Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Iteration 3/Community input/Foster and Develop Distributed Leadership

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Community input

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Narrative of Change

Community input

Principles

Glossary

In order to develop leadership in an equitable and sustainable way, the Foundation has been recommended to invest in infrastructure of the marginalized communities and equip them with social and technical trainings along with providing access to platform for knowledge management for resources, tools and information, both at the local and global levels. This will make the movement sustainable in the long run taking the socio-economic, political, and cultural contexts of different regions as it grows by 2030.

Mentoring and leadership development

  • The 2030 goals should be explained to the community for setting clear goals in leadership structures to ensure accountability and efficiency.[1]
  • Train the existing communities in different regions by bringing external trainers for particular skills.[2]

Building the leadership of the future

  • Hire a paid staff that can be a liaison between the WMF and the community to improve the overall development of the movement.[3][4]
  • Partnerships should not just be focussed on source building like GLAM sector but building other leadership elements including public speaking, event management, etc.[5]
  • Marginalized communities should be provided equal opportunities for leadership positions in our movement.[6]

Invest in the leadership potential of community members

  • For community empowerment, WMF needs to provide extra support for improving the community health and governance of the local affiliates.[7][8][9][10]
  • Create proactive practices to help first time organisers/grantees to continue to scale up their initiatives to sustain leadership of volunteers in the movement.[11]
  • Enable a platform that provides resources for organizational/ leadership training in a centralized way.[12]
  • Allocation and managing of resources for capacity building should be micromanaged at the ground level.[13]

Footnotes

  1. Set follow up goals related to Wikimedia 2030, make sure they are well understood and known, set clear roles in the leadership structures to improve efficiency and accountability and better educate users/contributors about what content is acceptable or not, make admissibility rules clearer. (Tanzania Strategy Salon, June 2019, Resource allocation thematic area).
  2. Train affiliates in a number of essential capacities, either by bringing external trainers, or from other more experienced affiliates (Cameroon Strategy Salon, capacity building thematic area).
  3. On leadership: There are leadership issues in Hindi community. There should paid staff in the foundation, who can work as a bridge between the community and the foundation. (Hindi Community Conversations, March - April 2019 - Roles and Responsibilities thematic area).
  4. Strongly support communities in countries where outside conditions make it impossible to build communities and capacities by paying staff members. (Venezuela Strategy Salon, July 2019, Capacity building thematic area).
  5. Partnerships should not just be focussed on source building like GLAM sector but capability enhancement as well (public speaking, leadership training, event management, etc). (Wikimedia Community near Manilla - Philippines, May 2019, Partnerships thematic area).
  6. Women and POC should have equal access to leadership positions in our movement, without pay gap. Contrary to the organic editor community, our offline community has the means to be exemplary. (Wikimedia Austria, June 2019, Diversity thematic area).
  7. There is a need to focus on community health at this point in the Hindi Wiki community. Currently, there are many conflicts in the Hindi Wiki community that are not able to be resolved by the current model of user group. (Hindi Community Conversations, March - April 2019 - Roles and Responsibilities thematic area).
  8. Wikimedia Foundation should oblige leadership of affiliates to adopt rotating positions in order to enhance their democracy. (Wikimedia Morocco Strategy Salon, July 2019, Roles & Responsibility thematic area).
  9. There is a complete lack of leadership in Hindi Wikipedia. In fact today Hindi is India's largest language and Wikipedia has the most article on this language, but if you talk about representation, Hindi is very backward. Whenever there is a need for a representative of Hindi in any program or if someone needs to go, then everyone here goes back or if anybody wants to come forward, then interference with them is done. (Hindi Editor community, Hindi offline wikimedia community, March - April 2019, Community health thematic area).
  10. Community Health is the key for Mentoring and leadership generation. Their experience says that leaders that have left is because of Community Health issues. Improving Health will improve our retention. If we invest in generation but not in retention, everything will fail again and again. It is great to identify the problem of the lack of renovation in leaderships, linked with the lack of renovation in the editor community. (Catalan Salon, September 2019, Capacity building thematic area).
  11. Rapid grantees with excellent results and great potential should be helped by WMF to scale the program and leadership over time because CB is the foundation of sustainable leadership in the movement. (Wikipedia & Education youth salon, capacity building thematic area).
  12. Have a portal/platform that gathers resources for organizational/ leadership training. (Philippines community, May 2019, Capacity building thematic area).
  13. Allocation and managing of resources for capacity building should be mirco-managed i.e. at the ground level and the person in charge should be provided organizational support, so as to build their capacities (in addition to their trainees's capacities) for developing leadership (Wikipedia & Education UG salon, Capacity building thematic area).