2024 talk:Meetups/Trilogue

Summary of small-group discussion on Thursday August 9

Overview

Participants: Anna Torres, Anne Clin, Anass Sedrati, Bobby Shabangu, Christophe Henner, Claudia Garad, DerHexer/Martin, Farah Mustaklem, Lorenzo Losa, Maciej Nadzikiewicz, Maryana Iskander, Nat Tymkiv, Richard Knipel, Yael Weissburg; Facilitators: Effeietsanders, Sj; MCDC members listening: Ciell, Daria, Georges, Jorge, Kaarel, Manav, Michał, Nhu

Goal: Given the confusion among parties about where things stand, this was an informal discussion to clear up where things stand and identify potential next steps, with a few people from each group.

We talked through the efforts to finalize a Charter and looked for points of agreement:

• The WMF board has expressed no opposition to these initiatives to share global decision-making — they only opposed the draft charter as proposed. The ideas around formalizing a framework for shared governance, as featured in our strategy, still make sense.
• Given the support shown in the recent vote, we want to make progress towards these goals.

  - We should build on the progress made in the process so far, even if not all in a single charter document.

  - We should not wait for a perfect outcome to make improvements now.

• Basic communication should be improved.

  - Have an early warning system. Express concerns early on about things that won't work.

  - Respond quickly to one another to clarify any areas of confusion.

We also discussed obstacles to making progress — including gaps in trust, gaps in joint collaboration, uncertain expectations, and unclosed loops (past commitments not yet made good) — and practical steps to overcome those obstacles.

Current state of things

Participants mentioned a number of topics that should be considered for a next drafting process:

1. Reaffirming our pursuit of shared goals

• Co-create processes with affected community and affiliate groups, rather than unilateral action

  e.g. for devising an Affiliate Strategy; for defining global technical & grants committees

• Take a step back to affirm + restate higher level principles, before trying again to create a new draft.

2. Revisiting the charter, learning from feedback

flexible public iteration, starting with consensus elements

• Have a separate discussion about community values and principles
• Carry out the work on public wikis

3. Developing a crisper purpose and frame for a global council

• General sense that no one was happy with the current compromise.
• Start with specific decisions for well-defined problems that are not currently addressed.
• Without more specificity, the term 'Council' means different things to different people, may not be helping

4. Effective delegation

Make good use of time across the movement

• Clarify how planned committees (PTAC and GRDC) extend from and align with those described in the charter.

  Can they be smaller? How can they be more autonomous? Make them impactful, not just advisory

• Iterate with these elements as building blocks that could possibly later be integrated in a charter.

5. Process + communication improvement

• Establish clear, time-bound commitments.
• Groups should talk to one another directly, not through a committee.

6. People have different senses of urgency (and some are tired!)

Topics with conflicting views

• Should we approach this as a set of building blocks to resolve, rather than monolithic decisions?
• Should future conversations happen in public, or in private with public summaries?
• What sorts of fast iteration loops are wanted, and helpful?
• Does "good enough is perfect" apply to small, reversible steps, or also to larger decisions?

Potential next steps

Please add time-bound next steps that you would like to see, and that could be started now. This was seeded with ideas proposed over the last few days. If someone else has added something you had in mind, add a +1 next to it. If you can do one of these items, or know where it is being done, add a link or your name next to it.

Strengthening our identity

• Restate the underlying mission where possible: In each of these proposals, clarify that more inclusive, transparent, and effective governance is in service to our collective desire to improve how we serve the world.
• Work through a "5 Whys" process to remind ourselves (explicitly) why we need each part of the movement, including organizations at different scales.

• Radically expand our notion of community: in defining what constitutes a sufficient quorum or participation. Geographic distribution of recent votes has been poor, compared to the distribution of community members. Note that people w different skill sets work at different speeds, and may need different dialogues.
• Get more input from the editing and dev community (similar to the Summit consult w/ affiliates): learn their needs and concerns that global decision-making could address. [e.g. around inefficient uses of resources]

  start with an analysis of feedback on the charter vote, pulling out specific needs

Building trust

• Create a space to list specific ways trust was lost in the past, and where / how that is being remediated
• Invite WMF staff back into otherwise-public spaces and discussions where they are excluded
• Also recognize that in some spaces the presence of WMF staff can make affiliates feel unable to speak their minds. Address the fear rather than exacerbating / duplicating it.
• Develop a common agenda, now and each year.

  We stopped taking time for that. The strategy recommendations felt like that, but when the charter/council recommendations stalled without replacement, that sense is weakened.

• Practice giving trust to others, empowering and relying on them.
• Clarify the role of 'representation' in equity, trust, and a sense of shared ownership.

Communication

• Don't wait for a formal charter to create space for shared decision-making. Name a place to work through these issues.
• Have an early warning system for communication failures: a place to flag confusion, with fast response.
• Get signals for what is moving in the right direction.
• Have more public conversations. there are groups who feel already left out.

  For new documents: have rapid back-and-forth editing on wiki to reach versions everyone is ok with.

focus disagreements and edit conflicts onto the narrowest possible bit of wording

• If needed: have a broader off-wiki place for everyone engaged in governance to collaboratively wordsmith and translate things before sharing them for public feedback. [not docs private to subgroups]
• We need a few rounds of iterative sense-making and deconfliction. Start now, repeat this process a few times before the end of this year.

Step by step - charter

• Simplify the current draft Charter. Refactor it into modules.
• Have a group including a WMF board liaison identify a subset of the charter that could be approved now, as uncontroversial, as policies [easier to change than a charter]
• Hammer out movement values and principles in a separate discussion; this didn't happen fully yet
• Propose a more flexible approach to revision and iteration.

  Make a version on Meta intended to be edited directly. Invite iteration and feedback.

Step by step - council

• Clarifying the purpose and goals. What are the core needs for shared governance / core problems it will resolve?
• What benchmarks might we use to decide whether a governance framework meets those needs?
• Reaffirm why the WMF board can't serve as a board for the movement (its first obligation is to the organization)

and why as a result we need an ultimate decision-making mechanism for the movement, empowered to resolve binding decisions

• Coordination function: identify current topic-specific decision-making groups that might be united under a council or other umbrella body. Are there functions or processes they could share or deduplicate?
• Propose how a council would interact with existing global bodies. (AffCom, LangCom, Regional grants committees...) Compare your proposal to this one.

Step by step - finances and planning

• Define an annual process (informal or formal) for reviewing the % of total revenues going to community groups + affiliates

  This year the grants committees ran a process on the overall budget for next year, which felt like a promising first step.

• Clarify a roadmap for expanding regional capacity for fundraising and partnerships

  Including improving messaging and campaigns in regions where there is both interest and opportunity

• Clarify a review process that could help standardize review of plans across the movement, deduplicate similar projects, and learn from the work of the largest organizations

  Plans for WMF and WMDE are more detailed and professional than others, and already have extensive public discussion built in, which might be mapped onto this

• Estimate budgets (in time, money, people) for current and projected global bodies — including planning, funds dissemination, grant review, technical reviews, dispute resolution.
• Estimate budgets for consultations and liaisons (nb: WMF is not the only organization which organizes these)
• Produce a global map of funds flows, from where they were raised to where they are spent?
• Propose a budget and financing plan for a council that draws support from many existing bodies.

Step by step - problem-solving

• Have movement entities resolve issues with one another directly, not through a committee
• Make room for discussions where people take off their hats and can contribute as individuals
• Name tasks that are hard for entities to do, where external help could simplify them. (translation)
• Create a space to name + address long-standing tensions ('elephants'). start resolving them
• Acknowledge that the quality of the Charter text was not up to the standard of good articles, identify a way to improve it.
• Summarize restrictions on budgetary growth of most affiliates, and the % of total revenue that leaves the WMF
• Summarize restrictions on which affiliates develop capacity for partnerships and local fundraising
• Summarize perceived inefficiency of certain programs, lack of distinction between core and non-core projects (both in WMF programs and in those supported by movement grants)
• Summarize concerns with internal innovation and shrinking support for community-driven tech innovation, e.g. through technical grants and awards

Just add clarity

• Clarify that the steps mentioned in the board statement are important next steps in reaching the eventual goal, and that they derive from ideas that went into the charter draft
• Clarify how much the WM Summit and Wikimania cost, and who bears those costs (across the movement)
  • The budget for the Wikimedia Summit 2024, including the financial contributions from WMF and WMDE can be found here.
• For the two committees being formed by WMF, clarify how they could become community-led or jointly-led, and not e.g. subject to unilateral closure by a single entity.
• Publicly list shared goals, start with fuzzier ones and iteratively sharpen them to make them SMARTer
• At the Summit, Maryana asked for feedback on what the WMF could stop doing, and transfer to whom, and how, but received no concrete responses. Propose things to stop doing and how, specifying what processes would take over from existing ones, and what groups would be accountable for the transition and final outcomes.
• List perceived power imbalances. Ex: some expressed feeling that within the same sort of entity (members of a committee, or affiliates, or grant recipients), different parties have widely different access to dialogue and support.

Dispute resolution

• List unresolved global disputes that need resolution.
• Identify an existing pool of mediators who could be called on to help parties resolve them.
• Pick a dispute and hold a series of short, time-bound sessions to try to reach a resolution.