User talk:Mike Cline/USCAN Working Group Drafts/Phase I Task Forces/U.S. Canada Education Program Proposed Structure/Meeting II

Some questions

Hi all,

Let's just assume for a moment that the organization structure of the organization will be bottom-up instead of top-down. I could image a scenario where every single campus has an independent Wikipedia Education Program group that runs programmatic activities on a local level. Whenever a group of teachers, students and Wikipedians want to join the program, they can establish a new local group at their university. That would make the program highly scalable and could be a better fit for our volunteer-driven culture. At the same time such a system would raise a couple of questions that need to be addressed. Here's some of those questions that come to my mind (and there are certainly many more that need to be answered over the course of the next months):

• What's the process going to look like for starting a new Wikipedia Education Program group on campus X?

Rationale: Assuming that all the different local groups should share the same goals and values, these goals and values need to be established among the members of the new group. How would that be achieved. Also, what exactly would a new group of volunteers do to join the Wikipedia Education movement – sign a paper? go through a training?

• If there was paid staff and a central office – what kind of services would the people on staff provide?

Rationale: Even highly decentralized organizations have some kind of central office. What exactly would the staff at such an office be responsible for? E.g. what if a journalist wanted to talk to some volunteer on campus Y, but didn't know how to reach that person? Would the central office help establishing the contact with the local volunteers? Also, would the central office oversee the budget of the organization and be held accountable for delivering grant reports to funders?

• What will the process for making overarching decisions look like?

Rationale: Every organization needs to have a solid and efficient decision making process in place. Would a decentralized organization as described here have an annual meeting that the different campus groups can send a representative to? Would the staff be in charge for organizing such an annunal event? What if an overarching decision needs to made shortly after the last annual meeting took place? Would everybody have to wait for the next annual event in order to make a decision that affects the whole U.S.?

• How will the reporting work?

Rationale: Wouldn't it be nice to have an annual report that outlines the achievements and some key numbers for the past year? Let's assume that the staff at the main office would be responsible for collecting the reports from the different local groups and also for getting a nicely designed report back to everybody – how does the main office make sure that it gets regular reports from the different campuses? What if some groups don't report back?

I'm sure that there are good and convincing answers to all of these questions and to a number of other questions that might come up during the discussion. So, this is just some food for thought and not aimed at discouraging anyone. However, I think it would be a good idea to come up with a more elaborate list of questions during the meeting in Chicago. And maybe it would even be good to come to a consensus on some of the points that you feel are most important.

All the best, --Frank Schulenburg (talk) 03:37, 22 September 2012 (UTC)