Whose Knowledge?/Reports/2019

Hi! This annual report outlines Whose Knowledge? activities supported by the group from September 2018 to September 2019. Whose Knowledge? is not funded as a Wikimedia user group, so no financial reporting is required.

Activities

Abigail DeVille, featured in VWW 2019

Sojourner Truth, featured in VWW 2019

VisibleWikiWoman Erica Malunguinho, featured in VWW 2019

Whose Knowledge? co-directors

#VisibleWikiWomen Campaign

• Señoritaleona joined Whose Knowledge? as #VisibleWikiWomen Coordinator once again this year, with planning for the campaign beginning in December 2018.
• This second annual #VisibleWikiWomen campaign ran from March 8 to May 8 2019.
• 3700 photos of women from around the world were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by the end of the campaign! After that, the #VisibleWikiWomen category continued to be used, reaching more than 5600 uploaded images as of September 2019. This far exceeded our original goal of 1600 images.
• 26 partners joined the campaign this year and were essential to add a wide range of women’s images to the Commons.
• The mini-campaign "Celebrating the colours of #VisibleWikiWomen" from April 22nd to May 2nd added significant focus on images of important women of color, especially black, brown and indigenous women from across the world
• Some images got a lot of attention. A portrait of Sojourner Truth, for example, was released by the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative, during the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign. According to Smithsonian's Wikipedian in Residence, Truth’s portrait has had hundreds of thousands of views since being uploaded.
• We wrote several blog posts from the campaign, and our coordinator presented about the project at both Creative Commons Global Summit in May 2019 and at Wikimedia Argentina's Conference on Human Rights on Digital Environments in September 2019.
• A new campaign uploader and lots of improved resources for participants were created this year.
• Also, learning patterns for How to join VisibleWikiWomen as a local campaign organizer and Having a photographer present at edit-a-thons to make portraits.
• We're already laying plans for 2020: 6 new partners from indigenous communities and organizations are interested so far in joining the VWW campaign next year.
• More info is in our 2019 VisibleWikiWomen grant report.

Communications and outreach

• Claudia Pozo has been with us as Communication Lead all year, while Kira Allman and Temi Lasade-Anderson each spent 6 months with Whose Knowledge?, bringing a range of different communications skills to the team.
• We launched The Internet We Want newsletter in February 2019 put out 4 editions.
• Continuing to be interested in sharing oral knowledge, we also launched our Whose Voices? podcast and released 5 episodes featuring interviews with Decolonize the Internet Conference participants and Visible Wiki Women organizers.
• Whose Knowledge? wrote some media pieces, including:
  • Build an internet for, and from, us all in a special edition of Nature on the Digital Revolution, where Anasuya, Siko and Kira were the only women authors (November 2018).
  • Beyond Internet Access: Seeking Knowledge Justice Online on the Open Global Rights blog by Anasuya and Kira (January 2019).
  • Towards a Wikipedia For and From Us All, a chapter to be published in the forthcoming MIT Press book Wikipedia@20, by Adele, Anasuya, and Siko (sometime 2020).
• Whose Knowledge? spoke about centering marginalized communities, knowledge, and Wikipedia at a bunch of events, including:
  • Exploring Our Origins as a Decolonizing Practice Keynote by Siko and Adele at Creative Commons Summit in Lisbon, Portugal (May 2019).
  • Decolonizing the Internet: Possibilities for Asia and Beyond Keynote by Anasuya at g0v Summit in Taipei Taiwan (October 2018)
  • Knowledge, Decolonizing the Internet Keynote by Anasuya at DLF Forum in Las Vegas, Nevada (October 2018).
  • Attending and speaking at Peace Development Fund's "Women Peacemaker's" Summit (Adele and Siko, March 2019) and the Salzburg Global Seminar on “What Future for Cultural Heritage?” (Anasuya, March 2019)
  • Organizing a panel session on Decolonizing Knowledge: Open for whom by whom? at HASTAC Conference in Vancouver, Canada, with Adele and Siko and featuring community knowledge activists/scholars Persephone Hooper Lewis, Leslie Chan and Maari Zwick-Maitreyi (May 2019)

Strategy consulting

We offered our time and knowledge to a couple of strategy projects this year:

• Wikimedia Movement Strategy, focus on equity: We advised Strategy Working Groups on some ways to bring an equity lens to their strategic implementation plans, serving as a consultant to the 2019 Wikimedia Strategy process.
• Global Fund for Women tech strategy: We advised Global Fund for Women on a feminist technology strategy, with recommendations coming out of landscape analysis as well as interviews with staff, board and community experts (strategy to be published in 2020, inshallah).

Decolonizing the Internet's Languages

• In 2019 we began planning to co-locate our annual Decolonizing the Internet convening with MozFest in London. The event itself was held in October 2019, so will be detailed in next year's annual report - along with the Latin American Festival of Indigenous Languages on the Internet, which Whose Knowledge? also attended in Guatemala around the same time. However it's worth nothing here that our focus this year was on Languages, and we spend significant time preparing to bring linguists, activists, archivists, academics, techies, Wikimedians, and so forth to London for this meeting.
• Whose Knowledge? participated as a partner in UNESCO's 2019 International Year of Indigenous Languages.
• We've begun research with Oxford Internet Institute and Centre for Internet and Society for a 2020 State of the Internet's Languages Report. We launched a very successful call for contributions for stories about experiences of marginalized communities using their languages online, which will be showcased alongside quantitative data about challenges and opportunities for languages online today.

Multimedia

• VisibleWikiWomen on Commons
• Whose Knowledge? on Commons
• Lots of multimedia as well as links to our Instagram, Twitter and Facebook are on our website
• See activities section above for more links to presentations and other media from the past year!