Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Transition/Phase II Implementation input

Transition

Global events

Recommendations

Design

FAQ

Phase II of Wikimedia Strategy included a final round of community conversations around the the recommendations from January to March 2020. This page features some of the feedback received during the conversations that's likely to be relevant to the upcoming Implementation Phase of Strategy. It has been consolidated here as an important resource of community input for the Transition Phase and the implementation afterwards.

Purpose of this document

• This document presents a summary of input, concerns, and suggestions shared by communities during phase 2 of Movement Strategy movement conversations, particularly Jan-March 2020
• When communities were asked what the movement strategy recommendations would mean for their local context, many shared operational and general considerations that are valuable to review even if not necessarily at a strategic level
• The input also demonstrates various polarities that we must anticipate for implementation transition discussions - e.g. IP protection for security comes at the risk of vandalism; compensating volunteers (even if strictly for non-editing activities) is perceived to risk opening up the movement to commercialization
• These common and valuable community debates are sure to come up again as we transition to implementation

Document user experience

• Where there are connections between the recommendations or common cross-cutting feedback, you will find highlighted notes in italics to help the review process. These same notes are also summarized at the beginning for a quick access overview summary.  
• For each recommendation, you will find a box presenting a quick overview of the feedback
• For some recommendations, affiliates on Meta or via email indicated that they wanted to work on a particular recommendation, they are mentioned in ‘people to include’ where relevant.

Sources: Summary report | Detailed table | Meta archives | raw information collected

Summary and overview

• This is a common theme we are seeing, honouring volunteers and our movement, while at same time realizing that it’s not a sustainable model, especially in part of the world we want to grow
• Connects to other recommendations as well, such as Coordinate Across Stakeholders
  • Cultural change for the movement is a common theme put forward by the working groups as well, although not all editors and communities think or see why cultural change is needed - something to keep in mind and make sure to reiterate
• It’s not sufficient and will not solve anything if we don't have dedicated people to enforce it and apply it
  • As seen under general and elsewhere, training and the need for culturally-sensitive skill development will
• If WMF is unable to provide security to volunteers in a diverse and changing world, it is probably more efficient to seek to meet that need outside of WMF
  • Seeking external support and best practices outside the movement has come up in relation to other recommendations as well, e.g. skill building tools, diversity and accessibility metrics, oral knowledge, databases and platforms
• We must demand and advocate for ways of opening up participation including, undoubtedly, admitting languages other than English
  • This will be a major concept to consider and design for
• More communication is needed between affiliates, the Foundation and the communities for the actual implementation of this recommendation
  • Improved communication and better coordination across stakeholders is a common ask and comes up in recommendation 5
• The Charter shouldn't be imposed
  • Similar to concerns around autonomy in prioritizing topics for impact or for the universal code of conduct, communities worry that implementation will be top-down or imposed
• There is a need of renewal in many communities and projects, however, care must be taken to respect, above all, their sovereignty
  • This is a common comment - that renewal is needed in many structures, operations and roles, BUT cannot come at the risk of losing expertise, autonomy or sovereignty
• Database of best practices
  • This key community ask connects us with recommendation 10. for evaluation and with others by extension, such as 6. skill development
• Spaces for innovation needed
  • This need for spaces of collaboration and innovation is frequently discussed such as around coordinating across stakeholders
• Spaces needed for innovation
  • Connect with recommendation 9 - innovate in free knowledge
• Implementation of a global Leadership Development Plan should focus on online editors and communities, not boards and non-editorial roles
  • As mentioned elsewhere, some of the more established editors would like skills building to only focus on contribution and do not understand why other skills are needed for the movement’s growth and diversification - something for us to work on through outreach and dialogue

General

• Community consultations:
  • How to balance Foundation and affiliate priorities and those of online communities, even if opposing
  • How to do it better - ample time, diverse outreach, reaching as many people as possible, genuine ‘on-Wiki’ consultations
  • Inclusivity - online communities, online editors, en.WP
  • Inclusivity - smaller and emerging user groups
• Communications:
  • Not just on Meta
  • Graphical content (drawings, visualizations, charts); interactive material (videos - schematics) to help community visualize and understand
  • How will the final documents be communicated with communities?
• Transition events:
  • Organize online meetings, both inside affiliates and between them, by subgroups or all together
  • Do training on virtual meetings tools
  • Before any online meeting, people should do preparative work (read and analyse documents, come up with suggestions) so the meeting is really productive
• How to work better with external partners for implementation?
• How to set up milestones along the way for implementation?  
• Many structures and concepts proposed in Movement Strategy already exist or have been attempted - how to build on that?
  • General fears about things becoming more bureaucratic  
• Localization for the recommendations - geography, projects
  • Local communities, affiliates and projects should have the ability to adapt the recommendations for their context
• Decision-making in implementation:
  • Roles and responsibilities, who does what
  • How will decisions be made
  • How will resources be allocated
  • Concerns around wasting money, initiatives being too costly, duplicating work, attempting initiatives that are costly given the current global circumstances
• Volunteers vs. paid staff
  • Knowledge management, evaluation, organizing, capacity building
• Many of the recommendations and initiatives will require skill building and culturally-sensitive training

• Suggestions from WMDE as a close partner in the process (also available on Meta):
  • Surface the difficult questions; a plan to implement change quickly and effectively; external support from experts in implementing major change processes; even greater engagement with different communities and cultural contexts than before.
  • Requires resources, entrusting various movement actors to implement selected initiatives, support for financially weaker organizations and community representatives to also participate
  • The change of power and decision-making structures in the Movement should be a priority plus some “quick wins”

Principles

• Widely appreciated
• Fundamental values in guiding the implementation phase
• Subsidiarity and self-management for implementation
• People-centredness, contextualization, transparency and accountability, self-management, participation, and empowerment are among frequently referenced principles

1. Increase the Sustainability of our Movement

Overview

Dedicated staff where needed, cannot just be volunteers, BUT concerns of going towards paid editing; volunteer support; greater collaboration with staff

Feedback:  

• While dedicated paid staff are a strongly supported need, implementation should keep in mind:
  • Transparency ("working in open") and existing movement governance bodies considerations
  • Being well spelt out and understood by the community - hiring local staff vs. having global staff based somewhere (big difference)
  • Potential friction due to only a small number of staff having any experience in volunteer roles
• Fear of allowing paid editing or mercantilization through implementation
• Sustainability is not just a matter of acquiring more funds - it's a matter of prioritizing current and future goals
• Editor retention and contribution metrics are needed for our sustainability
• There should be more attention paid to communities in different parts of the world regarding communication problems and issues in getting resources
• There should be a clearer set of criteria around funds distribution based on the expected impact
• If not designed properly, engaging third-party developers poses a potential threat
• Find ways to support volunteer teams with rare skills that the Wikimedia organizations have access to
• Getting help from Wikimedia staff members currently often requires a lot of personal connections
• There are two roles in the Wiki community that need to be supported - project content (fun!) and administration (less fun)
  • The WMF will get a lot of mileage from funding administration
• Cultivating partnerships should be a priority
• How do we reduce our movement’s environmental footprint?

2. Improve User Experience

Overview

Accessibility; documentation; working with developer communities; younger audiences / engaging UX

Feedback:

• Keep in mind younger audiences and retaining newcomers, advance visual features
• Eye catching-platform for Commons and more gamification also suggested, sister projects don’t need to wait for Wikipedia
• Too much translation demand on volunteers, e.g. South Asia
  • Needs staff support
  • This is a common theme we are seeing, honouring volunteers and our movement, while at same time realizing that it’s not a sustainable model, especially in part of the world we want to grow
• Don’t forget sister projects
• There’s a lack of documentation, which affects more experienced users as well as newcomers
  • AB tests and edit counts
• Community development team should interact with local communities
  • Connects to other recommendations as well, such as Coordinate Across Stakeholders
• New user experience changes should always come with AB tests
• Make the creation of new Wikimedia projects in Incubator more simple and accessible for communities

3. Provide for Safety and Inclusion

Overview

Contextualization; autonomy to localize; cultural change; related trainings; external support and best practices; opening up participation to non-English speakers

People to include:

• Art+Feminism: worked on guiding users through tools already in place via Wikimedia projects to prevent and document incidents of harassment or misbehavior (LINK)

Code of Conduct:

• Local communities and affiliates should be allowed their own Code of Conduct regulations
• CoC contextualization, safety policies, harassment, incident reporting
• Safety needs to be implemented in relevance to culture, region and communities, in accordance with the principle of Contextualization
• It is important to recognise that online safety is ultimately a cultural issue, not a technical one
  • Cultural change for the movement is a common theme put forward by the working groups as well, although not all editors and communities think or see why cultural change is needed - something to keep in mind and make sure to reiterate
• It’s not sufficient and will not solve anything if we don't have dedicated people to enforce it and apply it
  • As seen under general and elsewhere, training and the need for culturally-sensitive skill development will
• If WMF is unable to provide security to volunteers in a diverse and changing world, it is probably more efficient to seek to meet that need outside of WMF
  • Seeking external support and best practices outside the movement has come up in relation to other recommendations as well, e.g. skill building tools, diversity and accessibility metrics, oral knowledge, databases and platforms
• Naming explicitly the problem helps to set clear limits to harassment
• We need more conversations on analyzing how marginalized communities feel about their community health.
• Both offline entities and online communities need to take responsibility for community health

Localization

• What should Wikimedians & local affiliates do when movement ideals conflict with the laws of their country, e.g. where homosexuality is illegal?
• We must demand and advocate for ways of opening up participation including, undoubtedly, admitting languages other than English
  • This will be a major concept to consider and design for

VPN polarities

• IP masking and tools for authentication must be balanced with vandalism potential

4. Ensure Equity in Decision-Making

Overview

Not imposed or top-down; timing and sequence (e.g. Movement Charter); worsening existing inequalities in the movement; not at the risk of community autonomy and sovereignty; renewal is needed in many existing structures and roles; standardizing processes (equitable resource allocation); improved communication and transparency; relationship between proposed structures

General

• All decision-making structures should be put to the test in an open-ended manner
• Decentralization should be the standard, unless it is clearly unwise
• Criteria for decentralization must be developed
• There must be some form of democratic control over the implementation of central power - if we see WMF as an executive, and a possible Global Governance Body as a legislature, the question is who the judiciary is?
• Equal representation of voices of movement is required for inclusion of diversity in any movement charter or global governance body model
• This would be constructive if, as a result, obtain a better distribution of power in the movement and greater accountability and evaluation of the actors, including WMF
• More communication is needed between affiliates, the Foundation and the communities for the actual implementation of this recommendation
  • Improved communication and better coordination across stakeholders is a common ask and comes up in recommendation 5

Charter

• The most important part of such a Charter is always the rights
• The Charter needs to be a standard document for the movement governance that can guide affiliates to add their Bylaws and other documents
• The Charter shouldn't be imposed
  • Similar to concerns around autonomy in prioritizing topics for impact or for the universal code of conduct, communities worry that implementation will be top-down or imposed
• The main danger is for something like this to be so vague as to be meaningless
• The timeline of creating a “movement charter” to define our values should come before any sort of mandate is agreed upon

Global Council

• We need the structural autonomies and relative independence of particular actors, including distributed adequate resources
• It sets up a possible dynamic of volunteers vs the grownups, i.e. the appointed experts in management
  • Worsening existing movement inequalities and dynamics was a common concern around this recommendation and the structures proposed

Hubs

• They should only be implemented in a way that can be opted out by affiliates if they need to
• There is a need of renewal in many communities and projects, however, care must be taken to respect, above all, their sovereignty
  • This is a common comment - that renewal is needed in many structures, operations and roles, BUT cannot come at the risk of losing expertise, autonomy or sovereignty
• Hopefully Hubs are not WMF branch offices: they should be bottom-up more than top-down
• Their functions should be precisely to support and strengthen communities and their development at a local level; never to replace them

Resource allocation

• Equitable is a very vague term, and the danger is that WMF/others can pick and choose depending on the metrics they decide to focus on
• Volunteers in every region in the world should have equal access to funding through the standard Wikimedia funding process

Other

• Term limits can only be justified by: 1. a number limited position, or 2. the desire to "save editors from themselves" when it comes to burnout, which needs to be proven rather than just a guess.  

5. Coordinate Across Stakeholders

Overview

The role and purpose of the Technology Council; spaces for communication and coordination

• Technology Council - will not work, we need a better way of how to get better feedback into software engineering work, more diverse, more iterations, but we cannot have 3rd party control of the software department
• Technology Council: There’s plenty of reason to think that top-down is not the way to get our immediate problems solved
  • This initiative can potentially create complications (unnecessary centralization/bureaucratization)
• Finding the right balance between local initiative and centralized coordination will undoubtedly remain an ongoing task during the implementation phase
  • It is not always easy for volunteers to keep up with who has responsibility for coordinating global campaigns
• Spaces needed for innovation
  • Connect with recommendation 9 - innovate in free knowledge

6. Invest in Skills and Leadership Development

Overview

Broad and diverse set of skills (editing, research, organization, advocacy); mentorship, access to non-English sources

• Implementation of a global Leadership Development Plan should focus on online editors and communities, not boards and non-editorial roles
  • As mentioned elsewhere, some of the more established editors would like skills building to only focus on contribution and do not understand why other skills are needed for the movement’s growth and diversification - something for us to work on through outreach and dialogue
• Being able to create good content could also be considered a form of leadership
• No country adequately trains its students how to perform research
• Suggestions for a point-system that could reward editors with prizes from Wikipedia-shop
• Wikimedians need better training in how to access information in other languages, without which a major amount of articles is translated out of English

• Mentorship should be flexible enough to implement it in different regions and should not be overly bureaucratized
• Future leader roles must be broad, flexible, defined by contexts and communities, and not - as is often the case today - subject to the number of edits

7. Manage Internal Knowledge 

Overview

Staff support;  cost-benefit of a ‘knowledge base’

• We should continue supporting wiki platforms, where we excel, and bringing them to surpass current and new challenges
• Volunteers are strongly against using their time to fill metrics, i.e. in the internal knowledge platform
  • The need for dedicated staff support for admin tasks, as the movement grows, and especially with regional variations and support
• It is important to avoid excessive bureaucratization and regulation when developing a knowledge-base system
• Knowledge bases are notoriously costly and ineffectual time sinks
• If it’s to happen, there should be clear limits on what it is for and evaluation checks in place
• Database of best practices
  • This key community ask connects us with recommendation 10. for evaluation and with others by extension, such as 6. skill development

8. Identify Topics for Impact

Overview

Concerns around notability and paid editing; addressing content gaps; research, evaluation and assessment; access to verified non-English sources

People to include:

• WikiJournals: Involved in developing STARDIT, allowing reporting of who created an information resource and how: https://scienceforall.world/stardit/  

General

• The first thing to research is how to measure impact or utility, which would require defining what it means
  • There may be several metrics for impact and utility
  • Suggestions: Adopting the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals as the fundamental topics humanity needs to address until exactly 2030
• If there is no proper planning for execution, it would be a waste of movement resources
  • There is a need for creating a clear mechanism of prioritizing topics
• Fear of encouraging paid editing
• We can not expect members of a minority group to be solely responsible for writing all the content about that group, nor would that be healthy
• It would be helpful to have access to sources in different language groups
  • With better sources, there would be less problems keeping the content on-Wiki about a particular topic concerning marginalized groups

9. Innovate in Free Knowledge

Overview

Oral knowledge; reliability vs. content gaps; accessibility; different forms of knowledge and UX

People to include:

• Wikispore (LINK)

General

• New sister project for oral knowledge
• Oral knowledge important and valuable, but not under an encyclopedic label
  • Changes in notability criteria will need research
  • A solution is needed for inclusion of oral and non-traditional sources of knowledge
• Risk of misinformation to Wikimedia projects
• Concerns around balancing encyclopedic values of reliability with the need to fill content gaps
• Tools: Audio software Source discovery for verification - content farms, disinformation;
• Spaces for innovation needed
  • This need for spaces of collaboration and innovation is frequently discussed such as around coordinating across stakeholders
• Engagement with people with disabilities - can connect with improve UX

10. Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt

Overview

Localization of evaluation metrics; a knowledge base of good practices; staff support

General

• Knowledge base of good practices
  • Connects with rec. 7 - manage internal knowledge
• A/B tests should be routinely used
• Localization for evaluation / contextualization / national contexts
• Can’t be expected of volunteers
• Suggestions for metrics:  
  • Editing
  • Editing behaviour changes in relation to technical changes
  • Community trust in WMF
  • Demographic data to the extent of home project and language