Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wiki Editoras Lx 2023 Annual Plan

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Endorsements[edit]

  • Strong support Strong support I am very happy to hear that Wiki Editoras Lx has applied for this annual grant. I had the luck to meet its founders when they invited me to Lisbon to help them with their first editatona. That activity was the seed that gave way to the creation of a permanent working group that, like Wikiesfera but in Portuguese, has been dedicated to fighting Wikipedia's knowledge gaps. I know their work well because, since that moment, we have been in contact and have supported each other. After reading their proposal, I see how important it is for the Wikimedia Movement that there are initiatives like theirs that integrate new editors from diversity and contribute with content from an intersectional and decolonialist view. I hope they receive the financial support they need to continue to grow. #JuntasSomosMásVisibles PatriHorrillo (talk) 13:34, 6 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Thank you so much for your words and support, Patricia. Your inspiration, constant support and guidance has been of paramount importance for the emergence and continuance of our group of editors. The generous sharing of tools, tips and work methods as sustained our activity and evolution. We will continue to work together to move our shared principles and missions forward. --Anita Braga (talk) 16:29, 12 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support Strong support Trabalho incrível o das WikiEditoras Lx, estão sempre a promover aprendizagem e equidade de forma dinâmica e plural a toda a comunidade, inclusive lá do outro lado do atlântico, com os encontros online! Cumprimentos.--Danielly Campos Dias (talk) 21:28, 6 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Muito obrigada pelo teu apoio e pelas tuas generosas palavras, Danielly! Temos desenvolvido parcerias muito importantes para o cumprimento da nossa missão e é óptimo saber que continuaremos a trabalhar em conjunto! E sim, sair do nosso âmbito nacional, "tecendo redes" transatlânticas dentro da nossa comunidade linguística, é fundamental para o nosso trabalho. --Anita Braga (talk) 16:32, 12 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support Strong support Had the pleasure to be invited to one of their meetings and see first hand the commitment and effort of this group of women, and the struggles they face tackling knowledge gaps head-on. This is a natural step for them to be able to continue their highly valuable work in the region in a sustainable way. Help them thrive. Raystorm (talk) 09:15, 7 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Thank you so much for your words and support, Maria. It was a pleasure having you on that strategic transatlantic editors meeting and to receive your wisdom and guidance on collectively tackling knowledge gaps. A lot of what you shared supported the design of our annual strategy, so I hope this structuring will result in more female and nb editors being part in decision making processes within the Movement. --Anita Braga (talk) 16:39, 12 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support Strong support Wiki Editoras Lx in an inspiring and much needed project for the Lusophone community and the broader Wikimedia movement. This first Annual Plan will allow the group to growth and increase their capacity to continue doing their remarkable work. From Whose Knowledge?, we are looking forward to join their beautiful partnership network. --Mariana Fossatti (WK?) (talk) 14:50, 7 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Support Wiki Editoras Lx é um grupo que vem se desenvolvendo em seu fazer com projetos Wiki. Apoiar o grupo me parece fundamental para sua sustentabilidade. O foco temático do grupo é relevante e dialoga com aspectos da estratégia 2030, além disso o grupo evidencia consciência dos desafios a serem enfrentados para que as diferenças e desigualdades sejam constitutivas do próprio grupo. Desejo poder ver o que elas farão a partir do apoio financeiro Lilian Viana (talk)
  • Strong support Strong support I follow with great admiration the work of Wikieditoras LX since I became a Wikipedian three years ago. They are an example of how to fight against content gaps from a decolonial perspective as well as how to promote greater inclusivity and diversity among the collective of editors. In addition, I would like to highlight their effort to disseminate on social networks the content created by their group of editors about women, non-binary people, and other underrepresented groups, managing to bring the visibility of these profiles beyond the wiki. I hope that WikiEditoras LX can continue its important work, for which getting this grant will be key to its sustainability. Zapipedia (talk) 16:06, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support Strong support Art+Feminism and Wiki Editoras Lx have had fruitful conversations and collaborations up to this point that we look forward to continuing. The specificity and the rigor of the work that Wiki Editoras Lx does has enhanced the Art+Feminism community. The sustainability of such a project will benefit all of us working to close content and gender gaps. --Nyeboah (talk) 18:27, 10 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support Strong support Acompanho o trabalho das editoras há bastante tempo e posso afirmar que cumprem um papel importantíssimo na comunidade. Com certeza a oportunidade de maior financiamento fará o trabalho do grupo ainda melhor e maior. Att, --Alebasi24 (talk) 13:29, 11 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support Strong support In the last couple of years, Wiki Editoras Lx activities were foundational to the Lusophone Wiki Women Movement; by both encouraging new editors to collaborate on Wikimedia projects and advancing to bridge the gender gap, through a diversity-inclusive and decolonial perspective. It is paramount to support the work of this group, making it sustainable and ever-growing. Therefore, I strongly support the grant request for the group's Annual Plan. ❋CalliandraDysantha (✉︎) 02:39, 12 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support Strong support Wiki Editoras Lx is doing phenomenal and creating new avenues for gender equity on Wiki PT and beyond. I had the pleasure to collaborate with them on several Edit-a-thons and Wiki-focused initiatives in the past two years. NaPupila and I, support this project so they can continue to do important work. --MichaelaBlanc (talk)
  • Strong support Strong support I have had a great interraction with Wiki Editoras about gender gap issues in our communities and hope we will be able to continue their useful work promoting more diversity to the benefit of women, non-binary people, and other underrepresented groups. I met some group representents at the wikimedia summit briefly and hope we can continue to share knowledge on a regular basis. Hyruspex (talk) 22:53, 5 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Support Wiki Editoras Lx is an emerging organization in the Portuguese-speaking community, with which Wiki Movimento Brasil has partnered up in project and event organizing over the last three years. In all occasions, joint team work has been caring and efficient, with a documented track of success. My sense is that the group is ready to take a further step in organizational capacity, and I look forward to knowing how we can further our partnerships and coordinate activities. --Joalpe (talk) 17:24, 10 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support Strong support Wiki Editoras Lx have been developing consistent activities over the last few years with significant impact for the Lusophone community. Their work is truly inspiring and well organized. It's always a pleasure when Wiki Movimento Brasil collaborates with them. They are ready for the next step! EricaAzzellini (talk) 20:10, 10 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback from the Wikimedia Foundation’s Culture and Heritage team[edit]

Dear Anita Braga, XenoF, bantuwords, Categcc, Olhali,

As the only current gender-related group on Wikipedia in Portuguese and the only one in the Portuguese-speaking community that is addressing gender (as well as other gaps and minorities) as a main priority, Wiki Editoras Lx plays an important role in the Wikimedia community. Furthermore, this particular proposal is well structured and has a really good and clear mission. It addresses the content, but also the internal Wikimedia structures and hierarchies, which is especially necessary for the Lusophonic community. You demonstrate that you are very aware and engaged about your procedures, which is positive to see.

It is already impressive to see how many gatherings and partnerships the group managed to do already, even without funding. From reading this new submission, and knowing how WELx handled its past activities, I see this proposal as resourcing you to continue everything with more time and quality and increasingly adding new activities.

I am pleased to see that you plan to invest in communication and organize even more events, not just editing gatherings and editathons, to have more properly engaged participation. This has been pointed out, even by the Wikimedia Foundation Campaigns team, as a necessity in order for the communities that are working with gender to gain more engaged participants and create more impact. I was very impressed by the different approach the group plans to apply to its editing events and I was positively surprised by the guest curator program.

WELx is a pioneer group in the Portuguese-speaking community, with a very clear political position. It’s especially welcome to see that you are seeking to lead conversations about decolonization on Wikimedia and expand that to similar organizations outside the Wikimedia community.

I really like your approach to structure your work: by 1) creating content with and about underrepresented communities and 2) providing the tools to these same people to contribute to content creation, thus imprinting tacit knowledge on wiki projects. This is important as it addresses representation and autonomy.

I have some comments about your metrics below, and in some cases I have proposed some changes:

  1. The metric "Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities - N/A": This metric could be changed to the number of organizers that were trained through WELx's activities and, with that, offer a specific metric/number, which doesn't need to be high. I believe it is important to train even more community organizers in the Portuguese-speaking communities.
  2. The metric "Number of participants": I believe WELx should break this down into old and new participants.
  3. The metric "Wikimedia Commons - 250": How will the group use Commons? Is this metric about the upload of new files to illustrate women's (and other discriminated groups) biographies on Wikipedia?
  4. I believe WELx should try to act (and add metrics related to that) on other projects, as the group has been working with Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Commons for a few years now already. I would like to see your group (especially the members who are very engaged already) trying out new projects.

I have some additional comments on your budget:

  1. Related to the social media paid ads: This approach can, in some cases, raise concerns within the Wikimedia community, since such businesses (social media enterprises) are not always well aligned with the movement's missions, but rather, have a totally different way of dealing with their users. Can you share more about how your approach to outreach will incorporate awareness of Wikimedia standards around advertising?
  2. Regarding the spreadsheet: I believe the group should have an amount for travel (considering conferences, etc), other than just the amount for the transportation related to the editathons.
  3. Regarding the positions and the spreadsheet: The "Community development and outreach coordinator" and the "Communication and Social Media Manager" seem like two very similar roles, especially as they both have a substantial amount of hours per week (580 and 200 respectively). Even more, as the "Community development and outreach coordinator" is also similar to the "Skills development and dissemination coordinator" one. This is an unusually high number of paid positions for a newly funded group, and I want to ask if you can further describe what each role will do, and whether all of these roles are necessary. Is it possible some of the work could be combined into fewer roles?
  4. Regarding the spreadsheet: I want to understand better why the Lisbon edit-a-thon and the decentralized edit-a-thon have such different amounts. Can you comment on this?

Given that Flávia Dória is a half-time contractor for WMF and has now been accepted as a community coordinator for Art+Feminism, I just wanted to check that there is sufficient bandwidth for this work as well.

In regard to your training work to reduce the gender gap both on content and on capacity (editors) and with an "intersectional approach on racial, ethnicity, sexual identity, geography and more," I have some comments and suggestions around metrics:

  • In the proposal, WELx mentioned that Vanessa Sanches works as a journalist communicating with the black lusophone community. I would like to understand exactly which activities and metrics will be related to this.
  • Can you share how you think about such activities with countries other than Brazil and Portugal? Wiki Movimento Brasil and Wikimedia Portugal are very focused on their own countries and WELx even participate in the Festa da Lusofonia, in 2021. However, I would love to know more about how the group plans to connect to other Portuguese-speaking countries and help to develop diversity in this language's community. As one suggestion, maybe the metric "% of editors from underrepresented communities (BIPOC, roma, rural, with disabilities, LGBTQIAP+, etc)" should also consider editors outside Brazil-Portugal, from other developing countries, especially the Lusophone countries in Africa.

I imagined that the majority of the group might already know these resources, but as they related to the comment I just made, I would like to share these readings: Whose Knowledge's "Decolonizing the Internet’s Structured Data – Summary Report" and Art+Feminism's "Unreliable Guidelines Reliable Sources and Marginalized Communities in French, English and Spanish Wikipedias".

In closing, I have these last comments and questions:

  • The proposal states that the group wants to "position WELx as a pioneer and a referencial contributor to the decolonization of Wikimedia projects to exchange and support similar projects/groups" and "reinforce peer-to-peer collaboration with other groups and affiliates that share the same decolonial perspectives on the Wikimedia Movement Activities". However, I wonder if you might reframe this goal so that you are positioned in a less passive and more active way. Maybe these groups need more active help if they are not yet as well-developed as WELx. How exactly is WELx planning to help these groups? Has WELx also been thinking about the development of resources to help its own community?
  • Is WELx planning to participate in campaigns or even (which is better) developing a campaign itself in Portugal or internationally? The establishment of a campaign like that, by the only group with a Diversity approach in the Portuguese-speaking community, would be very valuable.
  • Is WELx thinking about more advanced training? For example, advancing the already diverse Wikipedia/Commons editors into more technical activities? This is slightly covered in "Objective 2 - Build our user group members' editing skills Activities" and "Objective 3 - Promote autonomy of WELx's user group members within the Wikimedia Movement Activities", but I would like to know more about it.

I offer all this feedback in the spirit of joining with you in your effort to make change in the gender equity space in the Portuguese-speaking community. I commend all that you have done already, and look forward to seeing where you go next, and supporting your work when I can.

Warm regards, GFontenelle (WMF) (talk) 00:50, 9 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Dear @GFontenelle (WMF),
first of all, thank you very much for the extremely thorough and thoughtful feedback, addressing so many relevant points of our proposal. We are glad that the nuances and details about our strategies and planning were well perceived and considered important to gain more participants and impact of our actions. Secondly, we are also grateful for the opportunity to better clarify certain aspects of our proposal that may not have been perceived as self-explanatory. We have been developing our processes and methods in a more experimental way, according to our needs at the moment, so the opportunity to systematize it is very welcome. Kindly find below our answers to your comments/suggestions. For a better alignment, we keep the textual structure of your feedback:
Comments about metrics:
  1. "The metric "Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities - N/A": This metric could be changed to the number of organizers that were trained through WELx's activities and, with that, offer a specific metric/number, which doesn't need to be high. I believe it is important to train even more community organizers in the Portuguese-speaking communities." Thank you for your suggestion, we agree. Indeed that change is better suited to our reality, since our organizers keep participating and involved in our activities.
  2. "The metric "Number of participants": I believe WELx should break this down into old and new participants." Agreed. In detail - old are participants that have attended at least one of our previous activities, since 2019 and new are participants have never participated in any of our activities, independently of their editing skills. That allows us to better assess if our strategies are reaching and motivating older participants to come back to our activities.
  3. "The metric "Wikimedia Commons - 250": How will the group use Commons? Is this metric about the upload of new files to illustrate women's (and other discriminated groups) biographies on Wikipedia?" Yes, exactly, all the metrics about projects’ goals refer to content within the scope of our work. In detail, concerning Commons, we already met with Whose Knowledge? and #VisibleWikiWomen campaign in order to have joint events next year, if our annual plan is funded, to support the achievement of this goal.
  4. "I believe WELx should try to act (and add metrics related to that) on other projects, as the group has been working with Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Commons for a few years now already. I would like to see your group (especially the members who are very engaged already) trying out new projects." We agree and we are thankful for that suggestion. Wikiquote, for instance, is a project that appeals to us very much. However, we already feel that our strategic plan is very ambitious as it is, especially considering the resources we have and requested. Our priority for a first funded year is to consolidate and amplify what we have been doing in the same projects. But we will keep that suggestion in mind for the following annual plan (it doesn’t exclude the possibility that some more engaged members won’t start doing it organically by themselves, as it has been the case so far since we started).
Comments on the budget:
  1. We are aware of potential conflicts between the movement’s mission and values and the ones from social media enterprises. However, using those media has allowed us so far to reach out to our prospective new user group members - digitally literate people and/or people outside from our social bubble, namely some underrepresented groups. Facebook, for instance, allows us to refine the target public universe to people with special interests. Although the ethics might be questioned if ill-used, it was what made it possible for us to direct the communication to Lisbon’s BIPOC community for our last edit-a-thon, which otherwise would have been more difficult. Social media is widely used by many projects and affiliates of our Movement precisely because much of our work involves outreach and education about Wikimedia projects - and they are embedded in a digital universe. Unfortunately, in recent years, social media has made outreach to smaller-scale projects extremely difficult, with algorithms that disenfranchise those who cannot afford to pay for ads. We have no interest or intention of basing our strategy on paid advertising, but as we are a group with several people with experience in the communication field - and by our own experience in publicizing WELXs - we know that we need to use this strategy occasionally in specific cases, such as publicizing events.
  2. We agree, although we haven’t thought about it since we tried to reduce the budget to a minimum. We believe we won’t be able to make changes on the final requested amount, since the Regional Committee has already sent their feedback, but we will keep that in mind for future requests.
  3. In order to define the roles we needed, we started by detailing all of the specific tasks that were needed for each activity of the annual strategic plan. That means the roles were created from a specific set of tasks, not the other way around. After that, we looked at the way we have been working together (meaning all of the group’s existing organizers), and we tried to, as much as possible, keep everyone’s role intact and respect our co-leadership governance model. As much as we need this funding in order to keep the group afloat, we are (maybe naively) also trying that these financial resources won’t interfere too much with our organic and motivated flow of collaborative work, where sorority has been a strong glue keeping us working towards the same goals. Some of the group members already have jobs and don’t have the same capacity to commit to a paid role, so they proposed or accepted to be volunteers, supporting the paid members either by continuing organizing and/or by acting as an advisor, supporting decision making and minor tasks. In detail, Categcc has been responsible for the group’s social media management since march 2020, and considering it’s her professional expertise, she will keep doing it better than anyone else in the group. Anita Braga has been the one promoting mainly off-wiki partnerships and organizing the in-person meetings. XenoF, also due to her minor role within WMF and now, also minor role (time-wise) with Art+Feminism, and having so well represented the group in WikiCon and other capacitation opportunities, should be the one responsible for developing that need of the group. To be honest, we would have loved to have included an undifferentiated lumpsum, in a form of a time bank, to compensate for the other organizers’ efforts when specifically contributing to the implementation of our proposed annual plan, even if they can predict at the moment their level of commitment. That would be more aligned with our way of working as well as our decolonial values of compensating work, especially work that historically has been devalued by society, namely, in our reality, female and BIPOC work. We know that the organizational model and roles are usually replicated from organization to organization within the Movement, but as you rightly said, we try to conduct a debate not only about gender but also with a decolonial perspective, which means that we implement certain actions to expand equity - including within WELx’s members. In this way, our path will always be towards more decentralization of roles, and creating more opportunities, not less. In detail,  the aims of each role are the following:
  4. The group’s coordination work is split  between two people, which is key for us. These are their main roles: Community development and outreach coordinator: This person will work together with our fiscal sponsor; Coordinate the regular editing activities in our community and do outreach to organizations and institutions outside the Movement. Skills development and dissemination coordinator: This person will coordinate activities related to capacity building and training, coordinate the production of capacity building and development materials and related content alongside with Communication and Design, and outreach to organizations within the Movement. Communication and Social Media Manager: This person will be focused on more technical work with social media, mailing and content and activities  communication to the public  throughout the year, supporting the communication of events, activities, produced contents and network expansion. Designer: This person will develop all of the visual materials for the training and development materials, as well as visual material for social media and on-wiki communication. Underrepresented communities outreach: This person will work closely with the Community development and outreach coordinator to achieve Outcome 3, supporting the outreach to individuals,   and organizations from underrepresented communities. Moreover, it will also support the principle of increasing diversity and equity to WELx’s activities and mission. These are the roles we need to fulfill the activities planned for the year. We are aware that our funding request does not look like what is expected for a first year, but WELx has already been working with some level of organization since the beginning of 2019, so the proposed plan is the result of three and a half years of learnings and strategizing.
  5. Sure. If you look into the tab “Detailed events budgets'' on our budget spreadsheet, you can see that in Lisbon we don’t have venue costs (due to our partnership with PENHASCO), and also since most of our organizers are based in Lisbon, we have less transport and accommodation costs.  2. The decentralized editathons require venue and more displacement expenses, given that none of our organizers are based in the place where we plan to conduct that decentralized edit-a-thon (Covilhã). Considering the comment on Flavia Doria’s commitment to this proposed work plan,  we would like to clarify that all issues regarding potential workload conflicts have already been resolved with Grant Administrators. For clarification, she  does less than 5 hours a week for A+F, as Regional Ambassador (and not, as said on your feedback, as community coordinator). At WMF, she does less than 8 hours a week on a contract that will end by the first semester of next year. Also,  Flavia's position at A+F is  strategic and beneficial for our group, since it directly connects with Outcome 2 - “Position WELx as a pioneer and a referential contributor to the decolonization of Wikimedia projects to exchange and support similar projects/groups”, which is the Outcome that most relates to her role in this annual plan.
Comments and suggestions around metrics:
  1. About this role, first of all, all of the activities of Outcome 3, since Vanessa’s role will be supporting the achievement of this Outcome. Moreover, as an active editor and organizer, Vanessa will also support by revising and commenting Catarina Cabral’s task of overall communication strategizing, to better create inclusive communication (Outcome 1). The metrics related to this are “% of editors from underrepresented communities (BIPOC, roma, rural, with disabilities, LGBTQIAP+, etc)” and “Diversity of participants brought in by grantees”. We are aware that metrics definition is a challenging task and, if our annual plan is funded, we would request support to better define our learning and evaluation plan and to monitor our progress. We are also aware that this being the first time that we will assess with such detail the impact of our actions, a lot will be learned with the process as we go.
  2. Thanks for the metric suggestion, it is very relevant indeed. WELx have already developed activities or given peer-to-peer support in other lusophone countries, namely Guiné-Bissau and Angola. In Angola, we are in contact with a feminist group, and we already had some of their members participating on our editing meetings. We will focus our communication, namely of our online meetings, to other lusophone countries, supported by Vanessa Sanches. However, we are aware that supporting the development of structured and effective editing efforts in other countries' communities, specially with the risk of reproducing colonial technologies and processes, demands more resources and other methodologies. Since Vanessa Sanches is very engaged on this goal, and it’s a long lasting desire of Wiki Editoras Lx to contribute to the expansion of the lusophone community, we hope that a first year funding, in the context of Outcome 3, will also give us the opportunity to develop other strategies to properly address these Movement priorities in a following funding opportunity.
Last comments and questions:
  1. Yes, that is the goal of the activities of Outcome 2’s Objective 2 - “Promote peer-to-peer capacitation based on WELx's learnings”. The proposed activities are: based on the products resulting from Objective 1 (reports findings and the manual), WELx will promote capacitation events: webinars, workshops, talks, promote events to disseminate our learnings, share knowledge with other user groups/affiliates, promoting co-learning and reach out to similar user groups. As for our own community, please notice on Outcome 1’s Objective 3 - “Promote autonomy of WELx's user group members within the Wikimedia Movement”. The planned activities are: capacity building events/talks/webinars - based on a needs assessment survey, to provide two capacitation building events/talk/webinars on the most critical knowledge needed. And, more actively, we will also promote one-on-one assistance and support - schedule one-to-one assistance and support to editors that need guidance on how to increase their levels of access, voting for community decisions, preparing their own projects or funds’ requests, etc.
  2. To further detail what we propose, the content of our training will be designed according to the needs of our community. To this end, if the fund is approved, the first thing we will do will be to assess and evaluate the needs of our community and only then the training will be designed a response to their needs. If the level of our community is advanced, or if we have a minimum number of interested people on more advanced skills, we will develop those trainings. But yes, the goal is to advance the editors with some experience based on the knowledge that they already have, not only technical knowledge, but also strategic knowledge and on awareness of the global wikimedia movement,so that they have more and more autonomy. To give two examples:  if it meets their interests and needs, we can replicate and adapt Flavia Doria's workshop at WikiCon Brasil on how to organize an editathon; or Rute Correia's talk on Creative Commons Licenses. However, it’s relevant to mention that our training opportunities are not only provided in formal moments. Our biweekly editing meetings have always served as scheduled moments for peer-to-peer training, where people can freely express their needs.
Best regards and thanks again, on behalf of Wiki Editoras Lx, XenoF (talk) 17:50, 29 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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

Hello Wiki Editoras Lx

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 appreciate that you have developed a strong network of good will. We like how you build for retention through a supportive social network for new members. We also appreciate how well the group has coordinated with other affiliates in Portugal and Brazil. We also see strength in the fact that you have distributed organisational leadership throughout a team, rather than just one or two individuals, giving more sustainability to your efforts.

There are a few areas where we would like to request more information:

  • Can you discuss any plans you have to spread into the Portuguese areas outside Lisbon? Do you have a strategy for non-urban or rural areas?
  • Can you share more about how your collaborations with other affiliates will work?
  • Can you explain how your alignment with Brazil works? What kind of activity or engagement do you plan there? Is there a way that you address linguistic differences among Portuguese speakers in different contexts?
  • Can you give us more detail about the reporting structure for the staff to be hired? While we value your interest in flatter and more alternative organisational structures, we would appreciate more detail about how your horizontal structure will work in practice, including.
  • How will accountability work? Who will the staff report to? Will the voluntary Advisory Board play a role in staff oversight?
  • Some staff have minimal hours. How will they be supported?
  • Who will oversee consultants?
  • Can you provide more insight into the organising strategies you will be using. To what extent are you bringing editors together to have time to write together? To what extent are you training new editors? To what extent are you training new organizers or otherwise building more advanced skills? What methods do you use?

Thank you and we look forward to hearing from you.

On behalf of the NWE Regional Committee,

☕ Antiqueight chatter 22:09, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hello to everyone on the NWE Regional Committee,
We are very pleased by your acknowledgement about our successful networking efforts, either within our community as for the outreach we have done to other affiliates and projects. Even though we are aware of how much work we have done to integrate and build upon the work done by who came before us, we must admit that all the strong support we have received l surprises us and touches us. All the work done in the Wikimedia Movement is a collective effort, so we are very happy to feel more and more connected to the whole, through these beautiful demonstrations of support.
We are also grateful that you were able to see strength in our decentralized shared leadership. We have always promoted and valued that model of organization and governance, and we are relieved to get positive feedback and valorization from the Committee, assuring us that it is also possible to work in that way in more formal organizations. Below you can find our responses to the questions you raised on your feedback, in their original order:
Can you discuss any plans you have to spread into the Portuguese areas outside Lisbon? Do you have a strategy for non-urban or rural areas?
In our existing activities, we have already spread into Portuguese areas outside Lisbon, through our monthly online editing meetings. Even though in 2019 and early 2020, we had only biweekly in-person meetings, the pandemic made us adapt our regular meetings to remote. That change and all of the intense social media efforts during that time, attracted participants from other areas of the country. XenoF (Flavia Doria) and Girassolei (Sofia Matias), for instance, are now WELx organizers and are not based in Lisbon.
In the context of this annual plan, we aim to hold also one in-person edit-a-thon outside of Lisbon. Our plan, according to already initiated efforts and outreach, is to co-organize it with the identified partner Coolabora. This association works to support women victims of domestic violence and is located in Covilhã, in the interior of the country.
But again, we would like to make it clear that the group already has an impact that goes beyond the boundaries of the geography of the country, with participants from many locations, and a focus on working the (also geographic) margins of content and participation in wiki projects.
Can you share more about how your collaborations with other affiliates will work?
About the collaborations, we intend to keep partnering with other projects and affiliates, as we have done so far, but hopefully with more time and resources to deepen the partnerships and better contribute to the joint organizing efforts - either campaigns, wikicontests or events. Next year, we plan to participate in a global campaign of an affiliate whose work also focuses on the gender gap, according to already initiated conversations. Another way to collaborate with other affiliates will be through training -  we intend to use those opportunities to mobilize our network and partnerships. We believe those exchanges greatly strengthen the equity of knowledge within our Movement. We recognize that we have much to offer and that, likewise, we have much to learn from our peers. Also, we know from previous experience that co-organizing events is very fruitful.
Can you explain how your alignment with Brazil works? What kind of activity or engagement do you plan there? Is there a way that you address linguistic differences among Portuguese speakers in different contexts?
WELx members are currently involved and supporting the creation of a transatlantic gender usergroup, that includes both Brazilian and Portuguese members, based on both countries. There is an intention of co-organizing events in the future, mainly focused on capacitation and peer-to-peer support, based on our experience creating a user group. We haven’t been explicit about this on our grant request, since everything is still in an inception phase.
Besides that, the fact that we run online editing meetings, and that we are the only lusophone group doing that with a biweekly frequency - plus the gender focus -, has attracted users that are based in Brazil (but not only) to participate in our meetings, as well as support requests from that country. We will keep communicating to that geography and being open to include participants from that geographic context in our activities, as well as our capacitation and support opportunities.
Moreover, considering the linguistic matter, WELx was founded  by both  Brazilian and Portuguese people. In the context of this grant, the proposed team also includes co-coordination by one Brazilian and one Portuguese. Even though we are based in Portugal, we are a thematic - and not regional - group. As stated previously,  since we started having  online meetings once a month, we have had Lusophone people participating from all over the world (Angola, Cape Verde, Brazil, Mozambique). Given this scenario, we already have experience  dealing with language variations within the lusophony, and we encourage a safe space where all our participants respect all aspects of our language. In more than three years of activity, we never had any issues concerning linguistic matters within our group members. Again, because our focus is thematic and not regional, all content developed by WELx‘s members on Wikimedia projects is focused on Lusophony as a whole - and not on any specific country, even if there is priority to marginalized groups, which can take on geographical dimensions as well - i.e. "rural women", "women from the periphery", "women from the global south", etc.
Can you give us more detail about the reporting structure for the staff to be hired? While we value your interest in flatter and more alternative organizational structures, we would appreciate more detail about how your horizontal structure will work in practice, including.
  • How will accountability work? Who will the staff report to? Will the voluntary Advisory Board play a role in staff oversight?
  • Some staff have minimal hours. How will they be supported?
  • Who will oversee consultants?
Our organizational structure is composed of two co-coordinators and three professionals with very specific roles: Communication, Design, and Underrepresented communities outreach.
The Volunteer Advisory Board will not play a role in supervising staff. Their job will be, as the name implies, to overview, guide and advise, through distanced positions. We already review and validate each other's opinions and positions. Creating this Advisory Board allowed us to include in the project volunteers who now work for other organizations, namely for the WMF and for the Portuguese chapter,  as well as other group members that are part of the group since the beginning, that will keep a critical sense throughout the course of our work.
The split-leadership is a power-sharing strategy, so that we can prioritize roles over positions, continuing to have healthy exchanges regarding the project leadership. In practice, the two coordinators will "oversee" (to use a word of your choice) each other's work.
Since the beginning of 2019, when the group emerged organically on a voluntary basis, that we have implemented a horizontal structure without defined roles. That doesn’t mean that naturally some people hadn’t assumed some more regular tasks depending on their personal preferences or skills. However, there has always been fluidity and overlap of responsibility, for instance, when someone is suddenly overloaded. That means that everyone on the organizing team knows how to perform any of the roles we proposed on the annual plan. We are aware that receiving funds brings more complexity to this structure and that we need a more tight monitoring of the plan implementation. That will be mainly performed and assured by the said two coordinators, which will, in turn, as previously said, monitor and aggregate each other's work, as well as the other three staff members (design, communication and underrepresented communities outreach).
Which means saying a few things to the people who work in the organization, among them that accountability is divided in such a way as to give full autonomy to those who perform any function. In the current structure we propose on this grant, which, as you can see, consists of only five people, the accountability of each function is determined by the definition of the function itself, which has a previously planned list of tasks. The plan implementation is secured by the completion  of the planned tasks and not by an external supervision, with each one being completely capable and responsible for the performance of its role.
We want this proposal to support our growth and professionalization, and we believe assigning roles supports that goal. However, we were careful enough to do it with a focus on the needs of the work and not with the aim of creating a hierarchy of power - first of all, because that could destabilize the functioning of the group and second, and more importantly, because we don't want to lose such a successful model of governance that brought us here.
We work with principles like accountability, equivalence, consensus. If you would like to know more about it, we recommend this resource on Sociocracy in Organizations:
Our two co-coordinators have taken courses in the subject and here is a free-licensed resource about it: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Practical_Guide_for_Evolving_Agile_and_Resilient_Organizations_with_Sociocracy_3.0.pdf
Concerning the minimum hours for some of the staff, once again, it was the way we found to adapt our way of working to the pre-established structure within that fund. Ideally, based on our existing governance and organizing model, we would prefer to assign a part of each role to a time bank, to compensate  work in a more distributed way, from organizers that couldn’t commit to a regular contribution of time. In the absence of this possibility, we had to restructure and create this role of minimum hours to better meet our needs of having someone doing a very specific work, namely, the Underrepresented communities outreach, that is key to achieve Outcome 3 from this proposal.
As for the following question about consultants,  as we explained at the proposal, the consultants will be our guest curators - a model that we have already used successfully on in our thematic editathons, which consists of inviting an expert on the theme of the editathon, to research and propose a listing based on topics for impact. As this is a job done by specialists with relevant work on off-wiki topics, these are professionals who will not be supervised in any way by us, instead they will work together with us so that we can better direct their work to the context and needs of the on-wiki work.
They are also responsible for providing participants with the context of that topic and its importance, so that we are always able to make a connection between the work of editing on Wikipedia with several other areas in our society. (We have already had the collective of architects W@arch Pt  and the poet Raquel Lima and Vanessa Sanches as curators in the past, to name a few). We have experienced it to be a very enriching  work model, that strengthens the Wikimedia Movement in relation to other areas, organizations and institutions less visible or underrepresented, namely that represent wikigaps.
Can you provide more insight into the organising strategies you will be using. To what extent are you bringing editors together to have time to write together? To what extent are you training new editors? To what extent are you training new organizers or otherwise building more advanced skills? What methods do you use?
We consider training as critical for a minority-oriented group within the Movement.
Since 2019, WELx has had open editing meetings every other week, with a duration of 2 to 3h, where participants are encouraged and trained to publish an article, in teams of two or three people, even if it’s their first time editing wikimedia. According to our experience, this increases the chances that they will edit again. For more experienced editors, this is a chance to train capacitation skills and to refresh their abilities. When more advanced training needs are identified, we mobilize knowledge from our network (other affiliates members, for instance). These editing meetings have been communicated through social media, so on most of the meetings there are new editors. We also direct everyone who shows interest in our work to come to our editing meetings. In addition, this fund will cover three in-person editathons, where we will focus on recruiting new editors. Additionally, it is likely, as mentioned before, that we will also collaborate in various ways at peer editing events in other projects and affiliates. Our whatsapp group is also an excellent medium to keep all the participants in contact, to exchange tips, to ask questions and request support, to disseminate training and job opportunities within the Movement.
So it's important to be clear that despite this proposal highlighting events exclusively focused on capacity building, WELx's work with continuous training through regular edition meetings.
As for the proposed grant, we have included these formal capacity building events, aiming to improve the skills of our participants in technical issues of Wikipedia, Commons and Wikidata (these last two platforms are always integrated in our editing trainings because we believe that the sister projects complement each other), as well as in issues related to the knowledge of Wikipedia's hierarchies and policies, and the functioning of the Movement's ecosystem. But the final decision on the focus of our editing events will be made  after an assessment of the needs of our community - a process that is part of this annual plan and that we consider very strategic for its realization.
Thank you very much once again and best regards, on behalf of Wiki Editoras Lx, XenoF (talk) 18:36, 29 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Round 1 2023 decision[edit]

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 39,927.76 EUR

Comments regarding this decision:
The committee is supportive of affiliates experimenting with alternative governance structures, which supports learning in the Wikimedia movement. We recommend that you create documentation to explicitly map out your approach, as well as capture learning as you implement that approach (including what works and what didn't). We recommend that your documentation include:

  • Clarity about how you will make decisions about the split between volunteer work and work funded through the time bank
  • Staff management practices, particularly giving attention to how you will handle firing / replacing people and transitions
  • Governance structure/processes and how reporting and accountability will be handled among staff in a flat structure

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) 08:48, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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