Dear Maryana,

Your Listening Tour has been a commendable initiative to understand the voice of the community. However, the essence of listening lies in its responsiveness.

Over ten days ago, we raised concerns that unfortunately remain unaddressed. This isn't a single person sentiment but a collective voice from the Indian Wikimedia community, a voice that has grown stronger since the recent Wiki Conference India.

We're concerned about the WMF India staff's involvement in community-led events, notably the Wiki Conference India. While their participation is welcome, there's a growing perception of encroachment on community-led initiatives. The community's autonomy is being compromised, and several experienced community members have voiced this concern on the public mailing list.

Furthermore, we've observed that the WMF India Staff is assisting community members in crafting emails and guiding them on how to handle this mailing list situation. As a community, we believe in the ability of our members to speak for themselves. Currently, it appears that only those on the WMF payroll—either through grant salary/contract or through WMF-funded CIS salary—are speaking on behalf of Wiki Conference India, seemingly under the guidance of WMF Staff India. We urge WMF India Staff to step back and allow the community to voice their concerns independently. Check the Wiki Conference India Team on Meta. Most of them are drawing salaries from WMF or CIS or have been previous employees in the last 5 years. Very few are people who have always been volunteers. Many of them have also not written WMF against their name because they say they did this conference as volunteers. Was there no volunteer to come forward and organize? This means WMF staff have not been able to grow the community.

We wish to understand the roles, responsibilities, and contributions of the WMF India staff who actively participated in the Wiki Conference India. Being paid by funds raised through volunteer-built platforms like Wikipedia, their active participation in community spaces calls for higher accountability.

WMF has spent so much money on Strategy 2030 but the India Conference had no session on it why? India is not important or what? Sunday there was a session on Strategy 2030 but it was removed without telling participants. Why?

We would like to clarify that this is not a request for personal information—since the identities of these staff members are already publicly known—but a call for professional transparency, as we seek to understand their specific roles and contributions. If these staff members were comfortable taking to the stage and receiving credit at the conference, they should be equally comfortable sharing the scope and impact of their work with the community that they serve. Their willingness to be in the public eye during the conference should extend to their professional commitments and achievements. We're keen to know about the partnerships they've formed over the past few years that have benefited Indian communities, the initiatives the communications team has launched beyond financial incentives for Instagram users, the community projects undertaken by other staff members, negative response on fundraising and the hiring practices aimed at empowering local user groups.

Considering the nature of these questions, we're interested in understanding your strategy for obtaining an unbiased picture of the situation. If the primary sources of feedback are the WMF India staff or their superiors, it might be influenced by the very concern we raise.

This message is a reminder about the necessity of listening when the community needs to be heard, not just when it's convenient. It's a plea for transparency and accountability—cornerstones of our community and the Wikimedia movement.

We understand that you might be busy, but we would appreciate at least an acknowledgment of this email, assuring us that our concerns have been heard and will be addressed.

We look forward to your acknowledgment and response.

On Sun, 14 May 2023 at 3:52 AM, Shyamal Bagchi <discard.media3@gmail.com> wrote:

My emails are also being censored.
Why is this happening and who is doing it ?

On Tue, 9 May 2023 at 00:51, Wiki Prasad <wiki_prasad@mail.com> wrote:
i say same thing, my email not posted. it is censored.

Sent: Monday, May 08, 2023 at 4:48 AM
From: "Jayantilal Kothari" <jayantilalkkd@gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia India Community list" <wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>, miskander@wikimedia.org
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Request for Transparency Regarding WMF Staff in India

Hello WCI 2023 Organizing team,

First of all, thank you for hosting the event. I appreciate your willingness to engage in discussions and provide clarifications on concerns related to the conference. However, I would like to remind you that this email thread is specifically addressed to the Wikimedia Foundation and Maryana Iskander.

I am curious if the Maryana/WMF has requested your team or given authorization for you to justify or defend their actions in this matter. As this thread focuses on WMF's actions and decisions in relation to the Indian community, it is crucial to maintain separate discussions for separate issues to ensure productive and organized conversations. I kindly request that you start a separate email thread or Meta-Wiki discussion for addressing concerns related to the conference itself.

Let's give the WMF the opportunity to address the concerns raised here directly. Thank you for your understanding, and once again, congratulations on organizing a successful event.

On Sun, 7 May 2023 at 10:59 PM, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Bodhisattwa,

Thank you for your reply.

While Wiki[p/m]edia started out as a pure volunteer project, it has long occupied a sometimes uneasy position between some of the biggest and most valuable companies on earth, who use our free content to make money, and volunteers working for love. This makes culture clashes of some sort or another inevitable. I don't have a solution.

I also suspect that you have a point with the "white guilt". What this means, of course, is that people are still not "seen".

If you ever feel like writing an op-ed or report about these matters for the Wikipedia Signpost, please feel free to send me a mail or just drop into our Newsroom. The Signpost hardly ever has content about India, let alone content written by Indian contributors. (The issue due to be published in a few hours' time is a rare exception.) It would be great to see that change.

Best,

Andreas

(User:Jayen466)

On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 6:55 PM Bodhisattwa <bodhisattwa.rgkmc@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Andreas,

There is no denial that money is needed in our region to run programs but there should always be a critical debate, if we are asking too much amount and for the right cause. I can't talk about others but I come from a cross-border language community which has always shown high regards to the value of donation money and expressed concerns in the past, whenever it has felt that money asked in a grant proposal is out of proportionate. So, whenever a grant proposal comes from my language community or from the two affiliates of the region, we brainstorm for days, if not months, to understand if there remains any small chance to waste the valuable resources which are to be entrusted upon us. For example, questions naturally arises in our community that if we really need to or have the luxury to spend this huge amount of around 10 million INR just for a 3-days conference to meet and greet each other after a long time or could that amount of money be invested on local affiliates and communities so that they can sustain themselves and provide quality output for the next decade. There has always been this debate and the people who talked about the second option are quietly moving away from the movement as they were not heard properly or were targeted for their critical analysis. We strongly feel that throwing unnecessary amount of money to whatever proposal comes over from the region is detrimental to the community dynamics as these money spoils people in the communities, brings more mistrusts and corruption and changes the motivation to contribute to the open knowledge movement. Also, huge amount of money does not necessarily translate to delivery of high quality output all the time, good results can come from limited resources too, even with zero budget, if they are planned properly; there are numerous success stories in our movement of those, which are rarely acknowledged or celebrated.

What we feel that there might be some 'white guilt' working in the background to reverse colonial sins from the past in the regions which might drive people from the west to approve more money in Africa and Asia without consideration of local inputs. Any voices against these western perspectives to flood local communities with huge amount of unnecessary money are marked as counter-productive, ignored, silenced and bypassed with different regulatory measures imposed upon the community until people stop criticising and get fed up of being ignored. For example, personally, I have developed apathy nowadays regarding whatever is happening around grant process western to our state border of West Bengal until they directly affects us and prefer to remain silent during their community review process.

By the way, I have no objection hiring WMF staffs from the region. In fact, a number of staffs and contractors from the region are and were highly respected for their support and understanding of the local communities. But all are not beds of roses. There are multiple evidences of opacities, ignorance, agenda pushing, bossing around, corporate mentality, hijacking of community plans and projects etc. among staffs, which builds walls of mistrusts separating them with the volunteers rather than breaking them. I can't disagree to what Jayantilal implied in his statement. So, to me, staffs are always welcome, but if they have no intention to listen and support for community needs, then we frankly don't need them around our communities to push their own agenda, we can manage ourselves.

Regards,

Bodhisattwa

On Thu, May 4, 2023, 18:30 Andreas Kolbe <jayen466@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Bodhisattwa and all,

You raise an interesting point – that the influx of money appears to have a demotivating effect on Indian volunteers. This has also come up in discussion elsewhere.

Now I have been one of those who have urged the WMF to spend more money in India. I have always felt that actual spending on the ground has not matched the Foundation's fundraising messages about how money is urgently needed to build capacity in Indian and African languages. And I have argued that hiring staff in India, e.g., makes more sense than hiring staff in the US, where salary expectations may run to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

How would you resolve these competing considerations?

Regards,

Andreas (Jayen466)

On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 3:21 AM Bodhisattwa <bodhisattwa.rgkmc@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

Coincidentally, just yesterday afternoon, when we were having a meeting in Kolkata with volunteers from West Bengal and Bangladesh, these concerns came up among other things. We were wondering about the visible impact of the increasing number of WMF staffs in India to improve our editing and reading experiences, significant partnership development or strengthening the communities in the last few years and if they have any impact at all in our language community to make our life easier as volunteers.

Anyway, if the volunteer communities or team of organizers are not strong and vigilant enough, there is always a chance to get something hijacked by staffs. This is not new; it has happened before a number of times and it will happen a lot more in the future. This could not be avoided as I feel the spirit of volunteerism in the Indian communities is much much weaker than the past and dying, if not already dead in some of the cases. In the last few years, I have seen long term trusted community members from all over the country leave the movement frustrated, heart broken and exhausted, including from my language community. Increasing flow of unnecessary money are rapidly changing the motivation of volunteers with a strange notion prevailing nowadays that money is the solution of all problems in the region. Community oversight and long discussions on meta talk pages about any huge amount of grant proposals are now a thing of the past. But who cares?

Unlike the previous wiki conferences, the wider Indian community did not get the invitation and space to actively take part in the decision making process from the very start of planning this conference which led to giving room to WMF staffs, who took over. Without community vigilance, a 3 days conference asked and spent 3 times more donation money than the last one and has set up precedences of many unwanted things which would burden future community programs and events in India. It's not at all surprising that even though no one was stopped, but a very few number of volunteers from my language community actually applied and participated in the conference, even being one of the most active community in the region.

Regards,

Bodhisattwa

On Thu, May 4, 2023, 00:53 Subhashish <psubhashish@gmail.com> wrote:

I find this email better worded than the other one in this list a few days back which was also about different issues.

Some of these issues, though I'm not personally aware of, certainly need to be addressed by WMF.

Thank you for upholding the importance of the community by saying -- "I am okay with WMF staff being paid, but it should not undermine unpaid volunteers and the movement's ethos." Can't agree more.

While I see public listing of WMF staff and contractors both on-wiki [1] and the Foundation's official site, WMF staff in India might mean staff and contractors who are hired both for long-term and short-term and part-time roles. It could also mean those who play global roles (say, engineering staffers) but reside in India and don't necessarily interface only with the India-based community. Their participation in a national level event could be an one-off thing.

But those nuances apart, the volunteer and staff dynamics certainly is a topic worth discussing.

A worse social phenomenon in India is a foreigner being treated with more dignity than a local. The intersectionality of caste, gender, fluency in English, intergenerational privilege and many other social factors play a role. I still think this is not a standalone issue and should be discussed (and investigated if needed) keeping in mind the intersectionality.

1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_staff

Subha

On Wed, May 3, 2023, 11:09 PM Jayantilal Kothari <jayantilalkkd@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Maryana Iskander and Wikimedia Foundation,

I hope this email finds you well. I am writing to request more transparency about the roles and responsibilities of WMF staff in India. I am assuming good faith and believe that any issues arising are unintentional; however, these occurrences seem to be negatively impacting the overall movement.

It has come to my attention that WMF allocates a relatively small amount of funds to the Indian community. This implies that a significant portion of donor money is spent on staff, making it crucial to ensure that donors and the Wiki community are aware of how the funds are being utilized and the impact generated.

Firstly, I have noticed that WMF hires non-community staff members who may be initially unfamiliar with the Wikimedia community and movement in general. This is not an issue as long as newly recruited staff members are willing to work collaboratively with the community, rather than competing with them. Unfortunately, there have been instances where this has not been the case, such as WMF India staff paying Instagram users without consulting the community, and the recent WikiConference India, where WMF staff overshadowed volunteer committees and took over volunteer roles during conference planning.

Initially, I thought that privacy concerns might be the reason behind the lack of transparency. However, during the recent conference, I observed that such staff members were comfortable being on stage and being identified as WMF Staff amongst friends from the industry whom they invited to the conference. It appears that more people from the industry are aware of WMF India staff's existence than the community itself. Some staff members were keen to take credit for the entire movement and even conference planning in front of the volunteer community and friends from the industry. It might help and advance the careers of WMF India staff by showcasing WikiConference India on their resumes, but the main purpose of such community events is to give a chance to community leadership and to celebrate unpaid community members. I am okay with WMF staff being paid, but it should not undermine unpaid volunteers and the movement's ethos.

The Wiki community looks up to WMF staff for support, but now there is a fear that WMF staff may hijack community programs and stages, with WikiConference India being a recent example.

There seems to be a lot of mystery surrounding the roles and responsibilities of WMF India staff members and their interactions with volunteer communities. The Wiki community is dedicated to the mission and will continue to thrive even without WMF staff. I believe it is crucial for WMF to publicly share the roles, responsibilities, and outcomes of the WMF India staff over the last few years. This transparency will enable community members and donors to appreciate the efforts of WMF India staff, as currently, the impact of their work remains unknown.

I kindly request that WMF provides a list of all WMF India staff members and their achievements, so we can celebrate their accomplishments and collaborate with them more effectively.

Looking forward to your response.

With Regards,

Jayantilal

--

Regards,

Jayantilal

Sent from my iPhone

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