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Community Resources/Grants Strategy Relaunch 2020-2021/Community brainstorming/ha

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Community Resources
Community Brainstorming
with CR team

The Community Resources team interacted with members from the affiliates, volunteers and allied organisations to understand the changes that need to be incorporated in the relaunch of grants strategy.

Round 1 of the brainstorming had volunteers, grants committee members, executive directors of affiliates, chairpersons of affiliates, user group representatives, people who have applied but not received the grants and representatives from other grant-making organisations contribute to the discussions.

Round 2 of the brainstorming conversation was focused on regional representation. We had dedicated conversations with a few volunteer members from the African communities, MENA region, ESEAP region and Indian community members.

These discussions are to provide an early assessment of the wishes and demands of community members regarding the changes that they would like to see in the grants structure. The Community Resources team would be engaging in a wider community engagement with pilot initiatives and improve the ideas based on the feedback received from community members.

We have identified the following areas that require support in addition to two specific areas for the Wikimedia Foundation to improve its operations:

Wikimedia Foundation-specific feedback:

It was also discussed that recommendations made by the Resource Allocation WG during the Movement Strategy process contain insights that can help in framing the discussion around what support can be offered by the Wikimedia Foundation to communities and how equitable allocation of resources can be taken up in the next steps.

Identified areas

Support to identify the skills required

  • Unrestricted funds to grantees to build capacities that they have identified.
  • New grant programs that specifically encourage more collaboration across the Movement.
  • Program management skills for volunteers are needed to support good programmatic work. Investment in financial management training should be done via grants. NGO management, specific to how to run in a transparent and open way is an essential skill.
  • Providing extra funding for partnering with underrepresented groups or organizations that work with those groups.
  • There is a need for funds to support documentation and sharing of internal knowledge.
  • Affiliates could benefit from coaching processes (this opinion was shared by members of the affiliates present in the brainstorming).

Support in identifying the right context and investing in the local needs

  • Not all communities start from the same place. Requests are for different kinds of requirements. For funding to be equitable these factors need to be considered.
  • Contextualized programs that are tuned towards local context is a key point, these are beyond regular programs. Such programs should be assessed as per the local/contextualised needs.
  • Availability of resources to support access to technical tools.
  • Sustainability of the movement is of high priority for Indian communities as an affiliate or underrepresented community do not always have the resources. Lack of sustainability hinders building infrastructure for affiliates.
  • Overcoming language barriers by investing in multiple language support or necessary translations are important.
  • Administration skills, Knowledge management skills that can help in simplifying the work done by affiliates.
  • There should be an investment in ‘taking care of the people you introduced to the projects’. It could be a stipend to support the newcomers and lead to nurturing of the community.

Support to grow technical capacity of communities

  • New platforms to support the inclusion of current and new communities.
  • Joint development of technical capacity across communities.
  • Training for volunteers about bots and other technical skills connected to content contribution and partnerships.
  • Need better technical solutions to solve capacity issues. Existing software is dated. Need access information about what tools different affiliates have used for different purposes.
  • Tools that allow for people to write in their local language and respond in languages comfortable to them.
  • Lack of a user-friendly technology that allows for ease in editing.
  • Tools and resources for creating admins, planning advanced training that will help editors become admins and other functionaries across the projects.

Support invisible work done by communities

  • Recognise the costs of organising conferences, writing grant reports.
  • Important to consider the process and not only the achievement coming out of the grant or metrics that are fulfilled.
  • The availability of resources has allowed them to invest in talented newcomers in the community and enabling participation in global events.

Support that goes beyond money

  • Follow-up required for small communities. Annual reminders are not constructive. Regular check-in, step by step mentorship is necessary until the point of maturity.
  • Knowledge within the movement must be made accessible.
  • Regional experience exchange, either within a regional hub (e.g. CEE, Iberocoop, WikiArabia) or a one-to-one exchange across organisations working in similar contexts and with similar communities.
  • For new communities and volunteers, there is not a lot of documentation or onboarding. We rely on surrounding communities for support.
  • Support connectedness and belonging across the Movement.
  • Efforts to support better governance and organisational guidelines. It should be able to seek support from another body. When smaller organizations want to become an affiliate. What do they need to do to become an affiliate?
  • There is a need to build a more structured feedback process between the affiliates and the Foundation.
  • Support should be provided towards addressing the tension between the pro-editors and the new contributors; how to manage these tensions.
  • Wikimedia affiliates should get more support regarding the monitoring and evaluation process.

Support to simplify reporting and application process

  • Recognise other ways to report grants. Video report and other kinds of structures that help the reporting process.
  • Reporting of grants in English is not easy. Not having contact persons who do not share the context is an obstacle.
  • Small/underserved communities do not have the same capacity to volunteer in comparison to bigger communities. Unfair to assume that the same kind of engagement can be seen across all the communities.
  • Focusing more on the process and long-term outcomes and learning is more important than the immediate metrics. The focus on more immediate metrics detracts from innovation.
  • Review the evaluation process, usually, for small groups, it takes a lot from them especially when the quantitative data is required. Grants can invest in qualitative reporting methods and overall focus on impact.
  • It is a big ask for emerging communities to access resources from WMF.

Support to organisational development/long term investment

  • Provide enough funding to develop an organisation (staff support and investment at the organisational development).
  • Guidance on how to grow as a chapter in order to have a better impact in the local context and with local partners.
  • Provide backbone support (e.g. in a regional/thematic hub) so that local partners can focus on developing their capacities.
  • Joint applications for external project grants.
  • Offering more support for affiliates to seek external grants. Better to have a main contact team/ambassador to introduce and provide orientation to a grant program.
  • Can organize training sessions around ideas of what boards should / should not do at a regional level.
  • Hiring of staff: At what stages of a grant, affiliate, organisation does it require paid support?

Support for strategies that aim at radical inclusion

  • Radical inclusion cannot be in terms of resources alone. It should go with working with communities at an individual level. What skills do they have now, what skills are required for future (organisational skills, financial capacity )should be developed.
  • Proactive in inviting people into the movement.
  • There’s a lack of explaining what Wikimedia is all about, while bringing in new staff members and volunteers. Massive lack of documentation. Lack of clear pitches to motivate this work.
  • More training is needed around things like restorative justice and practice training. Workshops to address racial bias to address anti-blackness is another need in the movement.
  • Compensate people for their time, especially in underrepresented and under-resourced communities.
  • The idea of just reserving some funds for underrepresented communities in the movement. Many communities may not have the bandwidth or capacity to apply for funding. Having flexibility with deadlines could help the inclusion of underrepresented and under-resourced communities.
  • Should be as multilingual as possible. Translating grants spaces to their own language is not a common practice. Dedicated amount to be reserved in the grant for translation.
  • Seed money/grant that when well utilized the partner can graduate to accessing ‘serious’ money.
  • The APG program only focuses on organizations, only focuses on building their own structures. There should be an equitable process to build coalitions using APG and other institutional grants.
  • More decentralized process, where the affiliate organizations can themselves give grants, the foundation can also give grants to other organizations and support cross-pollination.

Capacity to be developed by WMF and affiliate staff working with grants, being trained and onboarded to understand radical inclusion and equity, equitable

  • How is equity, equitable allocation, radical inclusion defined?
  • Better understanding of how local partners are contributing to the broader movement without necessarily turning that into a particular version of a wiki-project.
  • The relationship needs to be different from a typical grant-making process. The Foundation needs to be a supporting body rather than a controlling body.
  • WMF should acknowledge that there are certain geographical areas that cannot be included despite the best of efforts. Many communities are unable to get financial support or other kinds of support (hardware support).
  • Without structures of support, the idea of regional hubs would not be very effective.
  • Public notification of an unapproved grant is not motivating. The space for learning how to improve applying for a grant or be paired with someone who has done granting before.
  • People reviewing the grant need to have contextual information. Without such information, it would not be possible to understand the complexity of the grant application. Apart from cultural differences, there are also geographical considerations.
  • The question of capacity building should be understood in multiple ways. It is not just about the importance of building capacity across community members. There should be development of capacity to process, understand and determine the importance of local/relevant programs.

Responsibility on funders to identify new individuals and groups to support

  • We often put it on under-resourced communities to reach out and ask for support. WMF should be more proactive to reach out and ask what support people need. It would be radical if WMF had a partnership with a language co-op in which grantees or under-resourced groups could have a call with a PO with a translator on the line.
  • People being rejected also has something to do with the quality of the proposal submitted. Before people apply for grants, there needs to be some form of coaching and preparation / primed to apply for the grant.
  • There needs to be a program to retain the person rejected, assign a person to support the person to restructure the application, embracing the newcomers providing coaching to those who come in to retain them as contributors to the projects.

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Participants of Round 1

Name of the participant Alaka
Sandra Rientjes Affiliate staff
Marco Fossati Sa kai
Kira Wisniewski Affiliate staff
Monica Bonilla Affiliate staff
Philip Kopetzky Chairperson
Remy Gerbert Affiliate staff
Mervat Salam Sa kai
Revital Poleg Affiliate staff
Douglas Ssebaggala Volunteer
Nikki Zeuner Affiliate staff
Mykola Kozlenko Volunteer
Effie Kapsalis Smithsonian OA
Patricia Diaz Affiliate staff
Evelin Heidel Creative Commons
Anna Torres Affiliate staff
Daria Cybulska Affiliate staff
John Anderson Affiliate staff
Netha Hussain Volunteer
Nicole Ebber Affiliate staff

Participants of Round 2

Name of the participant Affiliation Yanki
Mohsen Salek Volunteer MENA
Mervat Salam Volunteer MENA
Anass Sedratti Volunteer MENA
Ananya Mondal Volunteer India
Bodhisattwa Mandal Volunteer India
Krishna Chaitanya Velaga Volunteer India
Pavan Santhosh Volunteer India
Isla Haddow-Flood Volunteer Africa
Sandister Tei Volunteer Africa
Bobby Shabangu Chairperson Afirca
Uzoma Uzorumba Volunteer Africa
Antoni Mtavangu Volunteer Africa
Kartika Sari Henry Volunteer ESEAP
Johnny Bautista Volunteer ESEAP
Biyanto Rebin Affiliate staff ESEAP
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