Movement roles project/Feedback/Dedalus

Goals

• Goal alignment - some in the chapters have questioned the right of the Wikimedia Foundation to set goals for the movement ... how well can the movement align around a shared set of goals, and what should the movement do or not when chapters are not aligned with goals?
  • my answer: local chapters are per definition aligned with those goals, and if not, they ultimately cease to be a local chapter. Based on review by the chapter committee the board of the WMF accepts new chapters, and the chapter committee does review the goal(s) of the chapter - that is description of goal in statutes or bylaws.

Priorities and allocating resources

• Funding - how best should money flow to align with movement priorities?
  • wrong question based on false presumption. In a decentralized model like ours there is no hierarchical control of groups and entities and bases on the false assumption of a positive correlation between money and priorities. For example one of the priorites is to get 50 million articles - and those are created by unpaid volunteers.
• Legitimacy - the vast majority of Wikimedians do not affiliate with any specific entity, chapter or group ... if there are 100,000 users making 5+ edits a month, as far as we can tell, only ~1-2% is a member of a chapter or group ... does this mean that we either need to make groups more relevant to individuals, or entities less important in the movement, or both?
  • this question comes closest to the original definition of a troll

Decision making

• Board decision making - where does the Wikimedia Foundation board have a role in making decisions for the movement, or not, and should this change?
  • the strategy project was awesome bottom up work, the board probably has embraced the outcome of that process, and not something else.
• Other movement-wide decision-making - the Wikimedia movement has evolved a set of decision-making bodies (e.g. Chap Com) and processes that may not scale well ... which decision-making processes need to be improved now and in the future to make them more effective, more efficient and more responsive?
• Peers - some other volunteer-based global organizations have avoided national chapters (e.g. Mozilla), de-emphasized them (e.g. Creative Commons), or worked hard to globalize them (e.g. Medécins Sans Frontières) ... what would you most like to understand about peers?
  • my position is that i would love to see as many local chapters as possible. The question tries to kill chapters. Moreover somehow we are not like CC we are not like MSF. For Wikipedians as a volunteer based global organization it is natural to have national chapters. The current model is with fully independent legal entities. In another world local chapters would be an integral part of the Wikimedia Movement as a federation of local chapters.

'Feel free to raise questions about my feedback on the |talkpage.