Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia Sverige – Supporting an equitable free knowledge movement by expanding our global initiatives and local fundraising/Yearly Report (2023)/Learning priorities

In our application we listed 11 areas where we hoped to learn more:

1. Access: Hub focus – Through multiple conversations we have continued to deepen our understanding around the interests of other Movement actors. This year we had an extra focus on discussing with and engaging other hub initiatives in joint activities. Based on our findings and understanding (which is building upon years of experience in the field) we have continuously iterated on the experiments we initiated in the beginning of the project.
2. Access: Recognition of hubs – A year later and we are still not sure about this as the work on establishing the interim Global Council has not progressed as much as we hoped. Through our participation on the Movement Strategy consultation on Hubs and the Global Council we hope to have contributed to the shared understanding and learning. In the process of developing our response the team learnt a lot as they had to deeply understand the issues at hand and consider how different options would affect possible governance models for our hub.
3. Access: Information access – We expanded our work on adding information about the chapter to Metabase and gained valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities of structuring such information. We finalized our multi-year project where GLAMs connect their data to Wikidata and our joint learnings were well received by the Swedish GLAM sector.
4. Access: Norm changes – By joining a number of networks and deeply researching multiple legal issues we have developed the needed knowledge and expertise to formulate clear and easy-to-understand material about complex legal issues. This allows us to experiment with how we can communicate this knowledge widely to both decision makers and the public to achieve a change of the norms.
5. Use: Wikispeech – In preparing and submitting our grant application for further development of Wikispeech we have partnered with multiple disability organizations. By expanding to more such organizations we gained a better understanding about the breadth of different reading challenges which are present among their members. As a collective their members speak a very large number of languages.
6. Use: Speech data collection – This work was canceled this year as we could not secure funding. We have learnt that more and more groups are keen on joining this work, due to an increased realization of the need for diverse datasets for AI research and development.
7. Community: Regional engagement – Through our regional work we learnt that while there was a big interest in establishing local partnerships these initiatives do not maintain momentum once we need to withdraw our staff resources. We concluded that for there to be more local ownership the shared Wikimedia Sverige identity needs to be easier to understand and communicate and more well developed e-learning modules must be provided as well as different kits for organizers.
8. Community: Movement leaders – The internal discussions around the content and focus of the training modules have increased understanding and enhanced learning between team members working with pedagogical activities. Our concept development around a training program for Wikimedian in Residence positions at IGOs has been and continues to be a valuable learning experience for us as other affiliates and groups have thought deeply about WiR positions in different contexts.
9. Community: Supporting existing communities – We experimented around this on multiple fronts. Through the Helpdesk communities can receive direct support – with another community body, the Expert Committee, prioritizing the work. We are now looking to bring this approach back to our community support within Sweden, setting up a volunteer body to help decide how support should be allocated. Lastly we learnt that supporting volunteer developers was more complex than expected.
10. Enabling: Funds for the movement – We dove deeper into CRM needs and implementation practicalities. We kept developing our strategies for face-to-face fundraising focusing on recruitment of new members rather than acquiring donations. We finalized our joint project with WM Uganda and initiated a new project with WM organizations in the CEE region, learning even more about the opportunity space of Swedish funding for Wikimedia work in other countries. We also had exploratory discussions with WMF and a few affiliates on how European affiliates could provide financial support for Wikimedians in Iran and other countries under US sanctions.
11. Enabling: Fundraising communication – We kept experimenting in order to develop our strategies for face-to-face fundraising. This year focusing on recruitment of new members rather than acquiring donations.