As someone who has been telling anyone at the WMF who will listen that this sort of capacity development is *essential* if community groups are going to meet the governance requirements of the Foundation and actually achieve measurable outcomes, I'm enormously pleased that something has finally been done about this. Nothing to add at this point except high fives and thanks all around for everyone who was involved in making this happen.
Cheers, Craig
On 26 August 2015 at 09:40, Asaf Bartov abartov@wikimedia.org wrote:
Dear Wikimedians,
{{Nutshell|WMF Community Engagement Team is allocating staff time and funding to deliberate capacity-development projects with interested communities in six capacity areas: community governance; conflict management; on-wiki technical skills; new contributor engagement and growth; partnerships; communications}}
==Details== This is a new way of partnering with WMF: through two way conversations (rather than top-down planning), WMF will work with specific emerging communities to explore obstacles for community growth and explore and pilot solutions together.
The first phase of this work consisted of a series of in-depth interviews with individuals from 16 specific emerging communities to gather information about existing and missing capacities. Reviewing those interviews in aggregate, we came up with six capacities it seems useful to work together on.
We prepared a page per such capacity, detailing challenges and possible approaches to build that capacity. We welcome your feedback! Contributions to those pages can be done in the following ways:
- Sign up on the sidebar of each capacity subpage if you want to implement
certain practices described,
- Provide more links to resources,
- Expand the Potential Solutions section with new ideas.
These pages, including your contributions, will serve as the basis for specific conversations with specific communities to develop plans or projects to build capacity.
During this initial pilot period, we intend to pursue projects in two or three capacities at most, which will be chosen according to community interest, scale of community, and scale of readership. We expect some of the specific actions we take in these projects would create resources [re-]usable by other communities as well.
==Join the Conversation== We invite you all to read through the capacity pages, and specifically, to see if the challenges described resonate with you and your community. If they do, have an on-wiki discussion about it with your community, and if there's general interest, sign up on the capacity pages and we'll have a conversation about what might be some possible next steps.
Find the six capacity pages on Meta, here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Capacity_Development
Looking forward to fruitful engagement,
Asaf Bartov Sati Houston Community Engagement department -- Asaf Bartov Wikimedia Foundation http://www.wikimediafoundation.org
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