Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Amical Wikimedia 2025 Grant

Feedback from the NWE Regional Funds Committee

Dear Amical Wikimedians Team,

Thank you for your application to the General Support Fund. The Committee appreciated the effort exerted to be able to fully comply with past reporting obligations and current eligibility requirements in support of this application, given the past years’ governance crisis. We understand that 2025 will be the year of rebuilding.

We were glad to observe that you involved the community in the preparation of this plan, and that you will do the same when developing your new 5-year strategy in 2025. Related to the new strategy, how are you planning to reflect on your very well-defined overall impact indicators of your previous strategy?

[Amical response] We are working to establish some more concrete indicators for the upcoming Strategic Plan 2025-2030. Nonetheless, we do not aim to focus solely on number-based indicators such as the number of editors, new women, and so on. This new approach has grown from our recent experience. We are worried about those targets' feasibility, which is mainly based on the evaluation we are conducting of the last strategic plan. We had so much disruption with the COVID pandemic, internal governance, and harassment issues. Our highlights will be precisely the past weaknesses. We definitely will be focusing on improving our community health and well-being in the near future. As we just had our seventeen Catalan-wiki annual meeting this very last weekend, we received some important feedback, and general indicators will be established for the following Plan.

Programmatically, the committee found it a strong application with colourful, impactful activities in gender equity, GLAM, language advocacy and education. We were also happy to see your planned support for activities focusing on regions and communities outside Spain and outside Western Europe (Viquiprojectes Brazil, Asia, Africa and Oceania).

We would like to receive more information on the following aspects of the application:

• We would like to see a more detailed (monthly) planning of the described activities to understand what activity takes place and when, from January to December.

[Amical response] See the following link with anual and monthly planning.

• We would like to understand better who will coordinate exactly these activities (for each of them, is it volunteer organisers, board members, or current / planned new staff?)

[Amical response] We generally allow and encourage Amical members and non-affiliate Wikimedians to lead projects and activities. An important part of our work efforts is helping and supporting them in creating and implementing their projects. We believe that our staff and board should help the volunteers with all their needs in order to have a successful project and pursue a healthy interactive community. Additionally, when new opportunities arise, and nobody is interested in taking on the work, we rely on our staff to start dealing with everything while being supervised by the board. Other volunteers can later catch on and participate if interest develops at any time during the process.

For next year, we are planning to have two project coordinators. This will help to take on projects that are currently frozen, waiting for volunteers or staff to take on the work, for example, the ones regarding Education both in high schools and universities. We have volunteers ready to help but not in a leading position. The project coordinators will divide their areas of work, but they will also have geographical and inclusion considerations. So GLAM, governments, and other knowledge institutions will be the main fields of one of the positions, and EDU, community, and diversity will be the second position.

To avoid burnout or activities falling off our calendar, we are now relying on several people working on each project. We are also gearing up and preparing projects for the next year, taking into account the possibility of having two staff contractors.

• We would like to understand how the new governance structure is working on community safety, health and inclusion, to avoid a crisis in the future, apart from the conflict resolution training?

[Amical response] We are working on restoring bridges and bringing people back together. There is a growing interest in doing more in-person meetings; our community members value this face-to-face time, and it helps ease tensions. In all on-wiki and off-wiki activities, before starting, we remind everybody of our own Safe Space Policy (in Catalan language, Protocol contra agressions i assetjaments). For the annual meeting (+40pax), we established a well-recognized and competent Wikimedian known to the community to be the person of reference to this domain. He or she is identified with a green lanyard to act as a steward to help deal with and ensure compliance with the Safe Space Policy and the wellbeing of everybody. This is the second year we have been following this procedure, and the community has expressed their gratitude for it so far.

Furthermore, we are also streamlining communication inside our own group and towards our stakeholders and reinforcing the autonomous “work groups” inside Amical. In these groups, everybody works together from the same level of recognition (staff, board members, and regular members). Generally, there is a cheerful ambiance and a will to reconnect and get along. Having staff now (contractor) also helps a lot because it frees time and stress, especially for board members, from administration and day-to-day meetings and operations, to dedicate more time and attention to our community and wiki projects.

• Given a history of underspending, can you please give us an update of your 2024 spending so far? Will you have underspending by the end of your current 18-months grant? The Committee would like the Amical Wikimedians Group to return to annual implementation, budget and reporting cycles, and avoid extensions and underspending in the future.

[Amical response] When we were working on this new grant, we discussed our options with the Lead Program Officer, and we agreed the safest option for us now is to apply for an annual grant and, if everything goes as planned, then apply for an annual but to be renewed.

Regarding this year’s spending, we are on track to use all of the available funds. We have already spent 30.500 EUR until early September (more than half of the amount given). Moreover, this November, we just had our annual community meeting with lots of work hours, food, travel and accommodation for dozens of volunteers, gifts, merch, etc.

Thank you for providing answers to our initial questions.

In terms of the schedule for our review process, please complete your review and responses to committee feedback by November 20th, 2024.

After this time, the Regional Committee will begin a final review of the proposal to make a formal decision. Thanks again for your work on the proposal and supporting our review.

On behalf of the Regional Funds Committee, ABruszik-WMF (talk) 15:51, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you so much for your kind questions. I am answering them on behalf of the whole board. If there is anything at all that remains unclear, please do not hesitate to contact us further.Kowalskyn (talk) 21:09, 20 November 2024 (UTC)