I've given a few initial thoughts at https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Talk:Volunteer_strategy_consultation_2015 but I'll leave a copy here to see if we can attract list members to the wiki to participate.

I welcome all attempts to bring more volunteers into the charity's activities and I'm glad that the Board and Office are taking steps to encourage that.

However, as I was a strong proponent of non-board committees as a means of attracting more volunteers into regular activity in liaison with the Board and Office, I am naturally disappointed to see the suggestion of replacing them with working groups. Working groups are, by definition, made up of subject specialists, focussed on singular objectives, and time-limited by nature. When a working group has accomplished its task, it disbands. I would suggest that those features are precisely the features that we do not want if we are to encourage greater participation by volunteers. We need volunteer groups to be open, so that nobody feels they don't have the expertise to contribute; we need them to be responsive to change in their focus; we need them to have the ability to consider multiple topics in their area of interest; and we need them to have a continuous existence, preferably independent of the Board and Office, to allow them the additional role of "critical friend" of each of those.

Rexx

On 5 June 2015 at 14:38, Michael Maggs <Michael@maggs.name> wrote:

Wikimedia UK needs your help. We want to transform the way we work so that we can bring volunteering right into the heart of the charity.

We plan to:

Establish a new volunteer engagement panel or steering group, focusing specifically on volunteering and volunteer engagement
Embed members into our day-to-day decision making via a new evaluation panel
Encourage the setting up of volunteer special-interest working groups to replace the existing non-board committees
Set up cultural/GLAM and educational outreach expert advisory boards to advise the WMUK main board on high-level strategy
Change our Articles of Association to allow volunteers to be appointed full members of board committees
Provide more effective support for volunteers via the new project coordinator staff roles
Move toward project-based working practices to improve efficiency and to enable better self-evaluation of our work

These draft plans follow on from the excellent feedback we received from our last Volunteer Strategy Gathering. They deliberately don't attempt to answer all possible questions about implementation, as we think it best that both further questions and the answers to those questions should come out of collaborative discussions. The plans are not set in stone, and with the community's help they can be improved, strengthened and fleshed out.

We would like your feedback, either online or in person at our next Volunteer Strategy Gathering on Saturday 25th July 2015, in London. For more information, see the links on the right.

Feedback, comments and discussion are more than welcome on the discussion page, or you can email chairwikimedia.org.uk if you have feedback you would prefer not to make public.

To read the full details on wiki see here: https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Volunteer_strategy_consultation_2015

Best regards

Michael

_______
Michael Maggs

Chair, Wikimedia UK

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