Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Amical: Drafting a strategy plan with the community

This was a draft for a blog post that has since been published at https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/26/drafting-a-strategy-plan-with-the-community/

Drafting a strategy plan with the community

At Amical Wikimedia we have started the process of thinking about, and writing down, our 2014–2018 strategic plan for the next five years, and also our 2013–2014 annual activity plan (our activities are linked with the educational calendar instead of the calendar year). We are trying apply both the principles and values of our association (shared with the global Wikimedia movement) and the lessons learned at the Program Evaluation June workshop in Budapest, which our GLAM ambassador Kippelboy attended. Thus, the key words defining all this process could be collaboration, efficiency and self-reflection.

First step: including all the voices

We made a collaborative effort to include all the voices within the association and the community of editors in the main plan. First, we opened a public proposals page to collect all the ideas coming from any interested person about the long term evolution of Amical Wikimedia. Secondly, we hosted an online chat meeting via IRC to ask our members' thoughts about the plan goals, their questions about the priorities and their suggestions about which should be the most important social sectors to address with our activities. Later, we had a few in-depth interviews with some users who are especially committed to Amical.

Second step: task force

Then we created a special task force of five members of different profiles to start the effective actual composition of the plan. After some offline and online meetings and developing previous working documents, we had an all-day session –hosted by the University of Girona– where the taskforce members met and used the specific methodology learned in Budapest, working as a community and implementing evaluation strategies in our programme activities. We shared and evaluated our thoughts and proposals before starting to write down the final document.

Third step: internal evaluation

Our strategy plan is now ready and is being shared on our internal wiki, so all the Amical members can add, remove, change, discuss or challenge its assumptions. The result at the end, which will published in September, will surely reflect the collaborative spirit of our community and all the reflections around what should we become.

Outcomes

Although the process has not finished yet, we can now present some partial results: Amical's Strategy Schema and the main intended work tracks. You can see the intersection of goals and actions of our plan in this graphic (still under construction, as is the whole wiki world). On top, there are the five key words which summarize the association's focus in the next years:

Cohesion: We want to keep the community binding and strong personal ties that make possible to work together.
Discourse: Since we would like to spread the word about what we do and think to participate in the global debate.
Content: Obviously the central point is to help to add content to Wikimedia projects - that should be the main goal for all the chapters and associations.
Territory: We want to be active in all the Catalan-speaking countries.
Readers: We want to explain the world in Catalan and make the people read it.

Below are the three paths to attain these goals: Activities (programmed projects for the next years), Internal (the sometimes invisible but crucial work to keep the community alive and growing) and External (how we relate with other users, Wikimedia groups and the non-wiki reality).

As for the Activity Plan, several initiatives were suggested by the community: continue the work with museums, extend our presence at universities and schools, promote Wikimedia sister projects, prepare a multilingual contest on Wikipedia focused on Catalan culture and history, increase the number of libraries that we are already collaborating with, explore new possibilities to attract editors... We are really excited to see what comes next, because surely at Amical we have plenty of work to do!

-- User:Barcelona, Amical Wikimedia

Notes

Author of the blog post text is User:Barcelona