Grants:Project/Rapid/MurielMary/Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand Strategy Workshop/Report

Template:Rapid Grant report/Final/Under Review

Goals edit

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went?

All 7 committee members of the new incorporated society met in person in Wellington on the weekend of 28/29 May 2022. We had a professional facilitator to assist us in our discussions. The aim of the workshop was to produce a strategic plan for the incorporated society, including identifying priority areas for action, identifying required standard operating procedures and policies and confirming the respective roles, responsibilities and portfolios of each of the committee members.

All of the committee members found the strategic weekend to be valuable, not only with agreeing the strategic priorities for the next few years but also for the baseline of getting to know one another better and documenting how we will work. It was noted that although online meetings via Zoom are great for connecting at a distance, face to face meetings are much more successful for longer discussions and for brainstorming/sharing ideas freely.

Overall, we met most of our goals for the weekend and the committee was satisfied with the outcomes and the learnings from this weekend.

Outcome edit

Please report on your original project targets. Please be sure to review and provide metrics required for Rapid Grants.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
A formal strategic plan will be published on the Wikimedia User Group of Aotearoa's meta page	A strategic plan has been developed as an output of the strategy weekend but has yet to be published on the meta page for consulation.	The strategic plan includes priority strategic goals and key focus areas. This is currently recorded in the Miro white board used during the weekend. The focus has been on creating the business plan in the Trello board to ensure all actions have cards so all committee members can see what we're doing. There is an card / action point to add the strategic plan and business plan to the WUGANZ meta page.
The committee members will use the strategy to formulate a business plan for the year and are actively working on the goals of the business plan	Business plan created in Trello as an action point arising from the weekend.	The Facilitator set up a Trello board for the committee and the committee members have also used the priority strategic goals, the focus areas, the activities listed in the General Grant application and the General Grant budget to create the business plan in Trello with all goals broken into smaller tasks and listed as Trello cards. Committee members are actively engaging with the cards, identifying where they can add value, claiming the cards they wish to be responsible for and delivering the actions required to move the cards into the done column of the Trello board. The Trello platform meets the agreed requirements of the committee to be shareable and remain distributed with Wikimedia User Group of Aotearoa New Zealand members. The strength of the User Group prior to incorporation and election of the committee has been the self organising nature of the group where members have not waited to be assigned work by other members but rather have found their own work and managed the associated responsibilities and timelines, coming together during the year to draft and edit the annual report. Post-incorporation, the committee do not wish to change this model of working and are actively working to support this high sense of ownerhip and responsibility within the user group. The Committee understand that self organising teams need high levels of trust and to communicate with each other often to be successful.
A communication plan will be decided at the workshop and enacted in the months following to ensure that New Zealand editors of Wikimedia Foundation projects are aware of the strategic goals, business plan objectives, and associated impact tracking	Not completed during the weekend	The strategy weekend agenda was overly ambitious about what could be achieved during the timeframe. The committee discussed the agenda at the start of the second morning and agreed that the priority of the in-person discussions were the business plan and reporting with a communication plan more easily discussed over video conferencing without a facilitator at a later date. An action was agreed that the Chair would be responsible for organising an out of cycle committee video conference meeting to complete the brainstorming and establishment of a comms strategy with agreed action points.
Total participants: 7	Total participants: 7	The facilitator was not counted as a participant in this weekend.
Number of newly registered users: 0	Number of newly registered users: 1 new user	The facilitator also took photographs of the group during a break and the committee members took the opportunity to teach the facilitator how to upload and openly license images in Wikimedia Commons.
Number of content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects: 0	Number of content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects: 6	A number of images of the event were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

Learning edit

Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

What worked well?

Hiring a professional facilitator worked extremely well. Facilitation is a specialised skill and ensuring that none of the committee were required to lead the sessions ensured that all of the committee members were able to contribute to the discussions equally, and discussions remained on-topic. The professional facilitator also brought a sophisticated understanding of what the committee required to get into a safe space for honest discussions. The facilitator also ensured that the group spent time deciding on a team working agreement. This agreement outlined our "why and how we want to work together" and gave the committee space to consider

Who we are as a group.
Our shared values
How we want to communicate - preferred channels, when it is okay not to respond, how will each of us know when something is needed from us, what language is acceptable, and whether we need acknowledgement
Discussion and agreement on the tools we use and what we use them for
Agreement on when and why we meet for both the committee's formal meetings, project meetings, and monthly community meetup channel including why we're having the meeting, who needs to be there and frequency and duration.

This discussion was a step that we had considered skipping due to the amount of strategic work we wanted to achieve during the weekend but was considered by the committee as one of the most valuable outcomes from the weekend.

The facilitation tool used to focus the group and keep us on track was Miro - an online white board tool https://miro.com/app/dashboard/ This tool was particularly effective as it allowed the committee to keep up to date with the pre-weekend work done by the facilitator and committee Chair in setting the agenda and discussion points. It allowed the committee to be familiar with what was going to be expected of them during the weekend. During the weekend it was a place to take notes and organise thoughts, including prioritising tasks and ideas produced during brainstorming discussions. At the end of the weekend the Miro board was downloaded; it can also be accessed at the online site and edited further if desired.

The committee self-evaluated its progress towards the weekend's goals and could re-prioritise as needed; as described below, at the end of the first day it was apparent that the weekend's plan was ambitious and a re-planning of the second day's topics was recognised as necessary.

What did not work so well?

We were too optimistic about what we could achieve in the weekend. We wanted to achieve:

Getting to know each other better
A good working agreement
Agreed strategic goals
Prioritised strategic goals and key priority focus areas for Now (year 1), Next (year 2), and Next (year 3).
Confirmed business plan with each key priority area broken down into achieveable tasks
Reporting - not only what might be required of the committee if the General Grant application was successful but also what reporting metrics we want to record, how will we report, and what measures can we take to make sure the analysis of our reporting feeds back into improving our activities
Brainstorm and document a communications strategy.

We actually delivered:

Getting to know each other better
A good working agreement
Agreed strategic goals
Prioritised strategic goals and key priority focus areas for Now (year 1), Next (year 2), and Next (year 3).
Confirmed business plan with each key priority area broken down into achieveable tasks

We briefly discussed

Reporting - not only what might be required of the committee if the General Grant application was successful but also what reporting metrics we want to record, how will we report, and what measures can we take to make sure the analysis of our reporting feeds back into improving our activities

We parked for a future committee session

Brainstorm and document a communications strategy.

What would you do differently next time?

Have a better understanding of what we can achieve with a two day weekend and not be so ambitious.

Finances edit

Grant funds spent edit

Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on. We spent a total of NZ$5,946.92:

Travel (For the 3 participants from outside Wellington) $1,062.78
Accommodation (For the 3 from outside Wellington) $463.00
Catering: $885.00
Venue hire: $710.00
Facilitator: $2,800.00
Local Travel: $26.14

Remaining funds edit

Do you have any remaining grant funds? Yes, NZ$56. We would like to transfer these funds into the annual operating expenses of the Wikimedia Aotearoa NZ group.

Anything else edit

Anything else you want to share about your project?