When I joined the Wikimedia Foundation as Lead Movement Strategy Specialist, I went into the work with an assumption of speed. I had previously supported the design of Baraza Media Lab, a hub created to serve independent journalists in Kenya. That experience had taught me how to begin with a community, understand the gaps within its ecosystem and design services around what people actually needed. I believed I could bring that experience into the Wikimedia movement and help emerging hubs move more quickly from an ambitious idea to a functioning structure.
I had some confidence in my assumption, but there was also a few things I misunderstood. I knew how to help design a hub. What I had not yet fully understood was how different it would be to support the emergence of hubs within a global, decentralised movement where no single person or institution could legitimately design the structure on everyone else’s behalf.
I had experience, a strategic mandate and funding available. What I would learn was that none of those could substitute for the time communities needed to build trust, establish ownership, test their assumptions and decide what they were prepared to create together.
This is a reflection on that learning. It is about what building regional and thematic hubs taught me about funding for equity, institutional maturity and the limits of strategy when the relationships required for implementation have not yet formed. It is also about the responsibility of funders and global institutions to support not only the visible project, but the slower work of coordination that allows a project to become something people recognise as their own.
Hubs were intended to bring support closer to the movement
So here’s how my journey began.
The Wikimedia movement already had affiliates: chapters, user groups and thematic organisations supporting Wikimedia projects and communities around the world. Many did (still do) important work with editors, volunteers and partner institutions, but attention was often understandably focused on their own programmes, countries or projects.
Hubs were therefore conceived as regional or thematic support structures that could connect affiliates, independent contributors and communities; identify shared gaps; strengthen coordination; and provide services that individual organisations could not efficiently deliver alone. Today you will find hubs described as common spaces for coordinating activities and identifying and advocating for the needs of the communities they serve. [Meta-Wiki]
The idea for me at the beginning, was therefore not to create another affiliate simply because an institution could be created. The strategic question was whether a region or thematic community had needs that were not already being met, and whether a hub was the right structure through which to meet them.
That became central to my work with hub actors. I frequently found myself asking groups to step back from the excitement of forming an organisation and first answer more fundamental questions. What problem were they trying to solve? Who experienced that problem? What services were currently missing? Could those services be delivered through existing affiliates or collaborations? What would require a new regional or thematic structure?
A hub was not meant to be the starting assumption. It was one possible response to a demonstrated need.
The early constraint was not a lack of money
People often assume that equity work begins and ends with making more funding available. In my experience, the early Movement Strategy challenge was more complicated. At the beginning, I had more funding available than I could readily deploy.
Wikimedia is a global movement of deeply knowledgeable and highly specialised people, but it can also be internally dense and somewhat insulated. The number of grant applications coming forward was initially low. It was not enough to publish a funding opportunity and assume that people across the movement would immediately identify an initiative, translate it into a project and submit a proposal.
I had to market the opportunity. I wrote posts, approached known actors and invited people to consider what they might do to move particular Movement Strategy recommendations forward. I also worked alongside a team of around 12 multilingual global facilitators who were embedded within different regions and language communities. They engaged local actors, explained Movement Strategy in context and helped information travel across the language, geographical and institutional distances of the movement.
That experience changed how I understood access to funding. Money may technically be available, but that does not mean people can see themselves in the opportunity, understand what it is intended to support or confidently translate their ideas into the language of a grant programme.
Equitable funding therefore requires more than an open application page. It requires trusted people who can carry information into communities, explain the opportunity in relevant terms, listen to what people are already trying to do and help connect that work to a wider strategic goal.
Making money available is one step. Building the pathways through which people can understand, shape and use it is another.
“Let’s talk first” became my funding approach
The Wikimedia 2030 Movement Strategy contained ten recommendations and 47 more specific initiatives. Together, they proposed changes in sustainability, user experience, safety, decision-making, coordination, skills, knowledge management, innovation and evaluation. They were not a simple list of independent projects. They were designed as connected parts of a wider transformation. [Meta-Wiki]
Against that scale of ambition, it made little sense to ask someone to spend weeks preparing an application before we had spoken about what they were actually trying to move.
My approach became: if you are interested, let us talk first.
During those conversations, I was not primarily concerned with correcting a budget or refining the language of an application. I wanted to understand the idea, identify which recommendation or initiative it could advance and help the applicant define an outcome that would genuinely move the work forward.
Sometimes an interesting idea was only loosely connected to Movement Strategy. Sometimes the project was far too broad for the time and people available. At other times, an applicant had identified an important issue but had not yet decided what practical change the project should produce.
The conversation helped us move from, “This would be a good activity,” to, “This is the specific gap we are trying to close, this is the group affected by it, and this is the result that would take the wider recommendation one step forward.”
Only after that did the scope, activities and budget begin to make sense.
This was grantmaking, but it was also strategy. My role was not simply to distribute money across 47 initiatives. It was to decide where there was already movement, where support could unlock further action and which initiatives could serve as a backbone for others.
There were far more important possibilities than one team could support at once. Strategy therefore required prioritisation. It required choosing areas where communities already had some energy and intention, while also investing in foundational work without which other recommendations would struggle to succeed.
Funding was one of the tools. The harder work was deciding where it could create meaningful forward movement.
Capacity to do what?
Capacity was one of the major concerns within Movement Strategy, but the Wikimedia Movement is not one without capable people. It iss full of people with highly specialised knowledge: editors, administrators, developers, researchers, organisers, philosophers, technocrats, policy shapers, communicators, partnership builders, community leaders etc.
For many applicants, the basic ability to manage a grant was not the biggest concern. The more useful question was: capacity to do what?
Someone could be an experienced editor but have limited experience designing an organisation. A strong community organiser might need support with governance or financial management. An affiliate could run excellent programmes but struggle to document and share what it had learned. A group could have deep regional legitimacy but lack the time and structure required to coordinate work across countries and languages.
There was also expertise that already existed within the movement but was difficult for others to find. One of the initiatives I supported was Capacity Exchange, which was designed to make skills and knowledge more visible. People and organisations could indicate the expertise they were willing to share, while others could identify the areas in which they wanted to learn or receive support.
The premise was important: the movement did not always need an external institution to “build capacity” from scratch. Sometimes it needed a better system for connecting existing capacity to the people looking for it.
You see, institutions often speak about capacity as though it is a deficiency located in a particular community. Yet capacity can also be a problem of visibility and access, or time and infrastructure. Knowledge may already exist, but the system may not already be set up in a way that allows it to travel to the places that could benefit.
Central and Eastern Europe showed what maturity made possible
The Central and Eastern Europe Hub became my clearest example of what could happen when funding met an already maturing regional collaboration.
CEE was not beginning from zero. The region had a history of coordination, recurring conversations and relationships across its communities. Important questions had already been discussed over time, and there were capable actors prepared to continue the work. That did not mean the hub’s design was obvious, but it meant the region had enough shared experience to engage seriously with the questions.
My advice was to begin with research and remain open to what it revealed. The first question was not, “How should we structure the hub?” It was, “Is a hub actually needed?”
The group needed to engage communities across the region, understand the gaps they were facing and identify which services were not already being provided. If the research showed that existing affiliates could meet those needs more effectively, then creating a new structure would not have been the right answer.
Their research included interviews and surveys exploring community needs, regional contexts, opportunities for cooperation and ways a hub might support growth. [Meta-Wiki]
The findings gave them a basis for identifying priorities and deciding what the hub could usefully provide. Only then did the structural question become relevant. If these were the services, what governance, staffing and operating model would be needed to deliver them? What could be tested during a pilot? What would need to be learned before moving into full implementation?
CEE moved with relative speed because the funding did not have to create coordination from the beginning. It entered a region where years of conversation and collaboration had already produced a level of maturity. Today, the CEE Hub has an established governance structure, staff and a growing set of regional services, including grant support, community exchange, communications and capacity-building work. [Meta-Wiki]
That is a success story, but success introduces its own strategic risks. When a hub demonstrates value, demand for its services can grow faster than its operating capacity. Staff can become responsible for an ever-expanding range of work because the structure is useful and people keep asking more of it.
This is where institutional strategy has to continue after a pilot succeeds. A functioning hub still needs to review its service boundaries, staffing, priorities and operating model. It needs space to ask not only what else it can do, but what it must stop doing to remain effective.
Funding can help a structure begin. It does not remove the need for ongoing strategic accompaniment.
MENA taught me that funding cannot manufacture ownership
My experience with the Middle East and North Africa hub process was very different, and I consider it my biggest failure in this work.
The challenge was not a shortage of intelligent or committed people. It was an ownership problem shaped by ongoing mistrust within the regional community. There was not yet enough agreement about who could legitimately convene the process, whose voices were represented or what shared structure people were prepared to build together.
I could see that trust needed to be developed before meaningful coordination could happen. I tried to help the group identify a neutral facilitator, but the process did not take hold. The work required significant volunteer time at a stage when there was not yet a funded structure to carry it. People first had to design the idea, establish ownership and agree on a direction before a grant could sensibly support implementation.
I pushed for progress, but I did not have the agency—or perhaps the right mechanism—to support the deeper trust-building the region required. Funding was available, but the social foundation on which a regional hub would need to stand had not yet been built.
Looking back, I would have treated trust-building as an outcome in itself rather than as a preliminary step the community was expected to complete before the “real” work began. I would have explored whether smaller collaborations, paid facilitation or a longer period of regional dialogue could create a safer foundation for future coordination.
The lesson is uncomfortable but important. You cannot use a grant to rush a community through questions of history, power, representation and legitimacy. Those are not procedural obstacles around the work. They are part of the work.
Money can fund conversations or compensate for coordination labour. It can even pay for research and facilitation. But it cannot decide who a community trusts, create shared ownership or make people collaborate before they are ready.
ESEAP showed the value of staying with difficult conversations
East, Southeast Asia and the Pacific showed a different path.
ESEAP is an exceptionally diverse region, encompassing many countries, languages, cultures, communities and organisational histories. There were powerful actors with strong voices, and the process of learning how to make decisions together was not always smooth. Some of the conversations were difficult, stressful and, at times, painful.
What mattered was that the group did not consistently run away from those conversations.
People stayed with the process. They worked through disagreements, continued building coordination and found ways to identify a shared purpose. Some individuals took on a considerable amount of the labour behind the scenes. Trusted facilitators helped conversations continue when the group could easily have fragmented.
They also did the strategic work. They pursued research, asked what services were required and developed a theory of change connecting regional challenges to the hub’s intended role. I had the opportunity to review that theory of change, and I remain grateful that they trusted me with it.
Their eventual framework focused on communication across languages and time zones, capacity exchange, more inclusive regional decision-making and stronger representation of ESEAP perspectives within the wider Wikimedia movement. [Meta-Wiki]
Today, ESEAP has an operating hub, a Steering Committee, Community Connectors, regular regional calls and active services. Its current structure is the result of more than a decade of relationship-building that began with regional meetups and gradually developed into deeper collaboration. [Diff]
So while CEE had already reached a high level of coordination maturity when formal hub support began, ESEAP was still living through some of its coordination teething problems, but the community stayed the course. They moved the needle bit by bit, conversation by conversation, until there was enough shared purpose and trust to support a functioning structure.
The lesson for me was that the process of a community maturing is not always calm. Sometimes what it takes is a community developing the capacity to have difficult conversations without abandoning the shared project/goals.
The Education Hub reminded me that an advisor can see a real risk and still be wrong about the outcome
The proposed Education Hub presented a different strategic question because it was thematic rather than regional.
The group undertook a substantial research process, including interviews, conference conversations, focus groups and a literature review. The findings identified shared needs across the global Wikimedia education community, particularly coordination, knowledge exchange, technical support and direct capacity development. They also found that programme size and context shaped what education actors required. Established programmes, growing affiliates and volunteer-led initiatives in emerging communities were not facing the same problems or asking for the same forms of support.
That regional and organisational variation concerned me. My reading of the findings was that education work might need to be supported differently across different contexts. The needs of an education organiser in an emerging African community could differ significantly from those of a long-established European affiliate or a large programme in North America.
I worried that a global hub built around one dominant methodology or tool might unintentionally ask regions to retrofit their education activities to the hub, rather than designing education work around their own contexts and then identifying the services they needed. I floated the possibility that a network connecting regional approaches might be more appropriate than a single global service structure.
The research itself reflected both sides of this tension. It found support for a professional, staffed global service provider, but it also recorded disagreement about scope, warned that a broad global structure could struggle to meet diverse needs and explicitly asked whether future structures could respond adequately to different contexts. [Meta-Wiki]
Today, the EduWiki Hub is operating. It has programmes in mentorship, workshops, knowledge exchange and open educational resources, supported by working groups addressing outreach, resource curation, technical infrastructure and volunteer capacity. [Meta-Wiki]
So perhaps I was wrong about what the final structure could become. I am comfortable saying that.
Being a strategist does not mean predicting every outcome correctly. It means identifying the risks that need to be tested, making your reasoning visible and remaining willing to update your position when the evidence changes.
I still believe the question of regional relevance matters. A global structure does need to always examine whose methodology becomes standard, whose needs shape its priorities and whether its services can adapt across contexts. But the hub’s progress demonstrates that a global model can create useful coordination and services even when the underlying community is highly diverse.
What I learned is that the concern was valid. It was not necessarily a verdict.
Ambition requires sequencing
So now I step back to look at what I learned from the broader portfolio I managed.
The Movement Strategy was deliberately ambitious. Ten recommendations and 47 initiatives! This is a presentation of a broad vision of a more equitable, sustainable and decentralised movement. But colleagues in the field would agree with me that an ambition of that scale creates a danger of implementation. That is that, when there is not enough time, capacity or institutional attention to move everything together, only selected pieces advance.
That is not automatically a problem. Strategy does require prioritisation. The danger comes when pieces are selected without enough attention to how they depend on other parts of the system.
For example, the Movement Charter process was intended to create a broader framework for movement roles and decision-making, including proposals for a Global Council. The Wikimedia Foundation Board ultimately chose not to ratify the draft Charter in full and instead moved selected components forward through pilots. One of those components became the Global Resource Distribution Committee, now operating as a two-year experiment focused on movement-wide grantmaking strategy and resource distribution. [Wikimedia Foundation]
I am not arguing that the individual pilots lack value. Far from it. The resource-distribution work is important, and the current committee has a meaningful mandate. My concern is a systems one.
When an integrated governance proposal is separated into individual components, the relationships between those components do not disappear. Questions of resource allocation remain connected to questions of representation, authority, accountability and movement-wide decision-making.
If one piece moves while another remains unresolved, someone has to identify the resulting gap and decide how it will be managed. Otherwise, the movement may implement several valuable parts without reproducing the coherence of the whole they originally belonged to.
This was one of the broader lessons of my role. Big participatory strategies naturally generate many strong ideas. The work after agreement is not simply to begin implementing as many as possible. It is to understand dependencies, choose a sequence and remain alert to what becomes weaker when one part moves without another.
What this taught me about funding for equity
My experience with Movement Strategy updated my understanding of equitable funding. It is not only about directing more money towards communities that historically received less, although that matters. Wikimedia’s funding reforms explicitly sought to increase support for underrepresented communities and to cover staffing, operations and other institutional needs beyond editing activity. In the early implementation period, more than half of Movement Strategy Implementation Grant funding went to emerging regions. [Meta-Wiki]
But moving money is only one part of moving power. Here are 5 key lessons I took from this experience:
- Funding becomes more equitable when people can discover it through trusted channels, discuss their ideas before being judged by an application, define outcomes that matter in their context and receive support appropriate to their stage of development.
- It is more equitable when research and relationship-building are treated as legitimate work rather than unpaid preliminaries.
- It can also become more equitable when communities are not expected to arrive with the governance, consensus and operating systems of mature institutions before receiving support to build them.
- Funding can be more equitable when funders recognise that different groups are starting from different places. For instance, CEE did not need the same support as MENA. ESEAP needed room to work through its coordination challenges. A thematic education community raised different design questions from a regional hub. Applying one timetable or maturity standard to all of them would not have produced equity. It would simply have rewarded the communities whose history already aligned with the funding system’s expectations.
- Finally, equitable funding requires honest limits. A funder or advisor can create conditions, offer questions, provide resources and sometimes require important preparatory steps. They cannot manufacture local legitimacy or make collective decisions on behalf of a community.
In my own work, I could translate between the Foundation’s expectations and community aspirations. I could challenge unrealistic plans, help groups clarify purpose and ask them to test their assumptions before building a structure. In some cases, I could make research or consultation a condition of funding. But I could not make people accept that advice. Nor should I have been able to decide the future of a regional or thematic community for them.
That is the tension at the heart of supporting decentralisation. The institution holding the money has influence, but the structure will not become genuinely decentralised if that influence is used to predetermine every answer.
What I would carry into similar work today
I entered the work assuming that strong design experience, strategic support and available funding could help hubs move quickly. I left with a much deeper respect for the conditions that determine whether speed is useful or harmful. Taking this learning forward into future work and engagement, here are a few key pieces I would take forward. These are pieces I am hoping my colleagues in the field can learn from as well:
- I would still encourage ambition, but I would pay much closer attention to maturity and sequencing. I would fund needs assessments before organisational design, and I would insist that research be allowed to conclude that a hub is not needed.
- I would treat coordination labour as real work and compensate it where possible. Communities should not be expected to resolve complex questions of governance, representation and regional trust entirely through unpaid effort before they become eligible for support.
- I would invest earlier in neutral facilitation where trust is weak. I would also accept that facilitation cannot always repair a process, and that pausing may sometimes be more strategic than continuing to push towards a predetermined structure.
- I would keep the conversation before the application. Good grantmaking should help reveal whether an idea is ready, what it is actually trying to change and whether the proposed activities are the right route to that outcome.
- I would distinguish between capacity gaps and connection gaps. Before creating another training programme, I would ask whether the expertise already exists somewhere else in the system and what would help it travel within the system.
- I would also remain alongside successful pilots for longer. Once a structure proves valuable, it needs support to manage demand, protect its staff, refine its operations and decide what not to carry. Success can overwhelm an institution just as quickly as failure can end it.
- Most importantly, I would remind funders and central institutions that coordination moves at the speed of trust. Money can accelerate work once there is a shared foundation, but it cannot create that foundation on its own.
The Wikimedia movement taught me that people can share an extraordinary global mission and still disagree about what should be built, who should lead it and how power should move. A common purpose does not erase language, geography, history, organisational interests or the very human difficulty of trusting one another.
Money matters. Strategy matters. Good design matters. But coordination is built through relationships, tested through practice and sustained by people willing to continue the work long after the initial grant has been approved. I went into the work believing I could help the movement move faster. What I learned was to ask a better question: not how quickly a structure could be created, but what had to be true for people to carry it together once it existed.
When the strategy is clear, but the system still has to catch up
At Project by Projects, I work with funders, networks, institutions and movement actors navigating exactly these kinds of questions: how to sequence ambitious change, how to move resources and decision-making more equitably, how to design structures that people can actually carry, and how to know when to push forward or slow down.
If you are working through decentralisation, institutional design, funding strategy or the challenge of turning a broad vision into something workable, PxP can help you think through the next move with greater clarity.
