Over the last 18 years, the Wikimedia Movement formed organically, allowing for a diversity of motivations, ways of working, and desired impacts that reach far beyond measurable pageviews and content pages into many different parts of society. Yet at the same time, this diversity has also created a shared community of practice that spans many parts of the world, and does many of the same things: convening different stakeholders, with different goals to create educational content and educational communities around the Wikimedia projects. Ultimately organizers are the front door for achieving the aims of the movement direction.
During the first half of 2019, the Wikimedia Foundation completed a generative study, following the earlier examples of New Editors or New Readers. The new Movement Organizers research seeks to understand and articulate the shared challenges across the global organizing community. This research can help staff at the Wikimedia Foundation as well as community leaders see and evaluate these challenges and then build local and international collaborations to design support for existing organizers and better welcome new organizers into the community.
During this session, we will
* share key findings from the Movement Organizers research in an introductory presentation (30-40 minutes);
* then invite members of affiliates and other community groups who have run programs for supporting organizers, to talk about their experience designing for growing and developing organizers (25-30 minutes);
* 20-30 minutes for questions, feedback and thinking about how community members can provide organizer support to their communities.
If we have interest at the end of the session, we will find one of the empty meetup space classrooms to further discuss findings, and provide space for folks to talk about the various components of the research