Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Reports/Summary of Movement Conversations 2020/CEE

The numbers

CEE itself: over 70 community members informed on Telegram and 630 members of a dedicated Facebook group. Additionally, some affiliates were informed via email. Out of those all groups and individuals, 2 affiliates (Polish and Ukrainian) held discussions on country-wide meetups. 14 members of WMPL were present out of whom 5 were involved + 30 WMUA members were present and involved.
Polish Wikipedia: 6500 pageviews of the village pump messages. 50 community members on Telegram were also informed. 20 persons were involved in the discussions.

General feelings

Most of the feedback by online communities was related to the language (specialist terms and lack of translation to local languages discouraged from diving into the document) and implementation phase (the uncertainty on how the proposed ideas would actually be executed made it more difficult to make a strong position). There was one person who declared that he opposes the recommendations due to the vagueness of the changes proposed.

The feedback by affiliate members (Polish board and staff members, and Ukraininan members) is generally positive, with suggestions of improving the details.

Areas of support

Polish affiliate leaders support volunteer support, skills development, and distribution of power. Ukrainian affiliate members support each recommendation as a whole, with some concerns regarding the details.

Areas of opposition or concern

Polish affiliate leaders are not sure if the tech council would resolve problems or quite contrary, would become the bottleneck of (ideally) iterative process of software development.

Concerns raised by Ukrainian Wikimedians were related mostly to the implementation phase, e.g. according to them, there’s a risk that the internal knowledge platform would not be available in their language. Furthermore, the word ‘bureaucratization’ was used often.

Suggestions for improvement

WMUA members noted that the definition of stakeholders should be improved.

Points to clarify

Both Polish and Ukrainian Wikimedians believe that the transfer of power to regional structures (the roles of hubs and affiliates, the resources of hubs) should be defined more clearly.