Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Whose Knowledge? 2024-2026

Questions from Regional Committee

@Anasuyas: and @Aadele:, I enjoyed reading your proposal. Can you please address the following questions by November 10? Thank you!

- You mention that a strategic plan is available upon request. Can you please provide this?

- You mention building/rebuilding your internal processes this year. Can you provide a summary of what that work included?

- Do you have any in-progress report available for 2023 related to public outreach and events you have facilitated, or new resources you have made available?

Thank you! Emjackson42 (talk) 21:47, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for the proposal from me as well. In addition to the above, I have a few clarifying questions regarding your proposal after also looking at your most recent annual report. Hopefully this helps us appreciate better the content. Where appropriate, feel free to refer to previously published explanations.

• In your proposal both this cycle and the previous cycle you seem to suggest that you actively support capacity building in the movement. Could you elaborate on that? What kind of capacity building for/with wikimedians/affiliates are you doing? Can you give examples?
• ALT is listed as one of your main strategies. Could you elaborate? What are you doing here? Development? Popularization?
• "Community Designed Tech" is listed as another strategy. Could you expand as to your role?
• I see you have included 'sustainable allyship building' as one of your learning goals. This sounds like a great goal. I would like to clarify who the 'allies' are here. Would that be actors within our movement, or outside of our movement?
• I would like to better understand how you shape your community support and engagement. Could you elaborate how you engage the Wikimedia community in your project design/reflection? Are you collecting feedback in any way from the community about how your work impacts them?
• You list micro grants as one of your ways you support community. Where would this be found in your budget? What does the process look like? (can you point to it on your website?)

In addition to that, I would like to state my appreciation that you have taken some of the feedback from the committee to heart and have more clearly distinguished between the programs that make up your work. I was wondering if you could clarify the other question the committee asked you the previous iteration to "more clearly describe its distribution of spending within the U.S. where it is based, and outside of the U.S. to the communities it supports, especially given that the organzation’s scope of work is heavily invested in supporting communities outside of the region". It might be that I'm simply overlooking this though.

Thanks! Effeietsanders (talk) 01:44, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Adding a @Anasuyas and Aadele: ping to make sure you're aware of the additional questions. Apologies for the tardiness! Effeietsanders (talk) 02:15, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Effeietsanders and Emjackson42:,

Thank you for these thoughtful questions. As we are about to submit the responses to the first round of questions on time (Nov 10), we are wondering what is the deadline for responding to the second round? Please tag me in further messages, I'll be responding on behalf of Whose Knowledge? Thanks!

Mariana Fossatti (WK?) (talk) 16:10, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for checking! Earlier is always better as it allows us to digest optimally - but I understand we're aiming to discuss this application in more detail on Thursday morning Nov 16. Feel free to answer some questions before the others, if convenient! Effeietsanders (talk) 18:18, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Whose Knowledge? answers

Hello @Emjackson42:, Thank you for your feedback. We are glad you enjoyed reading it. Regarding your questions:

- You mention that a strategic plan is available upon request. Can you please provide this?

Here it is our strategic plan for 2024, and some glimpses for 2024-2026: WK_ 2024 Strategic Plan.pdf

Kindly note that 2023 is marked with growth of our internal capacities and we are now in the process of evaluating, assessing and finalizing our 3-year strategic plan. We are working towards finalizing it in the first quarter of 2024.

- You mention building/rebuilding your internal processes this year. Can you provide a summary of what that work included?

In 2023 we have advanced in our organizational strengthening journey. We have seen how this has been taken up and given life and shape by a much broader set of brilliant humans that are committed to growing our work (16 in 2023, compared to 6 at the beginning of 2022). During the year, we have grappled with how to integrate our vision of change and a clearer pathway for our internal journey. The work we have been able to do included setting up various constellations that allowed for greater team efficiency. For example, each of our programs is primarily held by pedagogical pairs, along with the extended support in terms of operations, system design, and strategy. Cross-team collaborations are also facilitated through a number of thematic sessions (strategy, peer learning, wellness, collective design of protocols, etc.). In 2023, we worked on a number of internal processes, including drafting a Practices and Protocols Handbook that serve as the basis for a full update in 2024, as well as streamlining our internal communications. Working remotely with global staff has its challenges, but this year we’ve strengthened our internal communications spaces by landing and designing collective spaces in Mattermost.

We also put in place a model of shared leadership to lay the groundwork for a stronger, more interconnected, vibrant, and agile organizational ecosystem. We are focused on remodeling the foundations, clarifying roles and interconnections, and asking ourselves fundamental questions about who we want to be and how we want to show up as WK? in this next chapter. In this ongoing process, we are reviewing our social contract, and also engaging in strategic and leadership strengthening across the team to consciously cultivate more robust layers of leadership in WK?

- Do you have any in-progress report available for 2023 related to public outreach and events you have facilitated, or new resources you have made available?

Yes, we do. We have our User Group yearly report in progress, that includes our key activities and events, public speaking engagements and new resources created. Please keep in mind that our User group yearly report isn't finalized yet, and that there may be several changes in the coming weeks. We are planning to be done with this work by the end of November, and it will be fully available on Meta and our webpage. For a quick check of our 2023 progress in the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign, you can check this Glamorous query. We also have a report to be published and shared this month (Nov) for our Learning Circle: Deep dive into Decolonizing Structured Data. Mariana Fossatti (WK?) (talk) 13:39, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Answers to the second round of questions

Hi @Effeietsanders and Emjackson42:, thanks for giving us more time for the second round of questions. Here we are with our answers.

1 - In your proposal both this cycle and the previous cycle you seem to suggest that you actively support capacity building in the movement. Could you elaborate on that? What kind of capacity building for/with wikimedians/affiliates are you doing? Can you give examples?

For the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign we are continuously creating online learning resources to support campaigners (see the How To section in our website, and the VisibleWikiWomen resources category on Commons). These resources are being used by other Wikimedia affiliates and initiatives as part of their resources pool (like this Wikimedia Argentina resources page). For example, illustrations campaigns for Wikipedia often link or share our resource How to create drawings for Wikipedia. You can get to know more in our answer above, about the resources we created in 2023. And we are planning more for 2024, to deep dive in consent practices for photography, structured data, and campaign organizing. In addition, activities like photo-thons and photo campaigns are always supported with workshops and learning sessions. Is very usual for us also support other affiliates in their capacity building activities. Just to mention a few, this year we have collaborated with Wiki Editoras Lx, Mais Teoria da História na Wiki, Art+Feminism, Wikiherramientas by Wikimedistas de Uruguay, among others. Informal support and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing is also part of our routine practices.

One of our main strategies in capacity building is convening learning circles. This strategy isn't exclusively oriented to wikimedians, but they are key actors, among other partners like activists, scholars, techies and the GLAM community (and we think that this mix of unusual allies is beneficial for affiliates). Learning circles are inspired in indigenous talking circles, spaces in which all participant's voices have equal weight, and in the feminist pedagogy of bell hooks, centering the agency and the diversity of everyone in the learning space. This methodology has demonstrated to be useful for addressing complex issues, like in our 2023 learning circles on decolonizing structured data (held as a Wikimania pre-event), and plural public domain (reports on both learning circles are in progress).

2 - ALT is listed as one of your main strategies. Could you elaborate? What are you doing here? Development? Popularization?

3 - "Community Designed Tech" is listed as another strategy. Could you expand as to your role?

About question 2&3, there was a formatting issue in the meta page. "ALT" & "Community Designed Tech" are two pieces of research in action, and shouldn’t be listed as a strategy. One of our main strategies for Language Justice is “Deepening the understanding, and influence the design of liberatory and just language digital technologies through two lines of community-led research in action: 1. ALT: Accessibility. Language. Tech for the People: advancing language justice for persons with visual disabilities in South Asia, and 2. Community Designed Language Tech with a focus on East African Languages.

As to our role, since we are a community-facing, movement-oriented organization, our methodologies and protocols differ in some significant ways from mainstream institutions. We do not create rigid frameworks for working and learning well in advance of the execution of our projects, because the very nature of our work is to be in respectful and genuine consultation with the minoritized communities we serve, co-designing processes with them, and being responsive to the many uncertainties and insecurities they face, on an ongoing basis.

4 - I see you have included 'sustainable allyship building' as one of your learning goals. This sounds like a great goal. I would like to clarify who the 'allies' are here. Would that be actors within our movement, or outside of our movement?

For us, the Wikimedia movement is woven with different ways of meaningful participation aligned with the Wikimedia movement principles. It includes users, bridge builders, community organizers, thinkers, artists, academics, etc., with their contributions and critical perspectives on epistemic justice in the Wikimedia ecosystem and beyond. In parallel, we also recognize that our efforts are invested in nurturing a shared sense of belonging to the Wikimedia movement with these communities.

We work closely with chapters, user groups and community organizers, as well as institutions, organizations, and activists from different movements. An important part of our time, efforts and capacity are invested in facilitating collaborations, creating workspaces that are safe and multilingual, and co-holding tasks and leadership. Some examples are the multiple perspectives in the conversation around Decolonizing the Internet's Structured Data, the collective action-research work for making the State of the Internet's Language, the multiple partnerships in #VisibleWikiWomen, and the co-leadership for organizing DTI-EA and FIFAfrica activities with FEMNET.

5 - I would like to better understand how you shape your community support and engagement. Could you elaborate how you engage the Wikimedia community in your project design/reflection? Are you collecting feedback in any way from the community about how your work impacts them?

As our work continues to grow and expand, we continue to center the contributions of our feminist friends, allies, partners, and local organizers, with clear connections with their communities and experience in local convening/activism.

Engagement is shaped through regular communications with our community through different thematic channels (mailing lists, newsletter, social media, etc). Some of the examples include: #VisibleWikiWomen partners mailing list, Archives mailing list, DTI-EA mailing list and STIL mailing list. In terms of program and activities design, we convene with our communities, we assess the gaps and topics of interest and need, and co-design the process & methodology together. For specific events we convene, we are intentional with the invitation process, including communication and registration form design. At the core of this process are our practices of accessibility, multimodality, multilinguality, safety and care.

Throughout implementation of activities, we reflect together and analyze internal feedback in the form of post-activity surveys, and our learnings that inform our next activities and further approach. As part of our accountability to our communities, we further adapt the methodology, and process.

An example of this is the way in which we frame every year our #VisibleWikiWomen campaign in a specific theme, inviting communities to reflect around the theme, and then shape their own activities under the thematic umbrella. Our aim is to create space for our work to reflect the pluralities and intersections of our identities and our communities by exploring the many versions of feminist collaborations and partnerships toward our goal of bringing images of women of colors and non-binary folks from the global majority to  Wikimedia Commons.

For instance, the theme of the year for 2023 is #BodyPlurality #CuerposPlurales #CorposPlurais #Imizimba: Celebrating the uniqueness of our body sizes, shapes, and identities online. In the campaign's launch we invited two speakers from South Africa, Tiffany Mugo and Pontsho Pilane, to offer their reflections around the topic, as a way of collective sense making, to understand why bodies that are not white, not thin, not heterosexual, not cis-gendered, not able-bodied are less visible online. This insight offered by Tiffany and Pontsho was the setting stone for opening up the campaign to the diversity of contributions we wanted to see on Commons.

6 - You list micro grants as one of your ways you support community. Where would this be found in your budget? What does the process look like? (can you point to it on your website?)

In terms of community support and engagement, we understand there are many different and meaningful ways of supporting the local organizers in their events and activities on the ground (like photo booths, photo walks, edit-a-thons, memory-making work, archiving, collaborative coverages, and others). Our support is mostly non-monetary (co-designing activities, capacity and skill building, advising, sharing our best practices, networking, etc.). We also understand the work our communities do is voluntary work that takes time and resources from their ends - and one of the ways to support them in organizing the events is also monetary support. This includes funds to cover internet access, transportation, food and beverage, care and accessibility support, prizes and gifts.

We have a set of internal protocols, and the process design includes the following:

• Establishing communication spaces
• Assessing context and needs of the communities (training, advice, communication, resources), and alignment with our campaign.
• Assessing the type of support needed, internal capacities for supporting, and triangulating with other advisors in the region
• Designing an action plan together with them
• Holding pre and post support meetings, facilitating our learning process, and improvements.
• Sharing learnings internally and externally

In terms of the budget, this is part of our Decolonizing Wikimedia activities listed in both the timeline & budget (Supporting community-led initiatives).

7 - In addition to that, I would like to state my appreciation that you have taken some of the feedback from the committee to heart and have more clearly distinguished between the programs that make up your work. I was wondering if you could clarify the other question the committee asked you the previous iteration to "more clearly describe its distribution of spending within the U.S. where it is based, and outside of the U.S. to the communities it supports, especially given that the organization's scope of work is heavily invested in supporting communities outside of the region". It might be that I'm simply overlooking this though.

Our support to communities in the Rest of the World beyond the US  is obvious, so we won’t belabor that here! However, just as Wikimedia is a cross borders movement, with our work physically located in our bodies and contexts, while traveling virtually across the world, so too is Whose Knowledge’s. On the one hand, we have always worked and continue to work with Wikimedia communities and allies in and from the US; as examples, we are partners with Art+Feminism, support the Wikimedia LGBT+ group, have supported Native American nations in their Wikipedia editing, have worked with institutions like the Smithsonian in our #VisibleWikiWomen campaign, as well as partnered with the Internet Archive. This next year’s work on archives will see us working even more closely with archives based in the US. We also provide different forms of reflection  to the Wikimedia Foundation itself, in both formal and informal ways. On the other hand, the other way we work in the US is equally critical, because we are trying to make some key shifts in how what we call Big Knowledge (academia, proprietary publishing, GLAM and other memory institutions) as well as Big Tech (Silicon Valley and beyond) think about knowledge and tech equity and justice issues. We are also working towards shifting US based philanthropy organizations - especially in social justice - to understand these issues so they can support their grantee partners better. As examples, we have worked with Vanderbilt University and the International Feminist Journal of Politics, keynoted and spoken at MIT, the University of Washington School of Information, the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), and created a feminist tech and knowledge funding strategy for the Global Fund for Women. We also serve on different advisory boards, including those for UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), and MIT’s Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS).

Our publications make clear this translocal flow between contexts, especially critiquing the “global” nature of US institutions that assume a global reach without a truly global understanding (just a couple of examples: this, this, and this). Mariana Fossatti (WK?) (talk) 15:11, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

General Support Fund proposal approved in the amount of 600,000 USD

@Mariana Fossatti (WK?) and Constanza Verón (WK?): Congratulations! Your proposal is approved for partial funding over a period of three years in the amount of 600,000 USD with a grant term starting 1 January 2024 and ending 31 December 2026. This total is distributed over three years in the following manner:

Year 1: 200,000 USD

Year 2: 200,000 USD (minimum)

Year 3: 200,000 USD (minimum)

This multiyear award maintains a flat budget over the three-year funding period, as budget increases of 15% year over year were not possible to support given current budget limitations. However, these amounts for Years 2 and 3 should be treated as minimum amounts. You will be able to submit a different budget for Years 2 and 3 when your annual plan and other changes are submitted. The reason the committee has kept an initial flat budget is because the growth for General Support Funding in the region is expected to be minimal next year, and that beyond next year, the Regional Committee lacks sufficient information at this time to make reasonable projections about what funding growth will be possible. As such, the committee is only willing to generally support multiyear arrangements up to 200,000 USD for Years 2 and 3 at this time.

The committee encourages grantees with multi-year funding to propose reasonable increases which it will consider on a case-by-case basis in context of other applications during that round. These proposals can be initially discussed with your program officer, and then will be later shared with the Regional Committee for review.

In its review, the Regional Committee also had the following feedback on the proposal from Whose Knowledge?:

Strengths:

• The organization has managed to build strong foundations from a diverse set of funding sources.
• The goals of the proposal are very well aligned with the movement strategy.

Concerns/recommendations:

• Given the transformative work that the organization focuses on, the committee believes that the learning goals could use some further deepening. We encourage Whose Knowledge to also try to capture what they would consider to be 'success' and how progress towards this could be captured. Numbers of editors and images are helpful as a starting point, but don't speak very well to these transformative goals. Think about outcomes and impact as well as outputs.
• It would also be helpful to get more insight into the qualitative evaluation of your projects, also for the benefit of the wider movement. How does this inform improvements into your future projects and workflows?

We appreciate your efforts to support participation and opportunities for marginalized communities in the movement for open knowledge, as well as highlighting what more basic aspects of the Wikimedia movement need to change in order to support the needs of these communities to be adequately represented in our movement. We look forward to supporting your work over the next three years!

On behalf of the Regional Committee, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 07:34, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the great news @I JethroBT (WMF):! Please share our deep appreciation with the Regional Committee. The recommendations are well received and are at the core of the transformative work we want do to in the next three years. On behalf of Whose Knowledge?, in gratitude and solidarity, Mariana Fossatti (WK?) (talk) 23:20, 28 November 2023 (UTC)