Hi everyone,
As we start to wind down our work, we – the Movement Charter Drafting Committee – are grateful for the opportunity to go on this journey with each other and with all of you. You have engaged with us on many platforms and venues – Zoom calls, Meta Talk pages, Telegram messages, and at in-person events across the world. You have shown up in different roles – notably, Advisors <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee#Advisors> and Movement Charter Ambassadors <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Ambassadors_Program/Join>. You dedicated time to reviewing drafts and offering feedback. Most recently, you participated in the ratification process. From the very beginning through to the ratification vote, your comments and suggestions have informed the thousands of hours of discussion we have had as a committee. Thank you. This is not the last time you will hear from us – we will share out once more before we bid farewell to you as the Movement Charter Drafting Committee – but we want to take this opportunity to offer our reflections ahead of seeing some of you in Poland for the 2024 Wikimania. These reflections will focus on the journey we have been on as a committee and the recent ratification results. Reflections on the process When we were convened in November 2021, the Movement Charter Drafting Committee consisted of 15 elected and selected members <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Elections/Results/Announcement>. Although each of us brought unique experiences from our respective communities, we were in this drafting process together. During the two and a half year process, some members resigned and new members joined us; and our friend and colleague User:Nosebagbear passed away shortly after Wikimania 2023. His contributions to the charter and our committee, as well as to the movement, were invaluable. Early on, we acknowledged that creating a perfect charter was an impossible task. Instead, we focused on drafting a charter that would be "good enough" to serve the movement effectively in laying out the roles and responsibilities of different movement actors. We also differentiated between a “Movement Charter” and a “charter for the Global Council”, committing to the first one. Recognizing that both the Charter and the Global Council are experiments, we aimed to produce a Movement Charter that was “safe to try”, with the expectation that we would evaluate, iterate, and adapt with learnings over time. The process of drafting a charter brought together people who have never met before to speak about challenges they faced, and to investigate what could be done to overcome those challenges. Many volunteers were introduced to aspects of movement governance for the first time, and felt motivated to understand better and to share with their community, in the hopes of shaping the future of the movement. The process also surfaced new problems and reiterated existing problems of participation within our movement, and at the same time highlighted the adaptability of individuals, communities, and affiliates to overcome them. The idea behind equity – mentioned in Movement Strategy Recommendation #4 Ensure Equity in Decision-Making <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Recommendations/Ensure_Equity_in_Decision-making> – is to adapt the level of support to the needs of individuals in order to enable them to participate at the same level as others. We hope that throughout the charter drafting process, all movement actors felt empowered and supported in participating in these kinds of processes, that they felt that their voice was needed, and was heard. We hope that with the emphasis on convergence and compromise in our conversations and drafts, people learn that some of us need to take a step back to make room for others to step in and step up. Our biggest challenges in drafting a charter involved stakeholder engagement and expectations management. Our movement is diverse, in size and in complexity. Our opinions are diverse, often spanning one side of the spectrum to the other. Our engagement styles are diverse: some are vocal, while others prefer to observe first. Some can engage us on any and all platforms, while others only want to speak face-to-face. We identified three main stakeholder groups: the individual contributors, the affiliates, and the WMF Board of Trustees, and their expectations towards us varied. The individual contributors wanted to solidify their rights to contribute and edit on projects, while being protected and not being hampered by bureaucracy; the affiliates wanted to expand the governance umbrella and decentralize power; and the Board wanted more incremental and concrete proposals for change. Even within each group, the perspectives were varied – was the charter to be a 2-page document that served as a high-level compass for governance or was the charter to be a 40-page detailed roadmap to navigate decision-making processes that took into consideration subsidiarity, self-organization, and organic collaboration? The outcome of all these challenging questions was presented to you when we published our final text <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter> for the Movement Charter on June 10, 2024. This Charter has become a charter that describes current processes unchallenged; suggests new processes and ideas; and proposes improvements for the future where we thought certain topics were beyond our mandate or needed a more solid basis, rooted in a more extensive and targeted process to be validated. Reflections on the ratification results After we published the final text, we ran a ratification vote on the Charter. Thank you to all those who came out to vote – affiliates and individual contributors alike. We were pleasantly surprised by your overwhelming support. Thank you to the WMF Board of Trustees for your honesty and openness. We sympathize that it was not an easy decision to make. Reading the comments and feedback <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Ratification/Voting/Results/Voter_comments_-_report> that came from the vote, this is our takeaway: you support the idea of having a Movement Charter and a Global Council, but there are concerns with the proposed text. We would like to respond to two of the recurring feedback points that we have heard about the Global Council (more than 20% of all comments concerned this topic). Purpose of the Global Council We were often asked what the purpose of the Global Council is and what problem it is trying to solve; we were also told that form should follow function. However, the text of Recommendation #4: Ensure Equity in Decision Making does not provide sufficient information on what type of decisions should be made by the Global Council. And without agreement amongst and between the MCDC, the WMF Board, and the other stakeholders, it proved impossible to decide what the purpose and scope of the Global Council should be. We heeded the Board liaisons’ suggestion <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Charter/Archive_5#h-Wikimedia_Foundation_perspectives_on_the_Global_Council-20240229132100> from February 2024 to align the Global Council’s responsibilities in areas where there is a potential for greater volunteer leadership in decision-making, specifically adding grant-making and technical strategy at their request, while working with the legal department to avoid anything that would constrain the WMF from exercising its fiduciary duty. Despite extensive efforts, reconciling the differing visions proved challenging, and the proposed compromise did not meet everyone's expectations. Set-up of the Global Council As the form of the GC should follow its function, outlining the set-up of the Global Council was even more of a challenge because this function was not agreed upon by the stakeholders. As such, we carefully explored the possibilities to find a balance between a big enough body that could be representative of the global movement and a small enough council that could be functional and agile. We heard from many of you about the pros and cons of each model; we ourselves had repeated conversations about the size and set-up of the Global Council. Here, we noted suggestions by different stakeholders, including the Board liaisons, to start small and expand over time. Those feedback taken together is how we ended up with the Global Council and the Global Council Board, totaling 25 members to start, with the potential to grow up to 100 members over time, if approved by all stakeholders, including the WMF Board. This was also done to minimize cost, and the process would have benefited from a thorough cost analysis of different scenarios and the ability to take advantage of existing infrastructure - for example, the repurposing of resources used to support current committees, or the possibility of the Wikimedia Summit gathering evolving to become less affiliate-centric. Next steps While we are disappointed by the final result of the ratification vote, we know this is not the end of the conversation. At the time of publishing, we are on our way to Wikimania, where we hope to continue discussing with you about what’s next, not just for the Movement Charter and the Global Council, but for the Movement Strategy and the movement broadly. And after Wikimania, we will be sharing our final communication as the Movement Charter Drafting Committee, which will cover our recommendations for moving forward, including our thoughts on the three proposed pilots coming from the Board of Trustees’ ratification vote. With kind regards, The Movement Charter Drafting Committee Anass Sedrati, Anne Clin, Ciell, Daria Cybulska, Georges Fodouop, Jorge Vargas, Manavpreet Kaur, Michał Buczyński, Pepe Flores, Richard Knipel, Runa Bhattacharjee. 1) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee#Advisors 2) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Ambassadors_Program/Join 3) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Elections/Results/Announcement 4) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Recommendations/Ensure_Equity_in_Decision-making 5) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter 6) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Ratification/Voting/Results/Voter_comments_-_report 7) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Charter/Archive_5#h-Wikimedia_Foundation_perspectives_on_the_Global_Council *This message was also published on Meta <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Updates/MCDC_process_%26_ratification_reflections> to allow for translations.*
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