Grants talk:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Eesti/2021

Notice from board member forced to leave last month

Although the current grant application is quite similar to the previous ones in goals and form, there is a huge difference in the context. In previous applications we underlined the endeavour to professionalize, better prioritize the goals, improve the leadership, nurture and enlarge the community, but from the application it appears these objectives are not in focus any more. However, this does not mean they have been well achieved.

In internal communication during last half a year or so WMEE has rather withheld previous commitments of keeping track of tasks of employees and volunteers using Phabricator (as manifested in previous applications), but also renounced functioning as an organization with a board, that has official meetings, where decisions are made and procedures and laws that apply to that kinds of organizations are followed (which should be essential for organisations with a history like WMEE's).

During the GA in June we elected the board with six board members for WMEE to deal with development needs and aim for more professional WMEE with possibility of creating bigger collective with hopefully more employees and volunteers. However, WMEE not only failed to live up to these expectations, but decided to quite forcefully neglect the problems and remedies discussed in previous applications, explanations and reports, not to mention board meetings. After messing up the decision processes between board and employees, falling back to arbitrary decisions after repeated insults and threats by employee against board members, WMEE is again left with four board members as one of previous six resigned and the second one (that's me) forced to leave because of "too demanding way of communication" in demanding taking seriously official plans, board decisions, procedures and the requirements of the law.

As I also explained in my e-mail to SAPG officers, the issue that created an insolvable conflict in the board focused on temporary work contracts, which our employee tried to force the board to sign. He tried to do it without relating these to our plans in Wikidata and GLAM, also neither in the contract specifying the results to be delivered nor willing to organize meetings with persons to be contracted to discuss the details, from time to time resorting to insults and threats which after several months of working against the board lead to situation where some of board members gave in to the blackmail.

I'm afraid that with kind of leadership it is doubtful whether WMEE is in shape to fulfil the promises of the application in a way acceptable to foundation. As emphasized by the remainder of board in their ultimatum letters and oral declarations they want to do things informally, prefer to cultivate their ad hoc favourite projects instead of commonly agreeing on goals and executing them as an organization. This informality also entails restricting cooperation only to few selected old timers, be it the board members or paid employees, but also a tendency to make organization rely on few indispensable individual members who insist everything will stop if their will is not obeyed.

As I was excluded from discussing the SAPG application from middle of August, I will add some comments based on my knowledge of these discussions and numerous nightly hours of editing our applications and reports:

• Increasing staff with setbacks mentioned above and without proper collective of employees and volunteers does not seem reasonable. Foundation has never denied resources to WMEE neither because of limited funding availability nor size of Estonia, but because of our organizational capabilities.

• According to current sketch of staffing plan organizational manager (we used to talk about ED in this role before) oversees himself in the role of GLAM manager. To my mind this is also rather correct description of how things currently happen, but is hardly acceptable state of affairs.

• The explanations of programs tend to refer to past achievements and general goals without actually mapping them to objectives, activities and metrics expressing the outputs and leading to expected outcomes.

• It is unclear if within cooperation under different sections in-person cooperation with people from relevant institutions is meant or is it institutional cooperation agreements and practises that can be replicated and scaled beyond persons, but also beyond institutions.

• There are also goals of recruiting new Wikimedians, volunteers and engaging communities, but no dedicated metrics to measure that (this has been goal through years, but tends to be ignored during activities). There are events, meetings with community etc mentioned in text, but there is no metrics for it. Although we have COVID-19 restrictions, this does not mean that there is nothing measurable to be done for growth of the community.

• Lot of metrics tries to measure quantity of content created on Wikimedia projects, but it is not always clear who will provide it. More than often this has resulted in reporting content created by WMEE staff or contractors as an organizational achievement and it is not clearly defined, what makes the content part of a proper pilot project or institutional learning pattern.

• Work in education is rather omitted by WMEE lately and there is no proper statistics what is happening in higher education nor commonly agreed goals and plan for educational institutions. Miljon+ project is officially finished already more than year ago and cooperation with the Ministry of Education and Research existed before, but there have been no efforts to pick it up or clarity how this should be done. There are also great disagreements on what makes educational use of Wikimedia projects "not painful" or what are current problems and expectations of teachers in reality.

• GLAM cooperation tends to succumbs to the curse of content creation and doing work of GLAM institutions instead of educating them to do it themselves or creating and documenting relevant pilot projects in scalable manner. Our first step in introducing Wikipedian in Residence during 2020 resorted to paid content creation and fails to even mention free content and licenses. Yet this is one of the declared goals in different sections of SAPG application. It remains unclear how same problems of paid content creation are avoided with digitizing the collections and creating more virtual exhibitions.

• It is only conspicuous that although we once again phrased our strategic goals in 2018 after last bigger crisis in WMEE we have now three times failed to embed their vision in our SAPG and prioritize planned activities according to them. It is also recurring problem in grant applications and reporting cycles, that we too easily phrase our quite random ideas as plans and year by year end up reporting ad hoc content creation or our own somewhat relevant volunteer activities as success stories of planning.

• These problems will not be solved neither by giving more resources to our volunteers to do more of the same content creation nor to pay new contractors to do the same. There is also something wrong in organizational goals if only way to get new volunteers is to pay them. Problem is even bigger if there are no agreed plans in our main program areas which explain how particular paid work paves the way to actually bringing more volunteers into organization and won't ruin the community by paying some of volunteers making them fight for their careers as paid contractors.

I am well aware that Wikipedians and Wikimedia activists tend to be neurologically atypical exemplars of the society. I have always felt this is a good thing and I fully support various Wikimedia policies to include everybody and nurture special abilities we all have. On Internet Wikimedia projects function as sort of sanctuaries where people can meaningfully commit without asking permission and they are welcomed in community just because they do what they are best at. However, I find it problematic when at the level of chapter leadership these sanctuaries are shaped into occult societies, where none of the normally expected rules apply and in order to be accepted you have to go through questionable rites up to level of arbitrary verbal, legal and other forms of somewhat restrained violence.

This does not only limit engaging new editors, volunteers, members etc, but also sets hard limits to institutional cooperation. The sad part in this is, that it is not only my personal experience out of blue, but in recent history of WMEE you can find examples of the same thing happening year by year. Informal kind of organization also limits amount of people who can be engaged in chapter activities and running against this limit has been experienced too many times, following the pattern of stepping into similar crisis every two-three years.

To conclude, I'm afraid without minimal level of being professional WMEE will never be really recognised and welcomed as an expert in topics of "open data, open technologies, open source, open government" or even Wikimedia projects themselves, as the grant application envisages. Even more it's hard to see how without minimal standards of acting as an organisation we can expect that "Estonian Wikimedia community grows, and its members are happy and remain committed to the movement's goals". --Märt Põder (talk) 04:19, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

@Märt Põder: Thanks for writing down your view of current proceedings - I hope we can work this out in time, I will check with the grants team at the WMF to see what can be done. Ideally, we would try to solve this situation to everyone's satisfaction and with mutual understanding, but that will take some time and resources. Philip Kopetzky (talk) 14:21, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

APG approved in the amount of 63,037 EUR

Congratulations! Your grant is approved in the amount of 63,037 EUR, with a grant term starting 1 January 2021 and ending 31 December 2021.

Wikimedia Estonia has over 10 years of experience in working with Wikimedia projects, and has implemented a number of projects which led to substantial development of the Estonian Wikipedia. They are now in their 6th year in the Simple Annual Plan Grants program. The proposed programming is reasonable and conservative, especially given the size of the communities they are supporting both online and offline.

The Annual Plan is similar to last year; the activities are built upon three programmatic areas: Education, GLAM, and Open Culture and Outreach & Community. The Community programs are now incorporated into the Open Culture and Outreach program. The first program of the Annual Plan is the Education program, with an aim to ensure that Wikimedia projects are used in the educational institutions and that, in their turn, educational institutions create and improve the content of Wikimedia projects. This program includes a number of activities, such as collaboration with educational institutions, support to educators, and Wiki Science Competition.

The GLAM program is centered around the partnership with Estonian GLAM institutions. Wikimedia Estonia plans to capture the data and content preserved at these institutions, and make them available to the wider public through Wikimedia projects. This year, WMEE will be running at least 10 joint programs with GLAM institutions. Finally, with the Open culture and Outreach program, the chapter wants to promote open knowledge and culture. The program activities will be held on two levels: on one hand the chapter will be supporting the wider public to acquire knowledge on open culture, on the other hand WMEE hopes to be engaged in wider discussions around open knowledge. We admire Wikimedia Eesti’s dedication to their programs and care for their communities.

Wikimedia Eesti has done some strategic work, forming the chapter's strategic goals, but there is no progress to turn these goals into a comprehensive Strategic Plan. Additionally, there is no change in the defined strategic goals, and attempts to adjust them to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. We request that Wikimedia Eesti works on their Strategic Plan and tailor it to the new recommendations of the Movement Strategy 2030. We also ask that the staff members take on roles to support volunteer engagement in strategic thinking.

WMEE has struggled with its governance practices in the past, but has taken steps during recent years to address this area of organizational capacity. We appreciate efforts from the Board to engage more holistically with organizational operations, attending to the work and progress of staff members, and incorporating more routine reports to review its programs. We request that WMEE continue to develop its governance structures in order to support sustainable organizational growth. One possible way this could be supported is for the Board to seek outside support or consultancy on developing effective organization around certain areas of governance, including managing conflict and supporting the Board to provide a stronger foundation for programmatic planning, evaluation, and prioritization.

WMEE is maintaining a similar staffing plan from the previous year, which includes an Organizational Manager, two Project Managers for GLAM and Education, and a Communications/Outreach Manager. We request that separate individuals fill the two Project Manager and Organizational Manager positions, and discourage having a single person fulfill multiple staff positions in these areas.

We are proud to support Wikimedia Eesti’s work in the upcoming year, and look forward to working together in 2021.

On behalf of the SAPG Committee and Staff, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 18:58, 14 December 2020 (UTC)