Maybe to offer a bit of a counter-argument to you, Itzik, that not all is lost, if I may ;-)
(-: Agreed, Philip. We have reached a point in group transition where it is easy to be paranoid, because change brings uncertainty about the future. But we are closer now to meaningful delegation and shared decisions and prioritization. In some arenas the bottleneck is identifying community priorities, rather than having a mechanism for acting on them.
Communities and affiliates have shown what they want,
True to an extent, which needs refinement.
Communities have always wanted self-governance, but were the least involved in this charter+council development. Affiliates as a group are dominated by user groups, which are a fairly arbitrary subset of persistent active projects and were not intended to serve a global representation or governance function.
Over the last few years the level of cooperation between communities and affiliates has become a lot higher
Also because of simple community-run mechanisms such as SWAN.
The working groups wrote the recommendations, but more importantly, taught many people involved in the working groups about what the challenges are to implement those recommendations. The CEE Hub is a direct result of this process
This is a good point and a useful frame of reference. I also found the comments on the charter over the past few months from a number of regional networks to be a good sign. Since the time of the working groups, we are missing similar collective evaluations from the Projects; and we are missing a rhythm of peer feedback for those participating in discussion about their ideas, hopes, and concerns (outside of facilitated in-person events, which are costly and exclusive.)
So maybe the next step should [be] to build a structure that organisations, communities and indvidiuals voluntarily join... out of a sense of optimism and hope that together we can overcome the challenges we all together are facing and support each other in those challenges that only some of us need to face ;-)
Well put. Mutual support, resolving unsolved issues, and deduplication of effort are excellent motivation.
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Itzik wrote:
> the board made very clear in their resolution - they don't want any change of forces
We read the same text and interpret it in very different ways. 🖤
I see an explicit desire for change, and commitment to mechanisms for making it happen, however incremental.
> No one will decide how much money the foundation will spend.
> It is up to them to decide how much money will go to the rest of the movement bodies...
Technically, the WMF Board already decides how much money goes to different things. But we still (colloquially) say that the CEO and staff set the budget and spending plans, which are submitted to the community for public comment and to the Board as proposals for approval.
So when the Board plans for a new committee to "have the authority to adjust grantmaking structures... including establishing global or thematic funding goals" and says it will "seek the recommendations and insights of this body for proposals [for] how much of the Foundation’s budget will be made available for grants distribution", that seems to be asking clearly for a comparable sort of proposal for approval. Where such proposals conflict, the Board would have to iterate or otherwise find a compromise.
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Finally, this seems like a good moment to note that the WMF's fundraising and budget are only part of the whole. Today it manages more than 80% of staff and of funds raised (with WMDE accounting for the plurality of the rest), but we should be planning and developing shared language* for a future where fundraising and support are more distributed.
SJ
* To begin with, we should have an overall visualization of the flow of funds, in-kind support, and time in the movement. If anyone has been working on this, or would like to, please get in touch.