Dear all,
I just wanted to draw your attention to some really interesting information
about how boards in the Wikimedia movement work.
Jessie Wild in the WMF Grantmaking team conducted a survey of movement
organisation board members (Chapters, Thorgs and the Foundation) and the
results are here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikimedia_Board_Governance_Survey/…
This is particularly important because it highlights the needs different
organisations have in terms of what they want to learn more about, and how
they want to learn it.
Some key points are;
* Movement organisations' boards want to learn more about programme
monitoring, fundraising from outside WMF sources, visioning and strategy
* Shared learning and mentoring within the movement is wanted more than
training sessions or consultant support.
*Boards of organisations with big budgets behave very differently to those
with small budgets (this won't be a surprise to anyone who's seen the
Compass Partnership model of how boards develop).
Some discussion has already started on the page. I'd encourage everyone
who's interested in these topics to get involved and think about how we can
use the assets we have to increase the training and support on offer to
Wikimedia movement organisations. It would be good to centralise discussion
of this here;
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Organisational_development#Boards_surv…
Thanks,
Chris Keating
(trustee of Wikimedia UK, but writing in a personal capacity)