Grants talk:Conference/WikiCon Brasil 2022

Call for revision

Please, @GiFontenelle:, @Chicocvenancio:, @Geisasantos:, @Ixocactus:, @Ederporto:, @EricaAzzellini:, @DarwIn:, @Teles: and @Hermógenes Teixeira Pinto Filho:: give your feedback and suggestions. Regards, Sturm (talk) 06:55, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

I made some initial edits. I think the budget needs to be adjusted for more scholarships (including travel and added lodging for part of the organizing team in days before the event) and perhaps dinner for all participants. I would also like for @Jcornelius: to help review the budget for any items we may be missing in his experience. One thing that comes to mind is how we will deal with the exchange risk on this. While it is likely to be beneficial to us, as the Real has been strongly devaluing in the last months, it is always a possibility that it will fluctuate up and cause the grant amount in dollars to be less than the budgeted amount in Reais when the transfer is made. Should we have a larger amount in 4.3. Unforeseen expenses to account for this volatility or is this something WMF can handle and increase the amount in dollars if anything does happen? Chico Venancio (talk) 03:07, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Acho que está bem bacana @Sturm:. Parabéns e obrigado pela iniciativa! --Ixocactus (talk) 22:47, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

Staff salaries

Just to comment that the staff salaries here - R$4.500,00 or R$2.250,00 - are quite low for full time employees working in São Paulo. For context, as a postdoctoral researcher at the Universidade de São Paulo I used to be paid around R$8,000 per month. I understand that these salaries are limited by the WMF. I would strongly recommend that these amounts are reconsidered and significantly increased, if not here for this grant, then in the near future. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 18:18, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

I looked up median monthly income in Sao Paulo and the information I saw was BRL10,000. The amount requested is low and I also would support an increase.

I would also support the Wikimedia Foundation openly discussing this issue with the community so that we can have a standard practice for this commonly discussed point. I think paying median local salary rates is a good starting point for temporary event workers considering that this is intense work, highly engaged and trusted wiki editors are the usual people in these positions, it is short term and temporary so pay is typically higher than a permanent position, and people in these roles need some relief considering that an entire national community looks to such events. Right now they are asking for about US$3-4 per hour. The WMF does not share pay data, but median rates in the United States for WMF staffers probably is around US$50/hour. Local labor such as this merits proportional pay by local rates just like the WMF headquarters. Yes, I suggest raising pay to local rates. Blue Rasberry (talk) 21:43, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

@DSaroyan (WMF): You commented on this section in the committee's feedback below. Please could you clarify the WMF's role in determining these salaries in the past? Since you say "I kindly request to reconsider staff costs." - does that mean that any previous limits from WMF on this are no longer in place? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 18:16, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

Mike Peel: Wikimedia Foundation does not prescribe salaries/remuneration regarding staff costs of affiliates or volunteer led initiatives. We urge the affiliates and applicants to consider the median local salary range and prepare budget accordingly. In this particular case, we would be happy to consider revised budget if Wiki Movimento Brasil would like to make adjustments. Regards THasan (WMF) (talk) 15:53, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Comments and questions from the Community Resources team

Hello EAzzellini (WMB) and Wiki Movimento Brasil team, thanks again for submitting this Conference Fund application. We are really excited about the first national Wikimedia Conference in Brazil. We have reviewed this application and have some questions and recommendations:

Program

• Do you plan to invite external trainers or facilitators to lead the proposed group discussions?

We intend to prioritize community members to lead group discussions. We have learned from organizing WikidataCon what kind of facilitation will be needed for a successful event (i.e., technical support, mediation, Friendly Space Policy support), and we want to take this event as an opportunity to provide capacity building for community members to take up these leading roles. This is what we have done during WikidataCon and it has worked out successfully. In our risk assessment around this decision of relying on community members for facilitating discussions, we have agreed that besides the training we will provide we will convene two months before the event and re-assess the situation and then eventually decide to look for professional facilitators.

• Please specify the start and end dates for this grant. You can later update them if needed.

As our plan is to host the event in July, we’ll need the grant to start early January and to end by August when we will submit a final report.

• After your first successful national conference, would you consider running it in other locations in Brazil for the future?

Definitely. We initially considered to host the conference in a smaller city, that we would 'wiki take' in the context of the event, yet São Paulo is more practical and safer for a first time. We hope to bring the conference to Salvador (Northeast region) or Porto Alegre or Florianópolis (both in the South region), as this decentralization would contribute to our plan of decentering WMB's activities from the Southeast region. In the model in which the event would take place in a city we wiki-take, we would run activities to improve local-knowledge gaps on Wikimedia through edit-a-thons, photowalks, collaborative mapping, uploads of GLAM collections and partnerships with local government, as we normally do. It is worth noting that, in the two community surveys, we added a question on which city would be the best to host the conference and São Paulo was the one with the highest vote rate in the two cases, even among people who don’t live there. Plus, as it is going to be the first national conference organized by us, São Paulo seemed an operationally safe city to do that since the core organization team lives here and we are sure that we can count on the needed infrastructure in the city, especially as we are familiar with the sanitary protocols in the city. WMB also has around 30 official partners in São Paulo, thus providing an opportunity for broader connections in our ecosystem. Besides including them as potential participants of the event (as we need to include different stakeholders in our strategic discussions), they can provide support for the conference, as in the communication, for example, to reach out to more people.

Participation

• We think that ~19 responses to the community engagement survey is a low number given that the projected number of participants is 100. We understand that this is partially due to the fact that it was open only for a week. We'd strongly recommend keeping the survey open throughout the planning process so you can gather more input and adjust the program accordingly.

Yes, we’ll keep the survey running and diversify the communication channels in which it was circulated, so we can obtain more input from expected participants, which will be very helpful for us to design the program.

• With the low engagement for the community engagement survey, why do you think you'll have 100 participants in the conference? Do you have a plan B in case you have less participation?

Based on our experience with previous in-person events in São Paulo, we can easily gather up to 30 people for specific activities, as we did for a special Wikidata Lab at the University of São Paulo with Andrew Lih and Magnus Manske. Right before the pandemic hit, we were organizing a Lua training in São Paulo that would bring 25 people from different regions of the country. We have gathered up to 100 people just for an edit-a-thon activity at the Faculdade Cásper Líbero. Those were activities with very specific themes to be covered, meaning that we believe that the general scope of the conference will easily interest more people to participate. If we bring at least one person from each partnership in São Paulo, we can easily add 30 people at the event, for example. We have several university centers with education programs across the country that would be interested in participating. Our main challenge is to bring regional diversity to the event, for that we believe offering travel and accommodation subsidies will be key for ensuring participation of people from different Brazilian states.

• How will you make sure that community members are engaged in the development of the conference program?

We’ll take the following actions to ensure engagement in the development of the program:

1. Keep the community survey open to get more input
2. Community consultations for defining the main theme of the conference (as we did for WikidataCon when we came up with “a sustainable future for Wikidata”)
3. Organize pre-events to warm up for the conference discussions (also, as we did for engaging and empowering Latin America communities at WikidataCon)
4. Invite community curators for building the main program (that also worked out well at WikidataCon)
5. Design early on a communications strategy considering the different stakeholders needs
6. Link the conference to the current research led by WMB on the implementation of the Movement Strategy 2030 in the Lusophone community, focused on equity in decision making (it includes a survey, interviews and open conversations with the community; to be finished in February 2022)
7. Link the conference to WMB’s strategy process initiated in September 2021 that will be developed throughout a year based on the Movement Strategy recommendations and community consultations

• Please confirm that you plan to offer scholarships only to experienced community members.

We’ll define with our Diversity Committee criteria for offering scholarships as we want to ensure the meaningful participation of people from different locations and backgrounds in the conference discussions. As mentioned above, we are leading at the moment important discussions around equity in decision making in our community context, so practices for inclusion are important to us. In this sense, could you please clarify what you mean by “experienced community members"? We obviously don’t want to exclude experienced volunteers in the movement from receiving the support they need, if “experienced” means time of contribution.

• How do you plan to engage the community members who are outside of São Paulo after the conference?

As mentioned above, WMB is trying to decenter its activities from São Paulo and we intend to use the conference space to develop leadership capacities and provide a workshop on how to organize local events, for example, in order to encourage the participants to act locally as ambassadors on Wikimedia projects after the conference. We understand this event not just as an event for integrating our community, but also as an important moment for the development of a strategy for the Brazilian community to incorporate the WMF’s 2030 recommendations. WMB will keep track of the participants after the conference and provide support for their local activities, if needed.

Monitoring and evaluation

• The specific goals of WikiCon Brazil are mostly focused on participation. What other outcomes do you expect from this conference? How will you measure them?

Besides the quantity and diversity of participants, we also expect to:

1. Establish at least one Wikimedia ambassador for each Brazilian region (5), to be supported by WMB after the conference. Measure: Setup an open page for Wikimedia ambassadors in Brazil ratified by some conference participants interested in the role.
2. Advance in the development of the strategy process. Measure: at least two dedicated spaces for strategic discussions in the conference program and one document produced during the event
3. Improve Wikimedia outreach in Brazil. Measure: number of media appearances mentioning the conference (to be defined, based on the communications strategy for the conference)
4. Allow participant organizations to acquire new abilities in order to strengthen their local work. Measure: at least two workshops in the conference program dedicated to capacity building with up to 20 participants each

Staff

• Could you please provide a more detailed description of the staff roles? Why do you need these staff positions and what will be their contribution?

Based on our experience organizing WikidataCon, we’ve learned that counting solely on WMB’s professional setup would not be enough to organize an in-person event of that magnitude and that we need specific roles for doing so. Our current team is relatively short and in 2022 we’ll deliver a large set of activities apart from the conference. WMB’s professional team will be responsible for coordinating the team to be hired for the conference organization.

The roles needed are also based on the organizational structure we have relied on for delivering WikidataCon successfully. WMB has the tradition of defining roles & responsibilities early on the planning of the staff needed to conduct projects in detail. These documents are not normally shared publicly as they often have information that cannot be disclosed for privacy reasons, and as an example on this link you may find the roles&responsibilities document for a current contractor working on our strategy research, that has raised no privacy concern. We will make this kind of documents for the roles broadly explained below.

1. Communications officer: Responsible for managing the communications with participants, content creation and design for the conference.
2. Production officer: Responsible for the management of the conference production and logistics. Will support the program design and coordinate with the Communications officer.
3. Production assistant: Responsible for operationalizing the production of the event, under the management of the production officer. Will assist in the communication with stakeholders and in the participants' administration.
4. Administrative officer: Responsible for managing human and financial resources needed for the conference and ensuring WMB’s fiscal security.
5. Administrative assistant: Responsible for maintenance of tools for administrative control.

• There's a comment on the discussion page regarding the compensation rates. Are these rates lower than median monthly income in Brazil or Sao Paulo? If this is the case, then I kindly request to reconsider staff costs.

The compensation rates were calculated based on WMB’s staff salaries, which, in turn, were discussed with the WMF in previous rounds of funding. We have requested to the WMF a staff raise in our community funds proposal for 2022. If the staff salaries are adjusted, then we will request that compensations of the WikiCon BR team to be adjusted accordingly.

• How will you select and hire proposed staff members? How will you ensure a transparent process and avoid conflicts of interest? Do you plan to hire anyone from the organizing team?

In the context of WikidataCon, we have also hired people in Brazil specifically to organize the conference. User AJurno (WMB) was in charge of the production of the event, and we intend to hire her again as Production Officer given her gained experience. She’s signed in the organizing team with her volunteer user, ACheJu.

We will open a hiring procedure for other positions, making it publicly available on LinkedIn and other platforms yet to be defined. We’ll set-up a selection committee formed by CCosta (WMB), EAzzellini (WMB), JPeschanski (WMB), AJurno (WMB), chicovenancio and Ixocactus - the first three are members of the WMB professional team, the fourth was involved in WikidataCon, and the last two are part of our governing body and diversity committee. AJurno (WMB) would coordinate this hiring procedure starting in January. The committee will be responsible for evaluating resumes, applying knowledge tests and conducting interviews. We’ll aim for candidates with some experience on wiki and that correspond to the desired competencies for performing well in the positions offered. We want this to be an inclusive team, so we’ll aim for diversity in the process. We were not sure about what kind of potential conflict of interest you were referring to: could you please clarify?

• Who from the permanent staff will be involved in the planning of the conference? Will you outsource all staff members or some of them will be from your team?

Some members of the permanent staff will be involved. We are currently proposing a new organogram in our funding proposal for 2022 and we intend to use some aspects of our capacity to support the conference, but in any case, users CCosta (WMB), EAzzellini (WMB) and JPeschanski (WMB) will be in the roles of WMF liaison, logistics, program and communications as coordinators. They will serve in a supervision capacity, including this responsibility in their current position. The operational roles will be mainly outsourced.

Budget

• Meals - please confirm this budget will only cover lunches during the conference and one group dinner.

The meals budget were planned based on the following, with a 10% margin of risk:

Dinner: Friday and Saturday

Lunch: Saturday and Sunday

Coffee break: Saturday and Sunday

• Swags - please lower this expense and limit swag to low cost items like stickers only.

It is not clear for us why it would be necessary to limit this cost. Considering 100 people at the event, we aimed for 35 USD per person, which would cover expenses for t-shirts, ecobags and stickers.

• Cultural activities - could you provide more details about this expense?

Our Brazilian cultural session at WikidataCon received very positive feedbacks. One in particular was deep, as a fellow Wikimedian said that the performance at the wiki conference made him feel the very much needed joy we haven’t felt over the last few years regarding our country and it made him proud to be a Brazilian wikimedian contributing with the projects today. Planning cultural activities are great for better integrating the participants of the event, but it can also make them feel inspired to keep contributing and connect us to our local contexts, especially now that WMB has decolonization as one of its key principles.

We plan to organize a cultural activity for the event opening, maybe with live music on Saturday. We also want to organize group visits on Sunday to cultural spots in São Paulo, probably to some of our GLAM partners. We’ll prioritize safety in our planning so everyone can enjoy the activities. The expenses will cover the artists' fees, tickets and transportation expenses.

Capacity

• How will this conference affect Wiki Movimento Brazil's annual activities and capacity?

Wiki Movimento Brasil has almost ten years of experience and over the last few years have matured its operations and expanded its organizational capacity. We deliver diverse programs to the community and are internationally known for our competences.

WikiCon BR was included in our activities plan for 2022, as we hope this will connect to other activities we’ll be leading next year, mainly in the context of the development of our strategy. We have already planned to organize dedicated pre conference events to prepare the community for the expected discussions and integration. A major idea is to integrate WikiCon BR in our strategic cycle and use its power to give back to the community a feasible direction towards the Movement Strategy 2030 implementation in our context. One other expected outcome, also aligned with our goals for 2022, is to expand our regional distribution, which will be supported through the activities in the program of the conference.

• Could you share some lessons learned from the WikiDataCon 2021 that you will be using for this conference?

As mentioned above throughout our answers, organizing WikidataCon in partnership with WMDE has taught us a lot on how to organize a successful conference in different aspects: program design, participant engagement, operational needs etc. We are still in the process of reporting and discussing internally our learnings, that soon will be shared with the broad community.

Thanks again for your work. Looking forward to hearing from you soon. Best regards, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 13:14, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

@DSaroyan (WMF): Thank you for this thoughtful questions! They are really helpful! The core organizing team has set up a call meeting this Wednesday to start going over your questions. But, as you know, we are one week away from WikidataCon and very busy, and I was wondering if it would be OK to submit our answers in the first week of November? --Joalpe (talk) 13:33, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

Hi @Joalpe: sure, please take your time. Best regards, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 06:46, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

@DSaroyan (WMF): Thank you for giving us extra-time for replying to your questions. We've been busy, and your understanding gave us an opportunity to hold two discussion sessions in which ACheJu, Chicocvenancio, Hedestad, Ixocactus, EricaAzzellini, Sturm and I have participated. I have chosen to indent answers in your original message, and I hope this is fine. Cheers. --Joalpe (talk) 17:09, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Questions from the Conference Grants Committee

Hello EAzzellini (WMB), Joalpe and Wiki Movimento Brasil team, here are two additional questions from the Committee members. Please take your time to respond to these questions too.

• We are curious to learn about how you think implementation of the Movement Strategy 2030 will be in Brazil? How will it be aligned with the Movement Strategy as a whole?

This is a great question and is something we are working a lot on. We held this past Saturday a community meetup on the implementation of the Movement Strategy 2030 and are currently running a survey to learn from the community about how they think the Movement Strategy 2030 should be implemented in terms of equity in decision making. This meeting and this survey are part of a bigger project to work on the implementation of the Movement Strategy in Brazil started in September 2021. We organized our Theory of Change based on the study of the recommendations and we aim to include them in our broad strategy to be designed collaboratively with the community and other stakeholders. Being the single Wikimedia affiliate recognized in Brazil, we feel the responsibility to lead the discussions around the implementation of the Movement Strategy using our capacity for it, and we see WikiCon Brasil as a central event in this general process of discussing with the community on the Movement Strategy implementation.

More specifically, through our process, WMB will discuss purposefully the following Movement Strategy initiatives in our local context and capacity:

3 - Increased awareness about the Wikimedia Movement

11 - Resources for newcomers

12 - Peer-to-peer spaces

14 - Cross-project tool development and reuse

20 - Advocacy - local capacity development

22 - Movement Charter (Érica Azzellini, who is involved in the coordination of the event, was selected to be part of the Movement Charter Drafting Committee)

29 - Enhance communication and collaboration capacity with partners and collaborators

34 - Facilitate a culture of documentation

36 - Identify the impact of Wikimedia projects & content / Misinformation / Identifying impactful topics

37 - List of high-impact topics / Bridging content gaps

38 - Content initiatives in underrepresented communities

41 - Continuous experimentation, technology, and partnerships for content, formats, and devices

44 - Iterative change processes

• Could you please provide more details about expected outcomes that you would like to achieve with this conference?

Details were provided in the answer to the question on "Monitoring and evaluation" above. Please, let us know if the answer we have provided above is not enough, and there are more specific elements you would like us to discuss.

Best regards, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 10:56, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

@DSaroyan (WMF): Hello. To give you and the committee the heads-up. Event proponents met twice in the past two weeks and went over the first round of questions. We hope we will be able to post a thorough reply this week! We are grateful for your understanding. I will bring these two new questions to our group and work on the answers. Best. --Joalpe (talk) 12:22, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

@DSaroyan (WMF): Hi. Great questions! I have also indented answers to the Conference Grants Committee. We are of course available for further inquiries. Cheers. --Joalpe (talk) 17:25, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Grant approved for 380,750 BRL (73,221.15 USD)

Dear EAzzellini (WMB) and Wiki Movimento Brasil team,

Thank you for your work on the grant request and responding to our comments. We are glad to inform you that we have reviewed the final proposal and we are happy to support it! When implementing the grant, we recommend following the feedback and recommendations made by the LAC Regional Committee for your annual plan activities.

We will also send an email with more instructions and next steps. On behalf of the Conference Grants Committee and Community Resources team. Best regards, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 09:22, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

@DSaroyan (WMF): This is great news. Thank you! Yet, as indicated above, we were considering increasing the staff compensation rate, based on the rates we have submitted to the Wikimedia Community Fund application. Can we still do this change? Thanks again. --Joalpe (talk) 11:08, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

Hi Joalpe, thanks for the update. Since this grant is already approved, any increase should be done through an amendment request. You will need to post an amendment request in the discussion page with some information and requested budget. I recommend requesting this after having the final recommendations and decision about the General Support fund. After the amendment request is posted, we will need some time to review and process it. DSaroyan (WMF) (talk)

Staffing costs adjustiments

Dear @DSaroyan (WMF):. As you know, during WikiCon Brasil we forecast hiring people in positions of "officers" and "assistants". However, after the approval of our financing for 2022 (https://w.wiki/4aLU), the salary base for these positions was increased. In this way, I ask for an authorization for a readjustment of values, in order to make wages equal to others (both WikiCon Brasil and our Wikimedia Community Fund). In this case, officers will receive 6,500,00 instead of 4.500,00 and assistants will receive 3,250 instead of 2.250,00. Regards, CCosta (WMB) (talk) 13:50, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Hello CCosta (WMB), your request is formally approved. Please make the corresponding changes to the budget section of the grant proposal. Best, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 12:29, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Amendment to approved Grant

Dear @CAlmog (WMF):, as we have explained to you during our meeting yesterday, the organization team have identified the need to request an additional amount for us to successfully organize WikiCon Brasil 2022. There are three main reasons why the value approved and sent in advance will not be enough to meet our plans:

1. The dollar exchange rate in course when we received the grant was lower than expected;
2. The reopening of “post-pandemic” tourism coupled with the increase in fuel prices has caused an aggressive rise of air tickets’ prices, and the market projection is that they will continue to rise over the next months;
3. In September of 2021, when we wrote the event proposal, we imagined that it would be possible to offer accommodation in double rooms for the participants, as other Wikimedia conferences have done in the past. But, due to the ongoing coronavirus situation plus the collective trauma related to it, we’ll need to provide single rooms. As we don’t want to cut in half the total number of scholarships, we’d need additional funding for that as well.

Fortunately, Goethe-Institut São Paulo offered us the venue in kind, meaning that we’ll allocate part of the budget planned for renting the venue of the conference to cover the main costs we’re lacking. With your previous approval, we are free to move values between lines of the financing request table. After having said all that and a lot of thought and calculations, we have come to a final value. Anticipating that inflation and airfares will continue to rise, we would like to ask for an amendment to our Grant to include an additional US$ 6.850,00. Regards, AJurno (WMB) (talk)

@CAlmog (WMF): Chico Venancio (talk) 20:32, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Hi AJurno (WMB) and Chico Venancio .

Thank you for this detailed explanation. Your request for a 6,850 USD increase - is approved. I will send you a separate email on how to process an amendment. Best, CAlmog (WMF) (talk) 12:53, 25 March 2022 (UTC)