User:EGalvez (WMF)/Sandbox/PCL/Proposed projects

The proposed projects listed below are the Program Capacity and Learning team will be focusing on over the next year. We would like your input to help us decide which are most useful for you. There are 2 products and 5 processes.

Take a moment to review these proposals. We would appreciate your comments, even it just to say you like the idea. Thanks!

Support Area 1: Community Leadership Development

Process: Affiliate Partnerships

The Affiliate Partnerships work will focus on building increased communication, trust, transparency and collaboration among Wikimedia Affiliates and the Wikimedia Foundation. This includes staff support for AffCom.

One feature of this work will be the development of an annual WMF scorecard (benchmark in 2016) providing year to year input to WMF on trust, products and community support.

Other work to support Affiliate Partnership includes facilitating internal WMF knowledge management about communities and best practices of community engagement; Support of a central knowledge hub for affiliate support (Link to Knowledge Hub) and maximizing the value of conferences, site visits and high potential events and opportunities to extend movement wide impact and reach.

Process: Community Listening Project

Do you need community input to make important planning decisions?

The Community Listening Project is a series of activities and support for sharing, documenting and learning how to listen to communities and make well informed decisions.

In the first year, the Community Listening Project will focus on surveys and community consultations. Activities will include online and in-person workshops, as well as including dedicated effort to document resources in the Survey Support Desk and a Community Consultation toolkit. You will learn from your peers about when to use surveys or consultations and how to plan and manage the process. You may also gain technical expertise for interpreting results and how to be accountable to decisions. This project will help you save time when you need to start a survey or consultation. Future projects for the Community Listening Project could include learning about Community Wishlist project, how to create and run committees, using mailing lists for decisions, and other tools.

Most important, this the Community Listening Project will help you reach better decisions in a collaborative way with your communities. Together, the Wikimedia movement can become a recognized leader in collaborative decisionmaking.

Process: Peer Mentoring & Leadership

The volunteer community has a wide range of experience and potential leaders, however, there have been very few efforts to help grow natural skills and support them with leadership resources, such as learning frameworks, peer recognition, and shared inter-community understanding of “leadership”.

Peer Mentoring & Leadership: Wikimedia’s greatest strength is its community of volunteers. This proposed project leverages that strength by investing in resources and volunteers who will serve as peer mentors for the movement in enabling emergent leadership already existing in programs and other community activities.

Peer leaders will benefit from shared resources and targeted materials that help leaders navigate common leadership problems characteristic of the Wikimedia community to reduce duplicate efforts and systems. Mentors will have opportunities to connect with each other to collaborate and allow leaders to become better positioned to access available community resources, through WMF grants or other resource opportunities. Leaders would also be able to participate in an academy that will build skills and will recognize volunteers as emerging mentors for their contributions to the movement and growing their local community capacity.

Peer mentoring will invest in people. The Peer Leadership Academy will get beyond the Wikimedia Foundation's current capacity limitations to provide one-on-one support of leaders, beyond resources of the WMF or more developed affiliates, in major regions of the world through recruitment and training of regional volunteers.

Support Area 2: Programs Learning and Infrastructure

Process: GLAM-Wiki Support

The GLAM-Wiki community is one of the strongest community-generated programs, providing many of the highest profile, and most productive external partnership for the Wikimedia movement. These partnerships with age-old cultural heritage institutions -- like the British Library, the US National Archives and the Smithsonian -- have greatly bolstered our credibility and expanded the Wikimedia movement’s reach and quality; but the WMF has not consistently supported GLAM-Wiki community leaders.

We plan to embed support of GLAM-Wiki alongside WMF’s support of other high impact programs like education and libraries, providing each team the same ability to learn, connect, and scale the most successful community-generated efforts from these critical programs.

GLAM-Wiki leaders, actively teach leading content experts how to edit, and they facilitate uploads of millions of high-quality images. To more strategically leverage their work, we will give GLAM-Wiki leaders one person to act as a global point of contact, a connector among leaders and regions, and an advocate for software improvements that can multiply their efficiency ten-fold. Moreover, we will liaise with a number of teams throughout the WMF, such as Engineering and Strategic, that need connections to the GLAM-Wiki community to understand the needs and network of this vital community.

GLAM collaborations provide the Wikimedia movement long-term presence in facilitating access to the World’s cultural history, and having a GLAM-Wiki effort at WMF will allow the WMF to strategically support these amazing volunteers and communities doing this inspiring work.

Discussion

• In what ways is this project useful for you?

Product: Wikimedia Knowledge Hub

At the heart of our work is connection, communication and learning across communities, but where do we go to connect, communicate and learn? “The Hub” is a single, point of entry where affiliates and community program leaders can find the information they need on how to run programs, polish outreach, and distill learning. Most importantly it’s a place where they can find each other and share learning as well as connect with WMF staff.

This is presented as a joint initiative by WMF community engagement (PC & L Communications and Health and Safety) to support program leaders and affiliates, The Hub is a way to find people with the skills and expertise they’re looking for, to find guidance and answers to specific questions about what they are trying to do or build, and to find curated links to best practices and relevant documentation. A Contact Session on the Hub will help leaders connect with foundation staff and each other.

Product: Program and Events Dashboard

Program leaders spend a lot of their precious time manually tracking participants and maintaining program resources such as event pages, training materials, and metrics for evaluation.

The Program and Events Dashboard is software tailored for program leaders to manage and track programs and participants across Wikimedia projects. It will be based on the Wiki Edu Dashboard and Outreach Dashboard, but tailored to work for general programs across all Wiki projects and all languages.

Program management features will include things like easy preparation for programs or events (e.g. registration, eligibility, goals, etc.), distributes training materials, tracks participation and metrics, connects participants, and much more!

Program management shouldn’t be a limiting factor in growing or scaling programs--the Programs and Events Dashboard will enable program leaders to focus on running great programs and not tedious manual organizing and tracking.

Process: Outcome Mapping

(We need) to support affiliates and program leaders in getting beyond quantitative content metrics to mapping the qualitative outcomes of core programs as movement drivers for hundreds of implementations of core programs.

Enter Outcome Mapping: A Social Cartography of Wikimedia Programs that captures qualitative outcomes, local stories of programs, and shared movement impact.

Outcome mapping emphasizes qualitative approaches for both processes and outcomes. It surfaces stories of local programs to honor their diversity. Outcome mapping also provides qualitative approaches for evaluating outcomes across our programs landscape. It enables the capturing and sharing of social and environmental changes targeted by our program leaders and their partners. Outcome mapping also shifts away from assessing the products of a program and instead focuses on changes in behaviors and relationships.

Outcome Mapping helps us learn about the social and environmental changes targeted by our program leaders and their partners. It articulates the impact of program work on the Wikimedia ecosystem and the wider world. It helps program leaders to be specific about their targets, the strategies that they employ, and the changes that they see. As a result, it will help us be more effective as a movement in terms of the results we achieve together.