Wikipedia:Wikimedia Strategy 2018–20/Coordinate Across Stakeholders

Coordinate Across Stakeholders
Previous	Narrative of Change	Principles	Glossary	Next

This recommendation proposes the idea of building processes that encourage coordination and implementation of plans and ideas of differing scales for the growth of the Movement. It is supported by the recommendations: ‘Plan Infrastructure Scalability’, ‘Improve User Experience’, ‘Provide for Safety and Security’, ‘Ensure Equity in Decision-Making’, and ‘Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt’.

Intro section

These pages describe a major discussion process currently taking place at the website for Wikimedia.

If you wish to add comments to the main discussions for this process at that website, here is the link where you can do so:

• Link to main page at Wikimedia website:
  • meta:Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20

What

In order to “become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge,” as a Movement, we must enable coordination among all the various stakeholders to ensure our alignment and to achieve our goals. Coordination is the essential backbone functioning for the Movement we envision.

We must develop a practice of cooperation and collaboration among the different stakeholders to advance towards more equitable decision-making. Coordination must be facilitated by Movement structures, as well as technological solutions and platforms that take into account the different participants’ needs in context and the internal knowledge of the Movement.

Why

The need for coordination was clearly evident during community conversations, as often there is a lack of harmony between the volunteer communities and other parts of the Movement. A lack of clarity about the roles of the various stakeholders, ineffective communication channels, and differing prioritization systems have created points of conflict, perceptions that decision-making has occurred without consultation, and lack of unity of purpose. To ensure equity and access, we need to coordinate among stakeholders to address power imbalances that may facilitate elitism with little to no accountability among/to different Movement participants. We need to be accountable to each other and work together to reach our strategic goals.

Distributed leadership and power structures are key areas for developing and promoting equity in the Movement. This distributed structure comes with an increased need for effective coordination among the various players, to ensure that problems and challenges are solved inclusively and transparently, rather than simply shifted from one area to another. We must have processes and procedures that clearly define our relationships, along with their overlaps, and provide for coordination with efficient communication channels across all levels, particularly in facilitating our response to urgent threats or opportunities.

While coordination is necessary for decision-making, it is also essential for collecting and producing content in each local version of a project and globally. The need for having better mechanisms to put people in touch with similar topical interests is evident at all levels in the Movement and also with external stakeholders, such as partners. This core need will become more relevant as the Movement grows larger and more diverse, and finding solutions to it can have multiplicative effects in the quantity and quality of free knowledge we can create.

How

Coordination can take place between Movement stakeholders, extending to include external partners, who share our goals in the open knowledge Movement. To foster collaboration, we recommend an approach based on several actions to establish a communicative ecosystem: an adequate organizational structure, usable networking and technical solutions/platforms to address stakeholders’ communicative needs, and collaboration with the external knowledge ecosystem.

We must prioritize communication, information exchange, and working together and adopt an organizational structure that has a collaboration function built-in. The structure needs to provide, at all levels, for contextualized thematic/regional discussion and networking, support, planning, research, monitoring, advocacy, capacity building, learning, mentoring, etc. to ensure that our mission/vision remains cohesive. Further structural solutions to align and coordinate the distributed Movement include a Movement Charter and a global Governance Body, which would take on global coordinating efforts that cannot be tackled by emergent regional structures, for example helping set an overarching strategy, as they might have rivaling interests.

We must analyze whether emergent support structures / regional hubs should form a part of the Movement structures to serve as a dispatch and coordination centers for supporting Movement-wide, regional, or thematic focuses and foster better communication and collaboration. Among the thematic units proposed are support structures for advocacy, capacity building, community health, and technology, to ensure that our systems remain current, focus on future development, continuously evaluate requirements and needs in our dynamic environment, and allow our people and technology to be productive assets and relevant in a broad range of contexts.

Open and transparent software projects and functionality proposal processes which allow all stakeholders in the Movement to put forth ideas and a “Technology Council” which coordinates requirements for introducing new functionalities must be prioritized, as should enhancements to our systems to manage our internal knowledge. Improved communication systems to facilitate the exchange of information and collaboration among/by internal and external partners are crucial to remaining efficient, relevant, and sustainable. Finally, we propose collaboration with the external knowledge ecosystem in developing solutions and sharing expertise in both areas where we share common goals and areas which we may need to use but which will not be developed in our Movement.

Expected outcomes

• Create living, governance documents defining clear responsibilities and expected capabilities that reflect our common shared values, principles, and accountability to each other and facilitate growth, inclusiveness, and diversity.
• Develop a collaboration function that is built-in throughout all Movement organizational structures, making them capable of managing joint decision-making.
• Develop emergent support structures, when relevant, as a part of the Movement structures to coordinate support of Movement-wide, regional, or thematic focuses and foster communication and collaboration so our people and technology can be productive assets, relevant in a broad range of contexts, and be sustained.
• Design a “Technology Council” which coordinates the requirements for introducing new functionalities in software and invites all stakeholders in the Movement to put forth ideas for new features in an open and transparent software functionalities and projects proposal process.
• Enhance communication capacities to enable better management of knowledge, exchange of information, support, and collaboration amongst internal and external partners.