Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/AvoinGLAM 2025

Feedback and questions from the Global Advocacy Team on the Public Policy Advocacy Part of your application

Dear Susanna, dear AvoinGLam team,

The Global Advocacy team has reviewed your plans in the field of public policy advocacy. The team fundamentally supports AvoinGLAM’s plans to form your version of the F5 coalition and specifically, to have funding to work on the TAROCH campaign. They encourage the AvoinGLAM team to reach out to Patricia from WM Chile and Eric from WM Sweden as they are coordinating closely to help Wikimedians get involved in this campaign - it will be essential to work together as a united front.

Some other aspects of the plans remained unclear, would you please be explaining the following in more detail:

• What parts of DSM will you work on?
• What existing laws or bills you are planning to influence related to topics of AI and data sovereignty?
• Can you please specify the issues under exploration with your partner OKFI?
• Will your lobbying plans involve monthly meetings with government officials as the F5 coalition takes off?
• Are there specific proposed laws that would be the focus of your public policy advocacy? That could mean supporting or opposing those laws, or trying to affect what they say while they are being drafted.
• Do you plan to speak with legislators (or their staff) as part of your public policy advocacy work?

Thank you for providing answers for these questions here. Kind regards, Agnes, on behalf of the GA team ABruszik-WMF (talk) 17:25, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Dear Global Advocacy Team and the committee,

AvoinGLAM and Open Knowledge are crafting their partly joint agenda for advocacy for the upcoming year, and the creation of the advocacy network. The aim is to invite up to a dozen Finnish NGOs related to open knowledge to the network. As the scope of each organizations varies to some extent, we will find over the course of the gathering process which topics and methods are best suited for joint advocacy. We will arrange a Winter Festival on 2 December, which will convene much of the network and kick off the activities.

What parts of DSM will you work on?

AvoinGLAM and the GLAM community in Finland are concerned about the way in which out-of-commerce works were handled in the Finnish transposition. The governance of OOC works was given to collecting societies instead of making exceptions & limitations in the copyright law. The sentiment is that the collecting societies have been given a right to charge for works for which they have no obligation to further account for. As exceptions and limitations are not making a difference from the point of view of sharing on Wikimedia platforms, our main focus here is to support and amplify the efforts of the GLAM sector.

What existing laws or bills you are planning to influence related to topics of AI and data sovereignty?

So far, AvoinGLAM has not followed the development of the EU AI Act closely, but together with the advocacy network, legislation in the intersection of AI and the civil society will be in our focus as well as subsequent legislative initiatives and revisions regarding AI and data mining.

Regarding data sovereignty, AvoinGLAM's focus is likely going to be more on the practical advocacy side, advocating for CARE principles in the management of indigenous data or the use of Traditional Knowledge labels. Together with DAK, the National Committee of CODATA in Finland, we launch activities to understand, advocate for and deploy FAIR & CARE principles. However, in the (unlikely) event of legislative actions in this regard, we wish to advocate for a healthy balance between sharing and protecting.

We will learn and get involved in the Data Spaces in Europe, especially regarding cultural heritage to understand how they can be used to complement open platforms.

Can you please specify the issues under exploration with your partner OKFI?

Together with OKFI we will coordinate the advocacy network. As I outlined above, we must find the common ground among the participating associations and networks, or find a way in which we can work as a network despite differences of opinion across the range of issues. The most important topic will be the implications of the AI but the whole palette needs to be negotiated.

The broader ex-OKFI network is well-versed in personal data issues (MyData) and European Data Spaces (Data Spaces Support Centre)

Will your lobbying plans involve monthly meetings with government officials as the F5 coalition takes off? Do you plan to speak with legislators (or their staff) as part of your public policy advocacy work?

Meeting regularly seems like a useful methodology and we should explore it among local and EU-level politicians. We are (OKFI and AvoinGLAM together) well-represented in governmental working groups across the ministries and we are starting to coordinate and learn from that better. We can better address the EU high-level politicians on issues regarding the digital when we work together.

Are there specific proposed laws that would be the focus of your public policy advocacy? That could mean supporting or opposing those laws, or trying to affect what they say while they are being drafted.

At the moment, there are broader aims rather than specific laws in the focus. However, as our network becomes stronger, we will have more targeted plans.

Best regards, Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) 🦜 09:32, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

I would like to complement this as we progress.

The first measure to be taken takes place this year already. The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment has issued a Request for comments on the draft Government proposal for legislation implementing the AI Act. We are looking into opportunities to coordinate a joint response between members of the coalition that we are preparing, a joint discussion before the comment, and/or a panel discussion at the Winter festival 2 December, two days prior to the deadline of 4 December.

BR, Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) 🦜 09:24, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

We are following the development of the Sustainable Data Commons project coordinated by Centre for Internet and Society at CNRS and Open Knowledge Foundation and finding ways to contribute to it. – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) 🦜 09:45, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

Decision of the Global Advocacy Team

The team recommendation is that this work should be funded. Thank you for the team for preparing thoughtful answers and taking the time to share progress updates as they came. The GA team is particularly excited about the plans to engage with the request for comments related to the implementation of the AI Act. These updates demonstrate that the AvoinGLAM team is doing a good job of monitoring important developments from regional government ministries, and planning to engage in formal processes that we know are essential for Wikimedians to have a voice and be seen as a legitimate policy influencing actor. ABruszik-WMF (talk) 11:16, 30 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for the consideration! Best regards, Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) 🦜 12:05, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

Feedback from the NWE Regional Funds Committee

Dear AvoinGLAM team,

Thank you very much for your proposal, describing your activities and projects in support of the Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia movement. The Northern and Western European Regional Committee has initially reviewed the proposal, and wishes to offer some initial feedback and questions for your review.

The Committee, as in previous years, appreciated the innovativeness of the projects proposed by the team for the GLAM sphere. AvoinGLAM's strength of building impressive cohorts of external partnerships and collaborators (e.g. AI Sauna) and inspiring actions resulting in movement-wide engagement with the Living Heritage initiative were apparent in the recent past.

Furthermore, we identified several strong values in the current proposal, such as your advocacy efforts for GLAM, your crossover ideas in open cultures, pushing boundaries between databases (i.e., between Wikidata and other GLAM databases), fostering innovative initiatives like WikiDocumentaries, the organisation of GLAM resources on Metawiki, and coordinating the global GLAM-Wiki calls, since there has been a missing global layer of coordination in the GLAM networks that these initiatives will address. These are exciting ideas on the one hand that respond well to challenges in the GLAM area in the movement.

At the same time, the Committee is torn, as it detected returning and unresolved issues such as organisational and financial sustainability, the lack of prioritisation to ensure effective use of resources to avoid overextension, lack of measurable outcomes (especially in community engagement, in advocacy), which makes it harder to evaluate the overall impact of this work.

It was found particularly concerning the lack of consistent volunteer engagement to ensure the long-term viability of the proposed initiatives, not only in terms of current delivery of them (while engaging interns and students seems like a good option to fill current gaps), but also their long term maintenance and future improvements, e.g. Wikidocumentaries. Given the small size of the group, the Committee has given the feedback before to reduce the number of aims and projects in the annual plans and deepen a few initiatives for impact. This would be a strong direction especially coupled with a dedicated, consistent and larger volunteer team behind each such focused program.

In former years, it was communicated by the Committee that AvoinGLAM’s approach is not the best fit for the General Support Fund stream, where the project competes with established and impactful affiliates with clear planning and execution with less than 20% deviation from submitted plans. While embracing diversity is important in the movement, and therefore the Committee has been supportive of AvoinGLAM for three years, the Committee also feels that it is hard to evaluate AvoinGLAM’s plan and impact if it does not comply with expectations of programmatic stability and delivery according to plans.

It would be supportive of the Committee’s understanding of your plans if you’d be so kind as to elaborate on our following specific few questions:

• In case the General Support Fund would cease funding for AvoinGLAM, what other sources of revenues would the team be able to mobilise to support this work?
• What other framework / structure in the movement could enable AvoinGLAM to thrive and continue the explorative and innovative GLAM work?
• How do you intend to document and measure the impact of your advocacy work?
• What are the plans of the AvoinGLAM team for fiscal and organisational sustainability (building a larger team of volunteers around these projects, governance, fundraising)?

In terms of the schedule for our review process, please complete your responses to committee feedback by November 20th, 2024. The Committee agreed that it would be beneficial for us to meet with you to discuss the topics above. Agnes will be reaching out after receiving your responses via e-mail to schedule a meeting between your team and some members of the Regional Committee.

Thank you again for the team's responses.

On behalf of the Regional Funds Committee, ABruszik-WMF (talk) 21:02, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for sharing the concerns of the committee.

AvoinGLAM hosts a monthly meeting on November 18 and we will respond after that.

Best regards, Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) 🦜 18:49, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

Esteemed Regional Funds Committee. I am forwarding you the responses AvoinGLAM's monthly meeting has approved.

In case the General Support Fund would cease funding for AvoinGLAM, what other sources of revenues would the team be able to mobilise to support this work?

Governmental support for culture and civil society is melting in Finland. There are no sources of funding to support AvoinGLAM’s basic activities to our knowledge. The kind of support Wikimedia can offer comes as a lifesaver. R&D intensive scientific research is the only area where governmental funding is increasing. A certain part of our program is an overlap with open science to enable collaboration with OKFI activities focusing on open science.

We will in any case seek project funding for Wikidocumentaries in the European context, but this takes time and effort to set up in terms of gathering the partners and working on the applications.

Given transition time, we could organize our activities into R&D for Wikidocumentaries and public policy with specific allocated budgets. However, if we dissolve all administration, we will not be able to govern the projects we run. We doubt that this would be ideal to keep up the positive impact of our work we are able to provide with the current moderate funding. Instead, this can effectively kill it.

We would have to end support for the GLAM-Wiki community as that would not be in the interest of any other funder. The initiative to gather resources and make GLAM Meta pages appealing to both partners and volunteers is at risk.

What other framework / structure in the movement could enable AvoinGLAM to thrive and continue the explorative and innovative GLAM work?

I think this question requires a response, but we are not in a position to answer. However, given the opportunity, we would like to be proponents of voicing this need of those groups that the funding committee deems incompatible for community funding. We wish that the Wikimedia movement recognizes the importance of GLAM as a strategy for the future of Wikimedia. We must team up with the research and cultural institutions to safeguard and make available verified information in a way that is beneficial for the public interest.

How do you intend to document and measure the impact of your advocacy work?

We will look into how other affiliates and groups with advocacy work have outlined this and choose similar measurements for the committee to be able to assess the impact in comparison with the other entities.

What are the plans of the AvoinGLAM team for fiscal and organisational sustainability (building a larger team of volunteers around these projects, governance, fundraising)?

We find this question controversial, as AvoinGLAM will never have a community working on a wiki similarly to Wikimedia affiliates. Our approach is rooted in advocacy and diverse, proactive efforts to strengthen the cultural commons. This involves a wide range of interventions, including active participation in working groups, organizing impactful events, and driving innovative technology initiatives. Our activities would require long-term planning to be more predictable. With the short-term planning that we must work with, our initiatives may fail or differ from planned. This kind of resilience should be supported by community funds, it is not project funding. We are very focused on our vision and mission.

We consider our work takes place in the global GLAM community as much as it takes place in the local Finnish community. We have actively worked to strengthen the global GLAM community through the development of joint activities and shared resources. Members of our local community engage with various parts of the cultural commons, different networks and domains, some in Finland, some internationally. Our community has a rich and multifaceted representation of culture from researchers and GLAM professionals to language advocates and art production, and we are proud of our team! It helps us focus on meaningful activities.

The way GLAM activities create impact differs from that of volunteer content production. It requires longstanding, consistent work with the partners. We feel that there is a lack of understanding for this work in the Wikimedia movement despite its huge impact and the massive amount of activities in GLAM across the movement and affiliates. There are many people and groups working with GLAM in the Wikimedia movement outside affiliates around the world. It is not only us whose work is jeopardized by this limited point of view.

To address the diminishing volunteer efforts in open knowledge in Finland in general, we are working on clustering organizations through joint events and by helping initiate the Finnish advocacy network. We can gain traction by bringing together people across open government data, open science and open culture. The Winter Festival created by AvoinGLAM in collaboration with Open Knowledge Finland is already a significant effort in this direction.

The fiscal sponsorship relation to Open Knowledge Finland allows us to pool resources for funding the local ecosystem. When we pool resources, the failure of one part affects the whole system. Wikimedia becomes a risk to us and our network. We are very interested in diversifying our funding sources to minimize this risk, but cannot do this overnight. This is a fight for survival for the Finnish open knowledge ecosystem.

Best regards, Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) 🦜 18:27, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

Round 1 2025 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 60,000.00 EUR for the period of 1st January 2025 - 31st December 2025.

Comments regarding this decision:
The Committee found that the value of the proposal was high for the GLAM sector and for advocacy in Finland, and hopes that AvoinGLAM will be able to reflect and clarify the sustainability aspects identified in this evaluation round as needing attention.

We wish the group the best of luck in 2025 and fruitful collaborations in Finland and beyond!

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, ABruszik-WMF (talk) 01:29, 4 December 2024 (UTC)