Grants:APG/Proposals/2019-2020 round 1/Wikimedia Argentina/Proposal form

Overview edit

1. In order to support community review, please provide a brief description of your organization's work in the upcoming funding period.

Wikimedia Argentina will work in 2020 through three programs: Education & Human Rights, Culture & Open Knowledge and Diverse Communities. All three programs will be cross-cutting by two main lines of work: promoting knowledge equity & capacity building (leaders & communities).

In our Education & Human Rights program we will continue to promote projects to promote Wikipedia in the classroom as a tool for digital and informational literacy. We will work to scale up our projects at the federal level and advocate for the incorporation of Wikipedia into the national curricula. We will also continue to strengthen WikiDDHHH project; we want to continue building knowledge of historically excluded communities by positioning the voice of the protagonists in the construction of their history. Building quality, diverse and locally relevant knowledge will continue to be one of our priority during 2020. Likewise, for the first time we will have a line exclusively focused on strengthening, mentoring and accompanying educational projects in the region carrying out the I Fellowship project in LATAM.

Regarding our Culture & Open Knowledge program we will continue working with the wide diversity of cultural communities on preserving and making available their local cultural heritage, specially the one that has been historically excluded. To this end, we are going to promote the I Fund for endangered heritage and we will allocate resources for it. Also, we will partner with new and diverse organizations to carry out new projects and advocate for a local and regional free knowledge agenda aiming to guarantee the access to open and locally relevant information to the Latin American society. At the regional level we will work to mentor, provide resources and build the skills needed to help the adoption of open licenses in diverse cultural communities.

In 2020 we will continue to support our local community, organized through diverse thematic communities and we will reach out to already established communities of diverse organizations. In particular, we want to focus on those already working on SDG's subject, in order to co-create missing knowledge of quality and locally relevant. At the local level we will also actively promote the involvement of new voices as part of WMAR, designing new volunteer opportunities, develop, along with new partners, new projects of interest to attract new and diverse profiles within the movement and federalize the leadership, beyond Buenos Aires. At the regional level, we will work to identify, train and accompany new leaders as part of the movement. For this we will promote a training & leadership program and allocate resources for it (fellowship) In this sense we will also work to collect, classify, design and offer a resource bank according to the needs and demands of the communities at a regional scale.

Last but not least, WMAR is actively involved in the strategy process. Part of our work will focus on working in finalizing the process as well as work to help building the implementation phase if needed. In this sense, our work with our regional partners will be a priority too, with the aim of trying to engage the rest of the Latino American groups in the coming phase of the process.

2. Name, fiscal year, and funding period.
  • Legal name of organization: Asociación Civil Wikimedia Argentina
  • Organization's fiscal year: 01/01-12/31
  • 12-month funding period requested: 1/1/2020-31/12/2020
  • Currency requested: USD
  • Name of primary contact: Anna Torres


3. Amount requested.

Table 1

Currency requested US$
Total expenses for the upcoming year USD 283.728 USD 283.728
APG funding requested for the upcoming year USD 279.766 USD 279.766
Amount of funding received from WMF for the current year USD 279,784 USD 279,784



4. How does your organization know what community members and contributors to online projects need or want? Does your organization conduct needs assessments or consult the contributors and volunteers most involved with its work?

Wikimedia Argentina works closely together with Wikimedia’s Spanish-speaking community. For our 2020 annual grant, we have encouraged the participation of the community to obtain feedback as follows:

  • Monthly board meetings: Wikimedia Argentina holds monthly meetings with its Board. These meetings are open to the whole community, and travel allowances are paid for those community members who wish to attend. The current annual plan has been designed along with our local community and has been approved during our General Assembly 12th of October.
  • Activities' feedback: Volunteers, participants, partners and long-term wikimedians have been providing us feedback regarding our programs. This proposal reflects their interests, demands and needs.
  • Emerging communities: some of our activities involve leaders from emerging communities. We have reach out to them and also to potential regional partners in advance.
  • Wikimedia Argentina's members email list: Wikimedia Argentina has an email list to interact with its members where we share each new activity planned or any new regarding the Wikimedia movement. A great number of our members have given us their feedback regarding our activities through this channel.
5. Please provide a link to your organization's strategic plan, and a link to your separate annual plans for the current and upcoming funding periods if you have them.

Our 2020 strategic plan can be found here.

During 2019 we have begun to design a new strategic planning for the coming years. Although we have been able to define two new fundamental lines of work for the coming years, the Argentine context and the fact that the strategy process is still open, has slowed its development this year. In 2020 we are going to integrate our new lines of work - expressed in this year's planning - with other priority lines for the coming years, in a new 2/3 years strategy.



Annual plan summary edit


The annual proposal of Wikimedia Argentina for the year 2019-2020 is organized through three main programs - Education & Rights, Culture and Open Knowledge and Diverse Communities. We will work through to main lines of work for the next years:

  • Promoting knowledge equity: Creating diverse, reliable and currently underrepresented knowledge to ensure that knowledge is locally relevant for LATAM communities
  • Capacity building - communities & leaders: Generating skills, abilities, processes and resources to boost current and future communities in pursuit of the development of an equitable, inclusive, diverse and inviting movement for all.

Both are key to continue strengthening the new strategic direction in pursuit of being the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge in 2030. On the one hand, we want to continue working so that Wikimedia projects represent the total diversity of Argentinean and Latin American knowledge. We want to continue building knowledge from the South, directly involving the affected communities and prioritizing the knowledge of historically excluded communities. On the other hand, we want to continue working to build a more inclusive and representative movement, supporting and accompanying the growth and development of new and emerging diverse communities, both locally and regionally (more information on these lines of work here)

Apart from the strategic lines, our work on advocacy & partnerships will be crucial. As a matter of fact, one or some of these cross-cutting principles might become a strategic line of work next year or in the next following years, so we must keep our plans flexible and subject to possible changes. This is the result of the current political situation of our country, that will have general elections in 2019 and surveys point to a likely change of administration. This will directly affect our work in these areas and we will have to adapt to the new local agenda.

Gender & Diversity will continue to be a fundamental cross-cutting line affecting all the programs in 2020.


Programs 2020 edit


Education & Human Rights program edit

Since 2014, the Education & Human Rights program has consolidated as a referent in Argentina of work in pursuit of free culture and open knowledge in education institutions. As a result, we have consolidated our online proposals for educators and the work in high-schools and universities (+30 in 2019) These projects, that we will continue promoting during 2020, have grown across the country and at a regional scale, both in the number of participants as in the creation of content. Nevertheless, the education context in Argentina is very challenging. Formal education is directly affected by budget cuts, so civil society organizations play an essential role in providing resources to satisfy the demands and needs of educators. For this purpose, we will continue mentoring and training the education community and generating strategic alliances with social organizations that are aligned with our goals and that improve our outreach and the impact of our activities.

On the other hand, the development of Wiki DDHH and our alliance with Human Rights organizations - Institute of Public Policies on Human Rights of MERCOSUR, Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, OHCHR, UNICEF, Agencia Presentes, Amnistia Argentina etc- have allowed us to legitimize a project in which we create content on underrepresented issues, together with historically excluded communities, reinforcing the role of the Wikimedia projects, not only at a digital level but also at a social level. The conference on Human Rights that took place in 2019 served as a meeting place for many of these organizations and allows us to consider new alliances for next year to continue generating content with historically excluded collectives.

Goals 2020

The main goals for the program next year are:

  • Promoting Knowledge equity: reduce the current content gaps by involving educational and historical excluded communities as content creators.
  • Capacity building: along with the communities involved, to build contextualized training & mentoring programs to increase the number of education and Human Rights projects, at all levels.

New projects 2020

In 2020 we intend to reinforce our impact and results at a local, regional and global scale, in the following way:

  • Strengthening and scaling our digital and information literacy projects at a local scale -MOOC Wikipuentes, Wikipedia at the university, and training sessions in high-schools- For that purpose, we will work to strengthen our work with the local and national government and advocate, as long as the political context is conducive, for the inclusion of Wikimedia projects in the national syllabus.
  • To promote the development of a new community of editors, engaging historically excluded communities as protagonists in the creation of content. For this purpose, we will continue fostering the WikiDDHH project (LGBTIQ+, historical memory, native peoples, etc) both in Argentina and the region (at least Brasil and Panamá), prioritizing work produced from the voices of the communities and their own contexts.
  • To mentor the development of skills in emerging communities with the purpose of promoting education projects with a Human Rights perspective at a regional scale. In this line, we will develop the I LATAM Fellowship Program, which will be designed together with participating communities according to each context. The goal is to collaboratively work on the development of skills, processes and education projects to initiate or strengthen communities at the regional scale.
  • We want to strengthen and improve our collaborative work within the Wikimedia movement. Consolidating groups to transfer knowledge can be a way to promote the growth of new subjects inside the movement. Our work on Human Rights represents an opportunity to organize a network of leaders in a learning community at a global scale, with which we can develop training programs inside the movement and work on policies, processes, partnerships and collaborative projects.

You can read our complete program planning - specific goals, activities descriptions- for 2020 here


Culture & Open Knowledge edit

Resignifying the GLAM concept to our local context has opened the doors to work with new counterparts and position Argentinean culture in the Wikimedia projects. The work we have been doing on preservation and access to local cultural heritage has grown significantly during 2019. We have consolidated the Digitization & Open Data project that has positioned us as a referent organization on open access in Argentina. For instance, we have signed agreements with the National Academy of History, the Memory Park, the Library of Congress, The National Academy of Arts, Argentine Academy of Letters, Library of the Legislature of the Province of Buenos Aires, the Circe Library and the University of La Plata, important cultural institutions, with very diverse profiles, with which we are working to incorporate open practices and policies to their processes and heritage.

Also, adapting and keeping part of our agenda flexible has not only allowed us to work in a sustained manner with new counterparts from the third sector but to define strategic lines of our work - such as gender and science in recent years - as well as to position the role of Wikimedia projects as allies in the promotion of their work. This strategy, which we will continue in 2020, allows us not only to create locally relevant and diverse content but also to generate long-term alliances, incorporate new allies to the movement and create policies of open access in diverse cultural communities - librarians, gender organizations, government entities, etc- In order to achieve this, we will continue developing training, mentoring & tailor-made activities according to the needs of the institutions.

On the other hand, the program has consolidated a whole other line of work linked to the promotion of access to information and digital rights. In 2020 projects and trainings about misinformation and digital rights in the region will be a priority. These help us position the debate about open and free knowledge in the agenda, allows us to forge strategic alliances for advocacy, to reach new audiences and to position the role of the Wikimedia projects as sources of reliable information within Argentinean society.

Goals 2020

According to our strategic lines, our for 2020 are the following:

  • Promoting knowledge equity: Collection, development and access to knowledge that fully represents the local cultural diversity
  • Capacity building: Training, mentoring and supporting diverse cultural communities to advocate, serve and enable open and reliable knowledge

New projects 2020

Apart from the projects mentioned above, that we will continue, during 2020 we are going to carry out new initiatives to strengthen our two new lines of work:

  • We want to guarantee that access to knowledge is really equitable. For this purpose, our digitizing project will promote a line of work about education on heritage. Argentina is much larger than the city of Buenos Aires and the heritage we make accessible must be within reach of students across the country, regardless of their resources, location or access to internet. We are currently working together with UNESCO and its schools around the country for this purpose.
  • We will make work with cultural underrepresented communities and their heritage our priority. For this purpose, we will develop the First Fund for Endangered Heritage with the objective of supporting cultural institutions and communities historically left out from around the country. We will allocate resources - technical & economic- as well as develop capacity programs according to the needs. We will seek to enlarge the fund with the support of private entities such as banks, with whom we have already had a successful experience.
  • We will generate a learning and knowledge transfer platform (online) to accompany with resources the work of cultural communities at the regional level. To reach this objective, we will develop an online course together with allied organizations of the region that deal with certain topics: free culture, open knowledge, access to culture in online spaces, digitization and cultural metadata.
  • We will work to build a free knowledge agenda for Argentina and Latin America. We will promote an assessment of advocacy needs in the region. This will allow us to understand current needs and challenges.
  • Fighting misinformation and its impact on Wikimedia projects will continue being an important line of work. We will develop clinical sessions and we will open debate, awareness and training spaces. In alliance with media, NGO etc. - we will work to identify and plan actions to fight misinformation in the Wikimedia projects

You can read our complete program planning - specific goals, activities descriptions- for 2020 here


Diverse communities edit

During 2019 the community program focused on strengthening and growing the local community based on two objectives: sustaining the commitment of our new and historic editors; and incorporating and motivating new members with diverse volunteer roles as an active part of our community.

To this end, we have continued to develop thematic communities, strengthening those that already existed -gender, photographers and historical community- and generated two new communities -Wikidata and Litoral. Working through thematic communities has been key during the last 2 years. This way of working not only allows us to identify people with common interests, but also to design projects accordingly, define and establish new roles and volunteer opportunities, offer learning experiences and adequate resources and decentralize leadership. Ensuring support for our community will remain one of our top priorities in 2020.

On the other hand, another of our objectives is to continue promoting the role of the Wikimedia projects as a tool for civic construction.This help us to approach and work with organizations with established communities on socially and locally relevant issues. For this purpose, we design workshops and trainings where Wikimedia projects are presented as allies to enhance the work they are developing and allow us to add expert voices and quality content in our projects.

Finally, supporting the region's growth will continue to be a priority in 2020. During 2019 we have supported and mentored projects and leaders in countries such as El Salvador, Paraguay, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, as well as accompanied the professionalization of chapters in the region.

Goals 2020

According to our strategic lines, our for 2020 are the following:

  • Promoting knowledge equity: promoting the Wikimedia projects as a tool for the construction of citizenship, according to local social demands.
  • Capacity building: Develop leadership programs & volunteer opportunities to build stronger & contextualized communities in LATAM

New projects 2020

While we will continue to strengthen the projects described above, the community program will also incorporate major changes next year with the aim of promoting a movement build by inclusive and diverse communities that receive the support they need according to their contexts. This is what we are going to do:

  • Identifying, training and retaining new leaders at the regional level to promote emerging communities will be one of our priorities. To this end, we will work together with our regional allies and we will promote the New Voices Fellowship Program (pilot). We will carry out a needs assessment and develop a peer to peer learning program for new and emerging leaders in LATAM. As far as possible we will accompany the work with grants that support the development of activities.
  • We will strengthen our work at the regional level by developing a centralized learning and resource platform. For years we have developed diverse materials; compiling them and designing new ones according to the needs detected will be a priority in 2020.
  • We will work to ensure that our community reflects Argentina's diversity by federalizing leadership. To this end, we are going to develop a new training program with a national scope and we are going to provide the necessary resources and capacities for these leaders to grow.
  • We will continue to strengthen and support our thematic communities - gender, photographers, wikidata, etc - but we want to identify new roles and profiles and generate new opportunities to be part of our community. We will place special emphasis on involving people from historically excluded communities (LGBTQ+, non binary, etc) and from communities that are not yet part of our community (senior and youth).
  • We will continue to strengthen the role of Wikimedia projects as a tool for citizen construction. We want to continue creating socially and locally relevant knowledge. In particular, we will focus on communities that work to promote the SDG. To do this, we will generate alliances with organizations linked to these issues, develop training programs and involve their experts in the creation of quality content.

You can read our complete program planning - specific goals, activities descriptions, metrics- for 2020 here


Metrics 2019-2020 edit

Grantee metrics

Education & Rights

  • Diversity: % of content about and created by underrepresented communities
  • Impact: projects supported and mentored in the region.

Culture & Open Knowledge Program

  • Diversity: % of content from endangered heritage
  • Impact: # of organizations adopting open licenses.

Diverse Communities

  • Diversity: # of leaders from historically excluded communities as part of WMAR
  • Impact: emerging communities mentored and supported in the region.

Metrics 2019-2020

Total metrics Participants Newly registered Content pages Diversity Impact
Education & Rights Program 1500 500 1200 At least 20% of the content created At least 5 projects mentored
Culture & Open Knowledge Program 1200 500 100,000pages on the Wikimedia projects (books, pictures, articles, datasets etc.) 15% of the content released 10 organizations
Diverse Communities 700 140 6000 10 new leaders At least 5 emerging communities supported

Budget edit

In 2019 we closed all the projects we had with other funders beyond WMF. Although we continue to work to diversify our funds and this will be a priority in 2020, it has been difficult in 2019. Partly due to the country's economic situation, which has meant a reduction in subsidies at the local level and a - partial - change in the priorities of international cooperation for Argentina.

The WMAR's budget for 2020 can be found here

The summary of our expenses is as follows:

Summary of expenses
Program USD % of total expenses Comments
Administration USD 30,588 10,9% Adiministration expenditures decrease due to currency devalution
Staff USD 136,687% 48,0% n/a
Education & Rights USD 29,716 10,6% n/a
Culture & Open Knowledge USD 35,521 12,7% Funds required to WMF grow in order to support digitizing program.
Diverse Communities USD 28,650 10,2% n/a
Fellowship Programs USD 18,604 6,6% We expect to receive 10 fellows by 2020 in total - education program and community program.
TOTAL BUDGET 2020- Wikimedia Argentina USD 279.766 100,0% We expect to keep the amount of our In Kind Donations: USD 3.962

We also expect the peso to continue to devalue and this could affect prices (2019 will end with inflation of approximately 60%). The current situation is so unpredictable that we cannot really know what is going to happen and how it will affect us, but we are in contact with the Wikimedia Foundation and we handle different scenarios in order to be able to attend - if necessary - to possible difficulties.

Verification and signature edit

Please enter "yes" or "no" for the verification below.

The term “political or legislative activities” includes any activities relating to political campaigns or candidates (including the contribution of funds and the publication of position statements relating to political campaigns or candidates); voter registration activities; meetings with or submissions and petitions to government executives, ministers, officers or agencies on political or policy issues; and any other activities seeking government intervention or policy implementation (like “lobbying”), whether directed toward the government or the community or public at large. General operating support through the FDC may not be used to cover political and legislative activities, although you may make a separate grant agreement with the WMF for these purposes.
I verify that no funds from the Wikimedia Foundation will be used
for political or legislative activities except as permitted by a grant agreement
YES


Please sign below to complete this proposal form.

IMPORTANT. Please do not make any changes to this proposal form after the proposal submission deadline for this round. If a change that is essential to an understanding of your organization's proposal is needed, please request the change on the discussion page of this form so it may be reviewed by FDC staff. Once submitted, complete and valid proposal forms submitted on time by eligible organizations will be considered unless an organization withdraws its application in writing or fails to remain eligible for the duration of the FDC process.
Please sign here once this proposal form is complete, using four tildes. Anna Torres (WMAR) (talk) 23:08, 15 October 2019 (UTC)