Documents from the chapters meeting

I found some time to put together a draft:

Task force/Community Health/Implementation

Wanted to get some feedback from a few people, including you, before I tried to get more feedback from the village pump. Anything in the implementation plan that seems outlandish, or unclear?

Thanks for this! We can use this as a model to activate volunteers around the strategic plan as a whole.

I made some changes to your page. First, I merged the Board and Staff columns into one Wikimedia Foundation column. Second, I moved the Volunteers column and made it first. Third, I added a column for Wikimedia Chapters.

The Foundation is already moving to do many of the things in its columns, and we should figure out a nice way to indicate that. Many of the things in both columns could also go under the Chapters column.

We've got some easy icons:  Doing... and Done for example. I dropped one of them in.

Thanks guys! You'd know better than I would how to best organize it, so if the line between the foundation and the staff is worth removing then that definitely should be reflected. Not sure what role the chapters will have in the community health recommendations, though. It might make sense for some of the other task forces, but not really for this one. Maybe not thinking it through, though.

BTW, thanks for marking down what's being done. Again, you guys know much more than the rest of us. Feel free to jump in with further changes or criticisms.

As an aside, I hope the next evolution of strategy wiki will be to organize and activate volunteers. So being able to mark items as Doing and Done will be a critical aspect of this. Philippe has been thinking about how to structure this, and I hope others will join in. Probably Village Pump is a better place for that, although starting the conversation here is fine.

As much as us volunteers have a decent link to the community, nothing would activate the community as much as Jimbo or other "official" representatives of the foundation. But that kind of call-to-action has to be at the last step, when we're ready to take the recommendations to the end.

At the next step, it makes sense to organize and activate volunteers. But how we do it (and how much) depends on what we're trying to activate them to do.

On a basic level I see the chapters as another way for people to connect with each other and they provide alternative methods of communication for users. So, I see it as a way to address some issues related to community health. It also could be a vehicle for WMF volunteers in various wikis to organize in order to better collaborate across wiki or with outside organizations.

I agree with this. I think outreach in general -- both internally and externally -- is a great role for Chapters to play. The German Wikimedia Chapter gave birth to the idea of Wikipedia Academies, and they could play a great role in distributing swag as well.

I guess I'm still not clear on what it is that Chapters do. My understanding is that they were just meet-ups for active volunteers. I wasn't aware that they had more/different responsibilities than the rest of us online folks.

My understanding is that there has been growing interest in better utilizing chapters. This would be maximizing on the areas where they have been successful already, and looking for other ways that they would enhance WMF.

I suggest reading the Chapter reports for a snapshot of their activities.

I created a similar table for the local language task force: Task_force/Local_language_projects/Implementation

Yo, Randomran.

You are really keeping the store running :)

At least we defined what we think that should be implemented. Now whatever it's implemented and how it's implemented is left to each respective wiki.

Thanks! And I definitely agree that the recommendations need to be general enough that there is room for each project to work out the details. But they also need to be specific enough that they focus on the right priorities.