Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/AvoinGLAM 2023

Feedback from the Northern and Western Europe (NWE) Regional Funding Committee on your proposal

Hello Susanna, Tarmo, Tove

Thank you for taking the time to submit your General Support Fund proposal in the Northern and Western Europe region. We are pleased to have reviewed your application and have the following comments and questions:

• First of all we want to congratulate with you for the ability to bring the GLAM work forward, by developing GLAM both on a conceptual and practical and technical level
• We also appreciate your taking in consideration the well-being/mental health and tracking the records of good ideas
• As often noted, the GLAM work is fragmented. Can you please elaborate how you will let other Wikimedia communities know about this proposal and how do you plan to work with them (q. 13)?
• Your application suggests that you are seeking to play a lead role internationally in the GLAM work. Can you share more about how this role will play out? Have other GLAM-focused affiliates given input on how your role will look? How will knowledge production be shared? How will GLAM affiliates be interacting or coordinating with one another?
• In your proposal last year, there was a lot about plans for international activity. Can you share how your international work has played out over the last year?
• If you have feedback from people you shared or collaborated with last year, we would appreciate it if you can provide their testimony about their work with you. We would love to review that feedback.
• Reflecting on your work over the last year, via your first Annual Plan with the General Support Fund, can you share what you have learned? Is there anything you decided to change for your second year plan?

Thank you and we look forward to hearing from you.

On behalf of the NWE Regional Committee, --Camelia (talk) 23:10, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for your thoughtful comments! Below you will find responses to the questions you put forward.

As often noted, the GLAM work is fragmented. Can you please elaborate how you will let other Wikimedia communities know about this proposal and how do you plan to work with them (q. 13)?

The short answer to the question: As soon as the proposed activities are confirmed, we will need to use all our efforts to reach all the affiliates interested in participating. We will contact affiliates directly as well as publicize on the mailing lists and Telegram groups. The Movement Strategy platform also seems to reach a good audience. Up-to-date contact information is generally hard to find.

The long one: Currently AvoinGLAM creates Wikiprojects or pages for our activities, but that does not guarantee any visibility. We also publish in This Month in GLAM and social media and on our own blog and newsletter.

AvoinGLAM is not yet an affiliate, which has limited our access to knowledge that is distributed to the affiliates and opportunities for participating in the global community. We have decided to apply for user group status. This year Susanna was able to attend the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin in another role, which was very useful.

We have three key activities for 2023 that we wish to realize together with the global community:

• Wiki Loves Living Heritage celebrating the 20th anniversary of the 2003 UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage is soon becoming reality. It is planned to be a Wiki Loves contest bringing together affiliates and communities in the global Wikimedia network with coordinators of UNESCO Living Heritage in the countries. It invites existing contests to team up under the thematic focus during the anniversary year. Ethical guidelines for documenting living heritage will be crafted through a jointly realized seminar. Plans for this activity have progressed a lot since submitting the application. We are seeking additional funding for it with the project partners.

• The Wiki Loves Dataviz collaboration with Wiki World Heritage will be connected to the Visualizing Knowledge conference at Aalto University in 2023. It brings together designer students and the Wiki Loves Dataviz contest network in exploring ways to visualize cultural data stored in Wikidata.

• The co-creation / peer learning event Hack4OpenGLAM is gradually taking shape and separate funding will be sought for it. It will create small experimental online collaborations by bringing together practitioners interested in a variety of topics around cultural heritage and crisis. It builds upon discussions conducted in the GLAM community in 2022. We plan to recreate the Dashboard that we have done in the previous events for projects, ideas, creators and mentors to find each other and work together. The hybrid main event is planned to take place in Finland in October.

Your application suggests that you are seeking to play a lead role internationally in the GLAM work. Can you share more about how this role will play out? Have other GLAM-focused affiliates given input on how your role will look? How will knowledge production be shared? How will GLAM affiliates be interacting or coordinating with one another?

I have been thinking about the kind of role a single actor in the Wikimedia movement can take, and I would be careful not to imply we are seeking a leading role. Instead, we wish to be in a position to facilitate collaboration and peer learning across Wikimedia affiliates and also beyond the movement. The hackathon experimentation model is very important for us to develop. It aims to bring people together from different parts of the open movement and to give the participants the opportunity to experiment, learn new things, and to find out how to use open cultural heritage for the betterment of the world.

I have worked to gather the GLAM community to the GLAM-Wiki Global Telegram group, which I consider to be the central hub for exchanging ideas around GLAM currently. Also, based on the responses from the Wikimedia chapters in the GLAM School survey, and based on the interviews by Wikimedia Sweden, it is evident that a common knowledge sharing platform is needed for the GLAM community. There was a test spreadsheet used for sharing ideas at the Wikimedia Summit and even that proved very effective in informing the other affiliates about activities in the global community. The Movement Strategy platform would also work well, and I have asked for reactions in the GLAM-Wiki Telegram group about using that or another instance of Discourse for sharing GLAM work.

I ran a capacity building workshop in the European GLAM coordinators’ meeting in Prague together with Axel Pettersson and Tore Danielsson from Wikimedia Sverige, Michelle van Lanschot from Wikimedia Nederland, and Jessica Stephenson from the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimedia Sverige has gathered the results, and I will include them in the final results of the GLAM School project. Chapters struggle with similar capacity issues and are often overburdened with secondary tasks, which leaves them little opportunity to hop onto collaborative projects. I am confident that if there was an opportunity for anyone to work on programming, tools and practices serving all GLAM practitioners across communities, great things would come out of it.

I also participate in the work of the Helpdesk Expert Committee of the Content Partnership Hub where I wish to emphasize practices that promote skill sharing and capacity building.

In your proposal last year, there was a lot about plans for international activity. Can you share how your international work has played out over the last year?

We started some unexpected activities, and some of our planned activities got canceled or transformed for various reasons. The Global Cine Club was overrun by the urgency to react to the war in Ukraine, and I participated in the SUCHO - Saving Ukrainian Heritage Online project backing up Ukrainian GLAM websites. I contributed a lot of information from Wikidata and have advocated for its use in the project. I continue to work with them, and more opportunities are arising for integrating the work with the Wikimedia projects.

We have arranged two international workshops, one at Mozfest titled GLAM Together! with presenters Minne Atairu, Mariana Ziku and Kristen Tchernshoff, and another one at Wikimania, where we arranged a workshop/panel on the theme of Crisis and GLAM with Éder Porto, Nassima Chahboun and Hanna Osadchuk presenting. The theme was followed up by a workshop at the European GLAM coordinators’ meeting, initiated by Giovanna Fontanelle, and the next Hack4OpenGLAM will focus on the same theme.

In the spring we invited the global GLAM community to join us writing a response to a provocative blog post by the head of the Finnish National Gallery about overruling their open access policy in favor of monetizing with NFT. It was followed by a webinar moderated by Douglas McCarthy and Andrea Wallace along with several international guests and broad participation of the Finnish GLAMs.

I have been invited to present at a few international sessions. One of them was the Public Domain day seminar by Free Knowledge Africa in Nigeria, who also invited me to join their advisory board. I am so happy to see the work done at Hack4OpenGLAM bear fruit, as Alaafiabami Oladipupo of Free Knowledge Africa was one of the regional ambassadors in the project.

The new Wiki Loves Dataviz collaboration has already started. A workshop with Aalto University design students will be organized on 28 November with Yamen Bousrih visiting and introducing Wikidata. Collaboration with Nassima Chahboun of Wiki World Heritage also started at Hack4OpenGLAM 2021.

We are now about to initiate an activity around Living Heritage (UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage) for the festive 20th anniversary of the UNESCO 2003 Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage. We hope to bring existing contests and Wikimedia affiliates together with the UNESCO ICH Focal points to work together on the local level and celebrate the festive year.

We are also preparing to host next year’s Hack4OpenGLAM as a hybrid event in October 2023 with additional funding. We had prepared to organize it similarly with separate funding in 2022 as well, but the Creative Commons Summit, during which it was organized previously, did not take place in 2022, and the time was too limited for us to make alternative arrangements.

If you have feedback from people you shared or collaborated with last year, we would appreciate it if you can provide their testimony about their work with you. We would love to review that feedback.

I would be honored if Nassima Chahboun from Wiki World Heritage or Alaafiabami Oladipupo from Free Knowledge Africa would be willing to testify. I will forward the request to either of them.

Reflecting on your work over the last year, via your first Annual Plan with the General Support Fund, can you share what you have learned? Is there anything you decided to change for your second year plan?

Things don’t always go as you planned and you always end up working more than you thought to deliver what you promised! For us, surprises and obstacles have often meant new opportunities and a fresh, changed point-of-view. It is important that we are open about any challenges and can manage it in reporting.

Our budget missed some important categories. We have needed to cater for travel, community events and equipment with transfers in the budget.

We have raised the working time of the coordinator from 0.6 FTE to 0.7 FTE to better cover the full schedule of projects. We also implemented a small initial funding of 0.1 FTE to support the Wikidocumentaries project developed by us. It is in our interest to see the project developed and integrated into the programmatic activities.

With a single-person staff, we have to reduce labor-intensive data imports, for example, as they distract too much from the coordination work that is central to our activities. Ideally, we will connect with Wikimedia Finland or the global GLAM community for imports.

We have been thinking a lot about the incorporation of the group, but with major projects launching, at least the start of the year is not the right time to take on extra challenges. We must also find ways to spend less time communicating, especially writing the newsletters. We wish to rearrange the activities in the future to allow hiring a part-time person for some communications and office activities. Incorporating would release resources for us to cater for those needs.

Previously, we have sought to coordinate advocacy work on open licensing issues in Finland, but we prefer to shift from coordinating to joining the advocacy work led by others to be able to put more effort into production-oriented work.

The balance between our objectives always depends on what our main projects for the year are. This year we will be able to engage the Finnish GLAM sector more, if we successfully run the Hack4OpenGLAM event as a hybrid event in Finland.

Thank you for reading through, and best wishes!

– Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) 🦜 17:58, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Feedback about previous collaborations with AvoinGlam

Dear NWE Regional Funding Committee,

From my previous and current collaborations with AvoinGLAM, I can attest that they are doing a great job within the movement in terms of connecting dots, and creating collaboration opportunities.

Hack4OpenGlam, for instance, was a platform for networking and peer learning between different cultural heritage actors within and outside the movement. This was made possible through diversifying the thematics that were addressed in the different sessions and panels, and also recruiting regional/thematic ambassadors for the event, which allowed to reach larger audiences and transcend the language barriers. These connections were fruitful for Wiki World Heritage, as we are currently collaborating in WHindanger project editathons with several groups we met during the Hackathon.

Currently, we are collaborating with AvoinGLAM on Wiki Loves Dataviz, which is a project launched by Wiki World Heritage to foster the use of Wikidata and WQS to document World Heritage, and they played a key role in the project through facilitating the collaboration with Aalto University in Finland.

I believe that this kind of connections and synergies are very important to advance the work of our movement.

Nassima Chahboun (talk) 12:25, 11 December 2022 (UTC)

Dear NWE Regional Funding Committee,

This is Alaafiabami from Free Knowledge Africa, I would like to mention that AvionGLAM is part responsible for all the success Free Knowledge Africa has achieved in the Open GLAM space, I was a regional ambassador for Sub-Saharan Africa at the last HACK4OPENGLAM, joining the project enabled Free Knowledge Africa start the celebration and documentation of Public Domain items in Nigeria. Susanna has also been actively involved in our GLAM advocacy in Northern Nigeria, she made sure she provided us with enough resources and knowledge that empowered us at free knowledge Africa in our Open GLAM Advocacy in Plateau State, documentation of the Ndengdeng Cultural Group and the documentation of the oral history of the Tarok Tribe in Plateau State, Nigeria. I believe that AvoinGlam's success as it relates to the Open Glam space has transcended the European Continent, Africa has a lot to benefit from their network and future plans as it is stated in this Grant. It is important we continue to make over 1.2 billion people see the light the Wikimedia Movement shines through AvionGlam. Haylad (talk) 02:29, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

Round 1 2023 decision

Congratulations! The Northern and Western Europe Regional Funds Committee has recommended your proposal for funding!

The Wikimedia Foundation has approved the committee's recommendation to partially fund your proposal for 50,000 EUR

Comments regarding this decision:
The committee’s partial funding of your proposal is intended to specifically support the one-year, non-recurring intangible heritage campaign in partnership with UNESCO. We see value in your work to leverage the energy and resources that UNESCO will already be directing to intangible heritage in 2023, in its celebration of the 20-year anniversary of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Beyond funding for a one-year project, the committee has sufficient concerns about the proposal that we cannot support this proposal as a commitment to Annual Plan funding. For ongoing Annual Plan grantees, we look for overall strategic integrity, with specific goals and a plan that is logically tied to those goals and leads to clearly articulated outcomes. In addition, we look for signs that the organization or group as a whole has a stable, structured collective identity and participatory decision-making capacity that is not dependent on the work of a single individual. At this time, the committee has reservations about AvoinGLAM’s capacity in terms of both strategic planning and organizational or group identity/structure. Consequently, in offering funding for this one-year project, we want to be clear that we cannot commit to providing annual funding on an ongoing basis. Funding of future annual plans would be dependent on demonstration that AvoinGLAM has addressed these areas of concern. We would be happy to meet with you in 2023 to provide more nuanced feedback about these concerns, if that would be supportive to you.

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement.
2. If you have questions, you can contact the Regional Program Officer for the Northern and Western Europe Region.

Posted on behalf of the Northern and Western Europe (NWE) Funding Committee, –Marti (WMF) (talk) 08:16, 5 January 2023 (UTC)