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Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Alliances Fund/Supporting an Open Climate movement:Increasing the knowledge commons and collaborative communities of practice/Final Report

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Final Learning Report

Report Status: Under review

Due date: 2023-07-30T00:00:00Z

Funding program: Wikimedia Alliances Fund

Report type: Final

Application Midpoint Learning Report

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General information edit

This form is for organizations, groups, or individuals receiving Wikimedia Community Funds or Wikimedia Alliances Funds to report on their final results. See the midpoint report if you want to review the midpoint results.

  • Name of Organization: Open Environmental Data Inc
  • Title of Proposal: Supporting an Open Climate movement: Increasing the knowledge commons and collaborative communities of practice
  • Amount awarded: 40000 USD, 40000 USD
  • Amount spent: 40000 USD

Part 1 Understanding your work edit

1. Briefly describe how your proposed activities and strategies were implemented.

The amount of funding received was 40% of the total budget, so we decided to focus our efforts on the fellowship program, which was developed through the following activities:
  • Running an open call for applications
  • Setting up a website for Open Climate
  • Designing and developing a 4-month fellowship program
  • Creating a multilingual video to increase visibility of fellows’ work and the Open Climate movement

The first months (July-September) were dedicated to defining and running a hiring process for a project coordinator, who joined the Open Climate team in mid-October. Between then and mid-November the focus was on the fellowship program design, setting up a website for Open Climate and launching an open call for applications campaign, including a webinar with over 50 participants, which ran for 3 weeks until mid-December receiving over 260 applications from applicants based in 64 different countries. The review and selection process, including interviews to a short list of 21 applicants, and the onboarding of 7 fellows, connecting practitioners and communities in Mexico, Nigeria, Argentina, Chile, the Bahamas, Germany/Lebanon and the Philippines, took place in January 2023.

Between February and May, the remote activities were centered around the fellows, including hosting regular cohort calls (every two weeks), setting up a digital environment for asynchronous collaboration (Miro board and Zulip), mentoring sessions (each fellow had one Open Climate team member assigned as mentor and they had weekly calls), workshops on stakeholder mapping and personas tool, meetings with fellows from partner organizations, such as the Green Web Foundation, and other calls with collaborators who provided more specific support for fellows’ projects.

In parallel, and with the support of the Open Environment Data Project (OEDP), we created a multilingual video to introduce the fellows and their work, published on the Open Climate website and the OEDP social media channels.

2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you felt were effective in achieving your goals?

1) Running an open call to find fellows and sharing it with existing open communities mostly active in Africa and South Asia allowed us to expand the outreach of Open Climate and go beyond the usual networks of the team members, particularly in regions which usually are less represented in this kind of program.

2) Creating a clear downloadable guide for potential applicants, hosting an information webinar during the open call and allowing applicants to submit their letters of intent in multiple formats (including voice messages or videos) helped us engage with more people during the open call.

3) An important part of the selection criteria for the fellows cohort was to have a diverse group not only in demographic terms but also in terms of the type of open community or approach that they were bringing to the fellowship. By engaging fellows coming from different contexts such as open science hardware, open mapping or open education, and also different levels of expertise with Wikipedia, we were able to set the conditions for a richer peer-driven learning environment.

3. Would you say that your project had any innovations? Are there things that you did very differently than you have seen them done by others?

While the fellowship format generally mirrored fellowship programs/structures that traditionally have worked elsewhere, we focused on supporting fellows embedded in questions that have a direct impact on their local communities. While this approach seems like an evident best practice, climate funding still has not largely focused on the “epistemic innovations” of communities. We attempted to focus on this by connecting open movement practices and practitioners/researchers with deeply grounded questions and solutions.

4. Please describe how different communities participated and/or were informed about your work.

An important part of the selection criteria for fellows were the different forms of community engagement that they were looking to explore, practice or strengthen during the fellowship program.

Here are some examples of community engagement from Open Climate fellows supported by this grant:

  • Ben Hur Pintor started building a community of practice around open mapping for climate action in the Philippines, collaborating with local chapters of the Youth Mappers Network. He also supported and funded mini-projects by two Youth Mappers chapters:

-- Community-based participatory mapping process of Banaba, San Mateo with Buklod Tao (University of the Philippines Resilience Institute YM) -- Assessing the Impact of Climate Change on the Subang Daku River and Its Community Using GIS (Southern Leyte State University YouthMappers)

  • Rub(èn) Solís, collaborated with members from Múuch’ Xíinbal Mayan Assembly, in open translating and sharing scientific information about impacts of climate change on the local ecosystems and rural Mayan communities from Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.
  • Nano Castro, through the Open Agroecology Lab, engaged with rural organizations, researchers and activists that seek to be part and support the agroecological transition in Mendoza (Argentina) by facilitating the collective building of knowledge and the public amplification of agroecology.

5. Documentation of your impact. Please use the two spaces below to share files and links that help tell your story and impact. This can be documentation that shows your results through testimonies, videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, etc.) social media posts, dashboards, etc.

  • Upload Documents and Files
  • Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
- Open Climate website (http://open-climate.org)

Social media posts from OEDP

Meet the fellows video (also on Twitter, Linkedin) (https://www.instagram.com/p/CrWYPPOp-QV/)

Recording of information session during the call for fellows (https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/yCv8AYWYLfcoprr9zjyfPoeEVPKUsDJbbGp0nGmmRisN4VM9wliHXcjYr9NH9rhs.tDxhP9tbPdUs6BCw)

Social media posts from fellows

Fellows’ projects documentation

  • Please see attached documentation package (unavailable for public viewing)

Fellows’ projects outputs

Other outputs

6. To what extent do you agree with the following statements regarding the work carried out with the support of this Fund? You can choose “not applicable” if your work does not relate to these goals.

Our efforts during the Fund period have helped to...
A. Bring in participants from underrepresented groups Agree
B. Create a more inclusive and connected culture in our community Agree
C. Develop content about underrepresented topics/groups
D. Develop content from underrepresented perspectives Agree
E. Encourage the retention of editors
F. Encourage the retention of organizers Agree
G. Increased participants' feelings of belonging and connection to the movement. Agree

7. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your efforts helped to bring in participants and/or build out content, particularly for underrepresented groups?

- Running an open call for applications to the fellowship program and seeding it in existing communities based in regions often underrepresented in this kind of program, allowed us to bring in participants from very different places and backgrounds. Our fellowship cohort included participants from the Philippines, the Bahamas, Mexico, Nigeria, Argentina, Chile and Lebanon, and Open Climate team are distributed across US, Germany, Brazil, Spain, El Salvador and Uruguay.
  • One of the main limitations we faced while coordinating group meetings for fellows was the difference between their time zones and using English as the common language, as most fellows and Open Climate team members are non-native English speakers.

Part 2: Your main learning edit

8. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What did you learn about these areas during this period?

During the Fellowship exit interviews, we asked fellows what is next on their horizon, influenced by the fellowship and working through open practices. A selection of their responses demonstrates the breadth of connections between different sectors (one of our learning priorities) including selection by national government as a COP representative, application of open practices into national archival material on transport, developing new digital tools to share information in rural indigenous communities, integrating education curriculum and Wikipedia materials created to put content on climate into classrooms, and building common knowledge resources for farmers in biological sciences.

Regarding our interest in learning about workable solutions in the Open Climate space, when given focused time, supported by a cohort/network and mentorship – to talk through challenges, point you to resources, be an advocate for you and your project – frameworks and models can be created that others can build from in their own communities. The projects that fellows worked on demonstrated the breadth of opportunities and solutions and allowed this cohort to explore how open practices and processes can lead to grounded, local work addressing climate change. While additional funding for this work would have supported a more extensive and sustainable platform for the fellows' work, we are hopeful to provide this kind of support in the future.

9. Did anything unexpected or surprising happen when implementing your activities?

- During the fellowship program some fellows decided to change their original projects and ended up collaborating with non-profit organizations doing similar work to the one they intended to develop or adjusting their activity plans to the available time and resources. Our main learning from this was realizing the value of assigning one mentor to each fellow for the duration of the program. This allowed the coordinating team to support all fellows in a very effective and efficient way.
  • One unexpected and very positive collaboration during the project was the meeting with Green Web Foundation fellows, as this organization is also running a fellowship program with some shared topics. The coordinating teams from both initiatives were also able to exchange feedback on the program design and development.

10. How do you hope to use this learning? For instance, do you have any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future?

- We hope to be able to implement these and many other learnings to design and run a second iteration of the fellowship program. We would like to make the length of the fellowship program longer and be able to support fellows with more financial resources and create an audience development campaign around it, to engage and collaborate with different organizations and communities working on similar topics.
  • The number of applicants for the fellowship also set us on the course to explore who was working in the intersecting spaces of climate and the open movement, culminating in a “directory” of approximately 400 people and projects. As the fellowship came to a close in May and June, we started to turn our attention to how we can best support these open climate stewards, and coordinate the distributed work that they are doing. We hosted two community calls with approximately 80 people in attendance and a small convening alongside a digital rights and climate action conference in Costa Rica, which has provided more data (alongside the fellowship) to begin designing next steps for the open climate space.

11. If you were sitting with a friend to tell them one thing about your work during this fund, what would it be (think of inspiring or fascinating moments, tough challenges, interesting anecdotes, or anything that feels important to you)?

For us, the first and last days of the fellowship program were the most important moments, as we were able to gather a very special group of humans, coming together from very different places and backgrounds but still sharing a lot of passion for open collaboration, learning and taking climate action in hyperlocal and community-driven contexts.

The final act of the fellowship program was a call where each fellow did a presentation sharing their journeys, learnings and plans for next steps. It was quite fulfilling to learn more about how their projects evolved in such a short period and overall to experience how they became a group that is now multiplying and growing the impact of Open Climate.

12. Please share resources that would be useful to share with other Wikimedia organizations so that they can learn from, adapt or build upon your work. For instance, guides, training material, presentations, work processes, or any other material the team has created to document and transfer knowledge about your work and can be useful for others. Please share any specific resources that you are creating, adapting/contextualizing in ways that are unique to your context (i.e. training material).

  • Upload Documents and Files
  • Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
Call for application guide (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FB_dd9czCvP2aQPv7sf5OtVD3S8CfYCr/view?usp=sharing)

Fellowship program guide (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1S20inrpIzmU56P9iEsHjZluul0jZ7ElwQjlCOJI0gqg/edit?usp=sharing)

Stakeholder mapping workshop guide (https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVMXjTD0s=/)

Persona workshop slide deck (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Xfaz2qRLJDIP_hMD27DOhV9Ge37YIseH/edit#slide=id.p2)

Final presentations meeting (Recording: https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/e1-E7wbanpB-0S_Xs8HqunLKgfQeXZYKvO2uZWhaBaQzj6II1WN6mDYexOO4G9bJ.UeiIkVlTsofM0rOd)

Fellow exit interview template (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FCGMFumQy4OqPYRGHSe9pZ6BxbRr51abtakvNqF7HZc/edit)

Part 3: Metrics edit

13a. Open and additional metrics data

Open Metrics
Open Metrics Description Target Results Comments Methodology
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Additional Metrics
Additional Metrics Description Target Results Comments Methodology
Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Diversity of participants brought in by grantees N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Number of people reached through social media publications N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Number of activities developed N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Number of volunteer hours N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A

13b. Additional core metrics data.

  • Environmental and climate activists interviewed as part of the needs assessment: 20 new participants
  • General audiences engaged in public activities: 250-500
  • Speakers: 10
  • Community coordinator: 1-2
  • Supporting roles by OEDP: Communication and Content Development
Core Metrics Summary
Core metrics Description Target Results Comments Methodology
Number of participants
300 347 With the scaled back project we focused on supporting 7 fellows, we did not conduct the needs assessment. We engaged 260 through call for fellows, plus an additional 80 during community calls. Tracking number of participants and applications.
Number of editors 6 While this was not a metric of ours, after being surveyed, 6/7 fellows noted they had engaged more deeply with Wikipedia as a result of the fellowship. The fellow that did not was predominately working with open science hardware tools.

Fellows were asked "How many activities/pages/content did you create and/or edit?" and overall the response was 542. In future surveys it will be useful to delineate between the types of content as some respondents noted creating modules and others noted the number of content created within this prompt.

Post-fellowship survey
Number of organizers
18 8 With the scaled back project, we did not focus on the additional speakers. General count.
Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project
Wikimedia Project Description Target Results Comments Methodology
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A

14. Were there any metrics in your proposal that you could not collect or that you had to change?

Yes

15. If you have any difficulties collecting data to measure your results, please describe and add any recommendations on how to address them in the future.

N/A

16. Use this space to link or upload any additional documents that would be useful to understand your data collection (e.g., dashboards, surveys you have carried out, communications material, training material, etc).

  • Upload Documents and Files
  • Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
Call for applications form (Section 6 of this guide) : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FB_dd9czCvP2aQPv7sf5OtVD3S8CfYCr/view?usp=sharing

Survey format for fellows : https://tally.so/r/wzNVLR

Part 4: Organizational capacities & partnerships edit

17. Organizational Capacity

Organizational capacity dimension
A. Financial capacity and management This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
B. Conflict management or transformation This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
C. Leadership (i.e growing in potential leaders, leadership that fit organizational needs and values) This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
D. Partnership building This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
E. Strategic planning This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
F. Program design, implementation, and management This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
G. Scoping and testing new approaches, innovation This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
H. Recruiting new contributors (volunteer) This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
I. Support and growth path for different types of contributors (volunteers) This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
J. Governance This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
K. Communications, marketing, and social media This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
L. Staffing - hiring, monitoring, supporting in the areas needed for program implementation and sustainability This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
M. On-wiki technical skills This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
N. Accessing and using data This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
O. Evaluating and learning from our work This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
P. Communicating and sharing what we learn with our peers and other stakeholders
N/A
N/A

17a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Peer to peer learning with other community members in community/ies of practice* (structured and continuous learning and sharing spaces), Peer to peer learning with other community members (but that is not continuous or structured)

17b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Lack of staff time to participate in capacity building/training, Lack of financial resources, Lack of knowledge of available capacity building opportunities

18. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your organizational capacity has grown, and areas where you require support?

Through the funding we were able to hire a part-time coordinator for Open Climate who on top of designing and facilitating the fellowship program, also supported comms strategy and implementation and regular meetings for our team.

The areas where we require more support are community and partnership building also more structured and dedicated governance and leadership. We also would like to secure sustainable sources of long-term funding to support additional programs and activities, as Open Climate currently relies largely on voluntary work of its members.

19. Partnerships over the funding period.

Over the fund period...
A. We built strategic partnerships with other institutions or groups that will help us grow in the medium term (3 year time frame) Strongly agree
B. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to bring in more contributors from underrepresented groups Strongly agree
C. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to build out more content on underrepresented topics/groups Strongly agree

19a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Volunteers from our communities, Partners proactive interest

19b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Lack of staff to conduct outreach to new strategic partners, Lack of staff capacity to respond to partners interested in working with us, Limited funding period

20. Please share your learning about strategies to build partnerships with other institutions and groups and any other learning about working with partners?

While promoting the open call for applications to the fellowship, many opportunities to explore collaborations and partnerships with other organizations appeared but it was challenging to follow up the conversations due to lack of capacity of the organizing team. Partnership building takes time and demands regular communication to build trust.

We were able to partner and run a very concrete collaboration with the Green Web Foundation as one of the Open Climate team members works with them, so it was easier and faster to move it forward. We opened conversations to explore potential partnerships with Open Climate Campaign, Processing Foundation and DataKind but moving the conversations forward were difficult because of the voluntary nature of our positions.

Part 5: Sense of belonging and collaboration edit

21. What would it mean for your organization to feel a sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement?

Several of the organizations part of Open Climate already belong to the free knowledge movement. However, this is the first time some of them encountered the opportunity to collaboratively work alongside members of the Wikimedia movement. Entering into spaces where there is deep community history paired with the requirement of technical know-how and the ability to “speak” the language of a community, can be very daunting. Feeling a sense of belonging to the Wikimedia movement would come alongside breaking down some of these entry barriers which this grant helped us to do.

22. How has your (for individual grantees) or your group/organization’s (for organizational grantees) sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?

Somewhat increased

23. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.

As we operate as a coalition, we note the increase because of feedback received from fellows that they are now using Wikipedia more frequently, engaging with Wikimedia communities to a greater extent, and feel more comfortable using Wikipedia as a resource. Some of the fellows additionally noted that they had a clear understanding of how they would be using Wikipedia as an ongoing resource for their work and projects in the future.

24. How has your group/organization’s sense of personal investment in the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?

Somewhat increased

25. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.

We are a group that is already very invested in the free knowledge movement, but note the increase because of the work of fellows as well as the extensive interest of over 250 people in the fellowship program.

26. Are there other movements besides the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement that play a central role in your motivation to contribute to Wikimedia projects? (for example, Black Lives Matter, Feminist movement, Climate Justice, or other activism spaces) If so, please describe it below.

Our coalition was formed to promote knowledge commons for climate justice. In this space, Wikimedia is one of the tactics that people can use to promote their knowledge. Several fellows noted that they are interested in contributing to resources on Wikipedia about climate change, climate justice, and encouraging the incorporation of different languages and ways of knowing.

Supporting Peer Learning and Collaboration edit

We are interested in better supporting peer learning and collaboration in the movement.

27. Have you shared these results with Wikimedia affiliates or community members?

Yes

27a. Please describe how you have already shared them. Would you like to do more sharing, and if so how?

As noted in previous sections of this report, the fellows have engaged with Wikipedia resources and communities. The resources created for this fellowship by the Open Climate coordinating team are freely available for reuse and coordinating group members plan to host a Let’s Connect event in the future.

28. How often do you currently share what you have learned with other Wikimedia Foundation grantees, and learn from them?

We do this occasionally (less than once a month)

29. How does your organization currently share mutual learning with other grantees?

n/a

Part 6: Financial reporting and compliance edit

30. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.

40000

31. Local currency type

USD

32. Please report the funds received and spending in the currency of your fund.

  • Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.
  • Report funds received and spent, if template not used.

33. If you have not already done so in your budget report, please provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal.

The amount received differed from the original amount requested. We revised the budget in July 2022, but there are otherwise no deviations.

34. Do you have any unspent funds from the Fund?

34a. Please list the amount and currency you did not use and explain why.

N/A

34b. What are you planning to do with the underspent funds?

N/A

34c. Please provide details of hope to spend these funds.

N/A

35. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement?

As required in the fund agreement, please report any deviations from your fund proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.

36. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?

Yes

37. Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.

Yes

38. If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here.

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