Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Basque Wikimedians User Group - 2024

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

Dear Basque Wikimedians User Group

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 is happy to see that you have been active for several years and have found strong external partners that fund your work.
• We find that you have a sustained, balanced and appropriate project portfolio which is working well with regional and local partners.
• We especially appreciate your educational initiatives and participation in Wikimedia conferences around Education making you a great referent for others
• We admire your commitment to preserve and expand the Basque language's presence on Wikimedia projects, which has resulted in a 12 % increase of its content and an effective community growth and an impressive growth of biographies of women.
• Your strategy for 2024-2027 is strong, outlining a clear vision for future programs, including expanding the education program, recovering the Digital Humanities research grant, and enhancing partnerships. This strategic planning demonstrates forward-thinking and sustainability of your work.

While elaborating on your proposed plans, the committee members proposed/ recommended/ suggested for you to consider:

• Looking into your work to get underrepresented groups more visible, we have noticed your good initiative to include more biographic articles on women and your plan to work with women's health topics, but believe further initiatives in this area would be beneficial for you to be in line with the 2030 movement goals.
• While you have succeeded in finding a good external partner for funding, we believe making more use of these to get prolongations of them and get other external funding would be good for your long term sustainability.
• We encourage you to enhance your proposal by including specific, measurable metrics to demonstrate the impact of your activities.

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

• Can you please give us the numbers of your total external funding for 2022 and 2023 (and budget for 2024) and also reasons for a lower figure for 2024. We would also like to learn more of efforts from you to get more external funding/prolong these).
• Can you please elaborate over the increased personnel cost for appointing Galder as executive director (as he already is salaried project manager) and the need to expand Anabel Arraizas time from 0.75 to 1.0 FTE?

Due to restrictions on our ability to adjust our overall General Support Fund budget for this round, it may not be possible to (fully) fund this proposal. However, we do want to understand what impact a partial funding decision would have on your budget and related activities or operations? What would be lost if you instead of your request on 85 KEUR only get 50K EUR or 25 K EUR?

On behalf of the Regional Committee,Anders Wennersten (talk) 05:50, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

Dear Northern and Western European Regional Committee,

First of all, thank you very much for the time spent on evaluating our proposal and your feedback, we really appreciate it. We would like to elaborate on the points raised at your recommendations.

• You ask us to work more making underrepresented groups visible, and that’s something we are definitely doing. Furthermore, the aim of our User Group is that, as Basques are an underrepresented group with a minorized language. Is to say, everything we make is somehow related to making an underrepresented group more visible. Besides that, we are working on articles on women, supporting our local WikiWomen groups. But we are also working on editing about LGBT+ groups, especially transgender people. As we haven’t yet closed this collaboration, we didn’t want to add it in next year's plan, as it could take a little more. Another underrepresented group we are working with is Basque diaspora, as we pointed out, we are working with Basque diaspora members in Argentina in order to explain more about their emigration history.
• With regard to optimizing our resources and having more external partners, it is precisely the difficulty in doing so that has led us to you. We have been operating for several years with total external funding, making efforts to optimize the aid we receive and trying to increase it every year. However, the economic situation in recent years, with inflation, has made it difficult for both the institutions (increase or make prolongations) and for us (continue to do the same work with fewer and fewer resources).

It should not be forgotten that our administrator is already fully operational with all the work involved in the resources we obtain. Trying to find more grants, the documentation to be submitted before, during and, above all, after, would mean having to increase the team. Thus, the grants to be obtained would be to cover this expense and not to actually do any more projects.

Moreover, external aid is always for short periods of time (normally annual), so the stability of the project is always at the mercy of whether or not there will be such aid next year. Although we have been achieving this for years, it’s getting more difficult every year and we believe that the time has come to guarantee the continuity of our project with the support of the WMF. We are creating a very strong structure and this support would ensure that at least the grassroots could continue to work even if these external partners were to fall.

• About the metrics, we are aware that we didn’t include specific metrics to measure the work, as all the projects we are proposing are already launched, and this grant will help with them. In the last years we have recruited more than 2,500 university and secondary students per year in our programs, added more than 10 million words within our Education Program, or promoted contests to complete the list of 10,000 articles every Wikipedia should have, making Basque one of the three languages to accomplish it. As this grant will help us expand some of the projects, the final metrics will be mixing projects that we have been working on with brand new ideas. We hope to provide metrics at the end of the year that will justify by large the grant received, as they will help us improve the projects we are already making.

We would also like to elaborate on the questions asked.

• The total funding in 2022 was 339.374€/369.096$ and this year 2023 has been 398.748€/343.170$. However, by 2024 we are, for the time being, guaranteed the same amount of 2022. This means having less funding in a more complicated economical situation. Some of the institutions we work with have reduced our aid this year and others still have not even guaranteed that we will get it. For example, we have filled the application for the EIMA fund, for the same amount of money, but we do not have the answer yet.

In recent years we have been trying to get more support from our actual partners but for them the situation is also becoming more complicated, and we have not been able to achieve this. Obtaining new grants has also been a priority and we have obtained new grants in recent years, but this also means resources, and our administrator is already at the top of her job as far as this work is concerned.

• There will be no cost increase for Galder's appointment as executive director. Regarding the need to expand Anabel Arraiza’s time, we have to look at the bases of the aid we get. The external partner in Navarre does not allow us to touch any aspect related to education, a point where we are particularly strong and know how to work. Anabel works with multiple GLAMs and associations, but is not allowed to do any talks or activities with students. We receive requests for this, but we can’t work on them because the aid does not allow us to cover these expenses. By extending her working hours with external help, we will be able to offer these services and work on more educational aspects, which is one of our expertises.
• We fully understand the current situation, which is why this is the first time we have come to you. A partial funding decision would mean having to stop developing some of the projects we have in mind, such as the secondary school pedagogical project (which will be a large project for the future sustainability), not having representation at WMF congresses of our association and projects or nor developing a complete series of videos for Ikusgela. It would all depend on the amount, but obviously some, if not all, of these aspects would be left behind.

We hope these clarifications have answered some of your questions, please do not hesitate to contact us should you require further details.

On behalf of the Basque Wikimedians User Group, Edurne Agirre (talk) 08:18, 7 November 2023 (UTC) and -Theklan (talk) 08:38, 7 November 2023 (UTC) Theklan (talk) 08:38, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Round 1 FY24 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 50,000.00 EUR for the implementation period of 1st January 2024 - 31st December 2024.

Comments regarding this decision:
We appreciated your demonstrated sustainable track record over the last six years, from educational initiatives to effective community growth, and significant contribution to the Basque Wikipedia. Expanding your impact in your education program, recovering the Digital Humanities research grant, and enhancing partnerships showed us your strength in strategic planning and forward-thinking. We look forward to learning about your activities and impact in 2024.

We thank you for your contributions and wish you the best of luck with your implementation in 2024!

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) 07:01, 29 November 2023 (UTC)