally in the most neutral, sustainable and ethical way possible.

Practical fields of actions:

• raise awareness of Open Source tools already available in Wikimedia CH to communicate to the volunteers (WordPress; WMCH LimeSurvey instead of Google Form, WMCH Matomo instead of Google Analytics, etc.)
• adopt new Open Source systems in support of the "internal" ones.
• For example, adopt an Open Source Nextcloud collaborative suite, that can be also given to volunteers to collaborate in real-time on documents, or drop files, share meeting invitations, etc. as official neutral tool to communicate from volunteers to the organization and vice-versa.
• For example, adopt an Open Source BigBlueButton proessional videocall instance, that can be offer for community meetings, or meetings for the members or the volunteer board members, in order to keep private communication, webcam, audio, etc., in Switzerland. So that Zoom or Microsoft or other companies located in the United States etc. are not a requirement for volunteer participation.

These and similar actions can be achieved even without impacting the internal organization of Wikimedia CH, and can be achieved without proposing tiring/risky internal migrations.

Ensure an Internal Figure for Data protection and Privacy

Wikimedia CH is already following a good precautionary direction of "minimal data management", for example not using Google Analytics but Matomo, on servers owned by Wikimedia CH, in Switzerland.

This direction often involves several working groups and cannot be followed successfully on voluntarily basis. The GDPR consultant, on the other hand, is obviously a professional, but he or she must sometimes interface with volunteers, so it must be a sufficiently continuous contact so as not to create deadlocks.

It is therefore recommended to ensure contact with a sufficiently digitized and experienced GDPR consultant in the nonprofit.

General goals:

• help manage some concerns on community services
• review data protection policies
• review system permits and privileges
• better manage data processing
• learn how to handle data deletion requests properly

Experts involved

NOTE: Some experts have yet to be involved! This is a draft! Thank you!

Thank you to all the persons and external volunteer experts who are directly involved in the discussion on the IT Strategy document of Wikimedia CH. If you have a specific feedback, you can also report it to these people for their kind volunteer opinion.

Sorting: male names last, then alphabetical order by surname.

MadBob

aka Roberto Guido · Former president of Italian Linux Society

The Italian Linux Society is a non-profit organization based in Italy, focused on digital freedoms, since 1994. The contribution of Roberto is appreciated thanks to the experience in the field of Free licensing, contacts with Italian and European communities, and the experience with public institutions.

In the spare time, Roberto is an active contributor of the project Officina Informatica Libera, based in Torino. Appreciator of bagna cauda and local beer steward.

---

Contact:

(en) (it) w:it:Discussioni utente:MadBob

Mastodon:

Yes

Declaration of interests:

I love Italian pizza

I don't work for Wikimedia CH. I work in Torino, as freelance developer.

I'm involved as volunteer president of Italian Linux Society.

I'm involved as volunteer, as external expert for Wikimedia CH.

Nur

aka Nur Aiman Fadel · Scientific Engineer

Nur works in the field of the HPC (High Performance Computing) in Lugano, Switzerland. Nur is involved for the experience in the field of applied mathematics, physics and software, and knowledge of Open Data and software freedoms.

In the spare time, Nur is an experienced OpenStreetMap surveyor. Top player in StreetComplete.

---

Contact:

(en) (it) ...

Declaration of interests:

I like apples (the fruit, not the company)

I don't work for Wikimedia CH.

I'm involved as volunteer, as external expert for Wikimedia CH.

Ruphy

aka Riccardo Iaconelli · Department of Digital Transformation

Riccardo was involved as founder of WikiToLearn. The contribution of Riccardo can be appreciated as physicist who worked at CERN, in Geneva; and as Open Source Project Leader in the Italian Department of Digital Transformation, since 2017.

In the spare time, Ruphy is a contributor in the KDE project. Ukulele secret Rockstar.

---

Contact:

(en) (it)

Mastodon:

Yes

Declaration of interests:

I love coffee

I'm involved as volunteer, as external expert for Wikimedia CH.

Luca Mauri

Information Technology Manager (multi-national company)

Luca Mauri was involved for the prior experience in IT strategies in an enterprise sector.

In the spare time, Luca is a Space Exploration enthusiast. Lover of Mediawiki, Wikibase and Semantic MediaWiki: on this software stack he built WikiTrek.

---

Contact:

(en) (it) User:Lucamauri

Mastodon:

No

Declaration of interests:

I love photography.

The employee of Luca Mauri does not do consulting for Wikimedia projects.

I don't work for Wikimedia CH. I work in Milano, as IT Manager.

I'm involved as volunteer, as external expert for Wikimedia CH.

Phabi

aka Mrs./Mr. Placeholder · Innovative Lorem Ipsum Specialist

I'm a placeholder for a very special expert. Maybe you!

In the spare time, I'm an experienced Lorem Ipsum writer.

When I'm bold enough, I press the edit button and I change the world. When this is not possible, I change the world to have an edit button.

I'm pink since I was trying the palette.

---

Contact:

(en) (de) ...

Declaration of interests:

I love kiwis

I'm involved as volunteer placeholder

Other documents

Software Development Guidelines

Welcome to the software development guidelines, flavored by Wikimedia CH (Switzerland).

Visit the Software Development Guidelines

Resources

• Technology strategy § Typical structure of a (IT) technology strategy, 20 September 2022, Wikipedia
• "Consumerization of IT: Risk Assessment and Risk Mitigation Strategies and Good Practices". European Union Agency for Cybersecurity. Retrieved 2023-01-27.