Hi Heather,
Apologies for the delayed response; as you’ve probably heard, we’ve been a bit under the weather around here. In any case, here are a few thoughts related to your questions, I hope they’re clarifying.
The Global South strategy and what it really means: Thank you too for giving us another opportunity to clarify what I think we should make clear from the start: Asaf’s presentation at Wikimania does not reflect the complete Global South (GS) strategy from the WMF Grantmaking team, but really our "Strategy for the proactive development efforts by WMF Grantmaking of existing highly active editing communities in the GS" or the“Focus Areas in the next phase of catalysing GS community development’”(you can see why we’ve tended to shorten what is otherwise a misnomer :-)). Our overall GS strategy continues to be to support communities and organizations across the Global South in multiple ways: through grants, through connections with other communities and organizations, and through the support of ideas, needs and capacities that may need resources (people, information et al) beyond money. We are explicitly looking at improving the distribution of resources across our global movement, given that last fiscal year, only 8.5% of our total grants spending in dollars went to the Global South. We do better in terms of *number* of grants: 33% of our total grants went to the Global South. Still, we know and recognise the current reality and its historical roots, and are strongly committed to shifting this dynamic over time.
The "focus areas" are just that -- focus areas -- and are not exclusive, that is, the focus strategy absolutely does *not* imply that countries outside the focus areas are not able to receive help from WMF. The various grants programs continue to be available to all (within each program's criteria), and recent grants to, for instance, Estonia and Armenia show that small countries can and do benefit from WMF funds and attention, albeit in a more responsive or reactive context, i.e. those groups take the initiative to reach out when they need resources from us. We will continue to be open to working with groups and communities from around the world, and certainly in offering any advice and attention that is sought. At the same time, we recognise - from both Asaf’s Wikimedian experience and mine from other movements and community initiatives - that too much money is just as dangerous (if not more) to emerging volunteer communities than too little money. For a community to have a relatively strong, stable and self-sustaining core of volunteers is rarely dependent on (lack of) funds, while key to its long-term success, and influences its ability to absorb and implement grants effectively.
So why these nine geography/language communities as focus areas in particular? As you know, we moved away from the Catalyst Projects model in India, Brazil and the Arab region, finding it both resource-heavy and strategically problematic: we believe that the best way forward is to combine the ideas and initiatives of Wikimedia communities with investment and attention from WMF. While continuing to focus on India, Brazil and the Arab region - and shifting the Catalyst Projects in the first two into partnership grants - we decided to focus on geographies and related language communities that had the highest base of editors, both nationally located as well as contributing to a larger online community, in the Global South. We are attempting to learn whether a pro-active engagement strategy with these communities - reaching out to both online and offline active contributors - would raise their levels of contributions significantly, and how we can support these initiatives through grants and other resources.
The table below gives you a sense of how we made our choices. Countries like China and Russia that were obviously in the ‘top 10’ in terms of quantitative indicators, we knew might be difficult to support more practically with large grants or other intensive processes at this time, and we ended up with these nine as an interesting mix of geographies, languages, contexts and community forms. South Africa does have a good-sized active editing community (around 9-13 very active editors, 123-125 active editors). However, the fact is that all of the countries in our focus areas list have significantly more active and very active editors than South Africa, other than in Egypt’s case (though editors from Egypt are arguably important to the larger Arabic language community, which is why Egypt is one of our focus geographies/language communities) and so it did not make the list this time around.
The list is still an exploratory one, and it is quite likely to see some adaptations in the coming year or two -- not in the sense of abandoning projects mid-way, but of adapting to changing needs or newly-discovered obstacles where projects were not started yet. So a couple of factors that could bump South Africa up and into the list are:
* some of the selected focus areas may turn out to not be ready for a practical WMF investment. Not much is known yet about the potential for doing work in Vietnam, for example, though Asaf is in exploratory conversations, and when more is known, a decision will be made about whether or not to embark on projects in Vietnam.
* South African Wikimedians' own initiatives (e.g. the successful grant with OSF) can make _proactive_ WMF investment in South Africa more obviously useful and practical.
Note: while this was not the reason South Africa did not make the focus list, it is worth recognising that the chapter in South Africa - while passionate, responsible and growing in confidence - is based on the energy and passion of two or three individuals currently, having recently lost two of its previously active volunteers to Real Life<tm>. So the chapter is still at the "promising" stage, and not yet a solid platform for significant initiatives. We certainly hope this will change; we have been supporting WMZA with grants and advice, and will continue to do so.
Work in progress: Overall, to be clear, this is a work in progress. We’re exploring a new set of approaches to ‘catalysing’ communities, that are highly contextual, and that may change depending on our initial work. Over the course of the next few weeks, we will be building out more details about this strategy on Meta, and look forward to your further comments there.
Country
Major non-English languages
Population (millions)
Internet penetration (%)
Internet pop. (millions)
ENWP editors
ENWP very active eds
Maj. lang. eds
Maj. lang. very active eds
Active eds outside country (in non-EN major lang.)
Total active eds in non-en lang. (all countries)
1. India
ml, ta; gu, mr, kn, te, hi, bn
1210
11
133.1
1685
82
n/a
n/a
1. India (BN)
8
1
76
84
1. India (ML)
61
11
55
116
1. India (TA)
83
17
39
122
1. India (HI)
26
3
34
60
1. India (TE)
9
37
1. India (MR)
7
21
1. India (KN)
4
38
1. India (GU)
3
10
2. Brazil
pt
194
42
81.48
286
36
1288
164
409
1697
3. Turkey
tr
76
44
33.44
155
13
558
61
106
664
4. Mexico
es
115
37
42.55
124
5
538
44
4243
4781
5. Argentina
es
42
67
28.14
118
10
624
83
4157
4781
6.Vietnam
vi
88
34
29.92
51
2
268
44
78
346
7. Egypt
ar
80
36
28.8
43
3
175
19
571
746
8. Philippines
tl
92
32
29.44
428
40
18
4
40
58
9. Indonesia
id
237
22
52.14
164
17
368
32
65
433
South Africa (XH)
xh
51
17
8.5
123
9
0
0
4
4
South Africa (AF)
af
51
17
8.5
123
9
7
29
* These figures are from February 2013.
Research _is_ part of strategy but...: We do want - and certainly believe - research should be part of our strategy, for obvious reasons that we won’t belabour to you, as a Wikimedia/GS researcher! Just the existence of a focus initiative like this begs for a good research framework that will test some of our assumptions and hypotheses and throw up others. However, the point Asaf made was more in relation to our ability to manage and coordinate with external researchers, as well as our internal capacities to do relevant analyses. Within WMF, we are now setting up a better data analysis process by creating and strengthening our Analytics and Program Evaluation and Design teams, and within Grantmaking itself, we’re putting in place a Grantmaking Learning and Evaluation team that will support some baseline data and research. Asaf will also have more time to potentially coordinate external research in this area, as we are currently hiring for a program officer to support him in running the Project and Event Grants Program (what he’s largely been devoted to so far).
On a more theoretical level, though, we know that the research already taking place seems quite relevant globally -- e.g. editor retention research, policy change effects, etc., all have implications for our goals around editorship in the GS, especially as in most of the GS, the languages people are likely to want to contribute in are major, mature Wikipedias (Spanish, English, French).
We would actually love to know from you and your fellow researchers what challenges you see that are both specific to the GS and to Wikimedia, i.e. from the point of view of the online communities, the main challenges seem to be either standard Wikimedia challenges (e.g. newbie biting, where to start, surprise policy violation attacks), or standard GS challenges (Internet access, data charges, access to libraries, long distances or poor infrastructure). My sense is that the challenges that are both specific to the GS and to Wikimedia are around building a self-sustaining core of community (because of some of these intersecting challenges mentioned above and the constraints on cognitive surplus), as well as a potential language/confidence barrier in reaching out to the global Wikimedia community, including WMF, to request for support when needed. I certainly hope that if the latter should be the case, we are changing the reality rapidly: we are always open to conversation, on wiki, on email, on VOIP… and to supporting Wikimedians, particularly in the Global South, in expanding their communities and their online presence.
Let us know if we can answer any more questions, or clarify things further.
Warmly, Asaf and Anasuya
On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 9:36 PM, Heather Ford heather.ford@oii.ox.ac.ukwrote:
I'm sorry I'm coming so late to this but I've been thinking about this a lot and there are two questions that I still have that have been bugging me that perhaps you might clarify, Asaf.
The first is why South Africa isn't included in the strategy. The more I think about it, the more I think that it seems like a glaring omission and so I keep thinking that there is something I'm not considering. If the Foundation used 'active editing community' as a benchmark, South Africa has a really strong editing community in Afrikaans Wikipedia as well as a strong chapter that is interested in extending this success to other local languages and to broader editing of Wikipedia within the region - a region that is very poorly represented on WP and would benefit from more assistance and advice from the Foundation.
The second is your point about research not being at your disposal at the Foundation. I'm curious about why research isn't part of your strategy. It seems to me that this would be the perfect opportunity to engage in more research to understand what kinds of challenges people are facing, what conditions make a local project successful, and also, about what kinds of projects are useful in their symbolic effects rather than focusing only on scale. I know that research capacity at the Foundation might be strained by there are always opportunities for collaboration with the research community, as well as incentives for researchers to engage in research that the Foundation really needs.
Hoping you can shed some light on this!
Thanks!
Best, Heather.
On 30 August 2013 17:24, Asaf Bartov abartov@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 12:51 AM, Anders Wennersten < mail@anderswennersten.se> wrote:
Thanks for sharing this, giving me an insight into an area where I
myself
have little first-hand experience
[..]
But what about the key issue: What are the parameters that makes a
active
community to be created and also be sustainable? We have a lot of
anecdotal
stories and a lot of subjective opinions, but have there ever been
done a
professional study taking an analytical approach, using many different
of
our communities as input to find the critical parameters that creates success or hampers/disintegrate active communities?
Not to my knowledge. I explicitly state that this is a tough nut to
crack,
i.e. that we don't yet know how to create that sustained core of self-motivated active editors. It's very much worth studying, but I
don't
have a research department at my disposal. If and when research brings
us
some proposed solutions (we must not assume in advance that there is precisely one way in which such cores come into existence), I'll be first in line to listen and learn. For now, with so much work to be done where we _do_ have a core of active editors, we'll focus on working with those.
As stressed in the presentation, while we won't _actively_ try to make something happen where there is no active editing community (e.g.
Namibia,
Suriname, Botswana, Afghanistan), we remain open to experimentation with _community initiatives_ anywhere in the world, via our grantmaking
programs
as well as any advice, networking, etc. we can extend to support such initiatives.
Asaf
Asaf Bartov Wikimedia Foundation <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org>Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! https://donate.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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