Hi all,

Last week's update was late, this one is early - the Foundation staff are together this week for the Developers Summit and All Hands meeting the next two days, so we'll be doing more stuff face to face, learning and sharing. So, with no further ado:

As I mentioned in past updates, we have been working to identify the external experts which will serve as the Lead Architects for this process. I am very excited to introduce you to williamsworks http://williamsworks.com/!

williamsworks[1] has more than a decade of experience working with nonprofits, companies, and philanthropists around the world. Their team is made up of folks with deep experience in philanthropy, communications, public policy, and global development. They are based out of Seattle, with a global team in places such as Nairobi and Berlin. We're going to be working with a dedicated team, including their founder, Whitney Williams, on this process.

williamsworks will be responsible for coordinating all the various moving parts and needs of the strategy process. They'll be working closely with folks in the Foundation, community, and myself to help us identify the information we need and the conversations we need. They'll be leading us through parsing information and making decisions to help us arrive at a shared direction.

To begin this work process, I'm delighted that they'll be joining us at this week's All Hands. They've been meeting with teams from across the Foundation today in order to get to know folks. Tomorrow and Friday they'll be here to listen and learn about our culture and mission.

Over the past few weeks, we evaluated williamsworks among other candidates according criteria that reflects our needs as a movement. This included whether the candidate had created successful organizational or movement strategies before, whether they demonstrated a strong understanding of the need to build an inclusive process, and whether the candidate had international and nonprofit experience. (More specific criteria is outlined on Meta-Wiki.[2])

The next step is building out and confirming the core team facilitating the work ahead. Please stay tuned to this list and the Movement Strategy Portal on Meta-Wiki for more details.[3]

Katherine

PS. A version of this message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Updates/11_...

[1] http://williamsworks.com [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Team#Criter... [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017