Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Wikimedia Sverige – Growing communities, engagement and structures to expand access to free knowledge

Feedback from the Global Advocacy Team on the Public Policy Advocacy part of the application

Dear Wikimedia Sweden,

The Global Advocacy Team is happy to support WM Sweden’s policy advocacy plans in full given the longevity of your advocacy work on this topic as well as your commitment to sharing your experiences and best practices with others on this front. With the rise of interest in policy advocacy work in the movement, Freedom of Panorama is spreading as a topic of concern for affiliates outside of Northern and Western Europe. It would be great to see WM Sweden continue their role as a policy advocacy leader in the movement by assisting others in ESEAP and across Africa who are trying to push for Freedom of Panorama. They were disappointed not to see the TAROCH campaign mentioned and also hope that some of the copyright campaigning work Sweden will push will also fall under this initiative. On behalf of the GA team, ABruszik-WMF (talk) 17:15, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Many thanks for the support. With our Freedom of Panorama culminating in 2025 we are also happy to share our learnings and struggles around this with the larger community looking at implementing Freedom of Panorama locally. WMSE still intends to participate in the TAROCH initiative and there is work time put aside in our budget for this. It is however not a major component of what this grant funds, and as such it wasn't highlighted in the application. André Costa (WMSE) (talk) 08:02, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

As an addendum. Please note that Wikimedia Sverige will also formally be joining the TAROCH initiative. / André Costa (WMSE) (talk) 19:22, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Feedback from the NWE Regional Funds Committee

Dear Wikimedia Sverige Team,

Thank you very much for your proposal, describing your planned activities and projects in support of the Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia movement. The Northern and Western European Regional Committee has initially reviewed the proposal, and wishes to offer some initial feedback and questions for your review.

First and foremost, the Committee wishes to acknowledge the great work WM Sverige has been implementing in several fields, such as international partnership development, in completing complex projects, in GLAM sector development, in demonstrating the impact of contributions to existing partners, in requesting new content in priority areas, and noticing and responding to needs in the movement. It is particularly positive that you have been able to build a significant network of funder relations that reaches beyond the chapter and extends to providing access to funding for other affiliates as well in the movement. The current submitted 3-year proposal is ambitious, and you demonstrate your willingness to take on a movement-wide responsibility without knowing if necessary funding will be in place or not, using the WCF funding as a multiplier that creates opportunities / secures other funding.

From the Committee’s perspective whose primary responsibility is to evaluate the General Support fund applications, it was a bit difficult to understand your Content Partnership Hub plans embedded in the proposal from a 3-year multi-annual grant point of view. While the Committee remains open to considering gap financing for Q1 and Q2 for this activity, and recognizes that the hubs' general funding structure is under development, and therefore high levels of uncertainties are present, it remains a question whether it can support WM Sverige in these efforts for a prolonged period of time if hub funding is not guaranteed from Q3 of 2025 and onward.

Therefore the Committee would like to understand your overall ambitions with the Content Partnership Hub in a longer term perspective before agreeing to funding 6 months work of it, and also wishes to separate the request for the hub from the core activities in your annual plan. To do this, can you please explain:

• If you wish to build more practical partnership experiments in the Content Partnerships Hub, and what role some of the external partners (e.g. research and university institutions) would play in the Hub?
• If you have identified affiliate partners or got endorsed by other affiliates with GLAM focus (e.g. AvoinGLAM, WM Israel, WM Italia and others) to apply together for a hub funding in the new structure?
• If you plan to be the fiscal sponsor for the hub structure beyond Q2 and onwards or if you have identified the role that WM Sverige would play in the hub and in running the help desk in the future?
• How would you approach the continuation or withdrawal of services currently offered to other affiliates without continuing extra GSF funding beyond Q2, or if the different stakeholders who will get involved will decide that the focus and type of services should be different?

Regarding the core work unrelated to hubs, it would be supportive of the Committee’s understanding of your plans if you’d be so kind as to elaborate on our following specific few questions:

• It is encouraging to see that you successfully raised funds for the Wikispeech project. It would be great to understand how you have been engaging with volunteer developers and partners to build the sustainability of this initiative?
• Will you continue with the WikiGap campaign after the Ministry for Foreign affairs is no longer supporting it?
• Can you please tell us a little more about the following planned projects: 'Knowledge rights in Sweden 2', and 'Knowledge rights 2025 small grants'?
• Given that you have had mixed results in the past in F2F membership and donor recruitment, what strategic approaches will you employ in the next three years to your donor recruitment?
• Diversity strategy: while there was a diversity report in your annual plan (do you have a fresher report than the one from 2022?), the Committee would like to know your overall strategic approach towards addressing diversity (e.g. the deployment of paid canvassers could be strategically directed to geographical areas where membership is underrepresented), in what ways do you plan to extend the diversity and in which ways you wish to become a people’s movement? Are you planning to just increase the number of new members without any other constraints, or does your membership development plan involve recruiting specific target groups to improve diversity (e.g.more women, young people, more people from non-Stockholm areas, people speaking minority languages, etc) so there is a better representation of Sweden?
• You mentioned a transition towards a member-driven decision-making process that you are working towards, how does this look like in action and what major differences are expected compared to a community lead decision making process? In general, what is the rationale behind focusing on members, and will non paying members receive the same support as the members from WM SE? How will members and non-members be involved in programmatic planning and reviews?
• Staff retention: after the staff changes in previous year, do you feel the newly formulated staffing plan would serve retention by the end of the 3 years?
• The Committee observed a decline in all people metrics (participants, editors and organisers), what is it related to?
• Can you please clarify the 400% funds conversion target: is it related to the entire WMF grant (i.e. this grant becoming under 20% of the total WMSE budget) or only of the fundraising budget line?
• Lastly, can you please elaborate on how do you plan to balance your activities in Sweden, responding to your national communities’ needs and interests, if your international ambitions are increasing?

In terms of the schedule for our review process, please complete your review and responses to committee feedback by November 25th, 2024. After this time, the Regional Committee will begin a final review of the proposal to make a formal decision.

Thanks again for your work on the proposal and supporting our review.

On behalf of the NWE Regional Committee ABruszik-WMF (talk) 20:21, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

Many thanks for your feedback! We appreciate the opportunity to clarify the 3-year perspective of the Hub within the scope of this grant as many things are still in flux. The plan for Q1–Q2 of 2025 within the scope of this grant is two-fold. Firstly to ensure WMSE has the manpower and resources necessary to guide and support the process of a true multi-stakeholder Hub is established. Secondly to continue supporting some of the ongoing initiatives so that they remain viable when the formal Hub takes over. The loss of momentum during this time is something which would lead to frustration among both the volunteers and partners currently engaged in the initiatives and risk damaging the initiatives. This is why we believe that the stop-gap funding is crucial and an important investment for the movement to make.

The scope and prioritisation of these initiatives, after this point, need to be a joint decision by the stakeholders of the formal Hub. Both for the sake of the hub itself, but also as per explicit WMF instructions. It would be this Hub, rather than WMSE, which would formally apply for further hub funding. As such I will try to answer your specific questions, bearing in mind that some of the decisions are not up to WMSE to make.

• On more practical partnerships: This is a decision that will be up to the Hub to decide. That said WMSE would definitely be in support of more practical experiments with different types of content partners, a definition which goes beyond that of traditional GLAM actors and includes organisations that are willing and able to share valuable educational content through the Wikimedia platforms. One area we have identified, and already initiate work within, is to develop joint grant applications with research organisations. There are many grant giving organisations that look for larger projects that has a clear scientific focus and include a mix of different partner organisations (eg. NGOs such as WMSE, research organisations, public sector, companies etc.). The formalisation of a hub would increase interest to select it as the NGO partner. In our contacts with both public and private grant giving organisations we have already had positive reactions to the potential of a Thematic Hub being developed and applying for grants.
• As described above it would be the formal multi-stakeholder Hub, rather than WMSE, which would formally apply for further hub funding from the WMF. This can also extend to funders beyond the WMF when suitable opportunities arise. WMSE would use parts of the funds outlined in this proposal to support the development of such grant applications. Over the last year we have been in discussion with multiple other affiliates, globally, who have expressed an interest in supporting the Hub, either as formal stakeholders or through endorsements. We have also established partnerships with other hub initiatives such as the CEE and WikiFranca hubs and are in talks with a number of others as well. As described we have also initiated a number of joint activities with both affiliates and hubs. We believe that this has created a strong foundation to build upon. However to date we have not collected any endorsements as we have focused on the operational aspects of the Hub and not the governance structure. The discussions have focused on gaining support and creating interest for the different programmatic areas of the Hub. The governance structure, and thus who would be formal stakeholders, is to be formalised through joint discussions in Q1 of 2025.
• This is a decision which will be up to the Hub to decide. WMSE would be open to being the fiscal sponsor for the hub and we view this as a likely outcome. WMSE also sees that it would be one of the actors which provides the staff and expertise needed to execute some of the Hub’s initiatives, such as the Helpdesk.
• If there are some initiatives which the Hub would choose not to continue then WMSE, and other movement actors, would have to look at each of them and make a decision on whether it is something which we would consider bringing into our “core work” instead. Such decisions would of course have to take into consideration which initiatives are continued by the Hub and whether external sources of funding could be identified for them. It might also be that we would only be able to bring on some aspects of an initiative. Such changes would not take place during the 6 months of funding requested for here.

Moving on to the non-Hub aspects of our grant application:

• The Wikispeech project has only just been re-activated after a hiatus while we were searching for external funding. In the earlier work we engaged with volunteer developers both through Google Summer of Code and through outreach with the Wikimedia community. The project is designed with flexibility in mind and the development is agile, which will allow us to adjust the development incrementally based on feedback from volunteers.

Engaging volunteers is something we believe to be crucial and this is a large part of the planned project. This includes work with initiatives such as GSoC and both participation at, and support for, hackathons. From our previous work we have drawn a few important lessons that will increase our possibilities for success with volunteer engagement: The timing of the engagement is important as involvement in too early a stage is difficult as the process moves at a pace which is hard for volunteers to find the capacity to follow; volunteer developers require dedicated staff time (past when the funding has expired) to ensure both timely responses and that their contributions can be put into use otherwise their efforts and motivation are wasted; building engagement before funding has been secured creates frustration and drains volunteer motivation. The project also needs to be realistic about the amount of time the two-person developer team can dedicate to onboarding and supporting volunteer developers. In the current project a key part is an initiative aimed at building both awareness and long-term support for Wikispeech and other accessibility issues on Wikipedia through which we are aiming to engage partners and volunteer developers. As part of the project we are also investigating long-term funding for maintenance efforts, which would also allow us to support volunteer developers past the end of the project.

Regardless of where the volunteers come from, they will need to be trained and we will produce high-quality documentation of the tools, a digital training material (e-learning), a method manual, and different types of courses for them. The hope is that there will be local leaders in different places in the country who organise activities around, for example, speech data collection and efforts to increase knowledge about digital accessibility, which can include both writing Wikipedia articles or organising various seminars or giving presentations. We know from previous projects that close collaboration with various partner organisations is central to successfully creating commitment. We will therefore work throughout the project to find the forms for collaborations with different organisations, with a particular focus on those who represent the target group, both at central and local level. Engaging with other free knowledge, disability and MediaWiki stakeholders is an important part of the project. With multi-year funding secured we can now approach other stakeholders with clarity on what capabilities we bring to the table and we hope to identify areas where we can work together to support each other. This includes but is not limited to other Wikimedia affiliates and the WMF. If this project is successful we believe that there is a willingness and interest from the funder – which is Sweden’s largest funder of civil society projects – to also support other future large-scale projects. As such this project could act as a door-opener for large-scale funding for the Wikimedia movement’s work around areas such as MediaWiki and tool development, lobbying and volunteer engagement.

It should be noted that the WCF-funding is minimal in this project, and is almost entirely made up by the administrative costs associated with staffing the project.

• While we have, and will continue to, provide some basic support to WikiGap organisers globally our focus is now on identifying new collaboration opportunities with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. It is only through such collaboration that we would be able to leverage the international network of partners to Wikimedia affiliates, such as embassies, a resource that was a key component of the success of WikiGap. The focus of a new initiative with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs is likely to be centred around cultural heritage that is under threat, as it is a new priority area for them. We are still in the early stages of developing the initiative but we expect that each year there would be a theme where we connect the work to different aspects of underrepresented groups. This would support targeted efforts and also help to keep the initiative newsworthy and easy to communicate around. Our pilot project, the Heritage Guard Network, has given us a lot of valuable insights and is likely to also allow us to secure some initial funding to launch the work.

As for continuing the original WikiGap campaign, we have explored (and are continuing to explore) opportunities to engage with EU institutions such as the European External Action Service, and have been in contact with other Wikimedia affiliates, from countries whose embassies have also been engaged in the campaign. But this requires the active support and involvement of these Wikimedia affiliates and so far they have not had the capacity or funding. All this means that our intense efforts to find ways of maintaining and developing the WikiGap campaign have so far been fruitless.

• Knowledge rights in Sweden 2 is the informal name for our participation as National Coordinators in the Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) network which looks set to receive funding for another 5-years. The overall scope continues to be strengthening the right to knowledge through network building, building advocacy capacity and increasing the understanding of these issues. The specific focus areas are still being decided upon and WMSE has been invited to take part in those discussions. Knowledge rights 2025 small grants is an informal name grouping up small grants connected to the KR21-work which falls outside our role as National Coordinator. Historically these have varied from creating learning modules on copyright exceptions to holding a seminar on the copyright aspects of AI. Note that no WCF-funding is used for any of the Knowledge Rights projects.
• In the coming three years the strategic focus for membership and donor recruitment is:
  1. Improve our ability to communicate and maintain our members and donors: In 2024 WMSE will be migrating to a new CRM system which should make it easier for us to manage new donors and members as well as better understanding where the donations are coming from and which initiatives have a better chance of impacting. We hope to both learn and coordinate closely with fundraising teams at both WMF and Wikimedia affiliates.
  2. Connect all aspects of our work closer to fundraising: We must more clearly explain our value proposition and highlight it in all contexts, e.g. in our external communication, at events etc. Another example is to ensure that a membership in the organisation creates values ​​for the member or donor that might not be open for the general public (this could include things such as different types of training, participation at events, invitations to social events, and improved clarity on what the opportunities are to influence our work).
  3. Experiment with new areas of F2F recruitment: Based on our previous experience we will change our approach to instead focus on event-based canvassing, where we combine canvassing with events where we know that our mission has an aligned audience, e.g. at different fairs, and location based canvasing combined with a preceding geographically targeted social media presence. This could for example include canvassing on a university or at a GLAM institution. We will be strategic in how we pick areas and events to ensure diversity amongst our members and donors.
  4. Engage volunteers in the work: The staff will work closely with volunteers on developing the messaging and guide our efforts. We will also develop ways for the volunteers to engage actively in the recruitment work themselves. For this we will have to further develop our training programs (a combination of both e-learning and physical workshops). We already have a training program for new staff members (F2F canvassers) that we will redevelop.
  5. Increase the amount of organisations joining WMSE as paying member organisations: We will develop targeted campaigns towards organisations that potentially might be interested in becoming members of the association. We will also develop and launch the structures needed to create value for the organisational members, such as developing training courses, organise events and networks dedicated to the organisations that choose to become members. A clear value proposition will be developed and active communication work about this will take place. Linked to organisational membership is what we call an “openness certification”. The certification enables organisations to show that they care about free knowledge. An organisational membership in the association could be linked to the certification.
  6. Develop new paths for donations: This could for example include (1) for companies to donate money or stocks or offer pro-bono work, and (2) provide clear paths for how to bequeath funds.
• Diversity is a key component in all parts of our work, not just the membership. For example we are working hard on ensuring diversity amongst staff and leaders of the organisation and on our events to be inclusive and diverse (both amongst organisers/presenters and participants).

While the data for the 2023 annual diversity report has been extracted and partially analysed the final report has not been published yet due to the CRM-migration having taken precedence. We expect it to be published in the coming month and for the 2024-report to be published early 2025. Regarding membership recruitment the diversity report helps us with two things: (1) it helps us to identify what groups are we missing and should focus on recruiting through targeted efforts and (2) what is the low-hanging fruit to focus on – i.e. what type of person currently joins our organisation so that we can target similar people, this is an analysis that we had previously not done.

Membership recruitment during the coming three years will have a couple of different stages: we will initially focus on improving the absolute number of members. This is the top priority as we currently are missing out on large funding opportunities from external funders because our membership count is too low and we therefore do not qualify to their set of standards (we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars per year that could become available to us!). When we have identified a path for growth of our membership we will switch the focus on ensuring diversity. This will include diversity regarding both gender, age, geographical location etc.

An interesting addition to our work previous years is the Wikispeech project which could create synergies to the work done as part of this proposal. Through the new project we will be able to bring on an event manager to improve our outreach efforts and to leverage the new reach, audiences and partners. These connections will give us access to groups which are underrepresented in our membership today.

We are also developing training materials to allow existing members to deepen their engagement and will explore if this can include them doing further recruiting. For these efforts we will work with existing members from underrepresented groups and provide them with support and training. For the canvassers there will be some possibility to do strategic recruitment by selecting the appropriate events or locations (e.g. university campuses), this however has to be balanced with where we also believe it will be most efficient to reach the most people who already share and interest in the questions that we work with.

• The major change is not one of moving from community members to chapter members, but rather one of getting members more directly involved in the decision making processes throughout the year. The board has approved the following document (in Swedish, still to be published on wiki) outlining the engagement in the association. One concrete example of this is to bring the success of the Expert Committee for the Helpdesk back to our national context and having volunteers being the decision makers around how we should prioritise between received requests for community support.

The reason for framing this around membership is not one of exclusion, but rather developing a more holistic approach where the association gathers and supports several different communities and actors. To promote a member-driven decision-making process for us means to ensure that those involved in this process can see the totality, and thus get a larger responsibility than they would perhaps have had if they only focused on one aspect or one project. This is also more in line with how the rest of civil society in Sweden acts.

Most of the support we offer is agnostic of whether the recipient is a member or not, instead focusing on the recipient's intent and the impact of the support. Due to unfortunate events (theft), and for insurance reasons, some types of support has had to be made members only in the last years.

WMSE is organised as a membership organisation however and just as in previous years only members can vote in the general assembly, which ultimately decides on the direction on the programmatic planning. And only members will be able to participate in the process of developing a new strategy for the coming 5-year period.

The online Wikimedia community will always be a prioritised group, independently of if they are members or not, and events, consultations, training and support from them will be provided irrespective of membership.

• Yes, we believe that the new staffing plan, current and proposed, will serve the chapter well both during and at the end of this grant and will put us in a position to make the most of the current challenges and opportunities.
• If this question asks about the suggested 2025 targets for people metrics, as compared to those suggested in the 2024 plan, then this is in part explained by the metrics, per instruction, now excluding the metrics coming from non-WCF funded activities (a proportion of them is still included), whereas previous years we presented the metrics for all of the chapters activities. The second reason is that our externally financed project Wikipedia for all of Sweden will have come to an end and at the same time we don’t believe the event-side of Wikispeech will come into full force until 2026. Finally we have revised our expectations on some of the projects based on the results that we have seen in 2024.
• The 400% funds conversion target is meant to be a measure of the funds raised for free knowledge initiatives through WMSE's efforts put in proportion to the whole WCF grant. It is put in proportion to the whole grant, rather than e.g. the grant writing budget line since the WCF funding is unique in also financing the surrounding administrative and overhead costs needed to actually raise new funds. Note that this includes funds which may go straight to other actors, and thus wouldn't count towards WMSEs total budget, so it is not equivalent to the WCF-grant becoming 20% of the total budget.
• As for balancing our national and international activities. We don’t believe the proportion of international to national work has increased in this multi-year grant application. If anything the current proposal includes a larger proportion of Sweden facing work. As for the Swedish online Wikimedia community, as described above they will always be a prioritised group and despite our international expansions over the last years we have not reduced our support for this group. There is also a strong support and interest amongst the Swedish Wikimedia community for our work with the Content Partnerships Hub and our other international initiatives. These are areas where we have been engaging and discussing with them for years now.

Furthermore, we also see how several of the externally funded projects allow us to find synergies between national and international efforts. The KR21 program, for example, allows us to build networks and advocate for change at the national level, while it puts us in a central position at the European level for free knowledge advocacy. In similar ways, the Wikispeech project opens up and deepens collaborations with crucial parts of the Swedish civil society, while it builds a product that is requested in both Sweden and abroad.

Kind regards, André Costa (WMSE) (talk) 21:42, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Round 1 2025 decision

Congratulations! The Northern and Western Europe Regional Funds Committee has recommended your proposal for funding!

The Wikimedia Foundation has approved the committee's recommendation to partially fund your proposal for 13,017,535.59 kr for the period 1st January 2035 - 31st December 2027, and an additional 103,380.5438 kr for hub-application preparations in 2025.

Comments regarding this decision:
The Committee felt that WM Sweden’s overall plans for the next three years were in a good overall direction, but there are also some uncertainties at this moment in how the implementation of a few main projects will actually take shape. We are confident, however, based on historical evidence and stable governance, that the Chapter will be able to deliver the elements of the plan. The highly important and well executed advocacy efforts benefit the whole movement, while expansion in external funding beyond local needs benefits many affiliates and the Committee appreciated this thinking and generosity of WM Sweden. Unifying work on different campaigns through the lens of safeguarding cultural heritage is a great example that invites contributors, funders and partners. We hope that the Wikispeech project will yield further important cooperations, and the new CRM system will bring efficiency in the workflow of the organisation it hopes for. The Committee was glad to see that the Chapter’s activities in the next years will also have strong focus in Sweden, and will be curious to learn about the experiences with membership development and community engagement and rejuvenation of the volunteer communities. We are looking forward to hearing from WM Sweden on the development of its plans and project during the mid-term conversation in 2025!

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement.
2. If you have questions, you can contact the Regional Program Officer for the Northern and Western Europe Region.

ABruszik-WMF (talk) 17:10, 3 December 2024 (UTC)