Amanda Bittaker
| Tags | Social Impact, Strategy |
|---|---|
| Primary Session | Communities and Cross-Project Collaboration |
| Secondary Sessions |
Title Frameworks to connect infrastructure to the mission
Thesis We will better achieve social impact, succeed in our strategy, and fulfill our mission when the Foundation uses non profit programmatic frameworks when prioritizing and planning improvements to MediaWiki and other technologies.
Proposal Impact is an intangible, abstract social benefit and it can be difficult to consider how changes we make in MediaWiki will help or harm it. To illustrate the connections between infrastructure choices and impact and to incorporate those connections into our plans, we can use programmatic frameworks developed in the nonprofit professional communities. Frameworks used by these nonprofit communities for various types of programs and impact can explicitly and concretely link our engineering choices to the movement strategy and the social benefit we create. This increased attention to the social impact of our technical decisions and investments will in turn create increased investment from our communities, partners and potential allies beyond our community towards fulfilling our mission.
WMF programs such as New Readers and Structured Data on Commons, and Wikimedia community programs, such as Wiki Loves Monuments, model how building technology for well-defined social impact can structure our engineering and infrastructure choices towards more strategic and mission driven impact.
These programmatic frameworks can be helpful during annual planning, quarterly check ins, and throughout the process of deciding on, planning, implementing, and evaluating technological changes. We would be able to weigh and design intentionally for broad-end users while also supporting the targeted and specific organizing communities who use our technology towards our desired social impact. We could expand the impact that we achieve by consulting expert communities, such as educators, librarians, and activists, who will design additional social-impact programs and processes on top of those tools. We could also identify parts of our communities which already create desired impacts, and build technologies and technological services which increase the scale, effectiveness and efficiency of organizing contributors to fulfill our mission. Socio-technological decisions in our movement can be most successfully achieved when considering both social and technological benefits.
