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.
RSS