Dear Dan, Thank you for sharing your insight and choosing a vivid real life metaphor for surfacing your concerns! It is really relatable in current times. I would like to build on your metaphor to provide more context for the situation and I hope this will be helpful in clarifying some things. == Metaphoric description == - Perhaps this is not *your personal* pizza delivery, but actually it is a *community or family circle* event to which pizzas are being ordered? - Perhaps indeed the *decision to order pizzas has been made* by some other group of people, but it often happens in these community or family events that not everyone is being involved in making general decisions regarding the basic choice of food, because it would be really difficult, in many cases and some families *nearly impossible* to come to a (timely) decision. That is the reason why a general choice is often delegated to a representative / trusted group of people. - I think you are right that it is the local delivery place that is indeed on the phone, but I don't think they are yet asking the delivery time. I believe the question is rather what type of pizza do you want, *what are the toppings that respond best to your needs*? - There might be historical choices: *pizza bianca* or *pizza rosso*? - More modern choices: no crust or cheese crust? - And also highly controversial choices: pineapples or not? - Some of the people at the gathering will be vegetarian or vegan and we need to clarify and accommodate their dietary preferences, which come with certain complexity. E.g. not all of them are fungivores or mushroom eaters and some of them would rather have their pizza without cheese than to taste a plant made cheese like product. - There will be an even trickier approach in relation to gluten intolerants. Even if there are a number of pizza enthusiasts in the bunch, maybe the choice of pizza in the end does not fit all ... But now how do we mitigate that? Do we go with a low quality topping salad from the pizza place or figure out something else? - Setting these complexities aside the key question is - *how would you and your friends want your pizza*? And maybe you would be so kind to tell us while we have the local pizza place on the phone so we can actually get what you want. Otherwise it might be indeed a rather random choice from the menu or we don't get anything. Which is not really helpful == Without metaphors == Now, what do I mean by this? - We had a rather representative group of people from different corners of the movement who did intensive and extensive work on the recommendations. You can find the numbers of the composition in the selection process report [1] - Their background from different contexts in the movement was sufficient to map out essential challenges and opportunities for the movement and work on the general direction of the solutions to support the future development of the movement - We did consult a wider range of stakeholders to validate the initial thinking and significant changes were made over the course of iterations of the recommendations. [2] - Especially during the first iteration, some of the recommendations were on the level of actual implementation, which we realized needs in many cases to be contextual, so the recommendations were facilitated to a much higher level in later stages. - At the same time a meaningful engagement with most of our communities happens around the questions of - *What do these high level ideas mean in practice? and* - *How are we actually going to implement these ideas?* - This is why we need to ensure that we have wider representation of really diverse contexts in the transition discussions, so we can actually make informed and contextually relevant decisions about the implementation. This is why we have created a representative co-design group [3] to discuss how we are actually having these conversations in an inclusive and participatory way and this is why we are currently consulting on the initial draft plan [4]. - We have had significant shortcomings and misses in previous outreach events (some of which I cover in a meta thread on our transition discussion page [5] - feel free to jump in there). I think we learned from it and the online consultations in the beginning of the current calendar year [6] were much more successful than the previous ones. What we do know is that we cannot afford substantial shortcomings in engagement now, when recommendations move from theory to practice, when we actually start to implement things. We need to have tough conversations about the tradeoffs together and ensure that decisions are being made with people affected by these decisions sitting at the table. *Nihil de nobis, sine nobis* [7]. - *In short* - We need your insights now to think through and improve the engagement around movement strategy in the upcoming transition events - Even more we need wide participation at the events so we are all informed by different perspectives and contexts when making decisions about the implementation of the recommendations I hope it all makes somewhat sense and I am happy to clarify my perspective, history of the process, and plans for the future further. Thank you so much for a metaphoric approach in your question - it really made my day and it was a joy to write my own metaphoric response. Have a great continuation to the month of August! Kaarel [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Working… [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recomme… [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Transit… [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Transit… [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Tr… [6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Reports… [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_About_Us_Without_Us On Tue, Aug 11, 2020 at 10:18 PM Dan Szymborski &lt;dszymborski(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Kaarel Vaidla (he/him) Movement Strategy <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/2030> Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>