Grants talk:Project/Wiki Loves Monuments international team/2021 coordination

Proposal Clinics

Thanks for posting your draft proposal for the Project Grants open call! I wanted to make sure you are aware that we are hosting proposal clinics for applicants to discuss, ask questions and get feedback about their proposals. Participation is optional. If you would like to attend, you can find the dates, times and videoconference links posted at this link. Let me know if you have any questions! Good luck finishing and submitting your proposal for the February 10 deadline!

Warm regards,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 14:10, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Reporting reduction request

Hello,

I just wanted to acknowledge your request to reduce the reporting burden. Yes! This makes total sense and we will work with you to make the reporting requirements reasonable for your unique situation. Let's talk about this in a live call at some point before a contract is signed, as I think it might make sense to reduce the reporting requirements even further than you have proposed.

Warm regards, --Marti (WMF) (talk) 16:29, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

2021 PROPOSAL (2020 int. part didn't happen +some national lists are bad/missing)

Hi! Here is a 2021 PROPOSAL

• as 2020 international part did not happen (no generated lists)
• some national lists are bad (to old, narrow or other exclusive)

2021 PROPOSAL would be to create lists via Wikidata using Wikipedia pages on monuments (they passed notability)...and keep track of which articles are already there with photos which got first, which updates.

Best Zblace (talk) 16:41, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

I understand that there was not much capacity in the team to develop international and/or to support regional (sub/trans-national) competitions, but if you would re-include it as experimental development project I am happy to help organize activity with other people who previously objected to only national-lists/competitions. Let me knwo what you think! Best - Zblace (talk) 22:57, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

@Zblace: I'm not sure exactly what you mean but any help is welcome, d:Wikidata:WikiProject WLM/Status is a good place to start. Right now we only have around 2 million monuments on Wikidata, but indeed there is still a lot of work. Cheers, VIGNERON * ^discut. 23:24, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

@VIGNERON: is that bragging? ;-) It is a good number, hopefully well spread around...What I mean is that many countries and regions do not have official lists, which prevents local contributions under current WLM rules... + there was paranoia of double representation, that someone would compete in both local-regional/trans-national and national competitions (which is easy to eliminate). I think:

1. all photographic/video contributions to monuments that have Wikipedia page which they could advance should be accepted
2. all regions should have right for self-determination of competition (not to be regulated per country as only option)

Is this more clear to understand? Best - Zblace (talk) 14:56, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

@Zblace: not bragging at all and it's a very low number (I know for France, we have around 0,5 million monument to add, I plan to do it before next September). Technically, most country in the world have a list (for instance, per the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict) but indeed these list are often not available (or not easily at least).

Oh, I get it now. Double representation is indeed problematic (it's easy to eliminate but it would biase the chance to win the competition). That said, I'd love to see area without a local competition take part in WLM (we talked a bit about it least year, but a lot of work is needed).

« all photographic/video contributions to monuments that have Wikipedia page » maybe not all (depends on definition of monuments) but yes, I approve the general idea.

« all regions should have right for self-determination of competition », the last part is political and uneeded: « all regions should tak part in the competition » (we managed to have Antartica to participate 2 years for instance, again it's a lot of work but nothing impossible).

Cheers, VIGNERON * ^discut. 15:15, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

@VIGNERON: bragging was a joke :-) Yes state-managed lists of monuments are not updated or not available. We can do it bottom up, as Wikidata items from Wikipedia articles.

It is super easy to remove double representation and it should not be an argument to prevent more entry level engagement. As for new areas - I fail to understand how is that so much more complicated that you decided to remove it from the budget this year. Do you lack vision of a model? I offered to do a worksession with all people who want to innovate the competition and come up with solution, but from what I see now it was...ignored? Please correct me if I am wrong User talk:KCVelaga! Zblace (talk) 13:57, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Explicit transparency of local competitions needed

Hi! Again I wanted to ask from you to commit to explicit transparency not only on international level of coordination, but also on national/regional/international sub-competitions. I noticed that you made a request for jury members and organizers to be listed, but if they never do that what are you going to do? It seem that just accepting is inertia that goes against basic Wikimedia principles and onWiki practices.

Best -- Zblace (talk) 16:48, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Hey KCVelaga - I saw the etherpad after the second meeting did not have much to report and also my inputs from first meeting are not addressed. Could you please at least answer this one as it ties into core principles of Wikimedia movement. Best Zblace (talk) 22:48, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Hi @Zblace: As you mentioned, we tried to address this last year by encouraging national organizers to be transparent about jurors, however, it was not mandated as it was first time. However, we have plans to make it default from 2021's competition. KCVelaga (talk) 12:21, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Reminder: Change status to proposed to submit

IMPORTANT: Please note that you must change your proposal status from "draft" to "proposed" by the submission deadline in order for your proposal to be reviewed in the current round. When your proposal has been successfully submitted, it will show up in the "Open proposals" list (it may take several minutes for the list to update after you submit it). Applications that are not completely filled out and correctly submitted by the deadline will not be reviewed. To submit your proposal, you must complete all fields of the application and then:

1. Click on "edit source"

2. Change "|status=DRAFT" to "|status=PROPOSED"

3. Click the "Publish changes" button.

Thank you,

--MCasoValdes (WMF) (talk) 02:29, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed, Round 1 2021 - Community Organizing proposal

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for review in Round 1 2021 for Community Organizing projects. This decision is contingent upon compliance with our COVID-19 guidelines. If your proposal includes travel and/or offline events, you must ensure that all of the following are true:

• You have reviewed and can comply with the guidelines linked above.
• If necessary because of COVID-19 safety risks, you can complete the core components of your proposed work plan _without_ offline events or travel.
• You are able to postpone any planned offline events or travel until the Wikimedia Foundation’s guidelines allow for them, without significant harm to the goals of your project.
• You include a COVID-19 planning section in your activities plan. In this section, you should provide a brief summary of how your project plan will meet COVID-19 guidelines, and how it would impact your project if travel and offline events prove unfeasible throughout the entire life of your project. If you have not already included this in your proposal, you have until February 28 to add it.

The Community review period is now underway, from February 20-March 4. We encourage you to make sure that stakeholders, volunteers, and/or communities impacted by your proposed project are aware of your proposal and invite them to give feedback on your talkpage. This is a great way to make sure that you are meeting the needs of the people you plan to work with and it can help you improve your project.

• If you are applying for funds in a region where there is a Wikimedia Affiliate working, we encourage you to let them know about your project, too.
• If you _are_ a Wikimedia Affiliate applying for a Project Grant: A special reminder that our guidelines and criteria require you to announce your Project Grant requests on your official user group page on Meta and a local language forum that is recognized by your group, to allow adequate space for objections and support to be voiced).

Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during the community review period. By March 4, make sure that your proposal has incorporated any revisions you want to make and complies with all of our guidelines. If you have not already done so, you can make use of our project planning resources to improve your proposal further, too.

The Project Grant committee's formal review for round 1 2020 will occur March 5 through March 20, 2021. We ask that you refrain from making any further changes to your proposal during the committee review period, so we can be sure that all committee members are scoring the same version of the proposal.

Grantees will be announced Friday, April 22, 2021. Sometimes we have to make some changes to the round schedule. If that happens, it will be reflected on the round schedule on the Project Grants start page.

We look forward to engaging with you in this Round!

Questions? Contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 03:40, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

‎Feedback from Campaigns Strategy perspective at WMF

As the committee is probably already aware, the Wiki Loves Monuments campaign is important for growing movement capacity for running campaigns. The Goals of the program seem reasonable -- I have also been talking with the committee about their current model and what they are hoping for the future. In particular, there is space for the campaign to grow in both its diversity of contribution strategies, and in continuing to cultivate new leadership. Other campaigns with international scale and scope like this one have hired professional project management (i.e. Wiki Loves Earth, and the request for WPWP this round) to support the volunteer committees and to facilitate some of the consistency of process and support for local communities. I would encourage that to be part of the international committees continued discussions about strategy and capacity -- the movement relies heavily on the existence of this campaign to support and grow communities and document monuments and heritage around the world. Astinson (WMF) (talk) 17:03, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

• Not sure that discussing is an option, especially if team is overstretched and can barely communicate anything that adds complexity to their work (my experience in 2020)... There should be very direct change of modus operandi, specific actions in capacity building and resources behind both of that. In my opinion - thinking out of box and innovating is not going to hapen just via professionalization of single managment position if low level (now unsustainable) work remains dominant - no? Zblace (talk) 22:04, 24 February 2021 (UTC)
  • What I have noticed is that when the core "business as usual" mechanics of the campaign is managed and coordinated by someone, the volunteers have space to contribute the innovation and energy that characterizes volunteer work. Its not a guaranteed fix, but at least as I have observed with other campaigns and community activities -- paid professional support helps keep the team from getting dragged down by the more mundane "core" of drafting communications, coordinating calls, etc -- I am hopeful that the team will be able to find some space for that as they keep planning, Astinson (WMF) (talk) 21:25, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for Wiki Loves Monuments international team/2021 coordination

Scoring rubric	Score
(A) Impact potential Does it have the potential to increase gender diversity in Wikimedia projects, either in terms of content, contributors, or both? Does it have the potential for online impact? Can it be sustained, scaled, or adapted elsewhere after the grant ends?	6.4
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	7.0
(C) Ability to execute Can the scope be accomplished in the proposed timeframe? Is the budget realistic/efficient ? Do the participants have the necessary skills/experience?	8.0
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	6.8
Additional comments from the Committee: Wiki Loves Monuments is a long time contest that always proposes the same format. High impact project Wiki Loves Monuments is a mature campaign. This maturity could lead to a better discussion of knowledge equity, in which the general idea of what a monument is (and why it should be depicted, what power dynamics it represents...) and the relevance of images that are not necessarily of great quality but are important documents should be more strongly taken into consideration. Improve the experience of users It has been a good model to replicate but at the moment it is not inspiring anymore. High impact project that could be measured I miss a better understanding of what has affected successes and issues of this campaign over the years. I don't think best practices are the only documentation we need; we also need to understand why communities have disengaged, have never engaged and so on. The team has the ability to execute it with the current plan WLM has been a successful campaign for many years. The team has a track record of success. Congratulations on your 10th edition. I do not see enough community engagement Is the fact that national organizers are not massively supporting this project worrisome? Is there a disconnect between the international team and local organizers? This kind of campaign depends a lot on good communication skills, in which organizers feel they are welcome and empowered to impact the overall project. How has communication from the international team been with local organizers? The contest has a long tradition and a consolidated format but the project is always lacking about governance. After several years, this step is required. The model should scale and help to implement a better governance looking more in the rules, being more transparent and assigning the selection of the pictures to a group of external people not connected with the international team to avoid COI. This lack of governance and this management of COI is crucial also to the movement because smaller communities frequently start to do a national Wiki loves Monuments and behind the organization of the national contest there may be a knowledge transfer too. The group increased in terms of tools, communication, but the governance is not yet their cup of tea. I am recommending this proposal for funding but it may be interesting to have the list of monuments that have been covered as this would give us the idea of the knowledge gap, otherwise, we will just be having duplication of photos year-in-year-out. WLM is a strong campaign that could benefit from a project grant. I wish the proposal was more aligned with a discussion on knowledge equity and documenting issues and disengagement, as we can learn as much from them as we learn from success cases and best practices. Its potential of Improving the experience of users and helping local Wikimedia Communities is laudable.

This proposal has been recommended for due diligence review.

The Project Grants Committee has conducted a preliminary assessment of your proposal and recommended it for due diligence review. This means that a majority of the committee reviewers favorably assessed this proposal and have requested further investigation by Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Next steps:

1. Aggregated committee comments from the committee are posted above. Note that these comments may vary, or even contradict each other, since they reflect the conclusions of multiple individual committee members who independently reviewed this proposal. We recommend that you review all the feedback and post any responses, clarifications or questions on this talk page.
2. Following due diligence review, a final funding decision will be announced on Friday, April 22, 2021.

Questions? Contact us.

Marti (WMF) (talk) 05:04, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Round 1 2021 decision

Congratulations! Your proposal has been selected for a Project Grant.

The committee has recommended this proposal and WMF has approved funding for the full amount of your request, 36,500 EUR

Comments regarding this decision:
The committee is pleased to fund coordination at the international level for Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) 2021. They appreciate that you will focus on more proactive support for national organizers, and improving evaluation and learning practices.

The committee has awarded an additional 9,000 Euros (beyond the original proposal request of 27,500 EUR at submission) to support the additional scope of work discussed via email to create a participatory process of better integrating the knowledg equity theme into the WLM contest. For purposes of transparency, we ask that, as soon as possible, you post on update on your proposal page reflecting that additional scope of work.

The committee also requested that you further break down the $9,000 budget and activities for support of national competitions, documenting the ways you intend to better support local organisers, so it will be easier for others to review and give feedback on the planned scope of work before it is implemented.

Additional comments captured from the committee discussion in relation to the proposed work on knowledge equity:

• The committee discussed the importance of consulting not just participant communities, but also non-participant communities to understand the reason for the lack of participation. One participant noted that participation in Latin America has lower rates of participation in WLM and found it useful to try to understand why.

• Another committee member recommended seeking to capture learning, especially about contested histories, and asked, “How can experiences be captured from people who are outside WLM but engaged in those conversations?”
• The committee discussed that the proposed work may benefit from working with more than one EDI consultant, with different specializations. Multiple skills are needed: support for thinking through politics of memorialization, contested histories in the context of colonization, support for contested histories. It is recommended that there be a consultant with broad international knowledge. Finding the right person might be a significant stage in itself.
• The committee expressed interest in knowledge equity support for WLM to be continual, not just one year, and saw this request as support for first steps.
• The committee discussed the desirability of avoiding a US bias in the process. They noted that while the discussion of equity and monuments has been very active in the US in the last year, in some other contexts local organizers have had discussions in this direction for several years. This effort should connect discussions already happening and bring communities that might not be having these discussions onboard.

NOTE: Funding of any offline activities (e.g. travel and in-person events) is contingent upon compliance with the Wikimedia Foundation's COVID-19 guidelines. We require that you complete the Risk Assessment Tool:

• 14 days before any travel and/or gathering event
• 24 hours before any travel and/or gathering event

Offline events may only proceed if the tool results continue to be green or yellow.

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement and setup a monthly check-in schedule.
2. Review the information for grantees.
3. Use the new buttons on your original proposal to create your project pages.
4. Start work on your project!

Upcoming changes to Wikimedia Foundation Grants

Over the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has been undergoing a community consultation process to launch a new grants strategy. Our proposed programs are posted on Meta here: Grants Strategy Relaunch 2020-2021. If you have suggestions about how we can improve our programs in the future, you can find information about how to give feedback here: Get involved. We are also currently seeking candidates to serve on regional grants committees and we'd appreciate it if you could help us spread the word to strong candidates--you can find out more here. We will launch our new programs in July 2021. If you are interested in submitting future proposals for funding, stay tuned to learn more about our future programs.

Marti (WMF) (talk) 05:35, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Proposed DEI work

During conversations with the Community Resources team, the International Team realized the need to integrate the strategic direction of knowledge equity deeper in our work. In the wake of George Floyd's murder in the United States last year, there were anti-racist civil rights protests sparked in over 60 countries on all seven continents. Many sources referenced it as one of the largest (some sources said the single largest) globally distributed civil rights movement in history. Monuments played a prominent role in protest actions associated with this movement. We would like to acknowledge this. It is not only about acknowledging an important social issue that is closely tied to "monuments" but also pushes the campaign in a new direction. Several options, including special prize/category etc. are in consideration. However, we feel that only having a special prize or a category won't address the issue completely, as the meanings of oppression and their relations with monuments are quite varied across the globe, and not to make the work US- or Europe-centric. In some countries, this problem is also tied to the lists of monuments themselves or how governments define what a monument is and what is not. With the additional DEI budget, we would like to hire consultant(s) to help us explore this area in collaboration with the national organizers and other stakeholders. The work broadly includes designing a special prize; reviewing the campaign globally and provide a list of recommendations for 2022; and help us recruit a working group that will help us implement these changes. We will take the committee's comments into consideration. We welcome community members thoughts/suggestions. KCVelaga (talk) 13:02, 24 April 2021 (UTC)