Success criteria – Agreement on the goals the pilot needs to achieve to be considered successful, tied to the Needs assessment.
Monitoring and Evaluation framework – Clear plan on how the progress of a hub will be monitored and evaluated. Including clear definition of objectives and key results for the pilot.
Overlap Mitigation Plan – Clear mapping of its mandate against existing structures and a plan for mitigating potential overlaps.
Community engagement framework – Plan for how the supported communities can inform the work of the pilot, engage in its activities, and participate in the decision-making.
Inclusive leadership – The leadership of the pilot needs to be inclusive of diverse profiles (representation of gender, age, languages, regions…)
Connection to the Movement Strategy implementation process – Designated representatives for participation in the Hubs and Movement Charter discussions and commitment to follow the outcomes and decisions from these processes.
“Off-ramp” plan – Process for stopping the pilot if it doesn’t satisfy the success criteria.
These two points have been identified in other discussions as too demanding for the volunteers in the leadership team who are already busy building no less than a hub pilot.
One way to soften the commitment but still bring these valid points to the pilots could be to explicitly strive for inclusive leadership and to commit to not deviate from the movement consensus and decisions about hubs.
Regarding expectations around equity: A requirement to strive for inclusive leadership sounds sensible. I would refer back to the language used in this part of the Roles & Responsibilities recommendations:
"Wikimedia movement organisations will be governed by inclusive, diverse, and accountable boards. They will actively review and reflect on their own performance and composition, and take steps to ensure their membership includes people from a range of backgrounds and experiences reflecting the diversity of the communities and partners they seek to serve as well as the skills required, and to dedicate time and effort to the onboarding, training and development of Board members…
“Wikimedia organisations will continue to work in a wide range of contexts and exist at a range of levels of size and maturity. For this reason we have avoided setting out too much detail - for instance, we have consciously avoided trying to set quotas. We envisage that there would be a set of common standards (embodied in the movement charter) which are expected of large and well-established organisations, while these standards would represent an aspiration for smaller and newer organisations.”
It will be very difficult to find a specific diversity and inclusion framework that works for all Hubs. Every Hub will be dealing with a different context, and diversity and inclusion means something different in each context.
Two examples:
We have potential Hubs whose scope is mainly countries where LGBT rights are slim to nonexistent. In principle, the Hubs should be promoting LGBT engagement with Wikimedia. But in reality that may be very challenging, and we have to be very careful of volunteers’ safety and privacy.
We also have potential Hubs whose scope covers societies where caste exists. In principle, this is another axis of inequality that Hubs should seek to overcome. Indeed, I’ve heard some suggestions it should be among the top priorities for diversity and inclusion. But it’s very unusual for anyone who doesn’t come from a society with caste to understand the issue well, or to be able to look at a Hub and say how well it’s doing on that score or what it might do next.
Just to highlight some of the many challenges - and more reason for this all to be ‘light touch’ at present.
