Eugene Kim left his conference in central Buenos Aires last Thursday afternoon to visit the Plaza de Mayo, where the mothers of victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s march silently, their hair swept under white scarves.
The weekly marches began in 1977 to remember “the disappeared,” those who were snatched and killed by the dictatorship in an attempt to destroy the political opposition. Today, the mothers represent a movement, and they are joined by supporters as they march and there are key chains and T-shirts for sale. People like Kim come to take photographs.
“They have been professionalized,” Kim observed.
It’s inevitable, he says. He should know — he is in the professionalization business. Or consulting, as it is also known.
Kim’s latest client, as of July, is the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization in San Francisco responsible for Wikipedia projects around the world, which is spending US$600,000 to create a five-year strategic plan. And the conference he briefly ditched was the annual Wikimania gathering, held last week in the General San Martin Cultural Center, just off Corrientes Avenue, one of the main arteries of Buenos Aires and a short subway ride to the Plaza de Mayo.
Kim and the other newly hired wiki-consultants tended to stick out. They were a bit older. They were a bit better dressed (OK, a lot better dressed). They tended to travel in packs of two or three. And they were taking notes. Few had been to a Wikimania conference before, and they were clearly trying to figure out where to begin in remaking a miraculous online project that had reached Top 5 world status, with a total of more than 330 million visitors a month, without the benefit of consultants.
In addition to Kim, there was Jelly Helm, a former executive creative director at Wieden+Kennedy who worked for clients like Nike before leaving to focus on nonprofit work, and three members of the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consulting firm that will help analyze trends within the Wikipedia community.
SIMILAR ROLE
In a similar role is Matt Halprin, a partner of the Omidyar Network, a “philanthropic investing firm” created by Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, which last month announced a US$2 million grant to the foundation over two years. Halprin, a former vice president at eBay in charge of global trust and security, was just named to the Wikimedia board.
The wiki-consultants’ presence was the most tangible sign of soul-searching among Wikipedians, and certainly at the foundation. Wikipedia has never been more influential but this success has come with burdens — errors or vandalism can resonate around the world, while the largest projects, English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia, were losing steam, adding fewer articles and scaring off potential new contributors. And to a certain temperament, great success naturally leads to the question: How long can it last?
“There is a spirit and culture that is starting to shift,” Kim said of the need for a strategic plan. “That is a necessary thing. But the question is how do you scale without losing sight of your essence.”
A student of collaboration, Kim, whose consulting business is called Blue Oxen Associates, said he knows that any plan he formulates will have to “do it the wiki-way.”
“We will put those questions up on the wiki and have them go at it for an extended time and hope that we get something,” he said.
Kim will solicit proposals from the community, which will have its own wiki pages, and Wikipedians are being asked to commit 10 hours a week for four months to join task forces divided by issues of concern.
UNSPARING
Jimmy Wales, the public face of the project, was unsparing in his criticism when he addressed the conference.
“We are mostly male computer geeks,” he stated, adding that there may be a measure of diversity, but only in that “we are from different parts of the world.”
As he spoke, a chart showed the self-reported demographics of Wikipedia contributors — more than 80 percent male, more than 65 percent single, more than 85 percent without children, around 70 percent under the age of 30.
Some Wikipedias are dominated by articles about pop culture, Wales pointed out, especially Japanese Wikipedia; according to one of his slides, barely 20 percent of the articles on Japanese Wikipedia are about anything else.
More profoundly, he said that Wikipedia was losing sight of its commitment to give everyone in the world a free encyclopedia, particularly people in sub-Saharan Africa.
“Is it more important to get to 10 million articles in English, or 10,000 in Wolof?” he asked.
In her speech, Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, was effusive in her praise for all that Wikipedians have created, but she too thought there was reason for concern.
“I believe we are pretty suspicious outsiders,” she said, adding that there were good reasons for that. “We are vulnerable to exploitation — people want to monetize the traffic that comes to Wikipedia, or pursue a political agenda.”
“People want to help us,” she said. “We need to open ourselves up to external resources. It is important we open those doors and let those people in.”
Walking through Buenos Aires, Helm said this was unlike any communications assignment he had taken on.
“It is an awesome story to tell, but I have no idea what we’ll do in terms of tactics,” he said. “My hope is that no one will be able to say, ‘who did they hire to do this work?’”
Kim said one issue Wikipedians would need to examine would be “the introduction of bureaucratization,” as represented by outsiders like himself.
“It is important to me that my participation have a beginning and an end,” he said.
Trying to force a partnership between Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) and Intel Corp would be a wildly complex ordeal. Already, the reported request from the Trump administration for TSMC to take a controlling stake in Intel’s US factories is facing valid questions about feasibility from all sides. Washington would likely not support a foreign company operating Intel’s domestic factories, Reuters reported — just look at how that is going over in the steel sector. Meanwhile, many in Taiwan are concerned about the company being forced to transfer its bleeding-edge tech capabilities and give up its strategic advantage. This is especially
US President Donald Trump’s second administration has gotten off to a fast start with a blizzard of initiatives focused on domestic commitments made during his campaign. His tariff-based approach to re-ordering global trade in a manner more favorable to the United States appears to be in its infancy, but the significant scale and scope are undeniable. That said, while China looms largest on the list of national security challenges, to date we have heard little from the administration, bar the 10 percent tariffs directed at China, on specific priorities vis-a-vis China. The Congressional hearings for President Trump’s cabinet have, so far,
US political scientist Francis Fukuyama, during an interview with the UK’s Times Radio, reacted to US President Donald Trump’s overturning of decades of US foreign policy by saying that “the chance for serious instability is very great.” That is something of an understatement. Fukuyama said that Trump’s apparent moves to expand US territory and that he “seems to be actively siding with” authoritarian states is concerning, not just for Europe, but also for Taiwan. He said that “if I were China I would see this as a golden opportunity” to annex Taiwan, and that every European country needs to think
For years, the use of insecure smart home appliances and other Internet-connected devices has resulted in personal data leaks. Many smart devices require users’ location, contact details or access to cameras and microphones to set up, which expose people’s personal information, but are unnecessary to use the product. As a result, data breaches and security incidents continue to emerge worldwide through smartphone apps, smart speakers, TVs, air fryers and robot vacuums. Last week, another major data breach was added to the list: Mars Hydro, a Chinese company that makes Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as LED grow lights and the
RSS