Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Wiki Loves Earth 2025 in Uzbekistan (ID: 22958036)

Comments from I JethroBT (WMF) and OlesiaLukaniuk (WMUA)

Hello Kagansky, Kaiyr and Mamatkazy, and thanks for your proposals supporting Wiki Loves Earth 2025. I wanted to confirm that Wiki Loves Earth-related Rapid Fund proposals are being formally co-reviewed by both the Community Resources team and the Wiki Loves Earth Organizing team supported by OlesiaLukaniuk (WMUA) (talk · contribs) so proposal feedback reflects both feedback and discussion from both of these groups. Funding decisions on these proposals are also being finalized in a cooperative manner between the WLE organizing team and the Community Resources team as a part of this process. Speaking more broadly, this collaboration is part of a broader effort to support more localized review and decisionmaking when resourcing major Wikimedia campaigns.

It is clear that this proposal as well as WLE proposals for Kyrgyzstan and for Kazakhstan involve similar teams and were coordinated. This coordination on its own is not necessarily a problem, but there are some common concerns that apply across each of them. I am also going to ping Красный and Artemev Nikolay regarding collective feedback that pertains to all of these proposals. With all that said, please see our feedback and questions below:

• We are concerned about risks around capacity for what is effectively a single team running three campaign events across three countries that are taking place around the same time. Even if your team members have enough time and resourcing to coordinate these events this year, this arrangement is not a good practice when it comes to sustaining campaign events and leadership in the region. For example, if participation grows for these events, or if someone becomes unavailable, this introduces challenges in maintaining all of these events successfully. To run separate, larger campaign events, it is important to develop independent leadership and capacity for this work over the next year.
• It seems unlikely that a similar budget is needed to run effective WLE campaign events across each country, considering that there are significant differences in the number of active editors and potential campaign participants across Uzbek, Krgyz, and Kazakh Wikimedia projects. Relatedly, the budget for juror compensation is fairly high across each of these competitions, and has increased significantly from some requests from the previous year without a clear justification, and each uses a similar jury. Therefore, we are not likely to support full funding across these proposals as they are right now.

Based on these concerns, we are willing to support this general arrangement for this year, where your team proposes to runs competitions for Kazakh, Uzbek, and Kyrgyz language communities, but we are not willing to support this kind of arrangement for next year. For WLE and other Wikimedia campaigns in 2026 in Central Asia (e.g. Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves Folklore, etc.), your immediate team will need to decide on one of two approaches to take:

• Run a single campaign event (e.g. for Wiki Loves Earth) focused on one country (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan) with your current team. Events for other countries will need to be supported by an independent team of people (and not just an independent applicant), or
• Using funds from one (1) Rapid Fund proposal, your team can elect to run a smaller-scale set of events for a campaign across multiple countries in Central Asia, but cannot apply for separate funding for each of them.

We have not yet finalized a funding decision for these proposals, but wanted to convey these concerns and comments about the arrangements around Wikimedia campaigns in the region for your review and feedback. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 21:24, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

Hi, I JethroBT (WMF), thank you for your answer on these proposals. These concerns around the team and resources were adressed by creation of a group that applied for affiliate status and was rejected as "a group based only on one event" while that isn't true and the team also organizes handful of events through different campaigns already and had plans to adopt wider activities after gaining the status, and despite the fact that there are already existing groups with the same "one event group" type. After that, I was advised to apply for a hub instead and while the process is on hold now (we're waiting for the conference), it's clear that the existing model is... let me say, weak. It requires additional administration and accounting, it spreads the organizing efforts that can be done at once in a three different events and it's clear that organizing part of a team is working at, and, sometimes, over their capacity limit. That's why, for example, we decided to not to proceed with WLE campaign in Tajikistan while there's no any interest in the local community in joining the organizational efforts (and 2024 campaign was a disaster from the start, being honest).

So if the hub initiative will fail, and there'll be no entity to catch up on the efforts in 2026, seems that reducidng the activities and abandoning some of the campaigns (or even all of them) will be the only way. I've tried to reorganize it all in a different ways, but still no success, and, at the same time, we're already having a lot of wonderfull images uploaded and people attracted into the movement — isn't it a good time to make a final campaign, finish and move on with the existing capacity somewhere else? Красный^{wanna talk?} 22:27, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

Dear @I JethroBT (WMF),

Thank you for your comments and clarifications! I will try to answer questions from my perspective:

- Regarding coordination. Yes, I agree that there are risks since one team is organizing the competitions for each three communities. However, each country has local representatives from their respective communities who will take on most of the organizational work. We already had a similar experience last year, though with slight differences in the competition dates. I believe that the three teams, with Красный, could arrange a call or meeting to develop a one risk management plan to minimize potential coordination issues.

- Regarding the budget. I agree that each community is different, and the level of participant activity, results, and key indicators also not same. For this, I would suggest two possible options:

1) Combine the budget for jury compensation so that a single team of jurors work across all three competitions, and receive one (adjusted) fee.

2) Or, as you suggested, remake the budget for each country based on its potential and community engagement level.

- Regarding a long-term solution. It would be great if one team, created by representatives of from each Central Asian communities, applied for a grant to coordinate the competitions collectively. This way, we could work with a single budget while still organizing three separate competitions for different communities. In this case, it would be good if the Tajik community also joined, making it a truly regional initiative for Central Asia. Or, as Красный mentioned, we still hope for the support of the hub.

Mamatkazy Mamatkazy (talk) 04:40, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

• @I JethroBT (WMF): at the end, by the current situation seems that the contest in Kazakhstan will remain on me (at least for 2026), for Uzbekistan 2025 seems to be the last year since there's no current opportunity or interest for the community members to step in. Kyrgyzstan in 2026 will be moved under Mamatkazy and Kyrgyz community organizational capacity. Красный^{wanna talk?} 10:07, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

@Красный, Kagansky, Kaiyr, and Mamatkazy: Thank you for this update and for your responses above. We have approved partial funding for all of the current proposals of 2000 USD, and effectively are provide a total of 6000 USD to support this team to support the desired competitions this year in the region, which is generally consistent with our earlier remarks about how we would be willing to fund a single team running these events across the region. In terms of future support, we agree with this approach and are more inclined to support an arrangement where there are fully independent teams running competitions for the Kyrgyz and Kazakh communities moving forward. We also want to emphasize the fact that, while there may be conceptual interest in having many competitions, the viability of having separate competitions from a funding perspective will depend on several factors, such as whether there is a team with adequate experience to support it, a sufficient level of participation, and whether the competitions are being organized with the primary goal of supporting sustained volunteer engagement in the region in general. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 19:42, 28 March 2025 (UTC)