Talk:Community Resources/Reports/Funding Report 2021-2022

Global affiliates

@DSaroyan (WMF): Thank you for providing the deep insights into the funding procedures with this report.

Besides some other activities, I am also co-contact of the Wikimedia Stewards User Group. As also raised at the latest Wikimedia Summit, our group works on a global level and therefore doesn't fit into the current Fund Regions (we have no office, are not legally recognized, etc.). That's not much of an issue, we know how to get help if help is needed. ;) However, when I read “Out of the 177 recognised affiliates, 74 affiliates received grants in 2022 (41%).”, I was wondering whether you there and in other (more region-focused statistics) counted us and other global affiliates into these numbers or not.

Thanks for the answer, —DerHexer (Talk) 15:17, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi @DerHexer, thanks so much for your message. I remember your great interventions at the Summit as I was in a couple of breakout rooms where you participated. That 41% only includes those affiliates (either chapters or user groups) that received Wikimedia Funds in 2022 and that are managed directly by the Community Resources team. This includes the Wikimedia Community Fund, Alliances Fund and Research Fund. You can read more here. This report does not include some additional funding opportunities, like Movement Strategy Funds or the Equity Fund.

I understand the Wikimedia Stewards User Group did not access the Community Resource managed Funds, so it would not be included in the the 74 affiliates that did get funding, but it would be included in the total number of affiliates (177) used to calculate the percentage.

Let me know if you have any other questions or would like to learn more about accessing these funds and we can set up a conversation. Although we are organised in regions, there is cross-regional support for groups that work more globally or are thematic based. JStephenson (WMF) (talk) 17:30, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

Another reference that may be of interest: here are several affiliates that are classified as "international" that were Funded, a few examples being Art+Feminism, Whose Knowledge? Wiki World Heritage User Group, WikiJournal User Group, Wikimedia LGBT and User Group, Wikipedia & Education User Group. There are also affiliates, many in North Western Europe and United States that work on a global level and were also funded. In all these cases the funding proposals were reviewed by the Regional Fund Committee where the organisation is based, or in a few cases, where most of the work will be carried. out. Please let me know if I can support you with any other information. JStephenson (WMF) (talk) 18:00, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @JStephenson (WMF): Thanks for the kind explanations and throwbacks! :)

1. Indeed, we did not get funded yet so that it's pretty obvious that we are not part of the 74 funded affiliates. ;D But I'm not sure if I understood correctly that wouldn't fit at all in any of the funding programs (Wikimedia Community Fund, Alliances Fund and Research Fund). If so, why would we be included in the 177 affiliates then? If we had applied, for which region would you have counted us in? … Or are these cross-regional supports for groups which you have mentioned also part of the Community Resource managed Funds? In any case, I want to re-emphasize to create another region called “Others, Global, Multi-region, whatsoever“ to avoid representation problems like the current one.
2. On another topic (disclaimer: that's my daily business): I know that your report is focused on your very own funding programs. But since they are not the only ones, I somehow miss a footnote about other funding programs like the ones by affiliates, especially when it comes to statistical data about regions. There are well-financed support programs like Volunteer Support Germany-Austria-Switzerland in Europe which strongly influence your data in these regions (number of applications, budget spent, etc.). It's clear that you cannot do a report which takes all these things into concern (that would be very interesting, though!) but some more reflections on parallel support structures could be useful, I think. Best, —DerHexer (Talk) 18:06, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi @DerHexer! If you like we can set up a call so we can go through the Funding programs. I do believe that a user group like the Stewards could access funding, particularly the General Support Fund that is directed at more experienced or new user groups, regional or global. Would that be of interest?

Whilst Regional Fund Committees have been working on a regional basis, there were also discussions of having cross-regional revisions mechanisms, like you suggest. So this might be a good case to explore and that can apply to other affiliates with cross-regional influence.

To answer some of the specific questions. You ware included in the 177 affiliates because we include all the recognised affiliates as a base line, precisely to see how many of them have accessed funds and how many of them have not and why, to see how we can work with them to see if the funding would be supportive and required.

I think it is really interesting to have more information about affiliate-led grant programs. We did reference some of these experiences in our anual report about grantees work (we are going to publish the full global report soon, but for now you can see these regional summaries). But as you say, it would be interesting to collect more data on how much funds are distributed and how. They are key support systems that I think will become more widespread.

Thanks for all your thoughts and feedback! JStephenson (WMF) (talk) 15:47, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

PS: “where the organisation is based, or in a few cases, where most of the work will be carried out” That's not applicable for WMSUG. We only work in front of our monitors and live around the world. If we would apply for a grant, we would probably ask for a conference grant (but the location for such a meeting would be a topic of discussion and totally unrelated to the place of the group) or financial support of a programmer for some kind of technical solution (and there, too, it doesn't matter for our group where that person is based). —DerHexer (Talk) 18:10, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

Yes, that makes total sense. The General Support Fund, Rapid Fund or Conference Fund can be applicable, even if it is digital/global and not based in any specific region. Let's have a chat to discuss further. We can get some of the Community Resources team to join us. JStephenson (WMF) (talk) 15:48, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

List of grant funded projects?

I presume that all the proposed projects are published on meta but I do not quickly see a category containing them.

I am especially interested in list of grants by region as reported in the table at Community_Resources/Reports/Funding_Report_2021-2022#Annex_1:_Distribution_of_funds_by_geography. What is a good way to access the list of grants and then browse them? 175 grants went to Nigeria for small projects, for example. Can I get a list of links to the proposals for those? Wikidata would be a natural place for registering grants and making them queryable. Thanks for any guidance on how I can access these. Bluerasberry (talk) 20:12, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Hello @Bluerasberry: thanks for your question. You are right that all projects (grant applications) have been published on Meta. You can find the list of all application in FY 2021-22 for Wikimedia Community Fund here. I just added Wikimedia Alliances Fund and Research Fund data too, so that it is easier to navigate. Alternatively, you can find the list of applications on the Meta pages of each program (e.g. Alliances Fund). We thought about using Wikidata for registering grants data but we are still in the transition phase for some funds, so we don't consider doing it at this stage. Let me know if you have any other questions. --DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 14:31, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Resolved.

This is excellent and innovative. I am able to browse these applications. Thanks - this fully answers my request. Bluerasberry (talk) 15:08, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Any outcomes reporting

Does the Wikimedia Foundation have any process for measuring success in grant outcomes? Here are possible outcomes:

1. Grantee delivered as promised
2. Grantee closed out project with a final report
3. Grantee delivered anything, even if target outcomes not achieved

If such data is available for previous grants then I would be curious to see. Does WMF track such things at all, and if so, are outcomes published anywhere? Bluerasberry (talk) 20:34, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Bluerasberry, thanks so much for these ideas. I am the Learning and Evaluation program officer and I am always looking for good ways to think about grantee impact that is useful for communities and the wider Movement. Maybe we can have a call to discuss these ideas further. A few initial thoughts:

1. This is an interesting metric, but it might be a bit too open as we would have to define better, what is "delivered as promised", does this mean their funding was spent or that they met the metrics they set out to meet, etc. We have tried to analyse some specific results such as the quantitative metrics. We started by putting together this "grantee intended impact" report and we hope to be reporting on some of these intended results in the course of the year. It is important to note that many grantee partners (affiliates, groups or individuals) feel that just numerical metrics about editors or contents created does not reflect the depth of their work, for instance advocacy and awareness raising, or efforts to diversify communities and address knowledge gaps that may take time and not be immediately reflected in numerical outcomes. So we are also working with grantees to better define these metrics and possible measurement tools. We also want to emphasis qualitative metrics that will give grantees (and the Movement) more information to see what strategies may need to change. For instance, just knowing that only X% of new editors are retained doesn't really help us answer why this is the case, so documenting the reasons why there is good engagement or not is also of interest. The linked report also talks about some of these metrics gaps that we are hoping to support with better guidelines and encouraging grantees to invest in learning and evaluation and take time to do this.
2. Final reports are obligatory so this metric would be close to 100%. What we could look at is the timeliness of these reports, as a minority are not always submitted in the due date. We are also trying to go a bit deeper and see what we are actually learning from these reports, as mentioned above. We hope to share some preliminary analysis from the mid-term reporting soon.
3. Yes, we are interested more in what were the results, but also the learning from these results that might shape future programming and investments. As mentioned, we hope to share some of this analysis in the same way that we analysed their intended impact. We would love to get feedback on the usefulness of the analysis and if we are missing anything. I will keep you updated!

As regards to previous grantees we would have the data for point 2, but it might not say much as this is obligatory.

For past analysis of actual results (for instance aggregate metrics analysis), this is very difficult as everything was disperse on Meta and we didn't have a centralised information system. With the grants relaunch, we included applications and reporting on the Fluxx portal. This enables us to pull all data on grantees and analyse it. It was the basis for the report I mentioned and also for the one we are working on. We will be publishing this on Meta and hope to be more proactive about sharing with community members that are not grantee partners.

I hope this is not too long and actually helpful. Please let me know if you would like a call over a coffee to discuss more or we can do that here too. JStephenson (WMF) (talk) 11:26, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

@JStephenson (WMF): Yes, I would like to take you up on your offer to chat. I am an editor for The Signpost and if you agree, I would like to get a story out of our chat to share with the broader wiki community.

I do not want to put you on the spot or press you if you are not ready, but would you be willing to chat with me as a journalist in the context of me publishing, or do you think a more casual chat is best first? I am capable of video recording and as a wiki person share everything by default. Would you be willing to be video recorded, if after the talk I gave you a choice about whether we publish the video?

My first priority in talking is just that, the chat, but eventually I do need a story about the state of grants to share in the newspaper. I would let you set limits on that as suit you. If we did an interview, I would ask you to explain the state of things as you like, then have some general questions to follow up. I can give you those questions in advance. I want to keep it chatty with follow ups but my intent is to share basics with people who are unfamiliar with the grants program, not to go deep into any particular details.

Thanks for the reply and yes, I want to talk more. Bluerasberry (talk) 15:58, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Bluerasberry, thanks so much for your interest and input. Let's start by have a non-recorded informal chat first. @KEchavarriqueen (WMF) Director of Community Investment will join us. Do you mind sending me an email so we can set up a time? jstephenson@wikimedia.org

Many thanks! JStephenson (WMF) (talk) 13:43, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

Gender data?

Previous discussions including Grantmaking/Reports/2019-2020 tracked gender gap focus. That 2020 report mentioned that 16% of funds had that focus.

Does WMF still track this, and if so, what can be said about this year's grants and gender equity? Bluerasberry (talk) 20:38, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Bluerasberry,

Thanks for this question, again, a very pertinent one. Unfortunately that gender tracking that was done was not very precise and we are looking for better ways to report this in future.

1. Trying to define investment in gender issues: Many grantees don't necessarily divide their budget per a specific programatic area, and gender is often a transversal component of many areas of programmatic work for many grantees. Given that budget allocation to specific areas or thematic focus (such as education, GLAM, gender, etc) is of interest, we are working to see how this could be done, without being a burden on grantee partners as we are trying to lighten the work in application and reporting proceses. We will also keep you updated on this and welcome any ideas.
2. Understanding gender focus in programatic work: As mentioned in my previous message, we are interested in knowing what % of grantees say they are prioritising gender, for instance, in terms of how addresing the contributors gap (bringing in new contributors) and in terms of content gaps on Wikimedia projects (contributing contents about women or with a gender perspective). But beyond this, we also what to have more insights into what this programmatic work looks like and if it has been effective. In the grantee intended report you can see some of the insights we found and hope to report more on this in the mid-term analysis. In terms of intentions, 51% of grantees partners say it is in their top programmatic priorities to work on the contributor gender gap. This is a bit higher in Latin America, South Asia, Africa and Central and Easter Europe. 65% of grantee partners are working on addressing content gaps, mostly on language Wikipedias and Commmons. The report has more insights into what tendencies we are seeing in this work. We also created some region reports that captures this information that you can view here.
3. Limitations with metrics: as mentioned in the report, there are limitations with tracking some of the key information. Most registration tools for events don't enable grantees to capture details about gender to disaggregate how many new participants, editors or organisers are women or from any other specific group. Likewise tracking contributions (ie. how many articles or images) is easier with gender-focused campaigns, but not always easy to do in more open/continuous programatic work. It would be interesting to continue to work with communities to see how this data can be captured more accurately and systematically.

Again, happy to connect more to discuss and hear your ideas. JStephenson (WMF) (talk) 11:54, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, I get the issue. I do demographics tracking myself in Wikipedia and I know how difficult this is. I also questioned the gender data previously reported, but we have to start somewhere, and I support you in your efforts to get something measurable that is valid and which we can all discuss.

Anyway, you offered a coffee chat and I am going to take you up on that. Let's see where that goes. Bluerasberry (talk) 16:01, 14 March 2023 (UTC)