Movement Charter Ambassadors Program/Punjabi Community and Indic Education Group Feedback

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General Information

Feedback channels: Online and Offline meetings
Number of participants: 16

Feedback

Preamble

With the aim to keep this a high-level document, various terminologies have been used, which will be defined in the definition chapter. Given that, the term 'entities' is mentioned in the first paragraph whereas, in the second paragraph all entities have been listed. There should be standardization in writing. Using terms and then also elaborating them in the text can create confusion about the scope of the terms used.
In the preamble, it has been mentioned that infrastructure provides technical Support, and in the same paragraph's next line, it is mentioned that infrastructure provides financial and other resources why not club it all in one sentence? The last paragraph looks like an explanation of what infrastructure will cover but why is the preamble exclusively talking about infrastructure and not about the overall scope of the Charter and everything related to the movement- its support, scope, growth, and sustainability?
We are using multiple closely related terminologies like the Wikimedia movement, Wikimedia charter, and Wikimedia movement charter strategy. We should discuss their relationship at some place so that people can easily segregate them.
It would be better if the relevant definitions were provided along with these drafts so that the community has clarity about these terminologies when they were reviewing the content.
We understand that all these definitions will be provided in a different chapter but in order to facilitate the reading, it will be better to have some complex terms defined on the same page in the footnotes.
The preamble should also highlight the need for the charter and how it will change the governance of the movement and its growth in the future.

Values & Principles

There were no major concerns around how this chapter was drafted, there was a submission for consideration that the editor’s safety should be one of our priorities and it is a fit to be mentioned in this chapter.
Following the same the community also emphasized the importance of privacy and how will that be ensured in the movement.
The community was also curious to learn how equity will be put into practice. For example, while defining the movement entities where the definition of the new structures like hubs and global council will be proposed and hypothetically the existing movement entities will also be modified, the community is curious to learn how equity will be practiced in the process of defining these global structures.
The one challenge that the community has been observing and facing is challenges related to shared learning we believe that shared learning should be the core value of the movement as well. We were not able to find any specific section that mentions coexistence. Considering that this is an ever-evolving movement with a lot of affiliates and new movement structures being defined it is important to highlight how all these movement entities will coexist.

Roles & Responsibilities

The members of the community irrespective of their association whether they are a member of a group or an affiliate perform various kinds of responsibilities. Most of these works that are done in the online space are well recognized while the work which is being done in the offline space is often ignored. There are no criteria available to weigh the work and the contribution that someone is doing in the offline spaces which are actually keeping the movement sustainable and are also helping the communities expand their horizons.
This section also received the feedback that for better understanding and to facilitate the process of review the definitions of the different terminologies used in the drafts should be provided along with the drafts so that the community has a central understanding of what the document is reflecting and what entity they’re talking about.
The other commonly received feedback in this section was that the translation is tedious the content is complex and then there are so many overlapping terminologies that are used so again a clear definition of these related terminologies will help better understanding in the future iterations.
The community had no specific comments related to the intentions mentioned in the draft. They will be looking forward to more specific content for relevant feedback.

Miscellaneous feedback

The community also discussed the global council and hubs. They are aware that South Asian communities are far behind in the process of running pilots on hubs but are also concerned about the regional challenges. They are concerned that right now none of the pilots is representative of the challenges that this region is facing and if the structure of the hubs is based on the current pilots, it might not be representative of an entire region which will make it difficult for the communities to implement the defined structure.
The process of ambassador engagement onboarding and feedback collection was a bit rushed this time it will be better if the community will have more relaxed timelines.
The ambassador had to bear the expenses of all offline or online conversations that they had to organize with the community given the delays in the grants processing it will be better if this process can be improved for future iterations.
The discussions required a lot of background information and a lot of additional review of content which was beyond the three drafts that were up for review. There was a concern that this challenge will be faced by every new editor who’ll ever review the charter. So the feedback was that some sort of supplementary material should be provided for better understanding.
We should specify what sections of the charter are firm (non-negotiable) and the sections that are flexible with the possibility of amendments.
One of the related feedbacks was that we should also specify how firm the implementation of this charter is going to be on the communities.
If the charter is going to be the central reference document, the community needs to understand if they are allowed to practice a regional translation of the charter or if the English version will be the central reference document. If the translations are allowed to be adopted the community would like to engage a professional legal advisor for regular review and feedback.
Considering the charter is a legal document and every legal document is a complex document with complex information and that information requires a lot of background understanding and also an understanding of the high-level terminologies which will be used. It is practically not possible for everyone to be able to review this fairly so we should allow the communities to consult a legal expert or the movement charter drafting committee should consider having some regional legal experts provide that special feedback.
This is a text-heavy document like all other charters there should be some practical scenarios explained in an easy graphical format so that people who do not have an understanding of the English language are able to follow the basic instructions using those practical guidelines.
We had background understanding; even then translations were a tedious task for us because of the complexity of the language. We understand that the committee has tried their best to keep it high-level and simple but when it comes to translating the content for formal review and adoption it is still a very complex document in if we want to focus on the readability of the content it cannot be as high level as it is in the English language. When we are trying to translate this content, because of the nature of the information, there are too many formal and academic terms that we have used in the content which we usually don’t use in normal discussions and that’s why even if this is something that has been discussed multiple times in the community the formal translation is complex.
The inclination towards strategic direction is dependent on whether or not a community is in a position to expand. The only communities which are thinking about the strategic direction of the movement are the ones that are well-established. That’s why most of the communities in South Asia have not been proactively participating in these discussions because they are still working on the expansion of their respective communities.
It is an exhaustive process if we try to engage everyone in feedback so the Punjabi community has agreed to create a strategic group that will be involved in all future conversations regarding strategy or the movement charter. Some people were nominated by the community and there were some self-nominations as well all these community members will be the reviewers from the community side and their feedback will be considered community feedback in the future iteration
There was a question regarding the possibility of regional translations being admissible as valid
Irrespective of how long someone has been associated with the movement, we should be considerate of how it will be challenging for newcomers to actually understand the charter and its implementation.
The one common feedback was that we should focus on using free knowledge as a thematic term for the movement because the term actually represents the movement