Hello Chris and thank you for your feedback,

I do agree with you that there will be many challenging areas that will need to be discussed per community/region. During the different interviews and survey, it was clear that community members were not happy about having all Middle East and Africa considered as one region, and it was also clear that the Arabic Wikipedia was considered as the center of the community, although many voices expressed a wish to separate North Africa from the Middle East, given several aspects.

As Philip mentioned in his comment, it is very important to consider how the next steps will happen, mainly who will "start" this, and not to overwhelm volunteers by giving them the full responsibility to start this organizational work. There should be a discussion about how a professional support, or coordination can happen, in order to drive the regional (and thematic) hubs discussion and implementation forward. (Otherwise what will happen, or is already happening, is that big chapters with staff already work on that during their work time, while user groups with volunteers cannot keep up at the same peace, creating a huge gap in our movement...)

Best regards,
--
-----------------------------------------------------
Anass SEDRATI

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2021 09:22:27 +0100
From: Chris Keating <chriskeatingwiki@gmail.com>
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Report about Regional Hubs Ready
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
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Hi Anass,

Thank you very much for this report! It really highlights both the strength
of the demand/need for hubs, and the many challenges that we will face in
setting them up.

The list of areas where there is and isn't a consensus among the people you
spoke to is very useful and clearly highlights some questions which need
answers from a movement level.

I was also interested to read that Arabic-speakers firmly wanted an Arabic
hub (or possibly two, depending on what scale the hubs end up as) - and not
a "Middle East and North Africa" hub, let alone a "Middle East and Whole of
Africa" hub. Given what you say in the report regarding the communities
feeling they have little in common and different needs, this is
understandable. But it does also raise the question of which hubs would
cover/support the Turkish and Farsi communities. We are probably going to
encounter many more questions of scope like this one as more areas take
steps to define what they want from hubs.

Thanks,

Chris