Reading the Futures Lab as strategy

The Wikimedia Futures Lab brought together 100 Wikimedians to collaboratively design ways to respond to global trends impacting the movement. The format was an “ideathon”, and the focus on varied experiments rather than one big solution. 

I participated in the Lab as an expert, and asked myself afterwards: what if we read the Futures Lab’s experiment proposals not as isolated ideas, but as collective signals of various strategic directions?

One of the goals of the event was to “propose and adapt strategies to stay relevant”. Each proposal for an experiment can be treated as a voice of support for a certain strategic direction. And the sum of these ideas can be analysed to reveal a theory of change that emerged at the Futures Lab. This post reverse-engineers this vision.

Five pillars of a Wikimedia mission

The Futures Lab wasn’t designed to produce a unified strategy, as each experiment was developed independently. There was no process in place to fit them together. But when you step back and look at the full body of proposals, a coherent picture emerges. The collective intelligence of the participants points to five strategic pillars:

• Product: Create multiple entry points and formats while maintaining Wikipedia as a canonical source;
• Reach: Meet readers across platforms and formats while driving them back to Wikipedia as source;
• (Experimentation) Infrastructure: Build robust experimentation capacity and data systems to enable rapid learning.
• Community: Invest in making contribution rewarding, welcoming, and sustainable for multiple generations;
• Ecosystem: Assert Wikipedia’s unique value in an AI-saturated world through strategic alliances and a principled approach;

The rest of this blogpost looks at the pillars, and the various proposals in more details. My goal is to understand which of these strategic approaches were the most popular, and how they align together.

Capacity to address challenges is centralized

The proposals are heavily skewed towards centralized work, especially platform or product work. This is the type of work that mainly the Wikimedia Foundation, and a few large chapters like Wikimedia Deutschland, are best placed to do. About half of the proposals (from Product and Reach pillars) address major platform developments, like integrating videos, developing new products for users or building AI tools for editors. This is surprising, taking into account that the participants were meant to come up with ideas for small, localized experiments.

There is a much smaller group of proposals proposing decentralized action, mainly related to the Community pillar: working in various Wikimedia communities on refreshing policies, supporting editors, local practices, or research. The outcomes of the Lab suggest a skew – a stronger interest – in infrastructural solutions. It is also possible that the “experiment” framing encourages more technical solutions to be explored – as opposed to alternative frames like “social innovation”.

Nevertheless, working with the polarity between centralized technology work and decentralized community work seems to be key for any future strategy. Still, some of the proposals broke this pattern. A proposal for a rapid deployment of experimental features targeted four different Wikipedia projects – and presumably not the core English language one. A proposal for reviewing and refreshing policies could be applied across the Wikipedia projects, in a decentralized manner. And another proposal, for leveraging Wikimedia’s position to support ethical AI systems and solutions, depends heavily on partners from outside the movement.

A favorable stance towards AI tools

The event also offered an opportunity to get a sense of the collective position of movement members on the extent to which we need to engage in building and deploying AI solutions. If we treat Lab participants as a good sample, the data suggests broad support for such engagement. There was strong interest in building tools like an AI co-pilot for editors, which would automate tasks for experienced editors and help onboard new ones; or an AI-based tool that would help admins manage edits done by newcomers; or one that uses generative AI tools to create short video summaries of articles.

Automation of work done by the current community of editors emerged as a potential strategy that can support  the development and support offered for communities of human editors.

Partnerships and an ecosystem view

As global trends were presented and discussed in the first part of the Futures Lab, various types of partnerships were not in the limelight: content partnerships, Wikimedia Enterprise partnerships, Wikimedians in Residence. The list of key actors and stakeholders that were typically mentioned includes: the Wikimedia platform, editors, readers, and Big Tech AI platforms that impact Wikimedia in various ways.

Even the analysis of traffic data – a key evidence for trends impacting Wikipedia today – focus on visits to the platforms itself. The movement lacks an awareness of how Wikipedia and its content is being intermediated and reused, often by organizations that are in some ways partners of Wikimedia. Possibly, understanding these broader patterns would point to new strategies.

This simplification is possibly necessary, in order to drive a clear message about the global trends impacting Wikimedia. But it also has a blind spot, when it comes to partners and the broader ecosystem of the digital commons, in which Wikimedia are situated. At multiple times during the meeting, and in many conversations, I felt that partnerships are key to dealing with trends and challenges.

This intuition was confirmed by outcomes of the ideathon, as popular proposals included  “alliances and partnerships against Big Tech exploitation” and “partnering to boost ethical AI organizations”. These proposals offer a strong ecosystem focus and suggest that partnerships can help secure Wikimedia’s future in the new knowledge loop, to establish strategic partnerships and to set expectations for reusers, in order to protect the commons. The outcomes of the Futures Lab send a strong signal that partnerships need to be a key pillar of Wikimedia’s response to global trends.

(Full disclosure: I was a member of the Partnerships Working Group in the Movement Strategy process).

Making experiments happen

The Futures Lab can also be seen as an exploration of the dynamic between two logics driving the Movement: a Platform logic that bets on technical solutions and Wikimedia as a platform; and a Movement logic that puts faith in Wikimedia’s collective intelligence and energy.  Wikimedia’s success in facing the global challenges and adapting to them requires both.

The proposals from the Lab skew heavily toward the first logic — centralized, platform-scale solutions. But the most interesting ones are those that bridge both: connecting the Foundation’s capacity to build and deploy at scale with the distributed energy of communities and partners willing to test, adapt, and learn locally. The Futures Lab process, by seeding experiments across the movement, is itself an attempt at such bridging.

If the Futures Lab process leads to a deeper understanding of global trends, and builds the connective tissue between people willing to experiment — that infrastructure of collaboration may prove as valuable as any single experiment coming out of Frankfurt.