Program Capacity and Learning
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 | This conversation took place from February 1–19, and is now closed. We will update this page soon to reflect the outcomes. Thanks to everyone who took part! Read through the proposed projects • Find more information in the resources bar |
Program Capacity and Learning
Welcome to our strategy discussion page. Find our teams' main active portals below:
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Program Capacity and Learning was an integrated team in Community Engagement at the WMF, that brought together the Wikipedia Library, the Wikipedia Education Program and Learning and Evaluation teams. In this integrated team, we expanded our work to include GLAM support and Affiliate relationships. Even though we are not one team any more, we still hold this strategic projects in our annual plans, both for Learning and Evaluation team and for Programs team.
We conducted interviews with several stakeholders in November and December of 2015, including 12 key community members to help us define our focus and priorities. From these interviews, we were able to develop the team mission.
As two teams, our criteria to work on specific projects still remain the same. The criteria are:
- Impact: Increases content and / or contributors
- Scalability: Supports multiple communities, partnerships, and replication of best practices.
- Sustainability: Supports program and community capacity
- Community Leadership: Builds leadership, encourages collaboration, and engenders trust.
- Community Need: Points to the need for WMF staff support by multiple data sources.
Below you will find projects that we proposed for the Program Capacity and Learning team to work on over the next year, and beyond. They are focused on our two main support areas: Community Leadership Development and Programs Learning and Infrastructure. Which projects are most important to you? As we may focus on one or all of them, we need to know what is more important to Wikimedia communities all over the world.
On this page, we requested wikimedians feedback to help us decide which projects are most useful for them.
Join the conversation – Please share your thoughts on the page below by 19 February 2016!
At the moment, in addition to these projects described below, Learning and Evaluation team continues to offer ongoing support for program design, learning and evaluation; and Programs team continues to support program capacity for Wikipedia Education Program, The Wikipedia Library as well as GLAM.
Programs Learning and Infrastructure
[edit]Process: GLAM-Wiki Support
[edit]- What will we do?
We plan to embed support of GLAM-Wiki alongside WMF’s support of other high-impact programs like education and libraries, providing each team the same ability to learn, connect, and scale the most successful community-generated efforts from these critical programs.
- What will it look like?
GLAM-Wiki leaders actively teach leading content experts how to edit, and they facilitate uploads of millions of high-quality images. To more strategically leverage their work, we will give GLAM-Wiki leaders one person to act as a global point of contact, a connector among leaders and regions, and an advocate for software improvements that can multiply their efficiency ten-fold. Moreover, we will liaise with a number of teams throughout the WMF, such as Engineering and Strategic Partnership, that need connections to the GLAM-Wiki community to understand the needs and network of this vital community.
- Context and history
The GLAM-Wiki community is one of the strongest community-generated programs, providing many of the highest profile, and most productive external partnership for the Wikimedia movement. These partnerships with age-old cultural heritage institutions -- like the British Library, the US National Archives and the Smithsonian -- have greatly bolstered our credibility and expanded the Wikimedia movement’s reach and quality; but the WMF has not consistently supported GLAM-Wiki community leaders.
- Why GLAM?
GLAM collaborations provide the Wikimedia movement long-term presence in facilitating access to the World’s cultural history. Having a GLAM-Wiki effort at WMF will allow the WMF to strategically support these amazing volunteers and communities doing this inspiring work.
- Discussion
- In what ways does the GLAM-Wiki Support concept support the area Program Learning & Infrastructure?
- What questions or concerns do you have?
- Add a topic and leave your comments, or add to an existing topic, and sign below
Tool: Wikimedia Knowledge Hub
[edit]- What will we do?
The Program Capacity and Learning Team will support Knowledge Infrastructure to accelerate our learning across the Wikimedia Movement.
- What will it look like?
“The Hub” is a single point of entry where affiliates and community program leaders can find the information they need on how to run programs, polish outreach, and distill learning. Most importantly, it’s a place where they can find each other and share learning as well as connect with WMF staff.
- Why a Wikimedia Knowledge Hub?
At the heart of our work is connection, communication and learning across communities, but where do we go to connect, communicate and learn?
This is presented as a joint initiative by WMF Community Engagement (Program Capacity and Learning, Support and Safety) and Communications to support program leaders and affiliates. The Hub is a way to find people with the skills and expertise they’re looking for, to find guidance and answers to specific questions about what they are trying to do or build, and to find curated links to best practices and relevant documentation.
- Discussion
- In what ways does the Knowledge Hub Support concept support the area Program Learning & Infrastructure?
- What questions or concerns do you have?
- Add a topic and comment, or leave a comment on an existing topic, and sign below
Tool: Program and Events Dashboard
[edit]- What will we do?
The Program and Events Dashboard is software tailored for program leaders to manage and track programs and participants across Wikimedia projects. It will be based on the Wiki Ed Dashboard and Outreach Dashboard, but tailored to work for general programs across all Wiki projects and all languages.
- What will it look like?
The Program and Events Dashboard would prepare for programs/events (registration, creating event pages), distribute training materials, and track participants across locations or time periods and give real-time updates on program metrics. It will also create a cozy community space for peer review and asking questions.
- Why is this important?
Program leaders spend a lot of their precious time manually tracking participants and maintaining program resources such as event pages, training materials, and metrics for evaluation. Program management shouldn’t be a limiting factor in growing or scaling programs. The Programs & Events Dashboard will enable program leaders to focus on running great programs and not on tedious manual organizing and tracking.
- Discussion
- In what ways does the Programs & Events Dashboard support the area of Program Learning & Infrastructure?
- What questions or concerns do you have?
- Add a topic and leave your comments, or add to an existing topic, and sign below
Process: Outcome Mapping
[edit]- What will we do?
Outcome Mapping is, essentially, a social cartography of Wikimedia Programs that captures qualitative outcomes, local stories of programs, and shared movement impact.
- What will it look like?
Outcome Mapping emphasizes qualitative approaches for both processes and outcomes, it:
- surfaces stories of local programs to honor their diversity,
- provides qualitative approaches for evaluating outcomes across our programs landscape,
- enables the capturing and sharing of social and environmental changes targeted by our program leaders and their partners, and
- shifts away from assessing the products of a program and instead focuses on changes in behaviors and relationships.
- Why is this important?
We need to support affiliates and program leaders in getting beyond quantitative content metrics to mapping the qualitative outcomes of core programs as movement drivers for hundreds of implementations of core programs.
Outcome Mapping helps us learn about the social and environmental changes targeted by our program leaders and their partners. It articulates the impact of program work on the Wikimedia ecosystem and the wider world. It helps program leaders to be specific about their targets, the strategies that they employ, and the changes that they see. As a result, it will help us be more effective as a movement in terms of the results we achieve together.
- Discussion
- In what ways does the Outcome Mapping support the area Program Learning & Infrastructure?
- What questions or concerns do you have?
- Add a topic and leave your comments, or add to an existing topic, and sign below
Community Leadership Development
[edit]Process: Affiliate Partnerships
[edit]- What will we do?
The Affiliate Partnerships work will focus on building increased communication, trust, transparency and collaboration among Wikimedia Affiliates and the Wikimedia Foundation. This includes staff support for AffCom.
- What will it look like?
One feature of this work will be the development of an annual WMF scorecard (benchmark in 2016) providing year to year input to WMF on trust, products and community support.
Other work to support Affiliate Partnership includes facilitating internal WMF knowledge management about communities and best practices of community engagement; Support of a central knowledge hub for affiliate support and maximizing the value of conferences, site visits and high potential events and opportunities to extend movement wide impact and reach.
Affiliates are at the heart of our work in local communities. Through this work we can support trust, transparency and collaboration across our movement through support of Wikimedia Affiliates and increased partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation.
- Discussion
- In what ways does the Affiliate Partnerships support the area Community Leadership Development?
- What questions or concerns do you have?
- Add a topic and leave your comments, or add to an existing topic, and sign below
Process: Community Listening Project
[edit]- What will we do?
Do you need community input to make important planning decisions? The Community Listening Project is a series of activities and support for sharing, documenting and learning how to listen to communities and make well informed decisions.
- What will it look like?
In the first year, the Community Listening Project will focus on surveys and community consultations. Activities will include online and in-person workshops, as well as a dedicated effort to document resources in the Survey Support Desk and a Community Consultation toolkit. You will learn from your peers about when to use surveys or consultations and how to plan and manage the process. You may also gain technical expertise for interpreting results and how to be accountable to decisions.
- Why is this process important?
This project will help you save time when you need to start a survey or consultation. Future projects for the Community Listening Project could include learning about a Community Wishlist project, how to create and run committees, using mailing lists for decisions, and other tools.
Most important, the Community Listening Project will help you reach better decisions in a collaborative way with your communities. Together, the Wikimedia movement can become a recognized leader in collaborative decision-making.
- Discussion
- In what ways does the Community Listening Project support the area Community Leadership Development?
- What questions or concerns do you have?
- Add a topic and leave your comments, or add to an existing topic, and sign below
Process: Peer Mentoring & Leadership
[edit]- What will we do?
Wikimedia’s greatest strength is its community of volunteers. This proposed project leverages that strength by investing in resources and volunteers who will serve as peer mentors for the movement in enabling emergent leadership already existing in programs and other community activities.
- What will it look like?
Peer leaders will benefit from shared resources and targeted materials that help leaders navigate common leadership problems characteristic of the Wikimedia community to reduce duplicate efforts and systems. Mentors will have opportunities to connect with each other to collaborate and allow leaders to become better positioned to access available community resources, through WMF grants or other resource opportunities. Leaders would also be able to participate in an academy that will build skills and will recognize volunteers as emerging mentors for their contributions to the movement and growing their local community capacity.
- Why is this important?
The volunteer community has a wide range of experience and potential leaders, however, there have been very few efforts to help grow natural skills and support them with leadership resources, such as learning frameworks, peer recognition, and shared inter-community understanding of “leadership”.
Peer mentoring will invest in people. The Peer Leadership Academy will get beyond the Wikimedia Foundation's current capacity limitations to provide one-on-one support of leaders, beyond resources of the WMF or more developed affiliates, in major regions of the world through recruitment and training of regional volunteers.
- Discussion
- In what ways does the Peer Mentoring and Leadership support the area Community Leadership Development?
- What questions or concerns do you have?
- Add a topic and leave your comments, or add to an existing topic, and sign below