Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Conference Fund/Wikimedia Youth Conference 2024

WMF review and feedback

Hi @TaronjaSatsuma and the Wikivibrance team,

Thank you very much for this proposal and for your initiative in organizing the first Youth Conference. I highly appreciate the time and effort you put into this proposal. I have reviewed your proposal and have some comments and follow up questions.

Objectives and Strategy

• Establishing a Youth charter and a structor implementation plan are good goals and will be an amazing achievement. I just worry this might be a bit too ambitious for a 3 days first gathering. Have you started such conversations before? What is the work you are building on? I think that if this is your goal, you would need to start working with the community on identifying priority areas before the conference, to set it up for success.
• An outreach strategy is especially crucial in my view - both for non-wiki and for the movement to leverage your work.
• Who will be the non-wiki partners you will (or are) be working with?
• Can you show the impact of the annual campaigns you presented? Do you have metrics or a way to clearly indicate the impact or change you have generated?
• As I see a value in having Youth focused Wikimedia activities, me and the committee are having a hard time understanding the justification for the conference. Your target audience is 'young Wikimedians' aged 18-35 (and I acknowledge your original target audience was under 18). According to statistics, the 59% of Wikipedia editors are aged 17-40. Which means the majority of editors are already within the target age group you are focusing on and I believe this is true to participants at Wikimedia conferences as well. We have a concern that "young Wikimedian" might not be a well defined enough category within the movement to justify a global conference at this time. Can you please elaborate and explain the specific benefits and vision you have for the conference and what kind of impact and value are you expecting it will bring to the Wikimedia movement?

Logistical Aspects

• Can you share some of the eligibility criteria you are considering for the scholarships?
• As you do not currently have a local partner and you are not based in Spain, how will you manage on-ground planning and logistics? Are you partnering with a government officials or the Spanish immigration office for visas? (please mind that travel agencies usually does not provide visa support services).

Budget:

• Is this a 3 or 4 days conference? I see you have budgeted for 5 nights and this is more than the standard conference length. It's also a lot considering this is your first gathering. I strongly suggest 2 days or up to 3.
• Please note that Wikimedia Foundation staff's travel, visa and accommodation is covered independently by the foundation. So please remove the budget items that include WMF staff costs.
• I see you have budgeted for 95 people, but you indicated 105 total participants. Can you please clarify?
• Many times the Audiovisual are included in the venue fees. Have you checked if this will be an option?
• What kind of translation method will you use?
• Given the budget request, I recommend going with only 1 type of entertainment activity (dinner OR city tour Or Concert).
• As I already told you in some of our earlier conversations via email, your $202,000 budget request is extremely high and is far beyond the standard/ average cost per person for our community fund events (the benchmark for the bigger, regional events usually does not exceeds the 1,000-1,300 USD. Let alone smaller scale thematic events). That makes me wonder what is tying you to Spain? Spain might just be an expensive location for such a conference. Have you explored other options? (given that the Valencian Youth Institute's in kind support is not currently guaranteed).

If you think Spain is the best location for you, I suggest looking into other resources of funding or potential sponsorships and partnerships (in kind as well). Our partnership team might also be able to help with that later if we move forward. Another option is to look into the budget items and see what kind of adjustments you can make, and maybe removing or scoping down some of the services.

Thank you again for this proposal. When you're able, please respond to the questions above and revise the proposal on Fluxx if needed. These revisions will be due by October 2nd, 2023, after which the Conference Grant Committee will begin formal review of the proposal to make the funding decisions. Thank you, CAlmog (WMF) (talk) 04:24, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

WikiVibrance Team Feedback

Dear CAlmog (WMF),

Thank you for taking your time to review this application and for sending your comments. Below is the response to the questions you asked:

• Establishing a Youth charter and a structured implementation plan are good goals and will be an amazing achievement. I just worry this might be a bit too ambitious for a 3 days first gathering. Have you started such conversations before? What is the work you are building on? I think that if this is your goal, you would need to start working with the community on identifying priority areas before the conference, to set it up for success.
  • We intend to start the conversation to identify the priority areas as soon as we confirm this grant. But we have also been having some internal strategic conversations in the build up to the grant confirmation.
• An outreach strategy is especially crucial in my view - both for non-wiki and for the movement to leverage your work.
  • This is also a priority area identified for the stated goals. We have already secured alliance with a number of wikimedia and non-wikimedia entities through our recent programs, (see more on meta) we plan to utilize these connections in this conference. We have kept 10 slots for our supporters from non-wikimedia partners.

• Who will be the non-wiki partners you will (or are) be working with?
  • Given that we want to use this conference as an outreach strategy among others to share how young people in the wikimedia movement contribute to open knowledge and attract young people and/or collaborations from mission-aligned organizations, We hope to work with youth focused and/or youth-led organizations, networks, initiatives to reach a broad audience beyond the movement. Some of our core team belong to global youth movements and participate in global youth community engagement that we hope to explore with the support of the Wikimedia Foundation for possible partnerships if the conference application is approved. But we want to confirm the outcome of our application before taking a step in this direction. However, some of the partners we have been discussing include the youth communities at UNICEF, UNESCO, Valencia Youth Institute among others.

• Can you show the impact of the annual campaigns you presented? Do you have metrics or a way to clearly indicate the impact or change you have generated?
  • Through these annual campaigns, we have engaged about 1058 youth and people supporting their journey across 22 communities, creating 7,637 articles, improving 25,341 articles, 22,606 wikidata items and 3,719 wikimedia common uploads. Please see the different campaigns on our meta page. We recently concluded the third iteration of the International Youth Day campaign that enabled collaborations across different wikimedia communities from Africa, Germany, Turkey, Greece, Bangladesh, and others. Beyond our wikimania session, creating 1494 articles and improving 3173 articles, we created a fun-filled space that brought young people in the movement together to share in the joy of the 2023 International Youth Day and their different wikimedia experiences on this call. We also organized a series of events during the 2023 WikiForHumanRights that collaborated with the UNFCCC Youth Constituency, YOUNGO and Cambridge Climate Society to engage about 90 youth climate activists from around the world. Also, as the implementing partner for Africa Knowledge Initiative for the Africa Youth Month campaign, we engaged about 12 African wikimedia communities in fun activities which grew our X (formerly Twitter) followership from about 100 to more than 500 in just 2 months, increasing the visibility of our work and prompting young people outside the movement to reach out with interest to join us in our mission.

Through these campaigns, we have learnt that young people in the movement are excited to engage in the spaces created by the campaigns because it connects them with their peers while creating the opportunity to collaborate together on projects as one youth open movement.

• As I see a value in having Youth focused Wikimedia activities, me and the committee are having a hard time understanding the justification for the conference. Your target audience is 'young Wikimedians' aged 18-35 (and I acknowledge your original target audience was under 18). According to statistics, the 59% of Wikipedia editors are aged 17-40. Which means the majority of editors are already within the target age group you are focusing on and I believe this is true to participants at Wikimedia conferences as well. We have a concern that "young Wikimedian" might not be a well defined enough category within the movement to justify a global conference at this time. Can you please elaborate and explain the specific benefits and vision you have for the conference and what kind of impact and value are you expecting it will bring to the Wikimedia movement?
  • Convenings or gatherings that bring young people in the movement together as one open youth movement makes a very clear, loud statement to external audiences - Young people building free knowledge are here and this is how we are doing it. We clearly saw a glimpse of this through the Africa Knowledge Initiative Africa Youth Month 2022 campaign we implemented across 12 African countries and in the diaspora. It was the energy generated from the in-person events that complemented the efforts of those participating online and we saw how that increased our fellowship and visibility by 50% in just 2 months. We also got requests from different young people to join our work. We need to also come together to design our support system to accommodate the inflow of new young people that will come from our outreach efforts.

But we do not have this many convenings to gather as the youth open movement that we are building to attract other young people. Young people also need to build trust with themselves through this convening to strengthen their capacity to work together effectively.

As already mentioned in the application, we have been mobilizing, engaging and interacting with young people in diverse communities in the movement for the past 2 years. From then to now, we see how this is raising youth voice in the movement and inspiring people and communities to lead youth focus work. As our activities ignite growing energy among the youth, it is important for young people to gather together to co-shape a structure that coordinates, supports and builds an open youth movement. This coordination and structuring is critical as our outreach efforts bring opportunities to collaborate with external organizations and youth networks that would require us to engage as a collection of communities and/or regions in these partnerships.

We have a good number of conferences and wikimedia in person spaces where the young wikimedians also join but none of these in person spaces address the special needs of the young wikimedians, same for the online activities. Wikivibrance is the first wikimedia group to address specific needs of the young wikimedians at a global level. A high bandwidth in person event like a wikimedia conference can never be compared to online activities. We are determined to use this opportunity to invite people from all over the world who are youth themselves or working with youth wikimedians to address the special needs of the youth wikimedians and to create the motivation to proceed towards the solutions.

Regarding the target audience, we will prioritize 18-35 but also consider those outside of this bracket with experience working with or engaging young people in the movement. It is important to note that youth age definition varies across countries and regions. For example in Africa and Asia, it is about 15-35, and less than this in Europe and other geographies. But for an extremely distributed movement like Wikimedia, So far, we do not have any clear definition of who is considered a young person in the movement and this is an important discussion. We want to use the conference as a platform to shape this as well. Our participants, who are young wikimedians themselves or are working with the young wikimedians, will decide together which age range will be a perfect fit for the wikimedia youth definition.

• Can you share some of the eligibility criteria you are considering for the scholarships?
  • This will be determined by the conference scholarship committee and then published once that is available.
• As you do not currently have a local partner and you are not based in Spain, how will you manage on-ground planning and logistics? Are you partnering with a government officials or the Spanish immigration office for visas? (please mind that travel agencies usually does not provide visa support services).
  • We are currently still exploring partnership with the Valencia Youth Institute. We also have a travel agency resident in Spain that we will be working with. Our Core Team member @TaronjaSatsuma is also based in Spain and will be supporting on-ground with other Wikimedia affiliates to take the necessary steps for the planning and logistics

• Is this a 3 or 4 days conference? I see you have budgeted for 5 nights and this is more than the standard conference length. It's also a lot considering this is your first gathering. I strongly suggest 2 days or up to 3.
  • This will be a 3-day conference with participants arriving a day to the conference making it 4 nights. This should be an oversight and we have corrected this.

• Please note that Wikimedia Foundation staff's travel, visa and accommodation is covered independently by the foundation. So please remove the budget items that include WMF staff costs.
  • Done
• I see you have budgeted for 95 people, but you indicated 105 total participants. Can you please clarify?
  • We are leaving room for an additional 10 people who might come from the youth-focused organizations/networks’ partnerships we are exploring.

• Many times the Audiovisual are included in the venue fees. Have you checked if this will be an option?
  • This was only mentioned in the site services section but please let us know if there are other specific places you saw this so we can check it.
• What kind of translation method will you use?
  • Simultaneous interpretaion

• Given the budget request, I recommend going with only 1 type of entertainment activity (dinner OR city tour Or Concert).
  • Done
• As I already told you in some of our earlier conversations via email, your $202,000 budget request is extremely high and is far beyond the standard/ average cost per person for our community fund events (the benchmark for the bigger, regional events usually does not exceeds the 1,000-1,300 USD. Let alone smaller scale thematic events). That makes me wonder what is tying you to Spain? Spain might just be an expensive location for such a conference. Have you explored other options? (given that the Valencian Youth Institute's in kind support is not currently guaranteed).
  • The budget has also been reduced now after making the changes you recommended and we are still exploring the youth institute in-kind donation as well as other new ones where possible.

• If you think Spain is the best location for you, I suggest looking into other resources of funding or potential sponsorships and partnerships (in kind as well). Our partnership team might also be able to help with that later if we move forward. Another option is to look into the budget items and see what kind of adjustments you can make, and maybe removing or scoping down some of the services.

Thank you for the recommendation and we are happy to have the WMF partnership team support this as well.

Kind regards,

James Moore200 (talk) 18:59, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

On behlaf of the Team.