2016-03-18 9:01 GMT-07:00 Sydney Poore sydney.poore@gmail.com:
Hi Sydney!
Right now the central hub of the global movement is WMF. Despite other recent problems. The WMF is doing a great job of regularly communicating about the world wide movement.
There needs to be a successful transfer of the global mission to another body/bodies or there is the risk that local growth will be even more uneven than today.
Yes, I agree with that, and I think it's generally what characterizes successful federate models. A "Wikimedia Movement Association" with global membership could address this. Let's say as a hypothetical that grantmaking and evaluation responsibilities ultimately become part of such a WMA's scope. That would naturally give it a lot of responsibility for sharing practices, bringing attention to things that work, and helping to organize postmortems or governance reviews where appropriate.
Not being itself responsible for a large body of programs, and being accountable to its members, it could be in a better position to foster a global sense of belonging and accountability. I suspect a lot of us would become dues-paying members of such an organization, and proudly so.
To the extent that it would do programmatic work, like organizing conferences or developing tools for evaluation, it would likely do so by contracting that work out to affiliates within the movement, or externally if necessary. That would enable it to remain lean, staffing-wise. And incidentally, it could enable organizations like WMDE to bid for contracts alongside WMF, yielding the benefits of light competition and greater geographic diversity.
What would a WMA _not_ do? It would not host servers, or deal with trust and safety issues on the websites, or respond to DMCA notices, or develop MediaWiki improvements. It _might_ have a stewardship role for movement resources, like the movement blog and potentially even the brand assets, as an ultimate safety valve.
In short, a movement association would act as a direct proxy for the movement, maintaining a network of clearly scoped short term and long term relationships to advance the Wikimedia mission. It would not replace the WMF, but it would give it a more clearly defined scope of responsibilities and a more equal footing within the movement.
Erik