Hi Paolo,
In my experience Wikimedia staff are always just as committed and enthusiastic as volunteers - it's not a job anyone takes if all they care about is collecting their paycheque. :)
But where I share some of your concern is with the balance of some of the working groups. Staff and board members of large organisations are much more represented in some WGs than others.
Roles and Responsibilities has 8 members, including three Chapter EDs, two staff and one board member from the WMF, and two volunteers drawn from FDC and AffCom.
Resource Allocation has 11 members presently, of whom 9 are from the WMF, from large chapters, or from the existing FDC.
Are these groups really going to be considering significant changes to the way things happen at the moment?
By contrast the Diversity WG is wonderfully volunteer-led and diverse, but then I suspect the Diversity Working Group isn't going to be the one making important governance recommendations.
Chris
On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 2:20 PM Paulo Santos Perneta paulosperneta@gmail.com wrote:
Hello,
"*Given the extensive time commitment required for participation in the WGs, I think that it's reasonable to expect that a significant percentage of the members will be staff who are paid to participate because the time commitment is probably too heavy for many volunteers *" (
2018-07-23 0:04 GMT+01:00
Pine W )
Isn't that a problem of "bias by design"? If the design of the groups favors the participation of staffers, who are paid by the chapters to look after their interests, isn't this an obvious conflict of interest? Why would a staffer of Wikimedia Antarctida, whose relation to the Movement is mainly defined by the salary (s)he gets at the end of the month, paid by his/her chapter, be interested in participating in strategy discussions for other reason than to advance the points and interests of Wikimedia Antarctida? Even assuming those interests do not conflict with those of the Wikimedia Movement (which is not granted), the expected input would still be very limited in scope.
All the best,
Paulo
2018-07-23 0:04 GMT+01:00
Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com:
Speaking in general terms about diversity of the WGs, this is a challenging topic even for people who have the best of intentions. What do we mean by "diversity" and "bias" in regards to the composition of the WGs? That discussion alone could be extensive and there might not be consensus on the definitions.
If the goal in general is maximum diversity on as many factors as possible, that is a difficult goal to achieve. Given the extensive time commitment required for participation in the WGs, I think that it's reasonable to expect that a significant percentage of the members will be staff who are paid to participate because the time commitment is probably too heavy for many volunteers, and our existing volunteers already have plenty of important activities to do.
There are other ways that this phase of the strategy development process could be run that would be less burdensome for volunteers - and I personally would advocate for such an approach - but the downsides that I could foresee are that (1) the staff involved would likely also not be sufficiently diverse for the aspirations of many of us, and (2) the culture and mindset of staff can be very different from those of the volunteers, so there would almost inevitably be some loss in terms of the richness of the conversations.
What I'm trying to do here is to encourage us to have realistic expectations.
I lack the knowledge to comment on why particular individuals or groups were or weren't included in the WGs and I hope that Nicole and Kaarel can respond to the concerns that people raise here, perhaps in private communications.
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