Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Creating free knowledge in Israel through educational and GLAM projects, and enhancement of gender, age and ability diversity in the Hebrew and Arabic Wikipedias

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

Dear Wikimedia Israel 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 finds the application well-structured and coherent with the past applications, and acknowledges the stability and coherence of the vision of the organization, in accordance to the lines of WM Israel. We appreciated the level of detail, corresponding clear metrics and explanations provided in the application.
• The committee is grateful for the continuation of initiatives that can be replicated by other affiliates as best practices, such as WM Israel’s programs in education, working with senior citizens and extending these programs in Arabic as well next to Hebrew in education and academia;
• The committee is also grateful for the technical maintenance of and the connected services provided for the GLAM-Wiki Dashboard by Wikimedia Israel.

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

• Addressing the complex situation in the area in the planning for 2024, considering the proposal had been defined before the situation precipitated, while the Committee understands that it is difficult for WM Israel to speculate on the outcome of the situation at this point of time.
• In general, the more wide-scale documentation of the best practices, methodologies, strategies and approaches of WM Israel, particularly in education and academia, in order to increase their visibility and transferability for others in the wider Wikimedia movement.

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:

• What minimum measures WM Israel is thinking to introduce to adapt/mitigate the impacts of the current war on the planned activities? Is there a point of time in the coming months when WM Israel plans to re-evaluate the delivery plan, in light of the events unfolding by then?
• How do you plan to address the Arab language coverage issues in this context?
• How do you plan to shortlist the GLAM organizations to take part of the GLAM-Wiki Dashboard (i.e. do you prioritize institutions that cover particular knowledge gaps defined by WM Israel, or e.g. based on the openness/readiness of the GLAM organizations)?

In terms of the schedule for our review process, please complete your review and responses to committee feedback by November 14th, 2023.

On behalf of the Regional Committee, Marco ABruszik-WMF (talk) 10:25, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

First of all, I would like to thank the committee for the touching feedback you provided us with. We, the Wikimedia-Israel team, were very pleased to receive it, especially in these hard times of complicated challenges, with which the Israeli society and the State of Israel have to cope.

Secondly, please see below my answers to every question that has been raised.

With regard to the questions about the war and its possible implications on WM-IL’s activity, I would like to provide a separate answer to each field of activity.

Generally speaking, WM-IL’s team is socially and culturally diverse, which we consider to be one of our strong points. We would like to preserve it as such by conducting personal and team talks, and seeking professional help when necessary.

From the sheer professional standpoint, the war around us has different implications on every field of activity, therefore we are developing flexible adjusted strategies for each and every one of our core fields.

In the Arabic-speaking secondary education system, we have a solid partnership, to which senior office holders are very committed. We therefore presume that the scope of our activity will not decrease significantly compared with previous years. Nevertheless, the circumstances may not allow us to increase our activity as much as we planned.

In the Hebrew-speaking secondary education system, we are preparing for the possibility of a 30-50% drop in the number of participating classes, due to the school year shortening and the transition to distance learning in some of the schools. In response to this decrease in the volume of our activity, we prepare alternative products, relevant to the current situation, that we can distribute widely, e.g. online-learning adjusted lesson plans. We also examine the possibility of creating an educational project, which will be limited in size but prolific in terms of free-content creation, to compensate for the expected decrease in the amount of products resulting from our activity in Hebrew-speaking schools. We examine such directions as creating a follow-up course for gifted students who joined our projects in the past.

In the academic field, we take advantage of the slowdown in activity to develop infrastructures of training and cooperations. In addition, we keep in touch with our partners and try to get a clearer picture of the possibilities we will have during the forthcoming academic year (whose opening is delayed due to the circumstances).

With regard to the courses, these hard times are a constraint but also an opportunity. Many Israelis are interested in Wikipedia editing these days for various reasons (more available time due to business-activity slowdown, seeking distraction through a challenging enjoyable activity, a wish to spread free content related to the war, among others). Accordingly, we enhanced our regular activity and even created and implemented a new format of ‘mini-course’, which exposes various audiences to Wikipedia-editing related subjects in a nutshell. Wikimedia’s volunteers significantly contribute to the editing course now as in the past.

With regard to GLAM, we expect to be able to make progress in the development and implementation of this field, as most of the work is done through Internet platforms. Therefore, even these days, we work to develop training for GLAM institutes, and invite them and others to join Wiki-GLAM Dashboard. Further plans that require face-to-face meetings will be held in the second half of 2024, as planned or online.

With regard to events, we are working these days on the community events planned for the first half of 2024 and hope to hold them, albeit on a smaller scale, despite possible limitations.

Generally speaking, we are prepared to meet the objectives we set, and change the planned strategies for reaching these objectives, namely to adjust them to the current situation, e.g. the solutions mentioned above with regard to the Hebrew-speaking education system. If we see in the course of the year a gap forming between the defined objectives and the actual performance, we will initiate real-time updates and consultations with the Foundation.

With regard to the question about continuing our activity on the Arabic Wikipedia, considering the war, not only will we not halt our Arabic-language activity, but we will strive to expand it, as presented in the work plan. The Arabic-speaking community in Israel makes up 20% of the population, namely one in every five Israelis is a native Arabic speaker. Arabic is an official language in Israel, so naturally, as a local chapter, we see our service to Arabic speakers as part of our mission, in all that concerns access, consumption and creation of free content.

With regard to the criteria for Wiki-GLAM Dashboard, as presented in the 2024 work plan, we are interested in recruiting workers that will become professional in the field of GLAM, develop the sluggish scene in Israel, and be linking pins between the needs arising from the field in Israel and around the world, and the solutions in the context of Wiki-GKAM Dashboard and otherwise. At the moment, the main limitation we have on adding new GLAM institutes is the limited upscaling potential of the system. Therefore, at this stage, any request of an institute with a large volume of content, e.g. Digital Public Library of America, is deferred. The continued existence of the Dashboard as a beneficial solution for the needs on the ground is conditioned on improving its upscaling potential, as presented in the work plan. When we complete the necessary development, GLAM institutes all over the world will be invited to benefit from the service of Wiki-GLAM Dashboard.

Finally, we happily accept your proposal to share more of our educational activities on the various platforms, and we will gladly implement it in the near and far future. Michal-WMIL (talk) 06:48, 13 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 1,358,500.00 ILS for the implementation period of 1st January 2024 - 31st December 2024, taking into account the current NWE regional budget for the year.

Comments regarding this decision:
We thank WM IL for the thorough 2024 program planning, explaining well your work that supports Hebrew and Arabic communities in Israel and advances their Wikipedia. Your long-term stable programs in education and academia are ever evolving, and inspiring new experiential work is added, e.g. with groups of individuals with autism. Your proposal brings many elements of value for the culture and heritage sector as well. We hope that you will have the capacity to document and share some of your results with the wider movement.

We remain understanding of the incredibly challenging times for Israel, and we can only wish you the ability to continue your activities in peace.

Thank you for your contributions, and your willingness to work on innovative approaches!

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) 07:36, 29 November 2023 (UTC)