Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Whose Knowledge? 2024-2026/Yearly Report (2024)
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Part 1: Understanding your work
[edit]Per the recent update on the Wikimedia Foundation Affiliates Strategy process, Wikimedia Affiliates that are General Support Fund grantees will fulfill their affiliate reporting requirements through their final or yearly grantee report.
If you are a Wikimedia Affiliate, you will use this form for your affiliate reporting and to address the affiliate health criteria. You do not need to submit a separate report to AffCom. Follow the guidance in the green boxes to report on how you met the corresponding affiliate health criteria.
If you are not a Wikimedia Affiliate, aligning your responses with the affiliate criteria is optional and not required.
1. Please share to what extent your programs, approaches, and strategies contributed to addressing the challenges you shared in your proposal. If they did not contribute as you believed they would, please share what obstacles you faced and what, if anything, you learned from them? (required)
For affiliates, use this space (Question 1.) to address Affiliate Health Criterion 1.1 (Goal delivery). Describe how you actively delivered on mission goals, e.g. content creation.
Historical and current structures of power and privilege continue to define what is considered 'received' or 'accepted' knowledge, who creates it, and how. As a community-facing, movement-oriented organization, our work is centered and anchored in our communities across movements at the intersections of knowledge, technology, and social justice. We convene and connect communities of solidarity, and practice to break silences and challenge fundamental issues in “Big Knowledge” (mainstream academia, publishing, museums, archives, libraries and memory organizations) as well as “Big Tech” (Silicon Valley and other regionally dominant tech capitalist companies). Most significantly, we aim to demonstrate interconnections between our initiatives, amplify community-centered methodologies, and share our collective learnings and practices - that are all at the heart of just and equitable (knowledge and tech) futures. We do this through the frames of epistemic justice and decolonizing the internet. In 2024 we continued centering the plurality of decolonial feminist practices and framings at the core of our work. Across our different programs and activities, we made significant progress and faced different challenges in our strategies, and these are some of the learnings we want to share:
Co-designing community-led methodologies and practices. WK? is a community-anchored organization, a collective and a campaign. In practice, that means we are modeling a community-centered approach where we convene and support community building and capacity strengthening across movements, while the strategy, methodologies and thematic threads of each of our programs are co-designed in a relational and collaborative way in dialogue with our communities. For example, through our Language Justice community-led research in action pieces, we have been more intentional in our approach on intersectionality and language justice, where in partnership with disability rights organization Mission Accessibility (India) we are convening a community of practice for mapping landscape of tech and barriers with and for disability rights activists and people with visual disabilities by organizing 3 pilot community focus groups in Hindi (India), Bangla (Bangladesh) and Urdu (Pakistan). Our research lead is Nirmita Narasimhan, a well-known visually disabled scholar and researcher, and we are working with five other disability rights experts to co-design and implement this work. We are continuing building partnerships and alliances in South Asia and East Africa; tech policy thinktanks like Centre for Internet and Society, India; community-rooted Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), and Lesan, a machine translation organization for Ethiopian languages led by communities.
Multilinguality, Multimodality and Accessibility. While we are co-designing and seeding meaningful allyships with our partners and communities with care, we learned that creating multilingual and accessible spaces while holding collaborative, and creative processes is an intensive, slow, laborious and challenging process. Transversal work across WK? programmatic areas and diversity of allies also takes more time, as collaborations and partnerships have their own cadence. We’ve learned that the protocols, and agreements are open to adaptation based on community needs, contexts, and feedback as we try them out in practice. This dynamic process of reflection, adaptation and iteration is something we recognize as one of the core pieces of our internal learning process where radically honest communications, shared commitment, and solidarity are crucial to building trust and making deep connections.
Our Language Justice 2024 program work reflects extensive learnings related to accessibility that we plan to adapt and streamline across WK? Programs as our internal accessibility and security practices. As part of Language Justice research in action process “ALT: Accessibility, Languages, Tech for the People”, we designed a methodological framework for three community pilots with communities of visually impaired activists and researchers in South Asia. This process of designing community-led methodologies honored and centered the embodied knowledge of visually impaired communities in the critique and imaginations of new and different technologies. It also surfaced critical issues at the intersection of accessibility, security and languages that are essential for conducting anti-colonial and liberatory research-in-action processes. Internal process documentation was carefully maintained, reflecting specifically on learnings around accessibility and data protection as a guideline to protect sensitive and identifying information of all participants in the process. In addition to this, a Data Protection Policy document was created that outlines all the key points to be carefully considered and followed in relation to accessibility, consent, textual/audio/video data shared, collected, and stored from our research-in-action process. For example, Proton Drive was used for storage of sensitive information (anonymized), Cryptpad for documentation, WhatsApp 1-1 channels for encrypted daily communications, while the briefing note was textually transcribed and audio recorded and published on our WK? website. A summarized version of the note was also translated into Braille and into Bangla.
Another example related to our Decolonizing Wikimedia program and multimodality is that we co-organized ¡Alto! Mujeres haciendo historia campaign to encourage participants to bring the history of women's historical and current struggles, in collaboration with Wikimedia chapters across Latin America and the Caribbean. The campaign proposes a multimodal approach where different forms of knowledge building are encouraged through participation in Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia. This campaign is a long-standing commitment among chapters and user groups in the region that grows and sustains year after year is key to continue building and strengthening the work to reduce the gender gap in Wikimedia projects.
Narrative weaving across WK? programs. Throughout 2024, we have engaged with reimagining WK? Comms strategy as a narrative weaving transversal across programs. Our learning is that our WK? Communications role within the current ecosystem and information overflow context is that of a convenor offering sensemaking and analysis, while amplifying critical methodologies that are co-designed with our communities. Our Radical Communications work has seen deep transformation and is still being shaped, with efforts to move towards a communications practice that centres community through multi-modality, multilinguality and creativity. We’ve produced and supported new resources about Caste, Tech and Resistance, Cultural Genocide in Palestine (available in English and Arabic), a Whose Voices? podcast season on Decolonizing Structured Data (with a fun podcast listening party!), and in an effort to reach different communities, you can now find us on LinkedIn and Mastodon. Our publications work is also in full swing, with an upcoming title in the spirit of the anthology Defending Our Dreams (co-edited by Anasuya Sengupta and Shamillah Wilson) in the works. This new iteration offers meditations on hope through process work and collaboration with young feminist advisors from across the world, who are shaping and guiding the process.
Learning Circles as a methodology supporting communities of practice. Throughout 2024, we have deepened our Learning Circles as a methodology (based on learnings from 2023 “Decolonizing the Internet’s structured data” and “Reimagining the public domain”) diving deeper into collective understanding of complex topics through peer-level participatory design on trans-local levels. This has been particularly reflected in Liberatory Archives and Memory program design and implementation where we convened a community of practice in the UK, (organizing four core events: in Bristol in-person (February 2024), a virtual gathering (April 2024), Birmingham in-person (June 2024), and in London in-person (November 2024). This series is an action to bring together a network of memory makers in their diverse backgrounds, capacities and expertise in memory work across the UK. We deep-dived into questions of methodologies, liberatory practices, and mapping of thematic threads (care, funding, Tech, Digitisation and IP, Frameworks and Methodologies, and Structures). These convenings expanded our archivists network, helped map out the challenges faced by archivists of African descent in the field, and dreamed of the radical possibilities of memory work and community. The learning circles have also provided a powerful space of solidarity and resilience, particularly for Black and minoritised communities within colonial GLAM institutions. The co-designing of the convenings is done with the network - where the community co-designs the agenda with us, this process helps with trust-building, strengthens a sense of belonging and empowers the community to share and support one another. Our role as convenors is guided by our community members.
“How we do is as important as what we do”. At the core of our work is our feminist, anti-oppressions, pro-liberations, and intersectional framework that shapes, localizes and contextualizes our work. We’ve articulated our radical operations as our methodologies, frameworks, collective practices (ways of working) and institutional arrangements (policies and resources) that facilitate deep and collective work, learnings and context-informed strategies. Our strategic goals are to deepen our organizational resilience to drive greater impact across our programs and strengthen our ability to support the broader knowledge and tech justice ecosystem. We are committed to organizational building as a learning process and practice on “how we do is as important as what we do”. This includes strengthening our deep accountability and learning processes; diversifying and increasing our funding portfolio; strengthening team capacities and internal organizational practices; streamlining internal communications and developing digital safety practices, etc. Several of our practices and applications of learnings during 2024 include all members of WK? team holding and designing: collective conversations (on infrastructure, decision-making, WK? community principles and practices), decision-making events protocol, Practices manual outlining accountability and responsibilities of WK?, etc. Part of our commitment regarding expanding our fundraising portfolio and influencing the wider philanthropic field, has been strengthening our capacities in Resources and Reparations by hiring two Co-Leads working on community-centered resources and reparations strategy.
2. Is there a plan to build on the key successes you had? If yes, please describe the plan and if no, please share the limitations to do so. For instance, did the activities lead to any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future? (required)
Adapting our strategies to context-informed learnings across our work is anchored in a community-centered approach. We convene and support community building and capacity strengthening across movements, while our strategy, methodologies and thematic threads of each of our programs are co-designed in a relational and collaborative way in dialogue with our communities. In 2024, we deepened and adapted our strategies by reflecting on:
1. Centering and engaging feminist leadership through infrastructures and practices of collective and shared decision-making on programmatic and organizational levels;
2. Sustainable allyship building through convenings, events, campaigns;
3. Practices of Community support and engagement
4. Framing feminist tech in collective, cross-movement solidarity and resistance against systemic oppressions and military industrial complex at the AWID Forum 2024, in Bangkok, Thailand.
1. Centering and engaging feminist leadership through practices of collective and shared decision-making on programmatic and organizational levels.
Programmatic level: Convening with communities of practice and advisors. We are establishing communities of practice as our advisory groups for each of our programs: community organizers, scholars, archivists, alternative tech-builders, practitioners, and leaders who are deeply involved within their communities and movements, with expertise and experiences from their contexts and networks. Given that the foundation of this relational process is trust and intentionality, each of WK? programs have program-specific strategies and methodologies of engaging with practitioners, organizers, and circles of advisors. The overall process design includes:
- Mapping the needs, priorities and thematic areas of work, while being responsive to the many uncertainties and structural oppression our communities face on an ongoing basis.
- Co-designing methodologies and ways of working that are context-informed and based on feminist principles of accountability, intersectionality, and consent.
- Establishing communication channels, and engaging in a series of exploratory conversations on possibilities of collaboration with different communities across the Global Majority world.
- Revisiting, holding context-based learning processes, and adapting and applying our learnings
For example, throughout 2024 we have been applying the learnings from Honouring Our Guardians activities from 2023. This has been reflected in the design of the program, with the main focus of creating a network of Indigenous women leaders in climate justice through an advisory circle set up and a series of conversations with Indigenous women leaders at the intersections of knowledge and tech justice. We are also supporting the participation of network members in events of strategic importance for network creation. Second primary goal is to create a multimodal, multilingual children’s book based on the Honouring Our Guardians convening from September 2023 where we convened with Indigenous women from the Pacific Islands and the Brazilian Amazon to reflect on the program, and joined the III Indigenous Women's March: Women Biomes in Defense of Biodiversity through Ancestral Roots. We are now working on a soundscape as a multimodal reflection and learnings from the convening, through production of a children’s book.
Another example includes our Libratory Archives and Memory program (LAMy), where we will continue to support the community of practice in the UK through network building among institutional and community-based archivists and memory workers, particularly of Black and minoritised communities. This year, we are building an advisory committee of regional focal points, to assist our program in regional-based knowledge production and to continue documenting archival practices of global communities. Additionally, our plans for the UK network are to organise one face-to-face convening in April 2025, and three virtual learning circles for our global community around the themes of The Right to Forget, Tech & Data Security for Memory-Making.
Organizational level: WK? Board. Given that WK? has strengthened significantly in the last 3 years, we are doing a governance reimagining process of building a feminist intersectional model of the board that represents WK? in the spirit of strategies, practices, methodologies, and constellations we are building. This means we are doing a complete board restructuring, and so far we have completed a WK? Governance health mapping, and a series of conversations across full WK? team on the model of the governance we need for WK?. Currently we are finalizing the review of applications.
2. Sustainable allyship building through convenings, events, and campaigns
Strategic participation in Wikimedia movement events and networks. We convene, connect and participate in critical online and in-person conversations and campaigns to build shared perspectives, practices, and agendas for action. In 2024 we continued with our dedication to expand a sense of belonging and participation in the Wikimedia movement within the broader tech ecosystem, acknowledging different ways of meaningful participation aligned with the Wikimedia movement principles.
Our 2024 work has included collaborating with users, techies, volunteers, community organizers, artists, academics, feminist tech organizations, etc., with their contributions and critical perspectives on epistemic justice in the Wikimedia ecosystem and beyond. We have continued connecting and mobilizing chapters, user groups and community organizers, as well as institutions, organizations, and activists from different movements. Some of the examples include our collaborations within strategic spaces of the Wikimedia movement, such as Wikimedia Summit, WikiIndaba, LAC campaigns, and other feminist networks, movements and collectives within and outside the Wikimedia movement.
Through our participation and contributions to the Wikimedia Summit, we deepened our learning on the collective power of the community to call for accountability regarding resources, representation and governance within our movement and also deepened our solidarity with other groups like Art+Feminism, Black Lunch Table, Wiki LGBT+ User Group, among others.
'Strategic two-fold positioning of our annual #VisibleWikiWomen campaign': to visibilize plural feminist resistances against systemic oppressions and war, and to encourage greater collaboration within and beyond the Wikimedia ecosystem. During 2024, we launched the 7th edition of campaign “Our Resistance is Plural: Feminist solidarity, liberation, and peace” strategically positioning the campaign in two ways:
Firstly, as a space for collaboration between different communities beyond the usual Wikimedia Commons contributors, and nurturing Wikimedia Commons as a space for plural knowledges and visual narratives, beyond hosting Wikipedia images. Secondly, through the campaign we amplified our agency and collective power to contribute to feminist efforts across the world to document and highlight stories and images of feminist resistance, liberations, solidarity, and peace in the current context we are in. Acknowledging the gendered impacts of war and conflict, one of the main goals of the campaign was to make the work of womxn peacebuilders and human rights defenders visible through images that represent power, strength, respect, dignity, protest, and solidarity.
The campaign brought over 5800 images (and counting!) of black, brown, queer, trans, and indigenous women and non-binary folks from the majority of the world to Wikimedia Commons. This number is a record in terms of numeric metrics for a single campaign, but this number doesn’t tell the full story. The gender visibility gap also exists in terms of narratives and structured data, and we wonder: what stories are our images telling? To address this question, we are planning a #VisibleWikiWomen photo story contest on Commons, with some strategic goals, including; positioning the campaign among the community of feminist photographers beyond the usual Wikimedia Commons contributors and emphasizing that Wikimedia Commons is a friendly space for plural knowledges and visual narratives, beyond hosting Wikipedia images.
Additionally, we will work around structured data in a feminist data soiree with African feminists wikimedians that we are planning to convene around Wikimania 2025. Also, the work we started with the Queer Africa edit-a-thon will continue with editing the articles that are incomplete from the last year and creating new ones with volunteers interested in feminist Wikipedia editing, image making and data. Last, but not least, we will continue our community support to #VisibleWikiWomen local organizers and strengthening of community initiatives with wikimedians and feminists from Africa and Latin America.
The Decolonizing Wikimedia programme will build on all this work to hold the 8th edition of the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign while carrying forward the lessons from previous campaigns to dive into the impact and lessons from all these years, and to inform our strategy and planning for the future.
3. Practices of Community support and engagement. One of our key context-based learnings during 2024 is related to our practices of community support and engagement while reflecting on the positionality of WK? within the broader and trans-local ecosystem.
We are committed to continuing to connect local with global practices of solidarity and hope through our programmatic work, including amplifying shared and collective power in the work we do together with our communities. In the past years, we have learned that there are many different and meaningful ways of supporting community organizers: from context-specific strategizing together, to implementing activities on the ground. This includes monetary and non-monetary resources sharing: WK? tech and infrastructure, capacities and skill building, advising, sharing our best practices and protocols, networking, supporting communities’ participation in events, etc.; as well as covering internet access, transportation, food and beverage, care and accessibility support, prizes and gifts.
For example, in 2024 we worked with and supported community organizers in Africa to implement different pilot programmes under our #VisibleWikiWomen campaign as part of our commitment and learning to co-create with communities and center community-led knowledge. These included;
1. #VisibleWikiWomen in Ghana 2024: The Silent Contributions of Indigenous Voices in Building a Just and Free World.
2. A panel held in collaboration with Feminists in Kenya and African Feminism in Dakar, Senegal at the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa in Africa, on creating digital spaces for feminist futures
3. A queer Africa- edita-thon on the sidelines of WikiIndaba in Johannesburg in collaboration with HOLA Africa which was a community-led gathering on queer knowledges in Africa and a hands-on wiki-editing session that had the overarching goal of adding queer African LGBTQ+ narratives to open knowledge and the global discourse. Together with 25+ queer people in Johannesburg, we shared stories and experiences of being people who exist on the margins of power and knowledge; and joined in the collective joy and solidarity of decolonizing Wikipedia by learning, editing, uploading, and sharing rainbow cupcakes.
4. A #VisibleWikiWomen partnership with the Global Wiki Education Initiative in Tanzania visibilizing women from diverse backgrounds including; lifestyle, culture, sports, and physical activities.
Another example is the work the the Liberatory Archives and Memory is carrying out Mapping, Amplifying, and Connecting Community Archives as Sites of Resistance in the Trans-Local Context of Systemic Erasure. Throughout 2024, our program engaged in conversations with community archivists and memory workers across the globe, learning from their efforts to sustain, protect and decolonise archival practices. Convenings and learning circles we supported in the UK surfaced critical reflections on anti-colonial archival work, and strategies for resisting and challenging colonial capitalist memory institutions. Our learnings revealed the increasing vulnerabilities of archives due to state oppression, digital security risks, and resource limitations - reinforcing the need for sustained trans-local solidarity and knowledge sharing. These discussions directly informed our 2025 plan, ensuring that our work is grounded in the urgent needs of our communities. This year, we will facilitate the in-person UK Network convening in April 2025 to build on our 2024 discussions, bringing together memory practitioners from Black and minoritised communities to consolidate learnings and deepen collective strategies.
Knowledge production remains at the forefront of our work. In 2025, we will publish a report on key learnings, produce region-specific, multi-format reflections on community centred archival work, and develop new writings on the intersection of Land and Memory. Our plan is a direct response to the wisdom and strategies shared by our network of archivists and memory workers, ensuring our work remains collaborative and responsive.
From Palestine, Syria and the United States, archives have become a contested sites where memory is deliberately manipulated and erased to serve political agendas. We have been mapping the cultural genocide in Palestine, documenting the destruction of heritage sites, universities and cultural institutions. We will continue to build this database, expanding this crucial archive to resist colonial violence. We are also actively documenting the evolving archival ecosystems in the US under the newly elected Republican government. This includes capturing the systematic removal of data on transgender rights and LGBTIQ, diversity, equity and inclusions (DEI) initiatives, environmental and climate crisis, and health funding - particularly its impact on marginalised communities, including HIV/AIDS, reproductive health in Africa / Global Majority. These interconnected struggles underscore the urgency of resisting the suppression of current and historical narratives.
4. Feminist tech for collective liberation at AWID: Cross-movement solidarity and resistance against systemic oppressions and military industrial complex
During AWID as the biggest global gathering of feminists held in December 2024 in Bangkok, we articulated feminist tech strategy as a key component of feminist organizing both with the larger feminist movements and with different funders, while celebrating feminist friendships and collaborations. We convened Feminist Tech Gardens with our partners APC and Numun Fund (which we co-founded three years ago) and also held our #VisibleWikiWomxn photo booth. As WK? we were co-holding overall coordination and infrastructure design with our partners APC and Numun Fund, including supporting security and safety during the event (FTG Care practices, digital safety support, psychological and digital aid first kit in collaboration with VitaActiva, media clinics with The Gender Beat collective), to on-site support and direct holding of several sessions and activities during the four day convening. AWID 2024 was a full-circle moment for Whose Knowledge?, as back in 2016 we launched our first steps as a collective at the AWID Forum in Bahia, Brazil.
Feminist Tech Gardens was a powerful 4-day convening held in two spaces at AWID, with exhibitions, workshops and conversation spaces for feminists across the world. We came together in solidarity and resistance as part of our feminist, anti-colonial, intersectional, pro-liberation collectives and communities. It was a space for collective sharing of challenging and dismantling economies of colonialism, capitalism, military industrial complex, and patriarchy. Through participatory design of the program, we shared our embodied knowledges, stories, practices, and strategies of building feminist, decolonized, and liberatory tech, from feminist data and memory work, to security and feminist servers.
For us AWID was an important space to connect our 2024 #VisibleWikiWomen theme of the year Our Resistance is Plural: Feminist Solidarity, Liberation, and Peace, where we practice solidarity with all the many feminists movements around the world who are witnessing genocide, exploitation, and many other forms of violence including the regression of our reproductive freedoms. Our #VisibleWikiWomxn photo booth had more feminists visiting it to have their photographs taken by Sirin Muangman – a wonderful Thai photographer – in a single day, than at any other event in the history of the campaign! Our Decolonizing Wikimedia team then held a data edit-a-thon to add Structured Data on Commons and Wikidata items around images collected in previous photo booths, to connect the dots between image creation and data narratives. Our Liberatory Archives and Memory team held sessions on anti-forgetfulness and feminist archiving, while our Organisational Design and Practices and Operations team with our Program Co-convenors held a critical session on practices of weaving care as a tangible within organizational design, operations and programming. As a result of the different workshops and conversations, and to continue strengthening our commitment with communities and allies, we have adapted our plans for 2025. For example, during the Liberatory Archives and Memory workshop, participants highlighted the need for capacity-building around archival practices, which we have incorporated in our program plans for 2025 and we will organise capacity-building online workshops for our networks in the Global Majority focusing on: Digital Security in Archival Work - addressing challenges and strategies for protecting collections online; Learnings on the Right to Forget - ethical engagements with silences and gaps in the archive; How do we archive our movements? - developing and documenting anti-colonial, community-led methodologies; while our Organisational Design and Practices and Operations team with our Program Co-convenors will continue holding conversations with sister organizations around organizational design, operations and programming.
3. Please provide a link to reports that detail the activities that took place in the last year. This can include an annual report, Meta pages, and websites. If there are no links available, briefly describe the implemented activities and programs below or upload any files. (required)
For affiliates, use this space (Question 3.) to address Affiliate Health Criteria 2.1 (Affiliate health & resilience), 4.1 (Internal engagement), 4.2 (Community connection), and 4.3 (Partnerships and collaboration):
- Describe your activities engaging new users, new members for your decision-making body(ies), and developing leaders and organizers (2.1).
- Describe your activities creating or hosting spaces to encourage greater collaboration and engagement among your members (4.1).
- Describe how you engage with the contributing community that you serve and/or support (4.2).
- Describe your partnerships with other affiliates or with non-Wikimedia entities (4.3).
4. Are you interested in sharing what you achieved or learned this year with the wider community through different peer learning programs (e.g. Let's Connect program, Diff)? (optional)
Yes, we are planning to share some of our learnings on Diff and also encourage our communities to share as well, following the experience of our #VisibleWikiWomen partners Pamela Ofori-Boateng and Francis Quasie last year ([9]). We have been invited to join the Capacity Exchange initiative and we will explore the platform and its possibilities in 2025. Let’s Connect is always in our radar and we are interested in finding opportunities to exchange knowledge in this program as well.
5. Did you collect feedback from your community or target groups on how the activities implemented impacted them? If yes, please attach/provide information on the results (e.g. community surveys, stories, impact booklets/reports, interviews with partner institutions, etc). Did you collect other impact-specific data? (required)
For affiliates, the response to Question 5. also partially addresses Affiliate Health Criteria 4.1 (Internal Engagement), 4.2 (Community Connection), or 4.3 (Partnerships & collaboration), where applicable.
We carried out post-activity surveys and process reflections/debriefs with our communities that inform our planning and implementation processes.
We sent feedback questions requesting reflections on their experiences and learnings from our work together. An example of where we did this was sending out a survey to participants post the, “Queer Africa Edit-a-thon” where all the responses, expressed interest to join future editing events and shared lessons including; wanting to replicate the process of the edita-thon and a lesson on support from our co-organizer Tiffany Mugo, from HOLAAfrica who shared,
“Support. The biggest lesson around this is the need to have skills networks outside your immediate ‘mandate’, sometimes you need to know techy folks. There is a need for those with digital know-how and knowledge to come together with those with the stories that should be on these platforms and in these spaces. Those who have the politics and the will can collaborate with those with the narratives to push them into the great beyond”
We also have activity reports from individual community organizers as part of our ongoing learning process that is based on the different contexts of our communities. As well as internal shareback process for programmatic learnings, challenges and possibilities that team members have identified during the activities organized, and events in which we participate. This informs our strategic directions and planning processes.
We engage in active listening reflections from participants of the convenings and we document reflections and learnings to share with the broader ecosystem. One example of this is the podcast series about Decolonizing Structured Data where participants shared reflections, learnings and questions on what it means decolonizing structured data in their contexts.
6. During the fund period, did your efforts do any of the following? (required):
For affiliates, the response to Question 6. also partially addresses Affiliate Health Criterion 2.2 (Diversity balance).
- 6.1 Bring in participants from the following groups: women, people with disabilities, indigenous groups , LGBTQ+ groups, speakers of minority languages, underrepresented geographical regions (ESEAP, LATAM, SSA, MENA, SA)
- 6.2 Develop content about the following underrepresented topics or groups of people: women, indigenous groups, LGBTQ+ groups, speakers of minority languages, underrepresented geographical regions (ESEAP, LATAM, SSA, MENA, SA)
- 6.3 Support the retention of: Editors, Organizers, Partnerships
7. What, if any, effective tactics or approaches can you share that worked well when dealing with the programs under points 6.1-6.3 that you selected? (optional)
- Consent as a continuous process of information exchange. We understand consent as an ongoing practice rather than a yes/no binary, centering people's dignity, autonomy and bodily integrity; and the right to withdraw. Informed consent can only be meaningful when it is a process of exchange of information in which the participants have the right to negotiate and re-negotiate their participatory process at all times. We continue to develop, adjust, adapt, and deepen our consent and safety practices across our programmatic activities.
- Accessibility. We have started and are currently undergoing a process that will help us be better in terms of accessibility. This was prompted by our Language Justice program where it was challenging to start a deep learning and self-reflection process around our own accessibility practices. We have always made efforts to put at the center of our practices the needs of marginalized communities. However we were not aware of how much we needed to learn and improve to be a fully accessibility-oriented space.
- Translation and interpretation. Multilinguality facilitates access and meaningful participation for Global Majority World communities. Mere attribution is not enough in this field, and we need to recognize and center the time, resources, planning and those who carry the heavy lifting of making multilinguality possible.
- Care. We understand and practice care as a feminist strategy that challenges capitalist and patriarchal systems of oppressions. Weaving care at the core of our practices serves the repair of the trust within the historically minoritized communities and the way relationships are created, maintained, and transformed.This is reflected in both our organizational and programmatic design that facilitate our ways of working together.
8. If you developed partnerships, which of the following factors most helped you to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors (optional):
N/A
Part 2: Metrics for Year 1
[edit]| Wikimedia Metrics | Target (Year 1) | Results (Year 1) | Comments and tools used |
|---|---|---|---|
| Number of all participants | 450 | 353 | Event participants lists
People participating in activities organised by WK? |
| Number of all editors | 100 | 449 | Event metrics, glamtool, events lists.
Users participating in VWW campaign 2024; Ilustratona WELX; VisibleWikiWomen 2024 in Ghana; VisibleWikiWomen 2024 in Nigeria; ¡Alto! Mujeres haciendo historia. New and existing users participating in activities organized or supported by Whose Knowledge? |
| Number of new editors | N/A | 449 | |
| Number of retained editors | N/A | 449 | |
| Number of all organizers | 20 | 39 | Internal tracking system
People organizing / leading activities, projects or convenings - 6 New organizers (4 collectives) |
| Number of new organizers | N/A | 39 |
| Wikimedia project | Target - Number of created pages (Year 1) | Target - Number of improved pages (Year 1) | Result - Number of created pages (Year 1) | Result - Number of improved pages (Year 1) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | 700 | 535 | ||
| Wikimedia Commons | 2500 | 4827 | ||
| Wikidata | 350 | 10 | 112 | |
| Wiktionary | ||||
| Wikisource | ||||
| Wikimedia Incubator | ||||
| Translatewiki | ||||
| MediaWiki | ||||
| Wikiquote | ||||
| Wikivoyage | ||||
| Wikibooks | ||||
| Wikiversity | ||||
| Wikinews | ||||
| Wikispecies | ||||
| Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia |
11. Did you set other quantitative and qualitative targets for your project (other metrics)? (required): Yes
11.1. Other Metrics.
In your application, you outlined some other open metrics that you would like to measure. Please fill out the achieved results for each of the open metrics you defined.
| Other Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transformative Stories | Positive and meaningful impact of bringing minoritised knowledges to Wikimedia projects documented through storytelling centered and grounded in experiences and embodied knowledge of participants and their communities. Shared with our communities via WK? comms channels (website, social media, newsletter, etc.), and our meta page. Our target is 3 stories. | 3 | 4 | Transformative story 1 - #VisibleWikiWomen in Ghana 2024: The Silent Contributions of Indigenous Voices in Building a Just and Free World. Post on Diff by Pamela Ofori-Boateng and Francis Quasie: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2024/11/19/visiblewikiwomen-in-ghana-2024-the-silent-contributions-of-indigenous-voices-in-building-a-just-and-free-world/
Transformative story 2 - Bringing Soweto Pride to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. 2024 marked the 20 year anniversary of Soweto Pride. A historical politcal march by black LBQT+ people in South Africa organized by the Forum for Empowerent of Women.(FEW). In 2024 we followed up with our collaboration wiith in 2023 and through our feminist wiki editing club first sessions, we collaboratively created the wikipedia article for Soweto Pride to mark its 20 years, uploaded 27 images from Soweto Pride 2023 to Commons. Transformative story 3 - Wikifeminist data soirée at AWID. In our Feminist Tech Gardens at the AWID Forum, we gathered a small group of Wikimedia members participating in the forum to create a wiki-feminist corner and work around the images produced in previous #VisibleWikiWomen photo booths, to add descriptions, captions, structured data and also to edit Wikidata items about women and non-binary people in tech. Transformative story 4 - Honouring communities’ histories through archives. Another story from AWID Feminist Tech Gardens. Our Liberatory Archives and Memory (LAMy) program team introduced their critical liberatory interventions to archiving through a feminist lens, and provided skills on how to archive movements and their histories and work. Through these transformative stories, we got valuable insights about the work of centering historically marginalized knowledge in its complexity and plurality. In all these stories we observed a positive impact in the communities involved through the commitment of building, together with wikimedians, memory workers and feminists, a solidarity bridge to inhabit the digital space in equal affirmation and validation. |
Blog post writing, feedback surveys, post-activities debriefs and reflections, in-person conversations and private communications. |
| Sustainable allyship building | Deeper understanding on how sustainable allyship building and practices work for WK? & Wikimedia communities, including strengths, opportunities, challenges, etc. Shared with our communities via WK? comms channels (website, social media, newsletter, etc.), and our meta page. Our target is Minimum 3 key learning insights shared. | 3 | 3 | Partnership with Wikimedia +20 Wikimedia affiliates in LAC for the collaborative campaign ¡Alto! Mujeres haciendo historia. We were able to bring Spanish-Portuguese bilinguality, create an umbrella campaign topic for a diverse range of activities, and foster collaboration in multiple territories and wikis. This campaign is a long-standing commitment among chapters, user groups and volunteers in the region that grows and sustains year after year and is key to continue building and strengthening the work to reduce the gender gap in Wikimedia projects.
Partnership with APC and Numun Fund to create the Feminist Tech Gardens at the AWID Forum 2024, a dedicated space for participants to engage with technology as collective liberation. We articulated feminist tech strategy as a key component of feminist organizing both with the larger feminist movements and with different funders, while celebrating feminist friendships and collaborations. We convened Feminist Tech Gardens with our partners APC and Numun Fund (see above). Partnership with non Wikimedia African feminist and queer organizations namely; HOLA Africa, Feminists in Kenya and African Feminism to collaborate on community projects including a panel at the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa and the Queer Africa edita-thon. |
Post-activities debriefs and reflections, in-person conversations. |
| Collection of Resources, Tactics & Practices | Community pool of resources, tactics and practices around knowledge justice curated by Wikimedia community. Shared with our communities via WK? comms channels (website, social media, newsletter, etc.), and our meta page.
Our target is 3 practices documented. |
3 | 3 | Cultural Genocide in Palestine: A Resource List. A web resource on how the deliberate erasure of Palestinian cultural and historical heritage has been utilized as a strategic war tactic, and what are the long-term impacts on the knowledge(s), identity and memory of the Palestinian communities. https://whoseknowledge.org/resource/cultural-genocide-in-palestine-a-resource-list/
Caste, tech and resistance resource list. This resource list about caste, tech and resistance is a collection of different ways caste-oppressed people navigate the Internet, and resist discrimination on, and offline. https://whoseknowledge.org/resource/caste-tech-resistance/ Whose Voices? Podcast: Decolonizing Structured. With a series of 5 episodes and a listening party, we documented our conversations with Wikipedians and Wikidata enthusiasts and builders about what structured data is, how, and why it’s important to apply a critical lens to its creation and use. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Event:Listening_party:_Decolonizing_Structured_Data Gathering, curating and creating resources, tactics & practices with our partners and communities has been key in our journey to liberatory knowledge practices. These practices of knowledge curation and creation show us that behind every knowledge gap in the digital space, including Wikipedia, there is a history of erasure but also a story of memory and resistance, happening online and offline. By collecting and documenting these materials and lived experiences, we are able to foster and connect much needed reflections and relevant conversations for Wikimedians, techies and memory workers. |
Resource curation, community gatherings, feedback surveys, post-activities debriefs and reflections, in-person conversations and private communications. |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
Part 3: Skill Development / Capacity Building
[edit]12. Reflecting on your programmatic (external) and organizational (internal) work, did your grant support you to undergo any skill development that made a difference to your success? If yes, what skill was developed, and how did it lead to success? (e.g. received coaching on public speaking, attended training on nonviolent communication, hosted professional development conversations on leadership, learned and used a new tool for project management, etc.)? Can you share any materials? (required)
For affiliates, use this space (Question 12.) to address Affiliate Health Criteria 2.2 (Diversity balance) and 3.1 (Diverse, Skilled, and Accountable Leadership):
- Describe actions taken to prioritize gender balance in affiliate leadership, as well as any areas of diversity relevant to your affiliate's context (2.2).
- Describe the management, financial, or other leadership skills of your affiliate leaders. If you have a succession plan, please include it here (3.1).
- Describe any training or skill development (as outlined in the question above) (3.1).
- Incorporate into the annual report a disclosure of conflict of interests (if any) from the leadership (3.1).
WK? Board. We are in the process of building a feminist intersectional model of WK? board. We held a governance audit and conversations where external consultants held WK? full team and individual reflections, and existing practices on governance. Both the methodology and the reflections were really useful for us, particularly that “governance” landed as individual, pair, team and collective “accountability” for us. Following the governance mapping process, we initiated board recruitment by sharing an open call via our networks, and are currently reviewing more than 200 applications. We are envisaging that our Board recruitment process will be concluded by the end of the first quarter of 2025.
Strategic planning on programmatic and operational leadership level. Following our team retreat in 2024, all programs, including the shared operational leadership, have started working on strategic plans, 18-month timelines, ecosystem mapping, community building principles and practices, and programmatic budgets. Along these lines, we have held mini-retreats throughout 2024 to support this process. In 2024, this process was held by Program co-convenors, with the extended support from Operations lead, Executive Directress, and Directress of Organizational Design and Practice. Our goals are to strengthen WK? team capacities in strategic planning aligned with WK? strategic anchors, develop streamlining processes, and strengthen capacities of all team members in budget development, monitoring, and finance reporting.
Programmatic mini-retreats. During 2024 we have set a protocol for mini-retreats where we balance programmatic pair work with contributions from the broader team. Our protocol reflects considerations of budget possibilities and restrictions, location choice (combining it with external events attendance), timing, and overall process (eg. collaborative agenda design).
Internal Processes. In 2023, we worked on a number of internal processes, and launched our Team Practice Manual in 2024. We also launched Reflexivity Checks (aka. Performance Assessments) to reflect, learn, support and assess our work while identifying areas for improvement and skill development that are linked to their role within WK?. In addition to this, we are continually working on adapting our existing policies and protocols (including Scope of Work with Accountability agreements, ICAs, etc.). In terms of COI Affirmation and Disclosure, our practice is having all WK? team members sign it on an annual basis.
Finances and Budgeting. In 2024, our Administration and Operations lead with the Program Co-Convenors worked closely with the program co-leads to build capacities around financial management and budgets. This resulted in each program building their budgets for 2025 as part of a joint effort and responsibility for managing organizational resources. We were also invested in strengthening practical skills across WK? regarding budgeting and tracking expenditures (eg. full team workshops). Our Radical Operations team has also welcomed Bareya Khan to our collective as Operations Coordinator to streamline logistical, financial and operational processes and implementation. In 2024 we extensively worked on preparation and documentation for our first Audit for 2025.
Resources and Reparations. We have strengthened our staff capacities by hiring two Resources and Reparations co-leads élysse marcellin and Cassie Denbow in September 2024. Our goal is to sustain, diversify and mobilize resources aligned with WK? strategy, politics and mission and expand our community of supporters, in solidarity with our work and that of our communities and different ways of community-based approaches for resource mobilisation within a reparative framework.
Liberatory Archives and Memory. During 2024 we have worked to expand our Liberatory Archives and Memory (former Whose (Digital) archives?) towards a global program. We welcomed Ezrena Marwan as a program co-lead to work on building archives of resistance situated at the intersections of visual culture, history and social justice.
13. What is one capacity/skill area that you would like to focus on for the next year? And how do you plan to achieve this capacity? (required)
Distributed leadership. As we have agreed at our 2025 full team retreat, we want to focus on deepening shared decision making and distributed leadership across WK?. Held by WK? operational leadership team, we have already set some foundations and practices throughout the previous year. These include designing and implementing programmatic mini retreats for strategic planning with support from the wider team, series of collective conversations facilitated and held by different team members (on security, community principles, infrastructure, etc.), team engagement in Practices manual process, financial oversight of approvals by Coordinating Committee (including our Board treasurer), one program Co-Convenor joining Operations, etc. One of our 2024 highlights was also two of our team members designing a decision making tool for event participation. In addition to this, all our programmatic pairs now have designed programmatic budgets (with support from operational Lead and Program Co-Convenors) and are in the process of strengthening their skills in expenditure tracking and reporting.
For 2025, we plan to set up internal committees (programmatic, infrastructure, finances, etc.) where we will be testing different shared decision making tools (such as DARCI, MOCHA, Levels of involvement, Gradients of Agreement). By mid 2025, we plan to have a fully restructured Board that reflects WK? feminist intersectional model of governance WK? (see above).
Brave and safe space policy and UCoC. In 2024 we incorporated the Wikimedia Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) to our brave and safe space policy. In this way, we are committed to enforce the UCoC, but also to intentionally promote a safe and comfortable space for gender diverse and non-conforming people, for femmes, for women, and for people who are often marginalized in mainstream and western constructs of personhood. Our principles of Love, Respect and Solidarity are at the core of every event, and we model these practices and invite others to do so.
14. If you have additional information or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here. Use the space below to upload any additional documents that would be useful to understand your report.
For affiliates, also use this section (Question 14) to fulfill the Affiliate Health Criteria requirements.
- Describe and link to any public-facing documentation for affiliate governance, including affiliate leadership and membership with a breakdown of the demographics; how elections are conducted; how conflicts of interest are declared; and how decisions are made and communicated (2.2, 2.3, 3.1).
- Describe and link to any public-facing documentation for activities incorporating, promoting awareness about, or enforcing the Universal Code of Conduct in your affiliate's activities (3.3).
- Describe and link to any public-facing documentation for internal membership engagement, such as notes from your regular meetings and how you communicate to or involve your membership (4.1).
Part 4: Financial reporting
[edit]For affiliates, also use this section (Part 4: Financial reporting) to address Affiliate Health Criterion 3.2 (Financial & Legal Compliance).
| Description | Amount spent (USD) |
|---|---|
| Personnel costs | 23420 |
| Operational costs | 10437 |
| Programmatic costs | 166143 |
| Total (Year 1) | 200000 |
| Other revenue | 1900000 |
| Remaining funds (Year 1) | N/A |
15. Please state the total amount spent from this fund in your local currency. (required)
200000 USD
16. Please provide an overview of the amount spent from this fund in the following budget categories in your local currency. (required)
- Operational costs: 10437 USD
- Programmatic costs: 166143 USD
- Staff and contractor costs: 23420 USD
17. Did you have any other revenue sources (e.g. other funding, membership contributions, donations)? (required): Yes
- 17.1. Provide the total amount received from other revenue sources in your local currency. (required): 2200000 USD
- 17.2. Provide the total amount spent from other revenue sources in your local currency. (required): 1900000 USD
18. Provide a financial report document which will provide the details of funds received and spent in the currency of your fund. (required)
- Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.
- Report funds received and spent, if template not used.
18.2. If you have not already done so in your financial spending report, provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal. (optional)
- The WMF budget allocation for the following line items was reduced due to a slight overspend:
- Liberatory Archives and Memory Co-Lead's allocation was reduced from 10% to 8%.
- Epistemic Justice Researcher's allocation was reduced from 10% to 8%.
- General Operations allocation was reduced from 10% to 7%.
- Team Travel allocation was reduced from 10% to 5%.
19. Do you have any unspent funds from this funding?: No
20. Final confirmations (required)
- 20.1. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement? You must be in compliance with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement. In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the Wikimedia Foundation mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
- Yes
- 20.2. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?
- Yes
- 20.3. Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
- Yes
This is an automatically generated Meta-Wiki page. The page was copied from Fluxx, the web service of Wikimedia Foundation Funds, where the user has submitted their report. Please do not make any changes to this page because all changes will be removed after the next update. Use the discussion page for your feedback. The page was created by CR-FluxxBot.