Thank you so much dear Sj for your active participation during the summit and for the report/feedback provided to the group !
I finally took the time this evening to read again, in full, all documents, all discussion pages.
I equally feel uneasy about the proposition. The version proposed last year during the Wikimedia Summit was minimalist. The version this year is at the same time... too detailed/too long, and at the same time falling short on important points.
Examples of a bureaucracy, which results in obvious flaws... 1) the charter goes into details such as "decision making at the Global Council Level requires absolute majority of voters." My thought : anyone who has been in an association knows this is a path for immobilism... 2) at the same time, there is no provision with regards to minimum requirement of participation 3) and a bit disorganized sometimes... for example; rules related to elections of global council members are mis-placed in the section related to "decision making process of the assembly"
Falling short on important points... ultimately... it looks like an advisory body more than a body with power. Examples... 1) the Global Council will establish a committee to collect technical wishes from community, and then provide advice to the WMF. 2) the Global Council would be responsible for distribution of funds to the communities... but no mention is made of any power of deciding how much the global envelop of grants might be
My favorite is probably the list of responsibilities of the core team (the Global Council Board), which include 1) Appointing and supervising its members (ok... ) 2) Serving as a representant of the Global Council activities (ok...) 3) Coordinating the annual meeting - 100+ people (ok...) 4) Maintaining accountability for the executions of the Global Council (ok...) [So far... nothing too exciting... very centric-roles...] But the best is ... 5) Drafting the initial Wikimedia Mouvement strategic plan... (as if Wikimedia 2030 did not exist ? or was considered... not the right strategy at all ?)
So far, the committee mentions that it will have 3 or 4 main functions 1) decision-making on fund dissemination (but it will have no decision-making on either how much money is allocated by WMF, nor any decision-making related to collecting money) 2) decision-making on affiliate recognition (which is good, but mostly serves affiliates) 3) advice on Product and Tech (unsure we need a GC for that) 4) and possibly something related to Trust and Safety (info not provided yet)
And to help implement the roles and responsibilities "transferred from WMF to the Global Council", the charter plan to rely on... Wikimedia Foundation staff to help...
I am not sure it is worth it at this point. Simplification would be best.
Besides, as Sj point very well, the process is quite opaque, and very much driven by Affiliates. That does not feel right to me. Nor the recurrent feeling that the only "good" path for a group is to become an affiliate to be "part of"
That being said... I mostly invite you to read the feedback published by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is very instructive. Short version
" In the present form, and following discussion with our fellow trustees, we, as the liaisons from the Board of Trustees, would not be able to recommend that the Board vote to ratify the Charter; substantive changes are still needed. We do hope there is opportunity to address some of these issues prior to the final text.
"
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Charter#Wikimedia_Foundation_f...
Flo
Le 03/05/2024 à 23:30, Samuel Klein a écrit :
Thanks for the feedback, Shaba.
On Sun, Apr 28, 2024 at 7:47 AM Stephane Coillet-Matillon stephane@kiwix.org wrote:
Thanks SJ, very interesting. And cool to hear that there’s interest around offline wikis. The million-dollar question I guess after what you wrote is whether we should support or not this Charter when it is put up for a vote?Personally, I am unlikely to support this version of a Charter: it is still changing too much and too opaquely. A charter for our movement of all movements should honor the value of fast, flexible, frequent iteration. [the committee just confirmed https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Charter#End_of_the_Community_Engagement they will make another major bulk revision and immediately proceed to a vote.]
For our group, even if the final text resolves the many open issues with the current draft, I think we should be wary of supporting it for two reasons:
*–* Revisions are going to be made even harder. From Risker's latest comment https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Charter#Alternate_ratification_and_amendment_process_proposals on the talk page, all revisions of any substance may require a community vote. That's a risky outcome in my view: a high-overhead governance process, requiring a second high-overhead process to make any changes.
*=* This final round of outreach + vote has positioned affiliates against individual contributors in terms of setting tone, purpose, & priorities.* This is an affiliate-heavy governance proposal with a few affiliates already asking for a Council to be the "highest decision-maker" about resource distribution.** That doesn't feel right for reasons Yger expressed here https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Charter#Concerns_over_comments_from_Affiliates_EDs_and_Affiliates_summit. We should fix this in the draft before voting, or indicate that more work is needed.
Sam
- There has been little substantive engagement of the broader editing
community since the first drafts landed on Meta last year. The last month of outreach leaned heavily on a Summit gathering of affiliates alone. ** This would be risky governance practice to assign to a yet-undefined Council, with gameable governance and COI challenges. It's also rather different from the 2019 plans that started us down this path https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Iteration_2/Roles_%26_Responsibilities/2%263.
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