[Apologies for cross-posting]

Hi all,

We're excited to announce the launch of the Wikimedia Research Fund [1] with the goal of diversifying the network of Wikimedia researchers globally and supporting the Wikimedia Movement in deeper understanding of the projects, decision making, and building new technologies.

The reason we're reaching out to you, as the developer community, is that we believe one of the ways research can be impactful is through its use in tools/code and as developers, you have knowledge of what research can support you in your work. (Examples, OCR for specific languages, better NLP models in your local language, other ML models for specific tasks that you want your tools to offer, and more.)

The deadline to apply is January 3, 2022. We intend to give funds of value USD 2k-50k.

More info at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Research_%26_Techn... .

Big thanks to Emily Lescak for all her behind-the-scenes work to make the launch of the Research Fund possible, and to the Community Resources team at the Wikimedia Foundation for giving us the opportunity and the funds.

If you have questions, please reach out to us at research_fund@wikimedia.org, meta [2], here, or in one of our upcoming office hours [3]! :)

Best, the Research Fund committee chairs Benjamin Mako Hill (University of Washington) Leila Zia (Wikimedia Foundation)

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Research_%26_Techn... [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:Start [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Research_%26_Techn...