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Movement Charter/Community Consultation/Notes from 2 April 2024 monthly session

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Questions and responses from the feedback sharing part of the MCDC’s April 4, 2024 community call (Easy Retro):

  • Why doesn’t the Global Charter have a section about the roles of wikis overall?
    • MCDC response: This is in the “Volunteers” chapter in the Wikimedia communities section: “Wikimedia project communities have autonomy over the policies within their individual projects. These communities establish their policies within the framework of global policies, including the Terms of Use for the project websites.”
    • Suggestion: It might be better for the "Wikimedia communities" section to be promoted to a top level header.
  • Suggestion: Please distinguish Global Council Assembly (GCA) from Global Council Board (GCB) with more clear terms. It could be a Movement Senate, Community council assembly/ global council.
  • Question: What’s the difference between GCB and GCA?
    • MCDC response: GCB is the executive committee of the GCA, elected by the GCA, and helps coordinate certain functions of the GCA (meetings, convenings, etc.) GCA is mostly active during its annual meeting schedule, while the GCB is active year-round.
      • MCDC: GCA will do a fair amount of work offline between its annual meetings, because there will be decisions that need to be made by them and shouldn’t wait a whole year.
      • MCDC: A constant ask was to decentralize governance bodies. To create a space for representation of different voices, we created GCA, but there’s a practical challenge of having a lot of people in that body; so GCB is created with smaller size.
  • Question: What are the highlights of the charter in relation to new Wikipedia communities?
    • MCDC response: A lot stays the same for volunteers and online communities. Local projects will still be in charge of their own project, unless there’s something that needs to be done (e.g. legal conflicts), but that’s already the case. We made it explicit that communities need to be open and honest about what’s happening within their wiki communities and make themselves available to those who are asking questions, so we can learn from each other and build upon each others’ works.
    • You can learn more about how will the Charter affect communities and Wikimedia entities, including Wikimedia Foundation on the FAQ’s page. In short: The Charter might not have a daily, on-the-ground impact for individuals, communities, and entities, but it does start to shift decision-making powers and creates an ecosystem that demands more collaboration and coordination between the different movement bodies.  
  • Suggestion: The lack of recognition for Wikimedia wikis; shouldn’t be nested under Volunteers.
    • MCDC response: When we (MCDC) were writing this, we thought about where to place the wikis. MCDC thought that the Charter should only mention things that it governs; we don’t want to micro-manage local wiki governance. It’s not so much about recognition.
  • Suggestion: “Wikimedia communities hold full editorial control of the content” – need real distinction between communities and projects, especially in the possible situation of when you get into the smaller language projects.
    • Response: Good and bad news on this – the wording confusion is valid. The Charter cannot change the legal reality of editorial control. The odds of the Charter making the liability situation worse is low. Legal disclaimers will usually work for that.
  • Comment: Nothing to safeguard the rights of the individual contributors, that cover nondisclosure of personal data obtained through the movement (also taking action against people who do use that information), the freedom to contribute anonymously, ensure only absolutely essential information is retained once collected.
    • MCDC response: We have a Privacy Policy for information on our website. Individual organizations have their own versions. There’s no fundamental right to privacy here, because this is Wikipedia and the wikis and their cache remembers everything (in monthly dumps). Information you have in our user page will be there forever – we made this clear. We can mitigate things, but we can’t guarantee that level of privacy and be a wiki. We can continue to press that, but I don’t think we should have it as a right, because you’re responsible for your edits.
    • MCDC response: We don’t have a section for rights of volunteers in the current draft. We had it for a while, but we don’t feel it to be right. We don’t want to replicate that. I would love to see one, but we don’t think it should be codified.
    • Suggestion: What I think that needs to be there would be the guarantees that we don’t act vindictively, and guaranteeing anonymity, as guiding principles. Suggest acknowledging these basic guarding principles.
      • MCDC response: We mentioned this in Safety value – improvements are welcome.
  • Question: What is the legal status of the Charter? Is it a bylaw, a binding contract, or a nonbinding suggestion?
    • MCDC response: The Charter is not a contract, but a consented policy that would be adopted/accepted by participants in the Movement. Think of the Friendly Space Policy or the UCOC.
  • Comment: Financial resources – Global Council shouldn’t only be doing fund dissemination, but also consulting on the affairs of the movement money pool.
    • Comment: You can read more about fundraising and fund distribution on the FAQs.
    • MCDC: The word “Resources” in the glossary doesn't only apply to money, but also to physical assets, personnel, etc.
    • MCDC: Distribution of funds stays with WMF, as requested by its Board of Trustees. I can not imagine the GC not being consulted on this matter. They need to work together and consult each other.
      • Comment: Contrary to popular belief, the two chapters that run banners do not fundraise for themselves; they fundraise for the movement, and the money (less expenses) is transferred to the WMF's global fund.
      • Comment: That is right. WMDE sends ~60% of banner fundraised money to the WMF. Our huge advantage here is that we have the donor data. We can contact our donors regularly, and build relationships, recruit new members, recurring donors, volunteers, partners etc.
      • Comment: The fundamental flaw though is that WMF has in this charter claimed the right to fundraise for the movement on the banner, and it is very clear that (with the exception of a few chapters with pre-existing agreements) affiliates cannot have access to banners. So the status quo will be maintained: WMF brings in all the "movement" funds, but decides how much funding goes to affiliates as a block vs how much stays with WMF. The specific decisions currently made by regional committees will go to the GC instead but the actual dollar amount going to communities will still be a decision made by WMF. The challenge in the current Charter is the WMF claim of their right to bring funds to the movement and then the disconnect between the GC not having the ability to decide how much funds can be distributed to other movement actors. Recognize the thorny legal ability, but this is a flaw of the Charter draft: outsourcing decisions regarding the funds distribution without having the ability to claim any percentage of the funds “pie”.
        • Follow-up comment: An option moving forward: codify the baseline percentage of funds that the GC can request to decide. Concern for the next iteration of Strategy in 2030.
        • MCDC: Referring back to the WMF Board statement shared in February 2024.  
        • MCDC: The GC should not be focused mostly on deciding which region gets more than another, it should be more universally minded.
      • MCDC: For the first four GC purposes, it shouldn’t be underestimated how much needs to be done. Would be good to have the GC with limited scope of work in its early days. The Movement Charter shouldn’t be an endpoint; there’s a lot more to be done.
      • BOT member: Fundraising banner is not a growing source of revenue, and there’s no scenario where it can be more effectively decentralized. WMF is able to fundraise through banners efficiently – there’s no way to decentralize it in a more efficient way. The pie needs to be grown; fundraising capacity needs to be improved outside of the traditional channels, the channels that the WMF is legally limited to explore.
      • Question to the BOT member: Could you share the donor data you collect in a country with the affiliate in that country? Because I think this could actually grow the pie.
      • MCDC: Sharing the quote on this on the BoT’s position on the Charter: ”Retain the current principles for banner fundraising on the Wikimedia Projects. We see banner fundraising as inextricably intertwined with the operations of the website. As the platform operator, there will be legal and policy obligations for fundraising activities that rely on the Foundation's infrastructure. The Foundation will not be able to share donor data in ways that are not consistent with policies or privacy laws. We continue to believe that a future-proof revenue strategy for the Wikimedia movement will require diversifying streams of revenue beyond banners, and that should be where we focus fundraising resources.”
      • MCDC: WMF’s Legal responses to MCDC include one around the sharing of donor data, which can also be helpful for this point: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f1/Replies_to_the_MCDC%27s_questions_on_legal_responsibilities%2C_January_5%2C_2024.pdf (Question #10).
    • Comment: It's been noted several times that the WMF is not very transparent about how it spends its money. When we do learn about the spending, a lot of it goes to random activist groups that don’t actually help the movement.
      • Comment: Specifically the point about spending money on other organizations. The only thing I know of there that led to that was the knowledge equity fund. That was a) a very small amount of money compared to overall spending, b) was not renewed, it was a one-time experiment to the best of my knowledge, and c) the spending was decided by a community group based on applications, not by the Wikimedia Foundation.
      • MCDC: We did say on the Charter that all organizations need to be transparent on financial matters – do you have any proposal for improvement so that the Charter can address this point?
    • Concern: My concern is less about fundraising and more about fund distribution. I understand that at this point the WMF decides the WMF budget and the remainder of the Wikimedia Movement distribution. Why can’t the GC decide about this, in a practice of participatory budgeting?
  • Comment on the different aspects of the Amendments process.  
    • MCDC: Category 1: Changes are very simple, for typos and grammatical changes. Charter is a foundational document and shouldn’t be able to be changed easily. We created tiers because we recognized different actors need to be consulted on different types of changes to the Charter – e.g. Affiliates on Affiliates responsibilities. Read more on the FAQs.
  • Question: I’m curious about something in the supplementary materials, that says Global Council Board members cannot be board or staff of affiliates. Since several MCDC members are themselves the board or staff of affiliates (or WMF), can they share why they think this is bad for the GCB?
    • MCDC: The idea behind this was to avoid a potential conflict of interest when representing the views of an affiliate as a paid staff member or in a board of an affiliate and the interest of the GC Board. But this was where we landed after discussing the point, and we may of course change things if they make more sense after these discussions!
    • Comment: I feel like a good COI policy would address this. Many of our really great people in the movement who would be excellent GCB members are staff or board members of affiliates, so I’d hate to exclude them.
    • Comment: I am not a lawyer so I don’t want to draft COI text but I think the language change could just be something like “staff or board of affiliates must sign a COI document to participate in the GCB” – “And agree to remove themselves from any discussion involving their affiliate” or something like that.
  • Comment: A stronger claim for diversity to include those who for many reasons have not been able to join our movement for many structurally unjust reasons, for instance, a diagnosis of who has been missing and an affirmative action policy.
    • MCDC: Don’t disagree with the thought, open to hear about how it could be incorporated into the Charter. We do want to emphasize it’s a platform of free knowledge for everyone.
    • MCDC: We've (MCDC) struggled getting feedback from several regions. I hope to hear proposals for improvement from these regions e.g. LATAM which has different contexts from other regions.
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