Starting conversations on how to ratify the Movement Charter

As the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC) is busy drafting the future of our movement, in the meantime, the MCDC would like to have a robust and inclusive ratification process in place. The MCDC invites the Wikimedia communities and different movement committees to share thoughts to help the Committee achieve its goal. 

Over the past few months, the MCDC has analyzed community feedback, provided responses, and created drafting groups to work on the content of the Charter: Decision-making, Hubs, and the Global Council. In addition, the Roles & Responsibilities drafting group is still active from 2022. The MCDC has also launched call for advisors to support the drafting groups and organized online working sessions to focus on the content. The MCDC hopes to have the second draft of the Charter ready for review in July 2023.

The ratification of the Movement Charter is expected to take place either in Quarter 1 or Quarter 2 of 2024, and the MCDC wants to ensure that there is a clear and effective method for ratifying the Charter. To achieve this, the MCDC has proposed a methodology that incorporates learnings from previous ratification processes in the movement.

Ratification Methodology Summary 

The Movement Charter must be ratified by four different voting groups: individuals, Wikimedia projects, affiliates, and Board of Trustees. Individuals will vote on the voting platform (whether that will be SecurePoll or another tool), which will also determine votes by project groups. Each affiliate will have one vote, and their collective vote will determine the affiliate group vote. The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees will conduct their ratification vote last, if all three of the other groups vote to ratify the Movement Charter.

Diagram visualizing the process for the Movement Charter Ratification. CC BY-SA 4.0.

How can you participate? 

The MCDC welcomes community input on the proposed methodology and invites everyone interested to provide feedback by:

• Comment on the Meta page,
• Comment on the multilingual Movement Strategy forum, and
• Join the community conversation hours planned to take place on April 18th at 10.00 UTC (your local time) and April 24th at 17.00 UTC (your local time). You can sign-up and indicate if you require language support by April 16. Your early sign-up will help us to organize the language support. Language interpretation will be provided if at least 3 (three) people expressed interest to participate in the following languages: Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, French, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian and Spanish. 

What’s next?

The MCDC will produce a report of the review period in May, and use the community input to amend the methodology and determine if further iterations are necessary.

Thank you for your continued support and engagement in shaping the future of our movement.