On 2024-04-25 18:36, Joe Mabel wrote:

My report on the recently concluded Wikimedia Summit.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_Wikimedians/2024_Wikimedia_Summit_r...

Nutshell: if you care at all about Wikimedia budget and governance, this is big. Barring tremendously unforeseen events, we will have major and presumably democratizing changes in how the Wikimedia movement determines strategy, and how the discretionary budget is determined.

JM

Thanks Joe for the report. Information about these events is greatly needed.

It sounds that this conference was far more productive than the one I attended back in 2020, part of the Movement Strategy Global Conversation. This was online comprising 4 days covering 2 weekends. This was split into two sections for the different time zones across the world, so each section met one day each of the weekends.

Events were as follows (as I remember them). At the beginning of each session we watched a recorded speech, one by Katherine Maher one day & another by Maria Sefidari the other. Then we put in break-out sessions where we discussed matters with other attendees (which contributed nothing to the proceedings, best I could remember), filled out a multiple choice questionnaire, & the last few hours were filled with upset attendees who had expected to talk to someone who could make decisions (such as Sefidari & Maher) but had to settle with ranting at the bewildered organizers who clearly did not expect this.

I was left with the conviction that these "Global Conversations" had never been intended to gather input from Wikipedians, but were simply PR stunts to deflect the growing frustrations of the volunteer communities. Which was disappointing because so many people who attended had come in good faith with ideas they wanted to share. (Not all of us were there to discuss the FRAM affair, which had concluded not long before; I doubt more than a handful wanted to even mention it, if any.)

Having met Maryana Iskander, I want to believe that things are moving in the right direction, but having been disappointed more than once before -- at least Maher was more open & responsive than Sue Gardner ever was -- I'm still wary of the Foundation & if they really want to best work with us, or just looking to pad their resumes & bank accounts.

Geoff Burling en:llywrch