Wikimedia Conference 2017/Documentation/Movement Strategy track/Day 3

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Report

Introduction
of the Movement Strategy track,
 » design principles,
 » flow of activities
Day 1
» The Complexity of a Movement,
» Analysis of the Present Situation,
» Personalising the Present Situation,
 » Issues & Opportunities
Day 2
» Issues & Opportunities,
 » Distilling Key Points,
 » Ryan Merkley
Day 3
» Theme Statements,
 » Next Steps & Closing

Theme Statements: Priorities and Implications

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Moving into the most focused task of the Movement Strategy track, participants were asked to place themselves near the category they felt most inclined to contribute to. From this initial selection, participants in each category were asked to form smaller groups of 3 to 4 people with the purpose of producing thematic statements that would inform the overall Wikimedia strategy. 37 task-forces were formed.

 

Ritual dissent and appreciation

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The process of carving out the statement happened in several rounds, using a method of ‘ritual dissent.’ After working on an initial draft, each task-force would send out an ‘ambassador’ of the group to share the proposal to another group. The ambassador would then turn their back to the group they were visiting in order to listen to ‘constructive dissent’ and critique on the proposal. The ambassador would then return to their home group with the comments and consider them while re-drafting and refining the proposal. This process continued until the fourth round, where ‘ritual dissent’ became ‘ritual appreciation,’ meaning the visited groups were asked to offer positive remarks on the work instead of critique. When the statements were finalized, there was a great feeling of achievement, demonstrated by the amount of group selfies that followed this exercise.

Voting and comments

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To add another layer of insight about the results of the task-forces, the whole conference (not only the participants in the Movement Strategy) were invited to comment on and attribute some ‘weight’ to the statements by using dot prioritisation. Each person was given three red dots to vote on the direction they believed the Wikimedia movement should focus on, two green dots to vote on the statements they felt they had personal energy to contribute to, and one blue dot to spot the ‘weak signals’ (statements that might contain more subtle, but relevant, insight about the future).

Results

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List of Thematic Statements below under the same categories used for clustering key points (see "Day 2: Distilling Key Points").


CATEGORY # THEMATIC STATEMENT RED
("This is important")
GREEN
("I have energy for this")
BLUE
("Weak Signal")
Σ
Other medias 1 By 2030, Wikimedia should empower everyone to contribute and interact with a rich diversity of quality, curated multimedia, such as video, audio, 3D, tastes, touches, smells, and beyond, to share freely in the full range of knowledge and experience. 15 7 17 39
Other medias 2 Wikimedia will support a variety of learning experiences by providing a richer multimedia experience that is easy to create collaboratively. 2 3 0 5
Sustainability (and Growth?) 3 In order to be able to fulfill our mission in perpetuity, we the Wikimedia movement, shall continue and boldly expand our activities and impact, using our resources effectively and following our values, while continuously adapting to the world around us. 1 1 0 2
Sustainability (and Growth?) 4 By 2030, Wikimedia should be a globally-recognized, sustainable movement that has excellence in self-governance and collaboration with actors and stakeholders to advocate, create, and distribute free knowledge. 15 7 2 24
Sustainability (and Growth?) 5 The Wikimedia movement should strive for every human being to become a Wikimedian. 5 4 6 15
Community Health 6 By 2030, Wikimedia must be a constructive, collaborative and inclusive community where everyone feels welcome and can have fun. 30 15 4 49
Community Health 7 By 2030, we must recognize volunteers are the most valuable asset and deserve a healthy environment; we will both treat our community health issues and foster proactive care. 14 18 0 32
Community Health 8 The Wikimedia community should invest resources to actively adopt processes that make our environment welcoming, nurturing, and fun for new and existing contributors, readers, and supporters. 13 8 1 22
Education 9 The Wikimedia movement takes an active role in universal education and supports the contribution of learners to the Wikimedia projects globally. 17 16 2 35
Education 10 By 2030, all educators worldwide are empowered to teach about understanding and contributing to free knowledge through Wikimedia projects. 10 12 2 24
Education 11 By 2030, free knowledge is an integral part of formal and informal education around the world, for diverse new generations to participate in free knowledge, regardless of local resources. Sharing is standard in society and knowledge commons thrives. 24 12 3 39
Partnerships 12 By 2030, Wikimedia should lead[1] an ecosystem of key players in the knowledge commons[2] movement to improve quantity, quality, and reach of free content, to extend the credibility of the knowledge commons and to increase its resilience[3] without compromising our independence or values. 25 30 0 55
Diversity and inclusion 13 Everyone feels welcome and safe. 23 12 4 39
Diversity and inclusion 14 By 2030, Wikimedia movement should become a proactive agent of change towards the subversion of systems of knowledge inequality, while embracing values of diversity and inclusivity. 13 8 3 24
Diversity and inclusion 15 By 2030, the movement will reflect the diversity of human experience. 6 4 1 11
Knowledge gaps and biases 16 Creating an adaptive infrastructure (technological, etc.) which will support the production and preservation of diverse forms of knowledge. 2 2 4
Knowledge gaps and biases 17 Knowledge is global: we must move beyond western written knowledge, towards multiple and diverse forms of knowledge (including oral and visual), from multiple and diverse peoples and perspectives, to truly achieve the sum of all human knowledge. 49 23 2 74
Knowledge gaps and biases 18 By 2030, every person who is looking for information on any subject is able to find it on a Wikimedia project in their own language. 13 10 4 27
Knowledge gaps and biases 19 By 2030, Wikimedia will have reformed the manner in which it identifies, collects, and reflects the knowledge and perspectives that encapsulate the full range of human experience by embodying an open culture that celebrates, values, and actively incorporates diversity. 11 5 0 16
Beyond Wikipedia 20 Enable everyone to collect, curate, and share knowledge beyond encyclopedia knowledge from all fields, cultures, and traditions. 34 13 13 60
Beyond Wikipedia 21 Empower anyone to learn, teach, and research by providing a platform to share and access media, data, tools, and social interactions for growing the sum of all human knowledge. 1 4 6 11
Beyond Wikipedia 22 By 2030, Wikimedia should be a home for free knowledge – flexible in format and building bridges across languages – opening contributions from non-traditional knowledge sources. 6 5 0 11
Availability across languages 23 By 2030, Wikimedia should help language communities interested in Wikimedia achieve an equal Wikimedia presence. This includes social inclusion, technology, respect for diversity. 10 8 2 20
Availability across languages 24 By 2030, Wikimedia projects should be available in all the (live and dead) languages of the world. 34 16 9 59
Support emerging communities 25 By 2030, Wikimedia should empower emerging communities through exchange in a mutually-inclusive framework that embraces human experience in all its forms. 4 2 5 11
Support emerging communities 26 In 2030, Wikimedia should be a place where emerging communities are guaranteed support from peer communities so that members of all communities can share in the sum of all knowledge in their own language. 3 5 0 8
Support emerging communities 27 By 2030, Wikimedia should empower emerging communities by reducing barriers to access and share free knowledge. 15 14 2 31
Support emerging communities 28 By 2030, Wikimedia should institutionalize the research of emerging communities to efficiently find / discover, understand, resources, and nurture them towards maturity and use their performance as a key index to assessing the Foundation’s own performance. 15 13 3 31
Automation 29 Wikimedia, in order to make all knowledge available in personalized ways and empower contributors to create and curate it, needs increasing automation with a human touch. 26 19 15 60
Automation 30 By 2030, Wikimedia should operate at the forefront of advanced semi-automated open knowledge technologies. 11 2 7 20
Innovation 31 By 2030, Wikimedia should proactively innovate on all aspects of our movement, including community, content, technology, partnerships, and governance. Take bold steps to be a positive, relevant, impactful force in the world. 3 6 3 12
Innovation 32 From now on until 2030 and beyond, Wikimedia as a movement – communities, WMF, Wikimedia affiliate organizations and other stakeholders – should dare to evolve, be open and supportive of disruptive ideas, willing to experiment, take risks and accept failure, and embrace innovation in order to adapt to the rapidly-changing realities of every human being. 41 12 0 53
Adapt to Technological Context 33 By 2030, Wikimedia will be quickly adapting to new digital technologies and innovations, to excel in gathering, customized distribution, and structuring of human knowledge to remain relevant. 8 5 0 13
Adapt to Technological Context 34 By 2030, Wikimedia will provide user experiences that do not limit, but encourage users to share, organize, and access knowledge. 6 1 1 8
Values 35 By 2030, we live freedom of speech, openness, cooperation, independence, diversity and tolerance and stand for non-profit, fact-based, community-based and supportive knowledge activism open to everyone. 13 6 4 23
Reliability & Quality 36 By 2030, Wikimedia should guarantee verifiable, accurate and balanced content across languages to result in reliable knowledge accessible to every individual. 15 8 2 25
Reliability & Quality 37 By 2030, Wikimedia as a movement demonstrates that quality makes knowledge trustable by: providing high-quality information from all kinds of reliable sources to knowledge users around the world, and by having defined means of measuring and monitoring quality and reliability. 8 4 2 14

Next Steps & Closing

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“Strategy is a hopeful act of leadership. [...] The process is half the strategy.” - “You are weird,... but you are right.”

— Ryan Merkley (CEO, Creative Commons)

Closing session was led by Nicole, who thanked all of those who made the conference possible, especially the participants who contributed their energy, insights, and commitment. Suzie Nussel shared with the audience the next steps in terms of how the input from the Movement Strategy track will be integrated in the overall strategy. The slides from Suzie’s input are available for consultation.

A summary document will be produced and results from the conference will be posted on Meta-Wiki (hint: you are reading it at the moment), and potentially translated by the language liaisons. All thematic statements will be included in the process. There is an open invitation to groups, sub-groups and semi-organised groups to bring this conversation to their local realities, and to engage discussion coordinators because they will be the designated point of contact for each group.

Ryan Merkley also joined for a few last words of support for the time to come, reminding everyone that developing a strategy is a worthwhile but often difficult process. To close, the facilitators invited all participants to form a giant circle in the main hall and do collective cheers and shouts that represented the energy that all have put into the conference, and subsequently, the energy that each of the participants is taking back home.

Click the video to see what this is all about.

Introduction
of the Movement Strategy track,
 » design principles,
 » flow of activities
Day 1
» The Complexity of a Movement,
» Analysis of the Present Situation,
» Personalising the Present Situation,
 » Issues & Opportunities
Day 2
» Issues & Opportunities,
 » Distilling Key Points,
 » Ryan Merkley
Day 3
» Theme Statements,
 » Next Steps & Closing