Wikimedia monthly activities meetings/Quarterly reviews/Wikipedia Zero/January 2015

The following are notes from the Quarterly Review meeting with the Wikimedia Foundation's Mobile Partnerships (Wikipedia Zero) team, January 20, 2015, 14:00 - 14:30 PST.
Please keep in mind that these minutes are mostly a rough transcript of what was said at the meeting, rather than a source of authoritative information. Consider referring to the presentation slides, blog posts, press releases and other official material

Present (in the office): Geoff Brigham, Rachel diCerbo, Haitham Shamma, Toby Negrin, Anna Koval, Tighe Flanagan, Tomasz Finc, Erik Moeller (taking minutes), Carolynne Schloeder, Yana Welinder, Yuri Astrakhan, Lisa Gruwell, Lila Tretikov, Adam Baso, Jorge Vargas, Tilman Bayer (taking minutes, from 2:15), Adele Vrana, Dan Foy, Damon Sicore, Katherine Maher, Manprit Brar; participating remotely: Smriti Gupta

Agenda:
What we said we would do - 1 minutes
What we did - 3 minutes
What we learned - 8 minutes
What’s next - 12 minutes
Asks - 1 minute

Carolynne presenting

What we said

slide 4

[slide 4]

What we did

Keeping goals piece short in this meeting to focus on strategy

slide 6

[slide 6]

Q2/Q3:
- PV goal at risk after correction of measurement methodology; overall concern that chasing pageviews cannot be key long term objective
- After correction, 50% PV growth in 2014

Key lessons learned

slide 12

[slide 12]

- Zero-rating alone is not driving growth; need to address awareness & UX issues

slide 14

[slide 14]

- Marketing does drive growth, and we do have internal & external evidence of that
- Affordability definitely still an issue in many African countries, but increasingly less so around the world
- Partners want to help & are able to help beyond promoting WP Zero

What's next

slide 16

[slide 16]

Strategic shift
- Focus on one deep dive market and drive growth beyond zero-rating; secondary emphasis on supporting WP Zero inbound requests (but no outbound scouting)

we are kind of victims of our success
hardest part will be to say no to incoming requests
example of country where we are already in the market, but data cost not an issue: Pakistan
Lila: what is deep dive market in this context?
Carolynne: intersection of: has potential and we're not present yet
also, should be representative (for other markets)
still see a lot of opportunity in working with edu program
Lila: why edu program as opposed to other programs?
Carolynne: because many partners have edu as part of their CSR commitments
e.g. in case of Digicel, Jorge is already working with Floor

slide 17

[slide 17]

Transition plan this q:
still measuring pageviews, but looking for other success metrics
Erik: this enables us to see whether other strategies beyond zero-rating can drive growth in key regions
Toby: is this how you want to approach emerging markets?
Carolynne: we were blanketing emerging markets with Zero before, now we want to focus where we can have the most impact, figure out how to grow.
Lila: ...

slide 18

[slide 18]

Carolynne: Continuing to work with Yana, over to her for a quick update
Yana: not a lot happened regarding NN in last quarter
goal: move away from negative/defensive rhetoric, to A2K perspective
hope other kinds of collaborations come out of that

slide 19

[slide 19]

Carolynne:
Q3:
still want to work with (existing partners)
Lila: these goals look still quite soft, need more clarity
so keep the pageviews goal until you have a new one
wrapping up previous work is a task, not a goal
Open Library: quantify this goal
keep the open goal from Q2
Erik: team is going through a significant shift now, so deep dive goals necessarily still high level at this stage
Lila: agree we should focus on partnerships by market first
Carolynne: we're out of time, can't cover Q4 preliminary goal

Asks

slide 21

[slide 21]

prioritize Anaytics even more, work more closely with Comms