 So welcome to this panel discussion on leadership in Wikimedia. Today we want to introduce it to the work that the Leadership Development Working Group that will be the panel today is going to do and already did. And the plan for this little session is to first spend 10 minutes giving you a bit of an overview of what this group is, and then dedicate the rest of the session to Q&A where you can ask any question that comes to your mind. And for that we'd kindly ask you to put those questions in the chat. So what are we? The initial impulse for the foundation of this group came from the invest in skills and leadership recommendation of the Wikimedia movement strategy 2030. And we've been founded since in June as I'll show you later. We are a global and community driven working group and as such we are quite diverse. So we represent all eight major geographic locations are quite diverse in terms of language, gender and experience in the movement, both in share years of experience and also the roles that we've taken inside the movement. Why do we exist? What's our purpose? We tried to unpack the meaning of leadership for our movement. And so in relationship to the communities and the experiences that we have, because it's quite a complex topic and with a strong cultural variable. In keeping with that we have to understand our communities first, otherwise we can't really develop meaningful plans for developing leadership. And then we want to find a path for leadership development that we can follow. So this is just what derives from this invest in skills and leadership recommendation from the 2030 plan. This is what this group is for. Why leadership? Why is this important? Why did they even come up with this recommendation in the first place? The idea behind this is that investment in people's leadership has shown to successfully boost project efficiency and make movements more sustainable. This is what we hope we can do with leadership. Specifically, we believe that many domains could benefit from this, like just the ongoing participation, resolution of conflict, organizational development, project management, partnership development and many more. So there are a lot of perspectives and applications for this once it's established. So I already gave you the purpose of the group. The group has been set up for, Gilbert, would you please mute yourself? Thanks. We have a tenure of one year, so we were founded in June this year. So in one year from now we've got three goals. The first one is to draw off the definition of leadership, because we need a foundation on which to work. Based on that, we want to develop a plan for implementing leadership in the movement. And for the rest of the time, we want to guide the implementation of set plan, whatever that will mean. This is a bit of a timeline that we had. So as I said before, we started our work in June this year. And first we started setting up the process in which we would work. And in July, we started with the actual work on the goals, because we figured out that the definition was crucial to all the other goals. We started with that and we're almost finished now. So we did a lot of storytelling, building consensus and understanding the different contexts in which leadership develops. Because as I said, leadership is quite complex and there's a strong cultural variable. And we use the diversity in our group to make the most inclusive definition possible. We did that by having weekly discussions. So we met every week. And we also did asynchronous work, as you might expect. So now it's August. We've almost finished making this definition. We are in the final steps of finalizing it. And we'll share it shortly with you so that you can review it. How can you stay involved and updated? So we have a meta-wiki report that will give updates on our work every other month. We also set up a thread in MS Forum. I think yesterday we started our first post to open that. I'm not sure if that's online yet, but this will come if it's not there yet. And we need your feedback. This is crucial to our work. We will publish our definition on meta and you can then post your review there. We'll also take your feedback by other channels like the top page, as I said. Social media, we'll have one-to-one conversations if there is more detailed discussion that you want to have. And we'll also have community calls with more participants, sort of like what we're having right now. And if you want to have a steady inflow of information, you can sign up on meta or send an email to leadershipworkinggroup at wikimedia.org. And now we can use the remainder of the session to answer your questions, whatever they may be. And for that, I'd like to give the imaginary microphone to my colleague, Nitesh and end my overview. Thanks, Jan. Thank you so much for handing over the call to me. Hello, everyone. First of all, I would like to introduce myself quickly. My name is Nitesh, and I belong to Punjab, India. I have been a part of Wikimedia Movement for eight years, and I'm a member of the Punjabi Wikimedia User Group. For the last three years, I'm also working with Center for Internet and Societies Access to Knowledge Program, and I am also one of the leadership development working group members. So now quickly, I would like to thank the Wikimedia organizing and program team who gave us this opportunity to introduce our vision in front of the dedicated participants. I welcome all the panelists from the leadership working group and the audience to contribute to the session. Thank you for joining us, and who are not able to join us, those can watch the recording afterwards. Now we just switch to the session to save our time. Thanks again, Jan, for the brief presentation. It was really amazing. Here we are going to start question answers. So I will ask a few questions to all panelists, and if anybody feels comfortable adding something to the questions or answers, please feel free to add. Also, I request to the audience, please write your questions in the chat box so we can take those questions directly and finish the session on time. And it would be also great if you could also add your username, user group, or region details along with your questions. So I think let's begin with the questions. So welcome again. First of all, I request to all panelists before answering the question, please introduce yourself briefly. And then let us know, why did you personally choose to join this group? This group means leadership development working group. So if I would start from Nada, Nada, are you comfortable to answer and go first? Yeah, it's fine. Hello everyone. My name is Nadal Farra. I'm a doctor from Palestine. I'm a member of the Wikimedia Levant User Group and Wikimedia Heritage. I contribute to medicine and literature and art on Wikimedia, Wikidata, and Wikikomot. I started my Wikimedia journey back in 2018. And I started it this year as an editor, as a workshop organizer. And now I am on the leadership development working group. And I hope this group provides the purpose that it was made for. Thank you everyone. Thank you, Nada. Thank you so much. Goodness, would you like to go next? All right. Thank you, Nityish. And thank you everyone for joining us. I am Goodness, Nityish, from Nigeria. I am a librarian and a member of the Wikimedia User Group. I'm also a member of the Unbox Commission and a member of the leadership development working group. One of the reasons I joined this group is to constitute as a Wikimedia, a state, and gain more experience, certainly to be involved that presents my community. Thank you, Goodness. Francis, can you go ahead? Sure, I can. Hi, everyone. My name is Francis. You come from Valencia. And well, my involvement in this group, I believe it's a natural consequence of my long-time involvement in the Wikimedia movement for more than 40 years now. And as some of you probably know, I was quite involved in the strategy process in the second intervention of the strategy process back in 2019 and 2020. And as we all know, there's a recommendation of the recommendation set, which I believe it was a great outcome of our work back then that recommended us to develop leadership in our movement. I believe that the leadership is something that appeals to many things, such as capacity building, leadership itself, to resilience, to understanding ourselves as a movement, to understanding ourselves better. And this is something that we will develop in our session today. But I believe that there are many, many things to win for us by understanding how leadership is developed in our movement, that we all know that we are a movement of our own. And, you know, we are something very specific in the world. So definitions made by others that fit for us. So that's basically why I joined the team. Thanks, Francesc. Jan, you already introduced yourself, but if you can also let us know why you joined this group, that would be great. Oh, yeah, sure. So first, again, I'm Jan. I'm from Germany. Right now, I'm joining you from lovely Tallinn, actually, because I moved to Estonia and Wikimedia. So Wikimedia, so I think I've joined two years ago, but I haven't been this active over the last year. But I'm a biochemistry student, so I'm mostly involved in science. And why am I in this leadership development? When I read about this recommendation for leadership development, it was already natural for me to join, because I think leadership and soft-skilled development is something that the movement can really benefit from. And I think I did have to bring something to the table there. Thanks, Jan. And your internet is also not stable. You can fix this, please. Okay, Ray, you are the last one. Could you go ahead? Sure. Hello, I am Ray on Wikimedia projects. Go by his name for months. I am a steward, I'm an admin and check user. I'm a meta-wiki and simple English Wikipedia. I'm also a UCOC drafter and now I'm a leadership development working group. I personally chose to join for a handful of reasons. The majority of my work so far in the movement has been exclusively in enforcement processes. I have very minimal experience outside of enforcement processes and stuff like that, and working on something that is much more, I guess, affiliate-focused and sort of like grants-focused and community-development-focused and the more small projects is something that is quite fun, an area that I hope to help out. Thanks, Ray. Thank you, everyone, for your introduction and answering the question. Okay, so Jan talked about 15 volunteers in his presentation. I would like to ask how were members of this group selected? Francis, are you comfortable to take this question? Sure, I am. Yes. Well, when it comes to the membership of the people, I was trying to reply in the chat, of course, we have to jump. Well, if I'm honest, I must say that my involvement in that is that I made a proposal and I was selected. So I don't know the details, let's say, but basically it was an open application process. I believe it was announced everywhere, we would say. And it was reviewed anonymously and indeed in meta, I checked the names of the people who reviewed it. It was a selection of people, some coming from Wikimedia Foundation, some coming from the communities, et cetera. And as I said before, the only thing that I know is, okay, so it seems that my application, what I wrote there was consistent enough to convince the people, so I got selected. And when it comes to the actual composition of the group, we have 15 members, although we must say that soon we will be one number more. And that's a little bit the issue. We have all the regions in our movement represented, the original objective of the committee. If I remind properly, it was at least 12 people and at least one from each of the regions. We have all the regions covered and we have more members than 12 and I believe that's something good. And that's a little bit the situation of the membership in our committee. Thank you. Thank you, Francis. Now I will go back to goodness. Goodness, I want to ask what has the question done so far in two months, like Jan already talked about goals and plans in his slides. So how will you answer about this, what group has done in two months? Okay, thank you, Nadeesh, for that question. And like Jan rightly said, we have three goals. One of the goals is to draft a shared definition of leadership, to create a leadership development plan and to guide the implementation of leadership. And we intentionally spend time to view the common proposal and goal and also to find alignment with each other. The group stated the ground rules to interact, communicate and be familiar with members and through various platforms for communication and to complete tasks. The leadership development working group is close to finishing the first goal, which is a shared definition of leadership. And this definition is not ready now because we're still working on it. And when it's ready, reach out to all of you to give us feedback and suggestions to upgrade our definition and make it global. Thank you. Thanks, goodness. And I request all the panelists, if anyone has something to add, please raise your hand and you can add in that question. So I'm going ahead. Okay, so Nadeh, what has the working group learned so far about working together and about leadership development? Well, so we have learned a lot actually as the highlight of this group, of this working group is diversity. Diversity is a great way to enhance efficiency and effectiveness. That allows us to examine our goals at many diverse levels and brings different skills to the table. We also learned that every opinion is valuable and a great milestone. So we learned the importance of constant decision making. As I mentioned earlier, it's diversity. So we get to hear different stories outside our community and see different cultures. We also learned about new platforms and tools to enhance teamwork and productivity like Miro and Asana. He personally, they didn't know those apps before and it was a great chance to deal with that in action. We also learned about resilience and understanding of the members' needs. With regards to the leadership development, we learned that the good leaders exhibit certain characteristics or qualities that can be learned or on through experience and continuous training such as self-awareness, self-development, ability to develop others in strategic thinking and innovation. We also learned that leadership doesn't apply only to the individual level. It's a collective effort and it can be applied to the group level. We are an example. There is no leader here. We are a group. We communicate with each other and reach a decision based on everyone's opinion. So that's basically what we have learned so far and we hope to continue on this learning process. Thanks, mother. Thank you so much. You talked about a few things, how you are working together and there are a lot of things which you have learned, maybe all of the members learned. You also talked about some leadership things. I would like to ask about why leadership is even important. Is there a need for leaders in the moment? Francisco, would you like to answer this? Sure. Well, as I said in my small introduction, this is something that was already discussed during the second iteration of the strategic process in 2019-20. And well, I want to remind. I mean, there are some dangers here. Not the first danger is the world leader because through the human history we've seen many times some people's claiming to be leaders, but there were people who had no good intentions towards others. So let's say that leader is awarding a little bit dangerous. But still, there's a need for leadership in our movement and I believe that, I mean, since the very beginning, the small community that started almost as an experiment in 2001 to what we have built so far. I believe it's pretty obvious that there is leadership in the Wikimedia communities and that the leadership has been developed inside the Wikimedia communities. So basically we are having and perhaps I'm getting a little bit away of what is the opinion of the whole group and I'm I'm making more of a personal statement. We are working more as social scientists in the sense that we are identifying what's going on, what has been going on in our movement so far. And that's also addressed some of the questions that have been put in the chat. I mean, we have leadership in the online communities, in the offline communities. We have leadership in met organizers and we have leadership in partners. I mean, we have skills in our movement and those skills talk to capacity building, talk to leadership itself, to understand how the Wikimedia movement works, talk to resilience, not to make our movement more resilient for the future, etc. So basically this is, I mean, I believe that that's why it's important. It's important because basically we are doing a job of understanding things that have always happened in the Wikimedia movement and that's why I believe this is important. Thanks, Francis, for elaborating the answer. So, if Ray, you could add something because we didn't hear anything from you as of now. So could you add please? Perfect, cool. So as for whether we need leadership in the movement, I know this, it kind of sounds like a rhetorical question, like, oh, of course we need leadership. However, when you talk about leadership and like the traditional like political or like group focusing definition of the word leadership, the one that is not used specifically in Wikimedia, it often has incredibly negative and incredibly like group against group or cabal-esque results focused on competition rather than an attempt at global cooperation. And from the Wikimedia context, something that I've tried to kind of make sure we reflect their definitions because we have discussed leadership, we've also discussed what is good leadership and then what is good Wikimedia leadership. And then from there we can kind of work towards leadership development plan. But one of the thoughts that I've tried to push is that good Wikimedia leaders are facilitators, they're mediators, they're peer mentors, they do not give people a vision, they help people find their own vision. Okay, thanks Ray and Jan, if you would still like to speak in this specific question? Yeah, sure. I think Ray made a very important point that the traditional understanding of leadership is not what we're working on here. One of the main goals of this group is to sort of dismantle the misunderstanding that leadership is tied to hierarchy. I think one of the questions in the chat was what kind of leaders we're talking about like sock masters and admins. This is not what this is about. Those are hierarchical figures and Ray made it very clear that leadership is rather a question of facilitating and not being someone giving commands because they are higher in hierarchy. You'll see this reflected in the definition. I see this as the main point of the definition being made. Okay, another and you want to add something or want to speak something? With regards to the question that if we need leaders, I think we will think of this question as monocracy. It's not we are talking here about actions. We are talking about groups, levels. We are not talking about one person that leads the others. No, it's not the levels or who is opposed here. No, it's just the process of working that we are talking about. Thank you. Great. Thank you for everyone's contribution. Yeah, hello. I want to say now I have written, I think it's better when I say directly. I would say now as I hear that maybe then it would be better to use another name instead of leadership. Why not using, for example, the term facilitator or something like that? I think that would be a better term. It would lead to a higher acceptance for what you are doing because especially in Europe, or that's my experience that there are the Wikimedia communities are critical regarding leadership. So there they want a lot of freedom or I see it in German Wikipedia there. They want freedom and don't want that other people tell them what they have to do. And so I think it would be great if you think about maybe using another term instead of leadership. Thanks for jumping in. Ray, I just saw your hand raised. Could you answer this question? Cool. So I definitely understand and to some extent agree with that sentiment. The word leadership itself has very negative connotations in some areas. But the difficulty is that if we switch just facilitators or just peer mentors or just mediators or just insert other words here, because we do have a lot of those terms or definition, we define them and we define their attributes too. That wouldn't get the full picture. Like yes, leadership does have bad connotations in some areas, but that's also why we are defining what good Wikimedia leadership is and how good leadership manifests itself with Wikimedia projects. That's why our definition isn't just copied from Google. We're doing stuff to kind of ensure that we are properly informed in our future steps by creating a definition of leadership that goes in some ways directly against the generic definition of leadership. Yeah. Thanks Ray. Anybody have something to add or we can switch to the next question? Okay, yeah, please go ahead. Now this might be a bit of a side note. I agree with what my predecessors have said. Also, there's a large body of literature and sociological science being done on this term. So changing the name to something else wouldn't only lose a bit of the scope of the term, but also work against sort of the academic progress that has been made. So that would be a bit hard to reference the literature here. Thanks, Anne. Thank you so much. Okay, we have less time, so let's do it quickly. So I will go back to goodness. Because we are discussing a lot of leadership here, so I would like to ask how did you come up with the definition and what process did the group follow for that? All right. Thank you, Matish, for this question. And each step of the drafting was under consent decision-making process. And in agreement with this cost, it brings down during our weekly meetings to identify keywords, qualities, attributes, actions, and mindset that are an important element of leadership. We asynchronously and synchronously categorized these keywords to prioritize them into subcategories. We also used storytelling to share experiences of how leadership is seen in our diverse communities. We also created a shared definition of a shared document so that each member of the group can see and contribute to definitions and get responses from community members. We also discussed and resolved with issues with the definitions and subsequently merged the resulting definition into its final form. And finally, after the process has been completed, the definition will be published and announced so that it can be made open for community feedback and outputs and inputs of lives. My colleague Ray said that the definition we would see is not a form of, is not a kind that we see normally. We would define this definition so that it would be a community kind of definition. It would ensure that community needs and different cultures would be made possible or seen in the definition. Thank you. Thanks, goodness. If no one has anything to add, then I just end up the session. Sorry, questions apart from my side. I just have last one question. So I would like to ask from Nada. It would be great if you will answer this question. How can community members provide feedback on the definition that the working group drafted and also goodness talked about those things. So would you like to answer this question? Yeah, sure. Well, the working group is still in the process of creating a thorough feedback plan for community members. We are still in the process of creating a draft for our definition and we will share our definition very soon via several movement-wide channels of communication. Of course, Mita is the first one. We are also exploring regional and linguistic community channels for outreaching and feedback platforms. Since we are still in the process of putting a plan for feedback, we might use messages, social media platforms, talk pages, maybe direct interaction with affiliate members, central notice, one-to-one meetings. So we haven't decided yet, but we are still processing a plan for that. And we want to make sure that this is a very important part because we want to hear from everyone. We want to know if there is a gap in our definition so we can fix it. Thank you. Thank you, Nader. I think it's a difficult task to get some feedback and get involved community with us. So best of luck for that. And now we have just six minutes to close the session. So we will take some questions from the audience and we have a few questions there. So maybe a few questions already answered by Ray or Yan. Okay. So we have the next question from the audience. Can you please tell me an action within the Wikimedia projects you define as leading? Who would like to take this question? I can repeat the question. Okay. So question goes, can you please tell me an action within the Wikimedia projects you define as leading? Okay, Francis, please go ahead. Yeah, I will go personal and I will share examples that I share. I mean, with the definition of leadership by our group is not yet public, but we have been working with that. We have almost a final product to be reviewed by the communities. And some of the inputs that I've been sharing while, you know, the brainstorming process, etc., were examples in, for instance, the linguistic community I come from, the Catalan Wikipedia. And we have specific users that are very, very, very good in the things they do. Perhaps they've never been very active in international scenes. They haven't been very active while sharing their job. They have not been very active in affiliates, but they are people who are, I mean, I don't want to say names, but I believe that a lot of people know what the Catalan Info Boxes are, and that was made by a single person who had an idea. He developed that idea into our local community. We love the idea and not only did we love the idea, but other people around the movement in a totally horizontal way, they saw the idea once it was implemented in our community. They liked the idea and now the Info Boxes that are linked to Wikidata, it's something that is very, very common in our movement. And that was thanks to one single person. And I believe that's the next example of leadership. I mean, when he developed that, Amador, who is the name of that person, he wasn't, I mean, he was a member of the Catalan Language Affiliate, but he wasn't a member of the board. He wasn't this stuff. He wasn't, let's say, anything special. But I mean, he was a beloved member in our community. And he had an idea. He developed it. People liked it. And just as I have that example, I believe that we can point to other examples of other people who have been doing things and say, why don't people do good things? And they improved our communities. And I believe that that's, of course, this is not the definition of leadership, but this is an example of the people that we have had in mind while working on this. Thanks, Francisco. We just have three minutes here. And would you like to answer in a few words for the next question, what makes leadership wider than facilitator? I guess I should also answer that because I was putting this up. I mean, for me, a facilitator is just one of the aspects that you might have as a leader. I mean, going back to the example of the people inside of the community that developed, in this case, isn't exactly to a gadget, but it's something similar. I mean, facilitator is a very specific trait that means to facilitate among bills, et cetera. That's a good trait. That's a good trait that should be taken into consideration when talking about leadership. But you can live in many, many other ways. And specifically, I mean, I believe that the problem with the world leadership is that we are thinking on a single person, like something very top to down, a structure, a very pyramidal seam. And this is not the case. I mean, you might be a sectoral leader in the sense that there are individuals that are living in very specific things. And the leadership works both for, you know, let's say an all-around leader. There are individuals whose involvement in the movement is very wide, but it should also fit our leadership definition, fit those who are very good, those individuals who are very good in the specific things. So facilitators. Let's say the facilitators are leaders, but not all leaders are facilitators. I don't know if I'm able to give a satisfactory reply, but this is how I see it. Okay. Thank you, Ray. Thank you so much. We have just one minute and we need to close the session. So thank you everyone for your proactive participation and your precious time. We appreciate your time and thanks again to the organizing and program team who gave us this opportunity. If you have still some questions or you need some clarification or you have something to say, please email us on leadershipworkinggroupatpikimedia.org. It will also put in chat box. So thank you. Have a good day and thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Okay. Thank you all the panelists and all the audience. So thank you. Take care. Bye.