Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Conversation series - LGBT+

Questions from the Regional Committee

Hi @bluerasberry, @OwenBlacker, & @Zblace Thanks for submitting a really interesting proposal. I have a few questions:

1. Could you be more explicit about the long-term impact you are aiming for, & how this might be monitored?
2. One risk you identify is the possibility that the community might not find the conversation series relevant. How will you assess this? After every hosted conversation? If you are planning a 3-year project, can you suggest another way to address this risk besides cancelling years 2 & 3?
3. Your response to item #6 (Please include a timeline (operational calendar) for your proposal) seems truncated. Could you please elaborate?
4. in item #7 (question about the team required) your plan necessitates hiring staff and consultants through an open call. Can you suggest a way to mitigate the risk of labour shortages, of not being able to hire the necessary team within the project timeline?
5. You mention that one of the products of this project will be "published documentation." Can you give an example of where (i.e. in what venue) this might be published?
   • LGBT+ UG has multiple social media accounts that would be used + Wikimedia (Commons, Meta, Forum...maybe Wikispore), but also Archive.org and/or Flickr.com *(primarily to also have non-free media formats like .mp4). Likely we start also dedicated website for WmLGBT.org. --Zblace (talk) 18:57, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
6. item #16: You identify one risk as "Community discussions lead to invalid outcomes." How would you determine if the outcome of a hosted conversation was "invalid"? Can you give an example?
7. item #19: "What do you hope to learn ..." You ask some great questions. Besides the summary of each conversation, will you write some sort of Project Report/Year 1 Summary? (if so, this will need to be assigned & budgeted.)
8. item #20: main metrics: why is the "count of published summaries" given a target of N/A? Shouldn't this target = 5?
9. in the table labelled "Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project" the first entry (Wikispecies) looks like a mistake. Can you confirm (or clarify)?

Redwidgeon (talk) 03:03, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Hope you do not mind me numerating your questions above or maybe better to answer inline? I am aware that it is against Wikipedia norms, but here mightbe useful for overview, just so we can start answering also incrementally individually...at least for me that would be useful as I have more narrow focus :-) Also I do not have Fluxx access so I have no idea what should be answered there and what manually here. --Zblace (talk) 08:28, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

@Zblace: Sure, let's talk it through publicly. Invite anyone else also. Bluerasberry (talk) 11:28, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Numerating the questions makes good sense to me! (I should have thought of that myself). Redwidgeon (talk) 15:38, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

• Video response - Wikimedia LGBT+ conversation series proposal - @Redwidgeon: I am aware that you need a text response but here is a video that I made to share my thoughts answering some of your questions. We will get short wiki-style answers to your questions also.

transcript of video
There's a set of social and ethical challenges that Wikimedia LGBT is facing. Wikimedia LGBT is the community for LGBT Wiki editors or people who are editing LGBT topics. We have these problems. They've been recurring for many years and we need a way to address them. We propose to have a conversation series for these problems where we invite anyone who's got anything to say about what we should do about them to give their comment. The conversation series would be administered by paid staff. We're looking for this to be sponsored so whereas many things in the wiki community are managed by volunteers, these problems are too big. We volunteers have tried to solve them for too long without success and we need some administration. The kind of administration that we need is somebody to set up calendar appointments to say when can everybody meet. We're going to meet by video, we're gonna meet on the wiki in the discussion forums where anyone who can't join the video, they're welcome to just post text; and we have to advertise these things in social media, it's just too big of an undertaking to doing all these channels, and we also need to do this in multiple languages which is why we're seeking sponsorship. Now what what are these conversation series issues? What are we going to be discussing exactly? The perennial problems which face LGBT people. Number one in the wiki community, the one that comes up the most, why people desperately come to Wikimedia LGBT, is they say, "I'm being harassed because I'm LGBT. What kind of support services do you offer?" And again, we're a volunteer organization we're limited in what kinds of support we can offer people, but there's some really serious harassment that goes on online for anyone who's perceived to be LGBT and editing Wikipedia or anyone who's editing LGBT Topics in Wikipedia, and we need to have standardized responses for this. This isn't something that we can go to the Wikimedia Foundation for support. We've been dealing with this for more than 10 years. The support from the Wikimedia Foundation is inadequate. We the LGBT community, we've got to do something to protect our own. Some other issues that come up - we have all kinds of media organizations newspapers and magazines who come to Wikipedia and they ask us, "What is your policy for such and such?" or even LGBT organizations ask us, "How do you write about certain things? What is your manual of style? What are your standards for talking about things like transgender or dead names? Do you put them in Wikipedia or do you not? Under what circumstances do you use these or how do you manage pronouns for people who have changed gender or are using a neo pronoun some pronoun that many readers aren't going to be familiar with? What is Wikipedia's manual of style for these things?" And even people at the Wikimedia Foundation, they contact Wikimedia LGBT privately and say, "Hey we're having this problem with the Wikimedia Foundation. What's your policy on this?" And we've got to tell them there's many people with many opinions. We'd like to convene a conversation. It hasn't happened yet. Some other issues: how to deal with homophobia and transphobia that's not harassment. This comes up in in different ways in different countries. Many people in the Western World - United States for example - if somebody is homophobic, they're likely to be transphobic and vice versa. Sometimes there's some variation of this. In the United Kingdom right now there's a wealthy person who wrote a lot of novels about magical school children and this person is saying things that some people interpret as transphobic and trying to mix that with the LGBT community. And we get a lot of comments in Wikipedia saying "How do you manage transphobia that seems to be supportive of homosexual people?" We have to have these discussions in our text. It comes up in Wikipedia it doesn't come up quite the same way in other places. In India, for example, South Asia there's centuries of tradition where there's a class of people, or demographic of people, the Hijra, transgender people, so if you're in India you, on your ID, you can get a third gender designation on your government ID. It's very trans supportive so less transphobia there than perhaps in other places. On another, from another perspective in India we've got to address issues like homophobia still exists. Heterophobia exists to some extent! There's protests against Valentine's Day in India for example so if you have Global perspectives about what issues do LGBT people face in different places you've got to ask different people in different countries, "What are you experiencing?" and if we don't convene conversations to ask everyone in the Wiki Community to give their thoughts and actually record their opinions make these documented in a useful way so that other people can access them we're not going to be able to address these social and ethical challenges. Who asks for this? So there's the Wiki Community. We've been asking for this for a long time. There's a lot of Wiki community members who, when asked, they would give their comment. Some of the things they want is credit for giving their comment. If they give it they want to be heard. They want to make sure that somebody has noted what they said and it's going to factor into the decision that we make. There's external stakeholders. LGBT organizations, media organizations, as I've asked. Wikipedia is extremely popular and what happens in Wikipedia a lot of organizations outside of Wikipedia observe and emulate. They say, "If the Wiki Community has made a decision about something, that's good enough for us as well." And so when we do have these conversations we need to make sure that the decisions we make they're going to be accessible to be read and studied and copied by other organizations and another stakeholders. Very important! The Wikimedia Foundation itself, Wikimedia Foundation is the organization which acts as the steward of the Wikimedia projects. They're separate from the Wikimedia community, so for example the Wikimedia Foundation they have to keep keep the website on, but if someone needs to speak for the LGBT community the Wikimedia Foundation is not appropriate for that. They just don't have the diversity. They don't have the perspective. When you have a limited number of people who are employees in an organization, they cannot speak to social and ethical issues without going into the community. I'll give an example of a big social and ethical issue that the Wikimedia Foundation addressed. They organized community conversations around something called the Universal Code of Conduct. This was a big deal. They featured the outcome of this discussion in the Wikipedia Foundation annual report, so it was one of the biggest accomplishments of the organization for a year. They asked for LGBT comment on what should the code of conduct be for all people who are in Wikipedia and boy did we give them that comment! We recruited a couple hundred hours of volunteer conversation about what kinds of conduct rules there should be and we give this an LGBT perspective. If we hadn't contributed that perspective then it would have been missing from the code of conduct discussions and besides that we contributed volunteers to the drafting Committee of these rules and they've been adopted by the Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia Foundation convened this but the Wikimedia Foundation could not have done this without Community comment and it's not just about LGBT people it's about anyone who's a stakeholder in the social and ethical discussions in the Wikimedia movement. Now when the Wikimedia Foundation published the code of conduct, I'm very grateful, but it's still a first step. It's just published. There's more to say about this the code of conduct that they published. It did not fully reflect the views of the LGBT community. There's limited space, they've got to keep the rules simple, they can't represent everybody, they had to make editorial decisions, but come the end of this and in the ongoing conversation, if the LGBT community does not represent itself then it will not be represented in such discussions either for the Universal Code of Conduct or the social and ethical issues that I've already mentioned, or any of the other number of issues which continually arise in the Wikimedia movement. The community has to convene its own conversations to to speak for its community and keep ourselves safe and make sure that we're represented. So, what is the long-term impact that I want from the community conversation? Well I want to organize these conversations for the LGBT community so that the LGBT community can be represented whenever there's some kind of conflict or dispute or some kind of ethical issue arises but this is bigger than just the LGBT community. There's not a culture of supporting community conversations in the Wikimedia Movement at all. In the case of the Universal Code of Conduct, which was a very big budget, multiple millions of dollars spent on this, it wasn't the case that the Wikimedia Foundation gave money to communities to convene their own conversations. This was unprecedented and said they had their own staff and owned facilitators who were listening to communities and it's nice to be listened it's listened to it's nice nice to be heard but it's different if you have a professional communication facilitator who's doing listening versus the community who's organizing their own conversations and communicating outwards on their own terms saying here's here's the issues that we're trying to address we'll publish our own statement you don't need to listen to us thank you we can we can speak for ourselves uh and and speak speak directly so the long-term impact that I want is that every time there's an ethical issue the wiki Community increasingly especially when you're talking about large demographics like LGBT people we we speak for ourselves What kinds of products would come from the community conversation is this just a transient event no I'm not thinking about that at all this isn't it's participatory and we want individual community members we're talking about hundreds of people will participate in these conversations the LGBT community there's several thousand people who actually participate in LGBT community decisions in a year if we were more organized if we had administrators to call people and advertise these kind of conversations I expect that a reach would be in the the tens of thousands of people who watch these discussions uh comment in some way or another contribute to this we're talking about a very large community that we have access to so at the end of these conversations we need documentation everybody who posted a public comment okay that goes in the permanent public archive nobody nobody's left out if you've got a comment you go into the permanent record and then to increase the validity of this entire process we've got to summarize all those comments categorize them in some way say these people all felt the same way and so they're in a category we're going to group them together and the out and then we say so many people said this therefore this is important to put in our final summary statement after we publish the summary then we again present that to community and say hey is this a good shortening of everything that was said who's got something to say about this summarization style and if it's the community validity validates it then that's the summary that we start Distributing to other people as we do more of these conversations there's a few directions we could go in one of the directions is that we could start publishing regular reports of the reports like if we have multiple conversations this one's about harassment this one's about pronoun usage and then every year or so we could have an annual report that says here here are the big discussions of the the LGBT community in Wikimedia projects for this year here's how it went that could be interesting something else that we could do you is document their methodology and process what does it mean to have a community conversation because again this is unprecedented this is a challenge that the Wikimedia Foundation itself hasn't solved but if we the LGBT community designed this process to serve our community then I think that there's other Wikimedia communities that would like to have Community conversations for themselves either because they care about a particular subject domain like military history or the photographers or the women's interest or the medical editors or you could have geographical interests where people are editing any topic but Community conversations for people who are in India or in the United States or whatever other region has a community a language community if we build up this kind of culture I think that that adds legitimacy to a lot of things in the Wikimedia Movement, especially where there's social and ethical issues on the line. It's just not the case that the Wikimedia Foundation is ever going to speak to the social and ethical issues of the community the community absolutely has to speak for itself. Thanks for hearing me out! Please support the idea.

Bluerasberry (talk) 00:02, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

@Bluerasberry: Thanks for taking the time to prepare this video and transcript for the committee. While we don't typically receive video responses in response to committee feedback and questions, I think this practice generally fine on its own and for future reference, it's not necessary to prepare an additional transcript for these responses as well. I think the video does a nice job on its own. Thanks again for your engagement with our review! I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 15:43, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Text responses to questions

Check the video for responses with a broad view; I will answer briefly here:

1. Could you be more explicit about the long-term impact you are aiming for, & how this might be monitored?

   The desired long term impact is "demonstrate reasonable attempt to discuss social and ethical challenges facing LGBT+ wiki editors and those editing LGBT+ wiki content". Right now if any researcher or journalist were to examine the state of wiki and LGBT+, I do not think they would say that a reasonable effort to to convene discussion has started in this community.

2. One risk you identify is the possibility that the community might not find the conversation series relevant. How will you assess this? After every hosted conversation? If you are planning a 3-year project, can you suggest another way to address this risk besides cancelling years 2 & 3?

   This project is modeled after the Wikimedia Foundation conversations for Movement Strategy. Lack of relevance was a community sentiment for that and the budget was ~100x times this proposal. The best way that we can increase community relevance of conversations is to develop a norm of Wikimedia community conversations, do ongoing documentation, and get better over time. There were fewer community conversations in the past but demand is increasing greatly. No, I do not think it will be possible to assess relevance after each conversation, as we expect a different organizing team for each one, and one experience from one team is not enough to justify setting major rules. I think the best assessment would be an annual measurement of communication impact, community participation, and an interpretation of public sentiment about the project.

3. Your response to item #6 (Please include a timeline (operational calendar) for your proposal) seems truncated. Could you please elaborate?

   The best answer to this question would be a Gantt chart (Q192847) published in a methodology, such as protocols.io (Q56256113). We need two timelines - one for the model of the recurring public conversation, and one for the central management which is planning multiple instances of conversations in this series. If we are funded then we determine the calendar upon hiring organizers, but my preference would be to start every conversation immediately and simultaneously, then let the organizer for each one call the closing date for each one staggering them bit over the year.

   1. Timeline for each conversation
      1. hire organizer
      2. set up individual conversation pages on wiki, collect background discussion in wiki, collect research precedent
      3. document the outreach process for seeking comments both on and off-wiki
      4. Plan the video conversation - confirm an expert speaker, schedule the event, hire translators, pre-draft some likely outcomes
      5. have the live conversation, publish video, package it
      6. Seek final public comment including with video
      7. Package everything said
      8. Publish report and close out
   2. Calendar for overall series
      1. Months 0-3 - hire organizers, confirm conversation topics, design on on-wiki publishing pattern, invite early comment
      2. Months 4-6 - schedule endpoints for each conversation, draft out summary reports, solicit expert comment, end 1 conversation conversation
      3. Months 7-9 - call for end to discussion, present summary reports for public comment, seek publication venues
      4. Months 10-12 - all discussions closed, close public discussion, package the conversation for reuse by community, researchers, journalists, and policy makers
4. in item #7 (question about the team required) your plan necessitates hiring staff and consultants through an open call. Can you suggest a way to mitigate the risk of labour shortages, of not being able to hire the necessary team within the project timeline?

   The best way to prevent labor shortage is to offer market rate of pay. For Wikimedia Foundation grants, the historic norm has been to offer below market rate pay. We budgeted for a lower-middle class pay rate pegged to the United States job market, and we plan to offer this globally and especially invite applicants from lower and middle income countries to apply. We expect that this will have better response than typical Wikimedia community job postings as we can pay workers without asking them for charity or volunteering to complete the role, which is better for the workers than the norm.

5. You mention that one of the products of this project will be "published documentation." Can you give an example of where (i.e. in what venue) this might be published?
   • LGBT+ UG has multiple social media accounts that would be used + Wikimedia (Commons, Meta, Forum...maybe Wikispore), but also Archive.org and/or Flickr.com *(primarily to also have non-free media formats like .mp4). Likely we start also dedicated website for WmLGBT.org. --Zblace (talk) 18:57, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
   • In addition to what Z said we already have been exploring The Signpost as a media outlet and published a piece about trans rights in the October issue. It has already gotten more response than most Wikimedia projects, so we have a channel to readers here. Other channels that I like - but for which I am unsure we can budget - are protocols.io (Q56256113) for methods, Research Ideas and Outcomes (Q20895800) for a reproducible conversation project model, and actual established LGBT+ magazines. We will produce documentation but this is hard to predict as different audiences want different communication channels, they have different costs, and right now we have neither hired staff, identified the audience, or done community check-ins.
6. item #16: You identify one risk as "Community discussions lead to invalid outcomes." How would you determine if the outcome of a hosted conversation was "invalid"? Can you give an example?

   Again, see that trans rights article. Here we had a mini-community discussion about a complicated issue which will not soon reach community consensus. Part of the response is an extreme side for trans rights wanting all deadnames removed, and part of the side for conventional treatment of deadnames (which is still very pro-trans rights) is including the deadname in defined circumstances. I think the conversation is productive, but there is obviously still a lot of emotion in the mix and people who are not ready to trust either this publication or any summary of conversation on it. The heated conversation is an indication of low validity in the discussion outcome, as community is not accepting it. Fortunately the low validity is also inciting high participation in the conversation, which will lead to a valid consensus eventually.

7. item #19: "What do you hope to learn ..." You ask some great questions. Besides the summary of each conversation, will you write some sort of Project Report/Year 1 Summary? (if so, this will need to be assigned & budgeted.)

   I am not sure what makes sense at this point. I think there should be summaries of each talk, because this is what activists need to understand the Wikimedia community position on a social and ethical issue. I also think there should be a summary of the overall project which presents the "community conversation" outreach model which others can replicate. For an annual report I like the idea of communication metrics, because that is the norm established in the wiki community for user group reporting to the Wikimedia Foundation. I personally do not see the need for a one year report which tries to cover everything, because I do not believe that any of the three audiences I just mentioned for those other reports would want the one-year overall report. If I could imagine an audience that wanted information which we are not planning to give, then I could imagine a report to them. I think the smaller reports we have planned meet the needs of the stakeholders we have identified.

8. item #20: main metrics: why is the "count of published summaries" given a target of N/A? Shouldn't this target = 5?

   Yes!

9. in the table labelled "Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project" the first entry (Wikispecies) looks like a mistake. Can you confirm (or clarify)?

   Right, it is a mistake. Nothing about this project relates to Wikispecies.

Bluerasberry (talk) 14:57, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

General Support Fund proposal approved in the amount of 34,025 USD

@Bluerasberry, OwenBlacker, and Zblace: Congratulations! Your grant is approved in the amount of 34,025 USD with a grant term starting 1 January 2023 and ending 31 December 2023.

The committee supports the Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group’s efforts to directly engage Wikimedia communities on a host of needs around content, safety, and ethics related to LGBT+ communities and how they are represented and able to contribute to Wikimedia projects. Your organization has important experience in developing policies that support the safety of participants, such as the Friendly Space Policy and involvement in the early stages of Universal Code of Conduct (UCOC) development, which we expect will help support developing ideas and supporting conversations around needs you have described in this proposal. Related to the UCOC, we also recognize that this code and its systems are not likely to be the right channel to address many needs you have identified in this proposal. Finally, the proposal has important alignment with implementing certain aspects of Movement Strategy, such as maintaining a civil and healthy atmosphere and the need for peer spaces.

The committee also wanted to highlight some concerns over the evaluation plan for the proposal. The metrics and information you will be collecting, which focus mainly on participation, do not address the learning questions described (e.g. How do we manage names and pronouns for transgender people in biographies?). To better address these, the committee requests that some qualitative analyses be included in your activities assessing the discussions you facilitate with LGBT+ communities and within Wikimedia communities. These analyses should help you and communities understand what was discussed and what conclusions you draw from them. This approach could also apply to some risks you have identified. For example, one risk you identified was that communities you work with may not find the conversation series relevant. Are there ways you can assess these attitudes and report on your findings? Overall, the committee recommends implementing some qualitative analyses as soon as possible to your evaluation plan for this year, and would like to see these incorporated in future applications for funding. If you need support around designing qualitative analyses for your work, please contact your program officer, as there are some opportunities to discuss and brainstorm ideas for your consideration.

Multiyear funding for this proposal could not be supported, which requires a long-term strategic plan describing the overall purpose of your organization and detailing the long-term priorities your organization has over a multiyear period. Importantly, the committee is not requiring or recommending that your user group prepare a strategic plan for next year, and this kind of work could still be eligible for funding on a year-to-year basis. However, the evaluation questions mentioned above may help support some longer-term thinking that would help with creating a strategic plan.

The committee looks forward to your community engagement work supporting the needs of LGBT+ communities and how they participate and are represented in the Wikimedia movement.

On behalf of the Regional Committee, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 17:59, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

@I JethroBT (WMF) Pardon our delays. We should be able to get back to you in regards updates as we need to finish consultations with few individuals that were delayed due to winter breaks. --13:16, 11 January 2023 (UTC) Zblace (talk) 13:16, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Unable to accept proposed changes

I want to recap a perspective what has happened with this grant and Wikimedia LGBT+. In summary - Wikimedia LGBT+ is unable to accept the proposed changes to the original proposal. Here are some options going forward:

1. Wikimedia Foundation can mark this proposal as declined rather than approved, because the proposal as made was not accepted
2. Wiki LGBT+ representatives can meet any WMF grant officer for further negotiation or clarification
3. Wiki LGBT+ can accept the sponsorship, but only as written, and not with the additional requirements

Wikimedia LGBT+ is a volunteer community organization with no paid staff and many diverse voices in its governance. As such, big complicated decisions do not happen quickly. What happened was that the community was able to review the original published grant proposal, but not able to come to agreement on how it could meet the additional requirements requested in the case of the group receiving the award.

Although I sometimes speak for the group in some ways, I am not the group's empowered representative on all decisions, and I cannot speak for the group as a whole. However, I have an idea of where this situation became confusing and difficult, and a possible simple answer.

Here is the problem - the Wikimedia Foundation offer requests qualitative analysis, and offers to help with this. Speaking to my view: neither does anyone on our team wish to do such analysis, nor have we been able to identify someone in our network who seems ready to do such work. Here are some options we discussed:

1. Pay someone outside our group to do the analysis
   1. Ask for more money to do the analysis
   2. Cut other goals to free up money to do the analysis
2. Ask for WMF to identify another Wikimedia affiliate who is good at such analysis, and ask WMF to sponsor them to do the analysis for this project
3. Ask the WMF to sponsor a third-party research team to do the analysis. This might be the best option because universities have institutional review boards, and the kind of questions to be answered carry significant ethical concerns. We are unclear on WMF relationships with IRBs.
4. Agree to do the analysis in our own community, but ask WMF for more multiyear stability to make the endeavor more attractive to project workers.

If I had to identify one main problem with the ask, it is the lack of clarity around qualitative reporting. Here are some issues which arose in conversation:

1. We do not have training to do this kind of reporting
2. We are aware of no methodology for such reporting in use among other Wikimedia community organizations, and while we like the idea of designing such a methodology, research design of this sort could double the labor hours required for this project
3. As this group is "crossing the chasm" from being an all-volunteer organization to an organization with some staff administration, this kind of work is a significant labor and administrative commitment but has never been requested among the top strategic priorities.
4. This kind of research seems expensive and would require reconsideration of the entire budget. It is not just about hiring a researcher, but also about administrative support to implement this and ethical review because collecting this information seems like the kind of thing a typical university would require institutional review to do.

Here is the most direct question I have which I think would advance the conversation: When the WMF is requesting qualitative analysis, how many labor hours did you have in mind that this would take? More like 10, 40, 100, 300, or more? Wikimedia LGBT+ programs are ripe for designing research processes which could be reused throughout the Wikimedia Movement. Sometimes in the Wikimedia Movement random volunteers with no training make up single-use evaluation processes, and those have their place as useful pilots for small-budget processes. Such simple evaluations may be the norm in the movement. If instead we are to do evaluations which are supposed to be foundations for significant decision making, then we need some conversation about the broader Wikimedia Movement plans are for ensuring trust in such reporting.

I regret that in the above, I am speaking for myself. I have not been able to clear all of this with everyone who ought to have a say here. Time is passing though and I felt the need to say something to advance the conversation. Thanks.

Thanks so much for the offer, your patience, your availability for conversation, and the opportunity for a volunteer group like Wikimedia LGBT+ to do such projects. Much appreciated - wish for good conversation on this and other steps toward more robust program capacity. Bluerasberry (talk) 03:24, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

@Bluerasberry, OwenBlacker, and Zblace: As you know, we have been in e-mail correspondence regarding some of the follow-up after the Regional Committee arrived at a funding decision. In a communication in mid-February, I had requested that we meet to discuss next steps and how to resolve these concerns. It's been about a month since that last message, and I haven't received a response to this invitation for us to discuss further about how best to proceed. Unfortunately, due to the amount of time that has passed, we are no longer able to hold and honor this funding decision further for your proposal. This means you will need to reapply for funding in a future round for the General Support Fund. The next round is not yet scheduled, but will likely have applications due in early September 2023 for the US/Canada region.

More broadly, I have a few comments I want to convey regarding my assessment of our communications around this proposal:

• As a matter of practice, we are typically executing grant agreements in the same month as the funding decision or in the subsequent month if needed. For a number of reasons, we will generally be unable to hold a decision for multiple months after a funding decision is made in the future. While we are open to receiving feedback on decisions from the Regional Committee -- and have been able to revise them to support applicant needs -- it will be important to respond to decisions much more quickly than was done for this proposal.
• In some communications from your team, there were statements expressing a need to not speak on behalf of anybody else leading this proposal. While I respect this need, that this was expressed across multiple important communications around funding your proposal suggests to me that you were not adequately coordinating with one another around some important needs. This is a concern more broadly because the proposal requires complex community engagement work requiring careful attention and communication with each other to implement. In a future proposal from your group, it will be very important to make space to communicate with one another to coordinate a response that represents the view of your collective group. It is confusing for me and the Regional Committee to receive and meaningfully respond to messaging that suggests that there may not be in alignment among your team in important areas of decisionmaking.
• However, I appreciated your responses to committee feedback and questions. Furthermore, the idea to produce a video to respond to committee questions and more generally provide an overview of the project was thoughtful, and was well received by the Regional Committee.

If you are needing support around tools or practices that can help facilitate general coordination and communications needs for your team, let me know, and I'm happy to discuss what I've observed working well (and not) in other affiliates and also within the Wikimedia Foundation more broadly. Please feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss more. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 20:02, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

For clarity, I also want to acknowledge that for technical reasons, the status on the proposal of "withdrawn" is inaccurate and is due to limitations in Fluxx platforms we use to process proposals after acceptance. It is rare for proposals to be not funded after committee approval, so this was not an available option in these circumstances. A better framing for the status would be "not selected" due to the circumstances described above. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 20:07, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

👍 Thanks. I agree with your assessment. Wikimedia LGBT+ does not have administrative capacity at this time to do what you request. Perhaps someday! If anyone at the Wikimedia Foundation can approach Wikimedia LGBT+ with resources then I expect that the group can develop more administrative ability to negotiate proposals, but right now, there are no organizational staff and the volunteers have no capacity to give.

Thanks for the offer. It does not seem like a match with what the group can give right now, but we will discuss the experience with others until the next time. 🌈🌈 Bluerasberry (talk) 20:09, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T333003

I created a phabricator report about Fluxx being unable to change the status of grants. This grant was "not selected" but is marked as "withdrawn". I made the bug report to reduce the confusion. Bluerasberry (talk) 22:08, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

List of topics

This proposal never posted a list of proposed topics. Wikimedia LGBT+ is considering organizing a conversation in the future. Here are some of the topics which have been under consideration -

1. Queer biographies and use of pronouns in Wikipedias and elsewhere
2. Sourcing for marginalised subjects and countering misinformation and anti-Queer bias
3. Documenting LGBTIQ+ events (Pride season? Wikipedia & Commons + Wikidata!)
4. Trans visibility
5. Contributing from hostile jurisdictions
6. Intersectionality: being queer and BIPOC / disabled / migrants / experiencing poverty and/or houselessness / Roma / sex workers
7. Queer feminism (all-female / NB panel)
8. Harassment of Queer contributors
9. Internationalisation of quality content

The group has particular speakers in mind for each of these.

I know I am posting this a year after the proposal was declined, but I thought this info needed to be here if and when this proposal gets re-developed elsewhere. No such plans exist right now, but organizing a talk is one in a list of options the group is discussing. Bluerasberry (talk) 21:20, 29 January 2024 (UTC)