Hello, As most of you are aware, the Wikimedia movement has embarked on an ambitious initiative to discuss our collective future and determine a movement-wide strategic direction. [1] The movement is composed of people in many different roles, notably individual contributors who may not be affiliated with any organized group. It can be challenging to reach individual contributors and involve them in strategy discussions, since they may not monitor the usual communication channels, and they may not think that strategy discussions are relevant to them. For this year’s movement strategy process, the Wikimedia Foundation has decided to hire 19 part-time discussion coordinators to better bridge the gap between the strategy discussions and local communities of contributors. Today, I am thrilled to announce that we have concluded the search and assembled a stellar team of 19 long-time Wikimedians, who have agreed to join the movement strategy efforts in this capacity. As you go through the team’s page on Meta-Wiki, you will see many familiar names. [2] The team is composed of Abbad, Bohdan, Chico, Gereon, Jonatan, Ran, Marco, Nahid, Niccolò, Tomasz, Robin, Samuel, Satdeep, Szymon, Oleg, Takashi, Todd, Tuan, and Venus. Because of the team’s geographic distribution, Jan Eissfeldt, from the Foundation’s Support and Safety team, has agreed to help lead the day-to-day activities of the group of Asian language coordinators. All the coordinators started on Monday for a 3-month contract, and they have already been hard at work, translating materials on Meta and organizing the outreach to their local communities. [3] Some will focus their efforts on specific language communities [4], and others will support an array of smaller communities. If you are interested in working with the coordinators to bridge the gap with your local communities, I invite you to take a look at the description of the coordinator role, and sign up using the form on that page. [5] You can also contact them directly via their talk page. I want to express my deepest gratitude to everyone who was involved in this ultra-fast hiring process, most notably the Foundation’s Talent & Culture team, who handled the recruiting and administrative onboarding masterfully, and the Community Engagement department, who reached out to their contacts, thoroughly reviewed applications, and made this ambitious wave of recruiting ridiculously easy for me. Please join me in welcoming Venus, Tuan, Todd, Takashi, Oleg, Szymon, Satdeep, Samuel, Robin, Tomasz, Niccolò, Nahid, Marco, Ran, Jonatan, Gereon, Chico, Bohdan, and Abbad in their new role. Guillaume Paumier [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017 [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_ movement/2017/People/Strategy_coordinators [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_ movement/2017/Track_B/Outreach/Map [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Strategy/Wikimedia_ movement/2017#Language_list_in_development [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_ movement/2017/Toolkit/Discussion_Coordinator_Role -- Guillaume Paumier _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>