Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/WikiPortraits:2025 Activities

Initial Feedback from Regional Fund Committee

@SuperHamster and Jenny8lee: Thanks for your General Support Fund proposal this round supporting the WikiPortraits initiative. The Regional Committee has completed an initial review of the proposal, and has the following feedback, questions, and comments to help support their review:

• What factors do you use to determine the staffing you need for an event? Roughly how many photographers / administrators do you generally need for the events that WikiPortraits wants to attend?
• WikiPortraits programmatic plan has partially depended on members travelling internationally to attend some key events. The Regional Committee notes that this approach may both resource-intensive and has a high climate-related impact. When considering who to choose to attend certain events, does the location of those members factor into your decisions? If you do not have members available in certain regions to send to an event, how are you planning to build this capacity during this annual plan?
• Is WikiPortraits using queries or other data collection methods to identify what people are a priority to document at major events? Can you describe how you are using these tools to inform your decisions on what people or communities to attend to?
• One stated purpose of WikiPortrait's programming is to capture and improve biographies of underrepresented communities and notable individuals. WikiPortraits has predominantly focused on film- and entertainment-related events in its programmatic plan, with a relatively smaller focus on events related to journalism, politics, the sciences, and African-American communities. Why has WikiPortraits prioritized film and entertainment-related events as a means to address the critical gaps motivating this project? If it’s the case that viewership of these biographies is one factor, how is WikiPortraits addressing specific aspects of notability for biographical content (based on local project policy) to prioritize what events to attend and what people to cover?
• WikiPortraits is not an officially recognized organization in the Wikimedia movement, though its activities appear to be fully aligned with the Wikimedia communities and its projects. Is there any plan for your team to apply to become a User Group in the future?

Please let us know if you have any questions or needs for clarity around the committee's feedback. To support the Regional Committee's review, please respond to committee feedback by Tuesday, November 19th. On behalf of the Regional Committee, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 17:53, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

@I JethroBT (WMF): Thank you for providing the feedback and questions from the Committee! Jenny, Andrew, and myself have written the following responses. They're a bit lengthy, but we hope they answer the Committee's questions and provide some more details on our plans and goals.

Question: "What factors do you use to determine the staffing you need for an event? Roughly how many photographers / administrators do you generally need for the events that WikiPortraits wants to attend?"

The number of photographers and administrators we need will vary by event. Some events can be sufficiently covered by 1 or 2 photographers, such as the New York Film Festival, which has just one red carpet per day and is easily accessible by our New York photographers, or the International Journalism Festival where there are many concurrent panels, but they are near each other and photographers can move between them.

Other events require as many hands as we can get. The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), for example, has numerous concurrent red carpets per day across multiple theaters where we are committing more than 2 hours per shoot – at TIFF 2024, we started with 4 photographers and ended up having to recruit our two administrators and bring in one more for a total of 7 photographers (and we were still exhausted)! Edinburgh Festival Fringe was the largest event we have covered, lasting nearly a month with over 3,500 different shows from around the world. This was a challenge in both prioritizing and staffing, as photographers had to stay for the duration of the show and often the publicists were slow to get back to us in coordinating when we could attend. To solve this, we recruited other attending performers and creatives to shoot for events they wanted to go to anyway and gave them discounts on housing. They luckily had their own DSLR cameras or we were able to loan them ours.

The number of photographers and administrators we need can also vary through the duration of the event (e.g. if we are running a portrait studio on a particular day during a week-long event, we'll naturally need more staffing on that particular studio day). We also try to spend some administrator time before events to organize ourselves, including figuring out who is coming to the event, what we currently have on Wikidata/Commons/Wikipedia, and what to prioritize in photographing.

Other factors on staffing include cost, lodging, and other logistics:

• Depending on the event, we need photographers who can commit far enough out to be able to go through the credentialing process (often months in advance).
• The number of people we are able to send can sometimes be limited by the number of credentials we are able to get from each event. We have been flexible and creative in covering events when they either limit or deny us credentials – such as photographing public panels, or credentialing with other sections within the event. For example, SXSW's film track that we were originally planning to photograph did not issue us credentials, but we were able to get credentials for the SXSW Interactive track, which ended up being a good success for us. And while we didn't get credentialed for Cannes, we were able to cover Q&As and interviews after films, and schedule one-off photo shoots with film crews.
• We typically expect photographers to pay for their own travel to events, and depending on the number of staff and budget, the lodging situations can vary (e.g. shared vs. private rooms, beds vs. pull-out couches, etc.). We want to avoid cost being a limiting factor for dedicated WikiPortraits volunteers, so we do what we can to assist in travel when needed (e.g. using airline miles to book flights, finding alternative events to attend that include minimal travel, etc.).
• We try to prioritize and recruit photographers who are close to events, minimizing travel costs and climate impact (but per above, are also happy to include photographers who are willing to cover their own travel to get to an event).

For context, our WikiPortraits Rapid Grants have been critical for WikiPortraits's success, but for larger events, they do not cover the "true" out-of-pocket costs of photographing the event, which are partially subsidized by the photographers themselves and also private donations at times. For the larger events where we need to do intense work for 10-12 days—SXSW, Cannes, and TIFF—the cost of the coverage fully priced in is often $10,000 or more (not including the volunteer time!). You will need 4-6 photographers to get good coverage of the event without pushing everyone to the state of exhaustion.

Question: "WikiPortraits programmatic plan has partially depended on members travelling internationally to attend some key events. The Regional Committee notes that this approach may both resource-intensive and has a high climate-related impact. When considering who to choose to attend certain events, does the location of those members factor into your decisions? If you do not have members available in certain regions to send to an event, how are you planning to build this capacity during this annual plan?"

Regarding travel:

We do recognize the resource-intensivity and climate impact of travel, and we do factor in and prioritize the amount of travel needed when determining volunteers for an event. We touched on this in the previous answer, but in general, we try to both recruit volunteer photographers that are close to an event, as well as recruit individuals who are already planning to attend the event regardless (or even recruiting other photographers we meet at the event, as we did with performers at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe). We do also welcome volunteers traveling to cover events, as long as they are willing to cover their own travel (and sometimes these volunteers were planning to attend the event anyway).

It's not necessarily difficult to find Wikimedia photographers across the world, but it can be a challenge to find photographers who are able to carve out a particular and significant chunk of time (sometimes over a week) to attend an event and photograph on a volunteer basis.

In general through 2024, we have not used WikiPortraits funding for travel or transportation (with one exception), and would generally veer away from it with Wikimedia-related grant funding (with some limited exception for equity reasons explained below). As of now, photographers are expected to get themselves to events (which attracts photographers who are organically interested in attending, or have already been planning to attend the event in the first place), but we subsidize their housing once they are there in exchange for their time, which has a level playing field effect. The one exception in 2024 was the Venice Film Festival, where we simply needed enough people to cover this event of global stature with long days of red carpets and we didn't have anyone in our network who was already planning to attend. We reached out to Italian Wikimedians to see if they had anyone in-network who had the time and experience to cover Venice, and that did not end up with any candidates. We were able to recruit an experienced photographer from Germany, who already had a place to lodge, minimizing cost. In the case of Venice, we did recruit a young Latina photographer and pay for her flights. This is the one instance out of a total of the 8 major events we have covered this year. For Sundance (self-funded), SXSW, International Journalism Festival, Cannes, Edinburgh, Telluride (self-funded), and TIFF, the transportation costs were covered by the photographers themselves, and were in almost all cases events they would have attended in another personal capacity. Thinking long term, we do recognize that if our goal is to expand our network of photographers beyond largely upper middle class professionals who have the leisure time to take photographs for Wikimedia Commons as volunteers, we may need to reconsider the financial model to subsidize travel and other costs. For our "full" 2025 budget, we have included a $4,500 line item for travel subsidies for underrepresented and new photographers as part of our effort in inclusivity and bringing on new photographers globally.

Overall, we are conscious of the resource-intensivity and climate-cost of travel, and have been working on expanding our network globally to minimize the travel that is needed for WikiPortraits to cover events while maintaining quality – while also welcoming efforts from photographers who are motivated and potentially already traveling to attend certain events want to take photographs for WikiPortraits. For the Nobel Prizes, we scoured Wikimedia Commons to find Stockholm-based photographers whose quality and quantity was strong enough to be a fit for WikiPortraits. We are also trying to find photographers in India for the Jaipur Literature Festival.

Regarding capacity:

The events we have chosen this year generally are 1) global in stature and 2) draw many subjects from the Global South. These events, while sometimes more resource-intensive to attend, are more efficient because of the sheer number of subjects around the world you can photograph in a tight burst. While there are many film festivals around the world, most draw, at best, a limited number of the film makers themselves. Ultimately, it is less about our choosing the locations, and more that those locations are set because of the events and then we figure out how to obtain credentials for our photographers.

In terms of global capacity building, we have explored this in many ways, with an eye towards geographic and representative diversity.

• Building relationships with existing Wikimedia photographers, either personally or through reachinging out through affiliates. So far, we have built a network that includes photographers from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain. If desired, we offer the WikiPortraits brand (and a translated wordmark), our community, and credentialing help. Many existing Wikimedian photographers in the field are doing fine, with their own credentialing relationships built up over time, and don't need WikiPortraits credentialing help, which is great. We have also reached out to the Wikimedia affiliates in Canada, Italy and Sweden to see if they already had photographers who would want and be able to shoot, but didn't result in any volunteers. We have found that hunting through Wikimedia Commons is often most productive way of finding contributors. With more funding and capacity in 2025, we hope to have the time to build out our network and continue working with more affiliates and photographers around the world.
• Presenting our efforts and recruiting new photographers at conferences. In 2024, we presented a WikiPortraits panel at both Wikimania and WikiConference North America. Both sessions were well-attended, and Wikimania naturally drew a crowd from all around the world. Wikimania in particular connected us with individuals from Europe and Asia who are now a part of our network to work with moving forward. We also share our best practices and tools at conferences, so others can replicate our efforts locally.
• Another capacity-building effort is to recruit experienced photographers who are new to the Wikimedia movement (for example, meeting credentialed photographers at events who would be interested in volunteering with us). We have an eye towards certain cities, such as Los Angeles, Washington DC, and New York, which are hubs for smaller events filled with notable people and would not require travel for those photographers. We would also love to find people in India and Latin America.

Question: "Is WikiPortraits using queries or other data collection methods to identify what people are a priority to document at major events? Can you describe how you are using these tools to inform your decisions on what people or communities to attend to?"

We have a few methods to figure out where to prioritize our efforts:

• At speaker-heavy conferences, we use scripts that a number of community members have written which match speakers to whether or not they have Wikipedia pages or Wikidata items, and whether those articles have photos, and sometimes, an assessment of the quality of photos.
  • One example is the Wiki List Tool which uses Google Sheets and Wikimedia API calls to do quick reconciliation against Wikipedia articles and Wikidata, and returning basic info such as existing portraits and pageviews. This allows for us to quickly determine which images are missing, or in high demand. The meta page explains how it works, with examples of events where it has been used. The tool is also used by a number of GLAM institutions for planning edit-a-thons or crafting editing task lists.
  • Even with these tools, our bulk uploads from events have to be hand-checked for false positives, which is still labor intensive. Jin Wu formerly of the New York Times, for example, turns up the page for en:Duke Wu of Jin. We had to double check that Finlay Christie, a British comedian, is not the Finlay Christie, rugby player who already has a page. When looking at the list, we take into consideration whether the person has an article but no photo; deserves an article, even if no article, and who comes from underrepresented groups on Wikipedia.
• Film festivals distribute gigantic lists of films, their country of origin, and press contacts to all press. In addition to the showcase celebrity-heavy films, WikiPortraits has a strong preference for long-tail events from various regions of the world that are under-covered on Commons and Wikipedia, and so go through the lists highlighting and prioritizing those events. For example, we absolutely made it a priority to cover the commercial film from Indonesia on closing night of the Toronto International Film Festival (when most press are gone) or the 8:30 am Q&A screening for the Saudi Arabian female director with her first film at Cannes, even if it means pushing our photographers a bit and being one of the few photographers in existence. So we sit with the spreadsheet and schedule the films from undercovered regions. This is labor intensive, and usually the responsibility of the administrator.
• If we find partners (such as particular event organizers or certain film publicists) who admire our work and want to collaborate with us, we also prioritize working with them. If working with a publicist gets us excellent, free, front-row access to photograph many people in a day, we will naturally prioritize that. These relationships we build can foster new connections and be helpful in future years.

Question: "One stated purpose of WikiPortrait's programming is to capture and improve biographies of underrepresented communities and notable individuals. WikiPortraits has predominantly focused on film- and entertainment-related events in its programmatic plan, with a relatively smaller focus on events related to journalism, politics, the sciences, and African-American communities. Why has WikiPortraits prioritized film and entertainment-related events as a means to address the critical gaps motivating this project? If it's the case that viewership of these biographies is one factor, how is WikiPortraits addressing specific aspects of notability for biographical content (based on local project policy) to prioritize what events to attend and what people to cover?"

Of WikiPortraits's 3,500 photos with over 1,000 unique subjects, just under half are of women, and about one-third are of people of color. These proportions are roughly consistent across all of our events thus far (our upcoming Nobel Prize week activities may be different, but let us see which ancillary subjects we can take photos of). More funding outside our signature large festivals allows us to be more aggressive in covering specific events we know to have high representation of POC or women, such as the Congressional Black Caucus convenings.

Film festivals have surfaced early on as a primary locale for a few reasons (listed below), but our intent over the next year is to broaden the topic coverage by leveraging our existing track record.

• Film festivals are inclined to credential Wikimedia Commons photographers as "press" and give them access. Festivals are events designed to get publicity for the films that premiere there, so they have a robust infrastructure with photo calls, publicists and face sheets designed to enable photographs at scale. This is both time- and cost-efficient. In contrast, other events sometimes deny or limit the ability for Wikimedians to get credentialed, and even if they are credentialed, the settings are not always conducive to photography (as the primary purpose of credentialing at many events is moreso for journalists writing articles than photographers).
  • For example, we applied to the Grace Hopper Conference, the largest annual gathering for women in computer science (a population underrepresented), and were surprisingly rejected, even after an appeal to the organizers and explaining the benefits of having improved coverage of Grace Hopper presenters on Wikipedia. Instead, we were politely informed that we could pay $1,000 to attend the conference, which did not make economic sense for us at all.
  • We also contacted the World Economic Forum conference at Davos, Switzerland, and found that they have an exclusivity contract with Getty Images inside the conference center. WikiPortraits could send a European photographer to cover events and speakers outside the convention center, but it may not be that efficient from a time- and cost-perspective if we have limited resources to figure out the schedule of external events to cover.
  • Note that the International Journalism Festival (not paid by Wikimedia grants) was a non-film festival we did attend and photograph and it worked out well, because it had open concurrent sessions, no cost for attendance, and many speakers from the Global South. So we knew from past experience there that it would be a good venue for notable photos in the future.
• Film festivals are a very efficient way to take a high number of high-quality photos of notable or near-notable people from around the world, especially the Global South, in rapid succession. Global film festivals also have high language and country diversity, allowing us to cover a wide range of cultures in a single event and to highlight emerging creators from around the world.
  • SXSW and Sundance are examples of film events where emerging creators, POC and women are significantly represented, and our Commons uploads are indicative of that. These are both events where we have and will continue to run our public photo studio (on top of our press coverage).
• Another reason for film festivals is that many of the professional photographers we have recruited are also cinematographers themselves, so they are more naturally willing to give a week out of their year to taking photos as a volunteer activity since they can meet other industry people. Likewise, at Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the photographers we recruited were interested in live performance (and a number were performers at Edinburgh themselves).
• Film festivals have also been a good foundation because a number of our organizers were already regular attendees (originally as press), and know the lay-of-the-land and have connections that make it easier for us to operate and succeed. That being said, we have already been expanding to cover more types of events and plan to continue to do so through 2025 (such as the Jaipur Literature Festival). And this is why we want to expand the WikiPortraits network since more contributors will bring different relationships, geographies and interests with them.
  • For example, WikiPortraits photographers have also covered literary festivals such as the National Book Festival and Gaithersburg Book Festival in the Washington DC area. These also showcase a wide variety of POC, women, and minority authors of works for a wide age range in a short period of time. We would like to cover more of these given the funding. (Example: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:2024_National_Book_Festival)

Film festivals will continue to be a significant focus for us, given our core strengths and their nature of having high-volumes of notable individuals to photograph in ideal portrait settings, but we look to expand the scope of our work as the community grows. We have covered a number of non-film events in 2024 and plan to cover more in 2025 as we discover events that will credential us and provide an environment that enables good-quality photos. More funding from the annual planning grant gives up flexibility to cover smaller events on less lead time, and with photographers outside our core WikiPortraits contributors. Among the events we would like to cover in 2025 are science conferences like, the annual convening of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science; political gatherings, like the Congressional Black Caucus conference; literary events like the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Indonesia; and human rights conferences like the Oslo Freedom Forum. We also welcome working with other Wikimedia Commons photographers who take interest in non-entertainment and entertainment events.

Question: "WikiPortraits is not an officially recognized organization in the Wikimedia movement, though its activities appear to be fully aligned with the Wikimedia communities and its projects. Is there any plan for your team to apply to become a User Group in the future?"

We definitely have thought about applying for being a User Group. There was a recent moratorium for new User Group applications, but we've seen that applications have just opened up again with new critieria for User Groups. It's something we'll likely explore once we've met the criteria and feel the time is right.

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Separate from the questions above, we also want to highlight that after reviewing and revising our proposal, we've increased our ask from our original submission. This increase generally does not lie in our main events coverage and instead our increases are in a few areas:

• Capacity building. We increased more administrative resources for growing our WikiPortraits photographer base, including both quantity and quality. This includes time to find existing Wikimedia Commons photographers in various localities, time to train off-wiki professional photographers, and working with other Wikimedia affiliates and groups to find photographers in their existing networks to take photos of people they care about.
• Budget for public engagement events, such as local editathons. We feel that adding photos is a meaningful and less-likely-to be reverted way for new editors to learn and contribute to Wikimedia projects. WikiPortraits can dole out small amounts ($250) for local organizers, as long as there is some aspect of adding WikiPortraits photos to articles (namely Wikidata or Wikipedia).
• More administrative support for Wikidata item creation, categorization, general cleanup, and editor training. Given that the photography is volunteer, the grittier follow-up stuff gets pushed out, delaying the uploading of photos and creation of Wikidata items.
• More resources for administrative accounting, bookkeeping and preparing a 990. Given the $20,000 grant from Wikimedia Switzerland for WikiPortraits Gallery, our WikiPortraits fiscal sponsor may go over the $200,000 threshold for 990EZ.

As mentioned at the bottom of our grant request, our budget is largely structured project by project, with cross-event overhead costs listed at the bottom, and is designed to be modular. We have both "full" and "less optional" options, and given how our budget is structured, we should be able to work with however much the Committee grants, if the grant is approved.

Please let us know if there are any additional questions for us. Thank you very much! ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 09:07, 20 November 2024 (UTC)