Movement Strategy and Governance/Newsletter/5

Welcome to the fifth issue of Movement Strategy and Governance News (formerly known as Universal Code of Conduct News)! The newsletter distributes relevant news and events about the Movement Charter, Universal Code of Conduct, Movement Strategy Implementation grants, Board elections and other relevant topics. The purpose of this revamped newsletter is to help Wikimedians stay involved with the different projects and activities going on within the broad Movement Strategy and Governance team of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The MSG Newsletter is scheduled for quarterly deliveries and you can leave feedback or ideas for future issues on the Newsletter talk page. You can also help us by translating the newsletter issues in your languages and sharing the newsletter on your community portals and platforms. More frequent news updates will also be sent weekly or biweekly by the team to cater to Wikimedians who want to closely follow our processes. To receive these updates, please subscribe here.

Thank you for reading and participating!

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Call for Feedback about the Board elections

The Movement Strategy and Governance team invites you to give your feedback on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees elections. This call for feedback went live on 10th January 2022 and will conclude on 16th February 2022. Some of the key questions that need your opinion include the best way to ensure more diverse representation among elected candidates, as well as, how candidates should be involved during the elections.

We encourage and welcome you to help in organizing local conversations around this in your communities. For any assistance regarding this or to get further clarifications on this process, please contact the Movement Strategy and Governance team on Meta, on Telegram, or via email at msgwikimedia.org.

Universal Code of Conduct Ratification

The work on the Universal Code of Conduct is moving forward! The UCoC aims to establish a baseline of acceptable behaviour for the global Wikimedia movement. The UCoC came about through the extensive community conversations during the Wikimedia 2030 strategy process. The first phase of the UCoC process was concluded in December 2020.

In 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation asked communities about how to enforce the Universal Code of Conduct in this second phase of the consultations. Some participants asked that community approval be a part of this process. The volunteer drafting committee is currently working on the revised draft of the enforcement guidelines. This should be ready for community vote in March 2022. Read more about the Universal Code of Conduct.

Movement Strategy Implementation Grants

The Movement strategy Implementation Grants remain open to everyone! As we continue to review several interesting proposals, we encourage and welcome more proposals and ideas that target a specific initiative from the Movement Strategy recommendations. Hypothetical examples of projects have been provided and that anyone can consider implementing. In addition to these examples provided, support is available for developing grant proposals and ideas within the Community of Practice on grants. This support includes finding potential partners to collaborate on a project, or technical assistance with drafting and submitting your proposal.

To increase awareness on the availability of Movement Strategy Implementation Grants, we held community conversations in the months of November and December where we focused on deepening the understanding of Movement Strategy Implementation, as well as grants available for implementation projects. The community conversations will continue beginning this January, and we invite you to reach out to any MSG facilitator to schedule a conversation with your community members. If you have any questions about Movement Strategy Implementation Grants please contact us at strategy2030wikimedia.org.

The New Direction for the Newsletter

As noted in the previous issue of the UCoC Newsletter, the Movement Strategy and Governance team is envisioning a new direction for this newsletter, as well as the overall approach to communicating with the community. One of the changes that has been implemented is the transition of this newsletter from the sole focus on the Universal Code of Conduct, to topics on the broader Movement Strategy and Governance. This transition is much needed as the UCoC planning phase is nearing its natural conclusion.

Furthermore, in order to ensure adequate quality control and sustainability of this Newsletter, we will be delivering the full newsletter every quarter across all communication channels on all projects. However, we have also developed a more frequent “updates” communication format, which will highlight ongoing engagements that you can be part of. If you would like to receive these short updates from the Movement Strategy and Governance team, please make sure to subscribe here.

Please help us shape the delivery framework and frequency of the MSG Newsletter and Updates by leaving a vote on the Newsletter talkpage.

Diff Blogs

Here are some publications on Diff about the Movement Strategy, movement governance, and related topics which you may find interesting:

Movement Charter Drafting Committee – decisive step to lay the foundation for future movement governance: Kaarel Vaidla, our Process Architect, sharing some insight on how the now-convened Movement Charter Drafting Committee came into existence and will work toward creating one of the most important recommendations of the Wikimedia Strategy process.
Improvements in the Movement Strategy Grants process: Yop Rwang Pam, our Implementation Specialist and Quim Gil, Director of Movement Strategy explaining the recent improvements to the grants program that help our communities and Affiliates implement the Movement Strategy initiatives.
Writing a research report about Wikimedia Hubs: Anass Sedrati of Wikimedia MA User Group sharing the work process behind the recently published research report about a possible Hub for the Arabic-speaking community.
From our colleagues at other departments: the first of several reports from the Communications department’s research that try to understand the audiences of Wikimedia projects, and an upcoming pilot to map the engagement data of the Wikimedia movement from the Global Data and Insights team.