Hi Filip,

Previously WMF seemed to have a larger scope of work in supporting educators in institutions. I think that some of that stopped when a few WMF staff members left. I think that at least some of that staffing has been restored. However, I don't want WMF to use a staffing shortage as a reason to permanently offload more administrative and support responsibilities onto volunteers. If volunteers are contributing in ways that they like, that's fine and good, but I don't want volunteers to feel that it's their obligation to fill WMF's capacity gaps with their personal unpaid time, especially not on a long term basis. WMF's job is support the community, not the other way around. However, if the people in the user group like how things are going and feel that their time is being used well in a sustainable and respectful way, then I'm glad to hear that, and I wish you the best in your activities.

I'm sorry if anything in my second paragraph seemed offensive. I'm confused regarding how what I wrote was offensive. I thought that I was expressing concern about the sustainability of a person's activity level and the sustainability of the groups in which they are involved, which I thought would have been well received. Can you specify what you found to be offensive? I'm happy to discuss that off list or on one of my user talk pages if you prefer. I am not perfect and I hope that I am always willing to learn how to do better.

Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )

:) OK, it sounds like the group is happy with how things are going.

I think that, for long term endeavors like setting up a new organization which may be active over a time range of months to decades. thinking about sustainability is a good idea. I intended the questions to be benevolent and not hostile. I hope that this makes sense.

Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )

Hi Shani,

Thanks for your email. I have been waiting to reply in detail until I have fewer interruptions and short term issues to address. I am now in a better position to think about this discussion. The delay has also helped to alleviate my earlier feeling of surprise, and I hope that I can now respond calmly.

I drafted this email offline, but I hope that I retained the content of your message to me. I bolded the text that I took from your previous email.

* Filip already addressed some points, so **I’ll** add some food for thought (I'll try to keep it concise, since as you well noted, **I’m*

* very busy these days): * Yes, a lot of effort is going into setting up the Education User Group, but these are not only my efforts; rather **it’s* * a group effort. As the chosen chair, I can only hope I'm doing a good job facilitating, bringing people together, and most importantly, setting a good example, but in no scenario am I the focus -- the work we do globally is the focus, and many people deserve credit for making this a reality. The efforts invested in the group are yet another testament to the actual need and to the fact that many people in the movement, especially volunteers, see the value of its existence. * Great.

** While our User Group has been officially recognized only in October 2018, we have been around for quite some time now. The application process to AffCom took over a year (which is outrageous in itself, but besides the point here), and was a result of a work done by a group called the Wiki Education Collaborative (which has been around since 2014, and that has since dissolved in order to set up the UG). So you see, we have actually been very consistent in our work and lived through the many (many!) changes in the WMF Education team. I, personally, have been doing EDUWiki work since 2011, before the Collab, as did many of our members. This is why I believe that your concerns of **“sustainability”** should be directed elsewhere.*

Thanks for the information regarding the history. I had forgotten about the Collab. I’m glad to hear that the UG has a longer history than I originally guessed, because this implies to me that the organization has already demonstrated durability and may be more sustainable than I was first thinking.

** The WMF EDU team consists of 3-4 people. No matter how good they are, they cannot, simply cannot, attend to the needs of the whole EDUWiki community. In fact, they never did. The Education activity in our movement is simply too vast for such a small team to handle, especially considering their very limited resources (which is not their entire fault, but **that’s** the way it is for now). This is why they have always joined forced with local affiliates, later with the Collab, and now with our User Group. We keep our fingers crossed for Nichole and hope she will be able to build a more sustainable team. We also hope that the work she & Ben are doing inside the WMF universe, will yield some fruits and will help Education get the place it deserves in our movement, in terms of acknowledgement of contribution and resource allocation.*

I was aware of the work that the affiliates were doing, including affiliate staff, and my impression is that a large part of the work of the WMF education staff is to support the affiliates. However, I lack a clear understanding of which education program tasks in the Wikiverse are being done by the WMF Education Program staff, which are being done by affiliates including affiliate staff, and which are being done by the user group. Is there a page somewhere that describes the relationships among these groups?

** The UG is instrumental in giving a voice to the people on the ground, especially the volunteers around the world. Having a voice is key to achieving our global goals and attending to our international needs. It is also needed as sometimes that WMF has its own agenda and goals, and they could be different from what the community wants and needs. This is one of the main reasons we created the UG in the first place. But again -- we do not work in an isolated way; rather, this is an ecosystem, of WMF, UG, Chapters and stakeholders outside of our movement. We are aiming to be a force that strengthens these ties and helps this network evolve, within and outside our movement. So it really **isn’t** about me or the work that I personally do; **it’s** about the community and about joining forces, which is why it is a sustainable model of operation and also why I said there are many people that are making this happen. If it was just me, I would be failing my role as a leader, as I perceive it.*

OK, this makes sense to me. One of my concerns about groups in general, such as highly organized Wikiproject groups and affiliate user groups, is that they can pile a disproportionate share of work onto one person or a small number of people, in which case there is reason to consider questions regarding sustainability.

** Yes, **I’m** currently officially serving as chairperson of 2 affiliates and am involved in many projects. If **you’ve** been following my work since joining in 2011, that was pretty much the case from the get go. **I’m** simply the type of person I am - one with many interests, a variety of expertise, a passion for free knowledge, a flare for the international and a strategic thinking. Armed with my practical POV, my feminist lenses and my Israeli Chutzpah, I have been known to get things done and have been involved in a variety of projects (rather than concentrating on just one). BUT -- **I’m** hardly special because of that. Even if **I’m** the only one in the movement who is chair of two affiliates (not sure if I am, but for the sake of the argument, say that I am), many of my Wiki-friends are as involved in various aspects of the movement, run multiple initiatives and projects, some much more than me. In fact, all of our board members have other official hats as volunteers, with half of them being chairs themselves of other affiliates. This is all to say that **I’m** not sure what I did to deserve this **“special treatment”** by becoming the focus of your concerns. Sustainability, burnout and community health are general issues that certainly do not apply only to me and should be therefore discussed more broadly.*

I am glad that you agree that sustainability, burnout, and community health are worthy of general interest and discussion. I haven’t been following your work in particular. However, I would have similar questions regarding sustainability for other people who fill critical roles and for which finding good replacements would be difficult. As an example, if someone is an administrator on English Wikipedia and an OTRS agent for Commons, while those are both important roles, they are not unique roles in organizations such as chairperson, treasurer, or executive director roles in affiliate organizations usually are, so I would probably consider the administrator and OTRS roles to be less of a dependency concern for project sustainability than the affiliate officer roles are, unless someone is making contributions in their administrator or OTRS roles that are (1) difficult for others to replace if that person leaves and (2) important for the sustainability of one or more high profile elements of the projects. Maybe some people can successfully fill multiple critical roles if they are not overworked. For anyone who is in a role on which other people significantly depend, I hope that there are people who are good candidates to replace them if they become inactive, although our relatively small population of skilled volunteer contributors makes this a concern, and multiple small user groups and small wikis seem to have low levels of participation.

The risk of someone becoming inactive may be at a level that everyone involved is willing to accept, but I believe that acknowledging and evaluating the risk is important. If everyone decides that the risk is okay, then that’s fine, but I think that the question is important even if the answer is that everything is okay.

I do not intend my questions about the sustainability of work of a person who may be difficult to replace, and my questions about sustainability of multiple organizations which have dependencies on a single person, to imply a negative judgment regarding the competence of a person who fills multiple roles.

** Finally, talking and thinking about sustainability, burnout and community health is a very important and welcome topic. In fact, I wish people in our movement invested more time discussing and acting on that; but in my humble opinion, in order to achieve your goal of creating a proper discussion about this topic, it should be framed differently than the way you chose to frame it in your email. Here are some points to consider:*

* * When discussing general topics such as sustainability, burnout and community health, it is more productive to focus on the community rather than on one individual, especially in a public discussion. Helps people remain more objective and to the point.*

When a person their official capacities may be at risk of being overextended, and those risks are publicly known (I would likely treat risks which are not publicly known differently, such as if someone had cancer but they did not make that information public), I think that asking public questions about whether that person’s official work is sustainable is okay. The questions of sustainability are in regards to both the person’s individual sustainability in their official capacities, and in regards to the sustainability of the groups which they support in their public roles.

** It is advisable to know the history and the context of the example you use.*

I agree, but if someone doesn’t know, I don’t think that should mean that questions shouldn’t be asked.

** It is seldom a good idea to project from **one’s** own experience onto others.*

I agree that using personal experience as a basis for reaching a general conclusion is somewhat risky, but we are all prisoners of our limited experience, whether that experience is from a single accidental occurrence or thousands of occurrences from systematic experimentation. I generally would not discourage someone from asking questions solely because they had experience that is different from mine or may not be representative of a population. In addition to my personal bad experience of being overloaded, I have seen some high profile burnouts of other people, and I think that my concern is valid. The concern may seem to be unnecessary, but that’s something that I probably won’t know if I don’t ask. In this case I hope that the questions regarding sustainability would not be viewed as an implied personal attack.

** **It’s** rarely perceived a positive and benevolent move to target an individual (which is why Filip -- but not only him -- found your message offensive). As in point 1, it deflects from the main topic. It is especially true when the individual happens to be a woman. There are still too few of them in the movement, and they should be celebrated for their achievements and for overcoming all the obstacles and harassment women face by participating in the Wikiverse.*

Sometimes I think that asking questions about an individual is the right thing to do, and I continue to believe that it was the right thing to do here. Creating a feeling of dislike was not my intention, but I think that my questions about sustainability are valid and important.

Because you mentioned the subject, let me say that I am aware of the problems of diversity and harassment in the Wikiverse and in a variety of other contexts as well. Here is an article that I read today regarding this topic: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/magazine/woman-combat-afghanistan-militar.... We have many shortcomings in the Wikiverse with regards to diversity, and I’m willing to discuss that topic, although I think that it would be best as a topic in a separate thread.

** In general, it is more productive to empower people and encourage them to continue their good work, rather than be concerned that they are unable to properly manage their schedule and other life commitments, or that they will soon not be able to handle what they have committed to doing. I'm sure when put like that you can appreciate how this may be perceived as demeaning or a complete disrespect of their intelligence.*

I perceive this situation differently. I want to encourage good work, but I also think that my questions about sustainability are valid. The answer to those questions may be that everything is okay, but that doesn’t mean that the questions shouldn’t be asked or that they imply a personal attack. I made a point in my original email of saying that I had experienced problems myself with trying to sustain multiple activities simultaneously, and I thought that using myself as an example would make it clear that my question was not intended to be demeaning or disrespectful. I was concerned that you are at an elevated level of risk for being overextended among multiple good activities, and that multiple Wikimedia organizations may be dependent on you in a way that creates an elevated level of risk for their official activities. I have re-read my original question and in my re-reading of it I do not find an implied personal attack. There are other situations in the Wikimedia universe in which I have been sharply critical of someone’s choices, but I do not find any such criticism or attack when I re-read my original email in this thread.

Questioning the sustainability of activities does not imply that the activities are bad or that someone lacks sufficient intelligence to fill multiple roles. Let me illustrate my point with an example. Regardless of how intelligent a surgeon may be, my guess is that they are unlikely to be successful at working on 5 complicated reconstructive surgeries simultaneously for 72 hours with no breaks or sleep. The surgeon may be the world’s best reconstructive surgeon, but that doesn’t mean that I would encourage them to take on more work than they could successfully execute, and if I became aware of information that suggested that they might be doing more work than they can do with an acceptable level of risk, then I think that someone should ask questions about the sustainability of what that surgeon is doing. Alternatively, if the surgeon is performing excellent surgeries on a regular basis at a rate that seems sustainable, then I hope that someone will thank that surgeon and encourage them to continue their good work.

There may be occasions when a burst of intense activity is okay when there is a plan for discontinuation after a short time. For example, if someone is filling multiple critical roles for a length of one week due to other people being on vacation, that is probably more achievable and less risky than continuing to have that one person fill multiple critical roles for a length of one year.

I would view a situation differently if someone expressed a problematic assumption in a question or statement. For example, if someone says, “You wear a mohawk so how can you possibly be qualified for the Audit Committee?” or “You live in Canada so you should not write articles regarding Dar es Salaam”, or “I am concerned that you use an electrolarynx but this job requires good people skills”, or “You appear to be a member of <insert group here> but this job requires that you represent members of <different group here> in court and you could not possibly do that effectively”, or “You are a <group 1> person so you can’t understand the experience of <group 2>”, then I think that there should likely be a discussion regarding assumptions.

*Hey, I think we have a learning pattern here! :) But, seriously, Pine, while I personally **don’t** question your good intentions in your email, it was important for me to offer you my perspective on how your email was perceived by many, in addition to addressing your concerns. Mostly, though, **I’m** hoping that **you’ll** take this as a personal invitation to join us in the coming monthly open meetings. In other words -- **don’t** take my word for it; become involved and see for yourself. I do think you have a lot to offer and that we can learn from your experience in both running partnerships and governance.*

I am trying, with limited success, to take my own medicine by being involved in fewer activities than I was previously, so I decline your invitation but I thank you for offering it. Perhaps I will join a meeting at some point in the future.

I hope that I have clarified my thinking regarding this matter. You may disagree with how I worded my questions or perceive them in a different light than I intended, and you might continue to disagree with how I worded my questions after reading this explanation, but I hope that my thinking and intentions are now clearer. I hope that the depth of my response helps to communicate the seriousness with which I read your concerns and my sincerity in hoping to improve a somewhat tense situation which I did not anticipate. There are other situations in the Wikimedia universe where I intentionally confront what I think is a problem, but it was not my intent to raise tensions with you in this conversation. Maybe I’ll have an argument with you in the future regarding a different topic and maybe we’ll mutually decide that we dislike each other, but I hope that this thread is not the thread that causes any long term personal dislike. I admire your work ethic, I thank you for explaining the situation in more detail, and I wish the best for the user group.

Regards,

Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )