Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Knowledge Equity-Supporting equity on Wikimedia projects

Feedback from the Northern and Western Europe (NWE) Regional Funding Committee on your proposal

Hello Jon Harald Søby (WMNO), Mali Brødreskift (WMNO) and Astrid Carlsen (WMNO),

Thank you for taking the time to submit your General Support Fund proposal in the Northern and Western Europe region. We are pleased to have reviewed your application and have the following comments and questions.

We note that your proposal has an admirable focus on minority language support, and clear indications that you're making the most of your experiences with past projects to try new approaches in the future. We also note that you have strong engagement with your community members and that you're trying to understand and respond to their needs. We would like clarification on a few aspects of your proposal please.

Your plan for a language diversity hub is a central theme here via Track 3, but we are missing important background information. Please could you provide more context on your thinking and work so far with this hub, and which stakeholders you've engaged with so far and/or are planning to involve in future discussions? How will you scope out the work of a hub without pre-empting discussions about hub leadership structures, and how will you include other stakeholders in the preparatory work? We would also like to see a timeframe and improved metrics for Track 3, please.

We would also like more information on your staffing team. You identify that you do not have much skill redundancy, how would you handle this if any of your current staff were to leave in the future? In general, how is your team working with its current scale and skill level, and are there improvements you think are needed in the future? Related to this, you have a strength in building partnerships around the country: what do you see as your main limitations when it comes to growing partners, and getting new funding opportunities in the future, and what potential ways are you thinking about to resolve them in the future?

Finally, we are unclear about several parts of your budget. Please could you provide an overview of your budget as it relates to each of the three tracks? We're unsure if your Movement Strategy Implementation Grant is included in your current budget or not, please could you clarify this, and how this grant request and the movement strategy grant would relate to each other?

Thank you and we look forward to hearing from you.

On behalf of the NWE Regional Committee,

–Mike Peel (talk) 15:12, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

Hi Mike, and thank you for the questions! My apologies that this reply is a bit long, but me and Mali have tried to answer as thoroughly as we can.

Hub

We started working with the Hub last year, after the Arctic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference. We hosted a Wikimania session last year to connect with and gather feedback from a wider group of stakeholders. To explore the idea further we picked a group of people that represent different language regions and have a track record of work in small languages and Wikimedia projects to join in the Steering Committee. We wanted to keep the group small in the beginning, to make it easier to move forward. However, as we have gone along more people have been showing interest in joining, so the Steering committee decided to open up for observers to our meetings. The full list of members of the Steering Committee and observers can be found at our Meta page. There you can also find minutes from meetings and activities we have been involved in so far with the Language Diversity Hub.

The movement strategy grants have been implemented to support projects that are exploring opportunities created by the Movement Strategy 2030. We are using this opportunity to explore a hub according to the needs and wishes in the Language Diversity community. We are following the work done with defining the hubs closely, and we are taking part in the ongoing conversations about hubs. The timeframe for this work depends on these conversations, but we have a goal that within 3-5 years from now the Language Diversity Hub will be a self-governing structure independent from WMNO.

We are already including global stakeholders in the Language Diversity Hub work, both volunteers and employees with experience and commitment are included in the Steering Committee that we launched last year. The MSI Grant awarded for this work will be distributed among everyone involved in the project. One thing we are working on figuring out is how to involve more stakeholders in this work without "bloating" the steering committee proper, since there are many Wikimedia organizations (and external organizations) that do great work within this field that we would like to include and keep in the loop.

To add a metric for track 3 specifically, we propose to increase the number of organizations/affiliates that are interested in joining the WLDH by at least 10 during the year. At this point, signing up as an interested organization would not have any strings attached since we are still in the planning stage, but it is still a good opportunity to create awareness of the work beyond the already-established partners, and to get input and feedback from a wider array of stakeholders.

Due to a delay in the feedback for the MSI grant, the project period is running from May 1 through December 2022. During this period, we aim to apply for another project grant starting in 2023. More detailed description on the project can be found in the MSI grant application: Grants:Project/MSIG/WMNO/Language Diversity Hub.

Staffing

While those of us who are actual employees of WMNO don't have that much skill redundancy between us, there is some redundancy with the freelancers we have available, so if one of us is away for a longer period (a sick leave, for example), we would be able to use their skills as a stop-gap measure on short notice. If one of us leaves permanently, we would look for a replacement who has a similar skillset, but we usually try not to limit ourselves too much by looking for someone with a similar skillset – new blood usually brings new opportunities as well, so we try to be open-minded and adaptive, and let potential new hires' skills influence their job description, rather than let the job description limit who we hire, if that makes sense. Because we're such a small organization, we think this flexibility serves both us and potential hires well.

Our main limitation when it comes to growing partnerships is simply scalability – we already have several important partnerships, and we feel like we can't take on more at this time without "sacrificing" or downscaling some existing partnerships, which we'd rather not do. We would like to grow these in the future, but I think it mainly depends on getting more manpower, so to speak.

Budget

The way the budget is set up, the community fund grant – as our main source of funding – is intended to cover most of the expenses on the budget; when we receive grants beyond that, we usually use them to pay for parts of the salary and perhaps travel expenses and event organization (depends on what the grant is for, naturally). The MSI grant is indeed included in the budget, but confusingly under the heading "National funding" (labeled "Other funding" in Norwegian). We should have changed the English-language label considering it is not only national funding, but I guess we forgot.

By dividing our work into three tracks, our intention is to divide our time and efforts (i.e. the Salary heading in the budget) roughly evenly between those tracks with no preferential treatment to any track. As for the division between work belonging to the MSI grant and to the community funds, we intend the MSI grant money to only be spent on that specific project, while community fund money for this track would be spent on other tasks related to the hub work that is not specific to the research project, such as participating in relevant events, doing outreach to potential partner orgs. and communities, laying the groundwork for hub governance, etc.

I hope that answers most of your questions – please do let us know if you have any more. :-) Jon Harald Søby (WMNO) (talk) 11:50, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

@Jon Harald Søby (WMNO): Thanks for your reply. One follow-up question on the last part: your budget at [1] doesn't seem to include the strategy grant, do you have a revised version that does, please? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 18:25, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

@Mike Peel: It is, but lumped together with other grants under the heading "National funding" (labeled Andre tilskudd = "Other funding" in Norwegian). Jon Harald Søby (WMNO) (talk) 00:39, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

Comments from Paiwan community, Taiwan, Asia

We are Paiwan Wikimedians User Group which also participate in Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub. It's good to see that the track 3 of this project offers the support to the indigenous or small languages internationally. Many communities are new like us (Paiwan) that we are not very familiar with all wiki projects, such as the templates, source editing and so on. Also, we might not have many chances to meet the international communities for the language issues (translation to the local languages sometimes needed). During the project, several meetings can be held to recruit more small communities. So, it's good to have the experienced teams like this to help the develpment of new/small communities. We are looking forward to have more cooperation within the project.iyumu 00:58, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Round 2 2022 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 fund your proposal in full for $239,925.00 USD / 2,089,973.00 NOK

Comments regarding this decision:
The NWE Committee recommends full funding for Wikimedia Norge.

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.

Posted on behalf of the Northern and Western Europe (NWE) Funding Committee, --Marti (WMF) (talk) 17:37, 26 May 2022 (UTC)