Are you tired of workshops or events that lack tangible results? Wikimedia Deutschland and the Movement Ecology Collective have created a playbook that helps transform collective deliberations into tangible results and next steps.
Have you ever left a workshop or event feeling frustrated by the lack of tangible results, wondering what impact those discussions would actually have? We have, too. It’s not easy to enable collaboration, build convergence between diverse viewpoints, and create a space for equitable participation despite power dynamics. We believe that many organizations and individuals face similar challenges when it comes to bringing people together to advance common goals.
That’s why Wikimedia Deutschland worked with the Movement Ecology Collective to create a playbook designed to transform workshops into outcome-driven deliberations, ensuring your discussions lead to concrete actions and results. And since Wikimedia is all about free knowledge, we want to share it with everyone, as a gift to contribute to the sum of all knowledge.
What’s the purpose of the playbook?
This playbook draws from the lessons that Wikimedia Deutschland learned designing international strategic events with Wikimedians for many years. It offers a how-to guide to designing and facilitating a process for a group to discuss, assess and decide upon their collective position on a strategic or governance proposition. This playbook can be adapted to individual situations within and outside the Wikiverse, to deliver the intended outcomes and advance your goals. It is particularly suited for single organizations and large conglomerates of organizations from different backgrounds developing a common strategy, writing a foundational document or developing organization-wide values.
We have developed and tested the process for the Wikimedia Summit 2024, a three-day event where 170 participants from different backgrounds and continents were able to find a strong collective position on a major governance document, the Wikimedia Movement Charter. Most of the participants left the event with a feeling of having made significant progress (here are quotes from the feedback received in the anonymous event evaluation survey):
“I left with the feeling of having achieved something, of having made a really useful journey.”
“The structure and pacing of the program provided an excellent environment for making progress. I was impressed by how much progress was made in just 2 1/2 days.”
“It was definitely possible to bring all the voices together to make progress in a proactive manner.”
How to use the playbook?
The process consists of 15 steps from gathering feedback on the initial proposition to developing proposals on how to adapt and improve it and to making a collective decision about these proposals. It is divided into four sections which can be read in order or separately, depending on what you’re most interested in – key learnings, setup, process, and tools. Each section is illustrated with examples from Wikimedia Summit 2024.
When adopting the process, adapting it is key: to deliver the intended outcomes, it needs to be tailored to the group who’s using it, its goals and its needs. This playbook helps asking the right questions and finding practical answers.
Please get in touch with our team to share any feedback on the playbook, your experiences with using and adapting the process, or your ideas for collaborations: govmov@wikimedia.de
Have fun experimenting with the playbook!
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