During the Wikimedia Conference, the scope of the Working Group was defined through important questions that the Working Group will need to consider and answer in their work.
The clustering has been done by the group working at WMCON18, reviewed by the core team.
Power dynamics
What are the power structures that exist today?
What are the power structures we would like to see exist?
What does we mean by power? Who has the power to shape or design our vision? Who has the agency?
What are the roles we need to define?
Who are we doing this for? Who are we trying to change the roles/responsibilities for?
How do we design roles and responsibilities that are understood across cultures and languages?
Roles have boundaries. What are the boundaries between roles? What's within the the boundary/outside?
Power is an interdependence.
Movement structure
How do we make the Foundation's money the Movement's money?
Do we need affiliates? Do we need the foundation?
[How can we] encourage different growth paths for organizations that are just as legitimate (corsets)
Where does an organisation have the authority to to make decisions and where does this stop?
How to we ensure the stability of this (high value) entity (WMF)?
We are more like a government than a philanthropic organization. If we are moving away from this we need people who have experience with philanthropy (because of money aspect).
Leadership
How are we defining leadership? What are leaders responsible for?
There're are different forms of leadership are visible, but there are other forms that aren't as visible, creates a bias.
Process & Principles
How can we use "change management" theory/methods/consultants to facilitate the evolution of roles and responsibilities in the Movement?
Collective impact model, Fungi network (nutrients come from wherever and get to wherever they need to go)
How does this lack of clarity contribute to our ability to progress/move quickly?
What does Trust look like? How can I trust you so that I can get my work done, and trust that you are doing yours…
How can we be bold when we're not clear?
Decentralized model
Cathedral vs. Bazaar: should we be organized in a centralized way or a more distributed way?
Like distributed leadership model, movement needs to move more toward being more learning-oriented organisation
Unexamined movement is not worth leading (Auto-reflection, self-analysis, self-examination).
a mix of people from other countries, languages, genders
a mix of people who think visually or think in structures
someone who naturally gravitates between planner/organizing/logistical person
People who are comfortable with open process/exploration/processing
people who have time
Representation. Diversity
Representation of different points of view, experience and backgrounds as one of the major principles in forming the WG. Ideally each person would have more than one of these characteristics
"old timer”: someone like Asaf as example of a bridge character between old timer and the new change movement
“someone with a history of the movement”: who will help avoid the mistakes of the past
“(relative) newcomer”
“someone with experienced restructuring an organization”
“Someone with disruptive/strong voices” (e.g. let's not talk about improving WMF, lets get rid of WMF)
someone from earlier in the movement whose ideals/ideas were left behind for some reason
the super wikipedian, who don't care about the "political" part of it (the argument: it's your responsibility, you can't dismiss)
someone familiar with cultural change (we're really talking about changing the status quo, which is a culture).
“devil's advocates”, people who will force us to take a step back
a staff person whose job it is to manage this process (to monitor the state of the WG, to ensure the flow of information, progress)
someone from wikimedia.de
Collaboration with other contributors
“strong neutral facilitator”, who will design the process to get things done
Learn what we can from other similar/related organisations.
Someone who comes from a place where the ontological orientation is different from "ours"
Someone who represents TEAL organization/evolutionary model - reinventing organizations
Someone from orgs that have gone through this cathedral to bazaar
Draw from movements that have changed over time (e.g. women's movement)
Not talking about underlying power dynamics means that we may return to the same place because you haven't dealt with the underlying issues.
Balancing between open process vs. outcomes.
Process
Naming of the group is very important, and perhaps should be explicit about that it is a discussion about power (e.g. name the group "Power Structures")
[Set up] guidings principles/values/parameters two or three sentences, high level statements that are common to all the WGs
[Set up and make transparent] the decision-making process:
Suggest strong set of functional roles (communications, facilitation, etc.)
[Set] clear process up front defining each phase (building trust -> research -> check in / feedback (cyclic) -> etc).
Research:
a really clear mapping of the movement now
looking beyond us, current status (pain points)
looking to external experts
Develop different realistic scenarios for the Movement with the same level of details and a summary set of values that each of these concrete proposals represent (as an entry point to communicating the different proposals)
Ongoing: sharing of outcomes of research is a way to share beyond this group, sets the narrative.
Ongoing: the community feedback - sharing out and collecting feedback, chance to gather input
Face to face meeting at the last stage of the discussion (important for trust building, bonding)
Flexibility: process should accommodate different needs (ex. structured and organic thinkers have different needs in terms of process).
Tools
Record of how we got here - so that the outputs don't come from out of the blue
Good collaboration tools (mural.ly or live board) that produce good artifacts
Tools for visualizing flow charts, organizational charts etc.
