Content Partnerships Hub/White paper/1. Why Wikimedia Sverige initiated the work to become a Thematic hub

Developing a Thematic Hub in the Wikimedia Movement

Insights from Wikimedia Sverige's exploratory work to form a first thematic hub

White Paper

1. Why Wikimedia Sverige initiated the work to become a Thematic hub	2. Purpose and structure of the White Paper	3. Growing and reorganizing the current organization
4. Finding support internally and externally	5. Ensuring financial sustainability for the work	6. Final remarks

Why Wikimedia Sverige initiated the work to become a Thematic hub

The Wikimedia movement has, like most international movements, had a significant amount of discussions on how to ensure different values and goals, such as efficiency, diversity and collaboration and cooperation between different actors.

Every now and then, these goals end up in conflict with each other. Sometimes because they are actually in conflict, but often the perceived conflict is rather dependent on what time horizon one is looking at. For example, in the short term a centralized organization might be more suitable to enhance efficiency, but in the long run a more diverse set of organizations might enhance the efficiencies even further. What was true at one point in time might change over time and the discussion on how to best achieve our shared vision should therefore stay active.

The Wikimedia 2030 Movement Strategy Recommendations were developed between 2017 and 2020, and analyzed in depth in what ways the Wikimedia movement should develop until 2030. The skilled Strategy core team at the Wikimedia Foundation worked extremely hard to support the Working Groups. These consisted of about a hundred Wikimedians from across the world, with many more consulted throughout the process, and worked to deliver a set of thought-provoking recommendations for what the Wikimedia movement should transform into by 2030.

One of the key takeaways from this process was the intention to develop different hubs across the world. The need for two types emerged, Regional hubs which support organizations and volunteers in a certain geographical area (e.g. an East African hub), and Thematic hubs, which support organizations and volunteers within a certain area of expertise (e.g. a Content partnership hub).

Representatives from Wikimedia Sverige were strong proponents of the concepts of hubs during the development of the 2030 Recommendations. The chapter views hubs as a key concept to organize the Wikimedia movement around. One important reason for this is the real urgency to implement a more distributed power structure in the Wikimedia movement to tackle many of the identified issues outlined in the recommendations. As such the chapter was interested to start experimenting as early on as possible, to see how the idea of hubs could be organized in the highly complex and constantly evolving Wikimedia movement.

The hope was that, as an organized mid-sized chapter, these trailblazing efforts of Wikimedia Sverige would reduce the costs and complexities for other affiliates to take the necessary steps when taking a larger role in their contexts.

This work to become a hub has been done with the understanding that a clear definition of what a hub consists of is yet to be defined, and also that the exact scope is likely to change. And that in the end Wikimedia Sverige might not formally be appointed to become a hub. This is something the association accepts, if the work has moved the needle in the right direction and on the way achieved more free knowledge.

The intention was, and is, not to decide or claim to be a hub during this period. Rather, it is to state an intent and to make a serious effort to initiate a process of transition and organizational change, a process that would allow the chapter to develop into a new larger international role. As such we are currently working under the assumption that the Thematic hub will not be a separate movement entity, but an integral part of a future Wikimedia Sverige.

The hope is that this will help achieve the mission of the Thematic hub:

Support content partners across the world so that we, in a joint effort, can utilize crowdsourcing to bring together, interconnect and develop the knowledge they hold. For free, in perpetuity.

Local funding to get the work started was secured

In 2018 Wikimedia Sverige had identified a call for project grants worth up to 300,000 USD from a Swedish funder. A decision was made to apply for a project grant which would focus on two things:

1. Investigate the limitations of the current batch upload process through a number of uploads and describing the process; and
2. Identify the available data about the world’s galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs), work for the existing data to be freely licensed, and to upload as much of the information as possible to Wikidata. The goal was to create a unique database of contact information which would allow free knowledge actors to quickly find relevant content partners to reach out to as part of different initiatives.

The project that was developed was named FindingGLAMs. The name highlights the long term goal of creating opportunities for more new GLAM partnerships with the Wikimedia movement.

Valuable inputs were given from the Wikimedia Foundation’s GLAM & Culture team about how the chapter could contribute to improve the work regarding content partnerships around the world. The Wikimedia Foundation also joined the project as a partner organization. The project grant application received full funding and work took part over the following two years.

The white paper from the FindingGLAMs project can be found here. The project helped to establish a deep collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation and to form successful partnerships with UNESCO and other UN agencies. It also helped to scale the team at Wikimedia Sverige, and to test and develop the abilities to take on a larger role in the Wikimedia movement. This was made through hundreds of discussions, through technical development, by supporting other actors with micro grants, through global scale volunteer engagement (e.g. with contests) and communication to stakeholders across the world. As importantly, it exposed us to many of the limitations and problems which we realized will take significant efforts to solve.

In this period we also initiated and coordinated new international initiatives such as WikiGap. We also hosted Wikimania in 2019, with a theme focusing on how the Wikimedia movement is contributing to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDC). These activities were important in forming new connections in the Wikimedia world and for Wikimedia Sverige to continue its development.

Funding from Wikimedia Foundation to continue scaling followed

The work done as part of the FindingGLAMs project led to many insights. At the same time, the development of the Wikimedia movement's 2030 Strategy continued.

The teams at Wikimedia Sverige and the Wikimedia Foundation had regular, constructive and positive in-depth discussions about what would be needed to establish a Thematic hub in Sweden. Over time the focus and ideas changed as different people got involved in the planning process.The GLAM and culture team at Wikimedia Foundation was a driving force in this work and supported the internal process at Wikimedia Foundation to run forward. Equally important, it acted as a thought partner to develop the broad ideas in the recommendations for the 2030 Strategy into a pathfinding concept for Thematic hubs.

However, during the project a number of key decision makers at Wikimedia Foundation changed. This had a major impact on the project planning and execution.

Significant effort was given to plan for how an agreement between a chapter and the Wikimedia Foundation could best be structured. This trailblazing will hopefully make it easier and faster for other affiliates to reach similar agreements in the future.

In the end the focus of the initiative consisted of four parts:

• Developing, together with the GLAMwiki community, a plan for the first years of technical development by the hub.
• Developing a proposal for what the governance could look like and a model for how the global community and the hub could support each other.
• Researching how financial sustainability for the hub could be reached.
• Developing a white paper (this document), which outlines the insights gained over the years that, hopefully, could be of value to other actors interested in becoming Thematic hubs in the future.

The second goal, to deliver recommendations around governance and global community support models, was postponed mid-project. The reasons for this was that the strategic recommendations got delayed, and we needed to continue the work to finalize a long term collaboration agreement between Wikimedia Sverige and the Wikimedia Foundation.

The funding allowed Wikimedia Sverige to continue developing the organizational capacity. This, in turn, allowed the organization to scale its team and take on more ambitious long term development projects.

The continued funding is to be decided

For the second phase, we explored the possibility of forming a long-term commitment over multiple years together with the Wikimedia Foundation. This funding would be used to form a dedicated team of developers and staff working with e.g. training, events and communication which would support the global GLAMwiki community. However, due to COVID-19 and the possibility that the Wikimedia Foundation would not reach its fundraising goals, the agreed upon sum to Wikimedia Sverige was in the end significantly lowered. This unexpected reduction in funding led to an urgent need for Wikimedia Sverige to reduce costs and to secure revenue streams from other sources. A number of project grant applications as well as an increased focus on local fundraising have since been developed.

In 2021 it was decided by the WMF that long-term funding for the hub efforts are to be decided by the still-to-be-established Global Council, possibly with support of the newly created Regional Grants Committees that WMF has created. The future role of the Grants Committees and how they interact with hubs in the movement is still to be determined. A grant to continue developing the Thematic hub concept was awarded and Wikimedia Sverige also applied for a number of external grants to be able to realocate more of its Annual Plan Grant to the international work.