Movement roles/Recommendations

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Movement Roles — Index Edit
Overview Introduction Basics Current players and their roles Roles matrix Draft charter topics Recommendations Draft recommendations New models Affiliation models (Board resolution) National or Sub-national Chapters Thematic Organizations User Groups Movement Partners Standards Accountability standards (Board resolution) Next steps List of open topics Proposal for the future of movement roles issues Further reading Strategy:Community roles and governance Strategy:Wikimedia movement Strategy:Movement roles

Recommendations to all formal entities in the movement

• Proposed charter: To help improve mutual undertanding, strengthen our identity as a movement, and define ways to rely on one another, we propose that formal entities in the Wikimedia movement endorse and commit to the following charter of principles.

Internal Standards - All Wikimedia organisations need to agree to a minimum set of Internal standards to abide by. They might include things like carrying on their operations in a legal and ethical manner, or publishing regular and timely report to the community. The exact nature of these standards should be left to the organisations to develop and agree upon themselves. They should be in line with the same principles of the organization and the community they represent and/or support.

Recommendations to the Board

The movement roles working group makes the following recommendations to the Wikimedia Foundation board.

Movement Identity and Affiliation

We recommend that the board

• Support and comment on a movement charter laying out principles shared by the whole movement. We recommend that the Wikimedia Foundation invite all other Wikimedia movement groups to do the same.

• Recognize three new models of Wikimedia groups furthering our movement: incorporated "Partner Organizations", informal "Associations", and fellow-traveller "Affiliates".

• Appoint an Affiliations Committee to expand on the ChapCom model to support both chapters and new models. It would support new and developing groups, make recommendations to the Board regarding group status, and produce an annual review of the state of the movement.

Accountability and governance

We recommend that the board

• Define an annual planning task force to develop a planning cycle for the movement, reviewing movement goals reflectively and transparently. This task force would consider the movement's progress towards strategic goals, resource allocation, and tradeoffs; and recommend resource allocation to different Wikimedia groups.

• Endorse review mechanisms including self-assessment, peer review, and auditing, for affiliated groups. Support a pilot of peer review this winter, with engagement from the Foundation and Chapters, for review at the Board and Wikimedia Meetings in March 2012.

• Define minimum standards for accountability for affiliated groups.

• Define minimum standards for committees of the Board and Foundation.

The initial members of the affiliation committee and annual planning task force could be nominated by the working group, and would be appointed by the Board. Their first task would be to develop processes and guidelines for their work, to present to the Board for review within three months.

Recommendations to the Chapters

• Proposed Chapter council - A peer review group and a mechanism for chapter group-wide decisions, both call for an oversight body to handle disputes and review chapters. At this point, the two options are expanding the scope of ChapCom to include these concerns or forming a new council to oversee these. In light of the discussion at Berlin, ChapCom might not be the ideal body to expand these roles, therefore we propose a Chapter council assimilated from different chapters on a revolving basis. This is similar to the model other organizations follow for peer-review. Any and all matters would be handled internally.
• Chapter performance standards framework - Chapters should develop a set of standards amongst themselves for maintaining minimum standards of performance in key areas including financial controls, governance procedures, transparency protocols, local Wikimedia community relations, regulatory compliance, compliance with agreements with other members of the movement, minimum membership levels, minimum program activity requirements, etc. Ideally, these standards would then be adopted by the WMF Board of Trustees as a minimum requirement to maintain affiliation with WMF.

Recommendations to other groups and entities (beyond chapters)

• Internal standards - These would be similar to the standards for Chapters, though there would be many specifics that differ. For instance, while Chapters will have standards for effectively representing all wikimedia-focused projects within their geography, a thematic or topical group would have one for effectively representing all efforts to support that field or culture.

Recommendations to the communities

Recs to the editing community

NOTE: these will all need more work with input from a wider group of community members and groups - in particular, with representatives from small language groups, from each of the major Projects, from single-project dispute resolution orgs like the major arbcomms, &c.

• Proposed pan-project Dispute resolution body- We propose a dispute resolution body which would cover only inter-project disagreements. It would not handle appeals from ArbComs or other groups on individual projects, but would address issues that no single project can resolve itself. (perhaps 'Metacomm' instead of drcomm?) It would also work with global admins to provide advice on dispute resolution to smaller communities without internal guidelines for dispute resolution.

• The proposed community council (or other group) would be empowered to take decisions covering all WMF projects similar to how stewards operate. This would not undermine similar existing bodies in a local project, but would help resolve issues that no single individual project could decide. It would develop and update a long-term strategy for the Projects to complement the Foundation's strategy, and would help individual projects prioritize their needs, or organize them into proposals for time, language expertise, or grants from the rest of the community and the WMF.

  This proposed council would require multi-lingual members from different projects with long-standing track record and community support to be effective.

Recs to the developer community

[MW dev group, for on-Wikimedia development and extensions?]