Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia User Group of Aotearoa New Zealand’s 2022 General Support

Follow-up questions on grant application

Hello Wikimedia User Group of Aotearoa New Zealand, thank you for putting in a grant application and for providing further clarifications. We are capturing the key questions and your responses here as well for learning and sharing with the wider community.

Note: The questions were posed by ESEAP Funds Committee and the Programme Officer and responses were provided by the User group.

General

1) Strategic Planning: Could you share more about your strategic planning workshop that you will be holding in May and how do you plan to approach this planning process? How do you plan to better connect the vision to the strategies and activities? And how will it impact, influence and feed into the current grant application?

WUGANZ:

• The initial part of the workshop is to get the committee to know each other better, build a trusting and safe environment where everyone feels confident to put forward their views and opinions, tease out our assumptions and agree a way of working that will work for us all and enable us to have consistent expectations of each other. All of this is intended to build and develop us into a happy and invested high performing team that knows each other well and can communicate effectively without talking “past” one another or inhibiting anyone putting forward their views.

• The next part of the workshop is to lay on the table all of our desires for the Wikimedia User Group of Aotearoa New Zealand (WUGANZ) and the Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand incorporated society (WANZ). Not from a content perspective but as a community of contributors. While we’ve detailed the main strategies in our funding application, we have acknowledged already with each other that there may be strategies we want to prioritise that we didn’t document fully in the grant application. Also there may be strategies we want to more heavily prioritise over others.

• Once we have agreed our strategic direction and strategic priorities, this will inform the activities we have committed to doing and more importantly how we will deliver the activities and to which audience. Whether or not we get the funding approved, WUGANZ is already doing and planning activities for the year. See: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_User_Group_of_Aotearoa_New_Zealand/Annual_Report_2022 The funding will amplify and extend what WUGANZ is able to achieve in the year.

• The “how” of activities could be something like - if we agree diversity is a top strategic priority and if we agree that diversity for the New Zealand community means attracting more Māori and Pasifika New Zealanders to become editors and organisers - then this will change how we decide to run our activities e.g. edit-a-thons and competitions as we may decide to target those specific demographics and tailor our approach to those activities accordingly - picking editing topics more likely to interest people in those communities and reflect their culture, contacting Pasifika community via their church, approaching community elders to get support etc. Equally if we agree diversity for the New Zealand community means attracting young editors then this will change how we develop our activities - activities could be run in a school environment, encouraging tertiary class work to be conducted within Wikipedia, running edit-a-thons and training for tutors etc.

We are intending to use the Audience Impact Model (AIM) see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH5-GVtUWzA to track our assumptions of impact and run retrospectives with organisers after activities to determine whether our assumptions were correct and what we can do better next time. The AIM approach is also able to be tailored to the level of the person doing the analysis and will build competency for organisers that are exposed to impact tracking and analysis for the first time.

Programme and Strategy

2) On engaging participants, particularly non- Wikimedians: Could you elaborate more on the learnings from the recent successful project that trained 3 Pasifika editors from the Arts sector?

WUGANZ:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_New_Zealand/Pacific_Arts_Aotearoa

In this project Creative New Zealand supported three Pasifika artists to become Wikipedia editors, focussed on documenting the stories of its Arts Pasifika Award winners and other notable Pacific Island artists, while also building and developing capability through their increased knowledge and skills, and shared professional development. These editors were “wikipedians in residence” and were paid to learn editing skills from the Project lead. This investment was required as these individuals were practising artists requiring paid work in order to live as their art practice was conducted around their employment. Now that the project has finished the user group remains hopeful that these editors will continue to contribute on a voluntary basis now that they have the skills.

One of the lessons learnt from the project was the sparsity of secondary sources for even well-known and acknowledged Pasifika artists. Artists can be well-known and highly respected as makers in their community without New Zealand mainstream media or the mainstream art world publishing about them. The discussions with the project lead and artists/editors with the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa’s (Te Papa) Curator of Pacific Histories, Rachel Yates have influenced that curator to reevaluate her publication outputs from her research projects and place more emphasis on early and more frequent publishing about significant makers in the Pasifika community in Te Papa’s blog and open-access peer reviewed journals. She is also interested in using Wikidata to record individuals and factual information on them with citations in order to build these profiles to a point where they meet the notability criteria for Wikipedia. This curator is maintaining a connection to WUGANZ via the President of WANZ.

3) How do you plan to bring in new people and partnerships to the movement (i.e. new Māori and Pasifika editors, younger editor demographic etc)?

WUGANZ:

The WUGANZ have tried a number of techniques already. The Auckland WikiCon organisers communicated with the Pacific Studies school at University of Auckland and AUT. We offered scholarships for free attendance, travel, and a stipend for expenses such as child care. Despite direct advertising and advertising in the University libraries - no student contacted us for scholarship support.

To encourage a younger editor demographic we will support Auckland Museum with their latest funding application as this, if successful, will see 10 tertiary-age editors being trained. The User group is still to discuss at the strategy workshop where the diversity focus will be. If it is on younger editors, working with tertiary tutors to encourage course work occurring in Wikipedia may bear fruit.

New partnerships - we have strong relationships with a number of GLAM institutions already and a focus of the strategy workshop is to discuss whether to continue to develop on this strength or whether we should change our focus.

4) Content gender gap: Re question 8, there are many content gender gap campaigns (e.g.  WikiGap, Art and Feminism Campaign, SheSaid Campaign (Wikiquote)), could you share more on how do you decide which to focus on (e.g. Women in Red project and identifying and recording in Wikidata historic women natural environment collectors) and why?

WUGANZ:

• The decisions on which content gender gap campaigns to contribute to have been based solely on editors’ personal preferences and interests. With the New Zealand User community meeting up online regularly, women editors have heard from others about the Women in Red campaign and committed to working to rectify the gender imbalance of Wikipedia. The recording in Wikidata of historic women / natural environment collectors is a project contributed to by the prolific editor Ambrosia10 She has shared her workflow during meetups and advocated for the use of Wikidata as a holding place for factual information and citations for women who might not yet meet the Wikipedia notability requirements. Speedy deletion of articles about significant women was a common experience in the group. This technique has been adopted by others in the user group and added to their workflows. The meetups have also resulted in organisers coming together from the User Group and committing to creating successful editathons such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Aotearoa_New_Zealand_Online/International_Women%27s_Day_2022

• Part of the work of the User Group and the strategy planning work will be to identify our strategic priorities and then seek campaigns which align with our priorities.

Budget

5) On software and digital platforms, what’s your thought process in selecting the proposed software?

WUGANZ:

• We’ve set aside a budget for some proprietary information management and web platform tools but are currently assessing and costing the solutions used by other affiliates listed at the FLOSS Exchange, especially Wikimedia Australia, to decide which to use long term. Software and platform choice will be part of our strategic planning process.  
• The group has agreed that we are pragmatic about whether the platforms are FLOSS or not. We would prefer open source but functionality and user experience of platforms is considered more important.

6) Does the budget include costs associated with Wikimedia ANZ's formal incorporation?

WUGANZ:

• The registration fee for incorporation as an Incorporated Society was NZ$102.22. This wasn’t included in the budget and needs to be added. Registration as a charity is free. The budget includes related costs such as setting up a website and selecting platforms. JChen (WMF) (talk) 07:04, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

General Support Fund proposal approved in the amount of NZD 45,754.35

Congratulations! Your grant is approved in the amount of NZD 45,754.35 with a grant term starting 1 July 2022 and ending 30 June 2023.

The ESEAP Funds Committee is pleased to support the work of Wikimedia Usergroup Aotearoa New Zealand. The Committee values the efforts in putting together the grant application and budget. Your application provides insights into your lived realities and a deeper appreciation of the user group’s plans.

The ESEAP Funds Committee and Programme Officer sees a number of strengths in your application. This includes

• Programme delivery and innovation: We observed through your grant application and from previous work of the New Zealand community that the user group has built strong partnerships within the GLAM sector. These partnerships were nurtured over time through wikipedian at large, wikipedian in residence programmes and a combination of awareness building and advocacy through your networks. We also recognise that the user group is actively thinking about building deeper relationships with GLAM, state agencies and increasing diversity of the New Zealand user group, with more details to share when ready.

• Organisational capacity: It is evident that the user group is taking a collaborative approach to strategic planning in consultation with the community. We also value the time and space you are setting aside for skills training and building the foundational processes and systems needed to run an incorporated entity in New Zealand effectively.

We support your growth area which is exploring and being curious about learning and evaluation approaches/ tools that capture the breadth and depth of your work as a community. We are also interested to learn more about the audience impact model that you mentioned during our interactions.

In your 2022/2023 learning journey, the Committee and Programme Officer envisions you may require support in the following areas:

• Communications (e.g. storytelling; digital outreach);

• Learning and evaluation (e.g. evaluating programme impact)

For a start, you may find these resources useful (or contribute to the learnings) through the Let’s Connect Programme, Wikilearn platform and Wikimedia Education Greenhouse.

We hope to continue conversations and support you through your grant lifecycle.

On behalf of the ESEAP Funds Committee, JChen (WMF) (talk) 07:08, 25 May 2022 (UTC)