Biyanto,
Thanks for your reply on this, very much appreciate the context and more information.
On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 3:41 AM Biyanto biyanto.rebin@gmail.com wrote:
From the beginning, the Knowledge Equity Fund was designed as an experiment: a pilot fund to improve the pool of knowledge resources on underrepresented topics that can then be used to strengthen content on the Wikimedia projects. Because it is a pilot project with a limited pool of funds, our intention is to experiment with different approaches, and see where we can learn what works. The size of the initial Equity Fund, $4.5 million, was from the Foundation’s 2019-2020 fiscal year operating budget, when the Foundation had a budget underrun https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund/Frequently_asked_questions/en#11._Where_did_the_funding_for_the_Equity_Fund_come_from? due to COVID-19 and set aside funds for this pilot. No new funds from the Foundation’s revenue have been added to the Fund, and it is not meant to replace or compete with the other and larger grant programs https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start for community members and Wikimedia groups.
This budget context is pretty critical context, and as far as I can tell isn't clearly communicated on Meta or in the blog posts about the program anywhere. Is it somewhere already and I have missed it? I would suggest putting something almost exactly like this in an FAQ, because your statement here is the clearest thing I've read to date on it.
Ultimately I think to the community of editors and donors it isn't super convincing to say "we allocated this $4.5 million (which, to the average person who doesn't read our global movement budget and grant reports, sounds like an enormous sum of money) and therefore we have to stick to that plan despite the fact that we can't measure the impact of this work at all". In any healthy functioning organization, if you couldn't get results from investing a few million dollars, you'd change the plan and consider moving the funds elsewhere after a year.
I understand it is frustrating that we cannot yet measure impact directly to the Wikimedia projects. This is an area that we hope to improve in this new round, and to do so we are connecting each of our new grantees directly with groups in the Wikimedia movement. We believe that we cannot build stronger projects without building and strengthening alliances with other institutions working to create knowledge.
One example I can explain using my local context is with Indonesian Wikipedia, and how we are connecting them with two of our new grantees: AMAN https://aman.or.id/ and Project Multatuli https://projectmultatuli.org/en. I am coming from Indonesia where indigenous topics are still marginalized issues and they are left behind. Sure, there has been some improvement for the last decade, but it is not enough. AMAN has an initiative to build an Indigenous Peoples Glossary, so Indonesian people in general can benefit from this resource. As indigenous peoples are marginalized, sometimes we still use some insensitive words toward them, and even some Indonesian Wikipedia articles still use these words. We cannot rely solely on resources that are coming from outside of indigenous people realm to define who they are, what we should call them. By having this initiative, we firmly believe our community can later use the Indigenous Peoples Glossary as one of useful resources for Indonesian indigenous people related topics. Project Multatuli is a non-profit journalism organization working with indigenous women topics for this grant and they also can collaborate to empower more indigenous people as citizen journalists.
It would help if the blog post about learnings from the first year ( https://diff.wikimedia.org/2023/04/12/what-weve-learned-from-the-equity-fund...) and a first year report on Meta acknowledged the major gap in ability to measure impact.
None of the previous communication really acknowledged this issue in any serious way. If the folks working on this at the WMF and the committee do agree it is an area for improvement, we should have said that in the communication about evaluating the first year and talked openly with the community (i.e. on wiki ideally) about potential strategies for improving the measurability of the program. Instead the blog post pretty much ignored any objections about the effectiveness and impact of the program, and just talked about visibility into the work.
Examples like the one you gave really help, because it points to a clear theory of change (we fund investment in potential source material on underrepresented topics, Wikipedians use those sources eventually) that could actually be measurable. Today the time horizon might be very long, but maybe that's okay.
I’m also sharing details about the relationships that we’re building in the
movement with some of our other new grantee.
I do not agree that generically "building relationships" is worth funding $4.5 million of grants. I think Erik makes some really good points previously that if we funded specific Wikimedian in residence / fellowship type programs that were more akin to the GLAM movement or related movement work on Art+Feminism then we could get both relationship building with sister organizations *and* some kind of clear direct impact on Wikimedia projects.
Black Cultural Archives https://blackculturalarchives.org/: Given BCA’s focus, we have connected them with Wikimedia UK, Wiki Library User Group and Whose Knowledge to help them better understand how to connect their work and archives with the Wikimedia projects.
Create Caribbean Research Institute https://createcaribbean.org/create/: As the first digital humanities centre in the Caribbean, Create Caribbean has natural alignment with Wiki Cari UG, as well as Noircir, Whose Knowledge, Projet:Université de Guyane, and WikiMujeres. We also plan to connect them to present or speak at Wiki Con North America.
Criola https://criola.org.br/
Criola is a civil society organization dedicated to advocating for the rights of Black women in Brazilian society. We have connected them with Whose Knowledge, WikiMujeres, Mujeres (mulheres) latino americanas in Wikimedia, and we will be connecting them with Mais_Teoria_da_Historia Na Brasil.
Data for Black Lives https://d4bl.org/
Given D4BL’s focus in the US, we have connected them with AfroCROWD and Black Lunch Table.
Filipino American National Historical Society http://fanhs-national.org/filam/: FANHS is focused on Filipino American heritage, and as members of the diaspora we are connecting them with the PhilWiki Community, Wiki Advocates of Philippines and Wiki Libraries User Group.
If you have other ideas for how we can improve, please reach out and let us know. Our email is EquityFund@wikimedia.org.
Best,
Biyanto Rebin
(committee member, Knowledge Equity Fund)
On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 at 09:01, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
++. Anything we can learn + apply from Outreachy (and their own community of mentors, alums, and practitioners!) would be wonderful. Their impact per unit of funding seems, at very casual inspection, well ahead of all comparable initiatives. And we could even fund them directly, who have often helped us in turn. ;)
On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 12:13 AM Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Aug 16, 2023 at 10:23 PM Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
With the money allocated to Knowledge Equity in the last couple years,
we could have hired
at least a couple more software engineers to do work like fulfill
community wishlist requests.
I disagree with that framing. Wikimedia Foundation, even with reduced fundraising goals, is a very well-endowed organization that can easily shift more of its existing effort towards community wishlist requests. _All_ areas in which it spends money are deserving of healthy scrutiny, not just this new program. I feel it's best to evaluate this program on its own merits -- and to make a separate argument regarding the community wishlist & prioritization of software engineering ventures.
To me, the question with these grants is whether there's a plausible theory of change that ties them back to the Wikimedia mission and movement. I share some skepticism about broad objectives around "improving quality of sources about X" without any _obvious and direct_ connection to the movement's work (i.e. concrete commitments about licensing and availability of information, or collaboration with Wikimedians). The Borealis Journalism Fund grant report [1] explicitly states:
# of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages: 0 # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects: 0 Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects: 0
(There are qualifiers in the report, but frankly, they're not very plausible ones.)
I see a lot of value in WMF having new connections with these grantees -- these are organizations Wikimedia _should_ have a relationship with. But do we best accomplish that by directly funding their operations? This statement from the latest announcement stands out to me:
The Equity Fund Committee [...] have also connected each of these
grantees with regional
and relevant partners in the Wikimedia movement, including local and
established
movement affiliates who can support knowledge equity work and help
grantees learn about
how to connect back to the work of free knowledge on the Wikimedia
projects.
That's great, and I look forward to hearing what comes from these connections. I do worry a bit about slipping into a transactional framework -- "we give you support for your core mission, and to maintain good relations with us, you have some meetings with friendly Wikimedians in your area". Many grant-giving organizations tend to adopt transactional frameworks, sometimes overtly, sometimes without even realizing it. In the worst case, the grantee experiences it as a chore -- a checklist item to complete to apply for the next round of funding. Not saying that's where this program is at, just that it's something I would suggest watching out for.
Personally, I see potential in the direction of well-scoped fellowships/residencies/internships paid by WMF, where both parties understand fully that engagement with the Wikimedia movement is part of what they're signing up for. There are pitfalls here as well: avoiding paid editing; making sure that the fellows themselves are diverse, etc. But these issues seem "closer to the metal" of Wikimedia's work, i.e. "the right kinds of of problems".
There's a lot of institutional history to look back on & learn from, from GLAM residencies to WMF's internal fellowship program which you, Steven, went through so many years ago. I'd also encourage a close look at Outreachy, who have done amazing work getting diverse new contributors to join open source & open science projects. And that may be what you mean with "try less controversial methods to improve knowledge equity", but I feel this should be entirely about effectiveness and mission alignment, not about avoiding controversy.
In general, I'd love to hear more from both the staff and community members on the committee how they came to their funding decisions (i.e. what set the successful grantees apart from the unsuccessful ones, and what theory of change animated the decisions), and where they'd like to see the program go in future.
Warmly, Erik
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Knowledge_Equity_Fund_%2... _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
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