Movement roles project/Design principles

To guide our work we have followed some design principles:

The design must support the strategic goals of the Wikimedia movement

The design of the Wikimedia movement should help the Wikimedia movement bring the sum of all human knowledge to all people.To do this.the design should support the strategy particularly in reaching parts of the world that currently lack a Wikimedia community Through its year-long collaborative strategy development process, the Wikimedia movement set itself five key strategic priorities:1) To stabilize infrastructure 2) To increase participation 3) To improve quality 4) To increase reach (readership) and 5) To encourage innovation As laid out in our proposal the purpose of the movement roles project is to clarify the roles and responsibilites of different Wikimedia entities groups and people in achieving the strategic priorities

The design should nurture the best of the Wikimedia culture

The design of the Wikimedia movement should be open and inclusive to encourage participation; decentralized with many different organizations affiliating and collaborating; and coherent globally with programs and resources working together and responding to change flexibly

The design should help Wikimedia avoid pitfalls that have tripped other global NGO networks

Other NGO networks have encountered problems with fuzzy accountabilities leading to decision gridloct bad resource allocation and even corruption; fragmenting global coherence and becoming unrepresentative

How the movement may look in five years

If we follow these design principles, in five years the Wikimedia movement may look different, and, we hope better.

Broader, deeper and more inclusive

To bring the sum of all human knowledge to all people, the movement needs to grow:both broaden and deepen It will include more people and groups with a greater diversity of people and groups We hope that the design will encourage many more people and groups from the"global south"or any communities now under represented,As the movement grows, needs evolve,and people join,groups will change,too New ones will join,existing ones may grow,shrink,close or be closed down,The design should be frictionless,flexible and forward looking,and not held back by historical constructs,such as national boundaries.

Mutually accountable

As the movement grows is size and stature, so does the responsibility on each person and group,Readers,users,and donors entrust the movement,and assume that Wikipedia,Wikimedia and all associated honor that trust In a transparent world,any breach of trust by any part of the movement raises questions of trust with all parts of the movement The growth of the movement will welcome an increasing number of new groups, each of which has an increasing accountability to the movement for its actions.Wikimedia groups will be decentralized but not autonomous: leadership and initiative will be distributed and shared,and everyone is mutually accountable

Globally coherent

A wonder of the Wikimedia movement is its global coherence.Maintaining this coherence will not happen by accident.The movement could fork or fragment.Inter-group rivalry or hostility could harden.Instead, the Wikimedia movement needs to ensure that tensions are productive, and can synthesize new,better ways. For this to happen, the Wikimedia movement sometimes needs to make global decisions effectively, efficiently and responsively.The Wikimedia Foundation is the "keystone" organization of the movement, and the legal "owner" of Wikipedia. Its board therefore needs to be able, from time to time, to be able to make decisions for the movement To be legitimate, ts composition should represent the movements billions of potential readers, millions of readers, and hundreds of thousands of contributors. It should not over-represent any part of the world or the movement

===Implications for resource allocation=== Distributing and sharing scarce resources is always a hard task.Most good movements have more opportunities to act on their mission than resources to support those actions.If sharing resources is not hard it is almost a danger signal–it suggests that mission is no longer pressing. The design principles outlined above have implications for resource allocation

Resources move from where they are to where they can best help the mission

The movement as a whole is more than the sum of its parts. Resources are entrusted to the movement to realize the vision It is the responsibility of the movement to move resources to where they can best meet the mission–effectively, efficiently and responsively, The resources are not"owned"in whichever group they happen to be for its own purpose

Accountability is not divisible

Resources entrusted to the movement come with accountability. The accountability is mutual and not easily divisible. We are mutually accountable to anybody who gives time a donor who gives money a government that gives a tax break a museum which shares its intellectual property A breach of trust in any part of the Wikimedia movement threatens the trustworthiness of the whole movement

The more money, the more rules

Any organization that deals with large amounts of other peoples' money needs rules to ensure that the money is well spent and that there are procedures in place to ensure that money will be well spent in the future. With more money come more rules, which can seem bureaucratic or even presume mistrust But their value is that they enable resources to move swiftly because they build and ensure trust in a progressively larger and more complex network