Sunday, November 7, 2010

Vision, Mission, Strategy

In the four days while my stay in the Harvard Business School I often looked back at our vision, mission and strategy. The second day of the course concentrates on how vision and mission decide strategy. As Professor Leonhard put it, the question 0: What is we supposed to do.

Our vision is: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.

Our mission is: The mission of the WikiMedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.

And our overall strategy to fulfill that mission is: In coordination with a network of chapters and individual volunteers, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity.

One of the most appalling think that we experienced in study the cases by HBS is that it shows how easily one lose his mission out of the sight and how difficult it often is to judge if a decision supports the mission. This seems especially easy in time of crisis. And that brings me back again and again to the most difficult discussions at the moment in our movement. The most difficult inside the board, between the board and the community, and inside the community: The controversial content discussion.

We have here two radical position that in my opinion reflects two aspects of our mission:

*The freedom of speech, the not censoring of project content according to whatever criteria as long as we move inside the frame of law reflects the aspect in our mission and vision, that we want to share the sum of ALL educational knowledge. And the sum of all knowledge certainly includes also those that are controversial.

*On the other hand, if part of the knowledge we are providing is so upset for part of the people around the world, so that they feel our projects as insulting and refuses to share their knowledge on our projects or share the knowledge that is collected on our projects, than we certainly failed to fulfill this aspect of our mission.

The call of boycott on the Aceh Wikipedia against the rest of our projects shows in a radical and confusing way how emotional and sometimes irrational this conflict even can evolve inside of our own community.

To me the duty of the board is to find out a way so that all aspects of our mission can be fulfilled, in engaged discussion with the community. Because it is a mission matter, it is a board issue, and because it is a mission matter, it is important. The lessons I learned by studying the cases is, it is all too easy to lost our mission, because of our personal view, because of the emotion that is involved in the discussion, because it relates to value and is a complicated topic. All this is for me even more reason to keep our mission in our mind when we are working through this topic. And again

Our vision is: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.

Our mission is: The mission of the WikiMedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.

1 comment:

  1. "The call of boycott on the Aceh Wikipedia" What? Citation required!

    ReplyDelete