Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Sustaining Wikimedia LGBT+ (round 1 application)
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Applicant information edit
- Organization name or Wikimedia Username for individuals. (required)
- Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group
- Do you have any approved General Support Fund requests? (required)
- No, it is my first time applying for a General Support Fund
- You are applying as a(n). (required)
- Wikimedia Affiliate (chapter, thematic org., or user group)
- Are your group or organization legally registered in your country? (required)
- No
- Do you have a fiscal sponsor?
- No
- Fiscal organization name.
- N/A
Main proposal edit
- 1. Please state the title of your proposal. This will also be a title for the Meta-Wiki page. (required)
- Sustaining Wikimedia LGBT+ (round 1 application)
- 2. Do you want to apply for the multi-year funding or renewal process? (required)
- N/A
- 2.1. For how many years of multi-year funding are you applying? (required)
- N/A
- 2.2. Provide a brief overview of Year 2 and Year 3 of the proposed plan and how this relates to the current proposal and your strategic plan? (required)
N/A
- 3. Proposed start date. (required)
- 2024-01-01
- 4. Proposed end date. (required)
- 2024-12-31
- 5. Does your organization or group have an Affiliate or Organizational Annual Plan that can help us understand your proposal? If yes, please provide it. (required)
- No
- 6. Does your affiliate, organization or group have a Strategic Plan that can help us understand your proposal? If yes, please provide it. (required)
- Yes
- 7. Where will this proposal be implemented? (required)
- International (more than one country across continents or regions)
- The Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group has a cross-regional scope, and represents a disbursed, international membership. Our members reside in the WMF designated regions: North America; Latin America & The Caribbean; Northern & Western Europe; East, Middle East & North Africa; Sub-Saharan Africa; Central & Eastern Europe & Central Asia; Southeast Asia, & Pacific; and South Asia.
- 8. What are your programs, approaches, and strategies? What are the challenges that you are trying to address and how will your strategies support you in addressing these challenges? (required)
Wikimedia LGBT+ is a Wikimedia Movement Affiliate and international, multilingual community. The goals of Wikimedia LGBT+ are to create and expand the overall quality of LGBT+ related content Wikimedia projects in all languages; to support LGBT+ individuals who engage in Wikimedia activities; to deepen conversations around specific Wikimedia policies and how they relate to LGBT+ interests; to encourage LGBT+ organizations to use Wikimedia projects and to adopt the values of free culture and open access; and to promote Wikimedia projects as a tool for strengthening LGBT communities.
The Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group became a Wikimedia Affiliate in 2014, and was an early model for minority population-based thematic organizations. Wikimedia LGBT+ organizers have been centrally involved in campaigns and initiatives to increase diversity in the Wikimedia movement for 10+ years. Wikimedia LGBT+ members have organized to improve Wikipedia articles, Commons content and categories, Wikidata projects, Meta documentation, and have participated in Wikimedia policy discussions. The User Group has established communication channels (Telegram groups, mailing lists, etc.) where we coordinate about shared Wikimedia interests, engage in content discussions and campaigns development, and offer safe space support for LGBT+ Wikimedians.
Wikimedia LGBT+ has organized numerous conferences, events, and campaigns. Core organizers developed the Wiki Loves Pride campaign in 2014, a now annual campaign of photography events, edit-a-thons, and other content improvement projects. Wikimedia LGBT+ has organized Queering Wikipedia events in 2021, 2022, and 2023, with ~200 participants attending QW2022, and ~400 participants attending QW2023. We’ve also facilitated LGBT+-focused GLAM initiatives (edit-a-thons, mass uploads to Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata/metadata projects, etc.), and promoted participation in LGBT+ focused Wiki Loves Monuments projects, Wiki Loves Libraries, WikiProject LGBT studies, WikiProject Medicine, WikiProject AIDS, and additional projects.
We are seeking funding for operational support necessary to sustain and grow our organization’s capacity to improve Wikimedia project coverage of LGBT+ topics across languages, and promote diversity in Wikimedia by organizing spaces of support and cross-cultural conversation for LGBT+ Wikimedia contributors and allies. Our main strategies are: creating a management structure to support paid staff; building our capacity to offer response and support for safe space complaints; organizing basic annual reporting; seeking non-WMF funding; language accessibility and translation; and community needfinding.
Wikimedia LGBT+ has identified a need to sustain our organization by setting up formal staff positions to design and oversee administrative workflows. Creating a management structure for our existing and future programs and effectively compensating administrators will help us meet the demands of our members to serve as a central hub for international dialogues about LGBT+ topics and Wikimedia platforms and to gather data to understand our impact. Focusing on strategically building governance structures and workflows is necessary to ensure our organizers have the resources they need to lead programs, work with membership to engage in needfinding, program development, reporting and evaluation, and long-term vision planning.
Building our capacity to offer response and support for safe space complaints, to protect the safety of our membership, is another element of our strategy. Our intention is that establishing minimal safety gives our community enough hope to volunteer to participate in basic community citizenship and governance. Providing safety measures for safe space complaints will help our community accomplish other strategic priorities of documenting programs and applying for funding, with less fear of danger and more safety support in the likely case of threats. We are building towards the design of conflict management and prevention initiatives to serve our members, focusing on actions that will prevent offenders from future harm, mediation workflows, and education. In order to compassionately and ethically respond to all the safe space requests we receive, we require administrative support resources to engage in long-term planning, including workflow design and the training of leadership for safe space facilitation. Organizing basic annual reporting is the next strategic priority. Our organization needs good annual reporting because reports are foundational for seeking external funding from non-Wikimedia Foundation sponsors. Those sponsors would provide programmatic funding to LGBT+ programs in the Wikimedia platform, if only we could demonstrate impact. We know among ourselves that the Wikimedia platform is the world's most requested, published, accessed, and consulted source of information for LGBT+ topics. We can encourage sponsors that funding Wikipedia is the best way to advance their goals for promoting diversity, but to do that, we need to design a way to present our community programs and generate impact metrics. This is particularly difficult for LGBT+ content for reasons including safety concerns among our contributors; the unusually broad scope of content which we need to track including programs, events, Wikipedia articles, photos, datasets, and policy discussions; the need to do multilingual user contribution tracking; and the extraordinary politicization and need for community consensus which is customary to address when anyone speaks for LGBT+ communities. Although Wikimedia LGBT+ already has a large Wikimedia community, with robust content development and audience engagement, we need to measure and report this with care and in anticipation that whatever we say will be examined and researched in the long-term, and beyond the normal scrutiny that other Wikimedia programs have received.
Another strategic priority of Wikimedia LGBT+ is seeking non-Wikimedia Foundation funding. With the requested support, we will develop annual reports that will help Wikimedia LGBT+ as an organization and our individual members, wherever they are in the world, to successfully apply for and receive external financial support. Opportunities for applying for funding include calls for proposals which specifically target LGBT+ organizations and other proposals which are not LGBT+ specific, but which promote diversity, equity, and inclusion by favoring proposals which incorporate LGBT+ sub-programs. Wikimedia LGBT+ will survey the funding environment, design reusable arguments which this organization or anyone else can use to seek those funds, and then apply for this funding. Our hope is that by using Wikimedia Foundation sponsorship to develop our administrative base, we can gain even more support for programs from other sources. Language accessibility and translation are core strategic approaches to dee pen our capacity to draw together diverse communities to build deeper cross-cultural understandings of the nuances of editing about LGBT+ topics on Wikimedia Platforms and being LGBT+ in the Wikimedia movement. We have fostered discussions among our membership at User Group meetings and Queering Wikipedia about best practices for decentering Western languages and cultural norms as default categories for global conversations and aim to create additional learning opportunities to discuss the tensions between decolonial frameworks and human rights frameworks in our LGBT+ focused programs.
We are also committed to developing better strategies for privacy-centered community needfinding. Our limited resources put limitations on our organization’s ability to assess the needs of our membership as participation scales. Increasing our administrative capacity will allow us to develop accessible ways to survey our community and gather feedback about the issues they might be facing. We also aim to create better opportunities for our membership to provide feedback about opportunities for improvement through the creation of an idea bank maintained by paid staff to help inform organizational strategy and agenda-setting.
–
In order to establish the sustainability of our organization, we plan to focus on building our administrative capacity through hiring qualified individuals, training leadership for success, creating workflows and administrative documents, and establishing accountability measures.
We intend to recruit qualified individuals with a preference for bilingual and multilingual professionals already familiar with working within Wikimedia communities. Our Executive Director will collaborate with our Governance Committee to clearly outline roles and expectations for additional staff hires and oversee a robust hiring process. We will fund consultants for translations, grant writing, graphic design/report publishing, membership functions, and technical support, including data collection and cybersecurity. These personnel will do work to benefit the membership and provide impact to our programs, while documenting our work in accessible formats for funders and public audiences. We have also included a budget for operating costs, to ensure we have the resources to support our personnel, including IT infrastructure such as Google Workspace and banking/insurance overheads, as well as capacity development, for example, executive training, trustee training, and mediation work. Providing leadership development training for paid staff is a necessary part of our efforts to scale up our administrative and governance capacity. The ED will work with the Board to train staff hires, monitor staff progress and facilitate team growth. Administrative changes will be formalized as we establish our Board of Trustees, and involve our membership closely in strategic planning and the design of our governance structures.
We will continue to provide volunteer and community-building support to LGBT+ Wikimedians and allies through the existing monthly User Group meetings for our members and will start to offer additional skillshare meetups and training workshops for volunteers and community organizers. Community needfinding will involve a privacy-centered membership survey. Needfinding will inform the design of our harm reduction plan, safe space request response protocols, and the design-forward education and training resources we develop to offer to the community. We will further establish an idea bank to gather community ideas for organizational improvement and program strategy.
To keep our membership safe and help us accomplish our strategic goals, our Executive Director will lead the team in the design of a multi-pronged harm reduction plan, involving conducting a needs assessment, building our safe space request response workflows, training our safe space team, and creating community safety educational resources. We will be seeking external funding to support this aspect of our programs. A new intervention we would like to try to increase safety for LGBT+ editors is permanently staffing any amount of victim support so that at least we can begin collecting data and records to understand the problem, and to demonstrate to our community and the world that measurable progress by and for LGBT+ editors has begun.
We will be consulting with Spanish translators for all User Group meetings and workshops, with the possibility of additional language coordinators and accommodations necessary, on an as-needed basis, to meet our community members in their preferred mediums of communication. Translators will also help produce accessible reports and documentation for funders and public education.
- 9. What categories are your main programs and related activities under? Please select all that apply. (required)
| Category | Yes/No |
|---|---|
| Education | No |
| Culture, heritage or GLAM | Yes |
| Gender and diversity | Yes |
| Community support and engagement | Yes |
| Participation in campaigns and contests | Yes |
| Public policy advocacy | No |
| Other | No |
Culture, heritage or GLAM
- 9.2. Select all your programs and activities for Culture, heritage or GLAM. (required)
- Introducing new approaches to underrepresented culture and heritage, e.g. decolonising or reparative work; oral and visual knowledge; outreach to communities of origin, indigenous and first nations self-determination, Supporting institutions to open up their collections, data, metadata, and research, Supporting GLAM professionals to incorporate use of Wikimedia in their work, through documentation, training, or Wikimedian in Residence programs, Partnering with institutions, professional associations, and allied organizations to raise awareness of open culture, ethical sharing, and related issues
- Other programs and activities if any: N/A
Gender and diversity
- 9.3. Select all your programs and activities for Gender and diversity.
- Bringing in women and/or gender diverse participants and editors, Focusing on creating content about women and/or gender diverse groups, including biographies, intersectional topic areas and/or adding images, Focusing on creating content about marginalized (underrepresented) communities and their knowledge, Focusing on knowledge equity by bringing in contributors from underrepresented communities, Building organizer skills in women and diversity groups, Fomenting female leadership within the movement (either staff, members or boards), Sensitize and educate for gender perspective among Wikimedia projects stewards and editors, Other
- Other programs and activities if any: Wikimedia LGBT+ is the only Wikimedia User Group focusing on supporting 2LGBTQIA+ editors and stewarding 2LGBTQIA+ content and related policy on Wikimedia projects.
Community support and engagement
- 9.4. Select all your programs and activities for Community support and engagement.
- On-wiki training of community members, Off-wiki training of community members, Organizing meetups, conferences, and community events, Supporting community members' participation in events and conferences, Offering non financial support and services to community members (equipment, space, books, etc.)
- Other programs and activities if any: N/A
Participation in campaigns and contests
- 9.5. Select all campaigns that apply. (required)
- Not applicable
- Other programs and activities if any: N/A
- 10. Please include a link to or upload a timeline (operational calendar) for your programs and activities. (required)
- Timeline uploaded
- 11. Describe your team. (required)
We are currently in the process of establishing our membership through a membership registration process with a registration deadline of 31 October, 2023. We are also currently establishing the elections process for our first Board of Trustees, elected by our members. Upon appointment, the Board of Trustees will identify candidates and hire an Executive Director. The ED will then outline duties for additional roles and conduct a search to fill vacant positions. The ED will supervise orientations and training of staff hires, with a focus on leadership development and safe space facilitation training.
- Grant Managers*
Dorothy Howard is currently serving as Wikimedia LGBT+ Administrative Executive. She is also a Ph.D. Candidate in the Just Transitions and Design Labs at UC San Diego in the Department of Communication and grant writer for Crushing Colonialism. Dorothy was a Wikimedian-in-Residence at the Metropolitan New York Library Council, 2013–2015. Her interests include open source software sustainability, labor, ethics, gender and feminist studies, critical disability studies, archives, and nonprofit management. User:Hexatekin
Lane Rasberry is Wikimedian-in-Residence at the School of Data Science at the University of Virginia. His interests include popular science, consumer protection, civic engagement, access to health information, clinical research, the Open Movement, data science, LGBT history, and Wikimedia projects. User:Bluerasberry
Owen Blacker is a technologist working with the public sector, based in the UK. He has over 20 years’ experience of non-profit governance in the civic tech and digital rights spaces. His interests include Queer history, especially the cultural history of the Early AIDS Crisis, Queer popular culture, science fiction, human rights and labour rights, languages and language rights. He is owned by 2 cats. User:OwenBlacker
- Vacant Positions*
- Executive Director (PT) – Organizing and fostering partnerships, program direction, soliciting feedback from the Board, staff management, strategic plan
Additional staff and consultants, outline of roles to be updated on an as-needed basis
- Membership Coordinator (PT) – Communicating with members, maintaining contact lists, developing membership surveys, overseeing elections
- Translation Coordinator (PT) – Hiring and overseeing translation work
- Translators (PT) – Spanish and additional languages, as needed
- Grant Writer (PT) – Identifying development opportunities, assembling grant applications, managing grant tracking and reporting
- Graphic Designer/Report Publisher (PT) – Assembling templates and public materials about organizational resources and impact
- Technical Support (PT) – Overseeing data collection on impact; providing cybersecurity recommendations
- 12. Will you be working with any internal (Wikimedia) or external partners? Describe the characteristics of these partnerships and bring a few examples of the most significant partnerships. (required)
We did not partner with any external organizations on this application. However, non-Wikimedia partners are important to the success of our organization as a whole, and have supported our past projects, such as Queering Wikipedia 2021, 2022 and 2023. We will seek partners for the programs we are actively developing in the coming year.
Wikimedia LGBT+ has a 10-year history of fostering relationships with organizations, including Wikimedia community organizations, cultural partnerships with GLAM institutions, educational partnerships with universities, and medical partnerships with health organizations. We have partnered with allied organizations to develop awareness of the impact of contributing to Wikimedia projects for issues including sexual and reproductive health, transgender health issues, and mental health needs around harassment and anti-LGBT+ discrimination, in addition to human rights, fighting disinformation, celebrating arts and culture, and education.
Previous partners have expressed willingness to deepen their relationship with Wikimedia projects if we can provide them with metrics about the impact of LGBT+ content on Wikimedia platforms. Support from the WMF will be essential in the development of our strategic plan in the coming year, which will include collaboration with subject-matter experts and the demonstration of tools to gather metrics about impact on Wikimedia projects. With devoted funding for leadership, graphic design, and translation, we can create materials to present tools and opportunities for Wikimedia engagement to organizations with different areas of expertise and different regional audiences.
- 13. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select all that apply. (required)
- Increase the Sustainability of Our Movement, Provide for Safety and Inclusion, Ensure Equity in Decision-making, Invest in Skills and Leadership Development, Manage Internal Knowledge, Identify Topics for Impact, Innovate in Free Knowledge, Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt, Improve User Experience, Coordinate Across Stakeholders
Metrics edit
Wikimedia Metrics edit
- 14. Please select and fill out Wikimedia Metrics for your proposal. (recommended)
- 14.1. Number of participants, editors, and organizers.
All metrics provided are optional, please fill them out if they are aligned with your programs and activities.
| Metrics name | Target | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Number of all participants | 500 | Number of attendees at LGBT+ Wikimedia events |
| Number of all editors | 200 | N/A |
| Number of new editors | 100 | |
| Number of retained editors | 100 | |
| Number of all organizers | 50 | N/A |
| Number of new organizers | 10 |
- 14.2. Number of new content contributions to Wikimedia projects. (recommended)
| Wikimedia project | Created | Edited or improved |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | 100 | 200 |
| Wikimedia Commons | 100 | 0 |
| Wikidata | 100 | 20 |
| Wiktionary | ||
| Wikisource | ||
| Wikimedia Incubator | ||
| Translatewiki | ||
| MediaWiki | ||
| Wikiquote | ||
| Wikivoyage | ||
| Wikibooks | ||
| Wikiversity | ||
| Wikinews | ||
| Wikispecies | ||
| Wikifunctions / Abstract Wikipedia |
- Description for Wikimedia projects contributions metrics. (optional)
Other Metrics edit
- 15. Do you have other quantitative and qualitative targets for your project (other metrics)? (required)
- Yes
| Other Metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Number of new members which Wikimedia LGBT+ registers | Based on membership registration data | 100 |
| Number of countries represented for members who have self-declared | Based on membership registration data | 20 |
| Number of LGBT+ Wikimedia events | Including User Group meetings, workshops, and conferences | 20 |
| Count of LGBT+ harassment complaints reported, in categories | Complaints across all language Wikipedias, including data from Wikimedia LGBT+ membership survey. Analysis/summary of complaints. | N/A |
| Reach in Twitter / X | Existing tools available | 30000 |
Budget edit
- 16. Will you have any other revenue sources when implementing this proposal (e.g. other funding, membership contributions, donations)? (required)
- No
- 16.1. List other revenue sources. (required)
N/A
- 16.2. Approximately how much revenue will you have from other sources in your local currency? (required)
- N/A
- 17. Your local currency. (required)
- USD
- 18. What is the total requested amount in your local currency? (required)
- 100000 USD
| Year | Amount (local currency) |
|---|---|
| Year 1 | N/A USD |
| Year 2 | N/A USD |
| Year 3 | N/A USD |
- 19. Does this proposal include compensation for staff or contractors? (required)
- Yes
- 19.1. How many paid staff members do you plan to have? (required)
Include the number of staff and contractors during the proposal period. If you have short-term contractors or staff, please include them separately and mention their terms.
- - Executive Director (PT) – Organizing and fostering partnerships, program direction, soliciting feedback from the Board, staff management, strategic plan
Additional staff and consultants, outline of roles to be updated on an as-needed basis
- Membership Coordinator (PT) – Communicating with members, maintaining contact lists, developing membership surveys, overseeing elections
- Translation Coordinator (PT) – Hiring and overseeing translation work
- Translators (PT) – Spanish and additional languages, as needed
- Grant Writer (PT) – Identifying development opportunities, assembling grant applications, managing grant tracking and reporting
- Graphic Designer/Report Publisher (PT) – Assembling templates and public materials about organizational resources and impact
- Technical Support (PT) – Overseeing data collection on impact; providing cybersecurity recommendations
- 19.2. How many FTEs (full-time equivalents) in total? (required)
Include the total FTE of staff and contractors during the proposal period. If you have short-term contractors or staff, please include their FTEs with the terms separately.
- 2
- 19.3. Describe any staff or contractor changes compared to the current year / ongoing General Support Fund if any. (required only for returning grantees)
- N/A
- 20. Please provide an overview of your overall budget categories in your local currency. The budget breakdown should include only the amount requested with this General Support Fund (required).
| Budget category | Amount in local currency |
|---|---|
| Staff and contractor costs | 77500 USD |
| Operational costs | 17500 USD |
| Programmatic costs | 0 USD |
- 21. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)
Additional information edit
- 22. In this optional space you can add any other additional information about your proposal or organization that you think can help us when reviewing your proposal. (optional)
By submitting your proposal/funding request you agree that you are in agreement with the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and the Universal Code of Conduct.
We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.
- Yes
Feedback edit
- Please add any feedback to the grant discussion page only. Any feedback added here will be removed.