Dear all,
It’s my pleasure to be writing to you about the Movement Strategy. We have come together over the past 3 years to develop our Strategic Direction [1] and then the recommendations [2] to guide our collaborations and future. So many of you contributed to the process — some for only a part, and others throughout the entire process. With the recommendations complete, our focus now shifts to implementing the recommendations in a collaborative, open, and transparent way.
Transition To make the transition from the publication of the recommendations to their implementation, we need to do some planning. It’s a 10-year strategy, with dozens of initiatives, dependencies, and connected goals, to be delivered in a more distributed, deliberative, and open collaborative model than ever before. We’ll need to work together to define how we prioritize, sequence, resource, and support each initiative.
So much of our work is done online, but a lot of strategic work also happens in person. We can’t do that now, and so we’ve had to adapt to engage broadly, and in inclusive ways. To create this plan, movement-wide virtual events will kick off in September. We will use the Movement Strategy principles [3] as a guiding framework to ensure the planning will be inclusive and empowering for our diverse range of communities, without leaving anyone behind.
As a result of the pandemic, we lost the chance to work together in-person on the transition to implementation at the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin [4]. Yet we gained an opportunity to include a higher number and a more diverse profile of participants. Engaging with online contributors, technical developer communities, and smaller user groups throughout the process will be a key priority.
Successful virtual engagements with a high number of diverse participants are difficult to do well. Therefore, a Design Group will collaborate to prepare for the virtual transition discussions. This group will consist of community members reflecting different parts and perspectives of the movement, including representatives of regional collaboratives (CEE, ESEAP, Indaba, Iberocoop, North America, South Asia, WikiArabia, WikiFranca), the EDs and chairpersons groups, and WMF staff.
Anyone who is interested can contribute. Regular summaries of the preparation work and design discussions will be published on meta so that anyone interested will be able to share insights and help improve the process, even if not part of the Design Group itself.
Participation I look forward to: Working with many of you at the virtual transition events. Ways to participate and the schedule of events will be determined by the Design Group. The current plan is to start the virtual transition discussions with the movement in September. The virtual events is where major discussions will take place on sequencing, prioritizing, and resourcing the recommendations across the movement. Seeing those of you interested participate in the open review of the transition preparations. The task will be to review the work of the Design Group and share your perspective, enriching the thinking to improve the events. Open review will happen in parallel to the work of the Design Group from the end of June to the end of July / beginning of August. Having nominations from different movement groups and collaboratives (mentioned above) for the Design Group. The task will be to design as a group how the transition process of online events will be set up.
Want to know more? We have put together a placeholder meta page [5] and will keep updating it as more information becomes available. Join office hours with the Movement Strategy core team on Wednesday. June 10 @ 17:00 UTC (Google Meet http://meet.google.com/uun-pzmb-kti) [6] or Thursday. June 11 @ 08:00 UTC (Google Meet http://meet.google.com/rva-yqaq-zdk) [7] to share any comments and ask questions. Our email channel is always open: strategy2030@wikimedia.org mailto:strategy2030@wikimedia.org.
Best, Ryan Merkley Chief of Staff, Wikimedia Foundation
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017 [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommen... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommen... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Movement_Strategy_Principles [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Summit_2020/Report https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Summit_2020/Report [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/2030 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/2030 [6] https://meet.google.com/uun-pzmb-kti https://meet.google.com/uun-pzmb-kti[7] https://meet.google.com/rva-yqaq-zdk https://meet.google.com/rva-yqaq-zdk
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Ryan Merkley (he/him) Chief of Staff, Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org/
rmerkley@wikimedia.org mailto:rmerkley@wikimedia.org @ryanmerkley https://twitter.com/ryanmerkley