Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Transition/Proposal: Drafting a Movement Charter/Discussions round 1

On April 4th, 2021, 2 open meetings were organized to discuss what could be the next steps on our road to a Global Council. The detailled minutes are available on Etherpad.

But here is a collaborative attempt to report on the substance of both discussion. If you have participated in those discussions, this is a wiki, please improve the report and/or discuss in the talk page if you feel your opinion wasn't properly reflected.

Points were there seemed to be a consensus

As their was no formal consensus tracking in the meetings, those are points that felt were almost not controversial between participants:

• The idea of having a small (c.20-25) Charter drafting group almost had consensus - only one or two voices against this
• The process to the final charter must include different mechanisms for community input and validation
• At some point, elections will be needed to provide with better communities representation
  • The debate was more whether the process should start with an election, of if elections should happen during the process. I have not heard anyone strongly against any election mechanisms.
• The process to draft the charter should not be limited to topics but review all the mechanisms in the movement (clarification needed, what does this mean??)

Key take aways

Here we are trying to summarize some of the main points made during the discussions, and try to report them neutraly. If you feel the way it is written is biased, please do fix it, it wasn't on purpose:

• There were a number of different ratification proposals mentioned, and no-one seemed against the idea of establishing the ratification process in outline before any other work started. But this wasn't discussed much. Might there also be a consensus around this?
• Different people voiced concern and/or objections in having appointments preceding elections as it could hinder the power of the elected people in the work
• Different people voiced concerns and/or objections in having elections preceding appointments as the election process would require a lot of time and energy to run efficiently
• There was no consensus on the election mechanism at this point, there was however some proposals that were made like :
  • Yair Rand's Global Council distribution formula
• Marìa raised concerns over having enough people willing to run for elections for something requiring so much involvement
• Andrew raised concerns that a purely election based system would actually prevent people that do not have or want to spend the time and energy to go through public election and the scrutiny it entails. Especially for people from marginalized communities that wouldn't feel legitimate to run.
• Pharos proposed that we could move very fast on his 7/7/7 approach by having before end of May:
  • Appointed 7 people through SWAN and those discussions
  • Elected 7 people from communities
  • Appointed 7 people by Wikimedia Foundation

  The community election would be the most difficult/time-consuming part of this. If a 'simple' election model is proposed, how would it work?