User:Group 4 ASM/sandbox

Practices
Definition: Methods, tools and procedures employed during strategizing

Strategic Plan
According to Wikipedia’s Strategic Plan, its Strategic Priorities are the following:
 * Stabilize infrastructure
 * Increase participation
 * Improve quality
 * Increase reach
 * Encourage innovation

Three Practices
It aims to achieve these priorities through these three practices:

Governance Model - sets the principles for the community (e.g. no ideas here are bad ones. There are no set of project rules)

Five Pillars - the five pillars encourage its contributors to write from a neutral point of view, treat each other with respect and promote its accessibility as an encyclopedia.

Top-Down Approach - Although the concept of Wikipedia encourages contributions from all stakeholders, the actual strategy suffers from a top-down approach.

Conclusion
We identified the paradox between the fact that the process needs to be flexible so that everyone can contribute but also needs to have rules (centralisation). Furthermore, the organisation recognised that the majority of contributors are under 30 and don’t have experience with strategic planning processes. Therefore,the firm concluded that it couldn’t participate in an open strategic planning process.

Praxis
Definition: Praxis refers to the activity comprising the work of strategizing.

Praxis is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, or realised. In the context of the Three Ps framework, Praxis refers to the activities that comprise the actual strategizing.

As such, Praxis encompasses all the activities involved in the formulation and implementation of strategy – the strategy activity and its relationship to the contexts in which it takes place.

The design of Wikimedia’s strategic planning process was characterised by four phases – or Praxis:

Phase 1: "Level-setting"

 * By asking questions such as Where is Wikimedia now? and Where should Wikimedia go? the process of collecting, analysing and synthesising relevant information to getting the project started was the first stage of the process
 * Knowledge-sharing was facilitated through a platform “Wikimedia-pedia”
 * A basic template for proposals was developed to encourage a broad set of inputs from stakeholders. Together with the Call for Participation, Wikimedia encouraged the community to be part of the process to benefit from their resources

Phase 2: "Deep-dives"

 * The Task Force Selection Committee which was in charge of coordinating and administrating the recommendations phase of the deep-dives
 * The deep-dive Praxis was characterised with the failure of relationship-building efforts, meaning the recommendations this part of the process was intended to deliver did not manifest

Phase 3: "Synthesis"

 * Following up on the recommendations of the Task Forces, they were to serve as a fundament for future discussions
 * The feasibility of recommendations was a key focus of the synthesis phase, which was to deliver a draft for a strategic plan

Phase 4: Business planning / Call to action

 * The previous stages of the process brought the final phase where Wikimedia’s priorities were summarised in five strategic goals
 * This brings the group to the next challenge of bringing the ideas into action

Practitioners
Definition: The role and identity of the actors involved in strategy making

Roles:
 * Sue Gardner (Executive Director):
 * Eugene Eric Kim (Project Manager):
 * Erik Möller (Deputy Director)
 * Jimmy Wales (Project Governance and Structure Manager)
 * Co-sharing communities (Contributors)

Phase 1: “Level-setting”
Eugene Eric Kim (Project Manager) and project team heavily engaged in relationship building with individual volunteers and chapters. Established a shared knowledge base; which aimed to illuminate the larger context of the planning process and support the identification of knowledge gap.

Phase 2: “Deep-dives”
“Task Force Selection Committee composed of 15 members were defining the mandates and selecting suitable individuals from among over 1,923 confirmed applications for a set of 14 task forces related to the three emerging strategic priorities of sustainability, development, and accessibility.”

This was less successful than hoped for.

Phase 3: “Synthesis”
Wikimedia made a 5 year strategic plan: Background and content; Shared beliefs and principles of the Wikimedia movements; movement priorities; role of the Wikimedia foundation in supporting and building the movement; movement initiatives helping to grow the movement and the projects.

Phase 4: “Business planning/call to action”
Michael Snow and Jimmy Wales launched an official “Call to Action” to enthuse volunteers to implement the directions identified throughout the process.

Wales (2011) said “People can cooperate and can produce great value with harmony as long as some fundamental values of mutual respect are used to set the ground rules."