Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard/Board liaisons reflections on final Movement charter draft/Brief

Draft version as of June 20, 2024

This is a brief on the final draft of the movement charter to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, prepared by the Board liaisons to the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC) in advance of the Special Board meeting to be held between 25 June and 9 July 2024, and shared here. For the liaisons’ reflections and recommendations, see here.

Key points

These are critical points of high-level feedback on the text of the proposed charter:

• The areas that the Wikimedia Foundation proposes to delegate to the Global Council are consistent with the commitments the Foundation has already made.
• The outlined responsibilities of the Wikimedia Foundation are overall consistent with actual ones.
• The cost, risks, and complexity of implementing the Global Council are hard to predict and might be significant.

  • This is particularly the case as once established, the Global Council can grow substantially under its own advisement.

• The values should have been validated by the communities prior to incorporation in the proposed charter.
• It is unclear how the proposed charter will advance the Wikimedia mission.

  • The draft charter is inwardly focused and does not reflect the Movement’s many different types of contributors and supporters, and most importantly, the people that the Wikimedia movement aims to serve.
  • The draft charter attempts to respond to requests from some parts of the Wikimedia Movement about how decisions are made, but there is no compelling evidence that those decisions would be better.
  • There is no success metric for the proposed charter: if it is ratified, how would we know it is successful?
  • The proposed charter focuses on organised parts of the movement, and seems to be distant from the editing communities, which are the core of the movement.

Section by section

Wikimedia Movement Principles and Values

The key concern in this section, as shared in previous feedback to the MCDC, is that the proposed values lack community validation: we do not know whether contributors actually broadly support them, and there should be a dedicated consultation, independent from the final draft charter ratification. Even if the proposed Charter is ratified, it is unclear that specifically these values are shared, as the voting happens for the whole document.

• The separation between principles and values is an improvement over previous drafts.
• The three fundamental principles are in line with core practices in the Wikimedia projects.

  • The inclusion of “Factual and verifiable information” (that was not present in previous drafts) is positive.
  • Some phrasing in “Free and open licensing” is confusing. Also, the glossary definition of “Free knowledge” doesn’t mention the freedom to make derivative works - which is essential for the Wikimedia projects. Relying on an existing definition, like the Open Definition, would have been preferable.
  • The principle of self-organization and collaboration focuses on distributed leadership.”

• Some proposed values are aspirational, but they do not seem to be values actually shared by the movement. Main example: “resilience” (it would be great, but that is not the reality).
• One reason to avoid aspirational values not definitely shared by a clear majority of our community is that such values, if enshrined in a new foundational structural document, would be difficult to change and hence could be the basis for future conflicts or demands for things we would not be able to deliver as a movement.

Individual contributors

• Confusion between “individual contributors” and “volunteers”. The draft sometime seems to describe “volunteers” as a subset of “individual contributors” (e.g., it’s a subsection), and sometimes to describe “individual contributors” as a subset of “volunteers” (e.g.: “Individual contributors and other volunteers…”), and in any case as different concepts.

  • Throughout the section there are references to “individual contributors”, “contributors”, “volunteers”, “people who contribute”, “individual participants”, “individuals”, “volunteer contributors”. It is not clear which terms are to be considered synonyms, and which ones provide actual distinctions.

The confusion continues even beyond this section. For instance, the Global Council section says that "By electing and selecting a majority of the Global Council’s members from the Wikimedia Movement’s volunteer base…", but there is no explicit requirement that candidates are volunteers.

• The draft also implies that individual contributors might be paid because it states that volunteers are not paid but is silent on whether individual contributors are paid.

Wikimedia Movement Bodies (excluding Global Council)

• The Wikimedia Foundation is described as a “Wikimedia Movement Body” together with the Global Council and the “Wikimedia Movement Organizations”. The Foundation is not considered “a Wikimedia Movement Organization” in the proposed charter.
• Establishes an “Independent Dispute Resolution mechanism”. It is not further described in the proposed Charter, but only in the supplementary documents, which describe this as a role of the Global Council and that it be guided by a dispute resolution policy developed by the Global Council. The supplementary documents say it would apply to disputes between the Foundation and the GC and between Movement Bodies. It is transitionally assigned to the Wikimedia Foundation.
• “Wikimedia Movement Organizations” describe what we generally refer to as affiliates and hubs. No changes to the status quo are proposed. This is no immediate concern; however, it will make the current structures more rigid and harder to change in the future.
• Hubs are barely mentioned and not defined in detail. This is probably a good choice, to allow for experimentation in the first phases.
• It is implicitly assumed that the main fundraising flows will always be through the Wikimedia Foundation ("Wikimedia Movement Organizations may choose to develop their financial sustainability through additional revenue generation").
• The described responsibilities of the Wikimedia Foundation align with the actual ones.

Global Council

The Global Council is the most anticipated aspect of the Movement Charter recommendation. Overall,the proposed Global Council's purpose is not clearly connected to advancing Wikimedia's public interest mission. It lacks a compelling explanation of how it will ensure more equitable decision-making and support the mission of sharing free knowledge. It also does not guide us as the Movement on how to address many of the most pressing issues facing community governance on Wikimedia projects.

• The Global Council's flexible size, rather than a stipulated size, is an improvement over previous drafts as it allows for gradual growth in size.

  • In the scenario of a full-sized Global Council, the Global Council Board would reach 25 members, which would likely impede its working effectively, as 10-15 people is generally the maximum workable size for a board. On the other hand, a Global Council Board of 5 people might be too small.
  • A possible incremental enlargement to 100 members will increase costs and likely reduce efficiency while providing no clear benefits to quality of decision-making.
  • The proposed charter defines the composition of the first, 25-person global council, but does not say anything about future selections, that may or may not follow the same principles (including whether people will be elected or selected and by whom).

• The four functions of the Global Council overall align with the areas of responsibility that the Wikimedia Foundation has proposed to assign to the Global Council.

  • Establishing Strategic Direction for the Movement: this is a new function, where GC is tasked, according to the proposed charter, with “developing long-term strategic direction for the Wikimedia Movement (...) in consultation with all stakeholders inside and outside the Wikimedia Movement”.
  • Support of Wikimedia Movement Organizations: this maps to the current Affiliations Committee, which might become a committee of the Global Council.
  • Resource Distribution: this maps to the current Regional Grants Committees, which might become a committee(s) of the Global Council.
  • Technology Advancement: this maps to the concepts behind the proposed Product and Technology Advisory Council for the work of the Foundation, but also beyond, as the GC, according to the proposed Charter, will coordinate “across different Wikimedia Movement technology-focused stakeholders”.

• The Wikimedia Foundation is willing to delegate some powers to the Global Council. At the moment, we have not read similar statements from other parts of the movement - and without that, the Global Council cannot really act as a body that goes beyond the Wikimedia Foundation.

  • Would volunteers accept a decision made by the Global Council, even if they don’t like it, just because they had a chance to vote in their elections?

Amendments

• The section is overcomplicated.
• Differently from ratification, where a minimum of eligible voters is required - even if the threshold is low - no such requirement is present for amendments.
• The distinction between the four different categories of amendments is not clear-cut and may lead to disagreements on whether a proposal is in one category or another.
• The scope of Category 2 amendments (“changes that affect only the working processes of the Global Council”) is unclear, as the final draft of the charter says little, if anything at all, about the working processes. There might be a risk for it to be interpreted for the wider Global Council section, or the Global Council scope, instead of going through movement approval as in Category 3.

Ratification

• For an all-encompassing document the support required to ratify the threshold -- 55% plus a minimum of 2% of eligible voters participating in vote -- is quite low.

Community support

• We do not yet have a clear sense of the level of community support towards the draft charter. This will become clear with the ratification vote. Comments made accompanying the vote will be especially helpful.
• Formally, at the Wikimedia Summit, affiliates have overwhelmingly voted in opposition to the draft available at the time, asking for a long list of changes to be made (the Wikimedia Foundation did not participate in the vote). This is likely an artifact of the process, and does not necessarily reflect the likely outcomes of a ratification vote, had one been made with that draft.
• There is pressure to approve the proposed Charter out of momentum, and considering the tremendous amount of work put into it (which would be falling under the sunk cost fallacy).

Other publicly available opinions and/or statements on the proposed charter

• Talk page of the Movement Charter page, with thoughts from the community members;
• CEE Hub proposed Movement Charter analysis;
• WMDE scoring of the proposed Charter against the Wikimedia Summit statements (Google doc).