Hello all,

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For more than 20 years, we have grown to become a global movement unlike any other, with passionate contributors, diverse projects, and dedicated groups and affiliates.

As a committee comprising contributors from around the world, we have collaborated for months, engaging in numerous virtual committee and drafting group calls, and came together in-person three times in the past 18 months, including our most recent gathering in early June. These drafts are a result of extensive effort and refinement, and we are delighted to share them with you. They provide an opportunity for improvement and strength, allowing us to shape the future of our Movement.

We value your suggestions and feedback as we work together to create the Wikimedia Movement Charter. We understand that time may be limited for some. With that in mind, we have key open questions regarding funds dissemination, Global Council structure and membership, and others that we would love to hear your thoughts on. You can share your feedback here on the wiki, during calls, or at upcoming regional and thematic events.

Anass Sedrati (talk) 17:20, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

What role should the Global Council have in fund dissemination?

• Oversight or review of WMF decisions
• Coordination with WMF
• Other (please elaborate)

Should there be a committee that reports to the Global Council and handles central/cross-regional fund dissemination?

What should be the Global Council’s role with regards to the allocation of the funds within the WMF?

• The Global Council should be consulted on the allocation of the funds within the WMF.
• The Global Council should have no role in the allocation of the funds within the WMF and only be informed.
• Other (please elaborate)

Please add your answers/questions/thoughts below

• I am of the opinion WMF/Bot should decide on budget and allocations, but that there should be a body under the control of the global council that handles these issues and support central/cross-regional fund dissemination, both staff and representation from regional funds committees will be needed. And no role for Global council of the allocation within WMF.Anders Wennersten (talk) 16:18, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

+1 this is the only sensible solution. Otherwise you're basically just creating a committee to manage the WMF, which is not how it is designed organizationally and would inefficient. Steven Walling • talk 01:24, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

• In my opinion, there are two kinds of expenses. There are expenses that are essential to keep the Wikimedia projects running, there is little that the Global Council can discuss about those expenses, WMF can allocate those funds without Global Council consultation. The Global Council role in fund dissemination should be in those expenses that are not fundamental but the WMF decided to put those resources in activities that they believe will improve the Wikimedia Movement in some way. Those expenses should be deeply examined by the Global Council, they should verify which results are expected for those resources, consider if the importance of those results for the Wikimedia Movement are proportional to the financial resources planned for them, verify if something similar was done in the past, and if it was, check if results were the expected and if something was learned in the past experiences that should be considered in the new plan. The Global Council should make an initial report, ask volunteers opinions, process those opinions and publish a final report, that can contain suggestions for modifications in the fund dissemination plan. The WMF should have the final decision for the fund dissemination plan, but when they don't follow the Global Council suggestion they should explain in details why they did that. Danilo.mac talk 23:13, 13 July 2023 (UTC)
• I think the wording reinforces the current problematic mindset where donations belong to the WMF by default, except for some small fraction that gets earmarked as "community funds", and then the WMF decides largely on its own how to spend the money. The structure we should be evolving towards instead is one where there is an open goal-selection and prioritization process, not limited to any single organization, and then the goals we agree upon are distributed among the organizations according to their capacity. I would rather see the GC and wider community have debates about how to distribute our resources between the various possible goals and initiatives, rather than the various organizations. A democrativ governance process answering "What should we do?" is more likely to be efficient and morally justifiable than one answering "Who should do it?" - the latter obviously matters, but it's both less important, and harder for a non-expert to form an informed opinion on. --Tgr (talk) 23:44, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
• Hi there @Anders Wennersten, @Steven Walling thank you for the general feedback. We have captured it for the Movement Charter Drafting Committee. @Danilo.mac, really appreciate the pragmatic suggestion and the overall grouping of funds. And @Tgr, as always grateful for your thinking outside the box. The collective "what should we do" approach is something tangible we can collect around. Thank you. MPourzaki (WMF) (talk) 18:19, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
• I think that it'd be great if Grant Regional Committees could be involved with the Global Council. I posted an idea for making GRCs elected bodies on this RFC which I'll copy here: GRC elections might look like a SecurePoll vote, where the "honor system" is used: voters can choose to participate in voting for regions that they feel a connection to. This would leave out the complex process of setting eligibility rules for voters in terms of connection (obviously other criteria such as edit count would still be included), avoiding potential disputes for voters whose heritage is of one region but who are living in another. Best, Frostly (talk) 11:57, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

WMDE suggests to think of movement funds as being subject as distribution, rather than dissemination.

The Global Council (in WMDE’s vision a General Assembly with a board) should closely coordinate with the WMF on funds allocation and distribution.

The WMF, being a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, with the necessity to maintain its charitable IRS and Florida nonprofit status, cannot have an external entity or committee dictate how it allocates its resources. Based on the tasks, to be determined, that the WMF will continue to fullfill in a future movement model, it should and will have budgetary discretion - while of course ensuring transparency and accountability towards the GC and other movement stakeholders.

The Global Council, on the other hand, should have the authority and responsibility to decide over the movement budget. This would include the funds currently being "disseminated" through grantmaking to affiliates and others. The GC would create policy and oversee the distribution of movement funds as part of a robust and strategic revenue sharing model. The GC would also have authority over funds for movement infrastructure such as knowledge management, capacity building and evaluation, as well as over its own budget. Nicola Zeuner (WMDE) (talk) 09:12, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Should the Global Council exist only as an executive body or should it exist as an executive body with an advisory board? (See scenarios below)

• If the Global Council is an executive body with an advisory board, how are the members of both entities (executive body and advisory board) seated?

With its size, the Global Council must have adequate diversity and clout, but not be so large as to undermine effectiveness. As an executive body, how many members should the Global Council have?

• Option 1: 9-13 members
• Option 2: 17-21 members

Please add your answers/questions/thoughts below

• I strongly recommend that an advisory board is not created. It is against the basic idea of flat structure, and the need of more manageable groups can be met with having task-forces within the Global council (as Bot have and the drafting committee have had)The numbers around 18Anders Wennersten (talk) 16:18, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
• An advisory board with 100 members for a 20-person board is just ridiculous. Also I have never heard of an elected advisory board. I'm guessing the MCDC had some sort of parliament-style body in mind; calling that an advisory board is confusing and unhelpful. That aside, a two-level structure where there is a large diverse body that doesn't do much, and a small executive body, makes sense if the goal is to make sure that lots of communities / langauges / affiliates / etc. are represented. But then the executive body should be elected by the large body (ie. the large body should act as an association's membership and the small body should act as an association's board); otherwise I see little point in having it.
  Assuming that's the way it's set up, I like the two-level structure; I think direct election of people who are required to perform complex tasks has generally not worked well for us in the past. They tend to over-prioritize popularity and underprioritize skills and experience (as many voters don't spend a lot of time evaluating the alternatives, and vote mainly based on name recognition). Also, holistic aspects such as diversity, efficiency due to shared languages and time zones, or how well the executive body's members can work with each other, are also easier to accommodate in a smaller, more deliberative selection process. --Tgr (talk) 02:17, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

  • Thank you @Anders Wennersten for your input. A non-hierarchical structure resonates with many folks in the movement. Thanks for taking the time to write on this talk page. Thank you @Tgr for your pragmatic feedback and the historical reminder of how such processes often turn out in the movement. Something very key to keep in mind. We have captured this for MCDC. MPourzaki (WMF) (talk) 18:40, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

• I'm greatly opposed to having an advisory board as well. In terms of size, I think that roughly 15 members could work well; a Council that's overly large hinders on efficiency. Frostly (talk) 04:15, 31 July 2023 (UTC)
• My understanding of the Wikimedia 2030 strategy recommendations was that there would be a Global Council that would capture the diversity of the movement, provide for equitable, inclusive decision making. That would be a council of about 100 members, meeting say yearly. The General Council can elect among themselves a committee that meets say monthly to govern 'daily' affairs. Somehow the draft flips the names, without rationale. The big Global Council would be more like a legislative or a General Assembly than an executive body. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 11:23, 3 August 2023 (UTC)
• The two scenarios do not do justice to the intention of Recommendation 4, nor are they based on existing practices in INGO governance. The term "executive body" is confusing in the context of a governance model that suggest an advisory body. The urge to limit size for effectiveness is unnecessary, if the MCDC were to consider the scenario WMDE and others propose: The Global Council as a General Assembly (GA) with membership that creates parity between stakeholders: project communities, individuals, as well as affiliates, which are also weighted for parity between user groups and chapters. The GA comprises around 200 members (including the WMF), meets annually and makes high level decisions prepared by staff and committees. It elects a board for the more immediate business. The board may be structured to have set seats that are reserved for specific stakeholders, including the WMF.Nicola Zeuner (WMDE) (talk) 09:19, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Should there be some imposed limits to the membership in terms of movement representation?

Please share your opinions about potential criteria of such limits:

• Should there be a regional cap, e.g. max 3 persons from a single region? If yes, please specify the condition.
• Should there be a home project or entity cap, e.g. max 2 persons from a single wiki project or affiliate? If yes, please specify the condition.
• Should there be a specific cap for large^[1] language communities, projects, or affiliates, e.g. not more than 5 seats from between the 5 largest projects? If yes, please specify the condition.
• Should there be any other limits for Global Council membership? If yes, please specify the condition.

1. ↑ As determined by number of active editors for projects and voting members for affiliates

Please add your answers/questions/thoughts below

• In my opinion, it should there be a cap for volunteers that are also affiliates members. Affiliates can have different focus compared to non-affiliated volunteers, like off-wiki activities. The majority of volunteers are not affiliate members, so a Global Council with majority of non-affiliates would represent better the global volunteers community. About large language communities, in my opinion that should be proportional to the number of active volunteers in those projects. For example, if the large projects have 80% of the total of active volunteers in all wikis I don't see problem in a Global Council where 80% of members are volunteers of large projects. Danilo.mac talk 13:29, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

+1. Affiliates are proportionally over-represented in global governance and funds dissemination decisions. A new elected body is an opportunity to fix that. Steven Walling • talk 01:55, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

• Thank you @Danilo.mac, @Steven Walling, I know this is a key topic for the MCDC as well and they are grappling with ways to create such a body in our movement. Lots to balance when it comes to online communities, affiliates, regions, languages, projects, etc. A difficulty is that often fully non-affiliated Wikimedians are also not interested in governance discussions, unless something major is happening and then that's often reactionary. So how do we encourage their participation without either bombarding them or having the same faces represent online communities on one committee after another? What do you think? MPourzaki (WMF) (talk) 18:44, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  "A difficulty is that often fully non-affiliated Wikimedians are also not interested in governance discussions" Yeah, that's why you need to do outreach on their home wikis, in their languages. Steven Walling • talk 03:48, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

  I agree, that seems the best approach for me too. Danilo.mac talk 18:24, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

  Yes @Steven Walling and @Danilo.mac, we will do another round of on-wiki notices and boost this up with also watchlist notices and a central notice banner. If you have other suggestions, please let us know. MPourzaki (WMF) (talk) 15:43, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

• I'm in favor of proportional representation (ie. no caps, and a proportional voting method such as ranked choice). Large wikis have most of the de facto power because the entire movement is based on volunteer editors' work, so when large groups of editors organize a boycott or similar action, there isn't much that can be done to get around that - a community revolt is an effective but very destructive means of changing course, and one of the fundamental goals of a robust governance structure should be to replace it with less destructive alternatives. Ie. when an opinion is held by a significantly large majority that they could get their way via disruptive action, there should be a non-disruptive option available to them that also lets them get their way. Trying to reduce the share of large wikis in the Council to well below their share in the movement would defeat that purpose. --Tgr (talk) 02:35, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Nb. per my answer to the previous question, I'd prefer if the elected (and thus representative) body would be larger and less directly involved in the Council's day-to-day activities. That would allow the selection of the actual executive body to be more skill-based and also leaves more place for equity-based considerations, while the community still controls the Council in a fundamentally representative way. --Tgr (talk) 02:35, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

    • Indeed @Tgr, if after all these years and countless discussions, we still have to revert to reactionary and destructive ways for people to feel heard and included in decision-making, then we have not succeeded in our vision. Thanks for all your feedback. MPourzaki (WMF) (talk) 18:47, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

• I think all global regions should have representation on the global council. In the case of a 17 member council, this could be implemented through a minimum of one or two members per sub-region, depending on how sub-regions are defined. The w:United Nations Geoscheme has a few too many for this use, but maybe merge a few sub-regions and do something like this.

This is just a suggestion, there are plenty of ways of creating a policy that fulfills the spirit of global representation. But, I think it's important that the Global Council be globally representative. AdJHu (talk) 01:39, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

• In any of the scenarios where there is an elected advisory board, I think approval, rather than STV, should be used for that board. We're talking so many candidates that STV is just not practical. Barkeep49 (talk) 03:04, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

  I sense that the current Wikimedia regions are a good thing to go with. Two representatives for every of the eight defined regions will result in an equal distribution of voices, especially as @Tgr has mentioned above, that proportional representation is an important issue and a clear majority of Wikimedians is at home in North America and Europe. Denis Barthel (talk) 14:26, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

• The difficulty here comes from the self-imposed constriction to make a small council. In the model of a larger General Assembly (GA) that WMDE proposes, it would be much easier to assure representation in the spirit of Recommendation 4, not with caps, but with assigned seats. For example a GA could
  • contain the same number of affiliate seats as community seats (for example 80:80)
  • for affiliate seats: contain the same number of chapter and user group seats (for example 40:40)
  • for language and project community seats: contain a balance of seats between emerging and established project communities, to assure giving equal voice to marginalized communities. The formula would have to be developed.
  • have a set number of seats for knowledge ecosystem stakeholders (to assure diversity of viewpoints)
  • have a set number of seats for the WMF and potentially other stakeholders with movement-wide responsibilities and liabilities.

This is a rough outline, resulting in about 200 seats, which could be further refined. WMDE leadership and our team would be happy to discuss with others! Nicola Zeuner (WMDE) (talk) 09:25, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Who decided that these powers should rest with the Global Council?

The Technology Council will have a combined mandate, including:

• Prioritisation of areas of technical development
• Broad development plans for how to achieve these priorities
• Improving methodology for gathering and using feedback on technical development

Election processes are good at ensuring equitable representation from the community, but they are not good for ensuring that technical decisions are made by experts with critical knowledge of how engineering, design, and planning are executed at the levels required to run a top 10 website, mobile apps, enterprise APIs, a general purpose open source wiki platform, etc.

Technical decisions should be made by the volunteer community of developers and technology professionals (i.e. WMF or affiliate technical staff) hired to fill specialized roles that require specific skills and experience. People with the ability to create viable user experience designs and approved to commit working code to MediaWiki are empowered to do so because they go through a vetting process, whether as paid or unpaid participants.

It is well known that technology decisions made by committee are slow and suboptimal compared to those made by subject matter experts and trusted individual leaders. Even entirely volunteer-led projects like Linux or Python have strong leadership in place. The ones that do use an elected committee model, like the W3C, are known to be highly political bodies that are not very effective. As they say, a camel is a horse designed by committee.

Instead of declaring that the Global Council should directly prioritize and plan development, this section should be changed to something like:

• Develop and maintain a set of guiding principles and best practices for technical development within the movement
• Review and advise the WMF and volunteer developer community on technical project plans
• Create and maintain standards for how to effectively gather feedback on technical development

Steven Walling • talk 01:40, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

The Technology Council initiative is mostly based on three working group recommendations:

1. Evaluate and Decentralize Technology Components
2. Open Product Proposal Process
3. Deployment Council

which try to provide solutions for three problems our movement has or is predicted to have:

1. The movement strategy calls for more equitably distributed funding and decentralized capabilities, including software development. That requires coordinated technical decisionmaking, otherwise you end up with a patchwork. (That decisionmaking process was mostly already in place when the working group recommendations were written, so the recommendation mentions it but otherwise doesn't talk about it much. Since then the WMF has dissolved that process and excluded the technical volunteer community from decisionmaking, so now we do have a problem to fix.)
2. About half of the movement budget is spent on software development, but the community has little control over it. At best once the WMF has a plan, they get asked whether they like it; they can't really influence what the plan is going to be. (It does happen occasionally;e.g. the NPP letter has significantly influenced WMF priorities. But it happens via unofficial, unpredictable and unreliable mechanisms.) Given that volunteer work is the foundation the movement is built on and the reason the WMF even exists, that seems unethical.
3. Communities sometimes decide they don't like some software, and try to prevent it from being deployed (sometimes successfully, sometimes not). That decision happens when that software is ready for deployment, after years of development work. That is unwise for obvious reasons.

Those three working group recommendations ended up getting merged into a single initiative, mostly accidentally I think (writing the final recommendations was a messy process, with looming deadlines and lots of frantic editing). We might want to fix that now.

But in any case, there are three institutional functions that the Movement Charter should arrange to be fulfilled:

1. How do make technical decisions as a movement? (By "technical" I mean the kind of decisions that might have an indirect impact on editors, but that most editors cannot provide meaningful feedback on. Should we transition to a microservices architecture? Should we switch from PHP to Hack? That kind of thing. I.e. what TechCom used to handle, when it still existed.) In many ways, the technical community is more coherent than the wider community and could probably self-organize to handle this even without the Global Council. But as a high-level governance process, it does make sense to have the Global Council oversee it (which obviously doesn't mean the Global Council engaging in the actual technical decisions, or even into the selection of who makes them). In any case, it should be in the Charter in some form IMO, even if not under the Global Council.
2. The wider community should be able to meaningfully influence produce plans, including mid- and long-term plans. By "meaningfully" I mean they should be able to initiate new products / features, instead of being limited to giving feedback on ideas someone else came up with. That doesn't mean setting plans single-handedly (product planning requires expertise, resources and prolonged effort), but it does mean a significantly more open process than what we have now. Oversight of that process should be with (or delegated from) the Global Council, as with most processes where controversies tend to happen and legitimacy is important.
3. As part of the planning process, wiki communities should be able to raise objections or set requirements before a plan is agreed on. Once a plan is agreed on, that should mean a lasting commitment that cannot easily reneged (unlike, say, RfCs, wich anyone can just ignore and start a counter-RfC). Some group is needed to oversee this (e.g. decide whether the requirements have been met). As above, this is potentially controversial and needs the legitimacy of an elected body.

Tgr (talk) 05:58, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

@Tgr You have missed my point entirely. "so now we do have a problem to fix." "About half of the movement budget is spent on software development, but the community has little control over it." These are not problems, they are intentional designs for how we do technical development because a completely distributed, all volunteer model does not work. This is why we have a centralized technical organization hired and managed by the WMF, to do things that require a high degree of efficiency and professional skills. Steven Walling • talk 07:11, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

@Steven Walling I suppose one person's problem is another person's intentional design. I think you are familiar with the relevant history, but just in case: until 2011, the Wikimedia movement evolved in a decentralized direction, with several chapters raising funds via banner donations and building their capacity. The WMF reasonably felt that it's a bad idea to distribute donations in proportion to how large and rich a chapter's country is; both on grounds of equity and pragmatically (as chapters end up with revenue well above their soaking capacity), so it mostly centralized banner fundraising. This was done under the narrative of the WMF becoming "the payment processor of the movement", ie. the WMF does the technicalities of collecting and handling donations, which then get equitably redistributed in some movement-wide process. The WMF then went immediately went back on that promise, assigned 80-90% of the money to itself and limited said movement-wide process to the remainder.

This was seen as a historical injustice by many participants of the 2030 movement strategy, and a significant part of the strategy is aimed at repairing it. (See especially the recommendation section on participatory resource allocation.) The logical (not necessary, but likely) consequence of less centralized resource allocation is less centralized technical development, which raises the need for decisionmaking mechanisms which aren't tied to WMF organizational hierarchy. (There are other good reasons to avoid aligning decision-making mechanisms to organizational structures, too; it alienates volunteers, and in an environment where average staff turnaround is 3-4 years but the most engaged volunteers tend to stay active for over a decade, it's not actually very good at concentrating expertise.) Tgr (talk) 03:38, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

@Steven Walling since you brought up Python, here's their sort-of-movement-charter-equivalent document: PEP 13 – Python Language Governance. tl;dr developers with merge rights vote on major changes, and they elect a Steering Committee which handles process issues. I think that's not a terrible model for expert technical decisionmaking (my point #1 above), although in an environment like Wikimedia where the majority of technical contributions come from a few large organizations, I think the org command chains should be somewhat represented in the decisionmaking group - just not as exclusively as now. Tgr (talk) 03:55, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

@Steven Walling

First, on who decided, I guess the short answer is the strategy process, with all its shortcomings and strengths. It is a draft, so nothing is in fact "decided", but the movement charter is akin to a constitution for the movement so it is a weird question to address, since the decision is the charter itself.

On making technical decisions by committee, why is that relevant to this text? Is your point that everything is great with the technical governance in the movement and we have nothing to change here? If so I fundamentally disagree and think @Tgr has made a good summary of the main points to address in the charter. Chico Venancio (talk) 20:14, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

It is understandable that the WMF has legal concerns. Nonprofit governance and international transfer of charitable donations are heavily regulated areas, with limited harmonization between nations, and the structure we are aiming for (an international movement governed by its community) is unusual and doesn't have many working examples at our scale. It's the kind of thing over which lawyers have sleepless nights.

What isn't understandable is that these concerns aren't shared publicly. There is nothing personal or confidential here; no reason "WMF legal is concerned about this proposal because of X" (where X is well-substantiated with references to specific laws or legal doctrines) couldn't be added to each point which has raised legal concerns.

This is something the MCDC needs to push back hard on. Arguments that significantly alter the content of the charter must not be made in secrecy; that would significantly impair the legitimacy of the charter. (Also, there is sufficient legal expertise dispersed in the community that not taking advantage of it for peer review of WMF opinions seems like a missed opportunity.) Tgr (talk) 22:39, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Hey @Tgr, no secrecy here, we started we are working with our colleagues in the Legal department to share the external legal feedback. Thanks for the reminder. MPourzaki (WMF) (talk) 19:33, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

+1. I'm sure that Legal is acting in good faith but it'd be helpful to have the concerns be shared publicly. Frostly (talk) 04:11, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

• @Tgr and Frostly: hi all, you can find the external legal feedback for the Global Council draft at foundationwiki. Cheers, RamzyM (WMF) (talk) 23:02, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

• I agree with the fundamental issues mentioned by legal. The final fiduciary responsibilities lie with the Foundation and can't be transferred to any other body, council or subcommittee without neglecting the duties of the board, meaning liability. But if the decisions have to stay with the board, how can the council be created as an executive body? Is it feasible and even desirable? And yes, that's a big question that needs to be answered early in the process. --h-stt !? 17:18, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

• @RamzyM (WMF): The legal feedback doesn't reveal the author and it is qualified as an "external legal feedback" at Movement Charter/Content/Global Council. Could you tell us who was the commissioner and who was the author? Alice Wiegand (talk) 20:34, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

• @RamzyM: thanks for posting the legal advice. It is helpful to read and seems quite sensible and pragmatic. It highlights many areas where the MCDC needs to provide more detail in future drafts before a clear opinion can be given, which is natural at this point. I think there is a bit of a hint in the legal review that an 'advisory' rather than 'executive' body would be easier from a legal point of view, but I would not want the MCDC to assume that this is necessarily the only way forward - more specific proposals will result in more specific opinions and possibly routes around obstacles.

  I do not actually see the "Global site policies" section mentioned in the feedback. Have I missed it, or was this section already rejected on legal grounds before the legal review? It would be helpful to understand the legal position on this section as well. In fact, it is probably more important to understand legal concerns where they mean that proposals from the MCDC cannot be adopted. I would also echo Lyzzy's question about who actually wrote the document - part of the purpose of the external legal review is to provide community members with reassurance that legal issues raised by the MCDC proposals are clearly understood and there is no element of the WMF board or staff using 'legal reasons' to rule out proposals they simply do not like. Is there any reason not to say who wrote the document, who commissioned it, and what terms of reference were given? Many thanks, Chris Keating (The Land) (talk) 21:23, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

  @Lyzzy and The Land: hi, the external legal review was provided pro bono by a reputable multinational law firm, based on information provided by the MCDC. Under the terms of this engagement, the law firm’s services were limited to providing advice to the Wikimedia Foundation only, and their work product was not intended for publication. In the interests of transparency for this project, they have permitted us to share this document here without attribution. Thanks, RamzyM (WMF) (talk) 03:42, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Ramzy. Could this be changed for future legal reviews so that the name of the firm, the terms of their commission and their full opinion are shared? Without this information I don't think the document will fulfill its purpose. Thanks, Chris Keating (The Land) (talk) 10:41, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

I'll relay this to the team, Chris. Cheers, RamzyM (WMF) (talk) 17:15, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

@RamzyM (WMF) thank you for publishing the external legal feedback!

Does that mean there was no internal legal feedback (ie. advice given by WMF Legal directly?) Tgr (talk) 17:07, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

@Tgr: we're still working on its publication -- I'll check and get back to you on this. RamzyM (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for transparently sharing the legal review commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation. WMDE fully recognizes the accountability the Wikimedia Foundation has to Florida law and to the US taxpayer. We are aware of the responsibility of the BoT, as part of their legal and fiduciary duties, to assure that the governance structures currently designed pose minimum risk to the WMF’s charitable status.

The review clearly states that from the WMF perspective the Global Council should not be a "legal entity". It should be an advisory committee to the WMF Board of Trustees, and the WMF should retain power and authority over most of the functions it currently fulfills.

The current MCDC draft on the Global Council aligns with this perspective, in that it creates an advisory committee without its own decision-making authority, with very few exceptions.

According to the WMF review, the GC as an entity would result in complex legal relationships and overlapping responsibilities. That may be true, however, it is not an unprecedented situation, and there are examples of US nonprofits having effectively regulated relationships with their international movement partner organizations. This can be done through written agreements, as well as through strategic integration of governance bodies. The WMF has just structured a similar relationship between itself and the Wikimedia Endowment.

Clearly there are functions that must remain with the WMF, and under its full authority, such as trademarks, including the enforcement of their responsible use, the WMF’s own budget, and much of the technical infrastructure. Other movement functions, such as resource distribution, capacity building, and movement strategy, to name a few, in our opinion are better positioned with an international decision making body representing and working for an international movement.

The establishment of a global council in the form of a General Assembly, supported by an International Secretariat would be most faithful to the intention of equity in decision making and democratically legitimized decisions about movement-wide matters. We would suggest that ultimately, it would lead to better decisions and less conflict than our current situation.

We would urge the stakeholders, and at the forefront the MCDC in the governance design process not to take the WMF legal review as the last and only source of legal information. Instead we should do our due diligence and further investigate legal scenarios and precedents that make the collaborative structure possible with minimum legal risk to the parties.

The authors of Recommendation 4 of Movement Strategy had anticipated a situation such as this. Therefore the text states :

Design an independent and transparent process, along with an independent legal assessment, to transfer those responsibilities and authorities to the appropriate Movement-led bodies.

So far, as movement stakeholders we have not determined how and when the independent legal assessment should take place. It should probably take the form of a legal briefing, including the review of precedents and possible scenarios. There are reputable law firms in the US that bring the necessary expertise in designing inter-nonprofit legal relationships, and that have not had WMF as a client previously. WMDE suggests that it may be time to figure out together how we can commission this expertise, so that we can have a fuller and more neutral understanding of what is actually possible – to ultimately arrive at a governance structure that does justice to our movement and its diverse stakeholders and lets us move towards the strategic direction. Nicola Zeuner (WMDE) (talk) 10:50, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Just to echo this (in part) - "complex relationships" and "overlapping responsibilities" are an inevitable part of the governance of a global movement, let's not shy away from them. Also, while it's often said that nonprofit trustees have a fiduciary duty to the organisation they're on the board of, this is not quite the case. The fiduciary duty is towards the goals of the organisation as set out in its articles - not to the organisation's budget, staff, or assets. If the WMF Board believe that placing assets currently owned by the WMF (e.g. money or trademarks) into a separate organisation with a different governance structure is genuinely the best way to fulfill the WMF's mission then they not only can but must do so. Chris Keating (The Land) (talk) 13:56, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

• @Tgr, Frostly, H-stt, Lyzzy, The Land, and Nicola Zeuner (WMDE): hi all, please find the Wikimedia Foundation's legal feedback to this draft chapter (and three others) of the Movement Charter attached. Best, RamzyM (WMF) (talk) 12:33, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for sharing the legal feedback @RamzyM (WMF):! This adds some much-needed transparency around the restrictions that the MCDC has to navigate.

A further improvement would be if the legal constraints brought up in the feedback could be reformulated in a more explicit and verifiable manner, as some kind of position statement from the legal team, with references to relevant laws or precedents. Right now it's hard to tell what's actual legal advice vs. just the opinion of the legal team.

As an example, here is the WMF Legal feedback on the Technology council:

This proposal is not feasible as written. The Technology Council does not currently exist, so its purpose and scope is not yet clear. There are currently multiple opinions on technical decision-making within the Wikimedia community that need to be resolved through both collaborative and more binding approaches. There also needs to be a process for making these decisions durable enough that technical contributors can rely on them but not so detailed that they prevent timely addressing of new issues as they are discovered. Formal structures for technology decision-making need to be built on shared understandings of goals and the problems they will solve. It is not possible to evaluate transferring responsibilities without starting with a shared understanding of the problems it will address.

The Board of Trustees may be able to rely on the Global Council to do certain things, like setting strategic priorities for technical initiatives, but this will depend on the amount of technical expertise that is available in the Global Council. The Board of Trustees is not able to delegate other things, like providing fiduciary oversight over the organisation or operations of the Product & Technology team.

Questions:

1. How can the Global Council coordinate and unite the technical priorities among multiple organisations that contribute to the Wikimedia movement's technical infrastructure?
2. Can the Global Council provide long-term stability to technical decision making? One challenge that the Foundation's Product & Tech teams have faced is that there are shifting/competing priorities among volunteers, resulting in moving targets that prevent progress on long-term projects. How can the Global Council reduce this risk and enable more durable technical decisions for the Wikimedia movement?
3. Can the Global Council help the Product & Technology teams understand potential impact of new or emergent work?

As far as I can tell none of this is actually legal advice (with the exception of the sentence "The Board of Trustees is not able to delegate other things, like providing fiduciary oversight over the organisation or operations of the Product & Technology team." which is talking about something not actually present in the draft the feedback is about). It contains all kinds of practical advice like "there are multiple opinions within the Wikimedia community so this probably requires more discussion" or "the Global Council should not make technical decisions if it doesn't have the necessary expertise", which, while reasonable, have nothing to do with legal restrictions, and WMF Legal is probably not any better positioned to give them than anyone else who has a deep understanding of the movement. I think it's important to clearly differentiate between "we think this is a bad idea" and "in our expert opinion this would be illegal" (and in the latter case, what that expert opinion is based on). In the first case, the legal team is offering arguments for the MCDC to consider. In the second case, they are making an authoritative statement that the MCDC has no other choice but to accept. Those are very different situations.

I understand that providing feedback in a more structured and more verifiable format is a very significant amount of extra work. We are working on the constitution of the Wikimedia movement here, though. This is supposed to be the foundational document guiding organizational matters for many years to come. Whatever gaps of legitimacy are left in the process of creating in that foundation () will be pointed at every time someone disagrees with a decision backed by the Global Council. Also, there will be an amendment process for the charter; every time someone proposes an amendment, the legal concerns and limitations will be relevant again, while the people who provided and received the feedback might not be around or involved. Having the legal feedback available in a format that's durable and reusable is worth the effort. --Tgr (talk) 12:01, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

This draft puts a lot of burden on AffCom:

• In this new structure, AffCom is tasked to verify that affiliates are actively aiding the projects’ functioning.
• Additionally, AffCom gathers and assesses evidence for derecognition of an affiliate [...]
• AffCom’s scope is expanded to evaluate Hubs. The committee will be responsible for evidence-gathering and criteria review [for recognition]
• AffCom will be responsible to review the hubs’ functioning, capacity and and assess evidence before [derecognition]
• AffCom will primarily be responsible for guiding organisational development and ensuring adherence to good governance principles.

This doesn't seem realistic without significant use of staff time. The draft doesn't say it explicitly but I assume the GC won't be a formal organization with a significant amount of own staff. If so, maybe worth saying who is responsible for providing that staff time. Tgr (talk) 23:23, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

As I said above, I'd prefer a two-level structure where the community elects the GC "assembly" and the GC "assembly" elects the GC "board". But assuming we go with a flat structure - I'm not sure we should copy the concept of affiliate votes from the WMF board. Giving a significant fraction of the seats to affiliates makes sense given that most of the GC's responsibilities will be related to affiliates. But I don't think the "one affiliate, one vote" system ever made sense. Large affiliates employ dozens and represent hundreds if not thousands of members. Small affiliates are often just one person who thought it would be kinda cool to register a user group. It doesn't make sense to give them equal weight, and it incentivises strategic affiliate creation (which did sometimes happen in the past, for somewhat different but related reasons). I don't have a good idea of how voting should happen but we should explore alternatives. I'm not sure it would be terrible if affiliate seats were simply filled based on the choice of the community-elected members of the GC. (Also, I think a regional cap, where each affiliate seat corresponds to a region or group of regions, would make more sense for affiliates than for community seats, given that affiliates are already organizing into regional structures, and how affiliates work is much more dependent on regional context than how wikis work.) Tgr (talk) 02:53, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

Maybe it would make sense that affiliates select a bunch of candidates for their seats which then are elected by a community vote. For these seats they might select even staff then, which I else personally highly disagree with (see below). Denis Barthel (talk) 13:51, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

I think the draft would be more likely to generate productive discussion if the MCDC published their rationales along with the charter text. E.g. what do you see as the pros and cons of the various options for GC structure? I am sure this has been discussed extensively. Tgr (talk) 02:57, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

+1 to this. Chris Keating (The Land) (talk) 11:03, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks @Tgr, thanks @The Land, a bit of narrative goes a long way indeed. Providing a window into their many deliberations and discussions, the pros and cons as you mention, about such complex topics as funds and global representation for a distributed movement would be helpful. We can see what's possible for the existing drafts, but definitely for subsequent ones, especially Ton roles and responsibilities and decision-making. This is very useful, thank you. MPourzaki (WMF) (talk) 19:11, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

The draft (as expected) assigns the Global Council the responsibility of ensuring that affiliates and hubs remain compliant with movement policies and values, but doesn't do the same for wikis. (Think of e.g. a Croatian Wikipedia scenario where some wiki community abandons core project or movement principles.) I think this would be one of the most important roles of the Council; while there is plenty of space to make affiliate enforcement more predictable and equitable, it is already mostly working. Wiki enforcement, however, doesn't work at all; if a wiki's own governance mechanisms fail or get captured, no one is empowered to intervene. (The Croatian Wikipedia situation was well known for almost a decade, and even then it got only solved by accident, to the extent it got solved.) I wouldn't trust the WMF with that kind of enforcement role; I don't think the communities would accept it since it doesn't have the legitimacy that elections can confer; and it gets too close to having editorial oversight so it would probably be inadvisable from a legal point of view as well. So, this function has to rest with the Global Council. Tgr (talk) 03:11, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks a lot @Tgr, the MCDC also had the case of Croatian Wikipedia in mind when they added the mediation section to the Global Council. This is useful feedback to reflect on and strengthen that section as a priority for the movement. MPourzaki (WMF) (talk) 19:20, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

@MPourzaki (WMF) the mediation section was definitely a good idea. Mediation is voluntary and only works between good-faith actors though, so I think there's still a need for a process for when that isn't the case. Tgr (talk) 20:24, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

I guess in that case, the U4C is the right place to go. Denis Barthel (talk) 16:46, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

@Denis Barthel maybe in a situation where a minority of editors took over a wiki and uses illegitimate blocks to suppress the majority. (But even then they aren't necessarily well-situated to handle the issue. The policy is not very clear on their powers; they can presumably ban people, but can they e.g. appoint new admins / bureaucrats, which might be necessary for an orderly transition?)

But if e.g. the wider community thinks Wikipedia should be written from a patriotic point of view, not a neutral point of view (maybe because patriotism is such a strong norm in the given language community; maybe because patriotic organizations are actively recruiting supporters to sign up as editors), what should the U4C do about that? It's not an UCoC violation to write articles from a non-neutral point of view.

The UCoC and U4C is really about one of the five pillars, civility. Someone needs to protect the other four as well. Tgr (talk) 04:11, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

Thank you MCDC for the most substantial draft document so far. Here is my feedback, I hope you find it helpful. This naturally focuses on areas of disagreement or where I see a lack of clarity, but I am grateful for the time and thought you have put in to reach this point. I look forward to seeing further work, in particular on the Roles and Responsibilities.

Current draft on the purpose of the GC: "The Global Council has been set up to promote sustainable work and growth within the movement. For this, the Global Council sets accountability to empower communities in an equitable way."

I find this unhelpful. "Promote sustainable work and growth" is not very clear and is not related to the specific role of the GC. Then "The GC sets accountability to empower communities" is also unclear - as a native English speaker I do not really know what "sets accountability" means. "Sets accountability to empower communities in an equitable way" also contains 3 different concepts which are in tension with each other - one could read that and go "ok which do you really want? Is its role accountability, or empowerment, or equity? Because there are many situations where you can have more of one at the cost of the other two".

In the original thinking about the Global Council the aims of the GC included;

1. Accountability - making sure movement entities behaved in line with movement values
2. Coordination - helping movement entities align on a common direction (in some versions of this, making high-level decisions about funds dissemination and creating future iterations of Wikimedia strategy)
3. Discussion - creating the space for movement-wide discussions in a more systematic way with more in-depth discussion and more equitable representation

I think it would be easier to feed back on the rest of the draft if it was clearer what the MCDC viewed the purpose of the GC as being. Accountability is in there, but the MCDC seems like it does not really know what the other purposes of the GC are going to be, and has not asked this question either. Instead, the MCDC is asking other questions like "How large should the GC be?" which are affected by the definition of purpose.

In my view, the MCDC should recommend a change to the affiliate structure of the Movement. The categories of "chapter", "thematic organisation", and "user group" are not meaningful. The meaningful distinctions between affiliates are more to be found in the distinctions of incorporated / unincorporated, staffed / non-staffed, geographical / non-geographical (and if geographical, whether they are in a society that supports free expression and association or not), and their subject matter. A geographical, incorporated User Group is really the same thing as a Chapter; a non-geographical, incorporated User Group is really the same thing as a Thematic Org; a User Group with staffing and a six-figure budget is a very different thing to a User Group with five volunteers who meet for a chat once a year. The diversity of affiliates is great, but the categories we put them in no longer work.

Also, I disagree with this draft's apparent assumption that there should be one Affiliations Committee. In a future where there are 500 or 1000 Wikimedia affiliates, that is too much for one AffCom to handle. What's more, one global set of processes for affiliate recognition and monitoring probably does not work for the very diverse contexts of all the different affiliates. So having one global AffCom will not fulfill the needs of the future movement. If the MCDC does feel that having one AffCom is important to the future of the movement, why is that?

The original idea of the recommendations was that Hubs would start to play a role in affiliate support and recognition, and possibly even in the creation of different, context-specific affiliate models. Is this still part of the concept?

You make some comparisons here that aren't valid in the real world; User Groups aren't generally incorporated, for example; if/when they are, they are transitioned to Thematic Organizations and Chapters. As well, I strongly disagree with the premise of more than one AffCom, as it would greatly reduce efficiency and increase overhead. Best, Frostly (talk) 09:43, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Which real world is that? The one where in the last seven years we've seen many new incorporated user groups, but only a handful of new chapters? The last ten years have shown that global committees don't have the knowledge and expertise to judge local situations. Prolonging this situation isn't good enough for many communities. Braveheart (talk) 10:20, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

@Frostly - it's true to say that most UGs are unincorporated (most are very small!). But, there are a number that are incorporated; and only I think 3 have ever become Chapters and one a Thorg. Chris Keating (The Land) (talk) 09:28, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

It's unclear to me what this means. "Advancement" is usually the term used in the USA for "fundraising". But the term here seems to mean more like "capacity building". I would suggest sticking to a term that has already been used. If it means "capacity building" then who is meant to be actually doing the capacity building? This is also unclear to me.

I think the question about the composition of the GC and how to elect people to it can only be answered when the purpose of the GC is clearer. My only observation is that if the GC is meant to be a really representative group, it needs to be quite large - 20 or more people - and have an election model that is set up to ensure diverse representation.

I think the MCDC should think much more broadly about election models. It looks like only the existing model of election used for the WMF Board and the MCDC itself has been considered. These work OK-ish but are not really suitable for the future. I would tentatively favour elections on a regional model, with 2-3 people from each region (however defined) being elected. I think the MCDC also needs to consider what weight to give to affiliates - clearly it is important that affiliates have an ongoing voice in the Global Council - but our affiliate model is not set up to be a representative model. In particular, User Groups are designed to be very easy to set up - this is great for the impact and proliferation of user groups - but it does mean that giving User Groups votes in elections creates risks (e.g. if one person is involved in 10 user groups which all have small memberships, it's quite easy for that person to have a big impact on the eventual election result).

In my view, the GC should create a framework in which global funds distribution decisions can be made. That is to say, a statement of priorities and principles, and then a process for the decisions to be made. Whether this process is then implemented by the WMF or by some Global Council subcommittee (or something else) is arguably less important. This responsibility should only be gradually taken up by the GC - it is neither practical nor at all healthy for the GC to be set up and then right away try to work out what to do with the WMF's multi-million dollar grantmaking budget.

The GC should not attempt to scrutinise funding decisions within the WMF. It could not meaningfully do so. Rather, it should be consulted on the WMF's strategy and annual planning.

I am pleased to see the mention of mediation in the draft. I endorse this approach of the GC (or people appointed by it, on its behalf) acting as mediator in disputes.

A number of tasks listed as being the responsibility of the GC (or AffCom) would require significant staff support. Is it expected that the GC itself will be an incorporated entity with its own staff? Or will staff supporting the GC still be employed by the WMF?

I presume that there definitely wouldn't be a separate entity behind the Council. Frostly (talk) 09:44, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Like Frotsly I presume supporting staff would be employed by the WMF. But let me ask to whom will they report, the GC (and via them the board) or will they report to someone in the "regular" reporting structure of the WMF? Barkeep49 (talk) 16:14, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

I am not clear why this section was retracted - is it because the WMF isn't comfortable relying on the GC's interpretation of legal issues, and therefore cannot promise to give the GC a veto? If that is the case, then the GC could still be a "consulting partner" in the language of the draft. I would support it being such a partner.

I hope these comments are clear and helpful, I would be happy to expand on them if that is useful

Thanks, Chris Keating (The Land) (talk) 08:24, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

As this topic can generate a lot of discussion, I try to keep my message short. I apologise in advance if the conciseness of my message feels blunt.

As a way to analyse the current proposal, and make it easier to grasp, I summed it up in a RACI table and made a comparison to the current situation here after: RACI analysis of the MCDC GC proposal

As one can see, the changes are the following:

• Accountability moved away from the Foundation only regarding new projects (this never happens), languages (smooth topic) and AffCom (highly complex topic the Foundation desengaged from in 2008)
• Responsibilities shifts to the Global Council (volunteer body at the moment)

In summary, for all those topics, Global Council is responsible to make things happen but Foundation is accountable of the decision. Which basically means that this proposal is bundling all existing (and some discontinued) volunteer committees under the responsibility of the GC (LangCom, AffCom, FDC, etc.). If any process related to those topics fails or is not ok, it will now be the responsibility of the GC, but without the decision making capacity.

My questions are the following:

• Why did the MCDC decided to retain the current status quo regarding accountability?
• Why is there no options regarding the actual topics of power (revenues, ressource allocation, brands)?
• What led to the decision of increasing responsibilities on the communities without increasing accountability?

The four Values that fit that section are:

• Subsidiarity
• Equity
• Accountability
• Resilience

How does the current proposal improve the situation regarding those values?

As always, I'm happy to share and talk more on that topic :) schiste (talk) 08:37, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Dear @Schiste, thanks for taking the time to create this table and share your thoughts and questions. We have captured it for the MCDC. I'll also ping the drafting groups to respond. The connection to the values you mentioned is a great anchor, a solid litmus test, thank you. By the way, if you'll be at Wikimania or following regional and thematic events, please do come by an MCDC session and connect directly in-person if you can. Thank you. MPourzaki (WMF) (talk) 17:04, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Thank you very much for this table @Schiste, and the questions. The R&R drafting group has been working from a similar matrix, as we know the community (and we ourselves!) like this kind clarity to be part of the final Charter. This document will not be part of the upcoming R&R draft just yet, but we hope to include it in a future new draft.

For the table above: it is helpful to see the published GC text summarized in a table by someone outside of the committee, and we will take this as feedback to make sure the GC text reflects how we actually see the landscape of the future movement. I personally think there are a few inconsistencies in the table that are not inline with our ideas (which is on us, not on the reader!), but it will take the Movement Charter Drafting Committee a bit more time to reflect on this internally first. Also, the legal reviews we received for this first draft (or in fact: all drafts that we are now publishing) will be shared on Meta with you all soon, and we hope those will also give more context to the considerations for the draft. Ciell (talk) 09:02, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. What timeframe are we talking about here? You are pushing back on my assessment regarding the RACI table I made, answering that in the same format should be a very low level of energy/time (having done the initial one by myself).

Also, you did not answer regarding how your proposal improve the situation based on the values.

Thanks :) schiste (talk) 09:14, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

"Candidates may be paid WMF, affiliate, or hub, staff /contractors but must clearly disclose this information at the beginning of the election"

I think this is a road straight to hell due to potential Conflicts of Interest. With good reasons the Board of Trustees does not allow this currently and just recently we had a huge discussion about this around a former Board member being hired right away by the WMF. All this is blown away by this one sentence.

Staff of WMF/affiliates recommending spending of finances in the Movement, opening and shutting down affiliates and hubs where themselves or people they are close with (and who isn't in this small movement) have been/are/will be staff or board members? That is -with all due respect- a bad idea, putting either employees in a bad position or leading to decisions that might be influenced by their employers interest, direct or indirect. Denis Barthel (talk) 13:44, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Denis Barthel, thanks for sharing this feedback. We have captured it for the MCDC. MPourzaki (WMF) (talk) 16:49, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Participants of the July 30 launch party share the following thoughts about the Council (YouTube stream recording):

• Overall, there should be some kind of limits in terms of representation in the Council.
• There is a mixed reaction to a proposed "regional cap" to Council membership: a plurality thought that applying this would create a more equal opportunity for the regions and fix the historical problem of some regions being under-represented in Wikimedia’s governance structures, while a small section thought that some activity requirements are better suited to reach the equal representation than a cap.
• There is a mixed reaction to proposed "home project cap" for Council membership: some thought that it’s needed, some other think that it’s necessary but not under the current definition of home project (as used, for example, by SecurePoll software for Board of Trustees voters), and some other reject it as too complicated.
• Some other ideas about limitations or requirements to the Council’s membership:
  • Maximum number of the Council members, including the amount of Wikimedia Foundation employees or Wikimedia Affiliates employees;
  • Term limits of the Council members;
  • Requirements for the Council members to be active contributors to the Wikimedia projects.
• On the topic of the Council’s role in funds dissemination:
  • Some agreement that the Council should play the role of providing oversight/review to the Foundation’s funds dissemination decisions;
  • Some agreement that there should be another body that handles cross-regional funds dissemination and reports to the Council;
  • A plurality agreed that the Council should be consulted on the Foundation’s own funds allocation, rather than simply being informed as favored by a minority of participants.

-- RamzyM (WMF) (talk) 22:39, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

English (French below)

About 10 members from the francophone community (Benin, Cameroon, Congo (RDC), Ivory Coast, Guinea, Senegal, Togo) joined the conversation on July 28th. Below is a summary of the participants' feedback:

• About membership

The majority of the participants think there should be a limit in terms of representation within the Global Counsel to ensure a fairness for every region within the movement. Some participants think it would be good to set a quota per region, others proposed to set the limit to 3.

When it came to project cap, a participant proposed, instead of having a cap, to have a rotation of projects' representation from one term to another. The majority of participants think that, before determining a limit/cap for regions or projects, it is important to first determine the size of the Global Council.

• About the structure

Regarding the size of the Global Counsel, the majority of participants are in favour of "Option 1: 9-13 members", justifying that this option will help the Counsel deliver quickly and be productive...more members require more coordination. One participant voted though for "Option 2: 17-21 members" as this will give the space to have more representation within the Counsel.

On both membership and the structure of the Counsel, participants proposed to take into account the gender diversity within the Counsel.

• About fund dissemination

Regarding the role the Global Council should have in fund dissemination, the majority of participants voted for option B (Coordination with WMF) explaining that, the fund dissemination should be led by the Foundation. To the question "What should be the Global Council’s role with regard to the allocation of funds within the WMF?", the majority of participants went for option B (The Global Council should have no role in the allocation of the funds within the WMF and only be informed). Most participants suggest having a light process when it comes to fund dissemination...more actors in the process will bring more complexity.

Français

Environ 10 membres de la communauté francophone (Bénin, Cameroun, Congo (RDC), Côte d'Ivoire, Guinée, Sénégal, Togo) ont participé à la conversation le 28 juillet. Voici un résumé des retours des participants :

• A propos de l'adhésion

La majorité des participants pensent qu'il devrait y avoir une limite en termes de représentation au sein du Conseil mondial afin de garantir l'équité pour chaque région au sein du mouvement. Certains participants pensent qu'il serait bon de fixer un quota par région, d'autres proposent de fixer la limite à 3.

En ce qui concerne le plafond des projets, un participant a proposé, au lieu d'avoir un plafond, d'avoir une rotation de la représentation des projets d'un mandat à l'autre. La majorité des participants pensent qu'avant de fixer une limite/un plafond pour les régions ou les projets, il est important de déterminer d'abord la taille du Conseil mondial.

• A propos de la structure

En ce qui concerne la taille du Conseil mondial, la majorité des participants est en faveur de "Option 1 : 9-13 membres", justifiant que cette option aidera le Conseil à délivrer rapidement et à être productif... plus de membres nécessitent plus de coordination. Un participant a cependant voté pour l'"Option 2 : 17-21 membres", car cela permettra d'avoir une plus grande représentation au sein du conseil.

En ce qui concerne les membres et la structure du Conseil, les participants ont proposé de tenir compte de la diversité des genres au sein du Conseil.

• A propos de la distribution des fonds

En ce qui concerne le rôle que le Conseil mondial devrait jouer dans la distribution des fonds, la majorité des participants a voté pour l'option B (coordination avec le WMF), expliquant que la distribution des fonds devrait être gérée par la Fondation. À la question "Quel devrait être le rôle du Conseil mondial en ce qui concerne l'allocation des fonds au sein du WMF ?", la majorité des participants a opté pour l'option B (Le Conseil mondial ne devrait jouer aucun rôle dans l'allocation des fonds au sein du WMF et devrait seulement être informé). La plupart des participants suggèrent d'avoir un processus léger lorsqu'il s'agit de la distribution des fonds... plus il y aura d'acteurs dans le processus, plus complexe il sera.

MPossoupe (WMF) (talk) 07:07, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

This response was developed by the Movement Relations team at WMDE, jointly with board and executive leadership.

Thank you to the MCDC for providing this draft and the hard work that went into it.

Many individuals, groups and communities within the Wikimedia universe are currently not represented in decision making at a global level. One of the purposes of a charter is to create a global governance structure. Equitable, participatory and transparent governance is one condition so we can become a global movement in which all stakeholders are represented.

Wikimedia Deutschland has a vital interest in being part of a strong, just, cohesive yet diverse global movement. Therefore, WMDE’s Movement Strategy and Global Relations Team was established to promote and support the implementation of the 2030 Movement Strategy, in particular with a focus on the design of movement governance. The team has published several papers and a regular podcast to shine a light on the issues, conversations and big questions.

This draft on the Global Council leaves us wondering whether or not the MCDC strives to create an equitable governance structure as envisioned by the recommendations.

A few general remarks.

All following statements are based on WMDE’s positions on movement governance.

The draft mixes up the basic terminology: The use of the term executive throughout the draft of a governance document is misleading and confusing. While the Global Council is largely described as a committee of volunteers, it is said to have "executive power". It remains unclear what this term means or how it would be implemented.

We encourage the use of appropriate, correct and clear terms in English, so that subsequent translations are not made even more difficult and confusing than they already are.

We also wonder, given the confusion of even basic terminology, and the absence of any references to expertise provided, literature reviewed, or analytical/scenario modeling work done, whether the committee looked beyond the current movement structures to design something that is appropriate for building a global social movement in the 21st century.

Wikimedia Deutschland has stated from the beginning: Big questions were left unanswered by the recommendations: Should the Global Council be advisory or governing? What functions in the movement can and should be decentralized? Is fundraising and grant making the model we want to continue with to distribute resources?

The MCDC chose to draft a highly detailed text before these questions were answered. This could have been done in a co-creative process with the committee and consulting communities.

The draft is largely reflecting the status quo of movement bodies with additional structures attached, creating more bureaucracy, regulation and more complex decision making than before. It seems to reflect the lowest common denominator of a diverse group, essentially robbing it of its diversity of ideas and experiences.

It is difficult to envision the overall governance structure, with the higher level related drafts of roles & responsibilities and decision-making still unpublished. However, the complicated processes and bodies emerging from this Global Council draft will have significant weaknesses:

• it will rely on a small number of volunteers to do a large body of work;
• it creates a body that is not representative of all movement stakeholders (such as a Global Assembly would) and is instead based on how elections in the movement are used to be done, leading to those from larger projects and communities to be elected ("popularity contest");
• it relies on committees, which also rely on volunteers, to all be connected to the Global Council;
• it is confusing in terms of the powers, as there are no clear distinctions between where the Global Council governs, where it enforces, and where it advises the WMF;
• accountability to the community lies with the Global Council, while the final decisions (on tech, funding, global policies) remain with the WMF. The Global Council will be subject to criticism, while the WMF will formally be able to continue to make decisions as today;
• given all this, the Global Council will need significant staffing. There is no reference to the Global Council becoming a legal entity. Having this staff provided by WMF will not assure the independence of the Global Council that would give it the needed legitimacy.

A final remark regarding the format and content of a charter: In standard international practice, a charter is a foundational document that declares the basic beliefs, mission, values and high level rules for the co-functioning of a group of signatories (see a list of similar documents linked in Wikimedia Deutschland’s governance paper). A charter is a document that is signed and ratified by existing and new members of the confederation. It is not a "living document" in the sense that it is iterated and adapted continuously. Changes should only be made by a majority of the specified signatories, in rare occasions, when major events occur that warrant amendments. A charter is similar to the constitution of a country. What are laws and regulations in a country context, would be policies in an organizational governance context. Policies can be changed more easily, and in fact are supposed to be adapted and improved as circumstances change. It follows that details such as decision-making processes, as well as rules for the behavior of specific movement stakeholders should be regulated in policies. They are more easily adaptable and amendable by the global decision-making body.

Considering these standards, the Global Council draft contains many sections which in our view do not belong in a charter:

• The background text describes the MCDC process of writing the section, and not its purpose.
• Throughout the text we find goal statements (the Global Council improves, the Global Council simplifies) that relate to the current status quo. Rather, language in a charter uses clear terms such as ensure that, responsible for, decides on, deliberates about,... etc.
• The drafts seem to contain various references to processes (setting up committees, the Global Council will...) that relate to implementation rather than what should be in a charter.

WMDE recommends that the MCDC review their draft with these considerations in mind to decide which elements belong in our charter, which are better outlined in policies, and which are part of an implementation plan.

Following are comments specific to some of the sections.

This statement is a process description that is hopefully not intended to be in the final Movement Charter.

The definition should state clearly: The Global Council is a body to assure transparent, equitable and participatory decision making (=governance) about issues that affect the movement as a whole or a large part of its stakeholders.

The reference to implementation of movement strategy, while copied from the recommendations, is unhelpful in the definition, and belongs at best in the list of purposes below. Movement Strategy is an adaptive process that ends, for now, in 2030. The Charter is supposed to be an artifact defining the roles and responsibilities and decision making of the movement in perpetuity. The Global Council, specifically, has a role within that reaching far beyond 2030.

To assure independence from the Wikimedia Foundation or any other stakeholders with potential conflicts of interest, the Global Council should have its own staff.

The Global Council has been set up to promote sustainable work and growth within the movement. For this, the Global Council sets accountability to empower communities in an equitable way.

This series of buzzwords can be deleted.

1. The Global Council shall advise the Wikimedia Foundation on fundraising efforts to secure financial resources for the Wikimedia movement, in alignment with its mission and values.

   This should read, in accordance with Recommendation 1: The Global Council shall set (and enforce compliance with) a fundraising policy that applies to all fundraising affiliates. It shall advise the fundraising affiliates and oversee the overall resource development strategy of the movement.

2. The Global Council shall establish standards and guidelines for the equitable dissemination of funds to support Wikimedia projects, communities, affiliates, hubs, and other movement entities.

   We recommend replacing the term dissemination with distribution, which signifies strategic intent rather than a scattering approach to resource allocation. This purpose should have the following addition: ..., and shall establish a funding distribution mechanism to assure equitable, transparent and strategic distribution of movement funds.

3. The Global Council shall ensure inclusive and transparent decision-making processes, providing guidance and exercising limited executive responsibilities over specific cross-movement entities.

   This could read more concretely: The Global Council shall develop and enforce standards and policies for inclusive, subsidiarity-based and transparent decision-making.

   The second part of the sentence is unclear and should either be specified or deleted.

4. The Global Council shall create or modify committees for the overall governance of affiliates and hubs.

   This needs to be rephrased, since affiliates and hubs are independently governed entities and are not governed by the global council. It could state: The Global Council shall establish committees to ensure affiliate compliance with this charter and other global policies, as well as to guide the overall affiliate strategy.

   There will be other standing committees needed, however, so it is unclear why the power to create committees in this purpose statement is limited to the affiliate issue.

5. The Global Council shall create channels to simplify access to resources (financial, human, knowledge) for individuals and empower communities in an equitable way.

   This is weak and vague and could be strengthened by not using incremental or aspirational language ("simplify") that refers to a status quo baseline at the time of the writing. Better: ensure equitable, transparent, quick access to resources.

6. The Global Council shall ensure accountability by setting processes and reporting standards.

   Here, as with other purposes above, the question that has not been answered is: Does the Global Council just set standards or does it also enforce them? If the latter is the idea, the wording should be consistent throughout the charter.

The text lists a large number of decision categories: language projects, sister projects, affiliates, hubs, to name a few. For each, it designs a separate set of rules, committees and processes for establishment and un-establishment. This will result in too many committees, and too many different processes, all resting on a small number of volunteers.

Wikimedia Deutschland questions if this is necessary, and finds too much detail in each description. As stated before, the preferable home for detailed process descriptions are policies, because they might have to be adapted and changed over time. It is the purpose of a global governance body to set policies, review and adapt them (and, if so equipped with capacities in the form of a secretariat or office, also assure their enforcement). The charter on the other hand should contain high level language that the movement does not plan to change for the foreseeable future.

The language would create a body of volunteers with basically a full time job for these volunteers, and the need to meet at a high frequency. This is not feasible nor sustainable (see our fundamental comments on "structure" below).

Committees existing currently and in the past are perceived as dysfunctional, political and lack trust of many community members. There are many reasons for this - which would have been worthwhile to explore before drafting. Some of the reasons we suspect are that they are only advisory bodies to the WMF, that they rely on unremunerated volunteer time, and that their work and communications are often done by WMF staff.

Wikimedia Deutschland instead recommends a Global Council that is the highest governance body of the movement, that is structured in the form of a General Assembly (see below) and that has decision-making power over three areas: policy-making, budget and strategy.

The Global Council will have its decisions prepared by two types of committees: standing committees and ad-hoc committees.

• Standing committees coordinate and advise the Global Council on
  • (1) affiliation, including hubs
  • (2) Wikimedia sister and language projects
  • (3) Technology
  • (4) Revenue and Resources
• Ad-hoc committees are formed and dissolved as needed to prepare decisions and draft policies. They will in each case do this through a standardized, transparent process, regulated by a general policy that assures stakeholder participation in decision making.

Wikimedia Deutschland commends the inclusion of the Technology Council in the draft, and the request to provide input. In our view, the Tech Council is one of the standing committees of the Global Council. The language here seems to reflect a somewhat limited understanding of our tech environment, assuming a standard provider-user relationship, with the WMF providing and the communities and users consuming. This is not an accurate view of today’s situation, let alone doing justice to the movement strategy aspirations for the future. Software development already today happens in many places in the movement, with chapters such as Wikimedia Deutschland, Indonesia, Brazil, Sweden and others as well as volunteer developers working on the products. Very active communities are weighing in on their priorities around tech development. Software development likely will further decentralize and democratize. Creating an additional advisory body to the WMF teams, channeled through the Global Council, will not be effective. The members of the Tech Council should reflect the current tech stakeholders as well as assure that communities with higher tech barriers are included. The list of responsibilities of the Tech Council is a good start but should exclude development plans, which are better left to those stakeholders implementing the tech strategy. The Tech Council should also assure that tech development is in alignment with the values of the charter around equitable access and the inclusion of marginalized and disabled communities.

There is a reasonable assumption that the entity that holds legal responsibility over the platforms will have to have a level of control over site policies. To better understand the disagreement between WMF Legal and the MCDC here it would be helpful to list which policies this section refers to.

• The Global Council and WMF will collaborate on processes to coordinate Movement fundraising.

  As stated, aspirational ("will collaborate on processes") and vague language such as this does not belong in a charter. More problematic however, is that this language is opposed to Recommendation 1 and Recommendation 4.

• The Global Council, with support from the Wikimedia Foundation, will develop a policy that applies to all Movement entities around fundraising. This will include rules that can be adapted to local context and needs.

  This second point is in accordance with Recommendation 1, which states:

• Create a policy applying to all Movement entities to outline rules for revenue generation and to define what may be adapted to local context and needs. This policy will balance sustainability, our mission and values, and financial independence. In accordance with this policy, we will:
  • Distribute the responsibility of revenue generation across Movement entities and develop local fundraising skills to increase sustainability.
  • Increase revenue and diversify revenue streams across the Movement, while ensuring funds are raised and spent in a transparent and accountable manner.

However, the "support from the Wikimedia Foundation" should be removed. All movement stakeholders who are or will be involved in a decentralized fundraising movement should be involved in creating the policy.

Related to the Global Council, this means that the Council - or a representative committee empowered by it - will draft this policy, and that the enforcement of the policy lies with the council. The council should not be responsible for coordinating fundraising, as this, based on the principle of subsidiarity, lies within the responsibilities and powers of each fundraising affiliate, including the Foundation. That said, the fundraising policy should of course require fundraising affiliates to coordinate their efforts and not compete for funding.

All the charter needs to say here is:

The Council will establish a Revenues and Resources Committee, responsible for enforcing the fundraising policy, the movement fundraising strategy and the resource distribution agreement.

• The Global Council will not raise funds in any way.

While it would be preferable if the council did not have to fundraise, if this is the case, then the charter should state how the council is funded in ways to assure its independence and accountability to its stakeholders (or members). We recommend that this statement be removed, since there may be opportunities or risks in the future that we cannot foresee now. That said, we believe that the Global Council should be funded by contributions from the fundraising affiliates and hopefully will never have to fundraise.

• The Global Council will issue a recommendation to the WMF Board of Trustees with regards to the criteria for assigning the share of total central revenue to community general funds, regional fund committees, and any cross-regional grant dissemination.

Again, the language in here describes a process - in a convoluted way, the process of policy making. While we agree that there should be a policy, or rather, a written agreement on resource allocation, we believe that the GC should have more power than suggesting criteria for how the WMF spends funds. The draft assigns an advisory role, while Recommendation 4 is pretty clear that Resource Allocation should be guided by the Movement through the Global Council. In the recommendation, the GC has oversight, not an advisory function:

• In the near future, the Movement should play a guiding role in resource allocation. The processes for allocation should be designed through consultation and described in the Movement Charter. This transition to Movement-led guidance should occur in a timely fashion.
• The Global Council should oversee the implementation of the guidance given by the Movement as described in the Movement Charter, including recommendations for funds allocation to regional and thematic hubs and other Movement organizations while recognizing the involved organizations’ legal and fiduciary obligations.

Further, the draft assumes that "central revenue" will continue to sit with the WMF, which is opposed to Movement Strategy Recommendation 1 quoted above. In a movement with decentralized fundraising, as the Recommendation and Wikimedia Deutschland both envision, the fundraising affiliates, including the WMF, would contribute to a "central fund", after deducting their operative, fundraising and program costs. The global council, or its committee mentioned above, would then create an agreement among contributors around resource allocation and annually approve a budget that assures redistribution to non-fundraising affiliates and other areas of need.

• Regional fund committees will report to the Global Council to demonstrate activity that is effective, equitable, and accountable.

The draft assumes that the current model of regional committees will be extended for the same amount of time that the Movement Charter is in effect. To our knowledge, the model has not been proven yet, and therefore the language here should be more general, as the movement iterates and adapts subsidiarity in decision making and accountability around funds. Here too, amendable policies such as a funds accountability policy or agreement will be the best mechanism. This could be signed by the recipients upon receipt of resources from the central Movement fund.

Summing all this up for the charter level, the fiduciary responsibility of the Council in the charter could simply read:

The Global Council approves an annual movement budget developed by the Revenue & Resources Committee, and in accordance with the resource distribution agreement and the fund accountability policy.

(For more information on how similar NGO federations regulate and practice resource redistribution without grantmaking, please refer to our research paper.)

In this draft, the Global Council has too many operative tasks for an entity which is not even supposed to have its own staff. Mediation and similar functions should not be added to its already long list of roles, and these roles should be assured by external, neutral parties.

We are not commenting on the details of the models, membership, election and selection rules laid out in this draft. Again, there is too much detail in the draft - at risk to be required to be changed frequently. And the body created through this process in both scenarios described here will have the weaknesses we listed above in the General Remarks, due to its small size, enormity of tasks, convoluted decision making for each topic area, and last but not least, lack of proper, independent staff. Finally, the voting processes sketched out above will not assure representation of those communities that will provide the growth, diversification and relevance of our movement in the future.

That said, Wikimedia Deutschland believes that a fundamentally different model is required, which is also simpler in its design:

The model of a General Assembly (GA) with members representing the stakeholders of a movement is a proven, widely established practice in most large NGO federations. The GA can comprise a larger number of people necessary to reflect diversity of geography, projects, affiliates, and communities and represent these. The Wikimedia General Assembly could further be enriched by appointed free knowledge ecosystem partners providing expertise and more neutral viewpoints. The membership model would assure that marginalized communities are represented, and projects have their voice heard and incorporated. The Wikimedia Foundation would be a voting member.

Members of the GA can be elected or appointed, based on the capacity, constituency and governance system of the stakeholder sending them. This aligns with the Principle of Subsidiarity from our movement’s strategy, and pays respect to the decision making rights of the members, projects and affiliates of our movement.

The Assembly itself only gathers once a year, to make big decisions, such as approving policies, strategy and budget. This GA is supported by an elected board, staff and committees both standing and ad-hoc. The preparatory and groundwork for the GA making decisions is done by the committees, and the more time pressing decisions are made by the board. Staff works in a secretariat and supports the other parts of the system.

Wikimedia Deutschland recommends that the MCDC pay some attention to the above proven practices, rather than building complicated and inefficient systems with overburdened volunteers on top of, or attached to the current systems and inequitable power structures.

Down the road, this model would likely mean that the Global Council, now a General Assembly, would incorporate as an international nonprofit entity.

Coming back to the point on the WMF above: Having the WMF be a voting member of the GA assures that WMF remains a stakeholder and an eye-level participant in all matters of a global movement. This avoids a situation where WMF and Global Council become completely separate entities, or worse, adversaries. This would stifle and slow down decision-making even more.

In addition, the WMF could, per the by-laws of the ensuing entity, have a guaranteed seat on the international board. This would assure that the governance of both entities are connected at the highest level. It pays due to the fact that the WMF will retain central functions and liabilities, such as trademarks, donor relationships and servers. This also reduces the risk of the WMF having to comply with decisions made by the Global Council it had no say in developing. There are practice examples of international NGOs and US charitable organizations regulating their relationship through a Memorandum of Agreement and by-law articles aimed at minimizing the risks for all parties. This could be developed through legal consultation.

Wikimedia Deutschland strongly urges the MCDC, the WMF and all stakeholders to consider the model of a General Assembly (likely followed by an international membership organization). It would assure equitable representation, clear, democratic decision making paths, accountability along logical lines, and a workable practice in which volunteers are not overtaxed. Much of the policy level language in this draft could be transferred to the respective committees and policies.

The Wikimedia movement does not have to reinvent the wheel, but can adopt it to match its needs. It can learn from the many international movements and organizations who have walked this path before us, some for more than a century, and that have already gone through several iterations of their charters and improved their governance practices. --Alice Wiegand (talk) 17:50, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Lyzzy's comment on behalf of Wikimedia Deutschland does a phenomenal job of detailing the challenges with the document as is written now. I fully support and endorse WM-DE's comment.

In particular, I strongly agree with the sentiment that this draft is not at all what I was expecting, and it does not feel in line with the vast amount of Movement Strategy work that's been done to date. Without the core of decentralization (and the GC as a general assembly) this feels like another bureaucratic committee that only adds complexity to an already complex system, and does not solve any of our current problems.

I strongly encourage MCDC members to review the excellent research papers WM-DE has produced (linked above), and return with a draft more in line with our goal of evolving the movement structures. Liannadavis (talk) 21:13, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

I know that a fair number of my colleagues have already begun their travel process so may not be available to comment right now. Lyzzy and WMDE, thank you very much for this detailed feedback. I am certain that there will be a further response in the coming weeks. Risker (talk) 03:48, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

Just noting in passing that the cost of operating this model would be roughly equivalent to the the total cost of all conferences currently supported by the WMF (about 3+ million USD) just for the annual GA meeting (travel, hotel, food, conference facilities), with perhaps some in-person committee meetings thrown in. Given that income is pretty much flatlined right now, it's relevant to talk about fiscal trade-offs. I'm not saying it isn't possible, but it would mean discontinuing current large-scale international events like Wikimania and Hackathons, at a minimum, and probably would mean little to no central funding for regional conferences. Some of this depends on the size of the General Assembly, but as a rough guide, the average cost should be calculated at 4000 to 5000 USD per person for each person to attend the GA meeting, especially since we are working hard to be more inclusive. (I'll leave folks to do the math themselves.) Risker (talk) 04:48, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, @Risker, for your thoughtful comment. We can respond in more detail next week, but I quickly wanted to note that I think we cannot just compare the costs of a General Assembly to the current event costs. Yes, there are costs for bringing the representatives together, but we might also safe a lot of money on other processes. Just think about the time and energy spent by all stakeholders currently on decisions, programs, changes, policies, etc. started by the WMF that people oppose and that need to be pulled back. The hope is that with a more representative system, and a transparent, well-known participation process, decisions will be better, and thus more accepted and more sustainable. Nicole Ebber (WMDE) (talk) 08:50, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

I certainly agree that we should consider financials and not be cavalier about movement funds. However, the whole point of Movement Strategy isn't to lock us into perpetuating the way we're doing things now ("we can only spend 3ドルM of movement funds for conferences"), but to *rethink* how are we doing things to further our mission. If a General Assembly helps us meet the vision of Movement Strategy, then let's prioritize it for new spending, and not just keep ourselves locked into artificial "this is the conferences budget" decisions of the past. We should rethink the *entire* movement's budget in light of Movement Strategy to make sure spending is allocated appropriately. Immediately saying we'd have to cut conferences is too much of thinking in the same paradigm we currently have, which (I hope) we all agree will *not* get us to our vision for 2030. Liannadavis (talk) 21:21, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

There are quite a few assumptions in that reply, Risker, and I'm not sure which data they are based on:

• 3 Million USD for a conference is based on which experiences? There will be 150 participants at the CEE Meeting in a month's time and the conference has a budget of 122,000 USD, so there are ways and possibilities of keeping the costs low. It is also thinkable that (with decentralised fundraising) affiliates who fundraise a certain amount are expected to pay their own attendance costs, as is already the case for WMDE when it comes to regional conferences.
• Flatlining income would require more data at this point. It is also not clear how the current fundraising possibilites have been maximised, when WMF fundraising campaigns are run in wealthy European countries during the summer holiday season. Surely that can be done better.
• but it would mean discontinuing current large-scale international events like Wikimania and Hackathons, at a minimum, and probably would mean little to no central funding for regional conferences - again, what is this based on? There is more than enough money available, regional meetings cost the WMF a fraction of its total budget. I really dislike this mentality of sowing uncertainty where there is no reason to do so. Is that why the draft looks the way it does?
• Putting out all these statements and then letting others "do the maths" is not good enough, especially after spending two years in order to even get to the point where we discuss these kind of issues. Philip Kopetzky (talk) 21:23, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

For a maybe closer example (as the CEE meeting benefits from most participants living in the same region), see Wikimania/Comparative. Financial transparency of Wikimanias has degraded over time, but back when budgets were still published, events 3x time the size of the GA cost around 300ドルK. That probably undersells the costs (there was usually some sort of sponsorship deal, some of the participants were local, participation was heavily biased towards developed countries) but I'm skeptical that that would make up for a difference of 15x.

Part of it is that the WMF just got a bit too comfortable with having and spending lots of money over time, and if we really expect scarcity in the coming years, maybe some of those changes should be reconsidered. You don't actually need four-star hotels for all event participants, or a separate hotel room for every person, or 100ドル/day per diems.

But also, I am not sure a General Assembly really needs to meet physically. You'd probably have smaller bodies (committees, maybe a board of some sort) take up the the executive roles because 15-20 people are the upper limit for meaningful discourse; it'd probably be enough for those bodies to meet physically a few times a year, with the GC mostly being focused on selection of the bodies and reviewing and approving recommendations. Tgr (talk) 01:26, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

I would be interested to know if the MCDC has considered this kind of model already? To my mind the MCDC should be working by developing different options at the level of granularity of this proposal, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each and then inviting discussion on them. The workings of the MCDC are not very transparent so it's really difficult to tell if that is happening or not. But this is very much the way of working that the MCDC should adopt (really, it must adopt, if there is going to be any chance of a complete Charter which is ever ratified = we are clearly not on that path now). Chris Keating (The Land) (talk) 10:27, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Currently only the last of the listed responsibilities is Mediation. As I have written before: The one responsibility the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees neeeds to cede most to a more representative body is conflict resolution. Judging by the unusually constructive discussions surrounding last years fundraising banners on enwiki this body should have also the ability to withhold funding from the WMF. HHill (talk) 07:02, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

I have been on vacation so sorry for joining the conversation a little late. First a generic disclaimer: my views expressed here are mine, and do not necessarily reflect those of Wikimedia Nederland. I also want to thank the MCDC for the huge amount of work that they have done over the last 2 years, it is not easy and maybe we have given de MCDC an impossible task by organising things the way we have.

Normally when drafting a movement charter like this one would start with the broad goals... what are we trying to accomplish here? The movement strategy process and especially the work of the Roles and Responsibilities working group did give a baseline of what we as a movement wanted to achieve (some said that the recommendations did not go far enough in distributing the ‘power" within the movement but lets leave that aside for a minute )

So reading the current drafts makes me wonder what happened? One of the most important aspects of the recommendations was the equity in decision making within our movement. reducing this by (for example) reducing the global council to an advisory body is not something that I had expected to read here. Our current movement structure has major problems in that it gives older affiliates much more advantages than newer entities and more importantly: we do not use the potential of all the local knowledge and energy in order to achieve our mission. These are just two examples of things I would hope we are going to solve in the Movement Charter.

Arguably the members of our movement are the most valuable part of our Wikimedia movement (yes: more important than our brand or content). This is our chance to change the dynamic and give everyone a chance to help decide on the future of our movement, rather than reducing it and continuing the status quo.

This is not about reducing the Foundation to an administrative body. There are things that only the Foundation or Affiliates can do in an effective manner and I am a big fan of the dedicated employees that we have within our movement worldwide. But giving all members in our movement a voice in the future decision making process and distributing our ability to realize our potential are arguably the most important things we have to achieve.

And yes... there are a LOT of practical details to work out once you have the broad framework down is a lot of work, but at this point it seems like the drafting committee is working on the premise of "how do we make the current system work (marginally) better".

Looming over this discussion are legal issues. But the current mode seems to be "does this fit in the way the Foundation is currently operating" and  "is it legally acceptable for the Foundation to write this down?". This leads to a lot of risk averse behavior. A better attitude reflects in the words of a previous General Counsel of the Foundation "tell me what you want to achieve and I will try to help find a way to legally make this work".

And it has been said before: we are not that unique in most cases. There are a lot of worldwide organisations that have managed to create a structure that respects both responsibilities to donors (as an example) with decision making. Schiste’s excellent draft RACI matrix is a great example of how you can have this discussion while drawing inspiration from other movements. WMDE’s papers on governance and resource distribution show several real-life applicable practices and models.

When the discussion "gets hard" it is tempting to go into practical details... which is something I am observing here. That means that the arguments on the draft text are also often reduced to practical details (such as operational cost and legal review of specific issues). As an example, while I respect the hard work, I find it hard to focus on the ratification process of the Charter when I see that major issues have not been tackled.

Thanks to WMDE and others for the detailed responses. I think a lot of us were expecting a different outcome of the drafting process. Rather than continue down this road let’s take this opportunity to (radically) improve the process and the outcome of this initiative. A lot of valuable input has been given, and I am sure many more people still have contributions to the discussion which is good so that we get multiple perspectives from all around the world.

It is unfortunate that some of these discussions will take place "in person" at Wikimania without everyone being able to join, but I hope that we can make progress in the next couple of days on these topics. As some would say: "not only CAN we do better, we MUST do better". This is our chance to get this right. Jan-Bart (talk) 09:14, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

This came up in an IRL discussion with MCDC members today and figured it would be worth mentioning here. The potential legal limits of transferring powers and responsibilities from the WMF to the Global Council came up already during the recommendation writing phase; this is why the recommendation text contains the sentence ''In those cases in which the legal limitations of the organizational structure cannot be overcome, establish a social contract to allow those bodies to make legally non-binding but socially binding decisions.'' (The model we had in mind was WMF board elections. Legally, new WMF board members are selected by the WMF board itself; the community election is just a way to recommend someone to the board. But in practice there's a clear expectation that the board will honor the results of the election; if they just went and selected a different candidate, the community would see it as a serious breach of trust.)

I feel the conversations above are too focused on legally binding vs. not legally binding. While it is useful to investigate whether some apparent legal limitations can be overcome, I think the more important question is whether the decisions of the Global Council on a given topic are considered binding or not. Even if the WMF needs to retain ultimate authority on e.g. trademarks, the Movement Charter can still act as a binding social contract that requires the WMF to follow the Global Council's decisions. The WMF could break that contract in emergency situations (when it believes following a decision would create unacceptable legal risk), but it would have to face the reputational consequences of being seen as abusing its power if it refused to obey a decision and couldn't convince the community that that refusal was really necessary.

IMO such a setup could work just as well as a formal, legal transfer of powers. For very risky powers (such as the trademarks), maybe it's even better to have the WMF as a failsafe - we have two decades of experience with it and while it is currently a single point of failure for the movement, it is a fairly robust one. (Imagine transferring the trademarks to a new organization representing the Global Council, and then that organization turning out to be completely disfunctional for some reason, e.g. not being able to reach quorum.) Tgr (talk) 10:09, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

@Tgr - speaking initially just for myself, I think this route has significant potential merit. Speaking more broadly, the MCDC has done some degree of discussion in this vein but not yet detailed consideration. It could also pair well with the other feedback received, giving a possible solution for raised issues. Thank you for the highly constructive feedback. 06:10, 16 August 2023 (UTC) Nosebagbear (talk) 06:10, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

I interpret the proposal as

The BoT delegates its authority over issues related to communities and volunteers to a new body, called the Advisory Council. BoT delegates decision power and control over most of existing bodies (with supporting staff) that exist in the area today. What is not delegated are global fundraising support bodies, brand issue and legal issues especially related to our brand and also not delegated are some bodies like Trust and safety.

in contrast there are many, like WMDE who expected more

Control at least partial over fundraising and a council with 100-200 members to meet annually and make overall decision for more or les the whole movement, including some BoT and WMF issues

For myself I am happy with the proposal, and do not support the other concept, we wikipedians are doers not talkers, and a gernal body to met annualy only give the talkers unduly influence over us doers, who do fine in existing bodies Anders Wennersten (talk) 07:21, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

In US government, and other democracies, the goal of separation of duties is not to have efficient decision making. The goal of the right Movement Charter is neither efficient decision making, but more likely separation of powers. The purpose remains to create and distribute an encyclopedia for. Unpaid volunteer editors create the encyclopedia. Our movement consist of individual editors, project communities, informal groups and formal groups, such as user groups, thematic organizations and chapters. Together they are looking for a governance structure for the movement as a whole. In my vision the Wikimedia Foundation - which does not have members - distributes the encyclopedia by keeping the servers running, retain trademarks and legal. Anything else can and should be transferred to a new legal entity with a Global Council, which will be a membership organization with a general assembly. In the future the Global Council will pay the Wikimedia Foundation to host the websites. The source of income of the Global Council will be (banner) fundraising, executed decentrally by chapters - and preferably there will be a chapter in every country, other affiliates, and maybe as well by project communities. My view is equity in decision making, inclusion of currently underrepresented groups, and empower individuals and (informal) groups not only to edit a wiki, but also to have decision power in, but not limited to, fund raising, spending of money, software development. The current drafts of the MCDC under deliver on the promises of the strategy recommendations. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 07:46, 16 August 2023 (UTC)