Summary
#WhoTellsYourStory? Wikimedia Foundation executives share their mission to make Wikipedia a more inclusive and equitable place — and detail how they incorporated OKRs to do it.
In May 2020, Wikimedia Foundation’s then-C.O.O. Janeen Uzzell was talking to Katherine Maher, the foundation’s C.E.O. at the time. “None of this matters if we can’t tell people how we’re tracking it,” said Uzzell said… “We might as well just tweet like everybody else.”
The two leaders were deciding how the foundation would respond to the global protests spurred by the killing of George Floyd.
After several days of discussions, Uzzell and Maher published a statement on Medium declaring the foundation’s nine commitments to advance racial justice in their organization. Those commitments included “restructuring our resources, funding, and governance structures to share power with local communities” and “safeguarding the ability of minority and marginalized voices to participate safely in Wikimedia spaces.”
They ended the statement with this line: “With every edit, we write history.”
Building a resource for future generations
The Wikimedia Foundation is the global nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and other projects, such as Wiktionary and Wikimedia Commons. The foundation’s mission is to make knowledge free and accessible to every human on the planet.
The foundation supports a movement of thousands of volunteers who contribute to Wikipedia. Its vision is to build “a world where every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.” But this ambitious vision depended on the operational groundwork that was being laid that year.
Uzzell, a former global healthcare executive and head of Women in Technology at G.E., worked at the nonprofit from 2019-2021. One of her main tasks was to help the Wikimedia Foundation meet its goals for 2030, becoming the essential infrastructure for an ecosystem of free knowledge.
She knew that bringing the mission and vision to life was going to take a new level of discipline. Because the foundation supported a site with more than over 55 million articles, visited by more than 1.5 billion unique devices each month, it needed to stop seeing itself as a startup. The foundation needed a more robust system to measure its progress, but also to help leaders decide which initiatives should continue and which ones could be paused.
Uzzell, along with the foundation’s then-Director of Operations Lydia Hamilton, worked together to iterate on an Objectives and Key Results (OKR) system at the organization.
When implementing OKRs, they realized how vital it was to make each goal mission-oriented. The Floyd killing and the protests in its wake in the summer of 2020 led to a change in how the foundation defined its mission: It now includes advancing racial justice inside and outside the organization. Because of this, OKRs for inclusion have become a top-level priority.
Making open platforms equitable
Uzzell recognized that being an open platform isn’t enough. “We can’t just assume that because we’re an open-source platform, that we practice equity,” she said.
Only a tiny fraction of people who read Wikipedia also contribute their knowledge and expertise to Wikipedia. More needs to be done to ensure that the pool of contributors is diverse. Uzzell is a champion for expanding the range of perspectives featured on the world’s most-read encyclopedia, using the hashtag #WhoTellsYourStory.
“It is 1 percent of the world that is giving a perspective on all of these stories. And the way that we work on the inside can help change how we work in the movement,” Uzzell said. “The stronger we can become has a direct implication to the product we serve to the world.” The #WhoTellsYourStory initiative reflects the Wikimedia Foundation’s drive to grow and diversify the knowledge provided on Wikipedia. Inclusion OKRs provide clarity and focus to the mission, as well as the right metrics to measure and improve performance.
Setting OKRs for inclusion is happening in stages
For fiscal year 2021, Uzzell, Hamilton, and the rest of the foundation’s leadership team started embedding equity into their current strategic OKRs. In 2022, equity became a leading principle for all OKRs.
“We now want to add to that guiding light of racial justice and equity, so that it is a default out the gate when we’re planning our goals,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton also had operational expertise from her time at G.E., and brought to the nonprofit a precise, nuts-and-bolts approach to operations. One of her tasks included working out the details to make sure there was a system of accountability with these racial justice and equity goals, forming an equity task force made up of both senior leadership and individual contributors.
The V.P.s or directors from each department involved in the task force provided strategic advisory support, cross-departmental visibility, and were accountable for executing the key deliverables. The task force also gave employees who were closer to the day-to-day operations a seat at the table to ensure a top-down and bottom-up balance.
“It’s really critical for us to have varying levels of leadership from each department. I’m leaning on the individual contributors to keep us honest,” Hamilton said.
All this hard work and preparation help ensure Wikipedia is a truly valuable resource for humankind for decades to come. But accomplishing it will take great focus and determination. Uzzell believes that OKRs made it easier for her and her team to reach their full potential.
“I’ve learned that culture shifts in practices can happen, but they have to be rooted in some guidelines and guardrails and specifics of how we will get the job done,” Uzzell said.
“And maybe not boiling the whole ocean at the beginning.”
