Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Process/Steering Committee/Notes/2017-02-17

Community Process Steering Committee

February 16 or 17, 2017

Meeting A: 8 a.m. Pacific (4 p.m. UTC) (See conversion)

Meeting B: 3 p.m. Pacific (11 p.m. UTC) (See conversion) OR 2 p.m. Pacific (10 p.m. UTC) (See conversion)

Continuing committee members

Committee members

• Risker, Canada, Individual contributor/Former ArbCom/Functionary/Election Committee/FDC
• Lucy Crompton-Reid, UK, Staff/ED of WMUK
• Florence Devouard, France, Former WMF Board/WMF Adv Board/Individual contributor
• Nicole Ebber, Germany, Staff of WMDE
• Mykola Kozlenko, Ukraine, WMUA
• Dumisani Ndubane, South Africa, WMZA/Former FDC
• Sandra Rientjes, Netherlands, Staff/ED of WMNL
• Kaarel Vaidla, Estonia, Former ED of WMEE
• Liam Wyatt, Italy, Individual contributor/GLAM/FDC
• Andrea Zanni, Italy, Wikimedia Italy, Wikisource leader

In attendance

Meeting A

• Andrea, Lucy, Nicole, Sandra, Dumi
• Core Team: Guillaume, Suzie, Shannon, Ed
• CE Support: Jaime A (facilitator), Sarah M (notes)

Meeting B (1)

• Risker, Liam, Mykola
• Core Team: Suzie, Shannon, Guillaume
• CE Support: Jaime A (facilitator), Nick W (notes)

Meeting B (2)

• Florence, Kaarel
• Core Team:  Guillaume, Suzie, Shannon, Ed
• CE Support: Jaime A (facilitator), Nick W (notes)

Agenda

HH:00 Welcome and Orientation: Following-up & Milestones Review

HH:10 Overall Prototypes Updates: Guided Discussion

HH:35 Toolkit Review

HH:55 Wrap-up and Next Steps

HH:00 Welcome and Orientation: Following-up & Milestones Review

Task	Status
Promote the coordinator position to metapedians and languages needing more applicants	Complete - Seems we may have viable candidates for all positions at this point, thank you to those who helped to spread the word and outreach to potential applicants.
Continue to add any additional feedback to the prototype drafts	Complete
Continue to share any additional feedback and ideas to the toolkit development iterations	Ongoing through Feb 24th
Review Audit of 2010 process with specific recommendations for 2017 process (more detail on the complexity around this to follow)	Additional work being done on this after we complete the Toolkit
Core team to take feedback into final prototypes and plan for posting to Meta	Updated Prototype 4 for Tracks A and B. big change in the graphic to accommodate the requested changes and better represent the flow of discussions.
Core team to take first round feedback for toolkits into second iteration for next week	Toolkit  - still in progress
Core team to take feedback into framing draft	See Strategy brief draft

• January 20: The Committee holds the first to discuss design parameters for the two track processes (organized groups and individual contributors) and share ideas on process with the core strategy team. COMPLETE
• January 27: The core strategy team shares the first draft of the two processes for discussion with the Committee and iteratively improves it based on comments.
• February 3: Post Draft #1 of process on Meta for comments; core strategy team shares the second draft of the two processes for discussion with the Committee and iteratively improves it based on comments.
• February 9: Post Draft #2 of process on Meta for comments; core strategy team shares the third draft of the two processes for discussion with the Committee and iteratively improves it based on comments.
• February 13: Post Final Process on Meta
• February 17: Toolkits review - Specific action targets TBD
• February 24: Toolkits review - Specific action targets TBD

:00 notes

Group A

• Jaime A - Welcome & updates: 1) previously concerned about not having viable candidates for contractor position and it looks like we now we do. 2) Getting additional feedback for prototype and toolkit drafts - looking to finalize 3) Core team has brought updated prototype 4 and there is a toolkit that has progress (information below). On time with review but we also need to spend time reviewing prototype

Group B (1)

• Jamie: Welcomes, progress on: Success getting candidates for all positions, incorporating feedback on the prototype and toolkit drafts. Any questions or feedback on the Audit?
  • Will keep in the action item queue.
• Jamie: Updated prototype… [next section]

Group B (2)

• Jamie: Welcomes, progress on: Success getting candidates for all positions, incorporating feedback on the prototype and toolkit drafts. Any questions or feedback on the Audit?
• Finalization of prototype delayed due to your concerns, removed beta testing and updated language to emphasize plurals

HH:10 Overall prototype updates: guided discussion

The Core team has also further developed the framing of the movement strategy on meta (Strategy brief draft, Prototype 4)

• Review of timeline and cycles to better accommodate more convergence of ideas across groups and individuals
• Too short timeline to stand-up beta conversations - eliminated
• Additional changes to the prototypes
• Language revisions/clarifications needed as identified in the framing review last week: Discuss (currently made more generic on the prototype. Need to hear your ideas.)

:10 notes

Group A

• Suzie (sharing her screen) - had a preliminary prototype that we shared to the first group; last night Suzie did version 2 which has some refinements. Added how Tracks C & D will be playing into the whole things. Those are still being fleshed out. Big things are graphics for A&B. Track B might do separate conversations - everyone has options to participate. Cycle 1 has the WMCon with Track A participants going to be there. These are all opt-in. We want everyone to realize they don’t have to sign in for everything. Changed the language around Cycle 1-3. Finalized is the level of the strategic direction. Hopefully the priorities are closer in.
• Lucy - Mic is not working but I’m very pleased with the changes; combining Tracks A&B makes a lot of sense
• Andrea - Also clear to me
• Suzie - Track A can start having conversations as early as March 1 but on wiki won’t happen until March 10 since that’s when the language specialists will start
• Lucy - Also having three cycles works I think with ensuring more people involved with synthesis
• I have a very specific question - our AGM is on 15th July, would this be too late for involving community in cycle 3 at this in person gathering? No worries if it is (too late)
• Suzie - It’s a little bit out of the window but if you’re able to feed into the system, I’d like to take the info; If you have information starting to come out, just make sure that makes sense
• Guillaume - You could start discussing Phase 2
• Andrea - We should make it more clear that you can join Track A only, Track B only, or you could participate both
• Nicole - I’m still wondering how this would look in practice.
• Suzie - Should we make it more explicit on the toolkit so that people could make their own decision in a better. Showing up in Cycle 1 is critical and showing up in Cycle 3 is critical but they all have their benefits.
• Guillaume - We should make it clear that if you come late in the cycle that you can’t argue the same point over and over again - we won’t have the same conversations in cycle 3 that were had in cycle 1
• Sandra - There will be three opportunities for people to meet in real life and have this discussion but there’s still the ability to have input for both online and real life.
• Guillaume - We put everything on Meta so we know what was discussed
• Suzie - Do the description on the cycles make you less anxious in how we’re talking about the direction
• Sandra - language could be a little clearer
• Nicole - Cornelius and I met with the track facilitators - how can we work with this and they were were looking along the lines of theme and theme segments so that we could come from fragments into a whole
• Andrea - I'd very much like to read some examples that you have in mind. I fail to imagine one theme that is different from "universal access to all human knowledge", which already is the vision. Maybe you can explain us better what you think.
• Jaime - It seems important from folks comments that we make a clear distinction as to the height or level of the thematic direction vs. the mission vs. organizational strategies.
• Lucy - Your thematic statements sound like outcomes to me...but again, probably just semantics!
• Dumisani - Tracks looks very good, I just need more elaboration on the synthesizing - Synthesis/sense-making is with smaller group and not necessarily community participating
• Nicole: agree with what Dumi said. to avoid the feeling of this being a "black box"
• Suzie - Making a graphic to demonstrate would be helpful and is important
• Dumi - A separate graphic would be very good

Group B (1)

• Suzie: reviewing language. Baseline language added. Re: confusion over Track A&B, now combined into 1 graphic.  The cycles themselves are still the same. Cycle 3 has deepened per last week's discussion. Still need to finalize its direction.
• Cycle 1: Track A might have facilitated conversations alone. Ditto Track B. We've added in a "joint A&B discussion" - an organized group might decide "we don't want to have a conversation with just our own group/board" and thus include more participants. Re: Track A cycle 1 should all be in-person, there was some pushback that we should have flexibility to also have on-wiki discussions.  Not sure how it will be everyone together. Cycle 2 similar to last week, but shows how the 3 are separated. Cycle 3  -find top themes, and further understand their implications. - Does this seem like a good improvement?
  • Risker: I like the graphic, it seems to pull things together much better (+1s from Liam and Mykola)
• Still want to send invitations to smaller groups and individuals, so that we get more information in before Berlin.
  • Mykola: For A&B in the middle, what's difference between cycle 1 & 2?
    • Suzie: This was regarding the earlier comment, and pushback that Track A would only have offline and facilitated discussions.  Good to have it confirmed.
    • Mykola - It will be important for groups who are A AND B track to have on-wiki component
    • From chat: Risker: good idea, Mykola, flexibility of how/where to have conversations. There are many ancillary benefits to in-person discussions
    • Mykola: (and some disadvantages if nobody knows how to organise them appropriately)
• Shannon and Jamie have been working on the information flow structure, almost ready. Shannon: Yup, part of toolkit.
  • Liam: About the 2 yellow blocks, with the bit underneath "track B's blue band", is that just artistic? Suzie: Yup.
  • Liam: What does the joint A&B discussion look like? Is it parallel or merged?
    • Suzie: Some groups, e.g a large affiliate, might want to have discussions just amongst their staff, or just staff and membership, or staff and members and other volunteers (i.e., online contributors not affiliated with group).
    • Mykola: my idea was that we can write like "Joint A+B (optional)" - if they want to work together, they can. We don't want to make people think they need/ought to participate in THREE places!  E.g. Punjabi, where most editors are in the user group.
    • Suzie: With 110+ affiliates and thorgs, it's up to them.
    • Suzie: Support team will be looking at making the contacts, making sure discussions are happening, making sure summaries are progressing and being posted.
    • Jamie: There will be conversations led with online contributors through language coordinators as well as through affiliates as well as conversations among affiliates and other organized groups
    • Liam: doc results from the joint discussions - how will it be categorized/marked onwiki?
      • When summary are submitted, we'll ask "what group are you? A? B? A+B?"  - We want to understand where the info is coming from, but during the synthesis and sensemaking it will be merged together, plus continuous feedback loops.
    • Risker: Elephant in the room - all docs still talk about a single final direction...
      • Suzie: next section!

----Strategy Brief/Framing discussion time---

• Suzie: "Identify what might be left out if the focus is only on these top themes?" and "During this period the top 3-5 themes will be reviewed and incorporated into this final direction" - we might naturally get radically different themes that can't be grouped together. We have to plan for all outcomes.
• How do you see it, what makes sense to you?  We know it feels like the "narrowing" exercise in 2010 which lost good ideas to focus on just 2. Where that ended up with focus on infrastructure and grants, to me, feels very tactical and not at the level we are playing at here.  But we do want a strategic direction, that allows to people to work with focus.
  • Risker: In an external org strategy session, we were looking at 5 potential directions, but the people involved didn't want to eliminate any of them, because each had crucial ideas, and brought good people to the table, and eliminating any would cut off potential growth.  We don't want to end up with a single thing that is too generic, or too specific (disenfranchising some editors).
    • Guillaume: Aiming for coherent, internally consistent, would have sub-themes or sub-goals. E.g. two mutually exclusive themes that say "Just Tech" AND "Just Education" wouldn't work, but "Tech & Education in this way" instead.
      • Risker: We may be saying similar things differently, to me it is in how we say it, not we are doing tech and we are doing education that is problematic - how we frame is very important to not be singularly exclusive
    • Liam: The words are now in plural in many places, which helps, e.g. "themes", "commitments",
    • Nick: we need a combination glossary/infographic!
    • Suzie: Agreed on all, not too specific or generic.
    • Mykola: should promote not the 1 direction itself, but instead focus on the 3 (etc) goals. The direction could be the "title" of the document, but concerned if it's used for anything more than that. The main outcome of this strategy, should be these sub-goals.
    • Risker: yes, the"one direction" doesn't work without the themes/subthemes, they need to be completely integrated into the process
  • Mykola: On the cycles, what will come up between 2 & 3 ?  What will be the level of discussion in cycle 2?  Should they be more in depth discussions?  Or should the goal be to reduce the 20 into 5?
    • Suzie: Some reduction and some clustering. Some exploration of the depth in the existing themes.  If there are hundreds of themes in cycle 1, then we'll have to reduce. If it starts off smaller, then we can expand the scope.
      • The problem is are we asking the same question in cycle 2 & 3? We should be asking different questions.
        • Agreed. Probably a copy&paste mistake!

Group B (2)

• Suzie: Track A&B have pretty much the same activities now, just with different audience, these are now joined to make it easier to see the ways to participate. Main distinction is track A has Wikimedia Affiliates Conference plugged in there. The overall focus (but no rigidly defined) is for Cycle 1 - to find themes, Cycle 2 - to find clusters and further define, Cycle 3 - refine the top 3-5 thematic clusters into a cohesive direction, and understand their implications. We opened up the language to make it clear we're not aiming for "just 1 thing", we're just planning for all outcomes, e.g. if there are 5 distinct ideas that cannot be umbrella'd, we'll work with it.
• Suzie: [explain timeline graphic]. Thoughts?
  • Florence: Much much clearer than it used to be. One issue: "high-reach markets" and "low-reach markets" isn't clear.  Differences between Track C&D could use clarification.
    • Suzie: Will clarify and next update. Clarifications on names is on the to-do list. (High/Low also known as Global North/South, or Established/Emerging)
  • Kaarel: Question about criteria for clustering.  You talk about 20, I'd rather think of a dozen or so after cycle 1. It depends how we're going to cluster, and who's going to do it. For cycle 2, it's good to continue with top 5 - but big risk of them getting too vague or too concrete. E.g. the 2010 process provided 5 points, but they were items people thought we were doing anyway, and not able to used as a good direction, which is what we want to give the movement. Not a description of what we're doing already, but an inspiration for the future.  The themes need to be drawn out in a way that they're both descriptive AND inspirational. Need a clearer guide (for the volunteers, and for us to understand it) how exactly the clustering will be done.
    • Suzie: criteria for clustering is on the to-do list!  Core team will be working on that for next 2 weeks.  The steering committee will have concluded by then, but we might send it out to you for feedback anyway. - We're recommending the discussion summaries have thematic statements attached, via 1-3 keywords, which will enable the clustering. - We've reduced how much is coming out of each cycle (vs 2010 which was very wide, and resulted in thousands of dissimilar proposals with no way of easily clustering/comparing). - We have to be ready for 100+ clusters, but we hope for perhaps 40+, and will aim to get it down to 20+ by the end of cycle 1.
  • Florence: I agree with Kaarel on the 2010 outcome, that it was mostly descriptive of what we were already doing, not a direction. One element that will be important for the clustering, is to not attempt 'political correctness', or abstract/blankness. Maintain any provocative positions. If it's something that everyone agrees on, then it's not a direction. What we have currently is the right message for the outside world, a self-description.  But this movement strategy is something perhaps more for inspiring ourselves to do something differently. It must be provocative.
• Kaarel: Transition from Cycle 2.. It's great to have the channels drawn out, but concerned about the sentencing [??] of the outcome.  The community people who aren't into Strategy, might lose track of what else is needed from them in cycle 3, as it sounds quite repetitive.
  • Suzie: Spelling out the implications and tradeoffs, is part of it. Need to focus energy. Do we need more framing around this, or new words?
    • Kaarel: I think it is both but we have to be aware of tiredness of editors. This (cycle 3) is where we need the mandate from the communities. Must be framed well, but account for exhaustion and [TLDR overload].

HH:35 Toolkit Review/Workflow Graphic

The Core team has worked to flesh out more of the strategy toolkits (Toolkit draft)

• Changes to the front-end explanation, process flow
• Addition of Appendix on Facilitated discussions, including discussion roles, purpose, and discussion guide for 2-hr facilitated in-person meetings

:35 notes

Group A

• Shannon - (Sharing screen of the toolkit Community Discussion Flow diagram and walking through it.) We’ve decided to call volunteers discussion coordinators because it fits their role much more clearly. Asking community to be a discussion coordinator. We’ll give them virtual training and can connect them to someone as a point of contact. We’d love to have multiple people get more participants. Setting up the discussion over multiple platforms with list. The discussion coordinator will hopefully be able to translate into English to ensure that ideas from the community will come through in the strategy.
• Andrea - What happens after 7?
• Shannon - Ideas get channeled so that we have fruitful feedback on Meta. Core team will take ideas and factor them in
• Nicole - maybe it makes sense to put somewhere that discussions will be guided by a template so people don’t fear that there won’t be any structure.
• Jaime - would like to make it clear that there’s a goal and endpoint in progress as well as a process (in the toolkit)
• Suzie- We can expect that we have a number of people that might show up in person and they might disappear
• Lucy - Thinking very specifically about the UK, we’ll have discussions all over and not just in London
• Shannon - please give us feedback and take it directly so that we can get this finalized in the next week
• Sandra - The premises are going very well - good on that
• Guillaume - Draft that we started to show last week is on Meta with placeholders, please take a look/edit/comment on talk page

Group B (1)

• Shannon: "Discussion Coordinator" - doesn't need to do everything themselves, just general tasks that need to be covered.
  • Have attempted to give an understanding of what their work looks like, in the "Discussion Coordination Flow" graphic. [shared]
  • [run through the graphic]
    • Mykola: Do we expect that stage 6&7 will definitely happen?  If there are 200 summaries in Metawiki, do we expect the liaisons to translate them all? Could the ? team, prepare some sort of weekly newsletter?  If all languages did this it would be 40,000 translations…
    • Suzie: Might have multiple coordinators participate, and some will disappear partway through. Like the newsletter idea though.
    • Shannon: Re: step 6 & 7, the volume of translators
    • Mykola: Some will be redundant, and some will be unclear, but that's still a lot.
    • Shannon: Also translators will have their own intuition on what aspects will be of interest to their communities, or mirror ongoing topics.
    • Mykola: Difficult to understand, because I can't picture the structure of the ideas that will be summarized. [Having an example of what a Track A community summary from group Foo, looks like, would make this clearer. E.g. Long prose paragraphs? Bullet points? Diffs?]
  • Guillaume:
    • Premises - move to meta?
    • Briefing? Can we carve out some time next week?
      • Will add items to the email task requests.
  • Suzie: Score? :D  
    • Liam: thumbs up, Risker: Right direction, Mykola: Agree.

Group B (2)

• Shannon: [explains workflow graphic]  Have tried to build this out based on previous feedback. A) Gave clarity to the explicit tasks the Coordinators will do. B) Showing how the cross-location loops will work.  - Showing the steps of: Volunteer signup; Connecting volunteers to Coordinators and other facilitators; Inviting communities to participate; Initiating and facilitating discussions; Summarizing locally; Translating to Meta; Translating existing summaries from other communities from Meta to local language/location; Integrating Meta summaries into ongoing local discussions.
  • Florence: How will the coordinators be recruited? When/where will this happen?
    • Shannon: More ideas welcome. Currently, organized on meta, some ideas in Katherine's emailed updates.
    • Suzie: Part of the task of CE/Core lead team, will be making sure there are coordinators, and those coordinators are supported. Some staff time is allocated.
  • Kaarel: I like the visualization, clear and makes sense. Small note: For smaller communities, it doesn't mention Facebook which many of them use, and doesn't seem covered in the graphic. - Also, what form will this survey [??] take?  How organized? Do we want to set a word or character limit? Are we okay if different communities/groups that send summaries which differ from each other?
    • Suzie: It was in the prototype doc.. -- If each community has a discussion, and comes out with 20 themes, e.g. "Education - knowledge will be used to educate students in Global South" then capture keywords, "education/teaching/knowledge".  Using the form to capture this info. No character limit, but each box becomes a line in the database, thus enabling some sorting and deeper analysis.  E.g. these regions are looking at that, and …
    • Shannon: [Showing graphic]
    • Suzie: Short enough that summaries can be easily translated and reposted.
    • Kaarel: Want to be able to include citations, to back up the strategic themes.
    • Suzie: Right now it's on the group level, but each would also have raw notes.  Citations (who wrote/suggested what) could be used, yes.
    • Kaarel: Good.  We could also advise the summary translators to only translate relevant/crucial citations.
    • Suzie: Could add a field for that, to enable easier tracking back to origin, good idea.
  • Florence: Edward's email about the survey today, surprised me. It seems like potential overlap, with the survey being planned in the Movement Strategy.
    • I belie e that is an email reminder that was sent to the program and affiliate leader audience sample. A final reminder for a survey that was launched in January and will end after this month.
    • Kaarel: It would be good to not use email addresses, e.g.edwardgalvezsurvey [at] wikimedia.org[?] because they can get flagged into email spam. Especially when they include words like "this is your last reminder". But the Noreply address is at qesurveys.com [?]
  • Suzie: Also added in Agenda and Discussion guide. For various discussion types.  Plus Guillaume has done more work on the Strategy Briefing posted on Meta.

HH:55 Wrap-up and next steps

:55 notes

Group A

• Suzie - did we make any improvements from last week?
• Andrea - 8
• Lucy - 9
• Nicole - 9
• Sandra - 9
• Dumi - 8

Group B (2)

• Suzie -any improvements from last week?
• Kaarel - 7 - still concerned about the risks, the number of themes vs direction.
• Florence - 9
• Kaarel: Also appreciation for the 3 time slots for this meeting.

Task	Responsible	Target
Feedback on modified toolkit and discussion coordination flow diagram	Committee	Ongoing, please review and input for this iteration by Monday Feb 20
Review Audit of 2010 process with specific recommendations for 2017 process and see Link to performance against actual plan goals (more detail on the complexity around this to follow)	Committee	For next week
Review and discuss (ideally on the talk page, but other channels are also possible): Briefing (what every participant should know) and Premises (what every participant should agree with)	Committee	For next week
Updated Prototype 4 for Tracks A and B to Meta	Core Team	As soon as possible
Core team to takes second round feedback for Toolkit into second iteration for next week	Core Team	For next week