Community Resilience and Sustainability

Community Resilience and Sustainability is a team in the Wikimedia Foundation's Legal department, led by the Vice President of Community Resilience & Sustainability Maggie Dennis. The team currently consists of Committee Support, Community Development, Human Rights, Movement Strategy and Governance, and Trust and Safety.

The work we do supports critical components essential to movement governance and health. Resilience and sustainability refer to the capacity of a community to thrive in terms of its systems, structures, and community relationships. We focus on empowering and engaging the community in ways to strengthen the capacity to recover from damage or threat. The goal of the Community Resilience and Sustainability team of the Wikimedia Foundation is to support the movement in maturing its systems to achieve the key essential factors of both resilience and sustainability on the journey towards the sum of all human knowledge. This is achieved through directly providing programs, administering core services for the Foundation’s role as platform provider in partnership with Legal Affairs, and through supporting, as appropriate, the work of other teams.

While priorities for Community Resilience and Sustainability touch all four of the Wikimedia Foundation Goals for 2022-2023, the team is primarily rooted in Strengthen movement governance and health. Community Resilience and Sustainability consists of teams listed below covering the major initiatives. Certainly, this is not an exhaustive list of all the work Community Resilience and Sustainability encompasses, but this provides a general overview.

• Committee Support
  • Connects with movement committees to provide structured support for their outcomes and responsibilities.
  • Delivering support varies by committee, but often includes coordinating between committees, other movement groups, and teams in the Foundation.
  • Different types of support include include facilitation, coordination, knowledge management, outreach, assistance with membership selection processes.
• Community Development
  • Engage with communities to develop processes and resources to support community growth and health.
  • Deliver online programming and learning resources to support and increase community-facilitated growth and leadership development.
  • Update and implement holistic community consultation best practices, as with the Movement Learning and Leadership Development Project.
• Human Rights
  • Based upon response protocols, review cases of and assist users facing imminent persecution and other severe human rights violations as a result of their good-faith contributions to Wikimedia projects.
  • In coordination with Community Development, create training pathways to help users in at-risk areas to minimize the risks of exposure to such violations.
• Movement Strategy and Governance
  • Engage with communities to encourage and support implementation of Movement Strategy priorities where they are and promote discussion in community spaces, including the Movement Strategy Forum.
  • Supporting the development of the Movement Charter as an essential tool for the implementation of the Strategy 2030.
  • Collaborate with communities interested in developing regional and thematic hubs.

• Trust and Safety
  • Provide services related to credible, imminent threats of physical harm (Emergency.
  • Ensuring legal compliance and other core platform provider services in collaboration with Wikimedia Foundation attorneys and implementing the Foundation’s office actions policy enforcing the Terms of Use.
  • Collaboration between Product and Technology and Trust and Safety personnel, working on resources for the communities, including the Private Incident Reporting System (PIRS).
  • Supporting the Universal Code of Conduct implementation in collaboration with the communities as guided by the Enforcement Guidelines.
  • Reinforcing shared community values by supporting community members in distress through compassionate communication of resources and solutions.
  • Working towards ensuring content integrity on the platform by examining incidents of potential disinformation.

Community Resilience and Sustainability aims to host quarterly conversation hours to help improve understanding of their work and offer opportunities for conversation. These conversations are live streamed via YouTube. Community members have the option of joining the facilitated conversation in-person in the Zoom room. A combination of pre-submitted questions and questions asked live will be answered during the conversations.

For a list of these conversations and notes from them, please see Category:CR&S meetings. These conversation hours were previously known as IRC or office hours. See a listing of conversation hours and notes from 2022 and earlier.