Content Partnerships Hub/White paper/3. Growing and reorganizing the current organization

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Growing and reorganizing the current organization[edit]

Background and context[edit]

Affiliates of the Wikimedia movement have always had few staff members, with Wikimedia Deutschland as the only exception. An organization with 5-10 staff members has been considered large within the Wikimedia world. In most other contexts, this would be considered only a small team. Many affiliates have 2-3 staff members, but most have no staff members and are fully volunteer-driven. The strength has been, and is, the volunteer communities that support the organizations and allow them to take a much larger role than they otherwise could.

The affiliates called Wikimedia chapters have a national, or sometimes sub-national, responsibility and have historically been working solely to serve the communities in that specific geography. The national focus has in many ways been successful, especially considering the very limited resources available to the affiliates. Most chapters have plenty of local partnerships, have been able to support the local communities and to engage the public.

The limit with this national focus is that it has led to fragmentation, and a lack of exchange of knowledge and joint capacity building. The wheel has, unnecessarily, been reinvented quite a few times.

The last few years have, however, seen quite a few more internationally oriented projects. As affiliates now start working on a more international level, a number of questions about responsibilities and risks arise. The ones that have been identified concerning international coordination and governance is in this White Paper covered under the section Finding support internally and externally. There are of course also tough choices and challenges concerning internal changes when the resources are diverted from national work to international work. An affiliate must ask itself which of the two should be prioritized?

The small size of the local teams have limited the possibility of more ambitious projects. It has also limited the possibilities of the affiliates to be able to take on larger roles internationally and to fulfill more complex requirements outlined in the Wikimedia 2030 Movement Strategy Recommendations. Better tools are needed to increase efficiency, and a dedicated team of professionals is needed for these tools to be developed and maintained. Perhaps even more importantly, a stronger and better supported volunteer base, which can keep the pace of innovation and content creation up, must be supported and expanded.

When projects become more internationally oriented, the teams need to adapt in order to be able to work efficiently in a different context. One part of this is that the teams need to be more geographically diverse, and to some extent the teams will need to telework. For most organizations, it is a big shift to change from a geographically and linguistically homogeneous team, where the majority of staff are working from one office, to an international distributed team.

What has been done[edit]

Previously Wikimedia Sverige’s team has intentionally been kept at a maximum of 9 staff members, with a few supporting consultants. The reason is that after reaching 10 employees an organization in Sweden has to adhere to a number of stricter rules as an employer, with more policies, rules and procedures needing to be formalized. Now, however, the association has reached a level of maturity that has allowed us to grow beyond this previously set limit.

During the period July 2019 to June 2020 the staff grew from 7 to 12 members of staff. A further hiring of another 4 staff members took place successfully in June-September 2020. Including the replacement of a couple of staff members who left the organization for different reasons, a total of 10 new staff members were hired and successfully started working in the organization.

This has been possible through significant preparatory work. To give a few examples, the policies and guidelines of the organization had to be reviewed, and new policies needed to be added. Guiding documents for staff and volunteers had to be created or revised, financial routines established to handle larger budgets, and work descriptions for different positions had to be developed. There was also a significant need to develop internal training programs and educational material for staff members, to effectively join the organization and understand the finer details of the Wikimedia movement. Not least the organizational culture had to be clearly communicated to the new staff members. This transition has been possible as Wikimedia Sverige has a well-rounded team with a valuable mix of experience and knowledge, including five people that have previous work experience as managers. The board of the organization also consists of a number of people with significant board and management experience at the highest level.

For the duration of this project Wikimedia Sverige has chosen to (re-)focus many aspects of its work on international work. While efforts have been made to find synergies between existing domestic projects and international opportunities, the international focus has necessarily been at the cost of the association’s domestic projects. In particular the effort around grant applications has required a choice of focusing on calls with an international focus over those with domestic limitations, as such this focus will have a long term impact.

As an Internet-born organization Wikimedia Sverige have worked to create opportunities for staff to work remotely for a few years. The association has been successful in this regard and many of its current staff and contractors have been working from multiple different locations in Sweden and internationally. This was further accentuated during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Wikimedia Sverige’s intention to support the wider movement around content partnerships and the growth in staff needed for it. Work has also been initiated to translate the material and policies needed for international staff to telework.

In order to have professional support in scaling the team further, Wikimedia Sverige invited tenders from two HR-consultants. In the end, the association did not engage any such services as the timeline for the content partnership hub was delayed for a year due to COVID-19. The HR consultants will support the leadership with expertise if the increase in staff continues further and stricter regulations apply to the workplace.

Wikimedia Sverige also increased the work handled by the association’s external financial agency. They are now covering more of the day-to-day work with payment processing, salaries, and the creation of different types of financial reports for the entire organization and for specific project reports.

What the working language, or languages, should be in the organization is an important question to decide on and more international work might create a need to review status quo and ensure that any internal materials created are multilingual. At Wikimedia Sverige the focus has been to ensure that material is not only available in Swedish but also in English.

The biggest struggle to retain staff has been the limited possibility to offer long-term job security and a path to personal growth, which is connected to the lack of sustainability that comes with project grants as a main source of funding (see the section Ensuring financial sustainability for the work).

At the start of the initiative the different stakeholders within the Wikimedia community were identified and volunteers from the international GLAMwiki community were engaged in the work to develop the early ideas and to understand where the limitations of the efforts should be.

Future work[edit]

In order to be able to hire internationally, Wikimedia Sverige will engage HR and legal experts to develop necessary agreements etc. The plan is to initially focus on hires within the EU, but later also from other parts of the world. This will let us start the journey towards a more diverse team, whilst keeping costs reasonable and fostering closer cooperation with other affiliates (e.g. by having Wikimedia Sverige’s staff members working from the offices of other affiliates, creating direct links and an ongoing exchange of knowledge and insights).

A number of policies that will allow for international hires and staff spread out across the world will have to be developed. This includes: a salary framework (e.g. something like what the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap is using), policies around remote working, etc.

Policies to allow for more internationally oriented reallocation of grant money and the organization of international projects also need to be developed. Such policies might include bribery, anti-terrorism etc. It can also include processes to operationally be able to cater to the different needs in different parts of the world.

As an organization expands from working on a domestic level to taking on international responsibilities, a clear structure needs to be implemented to ensure that resources are divided between these two areas. The structure should ensure that the resource allocation supports the overall impact without one cannibalizing the other.

Planning for a comprehensive effort to translate (and when needed supplement) existing material into English is ongoing. This is something that the association views as a key step to allow for international hires. It will also be crucial to make the workplace suitable for a more geographically diverse team, and to engage the global GLAMwiki community. How much of the material should be multilingual is a complex question as there is not only an upfront cost to translating it, but also to keeping the material updated in two or more languages. To do this work with paid staff members is costly and to engage volunteers in the translation work should be a top priority.

If Wikimedia Sverige grew to 25 employees or more the association would again need to do a thorough review of policies and procedures as this is the next threshold for stricter Swedish regulations. (Other countries might have similar rules, which is worth investigating when planning to expand their team.)

Lessons learned and key takeaways[edit]

  • Lesson learned: A solid foundation is needed, if an organization wants to grow and take on a larger international responsibility. This, in turn, needs significant investments. Wikimedia Sverige had already, from 2012-2018, invested significant work by both staff and board to be in a good position as an employer and efficient national organization. However, this has not been enough and over the span of the last two years thousands of work hours have been spent on furthering the organizational development and capacity to prepare for a significantly larger international presence. This allowed the organization to successfully onboard 10 staff members in a single year, but work to be able to scale and internationalize the team is still ongoing with further investments taking place.
    • Key takeaway: It takes time, both in calendar-time and in person-hours to ensure that the entire organization stands behind the proposed change.
    • Key takeaway: Organizational governance, organizational stability, policies etc. is not always the most intriguing of tasks and could be viewed as an unnecessary overhead. Clarity amongst leadership about the end goal is needed to keep the work going. If the path to becoming a hub is clarified the long term engagement for this type of work would be easier to achieve.
    • Key takeaway: Financial stability needs to be in place, for an expansion to be initiated. The reason is that the work to prepare for a larger team is substantial, and furthermore that the task likely will be seen as pointless or of low priority, if it is not clear that the outcome will be used later on.
    • Key takeaway: To be able to scale a team, the organizational culture needs to be strong. Educational and training material also need to exist, as well as opportunities to allow successful onboarding. In many ways the Wikimedia movement is not easily understood and understanding it is absolutely needed to work efficiently within it. This does not happen automatically but takes dedicated investments.
  • Lesson learned: All affiliates work in different contexts, but expect that when growing a team, new policies, methods, tools and structures will have to be developed and/or adopted. This takes time and effort and should not be rushed. It will likely be needed to procure expertise such as financial agencies, HR consultants and legal practitioners to do everything by the book.
    • Key takeaway: Leaders in the organization must be aware that there are legal and ethical risks of expanding work internationally. Investments to reduce these risks must be made.
    • Key takeaway: Be aware of the national legislation and regulations that govern employers. Work systematically to upgrade your capacity to meet them. These contextual factors can make a significant difference in the workload.
    • Key takeaway: If you have no previous experience of creating an international organization (led or worked within is not the same, but a good start!), you realize many of the gaps when starting to practically implement and organize an international team. Allow flexibility in the budget and planning to cope with this. Wikimedia Sverige still has key materials that need to be developed or further refined after initial trial and error.
    • Key takeaway: If the organization's working language has been a smaller language (e.g. Swedish), then a significant amount of material needs to be made multilingual to make it possible for international hires and engagement of volunteers from across the world. Part of this can be planned and executed in advance, but without significant investments one should expect that there will be a continuous cost associated with this in the foreseeable future, both to translate documents ad hoc when needed, but also because of new documents created or existing ones further expanded upon.
    • Key takeaway: When developing policies and supporting material, an effective process is to look and learn from what has been developed by other organizations. Investments to ensure that such material that has been created by Wikimedia affiliates and other free knowledge organizations is translated, connected and analyzed can save significant time and funding for other organizations initiating this journey.
  • Lesson learned: Working internationally should not mean the end of national work. There are ways to organize the work so that the international work benefits the national work. Team members need to understand and share the vision to be able to connect the work in the national and international context. This is something that we continue to actively work on.
    • Key takeaway: Any organization considering this type of internationalization must realize that such a change creates a risk that less resources will be available for the national work in the short term.
    • Key takeaway: Funding should allow for continuing national work as well not to lose what has been built, and to ensure that insights from the local context are continuously included into the international work.