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Hello Strategy Liaisons!
It has been a while since we last connected; I am pleased to be able to reach out today with some updates on the movement strategy process. Since Wikimania, the Working Groups, Core Team, Affiliates and online communities have been working hard to take our strategy work forward and continue developing draft recommendations [1] for structural change in our movement. Here’s what we’ve been up to as well as what you can expect for Affiliate engagement over the next few months.
tl;dr: Strategy salons enabled rich community discussions around the world - see the results of your efforts here [2]. We also have a new timeline [3] that will take us through the end of this part of movement strategy. There will be a final, 5-week period of movement conversations around the recommendations in early 2020, an endorsement phase, and then our movement will transition to implementing these ideas.
Strategy Salons
At the end of September, we concluded our strategy salon series [2] to engage Affiliates in strategy discussions with their member communities around the world. In total we held over 40 salons in 35+ countries. Every Affiliate who led a salon published a report summarizing their community discussion, and groups in East and South East Asia and the Pacific (ESEAP), Tchad, Ghana, and others published additional videos [4] of their successful events.
Across all of our salons, Capacity Building, Partnerships, Diversity, and Community Health were our most popular thematic areas for discussion. All of the community feedback from in person and online conversations has now been reviewed, summarized, and analyzed by the Core Team with help from the Strategy Liaison contractors [5]. It will shortly be reviewed by members of the working groups, known as connectors, in order to integrate these ideas into the final rounds of draft recommendations. A special, warm thank you to everyone who took the initiative to organize and lead strategy salons, we are so impressed by the vibrant discussions that you enabled!
What Else We've Been Up To
In August 2019, the working groups published their first round of draft recommendations [1], the result of over a year of hard work building the ideas that will shape the future of our movement. The full list of 89 was published online and also presented at Wikimania. All nine strategy sessions at Wikimania were widely attended by members from the online and affiliate communities interested in giving their feedback on the work in progress.
In mid September 2019, 25 working group members gathered in Tunis, Tunisia for a Harmonization Sprint to begin bringing these 89 ideas together into a semi-final list. This event was not as successful as we had hoped in taking the recommendations forward, but it created an important opportunity for discussions around principles and goals to guide the recommendations process afterward.
Following this, working groups continued refining and making small adjustments to the recommendations. At the end of October, the nine thematic working groups dissolved, and a smaller subset of working group members have chosen to stay on as writers, connectors, and reviewers to help prepare the final content. Connectors, in particular, are tasked with helping to cite community content in the final recommendations and sharing back with communities how their ideas have been used.
Up Next
We have a new timeline [3] that will take us through the remainder of this phase of movement strategy. Early next year, we will have a final 5-week period of community conversations that will give online communities and affiliates a chance to read and discuss the synthesized draft recommendations before they are finalized and presented to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees as the completed product for this phase. The Core Team will also develop an endorsement process for movement stakeholders to indicate their support of the recommendations.
Starting with the Wikimedia Summit in April 2020, Affiliates and the Wikimedia Foundation will begin discussions around implementing these recommendations in a way that makes sense for their organizations and stakeholders.
Thank you one again for your continued interest and involvement in our process. We’ll be following up again by the end of the year with updates on what to expect for 2020 and how to engage. In the meantime, please feel free to reach out to me on social media or over email with further questions.
Best,
Kelsi
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations
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Kelsi Stine-Rowe Community Relations Specialist, Movement Strategy |
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