Wikimedia Conference 2016/Program/9

9: Affiliates Partnership Program (PC&L)

How to move forward

Q&A with the Affiliations Committee

What was this session about?

Presenting the new Affiliate Partnerships Program of the WMF and Q&A with the Affiliations Committee

What are the next steps to be taken?

n/a

Who is the person to reach out to?

Jaime Anstee, PC&L team

Photos

see the Commons category

Slides

Original Description

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced to take over responsibility for facilitating the development of the affiliates. In this session, the PC&L team presents results from the Program Capacity & Learning consultation. In this session we will share an overview from the team's annual plan and discusses with the AFfiliations COmmittee the potential next steps and collect further feedback from affiliates and AffCom.

Desired Outcome: This will be a discussion session, not a decision-making session. Aims include:

Share an overview of PC&L support for Affiliate Partnerships.
Learn from community how we might best leverage PC&L programs and AffCom support to help affiliates develop effectively.
Better understand the things WMF can do and things better suited for communities to support in partnerships and development.
Increase understanding in how affiliates might better connect to mentorship and support to succeed in their development across our many regional or thematic areas.

Session Format: Conversing
Speaker(s): Jaime Anstee and the Affiliations Committee
Summary of the session

Jaime Anstee opened the session on the Affiliates Partnerships Program together with the members of the Affiliations Committee.

Jaime started the session with a presentation explaining the new “Affiliates Partnerships Program” of the Program Capacity & Learning Team (within the Community Engagement Department) at the Wikimedia Foundation. Until now, the team’s scope included The Wikipedia Library, the Education Program, and the Program & Evaluation part. With the new annual plan 2016/17 the team’s scope widens with the “Affiliate Partnerships Program” and the “GLAM support”.

The idea was, she said, basically to support community leaders of the nearly 100 affiliates and not to go them lost, as well as helping them to develop their skills and their organizations. She highlights the planned initiatives of the “Wikimedia Resource Center” (a central hub on meta where everything can be collected and found) and “Community Leadership Development”.

After the presentation, the audience was asked to prepare (write down) their questions. The Affiliations Committee (AffCom) members Ting Chen, Manuel Schneider, Tanweer Morshed, Ganesh Paudel, Carlos Colina, Kirill Lokshin, Emily Temple-Wood, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, Galileo Vidoni and Emna Mizouni formed a panel to answer questions.

One of the first questions was someone asking what the AffCom was and what it did. The members explained the committee’s work, focusing on mainly mentoring new user groups and guiding them to their recognition. Someone else asked if the so-called “Chapter Moratorium” (the Board’s decision of not recognizing Wikimedia Chapters that lasted two years) still existed. The AffCom members said it was lifted (expired, respectively), user groups could apply for becoming a Chapter at any time now.

Another participant asked what the AffCom’s vision of affiliate development was: how in their point of view an idea affiliate looked like. The AffCom members answer that they were overseeing and evaluating the affiliate development and would help them to achieve what the affiliate wants to do. However, the AffCom’s scope would be mainly limited to the guidance of groups until their recognition.

One participant asked if the AffCom could (or should) help affiliates with (staff) transitions. The AffCom answered that it could be a desirable goal to do so, but they hadn’t the capacity to do so. Someone proposed that AffCom could provide communities with ideas taken from Signpost or with selections of organizational milestones.

AffCom was also asked if it was possible in the future to have a usergroup in every city. The AffCom answered that this was possible.

Jaime concluded the session.