I would hope the UCoC gives us the tools to address many of these long delays. In all cases no matter how long the process  when it is completed, the goals have shifted, there's new people, and they will one day want their say.

It all comes down to one simple little idea that was the foundation of what we have created "Assume Good Faith" .    Once we moved away from that we had to replace it with something that was process orientated with each process we became better at identifying holes so we built more complex processes but processes can never achieve the ideals we once reached for.  We have now become so scared to make a decision without everyone being ask, so we hold a meetings, talk, then the outcome is always lets do a survey, then lets check with the affiliates so goes to the regional hubs they hold their meeting, then do another survey, then send it back to local affiliates to give an opinion then the local affiliate sends out its own survey.   All we have done is kicked the ball 6 months down the road with no decision, then someone its often when just one that disagrees it gets kicked back for another attempt.  In that first meeting the people there could have decided with the same outcome thats taken 2 years to reach.


These long process development cycles necessitate paid opportunities just following the trail of meetings and making sure the ball has gone down every road whether the people along that road are really invested in the individual product, and now the consideration of stipends for various community guides; perhaps now the WMF has grown in size its worth looking into how this growth is impacting community development.  

It always amazes everyone what Wikimedians can do when left to just make it happen.





On Fri, 20 May 2022 at 11:43, Steven Walling <steven.walling@gmail.com> wrote:


On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 6:25 PM effe iets anders <effeietsanders@gmail.com> wrote:
The proposals that you list are a bit double edged. It may be necessary, but they have downsides. For example, there are in a few cases very good reasons to go back to the drawing board when we're talking about foundational documents. It is annoying that it takes so long, but with time we also should see increased ownership and an increased support base. Having a single phase reduces the number of messages and time spent, but it also reduces the process to a single point of failure, making it much higher stakes. If you don't participate, you're too late. It would be nice if we can somehow still lower the stakes by making processes more iterative, and accepting that the outcome does not have to be the same for a long period of time. But there is a fundamental tension between speed and perceived pressure. 

Do we really think that the dramatic increase in process has resulted in commensurately better community participation and buy-in? Doesn’t seem like it. Seems like we still get the same relatively tiny number voices who care a lot about global governance structure, and everyone else in the community mostly just votes when advertised to. 

In any case, taking multiple years to do things like even outline what say, a code of conduct committee or global council (I still have no clue WTF that really is) will even look like and do is egregiously slow by any standard. 

I'm less concerned about elections, if only one of these rounds involves the community. If having an additional round of filtering helps to make the ballot easier to digest (reduced to six candidates for three positions sounds great to me!) that also means less mental effort for voters. The real question is: how much cumulative time are we spending on this process (or rather: should we be spending on this, if we want a good outcome). If 100 people spend an extra 2 hour to trim down from 30 to 6 candidates, that is worth it, because 10,000 people don't have to read 30 statements, bio's, Q&A's etc. If we go from 7 to 6 candidates, maybe less so. 
If doing another drafting round means 30 people spend an extra 10 hours drafting, that may be worth it, if it means that 1000 people don't have to be frustrated for a year because they constantly run into consequences of the policy and have to go through protests to get it changed. If the iteration for things that don't work is more lightweight, maybe we can just try it for a year, and evaluate after that. 

Maybe it's worth it to sometimes take a napkin and do the math: how much collective time are we going to spend on this?

Best,
Lodewijk

On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 5:12 PM Steven Walling <steven.walling@gmail.com> wrote:


On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 4:35 PM Nathan <nawrich@gmail.com> wrote:


On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 5:38 PM Steven Walling <steven.walling@gmail.com> wrote:


On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 10:27 AM Evelin Heidel <scannopolis@gmail.com> wrote:
+1 to this, my perception is that we're wasting a lot of volunteer's + staff time + resources into complex governance processes without clear results. In theory, the reason why you want this much transparency & process is to make sure decision making (and in turn resources) are allocated fairly, but in practice so much bureaucracy makes it very hard for people to participate, leading to even more inequality.

It's a complex balance to strike but definitely the current initiatives are not even a good aim to begin with.

cheers,
scann

100% this. 

The intentions behind the complex governance processes are good in that they intend to increase inclusivity. But it’s easy to forget the most limited resource we have is the attention of volunteers. The groups we include the least today have the least free time and money. Longer, multi-step processes to form and elect committees to set up committees to review processes to inform a decision then has exactly the opposite of the intended effect because it reduces participation to the slim group of people who have the time and patience for such a process. The CIA wrote a manual about how to sabotage organizations, and it’s like they wrote a perfect description of exactly how things operate right now: "When possible, refer all matters to committees for further study and consideration. Attempt to make the committee as large as possible–never less than five."[1]

The other reason we ended up in this situation is simply a lack of strong leadership. People feel like they don't have the permission or safety to do things unless they've done the maximum amount of consultations possible. This is why decisions flounder in limbo for a long time, with no one really knowing if they are happening or not happening. We're stuck because we're trying to reset our governance to solve the problem where it's unclear who is able to decide what and when... but we're trying to solve that by perpetually punting a decision to some other committee or council of people. It's turtles all the way down. 



I think that means we need to acknowledge some culpability for this phenomena - in environments like this list, folks learn that no decision is too benign to spark controversy and any actually controversial decision is guaranteed to garner a vitriolic backlash. 

Combine that with the normal tendencies of bureaucracies, magnified by the special nature of the WMF, and the result is explosive growth in distributed decision-making organs.  

Accurate insights from SJ and others, if not necessarily new, but unlikely to lead to change because all the incentives that led to this place remain. 

Yes completely true.

Some of the other bullet points in that guide to sabotage are things like “argue over precise wordings of things” that are endemic to the culture of the projects for reasons that may be  unfixable. 

Coming back to SJ’s original point, the tangible immediate kind of changes the Board and Maryana could enforce are: 

- Set more aggressive deadlines for forming new governance bodies and policies. None of these processes should take multiple years to get running. 
- Reduce the number of pre-planned stages of duplicative feedback / drafting periods.
- Where elections are necessary just do a single round of ranked choice voting after an open call for candidates. 

What else? 

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--
GN.