Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Wikimedia Estonia Community Fund General Support Application for the year 2024
Add topicLatest comment: 5 months ago by Kruusamägi in topic General Support Fund proposal approved in the amount of 78,280 EUR
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General Support Fund proposal approved in the amount of 78,280 EUR[edit]
Congratulations! Your proposal is approved for partial funding in the amount of 78,280 EUR with a grant term starting 1 January 2024 and ending 31 December 2024.
The committee supports Wikimedia Estonia’s continued programs and efforts to support open knowledge for 2024 with the following remarks, requests, and questions:
- The committee greatly appreciates your efforts to secure funding from government partnerships, as with the Estonian Ministry of Education and Science. Wikimedia Estonia is a good example of this approach to partnerships in the Wikimedia movement, and the committee believes that other affiliates could benefit from learning from your chapter about this work. As a part of your reporting, will it be possible for you to share practices and approaches to forming government partnerships and how you were successful in securing funding through these efforts?
- Can you describe in more detail how you will be collecting the metrics from your evaluation plan? This is especially important regarding retention, since the work around collecting this information can be complex.
- The committee could not support full funding, largely due to limitations on overall funding growth in the CEE/Central Asia region (around an 8.5% increase from last year). In addition, while there was no specific line item in your budget for public policy advocacy, the committee did not support funding for this work because of a lack of a specific plan based on the proposal.
- Related to the above point, the committee recommends that Wikimedia Estonia work with partners to identify opportunities for public policy change given the current legislative environment in Estonia. Some key questions to focus on in this work are:
- In what areas are policymakers looking to make changes?
- What bills are currently being discussed?
- What opportunities are there for Wikimedia Estonia to build stronger relationships with policy influencers by working on other policy topics beyond Freedom of Panorama?
- During this midpoint conversation for this General Support Fund, we would like to revisit these questions with you to check in on your work in this area. As a reminder, public policy advocacy work can fall into one of these priority issue areas: Copyright; Intermediary Liability; Privacy/Anti-Surveillance; Freedom of Expression; Anti-Disinformation; Human Rights. We also recommend you review these projects as examples of what this kind of work can look like.
We appreciate Wikimedia Estonia’s movement work and look forward to your efforts in 2024.
On behalf of the Regional Committee, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 07:44, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
- Thank you, I JethroBT!
- We can include that in reporting. Considering that countries are all different, then I don't know if that may be helpful for others or not. There was this possibility and we applied. In our case, it may also play a role that we have been around for a long time, have developed an extensive network, figure in media, and are known for efficient work. But at the same time, it is not that we know what the people at the ministry think about that or why it went that way. Maybe we just got lucky.
- User retention is a curious case. We could even say that it is not a very important aspect for us. Wikipedians are a special breed and most people would never be suitable for that job. So we aim to find as many persons with potential as possible and show them the possibilities of Wikipedia. That means engaging a lot more people than just those few who might stay. In the end, it is just the total number of users who do meaningful edits in Estonian (and Võro) Wikipedia, that matters.
- Our public policy advocacy is not a thing, that needs money that much. For instance, we are looking into getting FoP in Estonia and promoting the use of free licenses by state institutions, but those activities do not have any budget items nor is it possible to predict the results as in the end, we are not the ones who make decisions. So it remains unclear how can it be cut from funding when it has no funding anyway.
- Due to a limited number of people we currently don't deal with many public policy advocacy work areas. In some areas, we mainly just keep ourselves around other organizations targeting this topic (like Anti-Disinformation; starting from 2023 we are also members of the Network of Estonian Nonprofit Organizations) to have the readiness to act when needed, but mostly stay dormant. We hope to grow our capabilities on this, but that relies on if we can find suitable volunteers. Kruusamägi (talk) 21:32, 30 November 2023 (UTC)