The Wikimedia Foundation sometimes calls for global community conversations. Every time it has done this in the past, I feel like the outcome has been invalid and misleading because the Wikimedia Foundation spends a lot of money to influence the conversation and also they document the outcome in a biased way without sufficient community input. The consequences of the bias have not been too problematic to date, but it is an abuse of Wikipedia’s democratic ideals, and every time this happens the foundation is advancing a precedent which harms the integrity of the Wikimedia Foundation demoralizes the Wikimedia community, and demonstrates poor governance to the world. There is an inexpensive solution to this problem: funds from the Wikimedia Movement should sponsor basic communication infrastructure to support the Wikimedia community in speaking for and representing itself. For as long as paid Wikimedia Foundation staff speak for the community, there will always be conflict of interest, and there will always be problems. Below I say more about this.
The particular problem happening right now is that the Wikimedia Foundation is asking for community comment in designing the ratification process for the Wikimedia Movement Charter. Here is the background on this: some years ago the Wikimedia Foundation organized a global community conversation to develop a Wikimedia Movement Strategy through the year 2030. The Movement Strategy identified a set of goals. The plan for manifesting those goals is to allocate Wikimedia Movement resources, money and otherwise, to agents who can achieve them. Allocating movement resources is a big deal, because the Wikimedia Movement brings in a huge sum of money; a five-year budget is a billion United States dollars, and lots of people want that money. There are two main camps asking for money – paid staff of the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wikimedia community members who have built Wikipedia into a project which can attract donations measured in billions of dollars. The process proposed for deciding who gets the money is to write a constitution, now called the Wikimedia Movement Charter, which defines roles and responsibilities for different players. Presumably the Charter would also allocate power, which means allocating money to enable the performance of the roles it defines. A number of conflicts arise between Wikimedia Foundation staff and the Wikimedia community; I could describe those, but in narrowly thinking only about global community conversations like this one, the problem is that the Wikimedia Foundation tends to make proposals which grant itself more power and more money, and then designs global conversation processes to validate the proposals it puts forth. Historically for such global conversations, the Wikimedia Foundation invests millions of dollars from Wikimedia Movement funds to develop and communicate its positions, whereas there is no particular budget for the Wikimedia community to host its own conversations, and communicate its own points. The Wikimedia Foundation’s theory of government is that the Wikimedia community is a functionally limitless volunteer labor pool, and that anytime the foundation calls for a conversation, then whatever crowdsourced volunteer response rises is the will of the Wikimedia volunteer community of stakeholders. This is an error; for many reasons, it was never reasonable to believe that Wikipedia community members are capable of running global governance without paid staff community administrative support, like conversation facilitators. In practice, conversation methods like the one for ratification are heavily weighted in favor of the side that spends money. If the Wikimedia Foundation spends a million dollars on its own staff and consultants to communicate a position, when the evidence of grant funding for global community conversation is something like US$100,000, then I feel that the power imbalance is so great that the results are unreliable. At best, reported results may present points on which both sides agree, but when the foundation has one position and the community takes another, then with power imbalance like this the communication at the end of the process inappropriately favors the foundation. The solution to correct this problem is a re-allocation of the communication budget to cut money from the foundation and grant it to community members. I am not sure how much money is in play here, but just to compare, in 2020 the Wikimedia Foundation spent about US$2 million dollars on a branding conversation in which the Wikimedia community felt that the Wikimedia Foundation and their consulting firm Snohetta spent most to advance the foundation’s position in opposition to the community’s position. Organizations like Snohetta sell communication services which produce documentary evidence of consensus; in that case my read of the community review was that the consultancy’s publications were fantasy propaganda telling of community support when in fact only opposition existed. The largest Wikimedia community protest to date was about this rebranding, and is centered in the petition called COLOR or Community Open Letter On Renaming. I am giving that example as a case when the Wikimedia Foundation spent money in an effort to publicize Wikimedia community support on a point which completely lacked that community support. This ratification process is different in that the community is not in opposition, but still, if the community did oppose all the resources are in place for the foundation to do as it pleases until and unless volunteers invest their personal labor into a massive protest.
Part of the routine injustice in this and similar community consultations is that the Wikimedia Foundation fails to express awareness that calling for community conversation is an immense labor burden beyond the capacity of Wikimedia community volunteers to organize. This WMF call for the community to ratify the charter requires a spontaneously organized, crowdsourced, global, multilingual, representative consensus-making process which appears by WMF request and without sponsorship. Somehow in the Wikimedia platform the WMF fantasizes or wishes that such organization could happen for free, but it does not, and it never has. Community conversation is possible if and only if the Wikimedia Foundation sponsors it with money to communities, especially to lower and middle income countries and underrepresented demographics. I propose that a transparent accounting of money awarded by the Wikimedia Foundation to Wikimedia community organizations be a metric for measuring the extent of validity and the legitimacy of the Movement Charter Ratification Process, and similar global conversations. Here is what counts: grants to community groups where there is public on-wiki evidence of community participation in discussions. Here is what does not count for this metric: money spent on Wikimedia Foundation paid staff doing anything for community groups, such as speaking for them, representing them, organizing them, training them, or directing them to use technology.
This ratification methodology lacks community confirmation that volunteer crowdsourcing of the requested conversation is feasible. The Wikimedia Foundation regularly organizes rituals with the appearance of democracy without doing the necessary checks to ensure that the communication infrastructure is in place to actually host a conversation of this sort. Community participation is greatest when Wikimedia Foundation staff set the agenda for discussion, and that is problematic too, especially for participation from Lower and Middle Income countries were there are problematic connections between community support for Wikimedia Foundation staff proposals and improved chances to access other Wikimedia Foundation resources such as grants. Too many times I have seen paid staff of the Wikimedia Foundation assume that the labor pool of volunteers is so large that they need not measure it, and that they can safely assume that whatever response comes from a call for comments is representative. This is not the case! The Wikimedia Foundation should account for its consumption of volunteer labor and hours, which it does not! Neither is the Wikimedia Foundation aware of how much volunteer time it consumes, nor does it attempt to estimate how many volunteer hours a conversation like this requires, nor is there any estimate of how many volunteer hours the global crowdsourced community has to give! There will be a reaction to this call for comments, but with our current community infrastructure and the Wikimedia Foundation proposed methodology, good democracy for a community-based ratification is not a possible outcome.
Yes, correct, community conversation is the way, and yes, correct, collaboration with chapters and thematic organizations is also an effective strategy for organizing conversation among stakeholder communities, but it is not possible to organize so many people so quickly for such complicated discussions without some sponsorship of local staff, non-WMF, community paid organizers. I wish that the WMF could sponsor communication infrastructure to be permanently in place for these discussions because we need them several times a year, perpetually. There is great overestimation among WMF staff about the limits of community infrastructure. Have mercy for the volunteers, please. Assign a budget to community conversation and be public and transparent about this resource investment. Also, Wikimedia Foundation staff should publish an estimate of how many volunteer labor hours they expect this process to consume, and ask community groups to report back on the labor burden.
Here is another small practice which we could implement, which would be helpful: The correct methodology includes each community organization tracks the number of labor hours its decision makers spent in deliberating the choice. As an example, a typical time investment for such decisions in the United States is that 5 community volunteers will plan a community discussion for 10 hours each, then in a mix of live and on-wiki discussion, about 50 other people discuss and consider for an average of an hour. The total labor investment to that point is 100 hours. Beyond that, there is still need for staff administrators to archive, organize, and summarize the conversation, and that could take another 20 hours to sort plus, plus another 10 hours to review by small committee, then get another 20 hours to circulate for final community approval. Depending on the wiki community group, the staff investment in all of this could be from 20-100 hours, depending on whether the staff is professional and part of an existing community versus first-time and in need of training, and trying to communicate this to a group of stakeholders who are not organized as a community. I think this amount of discussion and labor would be typical for most wiki community organizations which had a good democratic decision making process. Unfortunately also, most wiki community organizations are unprepared and unsupported to do this.