Hello, all.

This email gives a brief update on the current structure of the Community Engagement department of the WMF. :)

As many of you are aware, through over the last few months the Community Engagement department has been undergoing further reorganization and transition. While the core work that our teams are doing has been uninterrupted, we’ve been reviewing the department from the perspective of reporting structures to make sure that those make sense. One of my goals as the interim head of Community Engagement is to provide lean, targeted management support to staff while focusing department resources on programmatic activities.

Program Capacity & Learning (PC&L) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Program_Capacity_and_Learning has been divided into two groups: Learning & Evaluation (L&E) and Programs. These groups will continue to deliver on their 2016-17 annual plan commitments, with cross-team goals being reported at the department rather than team level.

The Learning & Evaluation team will continue to support learning and sharing tools for connecting community leaders to one another, to learning resources, and to capacity development opportunities. L&E also works with other CE teams and across departments within the Wikimedia Foundation to support good practices, such as improving survey report standards and in building out the annual planning process. I’m delighted to say that Jaime Anstee, who has been with the Wikimedia Foundation since 2013 and has been leading that group since Rosemary Rein’s leave, has agreed to manage that team permanently. She will report directly to the head of the Community Engagement department.

The Programs group consists of our team members supporting the Wikipedia Education Program https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education, GLAM https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM and the Wikipedia Library https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library. Their goal is to provide community and affiliated groups with the non-monetary resources they need to succeed in running these core programs, whether those resources are access to free scholarly reference works, building program tools, or connecting across communities. The Programs team, with team managers Tighe Flanagan and Jake Orlowitz, will report to the director of the expanded Support, Safety and Programs team, which includes the existing Support and Safety team https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Support_and_Safety. Support and Safety retains the specialized Trust and Safety subteam managed by James Alexander. Their work remains unchanged. Combining these teams aligns reporting structures for many of our activities focused on supporting targeted non-technical communities and initiatives. We believe a closer connection between them will help integrate best practices for all involved.

Two of CE’s other teams are currently untouched: Technical Collaboration https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Technical_Collaboration and Community Resources https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resources. There may be further small adjustments in coming weeks as we settle into the new fiscal year, but I’m not anticipating any other major restructuring. We’ll be updating our Meta pages in the next few weeks, but I wanted to let you know where we are with that at the moment. :)

Also, we'll schedule another CE office hour after the dust settles from Wikimania. We'll let you know as soon as a date and time are set.

Best regards,

Maggie