Recommendation 6: Develop Capacity Building Modules for running partnership

Q 1 What is your Recommendation?

Develop Capacity Building Modules for running partnerships that will assist individual volunteers, affiliates and partners grow their capacity and learn from existing experience. These modules and trainings should be centrally owned, so they are researched, developed, supported and executed professionally for the benefit of everyone. They should be in a variety of formats (videos, written documentations, online courses, etc) and should be built to support multilingual users and a variety of contexts.

Q 2-1 What assumptions are you making about the future context that led you to make this Recommendation?

We are assuming that the future will not differ from the present state, where existing Wikimedians are in dire need for online resources to help them scale their work, learn new tools etc, and newcomers will continue joining us, and will need tools to help them gain relevant skills to develop partnerships in their own region, language and context. We must support those efforts by providing proper capacity building tools for them.

Q 2-2 What is your thinking and logic behind this recommendation?

Volunteers, affiliates and partners are constantly evolving their work, with new tools being developed and deployed to assist the work around partnerships. In addition, newcomes join our movement and find themselves asking the same questions and needing the same type of assistance (though its content may differ from one place to the other). We should be assisting both veterans and newcomers scale their work and build their capacity by providing the resources they could use.

This could mean modules for newcomes on topics such as: “How to talk to partners”, “How to start a partnership in a developing country?”, “How to cultivate a successful partnership without internet access?”, “How to create a successful offline event?”, “How to measure your success?” and “How to report back on your project and curate the knowledge gained?”; As well as training modules for existing / new tools.

Q 3-1 What will change because of the Recommendation?

Our volunteers, affiliates and partners will have important resources that they desperately need to work efficiently and build their community’s capacity to do more.

Q 3-2 Who specifically will be influenced by this recommendation?

All of the above.

Q 5 How does this Recommendation relate to the current structural reality?

Currently, there is no systematic means for capacity building. Volunteers sometimes create tutorials or other documentations, but they are not done professionally, not maintained, hard to find and scattered all over the web. One has to be “well connected” to hear about a new tool and learn how it works, not to mention someone new trying to learn the complexity that is the Wikimedia movement.