Movement Strategy and Governance/Newsletter/6

Welcome to the sixth issue of Movement Strategy and Governance News! The newsletter distributes relevant news and events about the Movement Charter, Universal Code of Conduct, Movement Strategy Implementation grants, Board of Trustees elections and other relevant topics. The purpose of this newsletter is to help Wikimedians stay involved with the different projects and activities going on within the broad Movement Strategy and Governance team of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The MSG Newsletter is scheduled for quarterly deliveries, while there’s the more frequent Movement Strategy Weekly, which is designed to cater to Wikimedians who want to closely follow our processes. You can leave feedback or ideas for future issues on the Newsletter talk page. You can also help us by translating the newsletter issues in your languages and sharing the newsletter on your community portals and platforms. Also remember to please subscribe to this Newsletter here.

Thank you for reading and participating!

Leadership Development: A Working Group is Forming!

In February, the Community Development (CD) team published a Call for Feedback about a Leadership Development Working Group, which was shared in 42 languages. The Movement Strategy & Governance team’s 16 language facilitators collected feedback from their language and regional communities through multiple channels: Meta-wiki, Telegram, 1:1 meetings, community calls, on-wiki discussion boards and others.

The Call for Feedback was a crucial step to gather community input about leadership development and the working group, as community members were able to share feedback about the meaning of “leader,” the composition of the working group, and the need for continued community feedback. You can view a summary of the feedback on Meta-wiki.

Furthermore, the application to join the Leadership Development Working Group closed on April 10th, 2022. Up to 12 community members, including volunteers and affiliate staff will be selected to participate in the working group, with a term commitment of one year starting in May 2022. To find a detailed description of the working group structure, please find it on the Meta-wiki page. If you have further questions or concerns, please email the Community Development team: comdevteamwikimedia.org.

Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelins ratification results are out!

On 24 January 2022, the Movement Strategy and Governance (MSG) facilitation team supported the translation and publishing of the updated enforcement guidelines for the Universal Code of Conduct, covering over a dozen languages. The document was produced by a volunteer-staff drafting committee that worked throughout 2021 to produce the recommendations.

The team then engaged and encouraged community members to review and comment on the document through a series of community conversations leading to a global vote. The global decision process via SecurePoll was held from 7 to 21 March. Over 2,300 eligible voters from at least 128 different home projects submitted their opinion and comments. The results of the vote have now been published here. You can read more about the UCoC project.

Movement Discussions on Hubs

The Global Conversation event on Regional and Thematic Hubs was held on Saturday, March 12, 2022. Participation at the event was open with a request for pre-registration. As a result, anyone interested in the hubs conversation could participate, irrespective of their actual intent to start or continue working on a regional or thematic hub. The event was eventually attended by 84 Wikimedians with diverse backgrounds and experiences from across the movement. The goal of the event was to:

Share the findings from the Hubs Dialogue qualitative research interview series.
Validate the key findings of the research with the participants.
Clarify whether the identified shared needs can only be fulfilled by a Hub structure.
Gather more inputs for drafting a preliminary definition of Hubs.

Until now there is no specific clear definition of hubs; one of the goals of the conversation was to try to propose a definition based on analyzing the generally shared needs that were concluded from the hubs dialog, and try to understand what really is related to the essence of hubs.

This phase of the process is just for piloting and learning for practice, as it will take time to get to a really good formal consensus across the movement about what qualifies as a hub, and the exclusivity of hubs that makes it different from affiliates. There is a need to specify the minimum viable piloting criteria, understand what criteria hubs need to meet to form, and pilot parties to do some actual work around the regional and thematic coordination. Conversations will continue, and will need to be well connected and aligned with the charter conversations, which will tackle the governance questions that exist all around the movement.

The summary report is published on Meta-wiki.

Movement Strategy Grants Remain Open!

Since the start of the year, six proposals with a total value of about $80,000 USD have been approved. There are also seven fully submitted proposals currently being reviewed and awaiting decisions, and twice as many proposals still in the idea stage being supported by MSG facilitators to help transform the ideas into full proposals. A big congratulations to those who are now in the process of implementing their projects. Here’s a full list of projects approved so far:

Movement Strategy Grants reopened in October last year. MSG facilitators have been engaging with various individuals, affiliates and user groups to increase knowledge about Movement Strategy and support the transformation of ideas into full projects and proposals. Through this effort, we are learning a lot about the challenges that many face in developing strong proposals and getting the support needed to not only apply for funds, but also to engage fully in Movement Strategy discussions.

Do you have a movement strategy project idea? Are you unsure how your ideas fit into Movement Strategy and if those ideas are fundable through MS grants? Please feel free to reach out to a facilitator to request support. You can also reach out to us at strategy2030wikimedia.org, if you have any questions related to Movement Strategy Implementation Grants or ideas you want support for.

The Movement Charter Drafting Committee is All Set!

In October 2021, about 1,000 Wikimedians participated in an election and selection process to form the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC). The Committee consists of fifteen members, and aims to create a document that will define the future governance of the Wikimedia movement. After months of hard work, the Committee has agreed on the essential values and methods for its work, and has started to create the outline of the Movement Charter draft.

During its first five months together, the Drafting Committee invested significant amounts of time in establishing its work systems. For example, the Committee created documents to define its Principles and how it makes internal decisions, put together a communications plan, and updated the timeline of the drafting process. The Committee also replaced one of its members due to health reasons, agreed on a way to work with the Board of Trustees and refurbished its information page on Meta-wiki.

Currently, the Drafting Committee is discussing the first version of the draft Movement Charter's outline. To hear about the outline, once it is published, and more about the Committee's work, we invite you to follow the MCDC Updates (regularly published on the 10th of each month).

Introducing Movement Strategy Weekly - Contribute and Subscribe!

If you ever found it difficult to find your way between the many different Movement Strategy pages, or struggled to know what is going on and where you can participate, we invite you to subscribe to the newly-launched Movement Strategy Weekly! On this simply-accessible portal on Meta-wiki, you will find up-to-date news about the various ongoing projects, upcoming events and participation opportunities in Movement Strategy.

The portal is connected to the various Movement Strategy pages on Meta-wiki (for example, the Hubs page), which are automatically updated through the portal, without duplicating translations or content. If you have a project you are working on, you are also welcome to submit it. The Movement Strategy and Governance Team welcomes submissions for updates from everyone. Please don't forget to subscribe to the updates and watch the Meta page!

Diff Blogs

Here are some publications on Diff about the Movement Strategy, movement governance, and related topics which you may find interesting:

Voting for the Enforcement Guidelines for the UCoC – community members share their insights: four Wikimedians sharing their insight on the importance of the existence of an Universal Code of Conduct and urgency of having emerging communities represented in the now-finished global vote to ratify its Enforcement Guidelines.
How does the Wikimedia movement innovate in free knowledge?: our colleague Kannika Thaimai from Wikimedia Deutschland outlined the plan(s) to implement Movement Strategy's recommendation on Innovate in Free Knowledge.
Leadership Development Working Group: A working group is forming: the Community Development team announcing the creation of a working group to advise on the leadership development initiative.
Other interesting things: Wikimedia Argentina's workshop on digital citizenship and Wikimedia Ukraine's lessons learned from providing scholarships for online conferences.