Talk:Updating the ecosystem of Wikimedia organizations/Future Affiliate Landscape

Feedback on the proposal

This is a space to provide your feedback on the proposal from the focus group. Here are some of the guiding questions to respond to when reviewing the proposal and providing feedback:

• What sounds right to you in the proposal? What do you agree with? What might be some improvements?
• What are the gaps? What is missing? In your perspective, is there anything essential from your experience and context you would like to see in the proposal?
• Is there something in the proposal you disagree with? What feels misaligned with your experience and context?

The request for feedback on the proposal is open for 6 weeks until April 16, 2026, to provide ample time for communities and movement organizations to read through and reflect on the proposal, to then provide thoughtful and insightful feedback from their perspective, based on their context.

Thank you for your time and attention! Looking forward to get some good insights from you to improve the work. --KVaidla (WMF) (talk) 10:34, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

Looks good to me. Maybe some minor wordsmithing like "Wikimedia movement projects" instead of "Wikimedia projects" to emphasize that we are more than just projects run by the WMF. Best Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:50, 8 March 2026 (UTC)

Hi, I'll leave some ideas and another kind of discussion about some topics:

1. In the derecognition, I suppose the statement should be "or" instead "and": if any of these points is checked, the movement will proceed to derecognize the affiliate.
2. About clear governance, I support the idea. I have some doubts about staffing and non-staffing decision-making, and how they can reach consensus in the affiliates.
3. About peer and fiscal sponsorship, I support the idea, but with a limited time (ie, 3 years) if the fiscal sponsor comes outside the Wikimedia movement.
4. About hubs, I miss the idea about self-organized and coordinated affiliates. Anyway, seems OK as a resume about the discussions in the past about the goal and how to prevent any conflicts.

Superzerocool (talk) 17:10, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

Feedback from Wikiesfera

Thanks for the work on this. The proposal correctly identifies several core issues and proposes sensible directions.

The core definition of an affiliate's purpose, to deliver the Wikimedia vision in a local and culturally relevant context, is good. This centers the work on the communities and contributors the movement serves. Explicitly naming "equity through contextualization" and "subsidiarity in action" as guiding principles is a strong foundation. It acknowledges that different communities have different needs and that decisions are often best made close to the people they affect. The three-tier model (light, versatile, established) is a pragmatic way to acknowledge the very different capacities, lifecycles, and needs of groups. The explicit call for flexibility allowing groups to move between tiers based on changing circumstances helps to avoid a rigid, growth-only ladder.

While the framework is solid, several areas could be strengthened or clarified. The proposal uses the term "established" but the criteria in the tier table are somewhat process-oriented ("Formalized organizations"). It could be improved by more explicitly linking "established" to demonstrated community health, equitable governance, and proven impact over time. There's a risk that "established" becomes synonymous with "has a large budget" or "has been around the longest," potentially reinforcing existing power imbalances.

The section on derecognition is very brief. It mentions "significant break of the affiliate agreement" and "deliberate malfeasance." The proposal would benefit from outlining who makes this determination and what a fair, transparent, and supportive process looks like before derecognition occurs. Is there a path to remediation?

While the definition is good, the proposal states that "there should not be regional or thematic overlap between hubs." In a complex, organic movement, some overlap might be inevitable and even healthy for collaboration. The proposal would be improved by focusing on principles for coordination rather than an absolute prohibition on overlap, which makes no sense in our context where multiple transregional would-be hubs already successfully exist.

The proposal also suggests "light" tier groups might have "no or temporary funding." The text on funding also mentions multi-year support for smaller organizations with a good track record. The gap here is how a group in the "light" tier builds the capacity and track record to access more stable funding without getting caught in a chicken-and-egg situation. Could there be very low-barrier, small-project funding explicitly for this tier? We keep repeating this: volunteer exploitation is not a sustainable model.

The proposal mentions the Foundation as part of the "structured support" system but doesn't deeply explore its evolving role in this new ecosystem. We keep encountering this view of the Foundation as something above or beyond the Wikimedia organizations ecosystem, with the ability to decide how much funding affiliates may receive or periodically open discussions on how to limit their numbers and growth. Are we going to discuss how affiliates would like to see the Foundation operate in a new ecosystem, or is this Movement Roles 5.0? Have you given up on the Global Council?

The "people-centeredness" principle is a good start. However, the proposal could more strongly integrate community health and safety as a core accountability metric, not just a principle. This includes clear expectations around the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) and creating pathways for addressing interpersonal and structural conflicts within affiliates (which is much more typical than for example malfeasance). The "conduct commitment" section could be expanded to include expectations for internal dispute resolution and support for community members who face harassment.

The proposal mentions fiscal sponsorship for groups that cannot formalize due to safety concerns. This is critical and needs to be a fully developed, secure, and low-barrier mechanism. The process for an emerging group in a restrictive environment to connect with a fiscal sponsor without exposing its members to risk needs to be a central design consideration, not an afterthought.

Regarding peer mentorship for emerging affiliates, an essential component of this is explicitly planning for knowledge transfer and leadership succession. How does an affiliate ensure its institutional memory and community connections survive when key volunteers or staff move on? This could be a key area for peer mentorship between "Established" and "Versatile" affiliates.

The proposal states: "There need to be financial incentives for Wikimedia grant recipients to work together on common goals towards collective impact. Peer connections can be a responsibility included in the grant program, increasing the funds available."

While collaboration is valuable, tying additional funds to it (or making it a responsibility) creates a system that systematically disadvantages non-established groups. For a small, no staff "Light" tier group, coordination meetings and joint reporting consume precious time that would otherwise go to their core mission. For an "Established" affiliate with paid staff, this is routine. The "collaboration tax" falls disproportionately on the less-resourced partner. The partner with more experience and resources naturally shapes "common goals" to fit their existing priorities. The smaller group can become a junior partner in a project that may only partially address their community's needs, simply to access funds.

Established groups will logically seek partners who make their proposal look stronger. The most nascent groups, who might benefit most from genuine connection, become undesirable collaboration partners because they add risk to the application. The incentive inadvertently creates a hierarchy of "desirable" collaborators. Turning collaboration into a financial incentive risks creating performative partnerships, groups partnering on paper to access funds without deep, trust-based relationships. It also introduces competition for collaboration resources, undermining the solidarity that sustains volunteer communities.

A more equitable approach might include unrestricted capacity-building grants that give emerging groups the choice of whether to collaborate, funding for "connector" roles within hubs to lower the coordination burden for smaller groups, and recognizing different modes of collaboration: where a "Light" group's participation might simply be showing up to a peer learning call, not co-managing a complex work plan. The incentive structure should ensure that funding follows the capacity to do the work, not the capacity to navigate partnerships. But to be perfectly honest, right now only Wikimedia Europe (and its members) has the capacity to do this on a continual basis, furthering inequities with other regions. While the intentions are no doubt good, you should remove this last point since it will very predictably backfire. It’s not worth the risk.

On behalf of Wikiesfera, PatriHorrillo (talk) 11:36, 11 March 2026 (UTC)

Clarification request: Legal structures and re-registration of affiliates

I am currently working on incorporating a Japanese user group to gain official local chapter recognition, focusing primarily on legal considerations. I have a few questions regarding the draft:

Re: "Affiliate definition"

The text defines an affiliate as "an organization or organized group of people." Why are these two terms distinguished? For example, the Wikimedia Foundation is a legal entity without members. Would entities with similar structures—such as charitable trusts or foundations that lack "membership"—fall under the definition of "an organization"?

Re: "Affiliate growth"

The document states: "Any need for re-registration of affiliates that are legal entities needs to be avoided." Could anyone clarify what specific scenarios this addresses? In Japan, we are preparing to establish a legal entity founded by our user group members; will this provision affect our process?

I hope that clear explanations or examples will be added to the draft to help resolve these questions. Hijiri (talk) 18:24, 11 March 2026 (UTC)

Thank you @Hijiri for reaching out and for asking these clarification questions that can be helpful also for others to understand content better!

• Affiliate definition - terms organization and organized group of people are mainly differentiating between legally registered entities and groups of people operating in an organized way without a registered entity. This reflects the current reality of the movement where not all user groups, even though affiliated, are not actually legal entities in their country. For flexibility of the system it probably makes sense to enable some form for affiliation for these groups also moving forward.
• Membership - Whether the affiliates would need to be membership organizations is a separate question. Overall, there is an expectation for Wikimedia affiliates to have members and be of service to the project community. In an essential definition of an organization, a trust or foundation without membership still is an organization. Separate question is whether we would want Wikimedia affiliates to be such organizations. In the discussions so far, there are pros and cons provided for either option - it would be great to hear further thoughts regarding this!
• Re-registration - This point has been made because we already have entities in our movement that include user group in their actual legal registered name. If there are changes made in the categories, there is a potential for a need for re-registration to change that. The suggestion of the focus group has been to avoid such situation in re-framing the future landscape. This would imply no existing or future groups, including Japanese group, needing to change anything and being able to officially continue as is.

Again, I am grateful for your time and attention given to this proposal and am available for any further inquiries! --KVaidla (WMF) (talk) 13:24, 25 March 2026 (UTC)

Thank you, @KVaidla (WMF)! It was really helpful for our ongoing discussions.

Regarding our plans in Japan, we are currently weighing two options: establishing a Foundation (Zaidan Hojin - 財団法人) if we can secure sufficient seed money, or an Association (Shadan Hojin - 社団法人) if funds are limited. We lean toward the Foundation model because it offers a more stable framework for ensuring long-term public interest and prevents the organization's assets and governance from being dominated by a small group of individuals, which is a key consideration in the Japanese legal context.

The crucial point is that, unlike US non-profit laws, Japanese law strictly distinguishes between Foundations and Associations. Once established, it is legally impossible to convert one into the other. Therefore, we must be extremely cautious in our choice. As a Japanese Foundation is a non-membership entity similar to a "charitable trust," we would need to be creative in how we integrate the community’s voice. This is why I asked about the definition of "organization" and membership requirements.

Furthermore, we are concerned about whether it is preferred from the WMF’s perspective that our transition be seen as a single, seamless organization (continuous), or as two distinct entities where the legal one succeeds the rights and duties of the former user group.

My hope is that the WMF can offer a flexible approach that doesn't require us to be overly concerned with such legal hair-splitting during this transition. Hijiri (talk) 15:59, 25 March 2026 (UTC)

@KVaidla (WMF), @Hijiri, I'd like to share this Q&A with @JChen (WMF) because the Japanese UG’s grant application has been submitted. YShibata (talk) 09:21, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

Mutually exclusive blocs

I would like to address this point:

No duplication. Hubs need to support a number of communities and affiliates within its scope. There should not be regional or thematic overlap between hubs. In case of potential overlap, coordination needs to happen between hubs.

Some overlap of communities is healthy, we don't want a world of competing, mutually exclusive blocs. Better to lead with the criterion that coordination and mutual understanding is necessary to address converging interests among hubs, rather than dictating that overlaps and collaboration are somehow inherently forbidden (which would be both impossible and undesirable). Pharos (talk) 18:24, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

@Pharos If the blocks are mutually exclusive, they can't be competing. Or am I missing something? - Darwin ^Ahoy! 12:26, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

The problem is that these kind of rigid boundaries encourage a Cold War-esque w:zero-sum game mentality, where the only way to grow "your" side (and the resources allocated to it) is at the expense of others. Pharos (talk) 18:50, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

Thank you @Pharos and @DarwIn for chiming in here! I believe the issue that Pharos is highlighting is related to the default framing of avoiding the overlaps leading this particular section, only for the coordination and collaboration point being highlighted in the end. As I read it, the suggestion would be to lead with coordination and collaboration guidance as a default to then provide the clarifying detail on the reach and scope, including avoiding unnecessary overlaps. This would give less restrictive framing to the whole section and put principle of collaboration first.

At the same time, there needs to be clear guidance on preventing potentially harmful overlaps that can lead to high level of duplication of efforts and, as a result, conflicts between individuals and organizations. Considering this, do you have suggestions for a better phrasing? --KVaidla (WMF) (talk) 13:11, 25 March 2026 (UTC)

Also adding @PatriHorrillo to this thread, as this point was part of the Wikiesfera feedback with a suggestion "The proposal would be improved by focusing on principles for coordination rather than an absolute prohibition on overlap, which makes no sense in our context where multiple transregional would-be hubs already successfully exist." Thank you for making the point and suggesting a propoal for improvement! --KVaidla (WMF) (talk) 13:28, 25 March 2026 (UTC)

Feedback from Cnyirahabihirwe12345

Thank you very much this is a good, strong, thoughtful and much needed proposal that reflects a deep understanding of the Wikimedia ecosystem. It has clearer implementation mechanisms, stronger attention to capacity building, care and power equity; it could become a solid foundation for real, sustainable change in how the movement organizes and supports itself.

However, while the proposal is strong conceptually, some areas would benefit from further clarification : On the point of capacity building, many affiliates require sustained support in governance, financial management, leadership, partnership, community mobilisation, I think it is good to emphasize more on these points,

Reading the proposal I realized that there is a need to explain more on languages: multilingualism and language equity is not sufficiently emphasized, it is very important to support work in local languages for inclusive knowledge production and community growth,

On the point of digital infrastructure and access, this proposal doesn’t sufficiently address different challenges of connectivity, tools and infrastructure which remain major barriers in many regions, particularly in Africa. Access to reliable internet is very important for mass participation. This should be addressed more explicitly, as we know access to reliable internet and appropriate tools is fundamental to participation. From my perspective, it should therefore be treated as a priority. Cnyirahabihirwe12345 (talk) 09:16, 21 March 2026 (UTC)

ALARM BELLS! ********* Feedback on Proposal - I&I22

Thank you for this invitation for feedback!

I will review and add my notes here.

1. FIRST RECOMMENDATION - PLEASE USE ORIGINAL BRITISH SPELLINGS, whyyyyy use American spellings? This doesn't make sense to me. Particularly given MANY THINGS, particularly current events........

For example -------> Organisation as opposed to Organization I&I22 (talk) 15:03, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

2. Concern - How are QTBIPOC and those populations experiencing intersectional bias protected, included and advocated for in this agreement?

- Conduct Commitment - Where are the budgets and protocols for protective infrastructures?

Where are the explicit descriptions of protective measures, community protections and advocacy for those who experience higher levels of targetted harrassment?

-There is a weakness/lack of protection here re: "clear communication" and "transparency" requirements

In areas/communities where queer or trans identities are criminalised, the "clear communication" and "transparency" requirements (like public reporting on funds) could be used as tools for surveillance or persecution vs. support.

- does not address the legal and physical risks to individuals if identity exposed through sponsor's reporting requirements.

- Problematic: "Established" vs. "Emerging" power dynamics - "Equity through contextualisation" and "Subsidiarity," will disadvantage emerging QTBIPOC populations

- Problematic: Wikimedia's protocols of "reliable sources" and "expert organisations" discredits and works to erase grassroot community sources/ephemeral and oral community histories etc. needs to be updated urgently - we are no longer in the paper only encyclopedia capitalistic knowledge maintenance era - QTBIPOC

Although a fab start, I see many issues, and feel that those communities peripheral to dominant capitalistic narratives have neither been consulted nor considered. This is all I can say for now as am am a volunteer here and irl demands beckon.

In warm solidarity, I&I22 (talk) 15:27, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

Feedback - Wikimedia Serbia

Wikimedia Serbia welcomes the effort to bring more clarity to the Wikimedia affiliate landscape. We appreciate the intention behind this proposal and see value in trying to better define the purpose, roles, expectations and relationships of different Movement organizations.

We also find it useful that the draft tries to address several important questions at once: what an affiliate is, how different types of organizations in the Movement relate to each other, what is expected from them, and how their development and recognition may be understood in the future. In particular, we support the idea of creating a clearer overall structure for affiliates. We believe this could help make the structure of the Movement easier to understand and navigate, especially if it continues to grow and diversify, but also adapts to new environments.

At the same time, we believe some parts of the proposal would benefit from further clarification:

1. We think that some overlap between the affiliate and hubs is natural, but also that the distinction between them should be clearer so that there is no unnecessary overlap of roles.
2. We understand the logic behind including peer-mentorship and fiscal sponsorship as possible roles of more developed affiliates. However, we believe that these should be supported and encouraged, rather than threats as something that can always be expected by default. In particular, fiscal sponsorship can involve significant legal, financial, and administrative responsibility, and different affiliates operate in very different contexts and with very different capacities.
3. The idea of affiliate health review and tiering may be useful, but only if the criteria are clear, transparent and sensitive to context. If such system is developed further, it will be important to explain how health, capacity and growth are assessed, and to make sure that the framework does not unintentionally favor affiliates with greater resources over those doing strong work in more limited circumstances.
4. We also support that funding should not be based only on the formal size or status of an affiliate, but rather on its actual capacity, results and impact. Also, we strongly recommend that the wider context of the political situation and inflation rates be considered accordingly when funding. This seems like a more flexible approach.

Overall, Wikimedia Serbia sees this draft as a useful basis for further discussion. We support the goal of a clearer and more coherent Movement structure, while also encouraging further work. Gorana Gomirac (VMRS) (talk) 09:29, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

Feedback from Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand

Please see the following points of feedback on behalf of Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand:

• It would be useful to develop and be more explicit about through what mechanism the affiliate health checks and de-recognition would occur. Who takes responsibility for these processes?
• While collaboration with other affiliates is valuable, tying additional funds to it, or making it a requirement, will disadvantage Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand. We are already limited in our contributions to the global community due to our geographic isolation and time zone. We are building our relationship with Wikimedia Australia. Our capacity for affiliate partnerships is limited.

Hillmenco (talk) 02:20, 9 April 2026 (UTC)