Dear all,
My intent is contributing to drafting a text of the Movement Charter which will be
ratified by the communities, the affiliates, and the WMF. IMHO this will have to be an
iterative process of community consultations. The committee will produce texts and gather
feedback from the communities - and other stakeholders - in multiple rounds. This will be
an open consultative process, based on consent decision making. In the feedback rounds
anyone is allowed to raise objections against parts of the text. For the Charter to be
ratified in the end, the drafting committee will have to have resolved any blocking
objections, before asking anyone to ratify the text. A succesfull committee will gather
feedback frequently, and resolve issues swiftly.
To come up with a workable first draft it would be convenient to have "the whole
system in the room", to be inclusive of the perspectives of all major types of
stakeholders involved. The composition of the committee, and the method of selection of
committee members should be without prejudice for the composition of the Global Council,
and the method of selection of Global Council members. The major types of stakeholders
within the Wikimedia Movement are IMHO volunteer contributors to online content project
wikis (aka editors, users, or community members), members of small affiliates, members of
large affiliates, board members of affiliates, staff of affiliates, board members of the
Wikimedia Foundation, and staff of the WMF.
The method of selection of Movement Charter Drafting Committee members will be different
for each group of stakeholders, of which there are three: the WMF, the affiliates, and the
community. IMHO I do belief the WMF board and staff to be well capable through their
internal decision making processes to appoint to the Committee one or two board members,
and a couple of staff. Nobody outside WMF has any business in trying to influence or
determine who the WMF will appoint from their ranks. IMHO I do belief the affiliates are
well capable of through their method of liking, select, elect, or appoint to the Committee
some affiliate members, some affiliate board members and some affiliate staff. Nobody
outside the affiliates has any business in trying to influence or determine who from the
affiliates will be on the Committee.
So, what about the community members on the Community. IMHO neither the WMF nor the
affiliates should even think of trying to influence which community members will be on the
Committee. How will the community make such a movement wide decision? That is a problem to
be solved by the ratified Movement Charter, which we are about to create.
Lacking such a defined process to select community members to the committee, there are
IMHO two options (which have been discussed many times):
1 Hold elections
2 Appointments
And I do assume both options to be based on self-nomination.
The objection to 1 is mainly that it takes too much time. This whole discussion is going
around in circles for six months, which would have been sufficient time for two rounds of
elections. To resolve this objection, people who dislike elections propose appointments.
Who will appoint? Only recently Pharos proposed the community sourced board members to act
as electoral college for the community members of the committee. That is, the people who
are going to be elected in the upcoming elections. That will necessarily take more time
than starting an elections for the community members to the Committee right now. However,
elections are only necessary if there is anything to choose for the voters, that is (many)
more candidates than room in the committee. Another option is to delegate the screening of
candidates, and selecting to for example to the members of the Roles and Responsibilities
Working Group, or the Election Committee as someone proposed in the Telegram channel. What
I would like to see is how the committee matches the diversity matrix and expertise matrix
as presented in the Global Conversations on June 12 and 13.
On the weekend of June 26 and 27 there will be another round of Global (and local)
Conversations about how to form a committee. A third option is that anyone who would like
to be on the committee as community member (and not selected by the affiliates nor the
WMF) express their interest publicly, either by replying to this mail, or on meta before
June 26, so all present at the Global Conversations in the weekend of June 26 and 27 can
screen candidates and raise objections if necessary to the size, or composition of the
committee, or raising doubts against individual candidates, or make proposals towards
their preferred composition of community members on the committee, or maybe nominate
themselves to remedy a problem they see.
In case we can't reach consensus or consent in the weekend of June 26 and 27 who of
the community will be on the committee, maybe because there are too many people who have
expressed their interest, than a resolution could be to hold elections, starting with a
call for candidates through a central banner.
In case you don't want to express your interest - assuming you don't want to be on
the committee and you do want to participate in the Global Conversations on June 26 and
27, please start participating in the discussion now, by replying to this mail, state your
intent for participating in the Global Conversation, and what you do want to achieve, or
accomplish in this process. If you do participate to block the creation of a Movement
Charter, please state your objections against a Movement Charter. If you do participate to
block the creation of a Global Council, please state your objections against a Global
Council. If you do participate out of fear this process will intrude the autonomy of local
community of the content project wikis, please state so, and come up with ways to resolve
this issue, or, what should in your opinion be explicitly in the Movement Charter to
reduce this fear.
The stakes are high, and there are multiple competing interest in the movement, while we
all do serve the same mission. Given this complexity I do expect robust (but amical)
debate within the committee, and I will not exclude harsh criticism - or outright
rejection - from multiple community members to whatever text the committee produces as
their first draft. To deal with this, we need a committee consisting of members willing to
deal with this complexity, and willing to process, and digest any feedback given by the
community, with an eye on resolving objections raised.
Regards,
Ad Huikeshoven
About me: Economist - graduated in 1992 from University Maastricht, civil servant,
certified Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSP I), certified Prince2 Foundation
projectmanagement, experience in Theory U and hosting u.lab, trained facilitator, trained
in Art of Hosting, Wikipedian since 2005, former Audit Committee member, former board
member of Wikimedia Nederland, presenter of Virtual Friendly Space Policy at Wikimania
Hong Kong 2013, former election facilitator of the 2019 Affiliate Selected Board Seats
process (I drafted the initial version of the Resolution 2019, amending the previous
Resolution), facilitator of the discussion tools consultation 2019 at the Dutch Wikipedia,
member of UCoC enforcement drafting committee of Wikimedia Nederland, father of two kids -
one in university, one about to start. My native tongue is Dutch. Fortynine languages have
globally more native speakers than Dutch.
Also posted on meta:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Movement_Charter_Drafting_…