 Hey, everyone, welcome to today's talk. Today we have Chris Keating, user of the land. He's a longtime Wikimedian and on the board of Wikimedia UK. He's here to talk about community dynamics, specifically reflections on WMF and dynamics. Go ahead, Chris. Hello. Nice to meet you, everybody. So what I'll do is I'll talk for a little while. Probably nowhere near the full half hour we've got allocated. Then hopefully we can have a bit of a discussion. If you are watching this on IRC, then, or indeed, anywhere else, it'd be great if you could save up your questions until the end of what I have to say. Then we can discuss anything that comes up. Cool. So I was invited to do this tech talk because I wrote an essay on meta called Why Do They Always Do It Wrong? And this essay was kind of the summation of some thoughts I'd been having for quite a while about the dynamics of the relationship between the WMF and the community. Having been on the board of Wikimedia UK for all five years, I've taken part in some very interesting movement-wide conversations and everything from super protective, chapter fundraising, and everything like that. And more than that, I've also worked for a number of different voluntary sector organizations which have conversations in them that have some similarities to some of the conversations that have happened within the Wikimedia movement. So I was thinking back to one of the first jobs I had back in 2002. I was working for a political party called the Liberal Democrats. They used to be big. And I was basically campaign manager for this town in Southeast England called Eastbourne. And 90% of the constituency was this bit here, Eastbourne. The constituency I was working in also included this one small village called Willington, which doesn't even have a place name on this map here. And I remember quite soon after I started there. So I was the only staff member working with a few dozen volunteers on the campaign there. I remember just after I started speaking to a guy called Andy, who was the chairman of the Willington Liberal Democrats. Now, that's this bit here, not Eastbourne, which is this bit here. If you drive between Willington and Eastbourne down this road, you will not notice the difference between them. But still, this village was in a different local authority. And talking to Andy, the chair of the Willington Liberal Democrats, he would say occasionally half jokingly when we were talking about some issue, he would say things like, well, that's if them in Eastbourne let us do it or something like that. And it's kind of remarkable that in such a small pocket of the country in a voluntary organization that has no more than 10 people taking any kind of decision within it, there was still somehow this awesome then mentality that had developed on such a small scale. Then I was also thinking about a job I had later. So I moved from local campaigning to national fundraising for this party. And part of my job was sending out, organizing, sending out letters to people who needed to renew their membership. And on one occasion, we'd managed to send the renewal letters for the Liberal Democrats in Wales on the letterhead for the Liberal Democrats in England, which, bit of a mistake, Wales has a slightly separate political identity. I knew people's noses might be put out of joint maybe. What I didn't expect was to get a phone call from somebody responsible for running one for local launches, talking, telling me how disgraceful it was that I was deliberately undermining him and all the hard work he was doing by deliberately sending out the long renewal letters. And thinking about that, that kind of struck a chord with some emails that you read on Wikimedia L sometimes. So what seemed to exist in this organization, the Liberal Democrats, or so in the Wikimedia movement, or also in a number of other organizations I've worked in, is kind of, if you read some of the communications that happen within those organizations amongst some of the volunteers, from some of the volunteers directed to some of the staff, you get a sense that some people, or the people voicing their opinions, on the one hand, working incredibly hard to contribute to the movement. On the other hand, you get the sense of kind of perpetual outrage about decisions that are being taken and essentially how long people are getting everything. Does that sound familiar? Yeah, getting some nods? Good. So this made me think, what are the commonalities between these different organizations I have experience of? Because sometimes we hear, or I hear, I don't know about you, I hear the view expressed that either the Wikimedia Foundation is particularly bad at dealing with everything, or alternatively, on the other hand, that the Wikimedia community is somehow particularly difficult to work with. And I don't think that either of those things is particularly true. And I don't think that a conversation conducted along those lines reinforces that kind of unhelpful, us and them, mentality. So this made me think, what actually is going on? Is there some kind of fundamental dynamic that is affecting the relationship between the WMF and the Wikimedia community as a whole? So basically, what I think happens in all these organizations, and in ours particularly, is that we rely heavily on volunteers to spend a huge amount of their time and energy and passion contributing, in our sense, editing articles, uploading photos, dealing with vandals, that kind of thing. The people who take part the most and who contribute the most to the kind of meta-level discussions about the future of the movement, or about whether media viewer ought to be enabled on Commons, or something like that, those people are also the people with the most emotional stake in what's happening. And they care very strongly about the questions of, so what's the future of the Wikimedia movement? What's the foundation strategy should media viewer be enabled on Commons? They also feel that those are issues that they don't have any control over. So they feel that decisions are being taken in some office in San Francisco by somebody they probably don't know. And I don't know how they can influence those decisions, or they assume there is no way for them to do so. There's kind of a power imbalance that's just created by having an organization with a staff and a volunteer community. This made me think about this what's called the circle of influence and circle of concern, which is, essentially, people care about a wide range of things. They can only influence some of them. And the fact that there are some things they can influence, some things that they really care about that they can't influence, causes anxiety, frustration, and worry. So I kind of summed this up with this sentence here, which is the Wikimedia Foundation causes worry and frustration for Wikimedia volunteers, simply by existing, which not the world's most positive way of looking at things. But I think it's an insight and one which contains the seeds of some ways to address that worry and frustration and to result in a happier and more constructive Wikimedia movement. So something else that I often notice is that it's very easy for people on the volunteer slash community side of the discussion to make some quite negative assumptions about what is going on. So I actually was talking about this bit here from the eight fundraising debates of 2011 to 2012. Is that Jeff there sitting next to Rachel? Hello, Jeff. Yeah. I'm sure Jeff remembers this just as well as I do. So there were participating in that discussion from a chapter, from the kind of chapter point of view. For months I was listening to quite sensible people telling me about how the WMF was planning to do something really bad and nobody really wanted chapters to exist and things like that, which struck me as the time is slightly too strong a way of looking at things. So I was hearing people saying, so the plan was not only to stop chapters processing payments, which OK, there was a discussion that was going to happen. Also that the chapter selected members from the WMF board were going to be removed, which there's no sign of that ever happening. Or indeed abolishing Wikipedia chapters entirely, which I put in this essay was pure fantasy. Then on the talk page of this essay, we have Nemo. I don't know Nemo very well, but for most of his contributions to various discussions, he strikes me as quite sensible, saying, actually, yeah, that was definitely really a plan and by burning the land around existing chapters, the WMF is consciously trying to kill them off. If any of you there are part of the seek for WMF conspiracy to destroy each chapter that Nemo believes in and I don't, please raise your hands. No, this is good. Thank you. But it's kind of my conclusion after years of engaging in conversation with people about the WMF chapter relationship is that the last thing on the Wikimedia Foundation's mind is getting rid of chapters. Nonetheless, there's at least one person who thinks that the only reason that chapters haven't been abolished yet is because there are other things that the WMF is busy doing. So that's what I mean with the negative assumptions and negative expectations. From an initial situation of concern, it's very easy for somebody in a position of low power and low insight into what is actually happening, I think, to assume the worst and stop worrying about questions like, oh my god, what are they going to do next? So that, too, is part of the issue. Yeah, I just wanted to kind of note this kind of spectrum of motivation levels here. I mean, on any given issue, any given community member, there's probably somewhere on this spectrum. From at the top saying, yes, wonderful, I completely agree with what's happening here. Keep it up. Well, they probably know what they're doing, too. Questioning whether the decision being made is the right one. Well, that's not how I would have done it. But the WMF is still basically a good thing. Through to questioning competence, so whoever thought that that was a good idea clearly knows nothing about the issue. Through to questioning the fundamental values of whoever they're dealing with and assuming that not only does whoever it is not know what they're talking about, but they are deliberately taking the WMF down the path of turning into the next Google or something like that. And at the bottom, assuming personal rejection and saying, basically, there's no explanation for what the WMF is doing, apart from the fact that they don't care about all the efforts I and everybody else like me is putting in and they don't care about us, which is all really quite unfair on whoever it is on the WMF side that is dealing with this issue. Again, I have a perspective on this of being not only a community member thinking, what's going on? I also have the perspective of being a staff member of a non-profit thinking, why are so many people misinterpreting what I'm doing? And I think the objective fact is that nobody at the Wikimedia Foundation gets out of bed in the morning working out how they can make life miserable for volunteers. And the objective fact is that most WMF staff are just as committed to the work of the movement as anybody else in the community. But still, we sometimes, literally, get the emails to Wikimedia L or the comments on METU or something saying something like this. Again, not all of the time. And some staff members might not notice this, particularly at all, but it's still a there are probably plenty of other people who noticed it plenty. So this kind of the rapidity with which people's individual volunteers' views can slide down this scale is basically a symptom of this, of the fundamental imbalance in the relationship. OK. So how can we do this better? For community members, the only advice I'm going to offer is that whichever points you are on this scale at any point in time, reality is probably quite a lot better than you feel. I, myself, have certainly been at all of the points on this scale at various points and various conversations I've had, but reality has always been better and yeah. But this is actually mainly addressed at Wikimedia Foundation staff and board members. So I think the real question is how do you individually and how does WMF corporately handle conversations with the movement in a way that empowers and validates volunteers? And how do we communicate in a way that results in few, if any, negative assumptions about the way things are going? So I have a checklist here, but I will try to make this as checklisty as possible. But I will talk it through in a slightly different way while I'm here. So the first thing is to identify what's going on, what you are trying to achieve, and why you're trying to achieve it in, I think, pretty much any area, a project that's ill-specified or unclear or has a useless endpoint is a bad idea and that is even more true if it's a project that involves having a big conversation in the Wikimedia movement. One example of this, sorry, next point, the next issue is how big an issue is it that you've identified? And there is limited bandwidth within the movement for lots of different conversations to happen. Is this issue an issue that it's worth spending lots of bandwidth on? A example where this, I think it wasn't the case, was if anybody remembers the Media Viewer issue back in 2011 when the Foundation Board decided that it was very important that people could vows Wikimedia without seeing images of Genitalia or the Prophet Muhammad or something like that. That didn't really go very well because it proved to be extremely controversial within the community. And it also proved to be not very well aligned with what the WMF strategy was. So that's kind of an example of it would have been much better if that particular initiative had been kind of gone through some kind of, OK, so what are the big issues in 2011 that we're trying to solve process and it would probably have come out rather lower on the list of priorities for community discussion than some of the other things. So that's step one, defining the issue, the problem that you perceive and deciding that it's something that it's worthwhile to be accessing a conversation about. The next point to my mind is taking ownership of the issue you've identified. So one of the ways to short circuit the kind of us and them mentality is if people at WMF are as clear as possible about who thinks a particular thing is an issue and why. That way conversations get focused around issues much more quickly, I think, because you supply much more context for the conversation if it's clear who's owning it. And also it means there's a name behind it and there is a discussion happening with a person or a team rather than this kind of unspecified nebulous them who do bad things all of the time. Then it's always helpful to enter this kind of conversation with a idea of what the solution is or what direction the solution should be going in. I think, however, it's important not to get too invested in your solution right away. And it's probably healthy to assume that you only have parts of the picture. This is where this concept of integrative negotiation I think is quite important. So if you're haggling over the price of a antique or something, I go in with I'll give you 20 pounds for the person telling it says, oh, I only want 100. OK, how about 30? How about 90? How about 40? How about 80? Where your only concern is to get concessions out of the other party. That I don't think many of our conversations seem to end up or start off like that. But the better way of looking at it is this integrative bargaining approach where you assume that all parties are basically collectively solving a problem together. And this is something that has improved a lot between WMF and its various stakeholders in the last few years. This is so much more of an approach that we as a movement are trying to address some difficult problems. And nobody has the whole answer. And we're going to work together to work out what our criteria are. Once we've established what criteria for success, then we'll look at what the evidence is that different things are succeeding or not, taking into account everybody's views about what the ideal outcome is. Which is kind of important because the further one takes a step back from the immediate cause of the dispute, the easier it is to identify common ground. So for instance, people are currently saying, well, WMF has to disable media viewer on comments. And it would be quite possible to have a really big shouting match about that, which is something that should definitely not happen, the shouting match. But taking a step back from that, OK, what is WMF trying to achieve with media viewer? What are people who participate in comments trying to achieve their participation? They can have a step back. Then you get to a point of agreement. And once you've reached the point of agreement, it is then much easier to work towards a solution than it is starting with the disagreement and just addressing that right away. Good. It's a good idea to define a time and space for conversation to happen. It's also a good idea for staff members and board members, indeed, to contribute with their personal views and their perspectives. Again, this comes back to the if there's an us under them, then the they is normally monolithic and unapproachable. And there being real people engaging in real dialogue, or at least saying, yes, you're coming up with some really useful points that we need to bear in mind. That in itself is immensely reassuring. I mean, if you are behaving in the way that I'm saying, if you're following this advice, then you are fundamentally behaving in a way that acknowledges the value of other people's contributions. No harm also stating explicitly that you are acknowledging that you think what people are saying makes sense and you think they have a valuable role to play in it. That's often very welcome to hear. And very much at all costs just avoid, it may be possible, to simply barge through and impose what you think needs to happen. But doing that figures every bad response imaginable for some volunteers, really, as was quite clear with the whole Super Protect issue. Good. That is probably enough of me talking. So if anybody has questions, please get them very. If anybody's reading this on IRC, please type up your questions now. Discussion, comments, questions. Hi. Hello. Yeah, Bruce from Community Engagement. So I found it really helpful from your presentation, the graphics that I think you have on some text format of this essay that is on Meta. And I was wondering if you are thinking of sharing that on the essay on Meta as well. I think that it would help sustain some of your points. Yeah. Yes. It's on my to-do list somewhere. Thank you, Chris, for your presentation. This is Hayatang from Community Engagement. Speaking of graphics, I find myself most of the time disagree with the concentric notion of the movement around the foundation, the center as a circle, and then the community surrounding it. Some people might say it in this way. Yeah. Specifically because of what we call, and I'm glad you acknowledged the notion of we and them, what we call the community is not really the community that we see. I usually see the community in multiple tiers. We have the WMF community, which is active on the media, Meta, et cetera. They're the most active and vocal members of the community. And then there's the Wikimedia community that is our editors. Most of them, perhaps, they don't know about the Wikimedia foundation or its existence. And I think the Wikimedia foundation's role in the movement is to work for the Wikimedia community and serve their needs, whatever those are. Sometimes it has to go through the negotiation process with WMF community. But essentially, if those entities are not aligned with WMF and its core community, we won't be able to serve the larger community, which is the Wikimedia community. And that's the sole existence. That's the sole goal of our existence as WMF for chapters. Yeah. Thank you. So yes, that's certainly a good point. And I mean, the community is itself quite nebulous. And there are many different communities and many different layers of community, which makes the Wikimedia movement really a fascinating place to do anything, really, because it's so nuanced. Now, essentially, everything that I'm saying is making a big assumption that the WMF should be playing some kind of leadership role in that. And that is certainly not to say that the WMF ought to be leading every discussion, showing a lead on every issue. There are some people who would probably say that the WMF shouldn't be trying to lead anything. But what I think I'm trying to do is provide some insight so that where the WMF is leading in a particular area, it's leading in a more effective manner, which is more empowering of the people it's dealing with. Thanks, Chris. I have at least three more questions from IRC. So the first one is, what to do when the participants are not willing to participate in conversations? Good question. One, I have an answer to, sadly. There's two scenarios there. Three scenarios. I've just thought of an awful one. There is one which is that potential participants are too angry to take part in a conversation. In some ways, that's probably the easiest one to deal with, because with a big enough olive branch, it's always possible to calm people down or calm down enough people. Second scenario is people don't really notice the conversation you're trying to have or don't really care about it. In which case, you know your channels for reaching different groups of community members, and I won't rehearse them all. If you have exhausted that and you're sure that you've asked the right question, then simply going through saying, right, we had a consultation of some form. It didn't quite get any faction. That may be evidence that you can proceed with caution, because maybe people don't have strong views. The third option, though, is that people have noticed that you're trying to talk to them, but don't believe that what you're doing is likely enough to have an impact that they wish to participate, which kind of, again, goes back to the point I was making about how you define your objectives and the problem you're trying to solve. So to sum up those slightly incoherent thoughts, assuming it's not because people are too angry, and if they're too angry, you will notice, then probably look again at the assumptions you're making about what you're trying to achieve and who the stakeholders might be. And if, once you've done that, you still think everything is as it should be, then I would plunge ahead and see what happens. It's one of the cases where be bold is the right rule. Thanks, Chris. Sati has a question, and you can unmute Sati. Hi, Chris. Can you hear me well? Yep. OK. So thanks so much for this talk. I really appreciated, when I first read through your essay on meta. And I really appreciated the spectrum of motivation, because I think that's been my experience as well. So it was great to see it articulated. I guess to follow up on the point you just made, it seems like when we do these types of quote unquote consultations, or requests for comment, or whatever form they take, there's always varied participation. People who you think would be engaged aren't people who you never heard of, are engaged all of a sudden. And it seems like we take two main paths, right? We do general communication, and we do one-on-one communication. I guess it goes back to the point where you said there's limited oxygen. One person might have many roles, might have many perspectives, but we can't keep tapping them across many different topics. And so how do we diversify, basically? How do we get more voice into these give input? Yep. Not sure I know the answer to that one. OK, no problem. I'll think about it. While you're thinking about that one, Chris, we have another question from IRC, and then at least one more here in San Francisco. The question from IRC is, what happens when a community member that is advising a staff member is wrong and gives bad advice? Because this happens a lot. The staff then gets heat for doing the wrong thing, and no one ever notices that they were trying very hard. And staff cannot, of course, throw the community member under the bus. I think this is a perennial problem about advice. I've been on so many training courses where I've been told, don't give people advice. Only have conversations with them about to try and tease out the answers from them, because that's the way that means that you're not inserting your own errors into somebody else's thought process. So aside from that, any community member is only ever giving their own view. And again, the way our community works, because it's so diffuse, community members have completely different views. And when you get a community member moving in to a position of authority, they suddenly become them as well. How is any of what I'm saying useful? I think essentially, if you're asking a community member for advice, you have to note that that advice comes with a big pinch of salt and whatever. Simply saying, oh, well, we asked a community member the right way to approach this doesn't avoid a staff member's responsibility for that topic. And if you approach the kind of helpful community members as people to bounce things off, rather than what you think we should do, that's more likely to be productive. OK, thanks. We have a question from the office now. Hi, this is Maria Eisen from Community Engagement. Hi. I was wondering what your views were on the dichotomy as versus them, which is a topic that comes up frequently in global studies and in global conversations, et cetera. And I actually think we had this conversation in our team with Witte Lama, where he was pointing out that we should try to avoid this as versus them dichotomy. However, I see that your essay is pretty much taken by this view, and then you also start using we at the beginning, which is interesting. Yeah. I want to read it. And so I was wondering if you see that there is no escape for our movement from this dichotomy? My view is that we can work it out somehow on what is your advice in this sense. And this is related to what Haydn was saying before. I do think that WMF is part of the community. And I do think that there are multiple communities, and we are to the movement. So if you can explain all that, that would be awesome. OK. I think avoiding us versus them communication or us versus them emotional responses to issues is pretty vital for everybody. Now, my essay refers to us versus them quite a lot, not because I think that's how things ought to happen, but because us versus them is such a natural tendency that everybody in the movement should aim to have an awareness of how easy it is to slip into this us versus them dynamic and what impact it then has. Because if you imagine we're all walking down a path littered with us versus them bear saps and ditches to fall into, being aware of this dynamic is the best way to avoid anybody falling into any ditches or any bear saps. I hope that makes sense. OK, Chris, I think that's all the questions that we have for now. Thank you so much for doing this talk. Is there anything that you want to say to wrap up? No. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you for all the questions. And if anybody has any more thoughts, please do post them on the talk page on Meta, and we can keep the conversation going there. Great. Thanks again so much, Chris. Thank you. Bye.