Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia CEE Spring 2023
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Applicant details
editWikimedia username(s):
Organization:
- Wikimedia Community User Group CEE Spring
G. Have you received grants from the Wikimedia Foundation before?
- Applied previously and did receive a grant
H. Have you received grants from any non-wiki organization before?
- No
H.1 Which organization(s) did you receive grants from?
- N/A
M. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?
- Yes
M1. Fiscal organization name.
- Wikimedia Österreich
Additional information
editR. Where will this proposal be implemented?
- Ukraine
S. Please indicate whether your work will be focused on one country (local), more than one or several countries in your region (regional) or has a cross-regional (global) scope:
- International
S1. If you have answered regional or international, please write the country names and any other information that is useful for understanding your proposal.
T. If you would like, please share any websites or social media accounts that your group or organization has. (optional)
M. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?
- Yes
M1. Fiscal organization name.
- Wikimedia Österreich
Proposal
edit1. What is the overall vision of your organization and how does this proposal contribute to this? How does this proposal connect to past work and learning?
Our vision is enabling the communities of the CEE region to be more tolerant, inclusive, informed and knowledgeable. We want to support that vision by organising the regional contest CEE Spring. Wikimedia CEE Spring aims to join local forces of free knowledge to accumulate and distribute information about history, culture, traditions and people in every corner of the region to support mutual acknowledgement and understanding and to increase the quantity and quality of free knowledge available about the CEE region globally.
2. What is the change that you are trying to bring about and why is this important?
CEE Spring 2023 will primarily address the following three challenges: discovering and promoting countries, regions and communities; closing gender and content gaps; and strengthening cross-wiki collaboration. Central and Eastern Europe is home to a large number of language communities, cultures and ethnicities distributed across many countries which share historical and political commonalities. Although most of the communities in the region have been mapped and integrated with the CEE partnership, and substantial efforts have been made in the past years to create free knowledge about them, there is still a lot to do in order to reach out to underrepresented groups and close the content gaps. This year’s contest will help to better discover these communities and cultures by compiling lists of articles on important topics and promoting them by creating free knowledge in a number of languages. Communities participating in the contest have full discretion in identifying thematic areas and important topics. Nevertheless, it is expected that communities follow a common structure of thematic areas which are considered relevant. This is done to ease the identification of content gaps in a more organised way, as well as to make the different lists of articles comparable one with another. This year’s edition will also include women and human rights as topics of growing importance in the society, which will be addressed by adding these two as distinct thematic areas and encouraging local coordinators to consider awarding prizes for contributions to these areas. Cross-wiki collaboration is one of the main principles upon which the CEE partnership relies and CEE Spring has become the main method to facilitate that collaboration. This year’s contest will try to strengthen the network of the CEE communities but also enlarge it by integrating new underrepresented groups and also make connections with communities from other regions, like we are trying to do with the Romani communities in the CEE region this year.
3. Describe your main approaches or strategies to achieve these changes and why you think they will be effective.
The central infrastructure for the writing contest will be set up by a team of international organisers which consists of experienced Wikimedians from across the CEE region. This team will communicate with and provide support to local organisers, extend contacts and invite participants from outside the CEE region, make connections with similar like-minded campaigns in the movement (e.g. #WikiForHumanRights campaign), monitor the implementation of the writing contest and evaluate the results after the end of the contest. Local contests will be organised by local teams and in every community the contest will have a slightly different face to take into account the local context. The local coordinators will be responsible to set up the local infrastructure, define the rules of the local contest, form a jury which will evaluate the contributions and advertise the contest within the local community. This year, with the support of the CEE Hub we have created some new documents (Guide for participants, Guide for local coordinators) as we want to be as approachable and welcoming to the newcomers from the movement and enable them to take a more active role in the CEE Spring. By doing so we also want to promote clear work processes and an inclusive environment where participation of new people (both as organisers and participants) is stimulated. Local teams will present lists of articles about their country or community which they would like to see in every possible language in the world and editors from all other places create and significantly edit those articles, whereby participants can write about any topic, connected with the other participating countries, regions and communities in Central and Eastern Europe. Local organisers will have discretion to identify thematic areas (e.g. culture, sports, history, geography, society etc.) and important topics, but it is strongly recommended to engage other community members in creating the lists of articles. This year’s edition will consist of two sub-contests: CEE Women and CEE for Human Rights. The former aims to close the gender gap by encouraging article creation on women and related topics, whereas the latter aims to raise awareness about human rights by encouraging article creation on human rights, environment protection, climate change and related topics. CEE for Human Rights will also be part of this year’s #WikiForHumanRights campaign, which will take place from 15 April to 15 May 2023 and will be fully contained in the time frame for CEE Spring 2022. We wish to use prize funds of up to €400 per community to help us narrow down the focus of the editors in reaching those aims. By awarding prizes in certain categories, we can ensure the writing of articles in the categories, chosen by each local organiser (e.g. there can be prizes for the largest number of articles about women or human rights in order to close the gender and content gaps).
4. What are the activities you will be developing and delivering as part of these approaches or strategies?
All tasks/activities that will be implemented during the CEE Spring 2023 can be divided into 3 groups, depending on who is directly responsible for the implementation: participants, local organisers or the international CEE Spring team. Participants During the editing contest, participants are expected to: create new articles and improve existing ones; add credible external links to articles; and add images to articles to make them more vivid.
Local organisers
Prior to the editing contest, local coordinators have to prepare the following:
create separate project pages for CEE Spring and their separate editing contest on their home wiki;
discuss the rules of the contest with their community and afterwards publish this on the main page for CEE Spring (Rules);
define a list of around 100 articles about their country, region or language, which can be distributed in ten per possible categories (examples of categories are listed here). Article lists can be provided directly from the local coordinator or through a discussion page on the respective home wikis with the help from the respective communities, especially when the content of the article list is disputed;
inform the community and active editors about upcoming CEE Spring on their home wiki; and
Optional: organize a jury from other volunteers in the movement, who will not take part in the contest. Examples for various rules for local contests can be found here (Rules)
During the editing contest, local coordinators are asked to:
make sure that all participating articles on their own wiki have the CEE Spring template with parameters for username, topic and country, which is needed to acquire proper statistics about the local contest; and
promote the contest and give additional information about the contest through sitenotice, social media, blogs, or other ways.
3. International team is tasked to:
Provide support and additional guidance to local coordinators
Collect statistics (about articles, edits, uploads, added links…)
This year, also the CEE Hub staff is able to support CEE Spring by mapping work processes, writing instructions, communicating with the CEE communities and encouraging participations as well as promoting this competition across the movement.
5. Do you want to apply for multi-year funding?
No
5.1 If yes, 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?
- N/A
6. Please include a timeline (operational calendar) for your proposal.
- March 21st: Start of contest
May 30th: End of contest June to August: Handle local organiser request to receive funding October: Finalise report, start funding process for next year’s CEE Spring
7. Do you have the team that is needed to implement this proposal?
The team is listed on the CEE Spring page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Spring_2023#International_organisers This year we also have communication support by the CEE Hub in order to formalise the organising process of CEE Spring and expand our support for local organisers.
8. Please state if your proposal aims to work to bridge any of the identified CONTENT knowledge gaps (Knowledge Inequity)? Select up to THREE that most apply to your work.
Content Gender gap, Geography, Cultural background, ethnicity, religion, racial
8.1 In a few sentences, explain how your work is specifically addressing this content gap (or Knowledge inequity) to ensure a greater representation of knowledge.
CEE Spring is designed to highlight gaps in Wikimedia projects where communities have no articles about topics of a different community in the region.
9. Please state if your proposal includes any of these areas or THEMATIC focus. Select up to THREE that most apply to your work and explain the rationale for identifying these themes.
Human Rights, Culture, heritage or GLAM , Diversity
10. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Please note, we had previously asked about inclusion and diversity in terms of CONTENTS, in this question we are asking about the diversity of PARTICIPANTS. Select up to THREE that most apply to your work.
Geographic , Ethnic/racial/religious or cultural background, Linguistic / Language
11. What are your strategies for engaging participants, particularly those that currently are non-Wikimedia?
Our primary target participants are the communities affiliated within the CEE partnership, whereas our secondary target participants are all communities in the Wikimedia movement willing to contribute to topics related to the CEE region. Based on our experience from the previous years, the groups of target participants number more than 30 language editions of Wikipedia and span more than 35 countries, regions and communities. In order to participate in the writing contest, each community has to abide by the following rules on international level: CEE Spring 2023 is a set of local contests, however internationally coordinated. Local contests are organised in a way to select winners before the 30th of June 2023, with the reimbursement process open until late November 2023. In order to join CEE Spring 2023, an affiliate or community: selects one person as the coordinator; this person is ready to reveal to the Wikimedia Austria office their full name, contact address and bank account number in order to conduct money transfers prepares the set of rules of the local contest and documents them on Meta. prepares (preferably together with their community) a list of articles (roughly 100) in ~10 categories on their community to translate/create before 15 March 2023. decides about the method of selection of local winners, however it must be clearly defined and published on Meta presents to Wikimedia Austria originals or scanned copies of the invoices, for which they get reimbursed or provide an account in an online shop with a full shopping basket, so that only the payment details need be added by the payment processor. The shop must be capable of providing an invoice.
12. In what ways are you actively seeking to contribute towards creating a safer, supportive, more equitable environment for participants and promoting the UCOC and Friendly Space Policy, and/or equivalent local policies and processes?
Local organisers are responsible for the environment that users participate in. It is simply impossible without an unreasonable raise in staffing time on this project to police 35 different language projects, even if we were able to understand each of those languages perfectly.
In extreme cases like Croatian Wikipedia we are changing our approach to include a discussion process around the question of the local organisers. In cases like this our approach is more active e.g. with the support of the CEE Hub we are trying to reach out to local communities in order to encourage new people to act as local organisers.
13. Do you have plans to work with Wikimedia communities, groups, or affiliates in your country, or in other countries, to implement this proposal?
Yes
13.1 If yes, please tell us about these connections online and offline and how you have let Wikimedia communities know about this proposal.
International team composed of Wikimedians from different communities was having biweekly meetings during February and March 2023 where the preparation of this proposal was discussed. Each of the persons involved was contributing based on the feedback and suggestions they would receive from their local communities. This proposal was thus a joint work of the international CEE team representing CEE communities. Also, the feedback from communities outside of the region was taken into account as received the request for participation in the CEE Spring 2023 from some communities outside of the CEE. This was discussed during one of our biweekly meetings and it was decided how they could join as ‘guest communities’ this year.
14. Will you be working with other external, non-Wikimedian partners to implement this proposal?
No
14.1 Please describe these partnerships and what motivates the potential partner to be part of the proposal and how they add value to your work.
N/A
15. How do you hope to sustain or expand the work carried out in this proposal after the grant?
CEE Spring contest enables bringing people of the CEE region closer together by learning about each other. This year with the support of the Hub we plan to draft a document about lessons learnt through the years of organising the contest and integrate future editions of CEE Spring into the activities of the CEE Hub, if the hub continues to receive funding in the following years.
16. What kind of risks do you anticipate and how would you mitigate these. This can include factors such as external/contextual issues that may affect implementation, as well as internal issues, such as governance/leadership changes.
- The risks to this project are well known at this point and have become evident in some cases where volunteer time and contributions have lessened (see old editions like https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/CEE_Spring_User_Group/CEE_Spring_2021#Risks ).
This year the support of the CEE Hub helps mitigate many of those risks by having more eyes on the process and helping to maintain a higher level of activity compared to previous editions.
17. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select a maximum of three options that most apply.
Identify Topics for Impact, Innovate in Free Knowledge, Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt
18. Please state if your organization or group has a Strategic Plan that can help us further understand your proposal. You can also upload it here.
- No
Learning, Sharing, and Evaluation
edit19. What do you hope to learn from your work in this fund proposal?
CEE Spring 2023 will reveal the direction in which the writing contest develops, which will be used as a basis to iterate on the plan for the following years. This year’s contest will have to provide answers to questions regarding the number of participating communities, community growth measured through the number of participants, content coverage measured through the number of written articles, share of female participants and its tendency over years, and coverage of topics related to women and human rights. Our learning from the contest with regards to these questions will have to enable us to make future decisions on how to increase gender diversity, how to reach out to underrepresented communities, how to help local participants and which thematic areas should be prioritised. The war in Ukraine has made this kind of evaluation more difficult, because relationships across the region have been complicated and made more difficult. In some cases certain communities will not even try to write about certain topics because of a threat of incarceration.
20. Based on these learning questions, what is the information or data you need to collect to answer these questions? Please register this information (as metric description) in the following space provided.
| Main Metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | Number of participants across all Wikimedia projects - how healthy is the contest? How to events (like the war in Ukraine or revolutions in the area in past years) affect contributions to this contest? | 500 |
| Number of female authors | This number has been decreasing in past years, we are also reliant on people using that setting in their Wikimedia account for self-identification. | 100 |
| Number of new authors | How many new editors does this contest attract and how does this number compare to previous years? | 50 |
| Number of articles about women | How do subcontests like CEE Women and highlighting female biografies in en.wp motivate authors to write about them? | 1500 |
| Minimum number of articles per Wikipedia | Ensure that a minimum level of activity is happening on all participating Wikipedias, within their capabilities | 100 |
Here are some additional metrics that you can use if they are relevant to your work. Please note that this is just an optional list, mostly of quantitative metrics. They may complement the qualitative metrics you have defined in the previous boxes.
| Additional Metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities | N/A | N/A |
| Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities | N/A | N/A |
| Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability | N/A | N/A |
| Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors | N/A | N/A |
| Diversity of participants brought in by grantees | N/A | N/A |
| Number of people reached through social media publications | N/A | N/A |
| Number of activities developed | N/A | N/A |
| Number of volunteer hours | N/A | N/A |
21. Additional core quantitative metrics. These core metrics will not tell the whole story about your work, but they are important for measuring some Movement-wide changes. Please try to include these core metrics if they are relevant to your work. If they are not, please use the space provided to explain why they are not relevant or why you can not capture this data. Your explanation will help us review our core metrics and make sure we are using the best ones for the movement as a whole.
| Core metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | Number of participants across all Wikimedia projects - how healthy is the contest? How to events (like the war in Ukraine or revolutions in the area in past years) affect contributions to this contest? | 500 |
| Number of editors | Number of participants across all Wikimedia projects - how healthy is the contest? How to events (like the war in Ukraine or revolutions in the area in past years) affect contributions to this contest? | 500 |
| Number of organizers | Number of Wikipedia projects taking part in the contest | 30 |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| 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 |
21.1 If for some reason your proposal will not measure these core metrics please provide an explanation.
N/A
22. What tools would you use to measure each metric selected?
We use a statistics bot to create statistics based on the labeling done by the participants: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Spring_2022/Statistics
Financial Proposal
edit23. & 23.1 What is the amount you are requesting from WMF? Please provide this amount in your local currency. If you are thinking about a multi-year fund, please provide the amount for the first year.
- 9800 EUR
23.2 What is this amount in US Currency (to the best of your knowledge)?
- 10420 USD
23.3 Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it.
- Please see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZbrJudgyCQ4KlqhxssLTaFuDlyfm9sWZ1m5f5sacLE0/edit#gid=0
23.4 Please include any additional observations or comments you would like to include about your budget.
- The budget as usual is a maximum of what we expect to spend, but we are dependent on local organisers requesting it, which has fluctuated over the years.
Please use this optional space to upload any documents that you feel are important for further understanding your proposal.
- Other public document(s):
Final Message
editBy 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.