Talk:Wikimedia Deutschland/The Future of Wikimedia Governance

Seems reasonable

I just wanted to comment as a wiki community member that all this seems reasonable and aligned with conversations I have heard dozens of times with hundreds of wiki community members over the past few years. There are more details here and the seeing specific requirements here is interesting, but these ideas have been in circulation for some time. Thanks for putting into print what the international Wikimedia community has been discussing. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:03, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment, Blue Rasberry. Our intention is indeed to help structure the conversations that have been happening within the movement over the last years or decades by introducing – among other things – a common language on governance. I took your comment to heart and also mentioned in the SWAN call that of course this paper has not been developed in a vacuum but with the history and past debates in mind. --Nicole Ebber (WMDE) (talk) 09:51, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Important research

Thanks for this document, as it contains critical comparative research into how other NGOs are organizing themselves. We need to realize we are at the start of creating a new political class within the movement on a scale we have never seen before. Therefore, our community needs to look outside our walls to learn from the experiences and mistakes of others. In short: our uncharted territory is actually well-travelled and well-understood by many other entities that came before us.

Some ideas for follow-on work: the Wikimedia movement seems to be unique compared to NGOs in this report in that we are primarily a socio-technical "community of practice." We actively develop a product for public consumption, including all the tools and technologies around that global, multilingual mission. In that sense, how might we differ from these NGOs in terms of determining a governance structure and dynamic? Do we have a good survey of other movements or communities such as Mozilla, Creative Commons, FOSDEM, Apache, et al? That would be an interesting next step, to see how other socio-technical communities have evolved their governance. - Fuzheado (talk) 13:11, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, Andrew, I second your sentiment very much! We would welcome any further research on how other organisations might be governed. And we encourage affiliates and community members to share on this page – or with the MCDC, as soon as they start gatherin this kind of input – research findings and ideas on what different governance scenarios could be. --Nicole Ebber (WMDE) (talk) 10:07, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Responsibilities

Thanks to WMDE for the analysis, especially the overview of the models used by other groups of organizations.

I think the Recommendations set out a much more detailed structure than this document suggests, and that both of the scenarios here depart considerably from the strategy Recommendations. Some points and opinions:

• As the Recommendations bring up, the Board is neither designed for nor capable of acting as a governance body for the Wikimedia movement. The WMF Board is built around governance of a single organization, with its limited responsibilities. The Recommendations make clear that, for those responsibilities which are not fit for the Board, we must "transfer those responsibilities and authorities to the appropriate Movement-led bodies", ensuring that decisions by those bodies are binding, in a way that "ensures that the authorities and responsibilities of the Global Council and of the other Movement-led bodies are respected and they lead within the Movement." The GC cannot be simply an advisory body as suggested by Scenario 1 here.
• On the other side, I really think we should avoid a professional-heavy "Wikimedia International", which would likely fall into the same pitfalls as the WMF. Centralizing activities into a single global organization would result in the very opposite of a lot of what we're trying to accomplish. The Recommendations do not bring up the creation of a Secretariat or an equivalent.
• On specific responsibilities:
  • Budgets/Resource allocation: Per the Recommendations, the GC is to oversee "funds allocation to regional and thematic hubs and other Movement organizations", presumably including the WMF. The WMF's current unique position of being exempt from oversight is not at all desirable, as has been recognized many times before. The GC will be "Enforcing accountability of all Movement organizations around: Use of Movement funds" [emphasis added] The WMF will not be able to simply assign movement funds to itself.
    • Specifically, I think the WMF will be assigned funds by the GC within its broader framework (GC will be "Setting frameworks on resource allocation [...] for the Movement.") and, under limited circumstances, perhaps by thematic hubs. (Eg, if we have a Research Hub overseeing research in general, then WMF-run research might have a similar placement as research managed by affiliates, getting approval, assistance, and funding from the Hub.)
  • Fundraising: From the Recommendations, the GC's authorities include: "Setting frameworks on [...] revenue generation for the Movement.", the Charter outlines requirements for processes for "Ensuring Movement-wide revenue generation", GC also enforces accountability around "Compliance with the Movement Charter". By my understanding, fundraising campaigns would be managed by individual orgs (WMF, certain affiliates), with general oversight and global fundraising policy-setting by GC, within a broader framework outlined in the Charter. (GC would presumably not have the capacity to directly run fundraising campaigns. Fundraising agreements would be between GC and the orgs.)
  • Movement Infrastructure: This is two separate questions, of who provides supports the efforts (to which the answer is usually "everyone", WMF, affiliates, individual volunteers, etc), and who holds the central coordinating/decision-making position, for which there will likely be various coordinating bodies, in various areas: Software by the Technology Council (see Recommendation 5, TC will be "a central structure", "to establish processes for introducing new functionalities onto Wikimedia platforms and tools", "guide the focus and coordination of developing new technology"), several functions by thematic hubs (the Recommendation mentions "advocacy, capacity building, partnerships, research" as possibilities), some by assorted volunteer groups, and maybe some areas assigned to individual organizations like the WMF. Solutions vary from area to area. This isn't something with a single answer.
  • Trademarks: The marks should be legally owned by the GC, as the most trusted entity, specifically representing the Movement as a whole per the Recommendations. GC's responsibilities are stated to include enforcing "Appropriate use of movement branding and marks".
  • Liability for Content in Projects: This is ... complicated. Even currently, we haven't managed to ensure that all liability is held with the WMF: In practice, a bunch has been held by individual contributors, especially outside the US, facing local risks resulting from their contributions, often without assistance from the WMF. However, the main point under this topic is legal responsibilities deriving from keeping the website up, which I think should continue to be held by the WMF. (Ideally, I think the domain/infrastructure properties themselves would be the GC's, unless that would extend legal liability to them. (IANAL.))
  • Policy ratification: This should differ considerably by area. Communities and orgs create their own policies individually, global project policies go through RfCs, global org-binding policies would presumably go through the GC with associated consultations, and movement-wide policies would likely involve the GC, the orgs, and a community approval process. Exceptions (for org-binding policies) may include certain domains where particular Hubs or Committees may be involved (likely relates to Rec #5's mentioned "shared documents defining clear responsibilities [...] for specific activities"). (Relevant quotes: "To make Movement-wide decisions, we require a global structure [...]. In order to fulfil this function, a Global Council will be created.", "Any decision affecting our communities has to involve those communities to prevent imbalanced outcomes.")

• Other issues:
  • The GC has an additional role to "give guidance in matters of strategic importance" to the Board. This consultative role would likely relate to the Board's own CAC. This additional role is identified by the Recommendations as necessary in "some key areas" which "are not well represented" on the Board. It should not be confused with the GC's broader independent authorities and responsibilities. The WMDE document seems to be reading the sentence fragment in a confusing manner.
  • I am unsure whether the set of sentences in the Recommendation beginning with "Initially, the Global Council will..." are envisioning a transitionary period? I don't know how to read that section.

--Yair rand (talk) 17:55, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for your thoughtful and detailed comments, Yair rand. This is exactly the kind of discussion that we hoped to initiate. And our hope is that answers to these questions will be discussed and developed throughout the MCDC process. I am going to try and make some comments and expand on a couple of points.

To your first point that the recommendations already go beyond Scenario I: The spirit and language of the recommendation tends towards a governance rather than advisory role. But the text fails to detail how that transfer of decision-making power should be done, accountably and consistently. Given the US IRS Tax code regulating 501(c)(3)s such as the WMF, there are limits to the powers (especially when it comes to funding) the WMF can safely transfer to a body without any corporate form. If the GC is supposed to enter into contractual agreements with the WMF and others, it would need some kind of corporate form.

Your second point spells out the legitimate fear of creating yet another big bureaucratic entity. That is not what the scenario entails, and it would indeed violate the intention of the strategy. However, the pitfalls you speak of come largely from the reality that the WMF has to live with every day - being a US charitable organization while overseeing, supporting, fundraising for, tech-supporting and yes, effectively governing a global movement.

The GC secretariat is not mentioned in the recommendation, true. The recommendation is also not the end of all wisdom. It is now the movement’s job, in the charter and accompanying policies and agreements, to think it all the way through to the end.

In scenario 2, the new entity will be democratically and globally governed, and by virtue of being a membership organization, will be accountable to the movement stakeholders (including the WMF). Many good ideas of how movement organizations should be governed, structured, managed and integrated into our movement can be found in the [round of recommendations of the Roles and Responsibilities working group]. High emphasis there is placed on decentralization and self-management.

So our paper by no means suggests creating a centralized new structure that then takes over all functions in the movement. Rather it says that we need to look at which functions should lie with which entities, jointly or alone. The GC would be mostly dealing with the large, strategic questions facing the movement as a whole. Subsidiarity in decision making would shift most other decisions to the regional or local level.

It might be a little early now to discuss in detail each of the specific responsibilities. At this juncture, however, it is crucially important to understand where the journey goes, so we don't create a bunch of lofty, idealistic statements in the charter that have no grounding in the legal reality.

Then next we'll need to negotiate the division of labor, so thanks for your comments about the responsibilities/functions. A few additional thoughts:

• Resource Allocation/Budget: The WMF BoT members would violate their legal and fiduciary duties if they stopped making their own funding decisions, in particular as they pertain to the WMF’s own budget, assuring the sustainability of the organization. Maybe I don’t understand your premises, but I don’t see how that can just be taken away, so that the WMF can no longer ‘assign funds to itself’. That is literally its job, given its corporate form. Or who do you think would assign the funds to the WMF otherwise?

• Fundraising: same here - the GC has no authority whatsoever to determine fundraising policies, just because the recommendation says so. The Movement Strategy Recommendations are not a legal document. A charter, contracts, policies, grants and Memoranda of Understanding are legal documents. These would have to be between the WMF, the GC, hubs and affiliates. Fundraising will be a crucial starting point for change, because power will naturally shift once resources are also generated outside of San Francisco or Berlin, empowering other stakeholders.

• Movement Infrastructure: There are indeed many tasks and functions here that have to be divided in pragmatic ways. WMF is an appropriate, professional and experienced provider of many functions, and has been less successful at others. If these functions shift to the GC, it would need resources and independent staff.

• Trademarks: can only be owned by a legal entity or a legal person, and their protection and management really needs to be in professional and experienced hands. If you think that should be the GC, then it needs to have the appropriate legal and professional capacities.

• Content liability: As you say, it’s complicated. And this is also a changing legal area, different in each country. See also Amanda Keton and Christian Humborg’s recent statement on the EU Digital Services Act.

To sum it up, and referring to the transitionary stage you mentioned: “As the GC builds capacity, and is legitimately authorized by its membership, it is then able to take on more functions and decisions.” Our paper hopefully helps shed some light on the possible mechanics of this transition. --Nicola Zeuner (WMDE) (talk) 17:14, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

@Nicola Zeuner (WMDE): To clarify, I'm not arguing against having a corporate form for the GC itself. (If we did want to avoid setting up a legal entity for it, I could imagine ways we might go about that. We could have a non-legal-based system, and some kind of "bridge" between the informal/"wiki" reality and the legal realities. I'd imagine something along the lines of my proposal for bridging Wikimedia elections to the WMF Board's processes. However, an extralegal/informal GC would likely be a relatively fragile system, and would probably be best avoided if possible. Relevant: The Recommendation's backup plan for if "legal limitations" get in the way of a proper transfer of powers, of a "a social contract to allow [the GC and other Movement-led bodies] to make legally non-binding but socially binding decisions".)

However, there's a distinction to be made between a legal organization whose activities are done by its own staff (and governed by a Council and/or Board), and one primarily or exclusively consisting of the volunteer Council itself. An organization that spends resources internally will have a different dynamic than one dependent on the other organizations to carry out activities. I think it's important to both avoid:

• a situation where the GC has both the ability/means and incentive to accumulate power and resources within itself, increasing its own spending relative to others and defaulting to running activities internally rather than funding those in other organizations, and
• a situation where the GC's organization stops having the "character" of a volunteer body. (I'd consider the "danger point" on this to be if the person-hours put in by GC staff were to exceed the time put in by the GC members themselves.)

Your point that they still need the professional capacity to manage their responsibilities is well taken. Perhaps this could be accomplished by extensively delegating subtasks to various Wikimedia organizations? (For comparison: the FDC relied on the WMF staff for assessments of various orgs, and on WMDE staff assessment of the WMF. Not exactly equivalent, for various reasons, but still perhaps somewhat relevant.) Perhaps many other volunteers could frequently assist directly in their work as well. (I'm uncertain about whether this is a viable path.)

Regarding the GC's organization as a membership organization: I'm unsure of what is meant by this. Would the members be organizations, or individuals, or both? If organizations, I feel that that risks excluding the non-organization-based majority of the movement. If individuals, that risks some of the same risks posed when the WMF's own structuring was considered (eg, the risks posed to individuals upon disclosing their real identity, and the possibility of creating a "second-class" of participants who do not/can not register for membership). I suspect this would not be worse than the current setup, but both are very far from ideal, and I think the models could be improved upon.

--Yair rand (talk) 03:43, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Too much decision making power here

This document is recommended reading for Wikimedia Summit 2024. I am glad that is the case, but also, I think this document has grown to have a lot more weight and influence on decision making than was ever intended. This document is great; I am not criticizing it for what it is. I am alarmed that I think this document is prime among only a few pieces of evidence for informing major Wikimedia Movement decisions for investing 100s of millions of US$dollars, when it was never designed or intended for this.

The research here is good but it was casual. This is not up to minimal academic standards. It is still being used, but it was never peer reviewed by experts and even has low engagement from the Wikipedia community. We do not know how accurate it was at the start, and with it being several years old now, we do not know if it is still accurate.

I want to raise the concern that I think this relatively low-quality research review is being used to decide how to spend a lot of money. There is a great mismatch in the value put on this research and how casually it is recommended that attendees of the 2024 summit be familiar with it.

As a recommendation for improvement, I think that as soon as possible somehow we get sponsorship for a few part-time graduate students at any university review and update this for publication in even a modest peer reviewed journal. I imagine that this should cost less than US$50,000. Considering that this information has being used to make major Wikimedia Movement decisions, there needs to be a resource commitment to making this information right. Some appropriate professional backgrounds could be in accounting / commerce, or business administration, or nonprofit administration. Again, I appreciate the original authors and researchers, but the weight on this information has grown past any original intent.

If we did needs assessment, I think some of the additional information which the Wikimedia community would want includes budgets for the profiled organizations, some description of power/resource sharing, some explanation of the scope of work and outputs of these organizations, and a methodology for determining the extent to which these profiled organizations are comparable with Wikimedia administration. Bluerasberry (talk) 17:21, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Bundles up independent questions into a false choice

This document takes several mostly independent choices and presents them as being tied together:

1. Whether the Wikimedia Foundation or the Global Council should be the highest governance body (or in other words, whether the Global Council should lead or merely advise).
2. Whether the Global Council should be an incorporated nonprofit organization, or something informal.
3. Whether, if incorporated, the Global Council should be a membership organization.
4. Whether the Global Council should fundraise.
5. Whether the Global Council should be a large group of people (100-200) or a small group of people (10-20).
6. Whether the most relevant legal regime for Wikimedia projects and affiliates will be that of the US or some unspecified European country.

By bundling these together, the document avoids arguing for most of the claims it makes, or even really explaining them in detail, even though these aren't at all trivial claims. I'll just handwave towards a few of the potential issues:

• It kind of gets implied that the Global Council cannot truly be on the top of the power hierarchy unless it is a formal body, and its relationship with the WMF also gets formalized; but it is left unsaid how that would look. The original vision of recommendation #4, in which the Global Council can (at least initially) take over WMF responsibilities and powers without any formal arrangement, by a binding social contract, gets denigrated as a merely "advisory" relationship, but it's not at all obvious why the relationship between an incorporated GC (or "Wikimedia International") would be any more than "advisory". The only alternative I can see is transferring the trademarks or receiving the banner donations or both; and those both raise a number of questions that would really need to be discussed. (To name just one, we have twenty years of experience with the WMF; it's not great at some things, but we can be fairly confident it won't fail catastrophically overnight. How confident can we be of that for a brand new organization, created in a new jurisdiction? Confident enough to transfer to it hundreds of millions of dollars and the ability to cause hard-to-repair damage, if e.g. it gets hijacked and starts weaponizing the trademarks, like it happened with Freenode?)
• US law is very pro free speech and very favorable to online platforms, even compared to EU countries. What risks are created by moving the legal center of the movement to a country with more limited protections?
• If the GC/WMI is a membership organization, who are its members? If it's affiliates, that will further exaggerate the arguably already oversized influence of affiliates in Wikimedia governance (and potentially also the disproportionality where a chapter with a hundred thousand members and a user group with three members have the same weight in decisionmaking). If it's individuals, how do they get selected? Much like with the WMF, a community vote cannot possibly be legally binding.

Even more fundamentally, nothing is said about why we should want some of these things - what are the "design goals" behind Wikimedia International, so to speak. We just get the (easy to agree with) argument that the Global Council should be leading the movement and not just be a glorified advisory board, and all the other assertions are smuggled in under a pretense that they somehow logically follow from the GC taking a leadership role.

I wouldn't really hold this against a position paper written two years ago at the kick-off of the Movement Charter drafting process as a conversation starter. But like @Bluerasberry I'm worried it is becoming (or is being turned into) something more than that, with its use as training material for the Wikimedia Summit. There is a possible world in which the Movement Charter describes the role of the Global Council in a high-level, nonspecific way that makes it clear that decisionmaking and oversight powers for movement-wide matters are transferred from the WMF to the GC, but leaves it open how exactly that is implemented; we would then start with a low-stake, informal, somewhat experimental GC which relies on social norms instead of any legal power as the basis of its leadership position, and over time we would explore how much we want to formalize that, and would have ample time to discuss the various pros and cons in the process. So in this case it would be possible for the Charter to be drafted without delving into the issues around GC incorporation and structure. But it seems WMDE is pushing instead for the Movement Charter to specify that we want a Wikimedia International, and is using this document as a basis for that. And for such a role, the document is very lacking. Tgr (talk) 09:55, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

Agree with everything. No one should ever misunderstand that the views in this document are anything other than thoughts from a minority group which never sought to compare and contrast the information here with other views in the Wikimedia community. These are valid talking points but this document presumes that many fundamental decisions are settled when in fact the discussion has not even started. Bluerasberry (talk) 14:28, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

We appreciate that after two years, this paper finally generates some discussion.

Yes, User:Bluerasberry, this is indeed not academic-level research, and was never meant to be. However, this and our second paper about money distribution models is based on empirical research – a review of governance and finance models in many of the main global NGO federations. The manner in which they are presented was intended to be accessible to a broad Wikimedia audience.

While we agree that academic level research on INGO governance would be fascinating, we suppose that its reception in the movement would be quite limited. You might be overestimating the reception of this paper as well, both with the MCDC and other stakeholders.

Yes User:Tgr, using models and scenarios does bundle variables in a way that by design simplifies the issues. Yet, it does get people talking, and engaging with content, and then with those variables as well. For two years WMDE has argued that the big questions (GC advisory vs governing body of the movement, decentralization of fundraising to name just a few) should have been decided before drafting a collection of ideas, terms and concepts. That would have been easier and clearer to engage with than the current drafts which often remain on a policy level.

So simplification to start with could have worked. But now we are doing it backwards – discussing details like where an international headquarters should be located, and our two-year old initial paper is being accused of lacking nuance, such as details of membership composition.

I would also like to point out that nowhere in our text we say that an international secretariat should be headquartered in Europe, or that liability and trademarks should be moved to a new entity.

The discussion on the Why and the How of movement governance is better located on the MCDC talk pages, or if you want to engage with WMDE’s actual positions specifically, on this page. Nicole Ebber (WMDE) (talk) 20:28, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

@Nicole Ebber (WMDE) I certainly prefer WMDE's vision of the drafting process to how it actually played out. But I think that just reinforces the point I'm trying to make: that the current drafting process simply does not have the capacity to make good recommendation on complex questions requiring deep expertise, such as forms of incorporation or jurisdictions or specifics of revenue raising and reallocating mechanisms. (Maybe a different approach to drafting the Charter would have been able to incorporate such discussions, although I have my doubts; but that doesn't really matter now.) So I think the only responsible move is to not make a recommendation on them.

The question of whether the Global Council should be an advisory body or play a meaningful leadership role (more abstractly, whether the leadership of the Movement should be under democratic accountability) is more about moral principles than about factual claims on legal or NGO management matters. I think the reasonable path forward would be to focus on that question (and I very much appreciate WMDE pushing for movement self-governance), and on similar questions that have a moral rather than a factual / expertise-based character, and leave deciding on the exact organizational structures to a later step in the strategy implementation process.

So I think that this document was a fine conversation starter when it was published, but today, as an explainer of what choices we need to make in the Charter drafting process (with e.g. Wikimedia Summit attendees being asked to vote on the two scenarios laid out here), it is at best a distraction, and should come with a disclaimer. (The "Positions Governance" document, in contrast, very carefully stays at a high level of abstraction that's suitable for the Charter and the current drafting process; I think it's a great statement and I'd endorse it in its entirety.)

(Europe was my mischaracterization, the text does mention Singapore and South Africa as options; but the point still stands, that all alternatives have much weaker freedom-of-speech and platform-provider protections than the US and so a legal reorganization which makes the movement to a significant extent subject to these jurisdictions is something that would need very careful consideration. The transfer of trademarks does get brought up in the "Comparing scenarios" section; and the transfer of liabilities would be a natural consequence of that.) Tgr (talk) 13:22, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree with Tgr's comments.

It would be good to first articulate the design goals, i.e. the specific problems these scenarios seek to solve. Implicitly, the movement strategy recommendation #4 is taken to be the design goal, but it is at the same time too broad and too vague to be a rationale for these particular scenarios.

I would also like to point out what seems to me to be a (no doubt unintentionally) misleading assertion in the comparison table: in the infrastructure row, it is asserted that currently infrastructure is handled only by WMF and WMDE, whereas in the proposed scenarios infrastructure would be handled by "WMF, Affiliates, Hubs external actors via WMF grants und[sic] contracts" and "WMF, WMI, Affiliates, Hubs, contracts". It is in fact status quo that infrastructure can be handled by "WMF, Affiliates, Hubs external actors via WMF grants and contracts", and to the extent it is still largely WMF and WMDE that handle infrastructure, it is due to missing capacity or initiatives, not to our governance structure; if we create a WMI, nothing magical would happen that would suddenly allow a small user group to handle movement infrastructure, just as nothing prevents a sufficiently motivated and mature group from offering to take on infrastructure right now, via grants and contracts.

This, again, emphasizes the need to clearly articulate what these scenarios are solving for, because as the previous paragraph shows, they are not, for example, solving for shared infrastructure ownership, compared to status quo. Ijon (talk) 06:51, 5 September 2023 (UTC)