Grants:Project/MSIG/WMSE/Capacity building in the Content Partnerships Hub

statusfunded

Movement Strategy

WM SE/Capacity building in the Content Partnerships Hub

This project will establish processes for how the Content Partnerships Hub can be used for targeted capacity building, including experiments around how to use the Helpdesk and Metabase for this and the pilot development of requested materia.

targetWikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikibase

start dateJuly 1

start year2023

end dateMay 15

end year2024

budget (local currency)530,000

budget (USD)50,302

grant typeorganization

non-profit statusYes

grantee• John Andersson (WMSE)

contact(s)• john.anderssonwikimedia.se• eric.luth@wikimedia.se

organization (if applicable)• Wikimedia Sverige

website (if applicable)• https://wikimedia.se/

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Applications are not required to be in English. Please complete the application in your preferred language.

Project Goal

What will be the outputs of your project and how will those outputs contribute to advancing a specific Movement Strategy Initiative

Goal: Developing structures for capacity building around content partnerships The goal of this project is to pilot how the aspiring Content Partnerships Hub’s structures can be utilized for material used for providing capacity building that is sought after in the Wikimedia Movement. The outputs of the projects are:

Identifying material through the Helpdesk

1. Establish a process to identify materials that need to be created, through requests to the Helpdesk, and document this process.
2. Establish a process for how a Working Group can support the Helpdesk through identifying relevant existing, or missing, material, and document this process.

Making material about content partnership easy to find with Metabase

1. Develop and document processes for adding and structuring metadata on Metabase.
2. Showcase examples of insights which can be reached through making the material searchable to demonstrate the value of adding the structured metadata.
3. Investigate the needs of a few representative affiliates and develop a report.
4. Develop a report, including recommendations for future work, on whether Metabase is a net-benefit to efficiency and if it is flexible enough to work for other Movement actors. This will also reflect on if the current choice of plattform (wikibase.cloud) is suitable from a community and technical standpoint and what improvements might be wished for if so.

Create a process to jointly develop key material

1. Establish a process for Working Groups to support the development of the capacity building material, and document this process.
2. Develop at least one set of missing informational or educational materials.
3. Establish collaboration with at least one other hub initiative or affiliate on translation and refining of the material created.

Sharing and reporting

1. Develop a case study on how the Hub could be used for capacity building around content partnerships. The material will be published on Meta.
2. Share the results of the case study at two international Wikimedia events.
3. Develop two written summaries of the project results targeting different stakeholders.

SMART Goals During the project the following deliverables will be measured against:

1. 10 requests to the Helpdesk are processed to identify capacity building needs.
2. 1 Working Group is organized and active with identifying and co-creating capacity building material.
3. 100 capacity building resources are documented on Metabase.
4. 1 set of educational material is created.
5. 1 translation partnership with a hub or affiliate is formalized.
6. 100 people have interacted with the newly created educational material..
7. 1 case study is produced to allow other initiatives to benefit from our learnings.
8. 100 members of the Wikimedia Community have participated in events related to the project.

What specific Movement Strategy Initiative does your project focus on and why? Please select one of the initiatives described here

Ensure Equity in Decision-Making -> 26 Regional and thematic hubs

Capacity building is a key focus in the Movement Strategy and is a highlighted area for hubs to support. Recommendation 4 states that a key action point is to help with “coordinating capacity building”. Capacity building is important for the “empowerment of local communities” to take on larger roles, and as such increases equity in the Movement.

The Hub is coordinated by Wikimedia Sverige’s team, but we are increasingly building structures for engaging, involving and building capacity for stakeholders across the Movement, so that they can take part in and contribute to the Movement’s work with content partnerships. The work with the Thematic hub aims to support the content partnership efforts in the wider Movement, not the content partnerships between Wikimedia Sverige and Swedish organizations.

With more content partnership leaders in the movement, more stakeholders will have the experience and power to run their own projects, thus exponentially increasing the amount, as well as the diversity, of content partnerships project run. That will also enable more stakeholders to engage in the conversations and/or capacity building projects, ensuring equity in decision making on a global level.

Although a hub will touch upon many different Movement Strategy initiatives, this limited project is focusing on experimenting on how capacity building in the Movement can be supported through the aspiring Content Partnerships Hub’s structures. By increasing capacity and providing the missing pieces more stakeholders in the Movement can get involved with content partnerships, both when it comes to engaging in the conversations around content partnerships in the Movement and getting the knowledge and experience to carry out the partnerships themselves.

This project also directly contributes to to:

• Recommendation 6: Invest in Skills and Leadership, specifically “Invest in new or existing technological infrastructure which facilitates learning of skills through functional, collaborative, real-time tools and quality content" and "Procedures to evaluate the quality of learning content and to facilitate the transfer of knowledge at global and local levels”.
• Recommendation 7: Manage Internal Knowledge, all three sections (1) “Facilitate a culture of documentation to become integral to Wikimedia’s work and evaluation and as an outcome in itself, by resourcing its creation in key areas, such as capacity building, advocacy, partnerships, and technology”, (2) “Establish a knowledge-base system with access to all Movement learning assets” and (3) “Encourage the growth and maintenance of this knowledge-base following these practices”.
• Recommendation 8: Identify Topics for Impact, specifically “Advocate for and build capacity around content creation and quality writing in areas where both editors and content are missing (or content is known to be biased), for example through regional and thematic hubs.”
• Recommendation 10: Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt, specifically “Distribute responsibilities around the processes of monitoring, evaluating and learning with all Movement stakeholders so that they have mutual accountability (including coordination and knowledge management) and ensure continual progress.”

Project Background

When do you intend to begin this project and when will it be completed?

1 July 2023 to 31 June 2024

Where will your project activities be happening?

The project is initiated by Wikimedia Sverige’s team, but the activities will take part globally. To make sure that the project contributes to ensuring equity in decision making as well as serving underserved and underrepresented communities, activities under large parts of the project will be supervised and guided by the Expert Committee, composed by a diverse and global set of experienced volunteers when it comes to working with partnerships. This lays an important foundation for building a worldwide service. Development of the material will be done by working groups with Wikimedians from across the world.

Are you collaborating with other communities or affiliates on this project? Please provide details of how partners intend to work together to achieve the project goal.

Yes. A key part of our approach to enhance capacity building around content partnerships is to work with different Movement stakeholders, both to engage new stakeholders in this regard and to collaborate on a deeper level with those that already have experience. This is important for two reasons.

Firstly, content partnerships (with e.g. GLAM and educational institutions) is an area of work where the Wikimedia Movement has a lot of experience and have created different pieces of materials over the last years. However, it is very hard to find as well as to navigate among the material as the material developed historically is spread across multiple wikis (Meta, Outreach, chapter’s wikis etc.) and on other platforms with no structured approach to organize and find it, keep it updated and expanded on. To identify the material and fully understand it we need to work with the affiliates and volunteers that created it.

The second reason is that the content needs to be localized and contextualized. The material created to date is often in a single language and for a specific context. The majority of content created to date is developed in Europe and the US, which means that translation is not the only barrier to reuse but it also needs to be adapted for the local context. For this, and to identify more material from other geographic regions, we need collaborations and broad engagement across the movement.

We intend to identify what capacity building is most urgently needed through the requests submitted to the Helpdesk, a support structure which we have launched. The Helpdesk is guided by an Expert Committee, consisting of eight community members from a diverse set of communities from across the world. We also seek to engage affiliates in the Working Groups of the Helpdesk. The Working Group members will help identify the existing material needed to respond to the requests, and by doing so help to summarize the current status of information. Their work will be foundational to identifying what materials to develop next. Each individual request also represents a small and focused collaboration with an affiliate or a community member. We believe that the experts contributing to the working group could get even further reach through WMF’s Let’s connect initiative.

When we have identified different types of pre-existing material we will add it to our experimental platform Metabase. To this Wikibase platform we will be adding structured metadata about resources, events, projects and more, connected to content partnerships in the Wikimedia Movement. We are having regular conversations with WMDE around the technical aspects of Wikibase.

With the material identified as important, based on the requests for hands-on support, we will develop missing material. One possibility explored is to develop learning modules for the learn.wiki platform. For this we hope to involve both the OpenRefine team as well as the Community Development team at WMF. We intend to work with different experts across the Movement to contribute to specific learning modules.

We will actively seek out involvement from and collaboration with both affiliates, as well as Thematic hubs formed around languages (e.g. WikiFranca or The Wikimedia Languages Diversity Hub) and Regional hubs to join our efforts in translating and contextualizing the material.

We also acknowledge that there are a number of interesting initiatives currently in place, such as Let’s Connect and the Capacity Exchange initiative (cXc). We have initiated contacts with the respective teams to avoid duplication of efforts and to find synergies.

This project is built upon the idea of experimenting with a few initiatives to see if we can find a path to solve the issues outlined above. To do so a key component is to work together with other communities and affiliates. We will work to find practical ways for engagement for the different aspects we focus on in the project and iteratively develop the collaborations with the aim to achieve impact as early as possible.

What specific challenge will your project be aiming to solve? And what opportunities do you plan to take advantage of to solve the problem?

All the activities that are being worked on as part of this project are focusing on increasing coordination and capacity building amongst Wikimedia affiliates and volunteers in the work that is taking place around content partnerships.

The Wikimedia Movement is increasingly becoming a central node online, building up towards “the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge”. The more central the Wikimedia Movement becomes online, the more important it will however be to collaborate with other actors in society, including cultural heritage institutions such as museums and libraries, as well as intergovernmental organizations (IGOs, such as UN agencies) and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs).

Given the state of the world, after a global pandemic, with new wars and conflicts and an imminent climate crisis, we believe that it only gets more and more important that we, as a Movement, partner with other knowledge producers, to make knowledge freely available and shared, and especially when it comes to topics for impact and areas of high importance.

The Wikimedia Movement will need to find the means, the infrastructure and close partnerships for making more content – media, data, text or any other form – available through the Wikimedia platforms. This is in essence what we mean by content partnerships, and what we aim to strive towards on a global level through the initiative for a Content Partnerships Hub.

The capacity building is an area of work that repeatedly has been pointed out as a major obstacle for the Movement in the Strategic Recommendations. This was echoed regarding the needs around content partnerships in our interviews done as part of the Needs assessment, conducted in 2021–2022. In the preparatory work for the hub, it became clear that there are several different areas where capacity building is needed. Maybe the most prominent one is the fact that even though knowledge is produced and used in one part of the Movement, it often stays undiscovered – only used among the affiliates, user groups or even individuals that created it. We must find better ways of finding, collecting, translating and sharing the local knowledge globally and global knowledge locally. Other issues are that there might be knowledge gaps, or outdated information, that could quite easily be updated and expanded.

We launched the Helpdesk initiative in 2022, which has been well received by the Movement and resulted so far in almost 20 requests from all parts of the world. The early experimental phase of the initiative, as well as the responses that the Expert Committee has given to the received requests, point toward a larger need for general capacity building than we had envisioned. Our initial aim was, by building upon our long term experience of similar projects, to eliminate bottlenecks to increase the speed of batch uploads, but to a large extent, those submitting requests have requested capacity building and receiving training so that they can carry out similar content partnerships themselves in the future. This has also been prioritized by the Expert Committee, wishing to disseminate insights and learnings across the Movement. These insights together point towards a large and growing need for capacity building for content partnerships.

Does this project aim to apply one of the examples shared in the call for grants and if so which one?

Planning Hubs

Project Activities

What specific activities will be carried out during this project? Please describe the specific activities that will be carried out during this project.

In this limited experimental project we are targeting capacity building and exchange in the Wikimedia Movement. We are limiting our work in this project to focus solely on capacity building related to content partnerships. We are planning to work on the areas outlined below.

Developing a process to identify what key material is missing and what is already developed

During the hundreds of conversations we have had over the years one point has been made multiple times, namely that even though a lot of high quality material is created, it is hard, if not impossible, to find it. Therefore people constantly start from scratch and reinvent the wheel, wasting valuable Movement resources, to the large detriment of capacity building in the movement.

We believe that we have identified two innovative activities that are needed to move forward with this issue. These will be developed further in this project:

1. We want to build upon the expertise in the Movement, and in a specific high impact use case work with the Movement to identify what material already exists and what is still needed to be created.
2. We want to contribute to structuring the information about existing material in such a way that we do not have to redo the search and identification again over time, and that language barriers to discovering material are reduced as much as possible.

Identifying material through the Helpdesk

We believe that we should not just work on material that Wikimedia Sverige happens to be interested in at this point in time. Such an unstructured approach, focusing mainly on one's own current needs, is what has been used by the Movement to date. Instead we want to experiment with what a system for the whole Movement could look like. To achieve such a reach we believe that a structure is needed with clear, and very easy to follow, processes – where anyone can request help when they have not been able to find the answer with existing material. For such a structure to work it needs engagement from experts from across the Movement, as the area of content partnerships is so vast. There are bits and pieces of material and expertise scattered across the Movement.

We launched the Helpdesk for content partnerships as a new service for the Wikimedia Movement in 2022. The Helpdesk provides hands-on-support to Wikimedian volunteers or affiliates trying to form content partnerships, especially for local communities in the underserved and underrepresented communities.

We believe that we can build upon this structure to identify what material is key to develop based on the requests it receives. We want to explore how we can develop a model and process for how specific requests to the Helpdesk can guide long-term and ambitious capacity building efforts. I.e. if we receive one or even several requests about an issue where there is no documentation, learning material etc. to point to, this request could provide guidance that developing such material should be a priority. The questions from the Helpdesk will thus provide us with insights about the current state of documentation on Meta and other platforms used by the Movement.

The international Expert Committee, consisting of a diverse group of experts from across the Movement, helps us prioritize between the requests. They support the process by providing early guidance to the person or organization requesting help and help to clarify what the needs really are.

We want to expand the Helpdesk concept to establish integrated Working Groups. The Working Groups will consist of Movement experts. Together with them we will work on fulfilling the requests submitted to the Helpdesk, so that we can provide better contextualized answers, and identify what material connected to the request already exists. The Working Groups will therefore help with developing an inventory of existing materials as part of the process. We will establish a process for how Working Groups can be used to compile the most important material in different languages within a thematic area. The Helpdesk’s Working Groups will be a structure that increases coordination across stakeholders. The Working Groups also have the potential to increase the connection/matching of peers across the Movement for teaching and learning new skills, and to increase mentoring and peer-to-peer support.

We will coordinate with the Capacity Exchange (cXc) initiative to see how to best include the Working Groups’ members into the cXc’s database (if funded).

Making material about content partnership easy to find with Metabase

From our conversations with affiliates and volunteers one problem highlighted around capacity building has been the lack of findability of material such as training material, reports, case studies, and other resources created by the Movement. To see how we could help to alleviate this issue we launched a Wikibase installation called Metabase in 2022. The basic technical infrastructure is in place and we have started experimenting with how metadata about resources created by the Movement could be structured, to best improve searchability and findability.

As part of an externally funded project we have secured we are able to at least partly develop the basic structure for Metabase based on Wikimedia Sverige’s material. As part of this MSIG project we can scale the efforts to add a broader set of content around content partnerships from the international Movement. The Metabase would then be a useful tool for the Hub’s capacity building efforts as it will make it possible to quickly find what material is available and what is missing and thereby more easily guide people to the material they need.

As we have limited resources we will engage an intern in this work, who has significant experience from Wikidata. The person will work on this project by adding metadata about material related to content partnerships. Our staff will capture his experience and develop a routine for adding and structuring material on Metabase, so that the material identified by the Working Groups in their work process will be easier to discover later.

Through our experiments we intend to identify what benefits can be created with structured and searchable metadata. In addition to evaluating the usefulness of the platform we also need to establish whether the cost, in time and effort, of adding the information to the platform is worth it in terms of a net-benefit to Movement efficiency. If Metabase shows promise we intend to develop a basic Metabase training for the Working Groups’ members. A key part of the task would be to evaluate their impressions and thoughts about the platform and usefulness as part of the interactive training. This would be a small first step to engage more people to add information about Movement resources.

We believe that this has the potential to really improve how we manage our internal knowledge. If the structure for Metabase is successful the tool has the potential to include all types of information, not just for content partnerships but also e.g. material regarding lobbying efforts or education partnerships and hence benefit other hub initiatives. We will therefore contact a few representative affiliates to get a better understanding of their needs and how Metabase could serve them. We will then conclude this experiment by putting together a report, including recommendations for future work, on Metabase’s suitability for hub initiatives and the movement, and on the suitability of the current implementation of Metabase (on wikibase.cloud).

Create a process to jointly develop key material

When we have identified an area that is missing key information we will work to pilot the development of at least one new, or improvement of an existing, set of material needed for capacity building. We will engage the international Expert Committee of the Helpdesk in the decision making process to decide on the focus.

We will work with the Working Groups’ members to establish a path forward to jointly create missing or incomplete material that is needed for capacity building around content partnerships.

For the material to be of use we will work together with affiliates and volunteers to translate and refine the content and to identify parts that should be localized and contextualized. We intend to ensure that this is done in a structured way by creating a clearly defined translation role, a language ambassador. This person can be a volunteer, a staff member at an affiliate or a staff member at a Regional or Thematic hub.

We are in contact with the Community Development team at Wikimedia Foundation to start experimenting with the learning platform learn.wiki. If learning modules is an area compatible with the capacity building initiatives that the Expert Committee prioritizes, we will coordinate with the Community Development team. This work would give us a much clearer understanding of the cost of developing each learning module. Even if learning modules are not prioritized as material for this project we will develop a list of learning modules to create in the future.

We intend to engage other affiliates, the WMF and experts in the Movement to co-create the content for these learning modules.

Sharing and reporting

As this project will include a lot of firsts, a key outcome is for the processes and experiences to be detailed in a case study on how the hub could be used for capacity building around content partnerships.

In addition to describing the project experiences and outcomes the case study will also include recommendations and suggestions for which initiatives to move forward with and how these should be developed going forward.

We will actively share our learnings and insights with the Wikimedia Movement at events and through different written summaries (blog posts, long-form emails to email lists etc.).

The whole project will be concluded by publishing a final report including recommendations for the future and a draft implementation plan. It will also describe suggestions for corresponding governance structures for the Hub, which will be based on a philosophy of shared ownership and consensus based decision making.

The above are all in addition to ongoing communication and dialogues with movement representatives.

How do you intend to keep communities updated on the progress and outcomes of the project? Please add the names or usernames of these individuals responsible for updating the community

Yes we are, for each of the areas we are focusing on we have a dedicated lead person that is responsible for sharing material and the progress and updating the community (see next heading). For general discussion around different hub initiatives and coordination with them John Andersson is responsible.

Target group	Channels
Wikimedia affiliates	Hub portal on Meta – including translation work Individual conversations Participating in Wikimedia events on- and offline Ambassadors Diff blogg This month in GLAM Mailing lists Twitter Telegram Facebook groups
Volunteers	Hub portal on Meta – including translation work This month in GLAM Mailing lists Facebook groups Twitter Telegram Diff blogg Ambassadors Individual conversations with key volunteers
WMF	Hub portal on Meta Individual conversations with teams. E.g.: Partnerships Community Programs (esp. Culture & Heritage) Movement Strategy & Governance Community Development Diff blogg
Content partners	Individual conversations Participating in industry events on- and offline Mailing lists Twitter Facebook groups

Who will be responsible for delivering on this project and what are their roles and responsibilities?

Focus area	Lead	Other staff
Project Management (tasks)	John	Josefine, Eric, André
Helpdesk (tasks)	Eric	Alicia, Sebastian, André, John
Metabase	Alicia	André, intern, John
Develop material	Josefine	Alicia, Eric, Axel
Sharing	Eric	John, Josefine, Axel
Reporting	John	André, Eric, Alicia, Josefine

A complete list of staff members involved in the Thematic hub development work can be found here: Content Partnerships Hub/People – Meta

Additional information

If your activities include community discussions, what is your plan for ensuring that the conversations are productive? Provide a link to a Friendly Space Policy or UCoC that will be implemented to support these discussions.

We will cultivate a safe and supportive environment for all participants by:

• Hosting a UCOC and Friendly Space Policy onboarding session and discussion round(s) with the team working with the Hub.
• Introducing all participants at events we organize to the UCOC and Friendly Space Policy.
• Offering digital “HR office hours” for participants to book one-on-one meetings with the organizers, in order to discuss concerns or air complaints.

Friendly Space Policy: https://se.wikimedia.org/wiki/Riktlinjer_för_inkluderande_möten

If your activities include the use of paid online tools, please describe what tools these are and how you intend to use them.

Paid online tools for video calls and online collaboration tools will be organized by Wikimedia Sverige. None of the funds from this grant would go toward that expense.

This includes Google Workspace for Nonprofits for documents and online meetings, and Zoom and Streamyard for larger community online meetings.

Do your activities include the translation of materials, and if so, in what languages will the translation be done? Please include details of those responsible for making the translations.

Yes, we are discussing with a number of affiliates to support work in this space and are planning to launch a language ambassador program of some sort. We hope to engage the Thematic hubs focusing on languages in this work as well. Our team will ensure that published material exists in English and Swedish, and is prepared for translation whenever published on a wiki supporting this.

Are there any other details you would like to share? Consider providing rationale, research or community discussion outputs, and any other similar information, that will give more context on your proposed project.

In some aspects we are far ahead in our work and have been working iteratively for a few years now in this space. We have also developed strong concepts, we have conducted a very large number of discussions with relevant stakeholders and we now have a strong international team in place. Therefore we have a very short starting time and are ready to get to work from day one. There are a large number of areas that are completely new to the Movement that we are trying to explore and with these added resources we are able to continue some of the work we envisioned for this year.

Outcomes

After your activities are complete, we would like to understand the draft implementation plan for your community. You will be required to prepare a document detailing this plan around a movement strategy initiative. This report can be prepared through Meta-wiki using the Share your results button on this page. The report can be prepared in your language, and is not required to be written in English.

In this report, you will be asked to:

• Provide a link to the draft implementation plan document or Wikimedia page
• Describe what activities supported the development of the plan
• Describe how and where you have communicated your plan to relevant communities.
• Report on how your funding was spent

Your draft implementation plan document should address the following questions clearly:

• What movement strategy initiative or goal are you addressing?
• What activities will you be doing to address that initiative?
• What do you expect will happen as a result of your activities? How do those outcomes address the movement strategy initiative?
• How will you measure or evaluate your activities? What tools or methods will you use to evaluate your activities?

To create a draft implementation plan, we recommend the use of a logic model, which will help you and your team think about goals, activities, outcomes, and other factors in an organized way. Please refer the following resources to develop a logic model:

• Overview of logic models on Meta-wiki
• Example logic models for reference for other movement activities (such as partnerships and edit-a-thons)
• Blank logic model template on Google Drive

Please confirm below that you will be able to prepare a draft implementation plan document by the end of your grant:

• Yes

Optionally, you are welcome to include other information you'd like to share around participation and representation in your activities. Please include any additional outcomes you would like to report on below:

Budget

How you will use the funds you are requesting? List bullet points for each expense. Don’t forget to include a total amount, and update this amount in the Probox at the top of your page too!

How you will use the funds you are requesting? List bullet points for each expense. Don’t forget to include a total amount, and update this amount in the Probox at the top of your page too!

• Research (time needed to review, perform analysis, or investigate any information needed to support implementation ideas or planning): 116,000 SEK
• Facilitation (facilitation time including facilitator preparation, meeting facilitation time, and debriefing): 70,000 SEK
• Documentation (document preparation time, time spent documenting of discussion, post-meeting work): 124,000 SEK
• Translation (translation costs for briefs and global materials): 30,000 SEK
• Coordination (coordinator work to manage or support multiple workflows to prepare for meeting): 108,000 SEK
• Online tools or services (subscription services for online meeting platforms, social media promotion): 0 SEK
• Data (internet or mobile costs for organizers or participants to access or participate in activities): 0 SEK
• Venue or space for meeting (costs of renting a physical meeting space): 0 SEK
• Transportation costs (costs of supporting organizers or participants to attend the meeting): 30,000 SEK
• Meals (costs related to refreshments, lunches, or other meals during in-person activities): 0 SEK
• Other: 52,000 SEK

TOTAL AMOUNT REQUESTED SEK: 530,000 SEK (50,302 USD)

Completing your application

Once you have completed the application, please do the following:

• Change the application status from status=draft to status=proposed in the {{Probox}} template.
• Contact strategy2030wikimedia.org to confirm your submission, as well as to request any support around your application.

Endorsements

An endorsement from community members (especially from outside your community) will be part of the considerations when reviewing your application. Community members are encouraged to endorse your project request here!