Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Reports/Process overview/Community conversations
Movement Strategy community conversations were discussions with volunteers, affiliates, staff members, and other stakeholders from across the Wikimedia Movement about our recommendations for change. They took place in both on- and offline, in-person formats. The purpose was for everyone to have a voice in shaping the recommendations to advance in our strategic direction.
The 2019 conversations began in March after the working groups released their initial documents. From March to July, communities across the Movement were asked to give feedback on these materials to shape the direction of the recommendations that would be produced over the coming months. Around June, communities began giving substantive input around the nine thematic areas while working groups were drafting recommendations. By mid-August, the nine thematic working groups presented 89 draft recommendations for public comment and review. These drafts were at a very early stage and gave the community an opportunity to share input that shaped which recommendations were kept, changed, or eliminated.
Conversations took place on the Wikimedia 2030 Meta-Wiki pages, on various social media channels, village pumps, and in person at strategy-focused meetings, the Wikimedia Summit, and at Wikimania. Feedback could also be provided via an online survey.
Making it a truly global conversation
A key focus was to ensure as many Wikimedians as possible could participate. One barrier the core team was determined to reduce was the language barrier. As a result, seven community strategy liaisons supported the core team in early 2019 to support and facilitate community conversations in Arabic, French, German, Hindi, Mandarin, Portuguese, and Spanish. All relevant materials were also translated into multiple languages.
Many affiliates and the Wikimedia Foundation had dedicated strategy liaisons inside their organizations who were responsible for keeping their organizations informed and channeling their feedback back into the process. These representatives led conversations across their own internal channels and took part in a new strategy salon grant program to fund in-person meetups for strategy discussions. A total of 35 applicants received grants of between $500-$1500 to host 48 events between June 1 and September 15. The goal of these events was to allow affiliate leaders to bring together a broad mix of affiliate members who live in their local area to have deeper conversations about one or two strategy themes that were of interest to them. The hope was that these events would allow for relevant and creative discussions about our future and also offer affiliates opportunities to strengthen relationships and deepen engagement with their members.
In total, 48 strategy salons were held in 29 countries. The core team also worked with community members to co-design four larger regional strategy events targeting participants from traditionally underrepresented Wikimedia communities. These included the: ESEAP community (Bangkok, Thailand, June); Baltic and Russian communities (Narva & Ida-Virumaa, Estonia, July); Armenian and Farsi communities (Yerevan, Armenia, July); and communities in East Africa (Kampala, Uganda, September).
What was done with the feedback
Every month, community strategy liaisons summarized the feedback they had received and posted brief summary reports on Meta-Wiki in English as well as on their own language-specific channels in local translations. A collated copy of all of these reports was provided to the working groups on a monthly basis as well. These reports were also published on Meta-Wiki so that the Movement could see what input had been shared and what was being done with the feedback. Strategy liaisons also posted a series of blog posts to share what they had learned from facilitating community conversations.
The volume of input was high as was the working groups’ workload, and therefore processing and analyzing all the feedback was not always easy. For this reason, from October to December 2019, the strategy liaison team produced extensive analysis documents for working group members, sorting community feedback by relevance and connection to evolving ideas within the recommendations. Over time, several liaisons began to work more closely with working group members, helping to connect community ideas to each new draft of the recommendations. At an in-person meeting in December 2019, to create one set of recommendations from the nine individual sets produced by the working groups, one strategy liaison was present to help support the incorporation of community feedback. Other strategy liaisons also assisted in citing community feedback in the final published drafts of the recommendations, highlighting areas where working group decisions synchronized with community input.
Movement Strategy community conversations 2020: A new round of community conversations was launched in January 2020 to coincide with the publication of the third iteration of the recommendations. Conversations again happened on a variety of online channels, while some affiliates also hosted offline strategy meetings with members. Translations of the material were provided in 12 languages.
The core team dedicated its full team resources to engage in community conversations and worked with the community strategy liaisons, writers, reviewers, and staff and board members of affiliates and the Wikimedia Foundation to plan and support the discussions.
When this round of conversations closed in February 2020, community input was compiled in a brief summary report that was published online. It was also provided to a team of former working group members who used it to help finalize the recommendations. More details about this round of community conversations can be found in the section “Synthesized recommendations published”.
What we learned
- Active engagement and discussions with the online communities as well as the review of their feedback should have been made a greater priority for working group members as recommendations were being drafted. New rounds of community input were often delayed or disconnected from the active work of recommendations drafting, and, in the process design, working groups were not given sufficient time and space to review community feedback.
- Ensuring equitable participation from underrepresented communities requires intentional design and more intensive use of resources. In-person events are one highly effective strategy toward this aim, particularly in ESEAP and East Africa. For future events, greater follow up support for community development is recommended to build on an event’s momentum and strengthen capacity building and relationship development.
- The adaptive, iterative nature of the process made the strategy process hard for many community members to understand or follow along, and therefore provide feedback that working groups would find relevant.
- Using complex English terminology and cultural concepts posed a barrier to equitable participation from non-English-speaking and non-Western language groups.
- Core team presence in online forums should have been higher during community conversations in 2019. The influx of feedback was large, and we lacked time and capacity to address all of it. The core team also did not provide enough clarity to the working groups about the response process and who actually responds on what level and platform.
- Changes made between iterations of the recommendations were not made transparent enough in the first rounds. The community could not see how their input had shaped the content, which rightfully caused frustration.
Personal insights: East Africa Strategy Summit lead organizer Geoffrey Kateregga reflected that:
The East Africa Strategy Sumit gave the participants a common understanding of the movement strategy process and presented us with the opportunity to have our voices heard in shaping the future of the movement. Most importantly, we were able to look at the challenges we face as Wikimedia volunteers in East Africa and suggest solutions as we look forward to Wikimedia 2030. I was also happy to see participants from countries like Ethiopia, Burundi, Rwanda, and Kenua who had no existing Wikimedia communities get motivated to startup communities in their countries by learning from their counterparts in Congo, Tanzania, and Uganda at the event.
Personal insights: Community strategy liaison for French-speaking communities, Diane Ranville, reflected that:
In Community Conversations, the 'subsidiarity' principle proved highly useful: the more communities are empowered to create their own space for conversations, following their own dynamic, the more they engage, because they truly own the process.
- New Delhi Strategy Meetup, April 2019
- Open Foundation West Africa Strategy Salon, August 2019
- Wiknic New York, July 2019
- Emna, Aboubacar and Diane at WikiConvention Francophone, September 2019
- Wikimedia Levant Strategy Salon, August 2019
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- Wikimedia Strategy Salon in Rajshahi, July 2019
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- Strategy Salon Venezuela, July 2019
- Strategy Salon in Georgia, September 2019
- Strategy Salon in Tanzania, July 2019
- Wikimedia Thailand Movement Strategy Salon, August 2019
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