Wikimedia Conference 2014/Documentation/11

11 Learning, development and training in Wikimedia movement organisations

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• Speakers: Chris Keating (Wikimedia UK), Markus Glaser (WMDE), Alice Wiegand (WMF)

Notes

Session to share best practises in the past. Chris tells about his story, taking part in a training session.

exchange part

Five minutes, talk to your neighbor: Whats is your board spending time on?

Markus

• telling from a workshop
• hide burn out, expection of board members is very high
• discussion becomes fastly politcal
• huge differnce between the expections of the different chapters
• it came out: [] is a good concemt for affiliations to come together, shows aims how to become more diversity in the discussion

Alice

• the board is electric
• different approches to gov
• concentrate on a kind of assessment
• what is important for boards?
• boards want to have some outtcome, wants to do big things
• but they don't have the time for this
• boards should all the time try to be more effective
• how to have mor fun? eat enough, sleep enough

How does the WMF Board do?

• taking care
• listening to people who have experiences
• cut them down or let them grow
• There are three main points, what we do, when we talk about ourselfs
  1. assessment of the entire board
  2. assessment individual board members
  3. support individual learning

advices

• see the board as a body
• Ask yourself: what should be the outcome?
• make clear the relationship between board and staff!
• are there guidelines? which?
• where is the right place to put your nose, don't do the work of the staff!
• => it sounds beautiful, but it is difficult
• remeber we have different people with different approaches
• think often about the aim of you board!
• do surveys to collect informations about the thinkings of others in look of your work
• in the done survey every board member gots its own answers of the survey

Q: relationship between the board and the assessment - tell more about the survey A: it takles several parts of board

Chris

Ask yourselfes: How do you and your Board work?

1. defining a streategy
2. managing working with stuff
3. improive governance
4. avoiding burn out to its members

Aim is a closer idea what support people need.

• People should discuss in 5 minutes, what your board needs to do a better job.
• people diskussion in 5 well mixed groups a 6-8 persons

List of need for development a chapter

• introduce people in the culture of th movement, teach them
• help how to access funds if needed (and development practises)
• charity law support
• manage internal and external communication
• keep in active and involve people
• design decision-making
• make processes to be more efficient

Whos job is it, to develop this?

• there is a board workshop on meta (--> Boards training workshop March 2014)
• there is many material, but it is not so easy to find
• anual reports help much new chapters to understand, what happend
• activate translation matrix on meta and every chapter should publish there reports there