Community Resilience and Sustainability

Community Resilience and Sustainability is a wing of the Wikimedia Foundation's Legal department, led by the Vice President of Community Resilience & Sustainability Maggie Dennis. We currently consist of Community Development, Human Rights, Movement Strategy and Governance, and Trust and Safety.

What we do

Sustainability and Resilience are essential to the wellbeing of groups with shared aims. They refer to the ability of a community to thrive in terms of its systems, structures, and community relationships over time, and to the capacity of the community to absorb and recover from damage or threat. The goal of the community resilience & sustainability division of the Wikimedia Foundation is to support the movement in maturing its systems to achieve the key essential factors of both resilience and sustainability on the journey towards the sum of all human knowledge, both through directly run programs and through supporting as appropriate the work of other departments.

Priorities

Not all the work of Community Resilience & Sustainability is detailed here, but this is an effort to capture major initiatives.

• Community Development
  • Deliver online programming and publish learning resources to support and increase community-facilitated capacity-building and leadership development opportunities. (See also: Wikimedia Foundation Medium-term plan 2019/Thriving movement.)
  • Update and implement holistic community consultation best practices, as with the Movement Learning and Leadership Development Project.
• Human Rights
  • Update the Foundation's response protocol to review and assist users facing human rights violations from organized groups as a result of their good-faith contributions to Wikimedia projects.
  • In coordination with Community Development, begin approaching training pathways to help users in at-risk areas to minimize the risks of exposure to such groups (goal to begin implementation January 2022.)
• Movement Strategy and Governance
  • The transition phase of Movement Strategy was wrapped up last quarter, and it is time to start the implementation phase, looking at which projects can move forward first. Among these, the Movement Charter is an essential tool for the implementation of the Strategy 2030, and it is important to begin its draft. There is also a lot of curiosity around regional and thematic hubs, and also many questions, and we are ready to support resolving some of these. This team has also facilitated outreach to potential Board candidates and supported the Elections Committee in the 2021 board elections.
• Trust and Safety
  • Anti Harassment Program, a collaboration between Product & Trust & Safety personnel. (See also: Wikimedia Foundation Medium-term plan 2019/Thriving movement.)
  • Policy: supporting the Universal Code of Conduct phases 1 and 2.
  • Operations: ensuring legal compliance in collaboration with Foundation attorneys & enforcing office actions.
  • Disinformation: Working towards ensuring content integrity on the platform.

Conversation hours

Community Resilience & Sustainability has a goal of quarterly conversation hours to help improve understanding of their work and offer opportunities for conversation. These hours are live streamed, with in-person participation facilitated, and questions are collected in advance as well as through a number of text streams. For a list of these conversations and notes from them, please see Category:CR&S meetings.

These conversation hours were previously known as IRC or office hours. See a listing of conversation hours and notes from 2022 and earlier.