Verksamhetsberättelse 2020/Fail fest: A high cost from constant change

Enabling

2020

In this Fail fest we describe the challenges we have had with adjusting the organization to a constantly changing context.

The Wikimedia movement's new global strategy has created a lot of interesting opportunities for affiliates, including Wikimedia Sverige, to find new roles and expand influence and capabilities. As an active participant in developing the strategy (see also #Story: Developing strategies for the future during a year when the world took a pause) Wikimedia Sverige had decided to position ourselves and prepare for the new identified opportunities. In fact we started our involvement with the strategy as far back as 2017. We decided to aim to become a thematic hub and support partnership development in the movement, an area we had actively worked internationally on since 2015.

Going into this change process we knew that a lot of things would be in flux and that things could change quickly. We did, however, view this as an opportunity to support the wider movement by acting as something of a guinea pig and try to share our experience and thoughts and develop new methods to reduce the amount of work for other affiliates.

Even though we walked into the process with our eyes open, we did not expect the significant delays, the severity of the issues, the many uncertainties and the extent of the constant changes that we would have to adjust to throughout the entire year. Many of the documents, processes and methods we developed had to be partly or completely reworked more than once during this one year period. However, in the end, the process was valuable to refine our thinking, to highlight opportunities for the movement and more.

Despite our best efforts we are going into 2021 with significant uncertainties and unclarities remaining. That said, we are still very optimistic about the future for our organization’s development and role within the Wikimedia movement.