WIKIMOVE/Podcast/Transcript Episode 19

Nikki: Welcome to episode 19 of WIKIMOVE. I'm Nikki Zeuner and with me is Eva Martin. Eva and I are part of Wikimedia Deutschland's Governance and Movement relations team. And in this podcast, we imagine the future of the Wikimedia movement. Eva, what are we talking about today?

Eva: Today we are talking about the Movement Charter, an artifact that many of you have heard us mention in previous WIKIMOVE episodes. So in 2020, Movement strategy recommendations were published. And these recommendations were the more or less concrete steps for our movement to be on the way to its strategic direction. But, Nikki, what was that again?

Nikki: Okay. By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us. So that was the strategic direction and then recommendations were developed and recommendation four is called ensuring equity in decision-making. And that included several concepts aimed at making our global movement more equitable, participatory, and decentralized. One was to create a movement wide representative body. Another one was to establish hubs. And then another one was to make resource allocation more participatory. And then there was also the idea to write a Movement Charter that puts all of this stuff in a mutually agreed document. The Movement Charter was worked on over the past two years by a committee called the Movement Charter Drafting Committee. And at the time of this recording, they have just chaired, on Meta, a close to final draft with the movement. Yay! So, let's introduce our first guests.

Eva: And today we have two members of this committee with us. The first one is Ciell. Ciell has a professional background in social work and she has been an admin on the Dutch Wikipedia since 2006. She's also very active within the international community. She is an admin on Wikimedia Commons and a member of the international Wikilove Monuments team. And most importantly, for the purpose of today's podcast, she's part of the MCDC. Hi, Ciell, where are you calling in from today?

Ciell: Hi, Eva, I'm calling in from the Netherlands, east of the Netherlands. Thank you for having me.

Nikki: Then we have a second member of the Movement Charter Drafting Committee with us today, Daria Cybulska. Daria is the Director of Programs at Wikimedia UK and she joined the chapter in 2012. She's a Churchill Fellow investigating Central Asia's online civil society and an AKO storytelling institute fellow working on misinformation and information literacy skills. And like we said, she's a member of the MCDC. Daria, where are you calling from today?

Daria: Hi, I'm joining from London, although I'm originally from Poland.

Nikki: Welcome to the show.

Eva: But to also bring in the community perspective to this conversation, we invited Alek Tarkowski, who is a digital activist who joined the Wikimedia Movement back in 2017 during the strategy process. He's the co-founder and strategy director at the Open Future ThinkTanks, and he sits on the board of directors of Creative Commons. He's also the chair of the oversight board of Centrum Cyfrowe, a Polish digital think and do tank. And sorry for butchering this Polish name.

Alek: You did a very good job. Hello, everyone. Greetings from Warsaw.

Nikki: Nice to have you here. Well, thanks to everyone for joining us. So we're going to start out with getting to know our guests a little bit better and also their involvement in the charter or its sort of genesis, the whole story. So let's start with Daria, because you've been around for a long time, too, Daria. What motivated you back then to join the strategy process and then also later the MCDC?

Daria: Yeah, I've been involved in that process ever since we've been thinking about the strategic direction and I was really taken by the willingness within the movement to think beyond what we are to what we could be. We've been so successful as a project, it's easy to conclude that Wikipedia and its communities are enough. That would be an easy conclusion. But instead, we started thinking about what we could become, how to bring more equity into the content and into the communities that are creating it. And I think that's really beautiful. But I'm also a very practical person. So I've been very motivated by the question of, okay, that's great. But how, how to really pin it down in practice.

Eva: That's interesting. I would like to hear from you, Ciell. So what was your motivation to join the MCDC in 2021?

Ciell: I attended a few community calls in the strategy process after 2017 and I reached to the Dutch community what was happening in the strategic development. And when I saw the request for participants in the Movement Charter Drafting Committee, I realized that I found it very, very necessary that the charter would be culturally and linguistically balanced. And also the language should not be too difficult. I wanted to, if you create a document, a governance document, and you write it in a very, very, or in a difficult language in technical terms, it will still not be fulfilling its purpose because it will not be accessible for those that need it. So I wanted to use my experiences to make sure that we create a governance document that is understandable for all.

Nikki: So coming back to that, anyone who wants to can join us and having sort of the formative document being something that newbies can understand and relate to.

Ciell: Yes, yes, absolutely.

Nikki: So, Alek, you've also been around for a while, not just in the Wikimedia space, but the whole open knowledge space, and were part of the strategy process back then. So what were your hopes when you participated in coming out of the around Movement Governance?

Alek: I had big hopes and also big excitement about the process because I thought it's wonderful that there's such a collaborative Movement strategy happening. And I wanted to bring a sort of slightly outsider or a partner perspective. I responded to a call that was issued to partners of the Wikimedia Movement, to outside organizations. My long time histories with Creative Commons, which I see as extremely tightly connected with Wikimedia. So I thought, okay, if there's an invitation, someone needs to respond. And I did that. I will admit I'm not a great Wikipedia editor. I produce a very small trickle of articles. And I always would say that in the process to underline the fact that this has to be a process that's participatory also sort of for people on the fringes of the core Movement.

Eva: Okay, so. We now mentioned a lot of big words, but now we have something very concrete. We have a document, the movement charter. I would like to hear from you, Daria. Can you please tell us a little bit more about where does the charter come from?

Daria: Yeah, in its very fundamental form. It's a document that outlines the roles, responsibilities, rights and common values of the players within the Wikimedia Movement. And the thing is, as the Movement grew organically, a lot of those roles were assumed and not explicit. So part of the Charter's role is actually writing down all of those things so that we have a common map of the organized parts of the Movements, a bit like tying up loose ends. And within the Wikimedia Movement, we decided on the strategic direction of the knowledge equity, and we collaboratively established changes agreed to sort of high level changes that need to happen to make this vision a reality. And one of the key things that we wanted to do is introduce more knowledge equity. The way of doing that is shifting power. A key way of shifting power is making things explicit, writing things down, things that might have been previously unspoken. I believe that silence benefits the status quo. So speaking things out and writing things down is actually a key tool of making the change of empowerment and more equity. The Charter also clarifies where we're going, especially in the context of the values and it introduces some new governance roles, particularly global council and hubs.

Eva: Thanks Daria. And maybe without going too much into the process of it, the Committee has been drafting several iterations of the Charter over the last two years, three years. And I would like to hear from you, Ciell, can you maybe share some personal reflections around the challenges, but also the highlights of this process?

Ciell: A major challenge in drafting a Charter is that you want the Charter to be short, you don't want it to be long, you want it to be evergreen, you don't want to change a Charter and have a movement wide ratification every year, you want the Charter to be inclusive and not excluding anyone, people that want to join us, but also future developments that may cross our path. So that's a challenge and within the Movement Charter Drafting Committee it is agreed that our product, the Movement Charter, will never, never reflect the hours and energy and the amount of work that has gone into the actual drafting. What you'll see is on one side there are the opinions and the voices of those who are connected to affiliates. The other side, WMF, has fiduciary duties. They have to address the communities, have wishes and desires and a vision of how things could change. So that's all in all, it's a great challenge to balance that in one charter that we hope will be about 10 or 11 pages. You know, we don't want it to be that long.

Nikki: That makes sense. All right. Moving to Alek, so sort of taking a little bit wider view of the free knowledge Movement, given the role of the Wikimedia projects in the open knowledge Movement, why is it for us important to work on our governance, or even create governance, which we didn't really have before?

Alek: Maybe I'll try an even wider look beyond the Movement. I think for me, Wikimedia is honestly a global wonder. It's one of the most impressive and important expressions of civil society in the knowledge age. And if we look from that perspective, the fact that there's a process for determining governance of a mature already project, as Daria said, a project that achieved so much, but which becomes aware it needs more institutions, it needs more governance to work. Well, this is amazing and this is fundamentally important. Looking in the Movement, that's also relevant because we as a Movement have been making some attempts to have good governance, but I think there are many spaces that are not governed. So for instance, I would like to highlight the open definition. It's a definition of what constitutes a free license. So by the way, very important for Wikimedia. And for many years it had a council, which was pretty democratic. It was elected by the community and this council basically make sure this definition is working and check licenses against this definition. Wonderful stuff. Unfortunately, this council has been dormant for some time for various reasons. But so that's one example. And I hope this Charter and its mechanism will become another very important example of something which I basically read as a very democratic process.

Eva: So talking about the Charter that has been published on April 2, many people in the Movement speculated over the new changes that will be introduced with this Charter. Maybe before we move towards those changes, I would actually like to start by talking about the things that are not going to change. Ciell, do you maybe want to tell us what stays the same with this Charter?

Ciell: The Charter also addresses those things that we have been doing already for 20 years. We are a Movement built from volunteers. Volunteers form the communities. We share the same values. And that's actually where all of our togetherness, all of our work comes from. And we thought it was important to, for the first time, speak about, write down those values, agree on those values as a Movement, agree on the responsibilities for communities because also communities and individual volunteers have responsibilities in our Movement. It's important to be aware of those. They're not big, but they are there. And working from that, I think we were able to propose changes that are now in the current draft for the Movement Charter.

Eva: Maybe that's a question for you, Daria. Can you tell us a bit about the new elements that the charter introduces that we didn't have before?

Daria: Yeah, in the background, just thinking fundamentally, it's about shifting power, changing how decision making and how resources are managed. And then the structures that can facilitate it is what we were attempting to create the entities that signify hold those processes. And by the way, those are the sort of elements that are key in the current upcoming consultation round. The key one, the main thing that we've introduced is the Global Council, which is an entity that holds strategic planning for the Movement, administration of organizations and communities, technology, advancement and resource distribution. There's also hubs that are a key space for coordinating work, developing revenue streams, pulling allocating resources, mediating conflicts, developing strategic frameworks between different organizations. It's all about building stronger ties between Movement organizations. And so those are entities, there's also ways of operating that we've aimed to change or introduce new concepts of. One of them is a care responsibility, which is placed on any organization in the Movement, and it relates to communities that are supported by that organization. And this responsibility means that the organization needs to provide an inclusive, diverse working environment for community members, support activities and uphold movement values. There's also dispute resolution that we've tried to codify and make clear as so that communities have more access to resolution when things go wrong.

Eva: And the newly release Charter is now slightly shorter than the previous draft. And people may realize that many elements that used to be part of the Charter have now found their ways into the supplementary documentation. Can you maybe quickly share the reasoning behind it?

Daria: Yeah, as Ciell was saying already, there's so much work that has been done. It's the 10 page document will never give it justice. But we have as a Committee fought a lot about various structures, policies, things that could help in the future Movement. And instead of just retiring them, we've moved them to this part of the documentation called supplementary document. This means that the charter itself is just the absolute core of the content. And the rest are the things that would be perhaps helpful to the future global council, to the Movement as a whole, to see how some of the policies could be developed, how we understand some of the concepts.So it's all about not making the Charter a stifling document, it's about making it breathe and give space. So ensuring flexibility, which I believe is part of the resilience value, giving space to adaptation and change, but also sharing some suggestions and directions that we think would be helpful because that's the result of all of the work from the last two or three years.

Eva: And you mentioned the flexibility criteria of the Charter. Do you maybe want to say something, Ciell, about the mention for possible changes in the future within the Charter?

Ciell: While the Movement Charter Drafting Committee was drafting in the past two and a half years, we were aware that our movement could not be asked to stand still and to pause all their processes. So while we were working on hubs and thinking about the affiliate landscape, possible improvements for that, there was also a strategic process from Wikimedia Foundation side, for instance. And we quickly became aware we need to create something that will be almost an evergreen document that will allow for these kinds of changes, now and in the future. So at the moment, we still don't have a global council. We've been piloting with hubs for almost three years, but we don't have a global council. But the Movement Charter will set a basic framework for that global council to make their decisions in. We might want to change that in maybe three years when the first term of the first global council has passed maybe we say okay there are improvements we can do this needs to change and that should be okay there is a chapter in the Movement Charter that speaks about amendments there is a process we have identified five different categories for changes and who needs to be involved in that process of change who needs to agree to the change depending on the level of the change and how that should work is also addressed in the Charter and more extensively in a supplementary document.

Nikki: Thank you, Ciell. I'm moving back to Alek. So Alek, the draft Charter came out, it was published yesterday. So you had like 24 hours to take a look at it. And so coming out of strategy phase part two, what are the things you like? What are the things that may have carried forward from that spirit back then? And also in terms of the principles that we had back then and the recommendations and maybe what are some things that are missing? What's your first take on this brand new document?

Alek: First thing I want to say is that I like it, that it's short. It allowed me to read it in time. But jokes aside, I think there are good reasons why it should be short. And also, one is, as you both mentioned, I think it's correct that it's a document that needs to be concise because it will be more clear, but more importantly. And I'm saying this also from experience, for instance, with the network strategy process, Creative Commons. I think there's a tendency when you're coming up with these new ideas to sort of overload the framework, because there are so many things to address. We certainly did it with Creative Commons. So you try to come up with solutions and you try to come up with some body that addresses it or process. And then I think over time, you'll find out that some of it is simply too much. So I actually think that maybe the effort to shorten it to move things outside will do also a good job by simplifying the framework itself, not just its description, to the benefit of the process. Because as you also described it Ciell, it's a process that can continue in an additive manner. You wrote a really nice piece that explains that it's iterative. And I don't think the iteration will end right now. I like to think that in the long term, this will continue to be iterative and you can add elements. What I like about it, speaking as an outsider, this was a big learning from me to learn sort of the power relations in the Movement. And I think they're similar as many other places in the free knowledge movement. It's a challenges between the relationships between the stronger actors, often the institutional actors and this big grassroots communities that we work with. So again, looking more broadly, I think this is very important and a great example that you're looking for solutions that balance the roles and responsibilities and sort of relationships between the communities are very grassroots still, even after more than 20 years, and organizations are just as important for the Movement. I really like the idea of care responsibility. I think it's really well framed this relationship and I hope it will be sort of accepted by the Movement and brought into life because I think it very well describes what we want to happen. If I was to point to something missing again from a partner perspective, I would say these crucial stakeholders, in my opinion, so partners, but also I would mention users of Wikimedia. I don't see them in the Charter. I know that the Charter is very much a document that's meant to set relations in the Movement. And I think that's very important. But some sense of these outside constituents, I'm hoping that they will become visible in the council, that there will be maybe it's one seat, but that the user of Wikimedia who's never edited it will still become part of this process. I think that would be a very interesting another step forward.

Nikki: Very interesting. And it actually reverberates with some of the research we did on the general assemblies of other movements. For example, Oxfam has recently reformed their governance model to include external people into their general assembly because the 100 % representation model didn't work so well and they wanted more of a broader perspective and people who are sort of more neutral the organization in the assembly. So that's anybody who's interested and wants to nerd out about this stuff. There's a whole journey to read about Oxfam's governance reform and what led to it.

Eva: I was wondering if maybe someone from the MCDC wanted to react to the point that Alec just made, because as you said, there were hours and hours of conversation within the MCDC. Not everything is reflected in the end product. I just want to give one of you the opportunity to share maybe some reflections that you have on the role of external partners and the Wikimedia Movement.

Daria: One thing I would say to that is that we have created, drafted new values for the movement going forward. And one of them that we emphasize really strongly is inclusivity. And that is all about how as a movement we can be open to new communities, how we can be welcoming whilst we develop. And my hope is that that includes partner organizations that want to join us in knowledge equity.

Nikki: So let's take a look into the future a little bit. We've looked at the Charter and how it became about and what we think of it. So now you just published the draft. Daria, how can the Movement now engage with the content of the charter? Give us a little bit of the process that's ahead of us.

Daria: In the last few years, there's been many consultation rounds, so it might feel that it's just time again to consult. And yet we are very mindful that there are many people that wouldn't have heard of this or the Charter. What is different this time we have a consultation period now that the Charter has been released that we are approaching the end of the drafting work. So it's time to look holistically at the Charter and see from your perspective, whether it serves the movement well. So and from now, until the end of April, we are harvesting almost the final feedback, I guess, to the content, which will then lead the committee to incorporating the feedback and then it goes into review, publishing the final text from then on. The next and in some ways, I suppose, final opportunity to engage with the Charter is to vote on it. And this will happen across the end of June and into early July.

Eva: And maybe let me add as one of the members of the Wikimedia Summit organizing team that the Wikimedia Summit that will happen in Berlin in less than three weeks now takes place within this community consultation feedback period. And the Wikimedia Summit is going to be the place where many affiliates come together and generate output on the Movement Charter and discuss governance at large. And this draft is now linked in the show notes. Okay, so let's move on. Assuming that the Charter gets approved, what are the next steps in your view, Ciell?

Ciell: The Movement Charter, we have a supplementary document about implementation. And in that document, you can read like what do we as Movement Charter drafting committee think is necessary as next steps. One of the biggest steps is working towards building the global council. And that starts from elections to selecting and electing that first global council and then the global council needs to get started and it will not be something to take lightly, to build the global council. We need people there that are enthusiastic, have the time to be involved and to build this decision-making body. It's a very big responsibility. The publication of and ratification of the Movement Charter is only a first step or a next step on this road.

Alek: Can I add to this? For me, the council is a fascinating and important idea and a very bold one. And it's one where I imagine you will get a lot of feedback and people will be going, good idea, bad idea. There's a number there, 100 to 150 people. And it's again, the bold number. And I imagine some people will say, no, you need only 20 people. And some people will say, you need 500. I think in the long term, that's not really important. In a way, there's no good or bad way to do it. There will be just a certain way it will be done. And as you say, seal basically needs to be brought to life. And that's, I think, more important than any number. These numbers can be revised. I also read the charter as setting a general framework. I think there are still a lot of questions to be answered. I imagine it, I like it that it's pretty big because I think you will get the same mix of actors and stakeholders that you define in the Charters, so the volunteers will be present there, the communities, the organizations, the main found the Wikimedia Foundation, maybe some partners, and then you will start to see how this community works, right, discussing things. So I will be really looking forward to seeing how this council works. It's going to be basically another great experiment from the Wikimedia Movement. That's as I said it at the beginning, important at global scale for me. And I hope I don't sound too bombastic, but I really think it's very important.

Eva: Maybe as we move towards the end of this podcast, we can try and look beyond the global council and even look beyond the Wikimedia Movement. And maybe Alek, can you share some thoughts about why do you think that governance is relevant for the free knowledge Movement?

Alek: I think mainly because the Movement has to be alive and has to be changing. And we need to make decisions how to adapt. This may be in the early years of both Wikimedia and Creative Commons, we're all basically young as Movements. And just things happened. As we mature, I think we understand that this is really very well expressed in the Wikimedia Movement Strategy, that there needs to be equity in this. But not just equity is a very important value on its own, but it also brings a diversity of perspective. There's strengths to that. We are navigating a lot of challenges, disinformation, economic challenges. And I think we just need these variety of voices to make shared decisions.

Nikki: Thank you. So file words, Ciell or Daria, looking to fast forwarding more. Maybe let's start with Daria. We have this by 2030 deadline for the Movement strategy. Where do you see the Movement and how do you see the Charter coming to life? So let's say you're in 2030, what do you see as a result of your work?

Daria: I think like Alek was saying already, Wikipedia or Wikimedia Movement really is, can be seen as the last good place on the internet. And the values of our Movement, how we go about organizing and doing things could be an example and an influence over the values of the internet in the age of AI. So the key will be to model what we believe in and show others what's possible, walking this tight rope between the realities of a complicated Movement and a big vision.

Nikki: Ciell, what's your take?

Ciell: I think in six years, because 2030 is already in six years 30-20 is a nice look ahead. But I hope that the Movement Charter will help us to be better equipped to face the challenges that are ahead of us. The global council will bring more diverse community voices to the table. But things like hubs, for instance, will help us empower regions in a different way than affiliates until now have done. Through hubs, we might also be able to address resource issues that we are now experiencing. And I really see a lot of opportunities that can come from a ratified Movement Charter.

Nikki: Thank you. And thank you for all the work that all of you have done for this. And we're looking forward to everyone. We just encourage everyone to read the charter, interact with it, comment, provide your input, engage if you're an affiliate that is going to be at the Summit, engage at the Summit, make it, help make it even just a tiny little bit better if you think you can and hopefully we'll be able to move forward. So that's a wrap of the 19th episode of WIKIMOVE. Thanks to our guests, Ciell, Daria and Alek for sharing their insights and thanks for listening. We encourage everyone to engage with the draft of this Charter. Please over the next month or the rest of this month, read it, comment, make specific suggestions on language and engage with it so later when it comes to voting on it, you feel like you've done your part and you're part of this.

Eva: And you can do so by going on Meta. All the links are in the show notes. WIKIMOVE is a production of Wikimedia Deutschland and its Governance and Movement Relations team and is available on podcast apps and youtube. Our music was composed and produced by Rory Gregory, and is available under CC BY-SA on Wikimedia Commons - and so are all of our episodes.

Nikki: You can visit our WIKIMOVE meta page to listen to previous episodes and suggest topics and guests for our next episodes. You can also use our meta page to react to podcasts, to connect with other listeners and subscribe to always be notified of our new episode releases.

Eva: If you want to reach out to us, we are always pleased when you do, you can do so via the WIKIMOVE Meta page or you can send us an email. Tchussi, ciao! Au revoir!