User:Ciell/Designing a Movement Charter

Don't you get frustrated by this whole Movement Charter drafting thing?

I get this question a lot at the moment (Aug/Sept 2023), and so let me share with you my little story of why I don't feel frustrated with the work I am doing, even though it is costing me 10+ hours per week and feedback from the stakeholders can sometimes be overwhelming and tough.

In November 2021, I was elected to be on the Movement Charter Drafting Committee to draft a charter for the movement - not the easiest task out there.
When we started, there was literally nothing, except for *a lot* of WMF staff ready to support us. There was no facilitation plan for the committee, there was no process designed on how to build a charter, there was no communication plan on how we could (should) have continuous conversations with all stakeholders in the process. And at the same time, travel restrictions because of Covid were still in place, and most of us in the committee had never heard of the others before we gathered for the first online meeting.

In May 2022 the Dutch chapter granted me an Agile management course for the work I do in the WLM international organizing team. During this course we were given an assignment that could be very helpful in explaining MCDC's approach to drafting the charter, so I want to share it with you here.

Building a supermarket from scratch

My study group got the assignment that we were urban designers and had to build a new village from scratch, for 10.000 inhabitants. As the group of 12, we received some basic first input and brainstormed some more on what a village needs - flats, houses, church, library, schools, a park, gym, cinema etc. After the brainstorm a fictional group of stakeholders helped through a consultation process to prioritize the needs of the village. After this, we split up in smaller groups and started working on the essential elements from that list.

I was in a group of 4 that had to design the supermarket: for this we received a few hands full of lego blocks, and 4 minutes of time. After these first 4 minutes we had built a simple building with four walls, a flat roof, a window and a door, and our Product Owner came to see our work - the Product Owner is the customer representative and connects between the team and the stakeholders while also managing the process. We received our first round of feedback. "Yup, like what you've done there, but please add 2 more windows. Make the doorway a double doorway, and I don't like the flat roof - please make it a raised one." We had another 4 minutes and while we needed a lot of time for discussing the how and where in the first round, this second one went a lot smoother since we gained a lot of clarity on the direction and had already discussed a lot in the previous round. So we added the windows and the double door, changed the roof, and we decided to also add a parking lot with a handicap parking space. The Product owner came to see our work again: "That's better, great. Please make sure the supermarket has a fresh fruit and vegetable department, and please change the color of the walls - I don't like brown, it's so depressing." And so we did, and in this third round we even had time to create a little park with playground next to the supermarket, and two of us went to see if they could help out with the other subgroups tasks.

After the 3 rounds (iterations), the village was complete and stakeholders were satisfied with our product - even though we had not build a secondary school and the gym, nor the museum we initially thought would be essential for the village. This will come later: the town is ready to receive the inhabitants and the people coming to live in the little village will make sure the town can grow further to their own needs.

Iterative and incremental drafting process

This exercise was about iterative and incremental building, and this is also our approach for drafting the Wikimedia Movement Charter. The process of developing the Movement Strategy 2030 was the planning for the village, the building of the supermarket is the drafting of the Movement Charter. The MCDC knew on forehand we would not be able to deliver a perfect charter in one go, if only for the starting points of the topics the charter should cover were all on very different levels of maturity. Values are personal but also collectively shared in our movement: many were there from the beginning of our projects but they can change over time, or be of different relevance to people or in relation to the theme. We've been piloting Wikimedia Hubs for 2 years now and there has been research and reports from all over the world. And most of all: there has never before been a detailed outline for a Global Council presented to the community. You can see this reflected in the interim results of our drafting work: some chapters still need to grow more than others, and while some receive only little feedback and the nature of this feedback is mostly about the phrasing of sentences and copy edit proposals, other chapters received even more feedback than we can be expected to address during one next iteration.
I am absolutely positive that with the next draft, we can leave the really messy parts behind us and add the double entrance and a wheelchair ramp. Maybe we even have time to build solar collectors on the roof, and the only thing left to discuss in the final round is the color of the paint on the walls.

It will get better, I'm sure.