Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia Poland Accelerated Service Growth

General Support Fund proposal approved in the amount of 412,500 PLN

Congratulations! Your grant is approved in the amount of 412,500 PLN (~101,441 USD) for your first year with a grant term starting 1 January 2022 and ending 31 January 2023.

The committee is happy to support full funding for Wikimedia Polska. Over the next year, the committee recognizes the chapter’s programmatic priorities, including an internal focus on preventing interpersonal conflicts and developing better systems to resolve conflict, as well as the start of a new program connecting the chapter to school libraries across the country to support training of school staff and students on topics aligned different movement priorities. The committee also appreciates Wikimedia Polska’s success in establishing a diverse set of revenue sources to support its operations and programs. The current proposal for General Support Funds is primarily supporting staff expenses, which is atypical for proposals we receive in this program, but it is understood other expenses are already covered by other revenue sources.

The committee also noted a few requests and points of feedback in their final decision:

• One of Wikimedia Polska’s focus areas is to lower the barriers for entry for newcomers, but it is not clear from the proposal how this will be accomplished. How this work addresses the need for broader representation among contributors (such as women) is also not clear. The committee would like to understand the chapter’s planning around this area of focus in the next year.
• While it is clear that the chapter is connected to the #1Lib1Ref campaign, it was not clear how the chapter’s plans for its Wiki Library Spaces program would interact or be coordinated with this larger campaign. The committee would like to know more about the expected relationship and coordination between these two programs.
• While the requested funding is generally aimed at staffing needs – which the committee supports – we would like to see a full programmatic plan provided for the next year, beyond the two programs described (i.e programs beyond the Wiki Library Spaces and planned work to address and reduce community conflicts)
• Specific to the conflict resolution work, the committee recommend that the outcomes of these efforts be shared more widely within CEE, as many communities in the region may benefit from understanding what Wikimedia Polska has found to work well around these needs.

The program officer (Chris) recommends that a meeting be scheduled in January for us to discuss these requests in greater detail.

We look forward to working with Wikimedia Polska and supporting your organization’s work in the Wikimedia movement. Have a good rest of the year! On behalf of the committee, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 19:51, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Request for additional funding to General Suport Fund

In 2023 Wikimedia Poland planned to organize three big and a couple of small live events. Due to increasing prices of accommodation, food and conference services, and large costs of events organized in first half of 2023, we’d like to request for additional funds to our General Support Fund to organized two events in September: Breaking the Guinness record in longest edit-a-thon and WikiSource conference.

The Guinness record attempt will last 5 days. We are expecting around 40 participants from all over the country, editing Wikipedia for at least 80 hours. The event will help to promote Wikimedia movement in nationwide media and integrate the community.

We’d like to increase the popularity of WikiSource conference. In the future in times of automatic generated text, the reliability and openness of the sources of knowledge will be the key to maintain the social control over information. We’d like to begin the process of encouraging users to involve in WikiSource projects. This year we’d like to promote the conference more intense, invite interesting guest speakers, involve more participants.

The total amount of funding needed: 9000 USD.

The link to the budged: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FnfajlhpTN55yzAtBbiQMC0NFzgVI5ePTdgVNhP6x9k/edit#gid=0 Grzegorz Kopaczewski (WMPL) (talk) 07:28, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

@Grzegorz Kopaczewski (WMPL): Thanks for this request for additional funding for these proposed events. Based on our prior conversation regarding this request, I also wanted to acknowledge that the request here is for partial funding, as other funding for these additional events is being provided by your organization. The request for an additional 9,000 USD (~36,825.80 PLN at the time of this writing) is formally approved. The Grants Admin team will reach out regarding next steps to complete the amendment process and transfer these additional funds. With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 16:23, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Information about changes within Conflict Resolution Support budget

Dear committee, I want to inform that in budget categories related to Conflict Resolution Support Program (category 1: salary planned 60 000 PLN; category 2: programmatic actions planned 36 000 PLN) we will finally spend less on salary (we hired project assistant on part-time basis) and we will spend more on services like live and online workshops, trainings and meetings for the community. All changes are within the Conflict Resolution Program, but the balance is much better now, the funds are directed into community needs, not salary: more meetings with professional trainers, more workshops, wikimedians are meeting more often, discussing fragile matters. Feedback from participants is positive and the job done by the project assistant -Bartek Giołbas- is praised by the community. The prediction now is that we will spend around 16 000 PLN on salary, the rest will be spent on programmatic actions (the program goes on till the end of December, and we hope to keep participants focus on this or similar matters in next year). Sorry for late notice. I wasn't sure how to treat the program and both categories. There is no bigger change in funds in whole program, but quite a big in separate categories. Grzegorz Kopaczewski (WMPL) (talk) 14:37, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

@Grzegorz Kopaczewski (WMPL): Thanks for this update on how funding is being used in the Conflict Resolution Support Program, and we appreciate Bartek's work supporting conflict resolution needs in your communities. If there are workshops or trainings on this work that you have found helpful, would you be able to share these resources in your final reporting? I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 17:15, 20 December 2023 (UTC)