[Wikimedia-l] WMF's New Global South Strategy

[Anasuya Sengupta]

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 at oii.ox.ac.uk>wrote:

> 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 at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 12:51 AM, Anders Wennersten <
> > mail at 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>
> >
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-- 
***Anasuya Sengupta
Senior Director of Grantmaking
Wikimedia Foundation*
*
*
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge.  Help us make it a reality!
Support Wikimedia <https://donate.wikimedia.org/>