Grants:Knowledge Sharing/Reports/Grantee partners’ intended programming and impact 2022/Regional learning sessions

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Global analysis of reflection in the 7 Regional Learning sessions


In the months of September and October the Community Resources teams released a series of reports about the regional funding and programming and intended impact that was reported by grantee partners. 7 regional learning sessions were conducted to reflect on the reports. With this summary document we seek to illustrate just a few of the interesting points that came up in the discussion. It does not intend to do justice to the richness of conversations in multiple groups within each session, some of which is summarised in the etherpad of each session linked at the end, with session decks and the regional funding and programming reports.

Objective of the Regional Learning Sessions:

  • Use collective data and insights to learn together and think about future challenges and opportunities as individuals, organisations and collectively in each region. This can help feed into the annual report.
  • Promote a sense of greater partnership and interest in continuing to engage in peer learning between grantees, Regional Fund Committees and Foundation staff.
  • Analyse how communities are engaging with the new funds strategy, what trends are we seeing and what can be iterated and adjusted.

Quick Takeaways across all regions[edit]

  • Having aggregated data really was an opportunity to see trends and reflect together. More similar spaces of reflection are desired
  • A shared key issue: growing and retaining the volunteer base
  • Community health:  The lack of healthy environments onwiki came up a lot in discussions. Including volunteer burnout and also unsafe environments for newcomers.
  • Let’s measure what counts in each context: Learning and evaluation. There is an interest in building metrics that make sense of each type of project but can be shared across similar projects and contexts.

Participation: For the 7 regional learning sessions , there were over 200 participants including grantee partners, regional fund committees and Wikimedia foundation staff members. The background documents were translated into more than 10 languages and there was simultaneous interpretation in those 10 languages during the sessions.

Regional summaries[edit]

Regional summaries used as background reading for the Regional Learning Sessions to reflect on regional tendencies, challenges and opportunities.

Regional Summary for

Middle East and Africa

PDF link(s) on Wikimedia Commons: English and français
Regional Summary for

South Asia (SA)

PDF link(s) on Wikimedia Commons: English
Regional Summary for

East, Southeast Asia, and Pacific (ESEAP)

PDF link(s) on Wikimedia Commons: English, Bahasa Indonesia, 日本語, and 中文
Regional Summary for

Latin America and The Caribbean (LAC)

PDF link(s) on Wikimedia Commons: English, español, português, and français
Regional Summary for

United States and Canada (USCA)

PDF link(s) on Wikimedia Commons: English
Regional Summary for

Northern and Western Europe (NWE)

PDF link(s) on Wikimedia Commons: English, français, and español
Regional Summary for

Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia (CEECA)

PDF link(s) on Wikimedia Commons: English

What people valued in the report and the learning sessions[edit]

  • It allows for collective reflection that supports individual work and strengthens community ties. In some regions with a lot of grantee diversity (such as MEA and ESEAP), participants realized they had shared vision, similar strategies and were facing similar challenges.
  • For other regions, the data helped visualise differences among affiliates going through different stages in growth and country context (for instance NWE, CEECA, USCA).
  • There was interest in more continuous spaces like this, that involved the participation of all team members, allowed for in depth review of tactics or new ideas to tackle challenges (for instance around newcomer retention), and that was timely and able to fit into current workflows (time availability and funding cycles).
  • It was highlighted as valuable information to inform committees in their decision-making process and the community in identifying areas of new interest or existing work.
  • Some participants also valued that the report is framed around Movement Strategy principles and recommendations, however for some, these still need to be “ drilled down into more specific concepts/labels to be relevant for my work. ”— USCA participant
  • However... the reports are heavy with information and text - overwhelming for many. Grantees would like more timely information that is easier to digest and share with communities. For instance, a “purpose-oriented view” stating how each data point helps decision making. Also clearer breakdowns of regions differences within the global picture. More language inclusivity is needed. It is often a challenge to produce documentation and make sure it is adequately translated and contextualised.

Some reflections that were common across regions[edit]

A shared key issue: growing and retaining the volunteer base

  • This was a focus of attention across regions. Participants were interested in the cross-regional insight in the reports that single day or one-off events are not enough and multiple, continuous formats for “volunteer management” and building “volunteer spirit”  is needed, particularly to engage newcomers. Participants referenced a number of cases that proved effective, like week long sprints, to continuous Wikiclubs and Wikicamps. Documenting these different approaches and results is something of interest.
  • Context also matters, a lot: It was interesting to note  differences amongst and within regions (even within regions with years of grant experience such as NWE). Some affiliates sense they are reaching a point of “saturation” in volunteer engagement, making it more difficult to attract and maintain volunteers than it used to be, while other affiliates are experiencing ready growth in their volunteer base, especially among youth. Some say zeroing in on recruitment within specific target audiences offsets the decline in volunteer engagement. Some affiliates in smaller community or geographical contexts are asking how to determine realistic upper limits for how many more new volunteers it is reasonable to expect to inform decisions about how much to invest in new volunteer recruitment.
  • More research into the effects of the pandemic in volunteering dynamics was called for. In some regions, the aftermath of the pandemic is still something that affects community dynamics (particularly ESEAP where in the past 2-2.5 years, affiliates and movement organisers have observed gradual attrition of active membership/ participation base.
  • There are regions (such as MEA and South Asia) where there are structural barriers that limit volunteering (ie socio economic reasons where “volunteering is a privilege”). Therefore incentives and tactics must address this - ie. professional development for students, scholarships, certificants, networking opportunities, non-monetary incentives etc.  Creating the right incentives for volunteers was a focus of discussion in the South Asia, MEA, LAC and ESEAP regions, particularly for youth and certain professional groups. Connecting to the Tik Tok dynamic was also mentioned as an unaddressed challenge.
  • Likewise, structural challenges can really limit or frustrate grantees' work. They need to be discussed and also considered in impact analysis. For instance in the MEA region with limited internet access and IP blocking, “ IP block is one of the challenges that I feel should be added to the report. It makes things difficult for the grantees to implement their projects to the fullest. ”
  • Some affiliates find organizational partnerships to be key to volunteer development, allowing their partners to share the load of outreach and implementation of activities that might appeal to prospective and active volunteers. On the other hand, others say centering institutions can reduce the energy and innovation that grassroots volunteers can bring to the movement.
  • Some would like more insight into the many solo volunteer editors and uploaders who are quietly active but rarely participate in organized activities or community discussions.
  • In line with the report analysis, there was agreement that the need to focus on the training and retention of organizers is a priority due to support organizations to reliably run programs over time, and not focus exclusively on the retention of editors. There are several interesting models that came up in the discussions, like Art+Feminism Regional Ambassadors.
  • The issue of having better tools to assess retention was also widely discussed and also the flexibility with respect to their programs schedules– not rigid definitions (e.g. at least one edit per month). This is a need the Foundation needs to start addressing and investing funds. As one MEA participant described it,  “ we need to focus more on how to retain editors after an event — feeling the "party" after it ends. ”— (MEA participant)
  • Political contexts also act as difficult barriers for bringing in volunteers and maintaining partnerships, as was highlighted in CEECA region.
  • How to best bring in diversity was a key point of discussion and empowering content creation across the movement, not only in specific languages:“ more people need to contribute, no matter the language, the important thing is that they are people from our country. ”— (LAC participant)
  • Fostering greater diversity among volunteers is important for NWE affiliates, with multiple efforts focused on engaging with underrepresented groups across multiple dimensions ranging from age, ethnic identity, language, gender, socioeconomic status, and that this could perhaps be better represented in the proposal narratives and reporting.

Community health

  • The lack of healthy environments onwiki came up a lot in discussions. Grantees are often reluctant to bring new volunteers into inhospitable onwiki environments that can be unsafe for learners to experiment and make mistakes.
  • This is a topic that comes up repeatedly without a clear path of how to address this and how to really involve on-wiki contributors such as administrators and experienced editors. Addressing issues of community health is complex for affiliates. Because communities are independent, affiliates are not vested with authority to intervene when there are behavioral issues. Even with the Universal Code of Conduct in place, affiliates cannot enforce them without risking even greater conflict. Building community health has to be based on cultivating mutual efforts. Some affiliates are working on their own Codes of Conduct. This is a topic that grantees would like to dig in deeper, register case study experiences and share these widely within staff, teams, organisers and communities in general.
  • For some regions the lack of representation and contextual understanding affects community health and resilience:
  • Some regions highlighted gender disparity that affects leadership and program implementation. The implementation of programmatic work is often being done by women leaders in affiliate organizations, whilst men are elected to affiliate boards overseeing these activities, and sometimes object to the work. Harassment and aggression from male community members towards women leadership is a big problem, and hinders affiliates’ ability to address topics related to marginalized communities and generally run their organizations. This also affects people’s feelings of safety when applying for funding. Applicants fear they will be harassed by communities for merely proposing an idea.
  • In some regions there are expectations around the role that the Foundation should have to address this systematically.
  • Managing volunteer exhaustion/burnout is a concern for both online and offline volunteers, as is navigating unhealthy community behaviors and finding paths to healing after breakdowns. There is also discussion around how to find a healthy balance between working with new contributors and maintaining experienced ones.
  • More avenues for community engagement: some affiliates would like to find easier ways to invite collaborations with communities, and a suggestion was made to introduce a section in grant proposals that would signal openness to community engagement and allow people to get involved.

Let’s measure what counts in each context: Learning and evaluation

  • There is an interest in building metrics that make sense of each type of project but can be shared across similar projects and contexts. Some exercises that have been done in the past can be revisited (such as logical framework models).  Clearer guidance is needed in the application form.
  • Grantees also recognised the importance of including learning and evaluation expertise into their budgets and teams.
  • Knowledge-sharing and training sessions around metrics and collecting data would be useful, especially around core metrics. Some would like more space in the reporting format for case studies and stories.
  • As well as taking into consideration different program types (one time event, continuous campaigns, annual engagement),  it is important to consider culture and context in measuring impact (beyond numbers), as evidenced in regions like South Asia. It would be helpful to applicants to offer guidance for scaled and differentiated ways of measuring impact for programs that have different time engagement.
  • Affiliates are interested in exploring more qualitative measures to help them better understand the impact of their work. However, grantees expressed a struggle with making the connection from questions to metric (i.e. what to measure) and tools (i.e how to measure) and then adjust programs based on what you have learned. Grantees identify some of their challenges stating that “ the programs that we run are too small in scope to collect enough qualitative data or it is very anecdotal and difficult to aggregate. ”— (USCA grantee)
  • There is an interest in creating more visibility and knowledge-sharing among affiliate peers about qualitative methods that are being used within the movement. Specific qualitative measures were mentioned as points of inquiry, such as the Happiness Index, attitudinal change, willingness to contribute, sense of empowerment, evolution from editing to organizing, innovation (doing something in new formats), etc.
  • Easier qualitative methodologies are needed: polls and questionnaires can be too time-consuming and results are not always useful; collection methodologies that are not an imposition on contributors are helpful.
  • Some affiliates would like to see a development toward longer-term data collection efforts.
  • Metrics for measuring partnerships are needed, such as measures for partnership health, long-term retention, attractiveness to new partners.
  • Grantees would like more opportunities for internal reflection as well as reflection with others, including open discussion with focus topics among various team members. Some would like to have some of these discussions in person.
  • The lack of tools is a heavy toll: people find it difficult to aggregate information about contributors over time from several different programs.
  • Having the Foundation fund third party evaluations of programs was something also proposed. Some participants saw the Foundation playing a more centralised role in evaluation. For instance, “ the Wikimedia Foundation provides a general link (in different languages) to the organizers of Wikimedia events to collect the opinions of the participants, so that when they answer the questionnaire submitted to them….so that we have centralized data of the expectations of the participants to better respond to their needs for successful training. ”
  • More connections with learning from the Research team and Research grants is needed, particularly those analysing metrics of interest (newcomers, content quality/use, etc).

Capacity-building, governance, leadership challenges:

  • Grantees, particularly affiliates, are facing different stages of organisational challenges, such as building a team, as well as implementing activities, partnership outreach, managing community health and trying to stay connected to the global or regional Movement.  This is particularly challenging if the core team is small, support is thin and resources limited. Volunteer burnout is real.
  • There is interest in finding ways to invest in capacity building to deal with these challenges in a sustainable way and include this in funding proposals. One question that came up is what is the best way to fund capacity building through other networks, outside the Foundation.
  • In some regions such as ESEAP and South Asia, the current model of governance within Wikimedia Communities and external regulatory challenges can act as a hurdle for movement growth. Few User Groups and Chapters have formal advisory and governance structures and require information and mentoring to establish these structures. There are groups that are exploring ways to exist in the ecosystem without being an NGO or “bureaucratising” the process (particularly in the LAC and SA regions). Some participants see the lack of formal affiliates, in areas such as North Africa or the Middle East,  stifles growth, as this limits grants and partnerships.
  • In some regions, the role Hubs will play in providing support services vs what the Foundation, affiliates and other informal support networks in each region so grantees know where to go for what. In some regions, such as MEA, there was a concern for the capacity to move HUBs discussion forward more quickly.
  • Also, how to learn from peers and from different contexts where governance, staff and volunteering challengers are different. This is particularly relevant for those working with more of a cross-regional/global influence supporting affiliates and organisers in other contexts.
  • Some grantees mentioned that they don’t include issues related internal leadership challenges or training/building efforts in their proposal, because they may touch delicate internal issues that they don't want to make public or because they didn’t see this as something they should include in their proposals. It would be worth doing so, respecting privacy and community health considerations.
  • More guidance from Affcom was called for in some regions like ESEAP where new user groups are seeking to form. Also, in what affiliate growth is desired and what are the possible pathways, as there are several different models. Related to funding, is there a strategy to strategically fund larger affiliates or a number of smaller user groups?
  • It was interesting to note some comments that related to the sense of common challenges and struggle:
  • In some regions working with older communities to position Movement Strategy and explain affiliate work in general, particularly in why diversity efforts are needed, is hard and often creates barriers. Some affiliate leaders feel unsafe in these struggles and call for a support system.

Advocacy for open policy and general awareness raising:

  • Some affiliates emphasized the need for more advocacy around policies that affect open knowledge. Some affiliates (particularly in the NWE and CEE region) pointed to the limitations imposed on this need by the current grant contract language used by the Wikimedia Foundation and called for more clarity about what advocacy work is eligible for funding and closer collaboration with the advocacy team. Some affiliates intentionally earmark other external sources of funding (e.g. membership fees) to allow them to prioritize this important work.
  • In some regions such as ESEAP the regulatory landscape relating to freedom of information is evolving in directions that can erode the progress that affiliates make in building a community. In CEE the lack of freedom of panorama is still an issue and learning around advocacy work should be more widely shared. However, it has lost focus with other political issues taking precedence.
  • Participants called for greater detail about advocacy strategies to learn from how the work is being done and how results are measured.
  • It would be important to share specific grants data of those working on legal/advocacy issues to the Policy team.

Diversity in Wikiprojects:

  • Many communities, particularly in South Asia and MEA are thinking of longer term engagement in other Wikimedia projects. Partnerships, capacity building activities and Outreach are centred around supporting projects such as Wikisource, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.
  • There was discussion around how smaller wikis can sometimes have more receptive communities that are friendlier for newcomers and good places to experiment with policy changes, for instance around citation or notability.
  • Reflecting what affiliates stated in their proposals, there is excitement around Wikidata, particularly for cultural institutions (in the case of USCA, there are some indigenous artists working on Wikidata), however the platform is often "hard to sell” and it  is necessary to document good use cases.
  • Some participants found it interesting that smaller projects were less common. In regions such as ESEAP Wikibooks is valued to create open educational resources.
  • Grantees also mentioned the importance of having local culture and history reflected in English, as it is more likely to be widely translated into many language versions.

Partnerships:

  • Context matters: It was clear by discussions in many regions that contextual issues affect the way organisations can grow, the type of partnerships that are forged and how, volunteer engagement, the ways of evaluating, amongst many other aspects of grantee work. To give an example, in South Asia an interesting discussion came up about how, given existing regulations,  bureaucracy and affiliates lack of legal registration , partnerships are often more viable with less formal bureaucratic agreements, but through a working relationship/engagement with a key person than an entire organisation. However Wikimedians in Residence could be an opportunity to explore.
  • In other regions, such as CEE, it is hard to involve partners due to regional dynamics and risks. Affiliates want to figure out how to build a stronger network of culture institutions.
  • In LAC it was highlighted that newcomer organisers (accessing rapid funds) do not always have the skills (particularly project implementation, as well as Wiki skills) to actively engage partners and new contributors.
  • There were also questions around what other forms of contribution can bring value to Wikimedia work, beyond volunteer contribution. How can interesting ideas and initiatives form link minded individuals or organisations be welcomed.
  • Affiliates in some regions, such as NWE, are trying to orient more toward strategic partnerships in which initiatives are co-developed organically rather than short-term project partnerships which tend to be more reactive and more focused on onboarding to one partner’s existing project. Some affiliates are seeking to elevate their partnership work to higher levels: for example, partnering with the cultural ministry to disseminate information to many libraries, rather than partnering with a single individual library. Institutional engagement varies, with some affiliates reaching saturation with larger GLAM institutions and now pivoting to medium-to-small institutions, while other affiliates are still building awareness and recognition even among large institutions. Using webinars and videos has been helpful for some affiliates in extending their capacity to engage with more institutions. There are some interesting cases of working with libraries in other regions, for instance in Japan working within national library events.

Some programmatic discussions:

  • The concept of GLAM is in some regions (such as LAC and NWE)  in some cases moving outside the traditional institutional focus and centering diverse forms of cultural heritage including tradition, and other intangible forms of culture.
  • Decolonization is an important theme in GLAM work. Finding appropriate partners to lead and guide learning has been a key to success in this work. Ethical sharing, and crisis response work are also important focus areas for some affiliates in the GLAM context. USCA is finding ways to work with Indegenous communities to counteract the idea that Wikimedia is another “ "settler-based" platform. ”— (USCA participant)
  • Despite GLAM’s elevated importance in some regions such as NWE and CEE,  GLAM platforms are still not sufficient to meet needs and regional members have been active in advocating for better solutions[1].
  • In some regions, such as USCA there were discussions as to the extent that certain sectors, for instance the educational sector, still had a negative image of Wikimedia, particularly in secondary schools, in universities less so. This was also highlighted in the ESEAP region. There was also a call for more collective and continuous work amongst communities working in education that links in different educational levels, from secondary to university level.
  • In ESEAP working with teachers to build awareness and different approaches to do so was a focus of attention. Experiences in this region would be very interesting to document. Youth centered approaches are also an interesting focus of discussion in this region.

Funding:

  • Whilst funding distribution was not the center of discussion, there were some comments around this worth noting. On one hand, some regions found the growth natural after two years of pandemic (CEE, USCA, NWE), others were impressed by the growth (MEA, ESEAP, LaC) but  there were questions about whether it was felt by all communities, given the sensation of existing barriers and also how to grow staff in a sustainable and health way in relation to volunteering efforts. Some were surprised that the overall value was high, but the average grant in the region is low (CEECA, MEA).  
  • Some participants, such as in the CEECA, found that knowing what others are doing may help to  include countries’ initiatives in larger grants and reduce costs, bureaucracy and affiliate efforts. This is where the Hub could play a role.
  • There was also the call for more in depth analysis of North Africa and the Middle East and support for Francophone countries within the MEA region. Affiliates can be an important base for this support and growth. This was also expressed within the USCA region with French-speaking communities requiring more localised materials and support.
  • There were also questions around the rapid growth in Nigeria, and the risk that a number of smaller grants may lead to less inefficiency and fragmentation that may reduce impact or cohesion in the region. In general, seeking and valuing collaboration amongst affiliates/grantees in MEA was a topic of discussion and a recognised challenge.

What do we do to bring in others? Proposals for outreach to other communities:[edit]

  • Ideas emerged as to how to also report on “missing communities”. Who is not reflected in the report.
  • In some regional sessions there were discussions about how to best do outreach to bring in interesting ideas that have implementable processes.
  • There were still questions around how to streamline the grant process and make applications for larger grants easier and incentivise newer user groups or older communities that do not apply because of the effort involved. There is still pain felt around the process.
  • In situations of conflict or crisis, the option of more “closed/anonymised applications” may be necessary.

Some of the data would participants like to see in future[edit]

  • Provide more context of how information was analysed and a glossary of concepts, for instance, “youth, GLAM, advocacy, education-focused work”. We may be talking about different concepts.
  • Reporting on midterm and final outcomes and that this information should be provided in a timely manner for future proposal writing.
  • More comparison of countries regarding their size, impact, wikiprojects they are working on, or number of staff members, maturity of the organisation and catagorise this more. Also to contextualize metrics, maybe by presenting results with a variable like “per capita”.  
  • Also analysis of numerical metrics that consider those that “skew” the numbers because of such high contributions (ie Wiki Edu with Wikipedia contents and editors or some NWE affiliates with Commons).
  • Provide more data continuously so it is useful for decision making. Many asked for more details about implementation and impact. For some regions understanding specific spending in goods and services would be interesting to see how these can be shared (for instance in Hubs structures).
  • Provide funding analysis by language; to understand the investment by languages and understand any disparity in language support (for instance between English speaking countries and Portuguese/French speaking countries in the MEA region).
  • Statistics on volunteer activation: in rural and urban areas or the impact on targeted demographic groups like indigenous communities and older adults in the report.  It was made clear that this would be very interesting, but depends on grantee being able to capture this data and report it disaggregated so that the Foundation can aggregate this data.
  • More focus on technical contributions is needed, this is not a category that was analysed.
  • Aligning WMF stats and grantee statistics to see how grant statistics related to wider tendencies.
  • Include the connection to earlier movement discussions around Movement Strategy. Useful to see how recommendations are mapped onto regional work, priorities, and expected outcomes.
  • There was some interest in a summary of which grantees are getting external funding (i.e. outside the Wikimedia Foundation) and how much, as well as internal fundraising through things like membership fees, in order to learn from these practices.
  • More information about alliances fund (types of organisations and projects) and how they are engaging with existing Wikimedian communities.
  • The report was more targeted at the organisation-affiaite level, it would help to have version to engage communities and take this "bigger picture to show the local bigger picture" (CEECA participant), particularly when there is a lack of understanding of this work in some community members.

It was clarified that some of this information Foundation hopes to include in future reports, given that this was an initial baseline of intentions by gathering data of proposals, not analysis of implementation and impact based on reporting. Not everything will be possible to analyse (such as how much money was spent on very specific strategies, as this depends on how grantees report on spending, often with data that is not disaggregated in that level of detail). Also, there will be limitations of variables analysed given the Community Resources learning and evaluation officer’s capacity.

Proposals to continue learning[edit]

  • The Foundation could do more to use data about projects to connect: “ with small no. of staff, working on their own agenda, and harder to engage them with other projects. Maybe the Foundation could bring together affiliates across regions. Here's the list of 5 people who are interested in this issue. ”— (CEECA participant)
There was interest in global connections, as in some regions, connections within regions are already stronger.
  • There is a desire for more spaces to share examples and best practices, maybe through registering case-study type reports. Wikimedia UK gave a good example of a format they are using to register learning and apply for non-Wikimedia grants.
  • Related to this, How best to use the midpoint and final learning reports to document  experiences and identify organisational best practices and resources to be shared. There could be cyclical sessions to share learning from reports amongst grantees.
  • Some mentioned developing a better way of visualising grantees and their areas of work, with links to reports or case study registration, or any materials relevant to share with peers (the baserow tool could be an option, or the future Capacity Exchange tool).
  • Develop a centralized calendar and resource center for grantees to permanently look for spaces and resources to share.
  • Leverage spaces such as regional conferences for more peer sharing in person.
  • All affiliates expressed interest and intent to contribute and participate more actively at a regional level. Some have also included process indicators in their annual work plan on regional collaboration and partnerships such as New Zealand and Australia affiliates.

Notes[edit]

  1. ↑ One participate shared this link to an open letter to the Wikimedia Foundation Board as an example of such advocacy: Commons:Think big - open letter about Wikimedia Commons

Notes and presentations from the sessions[edit]

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