Grants:Conference/QW22/QW2022

statusFunded

Conference & Event Grant

WMLGBT+/Queering Wikipedia 2022

Deliver a global conference supporting LGBTQ+ groups, allies and individuals to share and document experiences using Wikimedia projects and build a more integrated Wikimedia LGBT+ social community.

targetAll projects in all languages.

strategic priorityImproving Quality

event dates3 days in October 2022

amount89,450

typeorganization

nonprofitYes

creator• QW22

contact• qw2022wmlgbt.org• claudia.garadwikimedia.at

organization• WMLGBT+ user group

website• https://wmlgbt.org

Friendly space expectations

index

Review your report

Event overview

Purpose and vision

The Queering Wikipedia conference is focused on movement growth and innovation as identified in Wikimedia 2030 Movement Strategy. In 3 conference days it brings together our global LGBTQ+ community in a variety of events to discuss ideas and share opportunities to improve open knowledge about and for LGBTQ+ content within the Wikimedia movement. This is both a thematic event promoting reliable open knowledge about and for all LGBTQ+ communities and a growth event focusing on capabilities, capacity, diversity and the representative authority of the Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group for all Wikimedia language projects.

The conference supports our volunteers and allies to work together to identify and build new capacities in our network, better to support each other and educate everyone in our Wikimedia family on best practices when sharing LGBTQ+ culture, history, and to ensure a welcoming environment for volunteers and readers on all our projects.

For more detail refer to Purpose and vision.

Please give a brief description of the event you are planning. What do you hope to accomplish during the event? Why is this event important for your community?

The strategic goals and deliverables are:

1. To deliver a first international conference for LGBTQ+ and ally organizations, groups and individuals to share and document experiences using Wikimedia and closely related projects
2. To recognize and document LGBTQ+ gaps, case studies and needs across Wikimedia projects
3. To expand and consolidate the Wikimedia LGBTQ+ network of stakeholders
4. To prioritise improvements for LGBTQ+ inclusion, safety and sustainability on Wikimedia projects especially for emerging and small communities
5. To develop the capacity of the Wikimedia LGBT+ user group and networks
6. To build a more integrated Wikimedia LGBT+ social community through discussion and fun
7. To experience using a global, multilingual and mixed virtual/physical safe environment

The key impacts are to increase participation from underrepresented LGBTQIA communities and to increase the sense of momentum within the community to address LGBTQIA content gaps and strategically-relevant policies on Wikimedia projects; such as on deadnaming or responding to a known systemic LGBTQIA hostile administration.

Do you consider this to be a Regional; Thematic or Growth event? You can read more about each category here.

QW2022 is a thematic and growth event. For the majority of attendees the themes of Wikimedia project LGBTQ content and LGBTQ related policies will be the focus, however the theme of ongoing Wikimedia LGBTQ capacity and community building will be a key deliverable.

See Audiences and scale for more information on how the different tracks for the conference are envisioned.

Is it a Remote, or in-person event?

The conference is available as a virtual event due to the necessary restrictions and risks during the Covid-19 pandemic. There is no international travel planned to deliver the event, however the plan includes local travel to enable local "node" meetings to enable active participation in the global conference by communities that will benefit from sharing high quality video connections and in-person support.

For more details on the balance between local events and the global virtual conference, refer to Pandemic risks and travel and Nodes.

Important details

Proposed dates	3 days in October 2022
Proposed location	Global online plus support for local self-organized nodes
Number of participants	300+ public event participants, 50+ in closed events for wikimedian development, knowledge sharing and networking
Event page	QW2022 and https://wmlgbt.org — conference on-wiki and public landing pages
Primary contact persons	The organizational point of contact is an appointed member of the WMLGBT+ governance team, who are all identified with the WMF and provide User Group governance for this grant, while financial procedures, data protection policy, and necessary financial reports to the WMF are under the authority of the Wikimedia Austria CEO. Once established the official conference team will appoint a single point of contact for operational reporting of the conference who will support the governance team and regularly liaise with WMF grants on progress. Refer to Organisation chart.

Background

Community input

Use the results from the community engagement survey to fill in the table below. Since you cannot cover all topics or meet all needs at one event, prioritisation is important. Please rank the priority of each topic, skill, project or problem as high, medium or low. Finally, please answer the questions in the table below, if any of the questions are not relevant leave it blank.

Description	Priority	Details
Strategic discussions: What are the top issues affecting your community that need to be discussed in person?	High	Meta issues Queerphobia on wiki projects Collaboration around queer vocabularies UG strategy Safely engaging new users Sustainable support structures Becoming more representative Content Identifying missing content The “Unreliable Sources” problem
Capacity development: Are there important skills that many people in your community need to learn?	Medium	Wikidata Sustainable support structures Fundraising Communication and community-building
Working groups: Are there joint projects that need to be planned in person?	Medium	How to address abuse and harassment Engaging new editors User-group admin processes
Community building: Are there other in-person activities are important for community building?	Medium	Meeting people with similar identities Getting people together from similar regions

Survey analysis:

1. How many people did you send the survey to? How many people responded to the survey?
   • The survey was promoted on the English Wikipedia LGBT studies noticeboard, the Wikimedia Commons village pump, WMLGBT+ user group telegram discussions (130 members), the LGBT Wikimedia mailing list and the WMLGBT+ Twitter account (37,000 followers).
   • There were 18 responses to the survey.
2. Did you see consensus around shared goals that this community wants to focus on in the next 12 months? What were the top 2 3 goals?
   • Queerphobia on wiki projects — how to address it and the lack of functioning on-wiki processes to escalate abuse and harassment
   • Collaboration around queer vocabularies — we don't have a good handle on it, and there is potential for widespread harm if we don't establish community guidelines and best practices quickly
   • Countering systemic bias with underrepresented biographies — the “Unreliable Sources” problem
3. Based on survey responses, what are the most important things your community should do at the conference to achieve those goals?
   • Plan strategies for addressing queerphobia in the absence of functioning on-wiki support and escalation structures
   • Learn more about and discuss taxonomy and controlled vocabularies — both for "queer vocabularies" above and increased use of Wikidata
   • Gather best practices from other LGBTQ+ groups and other groups working on underrepresented subject areas

There will be an ongoing user expectation and community needs survey and a more specific required survey for conference registrants, both staying open until QW2022 registration closes.

The user feedback, workshop on expectations and experience gained running the Working Days event in 2020 remain critical inputs to the design and choices during this conference for the priority of needs and understanding of access needs including safety and security, especially in emerging countries and for volunteers living in nations with known anti-LGBTQIA bias or an environment that presents a risk to their safety.

Context

It is helpful to get an understanding of why this event is important to your community, and what experiences you have had in the past. Please answer the applicable questions below.

1. What inspired your community to begin planning this event?

The user group started planning a global LGBTQ+ conference in 2019. In spring 2020 there was a public call for proposals and funding was in place, however the pandemic changed plans and it became an internally focused working days event which ran in April 2021. QW2022 benefits from that past work, and will aim to include original registrations and content proposals.

A more complete background is at History and legacy.

2. How does this event relate to other activities that your community is working on?

The WMLGBT+ user group has established regular virtual meetings and experimented with a variety of meeting and teamworking tools. WMLGBT+ telegram groups have become the most well established means to provide support to volunteers needing help with Wikimedia LGBTQ related content creation, providing stakeholder feedback on policies and cases with WMF T&S and Legal and feedback to other Affiliates asking for feedback on local LGBTQ related initiatives. All of the internal activities and projects will benefit from this global conference from socialization, training and sharing of best practices.

3. Do you have any Thematic or Regional committee or group? (Such as WISCom, CEE, Iberocoop, etc).

The WMLGBT+ User Group is a global group coordinated with monthly member meetings. The user group has active and friendly Affiliate relations with other groups with some overlap in members, goals and projects, such as Les sans pagEs, WikiProject Women in Red and WikiProject Medicine. Refer to the annual report Wikimedia LGBT+/2021.

Plan

Venue and Logistics

1. Do you have any proposed venue for the event? If so, please share details (such as: how far is it from the airport or transportation hub; how close is it to the hotel, do you anticipate any challenges with using the space for the event you are planning?)

There are no proposed venues as the conference is globally virtual with optional local meeting 'nodes' to be negotiated, refer to Nodes.

2. Is the event venue and hotel accessible for people with physical disabilities?

Refer to Diversity, equity and inclusion for the policies on access and support needs. These will be part of support costs and assessed as part of registrations and node negotiations.

3. Are you planning to outsource some of the services? For example - a travel agency, an event production service?

Processes for travel expenses and procurement that may underpin node hosting will be determined by WMAT as the outsourced financial controller, potentially other local national WMF Affiliates with existing financial procedures if they are partnering for the event, and the Conference Team. These financial processes will default to existing Affiliate procedures and the good governance of those partnerships is subject to reporting and review with the WMLGBT+ Governance Committee and WMF Grants.

Refer to Partnerships.

Planned procurement includes the outsourcing of translation services and conference facilitation, which builds on the experience gained successfully outsourcing these operations for the 2021 QW Working Days event. Refer to Translators and Facilitators.

Friendly space policy

Please link to the friendly space policy that your community will be using for this event.

• QW2022/Friendly Space

Participation

It is crucial that most participants have a minimum level of Wikimedia experience so that they can engage actively in workshops and discussions. Please answer all applicable questions below.

1. Please describe the target audience for this conference or event.

The event is structured to have three main different types of audience, each with different needs and planned outcomes:

A: Estimated 300: different viewing or participating members of the public likely to be members of the wider LGBTQ+ community and allies

B: Estimated 120: Wikimedia volunteers and open knowledge partners contributing to events and learning from them

C: Estimated 50: Wikimedia LGBTQ+ current participants with interests in helping LGBTQ+ related initiatives or open knowledge

For more information on the breakdown of the target audience, refer to Audiences and scale.

2. If your conference has an outreach component to also target non-wikimedian individuals or mission aligned institutions, can you explain your intention for this outreach (for example: how will you ensure engagement with these participants after the conference, and what impact do you see them having on the projects)?

Non-Wikimedia LGBTQ related institutions and experts will be directly invited to contribute via the Conference Team, but there are no plans for open outreach communications apart from publicly promoting the event using the popular WMLGBT+ twitter account with 37,000 followers which may attract inquiries.

3. Are you thinking about collaborating with potential partners? Such as national; educational or thematic groups and organizations? If so, will this partnership be a financial one (such as sponsorship), or a visionary one (to collaborate in regards to the content of the event)? Please share some details if you have any.

There are no plans for partners apart from fellow WMF Affiliates. Refer to Partnerships.

4. In which ways can Wikimedia Foundation staff support your event onsite? If you would like support, please list the different capacities in which we can support, or describe how you would like Wikimedia Foundation staff to be involved in the event. (Some examples of Wikimedia Foundation support or involvement might be: for outreach and communication efforts; to lead specific sessions; for legal or safety reasons, etc).

Based on the 2021 QW Working Days event, it is recognized that WMF staff may be able to help with conference operations such as translations, friendly space enforcement and necessary escalation, registration vetting, special needs support and governance related issues such as assessing conflicts of interest and appropriate use of branding. These opportunities will be part of the planned reviews within the Conference Team and the regular meetings with the WMF Grants representative.

Scholarships

1. How many scholarships would you like to offer and what expenses will the scholarship cover?

The model of scholarships is not being used for this mainly virtual conference, however both honorariums and expenses will be considered to support defined volunteer roles and the necessary expenses of local travel for volunteers attending node meet-ups.

Where equipment of significant value is purchased to support volunteer participation or presentations, these will be offered to local WMF Affiliates for reuse in other Wikimedia events.

2. How will scholarship recipients be selected?

The Conference Team will assess potential partners and LGBTQ Wikimedia volunteer groups for node events/locations and prioritize allocating funds from the QW2022 budget to these groups based on where funding will have the greatest impact for underrepresented DEI communities or where local WMF Affiliates funds are limited, unavailable or a WMF Affiliate does not exist. Local travel scholarships for individuals will in the first instance be assessed by node groups and fall back to QW2022 registration administration, reporting to the Conference Team where necessary.

Volunteers supplying significant effort in the administrative and support roles defined under QW2022/Volunteer may be offered expenses and honorariums. For example supporting the registration process may take significant effort over a couple of months and require administrative and help desk skills that are unrelated to Wikimedia projects. The Conference Team with the support of the project manager will assess the "work packages" needed and assess capacity and capability of the volunteer pool and decide whether honorariums are appropriate or which administrative tasks need to be outsourced to avoid any potential volunteer "burn-out". All volunteers in these roles will be subject to a basic vetting process and payment will be subject to the successful delivery of planned work packages. Refer to Task chart for the top level of task planning.

Conference registrants will be encouraged to identify additional support needs such as travel expenses, accommodation, mobile broadband charges, childcare, translation services, and technology support. Though not called scholarships some types of payment will be standardized with the financial oversight of WMAT, such as encouraging claims better to support virtual attendees with reasonable expenses. Refer to Participants and DEI.

3. Do you plan to target or prioritize specific communities or participants?

Registrants and communities needing special support will be offered early registration. This includes those with technical limitations such as access to video conferencing services, members of emerging communities who may have language needs beyond those planned for conference documents at QW2022/Proposal#Languages and those with additional needs such as live video captions or advanced access to presentation materials.

Training in the conference tools and services will be encouraged for participants with particular attention for those with additional needs, to ensure participants can make the most of the events and these services are tested and adequate, along with encouraging relevant claims that can assist their active participation.

4. How will you insure diversity and inclusion in your scholarship process?

The WMLGBT+ User Group has made efforts to address non-English support in its communications, establishing a Spanish language group on Telegram and French and Spanish on Discord. Active members of the QW planning team live in various countries on different continents and in the promotion of the Conference Team will seek to have representation from multiple cultures and many languages. This diversity within the team will ensure that the conference plan for diversity and inclusion is robustly applied during conference promotion, the design of conference content and the identified needs for support.

A priority for Conference Team membership and the application of honorariums for volunteer roles will be geared to counter systemic bias to ensure fair representation of LGBTQIA people, different genders, and people from emerging communities.

The support offered for registrants will set a priority for those with related support needs, including the promotion of nodes in regions where we know access will be problematic either for reasons of technology or anonymity for locations where attending an LGBTQ related event should not be done publicly. Refer to DEI.

Beyond financial support, the Conference Team will be supporting nodes with planning and scheduling, technical support including safety, accessibility, and responding to issues before and during QW2022 events. The Conference Team will coordinate with partnering WMF Affiliates and node groups for communications, registration and promotion of events to ensure a coherent approach and maximize the public impact of volunteer effort.

The detailed necessary criteria for eligibility to support participants and presenters will be added to the QW2022/Volunteer landing page and will closely follow criteria used for Wikimania 2021 Scholarships, which matches the practical experience of support offered during the Working Days 2020 event.

Resources and risks

Describe the resource potential for successfully executing this project and the key risks/threats.

Resources

Organizing team

Team	User Names
Wikimedia Foundation Liaison	QW22
Conference team	Conference team list

The operational management and reporting for the Project Manager will be the Conference Team. Independent line management will be the responsibility of the Governance Committee, which meets more rarely. The Governance Committee has oversight of payment of invoices and contract assessment with the support of WMAT financial procedures, including the authority to require changes to the Conference Team processes, or its voluntary membership, if needed to support the Project Manager in delivering the conference.

Please refer to timeline, which shows the official conference team being assembled in February-March 2022 as part of a volunteer recruitment campaign. Though many of the current QW planning team will be part of the conference team this outreach is intended to attract LGBTQ volunteers who represent emerging communities, multiple languages, different genders and diverse representation across LGBTQ communities globally.

Refer to QW2022/Volunteer, the QW volunteer landing page with the variety of roles that are being planned for including communications, conference programming, translation, training and special support needs. Though decision making roles, registration and organization representatives will have vetting and identification processes, QW2022 has a special need to respect anonymity, especially in the context that some volunteers will want to take part from regions where there are significant risks to being identified as LGBTQ+ or just an active contributor on LGBTQ+ subjects. Consequently registration data and necessary identification for grant payments or safe space operational needs will be ultimately controlled by paid employees under non-disclosure agreements. This is currently available with the support of WMAT and may include further supporting employees such as WMF T&S or Affiliate employees under the same controls and the QW2022/Friendly Space policy.

Risks

1. Poor response to volunteer notices, leads to a risk of being unable to fill volunteer roles.
   • Mitigation: Different rounds of community notices, extending to non-English village pumps and LGBTQ related noticeboards, email lists and Telegram discussions to workshop alternative ways of reaching out to the Wikimedia LGBTQ community and allies.
2. Delay in recruiting a project manager, risk of late task planning and missed deadlines.
   • Mitigation: Contract interim project manager or allocate some of the early planning tasks to volunteers with honorariums.
3. Shortage of specific volunteer skills or experience in the Conference Team.
   • Mitigation: Supplement the team with advisors such as Affiliate employees, with the necessary experience such as in procurement, software tools, project management or conference delivery.

A risk log will be managed by the project manager and be part of regular reviews by the Conference Team. Some risks, such as governance related risks and their mitigation, may need to be kept confidential.

Budget

Please provide a detailed breakdown of project expenses according to the instructions here. See Budget Guidelines.

All past proposals can be found here, you can use these for inspiration and reference but you are required to do your own local research and come up with your own budget numbers. Keep in mind that each event is different, has local context and needs, and there is not a one-size-fits all for our communities events. While making decisions on what to fund we will consider the local context and community needs for each event.

Event budget table

An explanation and justification of each budget line in the summary below can be found at Budget.

Line	Budget	Description
Project management	$30,000	Contract project management
Participant expenses	$18,750	Low carbon travel, accommodation
Presenter expenses	$4,800	Low carbon travel, accommodation
Management team	$4,000	Expenses and honoraria
Translations	$10,000	Contract, up to 10 languages
Facilitators	$6,000	Contract
Node costs	$10,000	Venue charges, technology costs
Communications	$3,500	Publications, honoraria
Awards, competition prizes	$2,400	Products, branded merchandise
Total	$89,450

Total cost of event

89,450 USD

Total amount requested from the Conference and Event Grants program

89,450 USD

Additional sources of revenue that may fund part of this event, and amounts funded

None, however partnering affiliates such as WMAT, will support with additional employee time outside of the direct conference budget.

Please confirm that you are aware that changes to the approved budget beyond 10% in any category must be approved in advance.

Yes.

Discussion

Endorsements

Do you think this project should be selected for a Conference Grant? Please add your name and rationale for endorsing this project in the list below. Other feedback, questions or concerns from community members are also highly valued, but please post them on the talk page of this proposal.

•  Strong support Considering the lessons learned during QW working days in 2021, it is important that we continue working on improving LGBTQI+ related information on Wikimedia projects and create awareness. John Samuel 12:40, 18 December 2021 (UTC)
•  Support This conference is a progression of the growth of Wikimedia LGBT+ and the LGBT+ community in wiki. Blue Rasberry (talk) 03:34, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
•  Strong support QW is a very important event -- TNT (talk • she/they) 05:59, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
•  Strong support This is a continuation of the QW2021 gathering, and as a regular ongoing event will be useful as the LGBT+ User Group continues to develop internal capacity. --- FULBERT (talk) 18:01, 31 December 2021 (UTC)
•  Strong support Open knowledge for LGBT+ communities is a key factor to defend equality and LGTB+ rights SGimeno (WMF) (talk) 11:43, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Strong support Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 14:29, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Strong support Very glad to see this thoughtful and detailed proposal that can only help improve the plurality and quality of Wikimedia content, contributors, and forms of knowledge. I'm particularly happy to note its attention to ensuring the ongoing participation (and hopefully in the long term, leadership) from its primarily global, non-English speaking community, through multilingual processes and more. Anasuyas (talk) 11:22, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Strong support --Clements.UWLib (talk) 20:28, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Strong support Another important step towards encouraging more Queer editors and better content relating to Queer topics, across all Wikimedia sites — OwenBlacker (Talk) 16:30, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Strong support The pandemic had derailed our first Queering Wikipedia conference. I am very happy to see a new iteration of the conference that we may be able to participate in online or locally in case pandemic travel restrictions continue. These gatherings are vital for Wikimedia LGBT+ to advance its work and to engage Wikimedians around the world in learning about and addressing LGBTQ+ issues in the projects and integrating LGBTQ+ inclusion in all projects. Not only that, but the conference organizers are an international team that decenter English Wikimedia projects, and that is something I strongly support as well. RachelWex (talk) 18:20, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Strong support To add to previous: Project was up to an ambitious start in 2019 and gained some traction beyond Wikimedia. Together with RachelWex and few others as editorail group we processed a lot of content submitted via CfP. Also some of the conference shaping work was done in 2020 just before and in early pandemic. All this created a good basis that should be built on in 2022 to make this first big LGBT+ conference both useful and relevant to Wikimedia ecosystem and beyond. --Zblace (talk) 10:04, 7 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Strong support This will massively benefit the queer community of Wikimedia projects and our diversity efforts. --Shikeishu (talk) 13:46, 7 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Strong support This is important for the queer community on Wikimedia project and to further provide more visibility. Kaizenify (talk) 15:44, 7 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Strong support Definitely essential to keep a standard of annual or better events for this community. Essential to have more public outreach now with the timing of the UCOC and other projects. Ɱ (talk) 17:32, 7 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Strong support --Mozucat (talk) 19:33, 7 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support -- Regards, ZI Jony ^(Talk) 04:26, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Strong support --03:43, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Strong support --Pharos (talk) 18:10, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Strong support = paul2520 (talk) 20:20, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Strong support – VisbyStar (talk) 15:26, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Strong support - Thank you to all the souls working to make this happen! DrMel (talk) 03:55, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
•  Strong support - Captainbrannigan (talk) 17:31, 17 March 2022 (UTC)
•  Strong support - Koziarke (talk) 14:16, 7 September 2022 (UTC)