Talk:Global Resource Distribution Committee/Funding Principles

COI Conflict of interest

Thanks for the great job. I have the feeling that some of the principles might cross issues of conflict of interest (in particular, I see specific issues in the principle of Subsidiarity, but it can be a transversal problem). Would it be possible to mention the issue of conflicts of interest somewhere in the funding principles (to consider it and manage it)? I think that addressing conflicts of interest openly is important (and a key principle in general). iopensa (talk) 17:03, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

The main issue remains

The Funding Principles are interesting, but the main issue is still there: this is not a Global Resource Distribution Committee, but a committee to decide on how to distribute some specific funds the WMF has previously decided that can be distributed. The main expending body of the movement is the WMF, and still the funding of that part of the movement is out of the table. If we don't talk about the main issue, all the other discussions are secondary. Theklan (talk) 20:24, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

@Theklan, the GRDC is set to define a refreshed Grantmaking Strategy, and the publication of these Funding Principles is the first step toward that goal. These Funding Principles apply to everyone involved in Wikimedia grantmaking, not only the GRDC. This is why for us this is an important discussion, regardless of the GRDC and its current mandate. Ridzaina (talk) 14:14, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

Missing principle: explicit alignment with the movement strategy

While the subsidiarity principle mentions "We trust in the capacity of local actors to make autonomous, informed and context-sensitive decisions that are aligned with the shared vision and strategic direction of the Wikimedia Movement." I strongly believe we need more explicit reference. I would suggest that only activities that clearly describe which initiative it relates to should be funded. ♥Ainali ^talk_{contributions} 20:51, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

+1. --Rosiestep (talk) 13:55, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

+1.

We have seen examples of funds-seeking from well-meaning, even noble, initiatives that just aren't within our Mission, broad though it is. It is crucial to tie movement funds expenditure to articulated Mission-promoting initiatives, because well-meaning "local actors" may certainly see other needs they would personally love to serve, despite not being within our Mission. Ijon (talk) 17:11, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

Collaboration and Cooperation Centered on People for Real Equity in Africa

I warmly congratulate the Global Resource Distribution Committee (GRDC) for this major and ambitious update to the funding principles, aligned with the 2030 Movement Strategy, which establishes a solid and practical ethical framework for equitable grant distribution.

To make them even more inclusive and operational, especially for underrepresented Central African communities like Wikimedians of Republic of Congo User Group in Brazzaville, I suggest adding quantifiable metrics ≥40% of funds to the Global South by 2027, concrete regional examples (workshops in Lingala/Kituba despite unstable connections), monthly virtual panels in French with live translation for people-centered collaboration, North-South matching funds for cooperation, delegation of 70% of regional funds without central veto for subsidiarity, and an open database of lessons learned for iterative practices these improvements would transform our linguistic, digital, and infrastructural challenges into tangible opportunities for equity and empowerment. What do you think? Ready to collaborate ! ♥Africany ^talk_{contributions} 11:01, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

@Africany, thank you for your ideas; we appreciate the time and intention behind your contribution. At this stage, the document is mainly focused on outlining the broad funding principles that will guide decision-making across the Movement, rather than setting specific targets, regional examples. The aim is to first establish a strategic foundation which will later help shape detailed strategies.

Your reflections on equity are valuable. We are gathering all the feedback and we will review it to assess improvements needed to the Funding Principles. We will keep you updated, and we will reach out if we need more details about your comment. Ridzaina (talk) 14:17, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

• I think an arbitrary quota that needs to be spent in Africa is not a good goal: it would necessarily lead to aiming to meet that goal no matter what, thus increasing the likelihood of funding programs without clear prospects of mission impact, wasting time and money.
• I think one different approach that could ensure adequate funding is investing in Mission-aligned activity in Africa could be a periodic (say, biennial?) survey of funding requests from Africa, both funded and unfunded, to verify that no compelling proposals were left unfunded because of insufficient funds.
  • If such a study (perhaps by the GRDC committee itself, as a body separate from the regional funding committees for Africa?) does find that there have been significant proposed grants from Africa that went unfunded only due to insufficient budget, that could be a strong signal to the Foundation to increase the allocation for grants overall.

Ijon (talk) 17:17, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

What is the purpose of these principles?

First, I'd like to thank the members of the GRDC for the work they've put into drafting these principles. It takes significant amount of time and work to reach consensus in any group of more than two people. The feedback that follows is not a critique of the work that the GRDC has done, but rather it speaks to how this process was designed to begin with.

Several things remain unclear to me. I'll lay them out:

• Who is the "we" that is mentioned in these Principles? Is it the GRDC? Is it WMF? Some other entity?
• What is the purpose of these principles? They seem like a re-written version of the Principles in the Grants & Strategy Relaunch, rather than an "updated & expanded" version.
• What's the process these Principles are supposed to be supporting?

More importantly, what problem or set of problems are these Principles trying to solve? Is it unfair distribution of resources? Is it unfair distribution of power across movement stakeholders? Is it lack of alignment between Movement Strategy, WMF strategy, and affiliates' strategy? Other than "the number of affiliates is growing and we don't have enough money to support all of them" (which is only partially true, considering that movement grants are only 10-12% of the total budget of WMF), there doesn't seem to be a clear diagnostics of what problem the GRDC is working on.

The GRDC has two functions: "Set the resource distribution strategy and policies for grantmaking across the movement." and "Make recommendations to the Wikimedia Foundation and its Board of Trustees on how much of the Foundation’s total budget should be allocated to grantmaking.". As @Theklan points out, your resource distribution strategy will always be dependant on how much money you actually have to distribute. These principles are very good at virtue signaling (who could disagree that underrepresented communities need to be at the center?), but at its core, they don't resolve the problem of what to prioritize in any meaningful way, and all the stakeholders in the conversation have a vested interest (including me, as staff of an affiliate) to maintain a certain part of the status quo or demand for changes. But that conversation is not happening at any structured or meaningful body of governance, and this is like this by design by the major power stakeholder in the conversation.

The document speaks about "WMF priorities", without accounting for the assimetry in power distribution between that actor to set its own agenda of work and the rest of the actors and stakeholders in the movement, which means that those priorities can be defined without taking into account the priorities of the rest of the ecosystem. This creates a lot of strategy misalignment, particularly considering how WMF has defined its main core areas of work (legal & advocacy, fundraising, and tech) and what the rest of the affiliates do (to simplify it, let's call it "programmatic work"). Which work is a priority? Which part of the work can be shared across the stakeholders (meaning they also need to share the budget), and which part of the work can only and exclusively be done by one of the stakeholders? By the way, programmatic work is extremely important: donors very likely think they are paying for education and GLAM programs, rather than software development. The principles of collaboration, cooperation, transparency, impact measurement, can't be applied only to the shorter end of the stick --the affiliates & communities--, it needs to be a conversation with all the stakeholders in the table. Because at the end of the day these are movement resources, not WMF resources, since they have been collectively generated by the work of all the stakeholders (yes, including staff at affiliates) involved in the projects.

Without discussing this power asymmetry, which was the thing that the Movement Strategy was supposed to solve and that WMF said this was the pilot to do so, we're back to where we were before the Movement Strategy process.

Lastly, as a general comment, the document is mixing so many different things that it's very hard to follow. As a way of example, the people-centered section directs to the stakeholders definition, and then talks about "readers" (which is a concept that is not in that glossary). Funding does not directly serve readers, because readers is a broad, impossible to define category such as the "general public". Wikimedia projects as websites serve readers, but to create a funding strategy that it's actually operational and functional, it's necessary to also have functional definitions that can be operationalized. Readers equals basically all the humans out there (because our content is available on chatbots, etc.), but when doing that in a strategy the risk is to reinforce biases on how does a reader looks like.

cheers, Scann (talk) 12:52, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

WMF funding can unintentionally produce symbolic and epistemic violence

Thanks to the interim committee for the work. The Equity & Empowerment section should explicitly recognize the risk of data colonialism and affirm that funded Wikimedia activities must support knowledge sovereignty rather than extractive documentation practices, particularly in contexts where power asymmetries limit communities’ ability to control how their knowledge is represented, circulated, or governed, especially in the Global South. It is an "equity" and "empowerment" section, so disempowerment and inequity should be addressed and they can happen through Wikimedia activities. These are topics that as a movement we are discussing and should be addressed here, eg. First Nations Focus Group Report from Wikimedia Autralia. Best, Felino Volador (talk) 21:25, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

Comment by Wikiesfera

Thanks to the Committee for working on and sharing these principles. We want to start by saying we agree with @Scann:’s comments. These principles, while containing commendable language, fail to address the central power imbalance the Movement Strategy was created to solve.

The principles present themselves as an "ethical and operational compass," an update of past guidelines. However, as Scann asks, "What problem or set of problems are these Principles trying to solve?" The document does not offer a clear diagnosis. They describe how to distribute grants more ethically but avoid defining why the entire system needs reimagining.

This is the heart of the issue. While the Subsidiarity principle rhetorically "empowers" local communities, it conditions this on "maintaining alignment with the overarching priorities of the Wikimedia Foundation." The WMF, as the Movement's primary financial and legal entity, retains the ultimate authority to set its own strategic priorities and allocate the vast majority of its budget independently. Affiliates, in contrast, must align with these priorities to access a much smaller pool of grant funds. The principles do not redistribute power, they merely outline a more considerate process for the WMF to exercise its existing discretion. This maintains the status quo where the WMF is the main actor, contrary to the Movement Strategy's spirit of radically reimagining the distribution of power.

The narrow scope addresses only a fraction of resources. Others in this talk page have highlighted a critical limitation: the GRDC's mandate covers only grantmaking, which represents a very small % of the WMF's annual budget. The committee has no say over the Foundation's core spending on technology, legal advocacy, or fundraising. This makes the GRDC a committee for distributing some specific funds the WMF has previously decided can be distributed. This frames Movement resources not as collective assets but as WMF-allocated funds, sidestepping the larger, more consequential conversation about the budget as a whole.

The principles strongly emphasize collaboration, transparency, and mutual accountability within the grantmaking process. But as Scann says, accountability "can't be applied only to the shorter end of the stick, the affiliates & communities." These principles must govern all stakeholders equally, including a transparent conversation about how the WMF's major budget areas serve (or potentially misalign with) collective Movement goals. Without this, the framework reinforces a one-sided accountability where grantees are scrutinized, but the primary resource holder is not held to the same standard of collaborative priority-setting, and can unilaterally decide Movement Strategy priorities such as redistirbution of resources and power are optional (we have unfortunately already seen this happen).

The principles represent a tactical improvement within an unchallenged strategic framework. They offer a better, more equitable guide for distributing grants but deliberately avoid the radical reimagining of who holds the purse strings and sets the agenda. The principles manage the symptoms of inequity (they do fail to specifically name women or the South as priorities, perhaps hoping that intent equals action) within the existing grant system but do not cure the issue of centralized power the Movement Strategy identified. They consolidate a reformed status quo rather than a leap toward a new, distributed model of governance and resource control. We believe the GRDC can tackle this and force the issue, if it is willing to make a stand for Movement Strategy.

On behalf of Wikiesfera, PatriHorrillo (talk) 11:43, 6 February 2026 (UTC)

Punctuation mistake?

In the excerpt:

We recognise that impact lies in building trusted, long-term partnerships—not transactional relationship-based on solidarity and mutual accountability.

I guess, what was meant was:

We recognise that impact lies in building trusted, long-term partnerships —not transactional relationships— based on solidarity and mutual accountability.

Otherwise, it sounds like the goal is to avoid solidarity and mutual accountability. Egezort (talk) 21:24, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

@Egezort Yes, you are right, and we have corrected the sentence. Thank you very much for spotting this! Ridzaina (talk) 14:11, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

Funding principles feel pre-AI; missing an explicit “human knowledge resilience” priority

''Disclosure: I am commenting here in my personal capacity as a volunteer Wikimedian/Wikipedia editor. This is not an official statement on behalf of any Wikimedia affiliate, chapter, or my professional role.''

Thank you for publishing a first refreshed version. I support the values expressed here — collaboration, people-centeredness, subsidiarity, evidence-based learning, equity. However, I'm concerned that the overall framing risks being strategically outdated for the 2026–2028 context.

The page explicitly notes that most of these principles originate in the Movement Strategy 2030 and were adapted into a grantmaking framework. That lineage is understandable, but the environment has shifted dramatically since the Strategy recommendations and principles were published in May 2020. Generative AI has become a dominant interface to knowledge, automated extraction and scraping is scaling, and the attention economy is changing the incentives that sustain volunteer participation and governance. A principles document published in 2026 that does not explicitly prioritize protecting the human capacity that produces, verifies, and governs Wikimedia knowledge risks steering grantmaking toward yesterday's problem framing.

I understand that the GRDC must ground its work in the Movement Strategy and ensure continuity. At the same time, the GRDC is a body with decision-making authority over movement-wide grantmaking strategy and resource distribution envelopes (while not deciding on individual grants). This gives it real leverage to shape incentives and priorities across the ecosystem for years. In that sense, being “aligned” with the Strategy should not mean being silent about the biggest structural shift affecting our mission right now.

A related concern: the implicit distinction between "longstanding" and "emerging" communities can be misleading in this context. The core challenge today is not primarily about balancing two categories of communities competing for scarce resources. It is about safeguarding the integrity of the entire human knowledge production system that makes Wikimedia credible. Longstanding communities face increasing pressures (including more powerful and accessible tooling that lowers the cost of large-scale manipulation and public opinion shaping). Emerging communities face the same pressures, often with less governance capacity to absorb them. Resilience is therefore not a “nice-to-have”: neglecting it undermines equity goals as well.

Equity and empowerment remain essential principles, but they need to be explicitly situated within this broader systemic risk. Without resilient human communities and governance capacity, equity goals become harder to achieve and to sustain over time.

Could the GRDC consider adding an explicit principle or at minimum a short preamble?

This would not replace or compete with equity goals. It would align them with the urgent reality that many communities, both longstanding and emerging, already perceive as central to their work. ~~~~ Ilario (talk) 10:03, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

Should we focus on people or content?

It feels like there's a disconnect here between the online community that's focused on content creation, and grants that are focused on supporting people. Statements like "(rather than beholden to) relevant policies, practices, structures and technical solutions" imply that the policies/practices/etc. on-wiki are not meeting new editor's needs (which may well be true), but emphasising that rather than focusing on onboarding new people to understand the community's expectations doesn't read well. Similar with "The default assumption is that the people from a geographic area or thematic community are best placed to understand local context and what represents meaningful impact." (that works well with people, not so much with content). Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 21:41, 15 February 2026 (UTC)