Movement Charter/Drafting Committee/June 2022 meeting

Movement Charter

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Drafting Committee

Ratification vote

Drafting Committee's group photo from the meeting.

The Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC) met in-person, for the first time, on 17-19 June in Berlin, Germany. The meeting was built-in to the Committee’s timeline in advance to help make progress on critical tasks. The main goals of the meeting were the following:

1. Creating a Movement Charter outline, based on which subcommittees can start drafting different areas of the Charter.
2. Creating drafting subcommittees to start creating content for the Movement Charter.
3. Agreeing on a drafting methodology to guide the work of those subcommittees.
4. Team building for the Drafting Committee to be better able to work together.

Hubs

Discussion session.

Breakout group.

The discussion reached the following agreements:

• The MCDC does not see itself as a committee responsible for approving Hubs.
• The MCDC is not obliged to reply to any questions about the Hubs Minimum Piloting Criteria. This is the Movement Strategy & Governance team’s responsibility.
• The MCDC will need to include a definition of the role of Hubs in the Movement Charter (along with other structures in the Wikimedia movement).

Movement Charter Outline & drafting groups

Presenting the "Community" area of the outline.

The “Outline” refers to a list of the main chapters that the Movement Charter will contain. Before meeting in Berlin, the committee already agreed on the broad topics (or “buckets”) that the outline would cover. Those were: 1. Preamble, Values & Principle, 2. Governance, 3. Resources, and 4. Community.

Committee members proposed a few more detailed versions of this outline. Those outlines are also expected to be the basis of forming drafting groups. For example: There will be one group to draft the text of the Movement Charter’s “Preamble”, and another to draft the “Values & Principles”, etc.

The final agreement was on an outline that contains the following chapters (also accessible here):

1. Preamble: Definition of the Charter and its purpose
2. Values, Principles, Policies: Core values and collaboration principles for the whole movement
3. Definitions: Definition of key concepts outlined in the Charter
4. Global Council: Definition of the future global movement governance body
5. Roles & Responsibilities: Definition of roles and responsibilities of movement entities
6. Decision-making: Definition of global decision-making processes
7. Amendments & Implementation: Definition of Charter amendment and implementation processes
8. Appendices/Glossary: Detailed outline of key content and definitions of key terms

Drafting Methodology

The Committee thoroughly discussed a drafting methodology to determine how the content of the Movement Charter is written, and how it’s reviewed with the community.

Charter content

Some of the core agreements about the methodology and the content were the following:

• Conciseness: Keep the Movement Charter as a concise, high level document.
• Appendices: Keep the detailed information in appendices to keep the outline and content lean.
• Definition/preamble: The first content of the Movement Charter (preamble) should be the definition of the Charter itself.
• Enforcing: The Charter should include clear mechanisms of enforcing its content.

Next steps

The hybrid working space at Wikimedia Germany's office remains open!

• Based on the rough outline above, the drafting groups will be formed in August 2022 to prioritize three initial chapters: Preamble; Values, Principles, Policies; and Roles and Responsibilities.
• The Committee will soon publish the finalized drafting methodology.
• Draft content will be shared with the community when ready and according to the timeline (note: the timeline is being updated with the aim of sharing publicly in September).