2016-03-18 9:01 GMT-07:00 Sydney Poore <sydney.poore(a)gmail.com>om>:
Hi Sydney!
Right now the central hub of the global movement is
WMF. Despite other
recent problems. The WMF is doing a great job of regularly communicating
about the world wide movement.
There needs to be a successful transfer of the global mission to another
body/bodies or there is the risk that local growth will be even more uneven
than today.
Yes, I agree with that, and I think it's generally what characterizes
successful federate models. A "Wikimedia Movement Association" with
global membership could address this. Let's say as a hypothetical that
grantmaking and evaluation responsibilities ultimately become part of
such a WMA's scope. That would naturally give it a lot of
responsibility for sharing practices, bringing attention to things
that work, and helping to organize postmortems or governance reviews
where appropriate.
Not being itself responsible for a large body of programs, and being
accountable to its members, it could be in a better position to foster
a global sense of belonging and accountability. I suspect a lot of us
would become dues-paying members of such an organization, and proudly
so.
To the extent that it would do programmatic work, like organizing
conferences or developing tools for evaluation, it would likely do so
by contracting that work out to affiliates within the movement, or
externally if necessary. That would enable it to remain lean,
staffing-wise. And incidentally, it could enable organizations like
WMDE to bid for contracts alongside WMF, yielding the benefits of
light competition and greater geographic diversity.
What would a WMA _not_ do? It would not host servers, or deal with
trust and safety issues on the websites, or respond to DMCA notices,
or develop MediaWiki improvements. It _might_ have a stewardship role
for movement resources, like the movement blog and potentially even
the brand assets, as an ultimate safety valve.
In short, a movement association would act as a direct proxy for the
movement, maintaining a network of clearly scoped short term and long
term relationships to advance the Wikimedia mission. It would not
replace the WMF, but it would give it a more clearly defined scope of
responsibilities and a more equal footing within the movement.
Erik