What kind of leadership would you like to see (or see more) in your community?

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What kind of leadership would you like to see (or see more) in your community?

“Leadership” is a concept that has different meanings depending on one’s context, situation, culture, and language. There are multiple kinds of leadership, some more helpful and relevant than others. What kind do you see in your community now? What kind of leadership would you like to see more or less of in your community?

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In our volunteer driven movement, supported by professional staff hired by WMF and affiliates, I would welcome their leadership by respecting the unpaid contributions by volunteers and showing restraint in renumeration of staff. A global cap of one hundred thousand U.S. dollar seems appropriate to me. It is appalling to me the WMF employs a dozen or so employees with annual compensation exceeding three hundred thousand U.S. dollar.

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ارى في القائد المتمكن من الأدوات التي تحفز المستخدمين على العطاء والمساهمة. أرى فيه ذلك الشخص الذي يعرف متى يشكر ومتى يقدح، لا يعطي أوامر أو تنبيهات بل يساعد ويوضح. يأخذ بيد الجميع وينير طريقهم

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It would be disastrous for the movement to introduce a cap such as this while trying to maintain and advance the platform.

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A post was split to a new topic: Grupo de Trabalho de Desenvolvimento de Lideranças

@Ad_Huikeshoven and @Fuzheado are you thinking of brutto or netto?

5 posts were split to a new topic: About the Leadership Development Working Group

I would love to follow this thread and find out what more people think about leadership and maybe include these perspectives in my work in the Leadership Development Group. :smiling_face:

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for me, the main question is not “what type of leadership do I want to see”. rather the question, what kind of roles do I want to see made available, for people who themselves would like to step up and provide some leadership.

for myself, I have been trying strenuously to find some platform, or venue, or any community forum at all, where I could find some ability to express my owwn concerns, ideas, goals, and recommendations, to help to develop the community and WMF efforts in a positive way.

this forum is absolutely the first time I have been given a full platform and full opening to do so. at the Wikipedia village pump, very often the ones who claim to call the loudest for real leadership, are often the first ones to shout down anyone who actually tries to do so. while on the other hand the WMF website is simply a dense, very hard-to-navigate thicket filled with underbrush.

this forum is not necessarily perfect, but i have never had any other venue where I could present my ideas, in a forthright, substantive, and focused manner, and actually get a reply, in a clear manner, and with being granted the same respect and acknowledgment that I seek to offer to others. and remember, I have been an editor for over 15 years.

so in short, I grealty appreciate tjhis forum, and yes, I see it as a positive soilution to many of the problems expressed elsewhere. this forum is not a perfect solution, since nothing is; however, I do very much see it as a very positive resource. thanks!

and to answer the initial question more fully, the type of communication, creativity, and collaborative environment fostered here at this forum, exactly typifies the type of leadership that I would like to seee more broadly, within and across the entire editing community which is the home and environment for all of us. bravo, to all of those participating here. thanks!!

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A post was split to a new topic: Leadership development and the MS recommendations

Happy to hear your thoughts about this question and appreciate the spirit of discussion and collaboration you are bringing through your messages @Sm8900. I’m also glad you are posing an important question about the kinds of leadership roles people can feel empowered to take. What are your thoughts about the question you’ve posed?

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@BJiang_WMF , thanks for your question. well., I will just give you a brief answer now, and then perhaps we can elaborate further over time. (EDIT: this answer turned out to be much less “brief” than I thought! :laughing: )

anyway, for one thing, for me this platform and forum, meaning Discourse, serves absolutely as the kind of forum and venue that Wikipedia sorely needs. until now, there has not been any centralized forum at all that promoted genuine creative ideas and collaboration,

we do have the Village Pump, but that forum is lost in the arcane rules they seek to uphold. with that said, they often do an absolutely exemplary and outstanding job of developing new ideas, new resources, and new editing proposals and approaches. however, one missing component there, in my opinion, is fostering any sense of continuity and collaboration on an ongoing basis. Namely, at that forum, either you have the technical expertise to comment, or else you don’t and therefore you remain more or less silent.

that is where I see this forum, playing a vital and totally necessary role. I liked this forum from day one, but I was afraid to say so, in case it was merely due to my own enjoyment at the dialogue and discussions here. however, now that I have been here a while, I can clearly say that my opinion is based on my own semi-objective knowledge about the Wikipedia community’s needs as a whole. I feel this forum is exactly the kind of resource we need, in order to create some genuine discussion and collaboration.

and furthermore, just to address one other type of forum platform, I don’t feel the community group threads on the app Telegram, are very effective either. in general, they suffer from a large surplus and excess volume of messages. the message traffic there can be very heavy, and therefore is often it can be very difficult to keep track of who is saying what, or indeed to read over the past thread in any way. And due to the nature and format of the threads themselves, I don’t feel the discussions on that app get very far.

As far as the Discord app, I feel the format there is too convoluted and too arcane to sustain much concerted discussion of any developmental topics that are necessary to have a real positive impact, as we seek to develop different areas.

I feel that the web-based, clearly-displayed thread format offered by Discourse, truly hits the nail on the head. This is the resource that our community has been waiting for. Unlike Telegram, the thread’s past messages do not disappear, but can easily be read later on. Also, new threads can easily be created in regards to specific topics. Also, I like and totally accept the approach to thread moderation here. Yes, we do absolutely need established moderators. I am totally comfortable with the approach that this forum’s moderators have exhibited over time.

in short, you can mark me down as a committed devotee of using “Discourse” as a platform. I am fully on board with this method, this platform and this format. please feel free to fire away freely when and if you wish to fire further salvos, to reinforce this platform’s role and usefulness, for the entire community! :slight_smile: I am ready to post a user box or two, whenever others may wish to help elevate this and to spread the word. I’m very energized by this whole current forum and its processes. I hope that answers your questions somewhat? :smiley: thanks!!

(By the way, i see now that your question was meant to clarify what kind of leadership roles I think people should take on. well, perhaps the good news is that actually, I fully accept a beneficial deliberative format, as being the main thing we need to create and empower the types of leadership that our community will generally need, further down the road. so I hope that is helpful to you. thanks!)

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Not possible to change emoji reaction?

I have seen many new topics posted in this forum recently. I was thinking that perhaps this thread could be one possible place to discuss and develop some of the new ideas as a group.

All of the new proposals, ideas, etc, can have a central theme, to some degree, of the kinds of leadership that we would all like to see overall, as individuals from various places, but also as an overall community. I look forward to seeing these ideas discussed and developed, possibly on this thread, in the days and weeks ahead.

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I would like to tag some of the board candidates, to ask if they could please kindly use their existing roles and current prominence in the WMF community, to help us to promote the wider usage of the forums here at this website, as run by Discourse, i.e. for wider usage and discussions by the general community. would they be willing to do so?

I am not going to tag them right now in this message; firstly, I will give them the chance to reply on their own. if no one replies, I may tag two or three candidates at a time, just to request their kind input and insights here on this thread, to assist with this effort, if they wish to do so. thanks.

yeah, don’t know why you would want to talk money, when the topic is leadership development.
the critical problem is leading / coaching the human resources to become more productive, and engage less in counterproductive behaviors.
the community has a problem discussing monetary resources: world class leaders would be worth a lot of money .

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Hm…there is much more complexity in this to unpack and deal with IMHO

yes. you need to view the actual data on the scren entitled “Users.” that is the key to gaining some real data to truly review this issue. thanks.

A leadership that would be supportive, attentive and motivating. A leader that is always ready to serve and support his or her team members. A leader that would inspire his or her team members to grow by showing them the way or giving them the wings to fly if they want to fly.

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I think $100,000 may be a little too low – some people really do have to be located in San Francisco, and it is expensive to live there. At the same time, I agree that WMF executive salaries have skyrocketed in recent years. These are 2020 figures (the most recent available):

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikimedia_Foundation_2020_Form_990.pdf#page=48

Moreover, each year the WMF increases its fundraising targets … and then exceeds these increased targets.

In 2020/2021, for example, the WMF started with a revenue goal of $108 million. This was increased to $125 million after the first quarter. But by the end of the year, the WMF had taken $154 million. Its surplus that year was over $50 million (not counting endowment growth, which added another $37 million or so).

In 2021/2022, the WMF started with a year goal of $147.8 million but had already taken $151.5 million by the end of the third quarter. And even though it had once again smashed the previous year’s fundraising record and exceeded its own year goal, the WMF then went on in the fourth quarter to ask readers and donors in India, South Africa and Latin America for money to keep Wikipedia online, ad-free, subscription-free and independent …

Meanwhile, only a minute amount of the donations collected (less than 2.5%, according to the Form 990) is actually spent in the developing world, despite WMF messaging that has emphasised, for the past decade or so, that more money is needed to support Wikipedia development in less affluent countries. In reality, most of the money is spent on salaries in the US.

(Source of fundraising data: Wikimedia Foundation tuning sessions on Commons, Advancement slides.)