Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Iteration 1/Community Health/Community diversity and growth

Overview

Recommendations

Implementation

Reports

FAQ

This is an archive for draft recommendations. Visit Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Recommendations to read the final recommendations.

Community diversity and growth

Invest in building an inclusive global community

1. There is a need of investing both resources and time in consciously building a global community. To that end the movement has to:
2. Provide scalable multi-lingual online training and learning infrastructure covering a wide range of voluntary skill and capacity building as well as mandatory training and re-certifications (after 2 years) for user rights groups with access to non-public information. Topics for mandatory trainings and certifications include but are not limited to:
   1. self-care,
   2. conflict resolution,
   3. adequate support of people with mental health challenges in online environment,
   4. diversity and inclusion,
   5. digital security basics for volunteers with access to non-public information as well as general security best practices, and
   6. risk identification and escalation for issues volunteers should not be handling but passing over the Foundation staff.
3. The training (re-)certifications demonstrate skill levels and results should be provided in a format re-usable by the people certifying for other purposes, demonstrating the skills they have gained in the trainings.
4. Training modules covering sensitive topic areas like support of users experiencing mental health challenges are recommended to be written and maintained by partner organizations and professionals partnering transparently with the infrastructure provider.
5. Affiliates and other local structures of support and self organisation with a role profile and resourcing to play an important role in contextualisation and context-sensitive localization.

Rationale

This would support the goal of knowledge equity by supporting people of different backgrounds to contribute and use the platform.  A social online movement needs to foster a shared group leadership learning space and experience to build a common experience group identity and direction.

Currently relevant education and training resources are limited and not equitably distributed.

The current community does not have a shared understanding of social dynamics within the ecosystem itself and how it relates to the world at large.

Build a culture in all communities which is welcoming to newcomers, as they  are a key to the success of the movement.

• We recommend a strong focus on programs, structures, and processes to support newcomers in various ways (people, events, communities, partners, software).
• As an initial step towards concrete actions, current and planned future efforts addressing newcomers, we should develop regional coordinators that coordinate the efforts in the various communities of that region.

Rationale

Newcomers (people, communities, partners) are essential to our movement as it diversifies both in terms of knowledge and people. The strategic direction challenges Wikimedia to reach out and embrace both new stakeholders and new forms of knowledge in the pursuit of knowledge as a service and knowledge equity.

Newcomers face a diverse set of challenges not encountered or already overcome by current members of the movement that need to be systematically assessed and incorporated in decision making on all institutional levels.

Wikimedia is just one of many current and potentially future online destinations newcomers can participate in, share their knowledge with, and learn from. If we want to be the destination of choice for such people, both in joining our existing communities of users (including volunteers and readers) and in building new ones, we have to make offers to them that meet them where they are, with their needs and in their language(s).

“Democratizing” participation by removing barriers  (making Wikipedia/Wikimedia everyone’s responsibility)

The community health working group recommends the wiki community begin actively acknowledging barriers to participation. Barriers must be considered during knowledge work and include differences in physical ability, geographical, language, social and technological. Examples of social barriers include gender identification, nationality and age.  Acknowledging barriers and working with barriers in mind. Simply recognizing and communicating barriers can alleviate the isolation the barriers impose.

Rationale

We are assuming barriers are limiting to the success of the wiki community. By not acknowledging barriers and continuing to isolate people, the hopes of the strategic direction will not be recognized.