Sharing Meta page drafts of Movement Strategy initiatives for review

General
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The following is an introduction to a good number of posts that I’ll create on this Forum in the next few weeks. You can see here an example of those posts.

Hello! I’m Abbad from the Movement Strategy & Governance Team. You may have noticed me recently posting some draft Meta pages for review. During the next few weeks, I’ll be regularly posting regularly drafts of Meta pages on this Forum to collect feedback. Each of those draft pages will be about one Movement Strategy initiative. The pages are intended to provide a simple introduction about each of the Movement Strategy initiatives, and to help Wikimedians (like you!) learn how they can contribute to the implementation of initiatives.

By posting the draft pages here, we invite you to review them before they are officially published on Meta. It would be especially great to hear what you think about the page’s structure and format, which we hope to make easy for newcomers to use.

We are using the Forum for this purpose to allow reviewers to quickly translate the content to their native language. You can leave your feedback in a reply below, or on the corresponding Forum’s post of each initiative.

Questions

If you had like some guidance for your review, we would love to hear your feedback on the following questions:

  1. What’s your first impression? Is the page appealing or interesting for you to read?
  2. Can you find the information you expect to find? Is there something missing?
  3. Imagine yourself as a complete newcomer (if you’re not a newcomer yourself :)). Is the information clear? Are some parts difficult to read or understand?

Posted drafts

Some of the initiatives shared so far:
(1) Systematic approach to improve satisfaction and productivity
(2) Funding for Underrepresented Communities
(3) Increased awareness about the Wikimedia Movement
(4) Global revenue generation policy & fundraising strategy
(21) Safety assessment and execution plan

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Ok @Qgil-WMF , can we please maybe stop or else slow down, with this deluge of WMF generic threads? I’d be glad to have few of these posts for actual discussion. But this is way too much. This is simply cluttering the forum at this point.

Also I tried to engage with @Abbad_WMF , and he never replied. Also, I don’t think he is even here…so this is simply becoming detrimental, and it is simply clutter. Can someone please address this? Also tagging @NPhan_WMF , @YPam_WMF . Thanks.

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We are posting all Movement Strategy initiatives on the Forum. The objective is to increase the awareness about these initiatives, to allow people to read them in their language, and to provide a way to discuss them and share updates on the Forum. We are aware of the risk of overwhelming the Forum with this one-off publishing, and this is why we are posting one per day. They are all tagged under #ms-initiatives and people can mute this tag if they wish. In a couple of weeks we will be done.

Abbad is on vacation these days.

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Also another question
Why not use one thread to post all of these pages for feedback
Posting all of these as separate threads seems excessive and a bit too voluminous if I may say so
Thanks

Edit
Just saw your reply above
Ok but then my suggestion above still stands
I suggest these should be posted on one thread not on separate threads

By the way my keyboard is acting a bit odd
Sorry for lack of punctuation

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These initiatives are the breadth of the entire Strategy 2030. Each initiative is expected to contain several projects, and each project might have one or more discussion topic if they wish. Having all the initiatives in a single thread would kill the possibility of having meaningful discussions about a specific initiative.

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Ok

Well I do appreciate your willingness to engage

I don’t quite agree but I’m glad we could discuss here
Thanks

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Do you think that these posts are accomplishing this objective?

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Looking at #ms-initiatives one can see that some topics have generated discussions, and so far all the topics published are accumulating views, slowly. The feedback shows that some people hadn’t seen this information before, including the person complaining about their publication.

So yes, so far and with the information at hand, we can consider these topics useful to some. It’s one topic per day appearing in the timeline, which is rather discrete. People can choose to ignore them, and they can even mute the tag.

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(Moderation note: this post has been moved from Movement Strategy initiative #28: Guidelines for board functions and governance because it refers to the process of posting the #ms-initiatives on the MS Forum, which is a topic being discussed here.)

I think the best place to request feedback on tangible proposals for new governance procedures, documents, rules, or resources, would be the Village Pump, not here. Therefore, based on that, I would ask that the Movement Strategy team please discontinue posting new ideas and proposals at MS Forums. A) it has not been effective for generating discussion and B) it is detrimental both to the ideas themselves, and to the MS forums as a platform.

I’m open to the efforts by the Movement Strategy team to make proposals to the community, and to be given full attention and discussion. However, again: A) I feel the MS forums are not an effective or definitive place to get centralized official consensus for any new proposals; B) I feel that if the Movement Strategy has new proposals that it wishes to formally present, then that needs to occur at a community forum that is 1) more official 2) more active 3) more accepted. C) based on the preceding point, the correct venue for these proposals is the Village Pump, not the MS Forums.

D) the Movement Strategy team should pick five or six proposals, and present them in a credible and authentic way. Posting thirty new threads at the MS forums, none of which get any comment, is not a credible way to present formal proposals to the community. If the goal was informal discussion, then it’s fine to use the MS forums, but then in that case, there was no reason to post all 30 proposals in such a mechanical way. The proposals should have been grouped together by topical area, and five or six proposals should have been proposed on each thread, rather than one at a time.

E) until now I have been one of the staunchest advocates of using the MS forums. However I think we need to also assert that the Village Pumps have not and should not be displaced or diminished, as the actual venue where any formal proposals need to be presented, any time that a community decision process is needed. Again, the MS Forums are fine as a venue for informal discussion, but not as a venue for any official decisions that are being formally requested from the community.

let me just clarify that I do in fact appreciate the hard work and dedicated effort of the staff members who have been posting these threads, and their work to add these as beneficial resources for the community.

I do appreciate their hard work. my points above relate to the process, not to any views about their own role, or even about the goals of their efforts and their work product, all of which I do view quite positively.

I simply would like to improve the process for this type of item, if possible. thanks.

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The Movement Strategy initiatives are not proposals at this point. They form the Movement Strategy recommendations, which were discussed at length through a wide participatory process and were approved.

Now we are in the strategy implementation phase. Each initiative may require one or more projects for their actual implementations. These projects may require further consultation that, indeed, should not be limited to this Forum. One example is the Movement Charter, which is a MS initiative, and it is being implemented through a process that expects several community reviews and a wide ratification process.

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I disagree somewhat with this item. if you are going to issue 29 new initiatives, then there is no need to include an item like this, with an overly and generalized approach of " Systematic approach to improve satisfaction and productivity."

on the other hand, if you do want to issue broad and generalized items like this one, then that’s fine as well. but if that’s the case, then why also feel the need to issue 29 highly specific proposals as well?

In short;

  • I fully accept, support, and embrace any effort by the Movement Strategy team to issue broad, sweeping generalized goals, for the movement to support and to coalesce around.

  • and similarly, I support and embrace any effort by the Movement Strategy team to issue highly focused and specific goals, for the movement to support and to coalesce around.

  • it is the two approaches together that are causing me some agita. why are there 29 separate new threads taking a signfiicant bloc of space in this forum? what is the goal here? is anyone going to comment? are we going to have a discussion here? what is the dynamic at work here?

by the way, please note, I am not “the person who is complaining” about these threads. I am the “person who is engaging” with these threads. I’m not your problem here. in fact, I am an ally of the movement strategy team, and I greatly support its work and see it as highly positive.

I am eager to get the community on board with these highly encouraging efforts. however, my concern is that you are making my goals on this somewhat harder, by posting a mix of both highly generalized, and highly specific goals. and then by not providing anyone who is engaging with these threads at all. zero people. not even the supposed originator of these threads is actually present on almost any of them, except for one or two of these threads.

can we please decide what scope is desired for the MS forums as a venue, for the MS initiatives as a potential community effort, and for the MS team as a resource? I feel we need to clarify for ourselves just how the inner workings and group dyanmics of our collective team effort will best function. and please note, I do consider myself to be part of the Movement Strategy initiative, in the best and most positive sense. Thanks.

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it is up to 35 proposals now, meaning 35 threads. sorry, but I do still disagree with this, even more, namely with this manner and this method of presenting ideas for review here.