This page is the English version of Wikimedia Deutschland's preliminary Plan and Budget 2020. It includes the preliminary goals and objectives 2020 and the preliminary budget 2020, which will be submitted to our Supervisory Board for approval on December 7, 2019.

Planning 2020

Goals & Objectives 2020

Budget 2020

Semiannual Report 2020

Our organization promotes Free Knowledge in various ways. We support communities such as Wikipedia, we develop software for Wikimedia projects, and we want to improve the political and legal frameworks for Wikipedia and for Free Knowledge in general. How we want to proceed and what we want to achieve next year, we make transparent in our planning. On these pages, we provide information about the starting points and our approach to planning for 2020 and present the results.

Impact-Oriented Planning

In 2018, we at Wikimedia Deutschland intently tried to look at the future, in order to put our planning on a better basis, and developed strategies for each of the three fields of actions of our organisation - Volunteers, Technologie and Condititons for Free Knowledge - as part of our Zukunftsprozess 2018. In order to enable monitoring and evaluation of our strategies, Wikimedia Deutschland’s annual planning follows an impact-oriented approach. The first step is to focus on the long-, medium- and short-term changes we want to achieve in the world. Only in the second step are possible approaches and activities derived from this.

For 2020, we want to focus on five goals in the three fields of action. The goals are long-term, i.e. not limited to one year, and are therefore largely a continuation of our work from 2019. They define what will change in the world in the medium to long term. The goals show what major impact we want to achieve in our fields of action in the long term. The subgoals each describe a contiguous step on the way to the goal, which is smaller and more concrete than the goal itself. The subgoals correspond to the programmatic strategies.

At the operational level, the success criteria 2020 describe as concretely and verifiably as possible the changes we aim to make on the way there next year. They outline what we want to achieve in 2020 and how we can later measure which of the paths taken by the organisation have led to the desired goal, and which have not. As was the case last year, these success criteria are made up of the objectives and indicators for 2020.

Finally, the budget outlines the revenues and expenditures we expect for the organization and the charitable Wikimedia Fördergesellschaft mbH in 2020, and what each of these are composed of in detail. It will be submitted to our Supervisory Board for approval on 7 December 2019.

Reflection and Strategic Dialogue

On the basis of our long-term goals for 2019, we reviewed our approaches in the various fields of action in an internal mid-year review. The findings were then incorporated into both the planning for 2020 and into an ongoing strategic dialogue with the Supervisory Board. Throughout the year, we work closely with the communitys on our goals and activities and learn from the feedback - online, at small and large events such as WikiCon. At the Members' Assembly, the Executive Director reports retrospectively on the achievement of goals, gives an outlook on further planning and responds to questions and suggestions from members.

Based on the insights of the reflection and the strategic dialogue, the strategies of the organization were adapted at a few places. These changes were proposed by the Executive Director and discussed with the Supervisory Board at a joint retreat in September 2019. The Supervisory Board decided on the first changes to the strategies on 16 October and is still in dialogue with the WMDE staff for further adjustments. At the Members' Assembly in June 2020, the Executive Director will request the approval of the strategic changes described below.

Main Changes Compared to 2019

As our planning is based on an long-term approach, our 2020 planning essentially continues our work from previous years. At the same time, Wikimedia Deutschland aims to be an organization that is learning and constantly evolving. Based on the findings from the reflection, the strategic dialogue with the Supervisory Board and our experiences from the current year, we have therefore made changes in some areas:

Diversity:
In the 2020 planning, we have taken the issue of diversity into account even more than before across all fields of action. We have explicit indicators of success for diversity in all fields of action. This means that in 2020 we are actively incorporating activities to promote diversity in the planning for all fields of action.

Stronger focus of our programmatic work:
For the implementation of the goals next year, we have focused our planning on the most important levers for 2020. The stronger focus is reflected in the 2020 plan by a significantly reduced number of indicators (reduction from 37 indicators in 2019 to 28 in 2020).

Adjustments to the Wikidata strategie in the field of Technology:
After the strategy development in 2018, we made significant progress in defining and working on Wikidata's strategy and today we can conclude that the core of Wikidata lies in being a platform in the network of linked open data. As a result, we have already achieved part of the strategy defined last year - "We define the core of Wikidata". Now a continuous further development based on the different needs for the future is highly relevant and represents our strategic focus. In the future, we will therefore concentrate on developing and anchoring Wikidata as a central platform in the network of open, linked, structured data.

Focussing on building the Wikibase ecosystem and the development of the Wikidata platform:
In the future, Wikimedia Deutschland will focus on building the Wikibase ecosystem and further developing the Wikidata platform. Integration projects to link Wikidata with its sister projects are no longer a priority in the Plan 2020 beyond the Wikidata Bridge (editing Wikidata directly from Wikipedia), but are to be implemented primarily by the Wikimedia Foundation. Within the product strategies developed jointly with the Wikimedia Foundation ("Wikidata as a platform", "Wikibase Ecosystem" and "Wikidata for Wikimedia projects"), we are thus concentrating on the two strategies that will strongly contribute to the infrastructure of Free Knowledge in the future.

New strategy „Institutional Practice‟ in the field of Conditions for Free Knowledge:
In the field of Conditions for Free Knowledge, the existing strategies were supplemented by a third strand on "Institutional Practice". We are working towards institutions and other societal stakeholders contributing to a free and diverse sum of knowledge. This is an addition to the existing strategies, which target either the political decision-making level ("Politics") or individual people ("Digital Literacies"). In fact, we have been active at this level of institutional practice for some time and have successfully brought about change. This adjustment is therefore also reflected in our planning for 2020, but does not mean a fundamental change in the way we work, but rather a consolidation of our existing approaches.