Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Decolonizing Wikipedia/Yearly Report (2022)
Report Status: Accepted
Due date: 2023-03-10T00:00:00Z
Funding program: Wikimedia Community Fund
Report type: Yearly Learning Report (for multi-year fund recipients) , reporting year: 2022
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General information
[edit]This form is for organizations, groups, or individuals receiving multi-year Wikimedia Community Funds to report on their yearly results.
- Name of Organization: Whose Knowledge?
- Title of Proposal: Decolonizing Wikipedia
Part 1 Understanding your work
[edit]1. Briefly describe how your proposed activities and strategies were implemented.
- 2022 was a year of significant learnings and experiences for Whose Knowledge? Our activities and strategies had a common anti-oppressions, pro-liberations and knowledge justice framing across our programs.
For Decolonizing Wikipedia, our work was to continually challenge and change whose voices, data and narratives are made available online, especially in Wikimedia projects. One of our highlights for the year was to co-design and co-host the Decolonize the Internet Conference - East Africa (DTI-EA), which brought together nearly 40 Black African feminists working in various fields in tech, digital rights and knowledge justice, to reflect together about why and how to decolonize the internet. As part of the conference, we created a #VisibleWikiWomen photo booth to show how images and structured data can impact online search results by making those results look more like us (the majority of the world). As part of our Language Justice work we published the State of the Internet's Languages, a research/action and community-driven initiative that surfaced the most pressing issues around language inequalities online, we then started working on its Internal Sign translation to address accessibility barriers in online content through practice. In our recently created Whose Digital Archives? program, we are developing a programme rooted in the resistance practices of liberatory grassroot archives, supporting our partners in developing their projects. The work of our infrastructure through communications and operations continues to evolve as a space where we can practice our feminist ethics of care and focus on the process as much as we focus on the outcomes. We developed careful consent practices for image-taking and image use/release in support of #VisibleWikiWomen campaign, and a brave and safe space policy which we would share before starting any event/edit-a-thon. From our operations side, we created a consent form to put care at the center of the convenings we host.
2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you felt were effective in achieving your goals?
- After two very challenging years navigating the global pandemic, we prioritized creating and strengthening our internal capacity in 2022.
Bringing together partners from around the world to decolonize Wikipedia’s content and contributors, is a work that needs tending all year long. For the year 2022 and beyond, we have brought on our long-term coordinator and experienced feminist Wikimedian Mariana Fossatti to provide her expertise and direction to our flagship program going forward. Having realized that that the #VisibleWikiWomen program coordination would ideally be a full time position and not a time bound one, we hired a new full time #VisibleWikiWomen Program Coordinator, Sunshine Fionah Komusana.We also brought Kelly Foster, a public historian and open knowledge advocate, to the team as the UK coordinator of the Whose (Digital) Archives? program. We hired a new Comms co-lead, Youlendree Appasamy as Claudia Pozo, who had been co-leading our Communications team over the last few years, shifted her role to become our Language Justice coordinator. To make new team members feel welcome, connected and aligned with our principles and values was key. Guiding them into the wiki-verse involved hands-on internal learning sessions about how to upload images, how to use tools like GLAMorous, how to create new categories, how to upload from Flickr to Commons and lots more! But also, it was essential to build a shared understanding of our position in the Wikimedia Movement; our relationship with the Wikimedia Foundation and the influence and impact that our work has on projects and community members who are working towards the same feminist, anti-colonial and anti-racist liberation.
3. Would you say that your project had any innovations? Are there things that you did very differently than you have seen them done by others?
- For the release of the first-ever State of The Internet Languages in 2022, we developed a multi-modal and multi-lingual website, with an information architecture easily navigable, weaving together visual, oral, and written pieces in a beautiful and meaningful way. We made this report accessible to a wider audience by offering audio versions in multiple languages, adding transcripts where needed, and translations of the summary report and the qualitative data (the stories) in a total of 15 different languages.
In Whose (Digital) Archives?, together with our partners, we are challenging traditional colonial archive methodologies and collectively reimagining the meaning of “archive” and “memory” as powerful spaces and acts of resistance, healing, and transformation. The Black South West Network‘s work on the UnMuseum is incorporating thinking with and through the global reparations movement and the challenges of both digitization and digitalization for community archives. Abira Hussein from Healing Through Archives, who joined us at DTI-EA, is bringing in an important voice from families and diasporas displaced through conflict from the Somali regions. The principles of feminist consent that we putted in practice during DTI-EA (using stickers to self-identify who wanted to be photographed) and in the #VisibleWikiWomen photobooth (using a friendly consent form), were mentioned by many of the participants who found pleasantly surprising to have this kind of informed, caring consent. Although this should be a basic practice, we want to situate it in the larger conversation about the extractive and exploitative ways in which Black women's bodies and African women's bodies have been photographed non-consensually and/or through an anthropological gaze. So these consent practices and the VWW photobooth were both a site of African women's agency over their image, as well as an example of ethical practice for photo-making on the continent with 'underrepresented' groups.
4. Please describe how different communities participated and/or were informed about your work.
- We use multimodal and multilingual channels to share our work, through our website, social media, Meta page, newsletter, mailing lists, podcasts, media & speaking engagements. These channels allow us to keep informed our broad community, and expand our base of potential partners and participants.
But, yet more important, is the co-creation approach that we follow in every project, together with our partners. This is an informal, internal, dialogic and reflexible process in which we share our plural expertises, lived experiences and different realities. From the beginning, we built together the goals, theme, methodology and agenda of the activity. We also created opportunities for deep accountability and learning by coming together to debrief and reflect on our joint efforts. We make sure that our activities are safe and brave spaces. We set up the space with care, starting with our policies of consent, and the commitment to listen to each other with love, respect, and solidarity. This is key in dismantling dynamics of power and oppression that keep communities away from the most relevant and urgent discussion around open knowledge and tech. Since we are in co-creation and collaboration with communities from the majority of the world, we are careful about the conditions of knowledge sharing, in ways that aren't extractive and alienating (as has been the norm throughout colonial history that has shaped knowledge building spaces). We do our best effort to follow these principles: Informed consent to be recorded, photographed or quoted (when we are in closed conversations). Multilinguality: in many of our activities, English isn't the only or first language. Financial support: when we ask for a contribution (from podcast interviews, to research participation) we compensate participants with a stipend for their time. Documentation and reporting: we engage partners and participants in the process of creating, reviewing and translating research and conferences reports.
5. Documentation of your impact. Please use the two spaces below to share files and links that help tell your story and impact. This can be documentation that shows your results through testimonies, videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, etc.) social media posts, dashboards, etc.
- Upload Documents and Files
- Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
https://internetlanguages.org/en/ https://whoseknowledge.org/resource/dti-structured-data-report/ https://whoseknowledge.org/resource/decolonizing-the-internet-east-africa/ https://whoseknowledge.org/initiatives/language-justice/ https://whoseknowledge.org/visiblewikiwomen-2022/ https://whoseknowledge.org/initiatives/whose-digital-archives/ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:VisibleWikiWomen_photo_booth_at_FIFAfrica_2022 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:VisibleWikiWomen_2022
6. To what extent do you agree with the following statements regarding the work carried out with the support of this Fund? You can choose “not applicable” if your work does not relate to these goals.
| A. Bring in participants from underrepresented groups | Strongly agree |
| B. Create a more inclusive and connected culture in our community | Strongly agree |
| C. Develop content about underrepresented topics/groups | |
| D. Develop content from underrepresented perspectives | Strongly agree |
| E. Encourage the retention of editors | |
| F. Encourage the retention of organizers | Agree |
| G. Increased participants' feelings of belonging and connection to the movement. | Agree |
7. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your efforts helped to bring in participants and/or build out content, particularly for underrepresented groups?
- We want to share more about the events we held with our partners to build content centering the voices and stories of historically minoritized.
- VisibleWikiWomen 2022 celebrated women in the workplace twice starting in March, as part of Women's Month through hosting the regional campaign ¡Alto, Mujeres trabajando!, in partnership with Wikimedia chapters in Latin America; and with Flickr Foundation in September, we made women in the workplace visible, especially those in professions and jobs they have been historically excluded from by patriarchy.
For #PrideMonth, we featured two black trans-women in a series of podcast interviews. We shared important messages for those who edit Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects from the voices of Leticia Carolina Nascimento, from Brazil, and Arya Jeipea, from Kenya: “nothing about us without us” isn't only a nice mantra for trans women in the Global South, whose life realities should be recognized as knowledge. In commemoration of the International of People of African Descent we partnered with 500 Women scientists with whom we hosted an edit-a-thon in recognition of the contribution of women and non-binary people of African descent in STEM fields. Our work had a special focus on African women and non-binary people editing Wikimedia projects: Decolonizing the Internet in East Africa (DTI-EA) convening, followed by the #VisibleWikiWomen photobooth and a panel on African feminism and digital spaces co-convened with FEMNET at FIFAfrica 22.
Part 2: Your main learning
[edit]8. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What did you learn about these areas during this period?
- 1 Marginalized communities feel safe, secure, and supported
Grounding our anti-racist and feminist principles in practice which determines how and who we invite to co-create and set up safe environments both online and offline, and how we respond when we’ve made mistakes Collaborating with marginalized communities, learning from them and co-creating with them, honoring and acknowledging their stories as the backbone of our joint initiatives. 2 Constellations of Solidarity build deeper connections with communities to help them join the Wikimedia Movement Acknowledging that the Wikimedia community as it stands does not represent the majority of the world, and that conscious and unconscious biases are inherently built within the community, platforms and projects. Building allyship means continuously unlearning those biases, and learning ways of supporting marginalized communities that do not burden them with the work of educating us. Instead, supporting them to exercise their agency and power to make contributions. 3 Sharing experiences, learnings and practices based on knowledge justice and multiple epistemologies Challenging Wikimedia communities to think beyond framing of ‘knowledge gaps’, moving the conversation to other framings of contemporary and historical epistemological violence, like knowledge justice / debt. Deepening the debate on the right to choose what and which knowledges should be shared freely and openly, and the impacts this has on marginalized communities.
9. Did anything unexpected or surprising happen when implementing your activities?
- By the beginning of 2022 our team was affected by the Omicron Covid wave. Several team members in different locations got Covid in the period between January and March. By that time, we were launching the STIL report and making the preparations for our first in-person retreat, and for our yearly #VisibleWikiWomen campaign. We started the year enthusiastically with our plans and expectations high, but with decreased people energy, we had to slow down to prioritize care and wellbeing.
On the other hand, to organize the DTI-EA conference in Lusaka was an unexpected but meaningful opportunity. This conference was a pre-pandemic plan that we postponed without knowing when we would be able to hold it. But when our partners from FEMNET showed up with the proposal to co-host a convening right before the FIFAfrica conference which was also taking place in Lusaka, we knew this was an opportunity we couldn't waste. In previous DTI conferences, we hosted an invite-only convening for our communities before a major public event, such as Wikimania, MozFest, etc in which our community members can later join and 'occupy', continuing the conversations we previously had in a smaller and safe space, in the bigger and mainstream one. FIFAfrica 2022 was the perfect opportunity, not only for participating in panels and sessions, but also for creating our feminist corner there, literally represented by the #VisibleWikiWomen photobooth.
10. How do you hope to use this learning? For instance, do you have any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future?
- The final quarter of 2022 and the beginning of 2023 has been a time for dreaming, imagining and adjusting our strategic priorities with spaciousness. It has also been a time of onboarding new members of the team and creating shared practices and alignment. We use the frame of “evolving” rather than “expanding” because the changes in the organization are not about size, but instead these changes are about deepening our ways of being, dreaming, and doing in the world. After our January 2023 team retreat in South Africa, this new constellation of WK? Is filled with new ideas about what we want and what are our priorities for the future:
Decentering #VisibleWikiWomen from the white and global-north feminist mainstream movement. Celebrating the plurality of the majority of the world, especially in the context of African diasporas, Black feminists, queer communities and Indigenous women. Working deeply around Decolonizing Structured Data and accessibility. Supporting small communities of practices around African languages, and African diasporas in Wikipedia, but also in other plural and sovereign digital spaces. Evolving our work with archives communities and practitioners globally, as we onboard a new global coordinator for the Whose (Digital) Archives? program.
11. If you were sitting with a friend to tell them one thing about your work during this fund, what would it be (think of inspiring or fascinating moments, tough challenges, interesting anecdotes, or anything that feels important to you)?
- During this fund we had an opportunity to hold a “Decolonizing the Internet-East Africa (DTI-EA) convening in Lusaka, Zambia. Among other activities, we had a parallel #VisibleWikiWomen hands-on session. To illustrate the problem of online invisibility, we asked the group to search on Google Images for images of lawyers, doctors and other professionals in different languages for different countries. In all the searches, images of white men were at the top of the results, with people of other identities much further down. When adjusting the search preferences for open license images, the disparities were clearer – there were only images of white men! That was an aha moment that inspired participants to engage in amplifying structurally invisibilized people through open-access images.
12. Please share resources that would be useful to share with other Wikimedia organizations so that they can learn from, adapt or build upon your work. For instance, guides, training material, presentations, work processes, or any other material the team has created to document and transfer knowledge about your work and can be useful for others. Please share any specific resources that you are creating, adapting/contextualizing in ways that are unique to your context (i.e. training material).
- Upload Documents and Files
- Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
- N/A
Part 3: Metrics for Year 1
[edit]13a. Open and additional metrics data
| Open Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Additional Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability | Strategic partnerships with organizations that work with Wikimedia projects, as well as community-centered initiatives and GLAM institutions in the Global South.
The total number will be 40 strategic partnerships in 2022 and 60 partnerships in 2023. |
100 | 36 | For its characteristics, #VisibleWikiWomen and DTI-EA conference: 23
Language Justice: 11 Whose (Digital) Archives: 2 |
Communications with partners |
| Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors | Post-event forms collected from all activities listed in this application (10 events/year in 2022, 15 events/year in 2023)
Participants’ feedback from pre- and post-event forms and surveys, and other ways of involvement, including quotes and interviews to be featured in reports and blog posts. |
N/A | N/A | Quotes from participants feedback: “The biggest takeaway for me was the capacity building on the tools that are within my reach/control/ownership through which I can use to make women more visible. I absolutely appreciated content creation via Wikimedia and the sessions that helped us define strategies of how we want to move on”. (DTI-EA participant)
“The community is part of contributing knowledge that is of them by them and for them. The workshop enabled me to learn about Wikimedia. Now, this is great as we are currently leading a training and mentorship program for community networks in Kenya and one of our priority areas is local content. I see Wikimedia as a great resource for documenting local content.” (DTI-EA participant) |
Feedback Forms |
| Diversity of participants brought in by grantees | Target: at least ⅓ of participants are in/from the Global South, ½ identify as women or non-binary, are indigenous/black/people of colors in origin.
Number of participants who are in/from the Global South, identify as women or non-binary persons, and are indigenous/black/people of color(s) in origin. Information will be collected as part of registry forms. |
N/A | N/A | For the activities we have a partial record of participant's background, they are between 100% to 75% in/from the Global South, women or non-binary, and/or indigenous/black/people of colors in origin.
Our records are partial: in our registration / guests forms we collect this data, but more automated tools, like Eventmetrics, aren't useful for collecting this kind of demographics (and we also have some privacy concerns about over-collective sensitive data). |
Registration form and participants records from DTI-EA, VWW photobooth and STIL launch |
| Number of people reached through social media publications | *6000 followers on Twitter by 2022, and 7000 followers by 2023;
|
7000 | 6068 | 6 068 Twitter followers as of 24 Feb 2023
493 000 impressions on Twitter in the months of #VisibleWikiWomen campaign in 2022 338 mentions on Twitter in the months of the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign in 2022; We are satisfied with the results of our Twitter metrics, however, this year we want to rethink these metrics conceptually and understand how they impact our campaigns. |
Twitter Analytics |
| Number of activities developed | Number of workshops and edit-a-thons organized in partnership with organizations in the Global South, GLAM institutions, and feminist networks.
10 #VisibleWikiWomen events organized by 2022 15 #VisibleWikiWomen events organized by 2023 |
15 | 4 | 4 #VisibleWikiWomen events organized in 2022
Our capacity in 2022 only allowed us to focus on 4 events co-created and co-organized with selected partners. While we invested our 2022 efforts in strengthening our internal capacity, we decided to focus on this co-creation strategy, rather than supporting event organizers to hold their own events. In 2023 we will co-create fewer events, and we are planning to support more local organizers of self driven events. |
N/A |
| Number of volunteer hours | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
13b. Additional core metrics data.
| Core metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | This metric includes users who participated in our campaign by joining online or in-person workshops with Whose Knowledge? and partner organizations, from feminist networks to GLAM institutions.
The total for 2022 is 350 participants and for 2023 is 450 participants. |
800 | 359 | We achieved our goal in terms of number of participants. This number includes participants in online and in person events of different kinds, and automated records from Eventmetrics. | Eventmetrics for VisibleWikiWomen and related campaigns.
Lists of participants in online and in person events. |
| Number of editors | Newly registered editors who have created their accounts during/as a result of workshops organized/co-organized by Whose Knowledge?. The number will be later complemented with the metric for returning members, as a means to identify who the contributors are, who keep coming back to Wikipedia and what strategies have worked to retain them.
The total for 2022 is 75 editors and the total for 2023 is 100 editors. |
175 | 121 | The number of editors was higher than expected, but for upcoming campaigns and activities, we'd like to know them better, their level of engagement and their strategies for continuing editing (if they do) over time. We expect to collect new, and more qualitative metrics this year, in order to get a more comprehensive understanding of our editors. | Eventmetrics for VisibleWikiWomen and related campaigns. |
| Number of organizers | The total for 2022 is 15 organizers and the total for 2023 is 20 organizers. | 35 | 17 | In most cases, campaign organizers and partners overlap, and we prefer to think about them as co-creators that are part of our collaborative efforts, like in the Latin American campaign ¡Alto! Mujeres Trabajando (ATM), and Decolonizing The Internet East Africa convening (DTI-EA). | Partnership records, Internal Monitoring |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikimedia Commons |
|
12500 | 1200 | In some specific activities, like ¡Alto! Mujeres Trabajando, and the #VisibleWikiWomen photobooth, we can say that the proportion of uploaded images featuring women from/in the Global South, is between 75% to 100%. But we need specific tools to measure this in terms of statistics on Wikimedia platforms. | Eventmetrics and GLAMorous |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | 417 | Wikipedia Target | Eventmetrics and GLAMorous |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | 103 | Wikidata Target | Eventmetrics and GLAMorous |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
14. Were there any metrics in your proposal that you could not collect or that you had to change?
- Yes
15. If you have any difficulties collecting data to measure your results, please describe and add any recommendations on how to address them in the future.
- We need to figure out how to do this with the existing tools, but it is also important to note that there is a lack of tools that can capture these metrics at the platform level.
We also need to find creative ways of getting feedback when we still have our participant's attention in events. We are planning to collect more qualitative data from interviews with selected participants to get in-depth feedback.
16. Use this space to link or upload any additional documents that would be useful to understand your data collection (e.g., dashboards, surveys you have carried out, communications material, training material, etc).
- Upload Documents and Files
- Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
- STIL partners: https://internetlanguages.org/en/about/
GLAMorous metrics: https://glamtools.toolforge.org/glamorous/?mode=category&text=VisibleWikiWomen%202022&depth=2&pageviews=1&month=2022-01 Eventmetrics output: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TTIb7eK7VRE_lqfMJJAITclweYsI1Ulh/view?usp=sharing DTI-EA participants survey responses: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cnj6BMvACjJKWUzxjBGtYyDAcIu8MdcSwn3EavIvQ6A/edit?usp=sharing
Part 4: Organizational capacities & partnerships
[edit]17. Organizational Capacity
| A. Financial capacity and management | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| B. Conflict management or transformation | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| C. Leadership (i.e growing in potential leaders, leadership that fit organizational needs and values) | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| D. Partnership building | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| E. Strategic planning | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| F. Program design, implementation, and management | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| G. Scoping and testing new approaches, innovation | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| H. Recruiting new contributors (volunteer) | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| I. Support and growth path for different types of contributors (volunteers) | This capacity is low, and we should prioritise developing it |
| J. Governance | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| K. Communications, marketing, and social media | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| L. Staffing - hiring, monitoring, supporting in the areas needed for program implementation and sustainability | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| M. On-wiki technical skills | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| N. Accessing and using data | This capacity is low, and we should prioritise developing it |
| O. Evaluating and learning from our work | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| P. Communicating and sharing what we learn with our peers and other stakeholders | |
| N/A | |
| N/A |
17a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
- Peer to peer learning with other community members in conferences/events, Peer to peer learning with other community members (but that is not continuous or structured), Using capacity building/training resources online from sources WITHIN the Wikimedia Movement
17b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
- Lack of staff time to participate in capacity building/training, Lack of training that fits contextual needs and interests, Ineffective training opportunities which did not improve capacity
18. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your organizational capacity has grown, and areas where you require support?
- As Whose Knowledge? continues to build its programmatic team, we are also evolving in our internal coordination and operational processes. Azar Causevic and Constanza Verón joined our team in late 2022 as Program Co-conveners. Together, they oversee our overall programmatic strategies and coordination. Our knowledge justice and anti-colonial framework has been also strengthened with Maari Maitreyi, our Epistemic Justice Researcher, and Persephone Lewis, our Honoring Our Guardians Coordinator. Our Operations and Strategy team led by Shamillah Wilson, Director of Organizational Design and Practice and Ashima Bhardwaj, Operations Lead, is in a constant ebb and flow of learning, unlearning and relearning the practices and policies that lie at the heart of our work.
19. Partnerships over the funding period.
| A. We built strategic partnerships with other institutions or groups that will help us grow in the medium term (3 year time frame) | Strongly agree |
| B. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to bring in more contributors from underrepresented groups | Agree |
| C. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to build out more content on underrepresented topics/groups | Strongly agree |
19a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
- Permanent staff outreach, Staff hired through the fund, Partners proactive interest
19b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
- Difficulties specific to our context that hindered partnerships, Lack of staff capacity to respond to partners interested in working with us
20. Please share your learning about strategies to build partnerships with other institutions and groups and any other learning about working with partners?
- We understand partnerships as clusters of solidarity; i.e.: spaces of relationship building and collaboration with “unusual allies”, like activists, community organizers, scholars, and alternative tech-builders. An important part of our time, efforts and capacity are invested in facilitating this collaboration, creating workspaces that are safe and multilingual, and co-holding tasks and leadership. We create and re-create this approach in every collaboration. 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.
Part 5: Sense of belonging and collaboration
[edit]21. What would it mean for your organization to feel a sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement?
- In 2022 we engaged in critical conversations in the Wikimedia movement around knowledge justice and the inclusion of the marginalized majority of the world as a key change to create knowledge equity in the movement. In this period, we joined several processes, like the Universal Code of Conduct, diversity and inclusion in the Board of Trustees, multilinguality in governance spaces, among others. With the support of this fund, we were able to commit more time and people's energy to participate, including making time for learning activities for our new team members that are taking their first steps in the movement.
Our sense of belonging has evolved as we are evolving in our knowledge justice approach, and we are excited about sharing and critically discussing topics with the Wikimedia community, such as knowledge debt and restitution, plural public domain, decolonizing structured data, indigeneity, oral citations, body plurality, diasporic knowledges, liberatory archives, and more!
22. How has your (for individual grantees) or your group/organization’s (for organizational grantees) sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?
- Increased significantly
23. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.
- N/A
24. How has your group/organization’s sense of personal investment in the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?
- Increased significantly
25. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.
- N/A
26. Are there other movements besides the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement that play a central role in your motivation to contribute to Wikimedia projects? (for example, Black Lives Matter, Feminist movement, Climate Justice, or other activism spaces) If so, please describe it below.
- The feminist movement plays a central role in our work. We are not external, but part of it; some members of our collective are also long term activists. Our partnership with Black African women and feminist organizations was key to organizing DTI-EA. In Latin America, we are part of a coalition between feminist wikimedians and media-activists. The global African diaspora is an important space that we bring to the center in initiatives and conversations (for instance, women in STEM). Different anti-oppression movements influence, inform and take part in our initiatives, like LGBTQIA+, Dalits, and indigenous and land defenders. Our own identities and multiple intersections bring us together in the struggles for justice and equity in our lived realities in and beyond the Wikimedia movement.
Supporting Peer Learning and Collaboration
[edit]We are interested in better supporting peer learning and collaboration in the movement.
27. Have you shared these results with Wikimedia affiliates or community members?
- No
27a. Please describe how you have already shared them. Would you like to do more sharing, and if so how?
28. How often do you currently share what you have learned with other Wikimedia Foundation grantees, and learn from them?
- We do this rarely (less than twice a year)
29. How does your organization currently share mutual learning with other grantees?
- N/A
Part 6: Financial reporting and compliance
[edit]30. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.
- 168878
31. Local currency type
- USD
32. Please report the funds received and spending in the currency of your fund.
- Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.
- Report funds received and spent, if template not used.
33. If you have not already done so in your budget report, please provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal.
- There were no changes in the budget in relation to the original proposal. There was an underspend in the amount of $40,540. We are proposing to reallocate the underspent funds towards some expenses. Please find the details of how we hope to reallocate those funds in 34c.
34. Do you have any unspent funds from the Fund?
34a. Please list the amount and currency you did not use and explain why.
- USD 40,540
- During the year 2022, we held a number of virtual events for Decolonizing Wikipedia, but were not able to hold in person events for coordinators or host local events where we would provide stipends for organizers. Due to this, we had an underspend of $7,704 in Decolonizing Wikipedia Programmatic Expenses.
- Our team worked tirelessly on the State of the Internet’s Languages Report and prioritized translations and accessibility as foremost. We are yet to focus on getting the report printed, hence there was an underpend of $3,366 in this line item.
- Our Comms Associate joined us a bit later in the year than we had anticipated, hence there is an underspend of $1,324 in this line item.
- Our Decolonizing Wikipedia Coordinator along with the support of our #VisibleWikiWomen Coordinator spent a lot of time on programmatic things as well as co-holding events. There was an underspend of $14,436 in the payments for the former, since the anticipated hours for her position for 2022 as budgeted, were more than the actual hours of work performed.
- Due to staffing capacity limitations, our timeline for the hiring of the STIL Coordinator, the Archives Coordinator and the Resources and Reparations Lead (formerly Fundraising Lead) was pushed to 2023. Because of this, there was an underspend of $5,040, $5,040 and $3,240 in each of these line items respectively. This also led to an underspend in the monthly wellness allowance that we would have given to these coordinators, in the amount of $390.
34b. What are you planning to do with the underspent funds?
- A. Propose to use the underspent funds within this Fund period with PO approval
34c. Please provide details of hope to spend these funds.
- Here’s a breakdown of the Total Underspent funds and my recommendations on the reallocation:
There were several expenses, as outlined below, that were more than our original anticipated figures. We are hoping to reallocate the underspent funds to cover those expenses.
- WK? successfully co-hosted the DTI-EA event in partnership with FEMNET (more details in the narrative report) and we would like to reallocate $17,039 of the underspent funds towards this expense.
- Due to an increase in our team capacity, we were able to participate in and hold multiple speaking engagements, webinars and events in 2022 (details in the narrative report). This required more time from our Communications Co-Leads, hence we would like to request reallocation of $14,171 from our underspent funds towards this.
- Our #VisibleWikiWomen Coordinator, Sunshine Fionah Komusana spent substantial time preparing for the photobooth and media at the DTI-EA event in Zambia. She was instrumental in capturing the essence of the event and arrived in Zambia several days ahead of the event, to prepare and plan everything. We would, therefore request a reallocation of $1,155 to cover the overspend towards her time.
- With a larger and more robust team, our Operations Lead, Ashima Bhardwaj spent more time developing our practices and policies while working with an HR Consulting Firm; worked on streamlining our accounts and books with a CPA; and stayed up to date on compliance with our legal counsel and bookkeeper. We would like to request reallocation of $4,198 to cover the overspend on her time.
- Our team grew in number last year and with added users to our systems and project management tools, our expenses also grew more than we had anticipated. We would like to reallocate $380 towards the overspend in the General Operating Expenses category.
- Similarly, our travel costs for our team to travel for our annual team retreat in 2022 increased more than we had anticipated. We would like to request reallocation of $3,597 towards the Travel Expenses category.
35. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement?
As required in the fund agreement, please report any deviations from your fund proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.
36. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?
- Yes
37. Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
- Yes
38. If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here.