Make plan to professionalize WfSD

[Ainali]

Here is an Action Plan I wrote. Needs more detail and refinement, but is a rough skeleton. It is written from the perspective of getting a grant to do it over a year.

Project Title: Professionalize Wikimedians for Sustainable Development

Objective: In one year, create a legal entity with a secretariat that has been accepted in the Wikimedia Foundation grant schemes with funding to cover at least one employee.

Key Activities: Set up a non-profit legal entity with bylaws and a board of directors. Start working on a long-term strategy for the organization. Make routines and procedures for coordinating the various communities and field test them, optimize these so that volunteers can be empowered to do most of the rewarding work themselves, and get support with the less exciting parts by the secretariat. Create presentation materials that explain the organization and what it does. Write templates for co-funding academics to work on improving these topics, based on the experiences of other "Wikimedian in Residence" positions in the cultural heritage sector. By the end of the year, find and hire a good administrator with fundraising skills that can take over the administrative burden.

Timeline: First month: Research possible legal forms of the non-profit and where to incorporate. Find people that would like to be on the board. Second month: write bylaws, incorporate and get basic admin procedures established. Third month: Finalize a strategy that is aligned with the strategy of Wikimedia Foundation to make alignment in fund requests easier and have the new board approve it. Fifth month: Finalize application for multi-year funding. Month nine: Make an open call for the next admin. Month twelve: Hire next admin. Ongoing all the time: communication with, support to, and coordination for the content producing volunteers.

Resources Needed: Time for me to work on this full-time. Travel budget to get board and highly interested volunteers to meet. Legal fees for incorporating and setting up administrative resources like bank account etc.

Metrics for Success: Funding for hiring new staff has been secured and suitable candidate(s) have accepted a job offer.

Risk Management: As Wikimedia Foundation is restructuring their grants, it is a bit uncertain exactly what procedures will be in place, but there will be some. This will need to be adapted to as soon as there is news about the next rounds of funding. Given the time to focus, it is also possible that other fitting funding opportunities may be discovered as the topic around disinformation in climate change is receiving interest.

Communication Plan: Internally in the user group, the current newsletter will be used and professionalized. To reach the rest of the Wikimedia movement, efforts will be made to have news published in related newsletters too. A podcast will be started that highlights the fantastic work of the volunteers to inspire them to collaborate with each other. The user group meetings that have been a little bit ad-hoc will become reliably recurring. All reports to the Wikimedia Foundation will be of exemplary status.

Evaluation and review: The board of trustees will be given monthly updates and will not only have the power to steer the work, they will be asked to actively come with feedback so that it gets used to being a board that engages with the employees.

[Ainali]

I also recorded a video pitch: https://youtu.be/2htkk3Rp0q8

[Ainali]

As another step and prompted by the upcoming affiliate health criteria, here is a start of an evaluation: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedians_for_Sustainable_Development/Affiliate_Health