Leadership Development Working Group

• Overview
  • 1. The shorter summary
  • 2. The longer summary
  • 3. Timeline
• Purpose and Structure
• Working Group
• Updates
• Participate
• Content
• Appendix

1. The shorter summary

The Community Development team at the Wikimedia Foundation proposes to support the creation of a global, community-driven Leadership Development Working Group. The purpose of the working group is to advise leadership development work by the Community Development team as well as in broader community initiatives in the near term, pending any future changes of direction coming from the Movement Charter and Global Council currently being formed. As of May 2022, the group formed and began their work. View the Working Group page to read about the members, the Updates page to follow their discussions, and the Participate page to find out how you can be involved.

2. The longer summary

From the Movement Strategy conversations, leadership development was identified as a movement priority. The Invest in Skill and Leadership Development recommendation indicates that our movement needs a globally-coordinated and well-resourced effort in order to succeed in leadership development. There are many ideas for the implementation of leadership development, among them the need for infrastructure has been expressed.

While longer term approaches to these issues may be defined by the Global Council, the Community Development team’s work and the work of community groups would benefit from some of these key infrastructure initiatives, including the creation of:

1. A community-driven working group that can support defining, prioritizing, overseeing, and evaluating leadership development initiatives
2. A shared definition of leadership
3. A leadership development plan

The Community Development team proposes to support the creation of a global, community-driven Leadership Development Working Group (#1). The purpose of the working group is to advise leadership development work by the Community Development team as well as share ideas and recommendations for community leadership initiatives. This is of course pending any future changes of direction coming from the Movement Charter and Global Council currently being formed. The working group will first focus on infrastructure building, which includes working with communities on defining leadership (#2) and drafting a leadership development plan (#3). Afterwards, the working group will advise on Community Development’s part in the implementation of the leadership development plan, and serve as a valuable as-needed resource for local and global community efforts.

3. Timeline

February 2022	Call for feedback about Leadership Development Working Group proposal from February 7 – 25, 2022. Feedback was collected in 13+ languages. See the Summary of Call for Feedback.
March – April 2022	Working group membership recruitment period. Thank you to everyone who applied! The application to be a member of the Leadership Development Working Group closed on April 10, 2022. This application was conducted via a third-party service, Google, which may subject it to additional terms. For more information on privacy and data-handling, see the privacy statement.
May – June 2022	Working group is announced and begins work. The group met for the first time June 2, 2022 and plans to meet weekly. You can view the members of the working group. The group will be collecting community input to ensure diverse voices are incorporated in their design and decision-making throughout the process. More information will be announced once the working group begins working. If you want to make sure that you are contacted, add your name to the Sign up for future updates section
July – August 2022	Working group drafted a definition of leadership and prepared for a community feedback period. They also presented their work at Wikimania 2022 and planned for participation at future conferences. You can read more details about the group's work in the Updates page.
September – October 2022	Working group published the draft definition of leadership and invited feedback. The feedback period was September 15 – October 6, 2022. The working group reached out for feedback in 14 languages. Read the announcement (Meta-wiki; Diff) for information about the feedback period. Working group is hosting 2 community calls on Saturday October 22 at 15 UTC and Saturday October 29 at 8 UTC. Sign up to attend one of the calls.
November – December 2022	Working group published a summary of the leadership definition feedback period and incorporated feedback into the leadership definition. They celebrated the collective effort to draft a working definition of leadership and began initial planning for the drafting of the Leadership Development Plan.
January – February 2023	Working group hosts a research period and collects information from community members about their roles, experiences, and learnings related to leadership. They created three surveys for three audience groups and kindly ask community members to complete the survey that best represents their movement roles. The survey is open from January 16 – February 3, 2023. Read more and access the surveys!
March – April 2023	Working group drafted the Leadership Development Plan, taking into account community input from the research period.
May 2023 –	The draft Leadership Development Plan is published! The Leadership Development Working Group (LDWG) invites feedback on the draft. Read the summary for an overview, or go directly to the Leadership Development Plan to access it in full. Give feedback by Sunday, May 28, 2023 through the survey, talk page, MS Forum, or email (leadershipworkinggroup@wikimedia.org).