Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedistas de Uruguay exploration phase to create strategies to scale, diversify and grow participation and content from Uruguay
Pablísima Pepe piton Señoritaleona
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Applicant details[edit]
Wikimedia username(s):
- Scann
Pablísima Pepe piton Señoritaleona Ezarate
Organization:
- Wikimedistas de Uruguay
G. Have you received grants from the Wikimedia Foundation before?
- Did not apply previously
H. Have you received grants from any non-wiki organization before?
- No
H.1 Which organization(s) did you receive grants from?
- N/A
M. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?
- Yes
M1. Fiscal organization name.
- Datos, Acceso a la Información y Transparencia
Additional information[edit]
R. Where will this proposal be implemented?
- Uruguay
S. Please indicate whether your work will be focused on one country (local), more than one or several countries in your region (regional) or has a cross-regional (global) scope:
- Local
S1. If you have answered regional or international, please write the country names and any other information that is useful for understanding your proposal.
T. If you would like, please share any websites or social media accounts that your group or organization has. (optional)
https://www.instagram.com/wikimedistasuy/ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedistas_de_Uruguay https://wikimedistas.uy/ https://www.facebook.com/WikimedistasDeUruguay/
M. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?
- Yes
M1. Fiscal organization name.
- Datos, Acceso a la Información y Transparencia
Proposal[edit]
1. What is the overall vision of your organization and how does this proposal contribute to this? How does this proposal connect to past work and learning?
Our mission is to build equitable, diverse and open knowledge from and about Uruguay and Latin America in Wikimedia projects. We promote open tools as a way to generate knowledge on pressing societal challenges such as gender and racial inequality, human rights and climate change. We work with social movements and underserved communities to increase their participation in Wikimedia projects, providing a safe and collaborative environment.
2. What is the change that you are trying to bring about and why is this important?
Wikimedistas de Uruguay has been running activities during 2020-2021 that implemented some of the standard tactics in the movement, such as edit-a-thons and training workshops. We have learned that edit-a-thons are a good way to introduce a partner to some of the complexity involved in contributing to Wikimedia projects, but they don’t contribute to scale, diversify and grow the participation of target groups in the Wikimedia movement and they only modestly contribute to covering topic gaps.
In our experiences, we have learned that:
- participants have to be motivated by aligned values to keep on coming back to Wikimedia activities;
- there are several challenges to capture the knowledge that partners bring to Wikimedia and to connect the needs, goals and audiences of a partner to the Wikimedia toolbox;
- and there needs to be a constant, regular invitation for people to remain engaged in contributing to Wikimedia.
We need to transform awareness of Wikipedia as a platform with a huge audience into Wikimedia as a tool for partners’ and audiences to achieve their goals. Our proposed solution is to create spaces to exchange knowledge with partners that leads to better strategies and tactics for collective action around Wikimedia in Uruguay. As Wikimedistas de Uruguay, we understand how the Wikimedia ecosystem works, how to discover topic gaps, and what are the participation gaps in Wikimedia platforms. Partners have knowledge experts on their subject matter and targeted audiences that are committed with their agenda and their topics. We need to understand how Wikimedia as a tool fits and connects with the partners’ and audiences goals, needs and abilities. To solve this challenge, we propose to do some research and conduct trainings and workshops with at least five partners. More detail about each project can be found in our Annual Plan attached to this proposal. We expect this will lead to strategies and methodologies we could implement, try, learn from, and share with the broader community.
We believe that Uruguay has several opportunities that could be tapped for sustained growth. We have explained them in the Annual Plan attached.
Lastly, we need to build a long-term organization that adapts to our capacity as a group and allows us to implement a multi-year strategy in the upcoming years. For doing this, we need strategic, legal and financial support to structure a formal organization.
3. Describe your main approaches or strategies to achieve these changes and why you think they will be effective.
Our main strategies stem from a combination of skills, topics of interest and opportunities to grow both from the group and our partners. More details of our partners can be found in the Annual Plan attached and more detailed activities can be found in the Estimated Timeline attached.
Research & pilot.
- 1. Research tactics for increasing women and gender diverse participation and perspectives. We will do a set of interviews and focus groups with around 25 women and gender diverse people to understand their barriers, limitations and enablers to participate and engage on Wikimedia projects in order to produce strategies and actions for more inclusion of women and gender perspectives.
- 2. Identify strategies for covering topics for impact. This project will connect Wikimedia knowledge with partners’ knowledge on audiences and topics in ways that lead to better tactics for covering knowledge gaps by understanding how the use of Wikimedia tools can help partners and audiences achieve their goals.
Trainings. We will develop two multi-week training courses that engage targeted groups in partnership with other organizations.
- 1. Wikipedia training for climate change professionals and organizations. Following our learnings from 2021, the goal of this training is to transform climate change professionals and organizations into advocates of Wikipedia as a platform to communicate about environmental topics. This, in turn, will lead to new partnership opportunities, including funding opportunities.
- 2. Digital literacy and Wikimedia projects training with the UNESCO Chair on Open Education-Núcleo REA at the University of the Republic. This training will be directed towards education professionals. The goal of this training is to position Wikimedia as a key tool of the Open Education ecosystem to aid with digital literacy skills.
Activate & engage. We will run at least 15 activities that are core to Wikimedia’s day-to-day, such as content campaigns, edit-a-thons and workshops.
Community growth. We will run at least 15 activities that engage the Wikimedia community from Uruguay, including social activities.
Sustainability & Governance. We will be working with our Advisory Board (more details below) to structure a formal organization that can achieve sustained growth while adapting to the group needs.
4. What are the activities you will be developing and delivering as part of these approaches or strategies?
Our main objective is to generate knowledge with partners and communities that allow us to implement new methods to diversify, scale and grow the participation of target audiences in the Wikimedia ecosystem. To achieve this, we will do research, run trainings and workshops to understand our target participants’ needs and abilities that lead to the development of five innovative strategies and tactics to cover topic gaps. The process will engage at least 200 people around Wikimedia projects.
5. Do you want to apply for multi-year funding?
No
5.1 If yes, provide a brief overview of Year 2 and Year 3 of the proposed plan and how this relates to the current proposal and your strategic plan?
- N/A
6. Please include a timeline (operational calendar) for your proposal.
7. Do you have the team that is needed to implement this proposal?
Wikimedistas de Uruguay is currently a User Group composed of 10 members. Most of us are NGO professionals working at the intersection of digital rights and societal issues, with over +10 years of experience. For implementing this proposal, we are proposing the following structure.
- Financial management of funds will be done by and agreed with our fiscal sponsor. To ensure transparency in the management of funds, the President of our fiscal sponsor will be part of our Advisory Board.
- Two current members will act as part time contractors to implement the projects. A short bio and a CV can be found in the Annex documents attached to this proposal.
- Short-term outsourced contractors and agencies will provide aid in completing some elements of the projects, like communications and support for training & learning activities. These are reflected in the Budget attached.
- An Advisory Board composed of seasoned executive directors and subject matter experts will help us to see the big picture ideas, prioritize strategic opportunities moving forward and provide advice on how to set up and grow the organization.
- Role: Senior Project Manager. Evelin Heidel. Username: Scann. This role will be in charge of overseeing, designing, implementing and closing out the projects.
- Role: Community Engagement Manager. Paula Domínguez Font. Username: Pablísima. This role will be in charge of implementing activities and managing relationships with partners and communities.
Advisory Board
- Anna Torres Adell. Executive Director (ED) of Wikimedia Argentina.
- Anita Dos Santos. Co-founder of Mediared. (Uruguay).
- Claudio Ruiz. ED of Derechos Digitales. Founder Tecnología Crítica. (Chile).
- Emilio Velis. ED of Appropedia Foundation. (El Salvador).
- Daniel Carranza. President of DATA Uruguay.
8. Please state if your proposal aims to work to bridge any of the identified CONTENT knowledge gaps (Knowledge Inequity)? Select up to THREE that most apply to your work.
Content Gender gap, Age (regency) , Geography, Sexual Orientation, Important Topics (topics considered to be of impact or important in the specific context), Cultural background, ethnicity, religion, racial
8.1 In a few sentences, explain how your work is specifically addressing this content gap (or Knowledge inequity) to ensure a greater representation of knowledge.
9. Please state if your proposal includes any of these areas or THEMATIC focus. Select up to THREE that most apply to your work and explain the rationale for identifying these themes.
Education, Culture, heritage or GLAM , Advocacy, Climate Change and sustainability, Diversity
10. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Please note, we had previously asked about inclusion and diversity in terms of CONTENTS, in this question we are asking about the diversity of PARTICIPANTS. Select up to THREE that most apply to your work.
Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation, Geographic , Ethnic/racial/religious or cultural background, Age
11. What are your strategies for engaging participants, particularly those that currently are non-Wikimedia?
Our annual plan attached specifies the target participants for each activity. These are our target participants:
- Women and gender diverse people. Our research aims to understand the barriers and limitations for the participation in Wikimedia projects of this group. The research will lead to recommendations that we can implement in our activities in order to offer a better experience that mitigates or eliminates the barriers that this group might face when participating.
- Social activists: we will target activists, particularly climate change, gender and labor activists. We follow the recommendations of the Movement Organizers report around the stronger motivations that activists feel to engage with Wikimedia platforms. We plan to target them through a mix between word of mouth, our existing networks and partners and targeted ads.
- Partners and topic experts: we have already been in touch with the partners that we are specifying in this proposal. We plan to target them more specifically by producing activities to understand their needs and goals and how Wikimedia could help them solve or achieve them.
- Wikimedia-engaged volunteers: our Activate & Engage and Community Growth activities are targeted towards these groups. We plan to facilitate conversations around current knowledge and tactics in the movement and mapping knowledge gaps that help on-wiki editors contribute in more impactful ways. We also plan to design joyful activities where people can socialize with each other.
- Educators and education professionals: one of our activities is directed towards enforcing the role that Wikimedia has as a tool for digital literacy. We plan to engage with this group through our partnership with the UNESCO Chair on Open Education.
- Senior citizens: we will run a small training workshop with UNI3, a non-formal education organization from Uruguay. We plan to learn from the experience of Wikimedia Czech and implement a small pilot activity with our partner.
To retain participants we plan to:
- Design follow-up activities where they can engage after the first contact has been established. Continuing to invite people is key to their engagement with the Wikimedia movement.
- Follow-up with surveys and interviews where we can better understand their motivations and challenges in participating.
- Write and design small case studies that can tell the story of what participants learned and obtained from us and share them with the movement.
12. In what ways are you actively seeking to contribute towards creating a safer, supportive, more equitable environment for participants and promoting the UCOC and Friendly Space Policy, and/or equivalent local policies and processes?
- We will include a link to the Friendly Space Policy and the UCOC in the event materials.
- We will communicate the policies before starting any meeting or event.
- We will ensure that the organizers have received basic training on handling problematic situations, that they know how the policy works, and that they are available for anyone that might be experiencing harassment to contact them in private.
- If organizers get contacted for a violation of the Friendly Space Policy or the UCOC, organizers will evaluate the risk and level of offence with a matrix provided by Wikimedistas de Uruguay (from minor to very serious) and act accordingly (ban or expel from the event, ban with a period, ban indefinitely, call the police).
- For in-person events, we will make sure to coordinate with the people that are providing the physical space to get familiar with their protocols and how to coordinate in case there is a violation of the Friendly Space Policy and the UCOC.
13. Do you have plans to work with Wikimedia communities, groups, or affiliates in your country, or in other countries, to implement this proposal?
Yes
13.1 If yes, please tell us about these connections online and offline and how you have let Wikimedia communities know about this proposal.
We are part of the Iberocoop initiative. We are in contact with other affiliate chapters and we have been collaborating with them already to write this proposal. We count with the generous support of Wikimedia Argentina, that has been helping us through our activities this year and whom we plan to run some joint activities. We are part of other Wikimedia communities, such as VisibleWikiWomen, Art+Feminism and Wikimedians for Sustainable Development. We will notify them when the Meta page is available.
We have been uploading all our meetings to Meta. We have been sending messages to the Wikimedistas de Uruguay mailing list as well.
We will make sure to participate in relevant discussions, talk pages and conversations as soon as the grant proposal is published on Meta.
We have also contacted several of our partners to let them know beforehand and ask for their support on the activities that are presented in this proposal.
14. Will you be working with other external, non-Wikimedian partners to implement this proposal?
Yes
14.1 Please describe these partnerships and what motivates the potential partner to be part of the proposal and how they add value to your work.
Our partners will be mainly providing in-kind support, expert knowledge and audience outreach.
Culture & Education:
- Instituto de Documentación Cuesta Duarte (archive).
- Archivo X and Colectiva Cocó (arts collective; also working on gender issues).
- Plan Ceibal.
- UNESCO Chair on Open Education at Núcleo REA-University of the Republic.
Gender & Diversity:
- Mediared (alternative media collective).
- Art+Feminism.
- WhoseKnowledge?
- Área de Promoción Sociocultural, División Derechos Humanos, Diversidad Sexual, Ministerio de Desarrollo Social (MIDES)
Climate change & Sustainability:
- FFLA-CDKN (Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano-Climate & Development Knowledge Network).
- Open Climate (an alliance with other organizations from open knowledge projects exploring open & climate).
Advocacy:
- Creative Commons Uruguay.
- DATYSOC.
15. How do you hope to sustain or expand the work carried out in this proposal after the grant?
We expect to sustain and expand our work with a three-pronged approach.
- Generate knowledge. The main goal of our research and piloting activities with strategic partners will be to understand what tactics work better and have a high return on investment according to different metrics. This will help us build an understanding of the tactics that we could engage with more partners moving forward.
- Learning iterations. For every activity, we plan to have a Learning & Evaluation tactic that allows us to either improve or drop activities based on the feedback that we are capturing from participants and partners.
- Strategic thinking. This is the main reason why we are recruiting our Advisory Board. The Advisory Board will be crucial to help us transform our learnings into big picture ideas. They will help us prioritize the opportunities that we have identified over the course of the year for further growth.
Lastly, we will work on setting up a non-for-profit organization that accommodates to the current stage of the group. This approach will set us up for establishing strategic goals that are accompanied with a diversified funding strategy as well.
16. What kind of risks do you anticipate and how would you mitigate these. This can include factors such as external/contextual issues that may affect implementation, as well as internal issues, such as governance/leadership changes.
- n/a
17. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select a maximum of three options that most apply.
Identify Topics for Impact, Innovate in Free Knowledge, Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt
18. Please state if your organization or group has a Strategic Plan that can help us further understand your proposal. You can also upload it here.
- Upload Strategic Plan
Learning, Sharing, and Evaluation[edit]
19. What do you hope to learn from your work in this fund proposal?
We expect that we will be able to answer the following questions:
- What type of knowledge gaps around audiences and topics we have in Uruguay, how we could better tackle them, and how we will prioritize them.
- How we can better support partners’ and audiences in achieving their goals and needs through Wikimedia tools.
- What are barriers and enablers for women’s and gender diverse groups’ participation and retention on Wikimedia projects, particularly on Wikipedia, and what type of interventions could increase their participation and perspectives on Wikimedia projects.
- To the extent possible, what is the current demographics of on-wiki editors and volunteer organizers from Uruguay and what are the best ways to support their work.
- What are the differences on the level and quality of engagement across different target groups and how a better understanding of their needs and abilities can improve our tactics.
20. Based on these learning questions, what is the information or data you need to collect to answer these questions? Please register this information (as metric description) in the following space provided.
| Main Metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
Here are some additional metrics that you can use if they are relevant to your work. Please note that this is just an optional list, mostly of quantitative metrics. They may complement the qualitative metrics you have defined in the previous boxes.
| Additional Metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities | N/A | N/A |
| Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities | N/A | N/A |
| Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability | We expect to have at least 5 new partnerships.
We expect to maintain our current 13 partners described in the Annual Plan. |
18 |
| Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors | Our plan has an important component of obtaining feedback from participants.
Research: we obtain insights from at least 40 participants. Trainings: we obtain insights and feedback from at least 30 participants (total from every training). Organizing activities: we obtain feedback from at least 15 participants. |
85 |
| Diversity of participants brought in by grantees | Described above. | N/A |
| Number of people reached through social media publications | N/A | N/A |
| Number of activities developed | Total activities: 30.
Trainings: 2. Research & Pilot activities: 2. Survey for on-wiki community: 1. |
35 |
| Number of volunteer hours | N/A | N/A |
21. Additional core quantitative metrics. These core metrics will not tell the whole story about your work, but they are important for measuring some Movement-wide changes. Please try to include these core metrics if they are relevant to your work. If they are not, please use the space provided to explain why they are not relevant or why you can not capture this data. Your explanation will help us review our core metrics and make sure we are using the best ones for the movement as a whole.
| Core metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | New participants: 100
Returning participants: 100 Participants per type (some of them overlap):
|
200 |
| Number of editors | New editors: 30.
Returning editors: 20. We define "new editors" as people that do at least 10 edits in the platform, even when they might not remain engaged with the platform afterwards. We define returning editors as people that are already active in some capacity. |
50 |
| Number of organizers | Advisory board: 5.
Advisors to the implementation: 15 (people from Wikimedia Foundation staff and other movement wide advisors). Planners & coordinators (paid and volunteers): 7. Speakers: 15. |
42 |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | Number of articles improved: 400.
Number of articles created: 100. |
N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
21.1 If for some reason your proposal will not measure these core metrics please provide an explanation.
We believe these metrics need improvement based on a throughout review of what we did last year in order to understand what is realistic based on our current plan, where we have put more emphasis on participants' outreach and retention than outputs from events. We do acknowledge that we need a better baseline and we will be working on it after presenting this proposal. We will provide our baseline with a reviewed set of metrics after the proposal is uploaded on Meta.
22. What tools would you use to measure each metric selected?
For Wikipedia edits:
- Eventmetrics.
- Outreach dashboard.
- Manual tracking systems & Google spreadsheets.
For organizing activities:
- Google Forms and/or Limesurvey.
- GoogleDocs.
- Visual materials such as infographics that create narratives about the impact of our work.
Financial Proposal[edit]
23. & 23.1 What is the amount you are requesting from WMF? Please provide this amount in your local currency. If you are thinking about a multi-year fund, please provide the amount for the first year.
- 3718060.5 UYU
23.2 What is this amount in US Currency (to the best of your knowledge)?
- 85515.39 USD
23.3 Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it.
- We are providing subtotals in USD.
- Administrative costs: 966
- Sustainability & Governance: 2484
- Communications: 8921.7
- Staff (contractors): 44615.4
- Programs
-- General expenses: 11794.4 -- Research: 1610 -- Training: 3647.8
- Contingency fees: 3701.96
- Fiscal sponsorship fees: 7774.12
23.4 Please include any additional observations or comments you would like to include about your budget.
- N/A
Please use this optional space to upload any documents that you feel are important for further understanding your proposal.
- Other public document(s):
Final Message[edit]
By submitting your proposal/funding request you agree that you are in agreement with the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and the Universal Code of Conduct.
We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.
- Yes
Feedback[edit]
- Please add any feedback to the grant discussion page only. Any feedback added here will be removed.