First it was the Knowledge Engine. Did anyone ever figure out what that was?
Now it’s hubs.
Hubs are apparently the hot new thing in the strategy handoff, from Katherine’s office to the …well, we’re really not quite sure, but which we are told is now complete.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Transition/Update_14-04-2021
This in turn was announced on the mailing list, just before Katherine’s farewell message.
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2021-April/096438.html
There is also a cryptic message on the mailing list from someone named Chris Keating about moving the strategy process forward by moving the Movement Charter process forward. It asks you to endorse a proposal.
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2021-April/096439.html
The proposal proposes a Movement Charter..
The Movement Charter will establish a solid base from which the future Global Council will be built, ensuring that it is representative of the Wikimedia Movement communities and organizations, and that it will facilitate a more distributed, aligned, and equitable decision-making mechanism.
Global Council?
The members drafting the proposal are listed. And then it adds:
We acknowledge the lack of diversity of the group behind that text. This work started as a friendly discussion and we were too far off in the work to include new people without tokenizing them.
Then they go into a long thing about why they say the progress is stalled, although they don’t say what is stalled about it.
However, there is stagnation concerning the implementation of Recommendation 4: Equity in decision-making. There have been productive conversations, but progress has halted.
This is caused by:
-
- unclarity about the scope, responsibility, and duration/life span of the Interim Global Council;
- unclarity about the process for ratification of the draft Movement Charter;
- unclarity about who is in charge to drive this forward.
Summarising, there is an overall unease within the community about losing control and handing over responsibility for crucial decisions to an as yet undefined, unknown, and therefore untrustworthy, group.
“Interim Global Council”?
Well, guess what, they themselves can’t be bothered to have “Equity in decision-making”, because their own decision-making group has a “lack of diversity”. They don’t know ANY non-diverse people they can ask? And every single one of the non-diverse people they know is a “token”? Dude.
But let’s go back to that very first link, about the hubs. Here it is again, in case you don’t want to scroll up. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Transition/Follow-up_events/Cluster_D
If you look at the footnotes at the bottom, you would expect them to reference some document or another. But they don’t. They reference notes taken during sessions. I would guess this anonymizes the comments somewhat, at least more than people signing their names to RFCs. One of the big problems with RfC’s is that no one ever summarizes the points, they just plop down their own opinion without reading the others, and the RfC is often closed by some random person who doesn’t understand the issues. And one of the big problems of trying to communicate with WMF staffers is that you are never quite sure if they are paying attention.
But this has got to be a first. The WMF asked some volunteers for feedback, and they are actually compiling and organizing the responses.