Wikimedia 2030/Transition/Reports/Advocacy and GLAM/December 2020/Group D Summary

Group D video presentation by Francesc - 12 December 2020

The following report is part of the Advocacy and GLAM event report, and presents key points from the discussions in the fourth breakout room: Group D - Capacity Development for Advocacy.

Discussed questions

Main question:
- What do we want to achieve in 18 months?
Supporting question:
- What are the immediate steps we need to take?

Discussion Details

Initiative description: Provide for Safety and Inclusion
Facilitator: Francesc
Notetaker: Fiona, Evelin, Hardarshan
Participants: Francesc Fort, Evelin Heidel, Fiona Romeo, Szymon Grabarczuk, Alice Kibombo, Joy Agyepong, Giovanna Fontenelle, Jeremiah, Rene BILE, Mikaeel Sodiq, Hardarshan Benipal.

Key Discussion Points

Summarized Points

Started talking through the experience in different contexts.
Need to make advocacy easy to understand which is one of the main issues in doing advocacy work.
People have more willingness to learn than actual time to learn things.
The movement should focus on strengths and finding a place for people in the movement.
In the developing countries when advocates are in contact with GLAM entities the proposals are unclear. We need to make it more clear.
Creating coherence between energetic volunteers and the vision of the GLAM institutions.
Focusing too much on reaching out to particular institutions rather than looking at general advocacy efforts.
For the 18 months the idea was to translate the documents created by GLAMs and create a corpus to work with.

Detailed Notes

Round of introductions - Participants

Francesc (Amical Wikimedia)
Fiona, WMF Senior Manager GLAM & Culture
Evelin (scann), Creative Commons lead for OpenGLAM, and developing new GLAM CC certificate course
Szymon (WMPL Vice-Chair, lawyer, folks have been asking him for legal advice on the issues around licenses, and this is very much close to GLAM & advocacy)
Hardarshan (Punjabi Wikimedian, also working at Open Heritage Foundation)
Mikaeel (community lead from Yoruba Wikimedians Group)
Giovanna (part of the GLAM team at WMF, she was part of the Wiki Movimento Brasil User Group, now a volunteer member)
Jeremiah (new to the Wikimedia movement)
Joy (based in Ghana, many hats in the Wikimedia movement!, program coordinator with the Open Heritage Foundation)
René (from Cameroon)
Alice (volunteer, Wikimedia Community User Group in Uganda, serve as the WiR for AFLIA)

General Discussion

"Capacity building” definition in the context of the Wikimedia movement

Which tools, which abilities do we need to have in order to be able to do advocacy in a successful way?
Types of capacity-building:

Training within movement to improve GLAM content (tools and skills);
How the movement volunteers influence GLAMs to contribute their content to Wikimedia platforms;
Exploring newer ideas, such as indigenous rights, intangible cultural heritage, digitization

What do we want to achieve in 18 months? What are the immediate steps?

As the Wikipedian in residence for AfLIA, training professional library staff, … first session is very theoretical, when we address advocacy gets many of the participants confused and it’s a good opportunity to talk about it, but they have to go down to the basics -- why? But they can’t even go to the “hows”, even when they train other librarians across the country, advocacy is going to be treated as its own, because is too big to be combined with other topics, so it’s actually they’re looking at as skills development
The reason I called out Alice’s work is because she is reaching potential collaborators through their existing professional networks. This is a model I can imagine us replicating within other networks.
Building capacity or capacity building for Wikimedia participants for GLAM or Wikimedia, in my region most of the problems we face is that most of our contributors although they are ready to learn but they are short of time to manage things, many of them live in different places, most of the times they organize online meetings on how-to do things on Wikipedia/Wikimedia projects. They want to contribute, but they don’t have good knowledge to contribute more on projects. Acknowledge the challenges. Help them learn / see more on what they can do to improve our Wikimedia projects.

If we could change the world in 18 months, what would that be?

One thing, making people have a better understanding of the basic things and how to go about doing the right thing at the right time. Most of our contributors are saying that they..
Capacity building and what it would like to see, I benefited a lot from practicing librarians, their wiki-skills are specialized, and you will find those who are really skilled at content curating, practically developed… one of the things she would like to see.. There’s so much at the wikiverse and something for everyone… is to specialize in something, some of the things I’d like to see… she found GLAM as her space in the movement.

What should we specialize in?

Specializing maybe is too big of a word, but concentrating, focusing on someone’s special strength, esp. In the movement, dealing with some of the librarians, whose knowledge & expertise she has benefitted from, some of them have become adept to editing, and being able to do the work that they do, which is part of advocacy. What are they good at? Their strengths are improved in that area.
Not with her WMF hat, but more with her volunteer groups with the WMNO Brazil, something it’s kind of hard to make the GLAM institutions understand that they work they can do with the Wikimedia projects goes beyond of what they first understand -- they focus a lot on how their objects are going to be visualized more through the wikimedia platforms; the link between the works shared & the website from the institution; and sometimes in a place like Brazil that’s not reason enough to share their works through the Wikimedia platforms; it goes beyond that fact to the fact that it’s important for them to share their knowledge, the work, bc it makes a difference not only for them but for education, etc., advancement of the country. This is something that we see more in developing countries, bc there are institutions that have problems with basic stuff, we try to make them understand to take their efforts, trying to explain to them why this is important as a social aspect as well.
In some contexts, they won’t have expertise in digitization, or digital skills more generally. See work of Heritage Lab in India, where they persuaded an institution to release their collection because they got a lot of social media attention and that was the most important metric of success for them. So content should be targeted to their motivations. Most GLAMs don’t have legal expertise or knowledge of copyright to begin with, so it’s hard to interest them in ideas about open access. In some regions see Wikimedia platforms as digital colonialism. There is a value gap that needs to be solved between the enthusiasm of Wikimedia volunteers and the GLAM perspective. Different levels you can work at: advocacy to change national policies, or work with an institution to release a small part of their collection.
A lot of things you can do with Wikimedia volunteers but also things you can do with GLAM institutions directly. Capacity building for volunteers to go and talk with the GLAM to do releases, and then capacity building for GLAM institutions to understand the “open” parts.