Hi! This annual report outlines Whose Knowledge? activities supported by the User Group from September 2021 to September 2022. Whose Knowledge? will be reporting on its 2022-23 Community Fund grant separately.
WhoseKnowledge? Costa Rica Retreat, 2022.2022 marked the 5th edition of the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign. The 2022 campaign brought over 1100 images to Wikimedia Commons so far. This year, we brought the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign physically to the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa #FIFAfrica2022, in Lusaka Zambia.
We launched the State of the Internet's Languages report in an online event with the participation of contributors, partners and allies.
We published “Decolonizing the Internet’s Structured Data – Summary Report”, a collective analysis of the power dynamics of online structured data, with translations to Spanish and Portuguese.
We co-organized the Decolonizing the Internet East Africa (DTI-EA) convening, that took place in Lusaka, Zambia, in collaboration with the pan-African feminist network FEMNET.
Our initiative Honouring Our Guardians continues centers the leadership of Indigenous women activists, policy makers and scholars from different parts of the world through an international/translocal community of praxis for climate justice.
We are consolidating our program Decolonizing the Internet’s Archives (Whose Digital Archives?) and supporting the partners in developing their projects.
In 2022, we engaged in critical conversations in the Wikimedia movement around knowledge justice and the inclusion of the marginalized majority of the world.
At the Whose Knowledge? #VisibleWikiWomen photobooth, we documented women and non-binary feminists participating at the Forum for Internet Freedom in Africa 2022.
2022 marked the 5th edition of the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign. Launched on March 8, under the theme Hope and healing: Creating feminist memory online, we invited participants to occupy the digital space, creating, sharing, and uploading open-licensed images of marginalized women and non-binary folks to Wikimedia Commons.
Bringing together cultural, educational, feminist organizations and women from around the world to decolonize Wikipedia’s content and contributors, is a work that needs tending all year long. For the year 2022 and beyond, we have brought on our long-term coordinator and experienced feminist Wikimedian Mariana Fossatti to provide her expertise and direction to our flagship program going forward.
In this period, we have also focused on strengthening our flagship #VisibleWikiWomen campaign. Having realized that that the #VisibleWikiWomen program coordination would ideally be a full time position and not a time bound one, been working on expanding the team and have hired a new full time #VisibleWikiWomen program coordinator, Sunshine Fionah Komusana, and a part time communications associate, Youlendrree Appasamy that started working with us in June and July 2022, respectively.
As part of Women's Month celebration, we co-hosted the regional campaign ¡Alto, Mujeres trabajando!, in partnership with Wikimedia chapters in Latin America, with the aim of making women visible in professions and roles that have historically been dominated by men.
In the backdrop of the celebration of the United Nations International Day for People of African Descent on August 31, 2022, we held an editathon in partnership with the collective 500 Women Scientists, to celebrate the contributions of women and non-binary people of African descent in STEM and to ameliorate the erasure of their labor, voices and stories on Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.
In September, we continued focused around the theme of celebrating women and queer people in workplaces that have historically excluded them. In partnership with Flickr and the Flickr Foundation, we held a photo-a-ton to celebrate the women and non-binary people who work in historically cis-male-dominated workplaces, and the history of their fight for labour rights (maternity leave, equal pay, bathrooms, sexual harassment legislation etc.).
On September 2022 we brought the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign physically to the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa #FIFAfrica2022, in Lusaka Zambia, to document the presence of African women digital rights defenders and leaders at the conference.
Picture of the Ugandan journalist, Rosebell Kagumire, took at the #VisibleWikiWomen photo booth. Currently illustrating her Wikipedia biography.
Outcomes / metrics
So far in 2022, #VisibleWikiWomen counts 1,194 images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, illustrating pages in 9 different Wikipedias plus Wikidata, by 123 participants, 37 of them new editors. All these images together total 53,096 pageviews by November 8, 2022 (total calculated using Wikimedia metrics tools Glamorous, Massviews and Eventmetrics).
We established new partnerships with the Flickr Foundation, 500 Women Scientists, FEMNET and Mozilla Foundation, adding relevant networks to the campaign.
In terms of social media impact of the campaign, we’ve had an average engagement rate of 2.5% or higher since its launch (reaching as high as 7.9% in posts linked to VisibleWikiWomen in English and Spanish), with 1,524 engagements on our Twitter page.
Partners
AfroCROWD, Association for Progressive Communications, Campaña Alto Mujeres Trabajando!, Flickr Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Wiki Movement Brazil User Group, Women in Red, World Pulse, FEMNET, 500 Women Scientists, Art+Feminism.
Challenges / Obstacles
We and our partners were (and continue to be) deeply affected by Covid-19, facing the many challenges of organizing a global, multilingual campaign during a global pandemic. Despite the challenges, our partners and community are bringing extraordinary images of women and non-binary individuals to Wikipedia and the broader internet.
As we informed in our previous report, in October 2021, with the partnering of Wiki Movimento Brasil and Wikimedia Germany, we hosted the first “Decolonizing the Internet’s Structured Data”. Over 40 knowledge activists, community organizers, tech-builders, and other “unusual allies” joined the conversation in English, Spanish and Portuguese (with simultaneous translation). We focused on communities that are most affected by how structured data is used and abused, as well as folks who have long engaged with questions around these systems.
As a result of this convening, in April 2022 we published “Decolonizing the Internet’s Structured Data – Summary Report”, a collective analysis of the power dynamics of online structured data, with translations to Spanish and Portuguese (the two most widely spoken languages in Latin America).
At WikidataCon 2021, we continued to bring thought-provoking questions on the matter. Our co-founder and co-director Anasuya Sengupta kicked off the conference with a keynote on why knowledge justice matters for structured data, which was received with excitement by the audience. Later on, during the event, she participated in a Q&A and a follow-up discussion. We have received a grant from Wiki Movimento Brasil in order to prioritize the participation of communities from Latin America and the Caribbean and provide language accessibility to them. See the grant report here.
The conversation continued after WikidataCon. Anasuya spoke to the Deutschlandfunk Kultur about decolonizing structured, open data in projects like Wikidata, in an interview translated to German.
At the DecidimFest, Anasuya joined a panel on data decolonialism with Paola Ricaurte, moderated by Tayrine Dias.
At Wikimania 2022 we hosted a panel to invite wikimedians to join and continue the conversation, and acknowledge the power dynamics in the ways we work with structured data in Wikimedia projects: whose views, whose agenda, whose ontologies, and whose decisions sustain the classifications we are building.
Partners
Wiki Movimento Brasil and Wikimedia Germany
Outcomes / metrics
Our group of thoughtful, powerful thinkers and doers, was mostly female-identifying (71%), in/from the Global South (66%), and indigenous/black/people of color(s) (82%) in origin.
After holding our first DTI convening focused on structured data, we received incredibly positive feedback from the participants via surveys and comments during the sessions. This precious feedback has made us realize that this conversation was just the beginning of a series of ongoing and intentional conversations that our communities would like to have.
Challenges / Obstacles
We recognize the enormity of the challenge of decolonizing online structured data, from the need to go beyond text to find different forms of encoding data, to the recognition of the environmental impacts of the technical infrastructure needed for massive data processing. We knew from the start that this conversation would need to be the first of many. We are keen to create and convene more opportunities to radically reimagine and redesign the internet’s structured data through a feminist, anti-colonial, anti-racist lens.
State of the Internet's Languages Report name in multiple languages
Activities
We have successfully designed and developed a fully tailored website that presents the State of the Internet's Languages report to our wide audience in a user-friendly manner.
We launched the report on February 23, 2022 in an online event with the participation of contributors, partners and allies. The event was live streamed and offered simultaneous interpretation into Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese and Spanish. The recordings in these different languages are available on our Youtube channel.
We made this report accessible to a wider audience, by offering audio versions in multiple languages, by providing transcripts where needed, and producing translations of the summary report and the qualitative data (the stories) in a total of 15 different languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Bengali, Chindali, Egyptian arabic, English, French, Italian, Kishwahili, Mapuzungun, Portuguese, Sinhala, Spanish, Taiwanese Mandarin, Tunisian Arabic and Dill Whall..
We talked about the importance of a multilingual and multimodal internet and led this conversation in a number of spaces, including Mozfest 2022, RightsCon 2022 and the webinar series of the Endangered Languages Network.
We contributed to the Wikimedia Research Showcase (June 2022) with the participation of Martin Ditus, one of the researchers of the State of the Internet's Languages report, presenting The Language Geography of Wikipedia.
The State of the Internet’s Languages report was amplified via the Centre for Internet and Society (India), Common Voice (Mozilla), and Folha de S.Paulo.
Partners
Oxford Internet Institute, and the Center for Internet and Society (India)
Outcomes / metrics
Over 100 individuals engaged in the STIL process, including writers, reviewers, translators, designers (web, graphics, video), advisors, etc.
We have 2 new partners resulting from this project.
We achieved nearly 4000 unique visitors to the STIL website, and the report has been downloaded over 180 times.
We reached an engagement rate of 2-5% for social media content related to the report
We talked/wrote about the importance of a multilingual and multimodal internet and/or shared the STIL report in 7 online spaces and events.
11 websites, 12 Android apps, and 16 iOS apps were surveyed in the report.
Contributions to the report in the form of essays totalled 11, came from 12 countries, and were written in 9 different languages.
The Summary Report is available in 13 languages, including International Sign (to be published in August).
Challenges / Obstacles
The main challenge of this initiative has been to make this report accessible to a wider audience, and push ourselves to go beyond the boundaries of the usual text-based and English-first reports.
We also challenged ourselves to put our multilingual principles into practice, especially for the launch event of the report. Offering simultaneous interpretation in multiple languages in an online streamed event was challenging due to the technical limitations of online video conference platforms and services.
The pandemic still presented an obstacle to push this initiative further, since many members of our team have been dealing with either long-term effects of Covid-19, post-Covid conditions, or were recovering from Covid-19 during the build up of the report, its launch, and its outreach phases.
Screenshot of the State of the Internet's Languages launch event
Decolonizing the Internet East Africa (DTI-EA) convening[edit]
Activities
Group Picture of Decolonising the Internet-East Africa convening, in Lusaka, Zambia.
On September 26 and 27 2022, the African Women's Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) in collaboration with Whose Knowledge?, convened 40 feminists, activists, technologists, wikimedians, artists, scholars, knowledge professionals and digital curators from across the East-African region to facilitate authentic and deeply thoughtful conversations and reflections on decolonizing the internet, leveraging critical feminist scholarship, human rights activism and knowledge of internet technologies, community organizing, and partnerships. The convening took place in Lusaka, Zambia, in advance of the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa (FIFAfrica 2022), also in Lusaka.
On Day 1, we centered ourselves and our contexts for tech and knowledge justice through mapping expectations, using art to set the scene, and sharing the context of decolonizing the internet within the context of African history, with particular reference to colonialism. Participants shared their individual reflections in groups, where they discussed the challenges they faced in decolonizing the internet, and opportunities for resistance towards knowledge/tech justice.
In the afternoon of the first day of the convening, participants chose amongst three parallel sessions to learn and share skills that put decolonizing the internet into practice. These sessions provided hands-on practical experience to edit Wikipedia with a decolonial lens, explore how African women are represented in images online through the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign, and learning to code.
On Day 2, participants re-grouped and were prompted to think about the type of internet they wanted to create and enjoy, and consider what actions and resources would take to create it.
Right after DTI-EA came FIFAfrica 2022. Participants of DTI-EA brought their previous conversations to this regional forum (scholarships included support for participation in both activities).
During FIFAfrica 2022, the #VisibleWikiWomen photobooth became a little feminist corner for rest, conversation and breaks at FIFAfrica22. The photobooth was conceptualised as a space for documenting feminists and allies in the digital rights space at FIFA 2022. We hired a feminist Zambian photographer, Namukolo Siyumbwa, to take pictures at the photobooth, and women and non binary participants were invited to make a portrait that has been uploaded (with proper consent) to Wikimedia Commons.
At FIFAfrica 2022, four panelists: Helen Nyinakiiza, Ann Holland, Carolyne Ekyarisma and Sandra Kwikiriza (three of whom were from the DTI-EAconference) spoke about African feminisms on and offline. They interrogate, from an African feminist anti-colonial perspective, what it means when what has become a core spaces for feminist activism and organizing is owned by corporations from the Global North. This conversation was built on the feminist work of reimagining, dreaming and creating alternatives of our online existence in ways that are safe, affirming and community building.
Partners
African Women's Development and Communication Network (FEMNET).
Participants of DTI-EA working in small groups.
Outcomes / metrics
40 participants, among feminists, activists, technologists, wikimedians, artists, scholars, knowledge professionals and digital curators from across the East-African region.
Our wrap-up thread about the conference led to 672 engagements on Twitter, which includes 139 likes and 57 retweets. Six people who were photographed at the #VisibleWikiWomen photobooth shared their images on Twitter, and of these, the tweet with the highest engagement earned 421 engagements, including 88 likes and 26 retweets.
Individually, participants committed to taking following actions and steps as a result of the DTI-EA conference, including spreading the DTI-EA conversation in other spaces, learning, engage and research on feminist and anti-colonial views of the internet, pushing for the use oral tradition on Wikipedia and Wikidata, sharing knowledge and open more opportunities for collaboration among African feminists online.
Co-hosts made a commitment to:
Document this space and all the conversations through a report to serve as an awareness and conscious raising tool; and respecting participants' right to privacy and anonymity (work in progress, report will be available coming soon).
Keep in touch – using a mailing list, and the contacts and bios shared for collaboration and partnerships beyond the DTI-EA 2022 (done).
Upload to Commons and send pictures took in the #VisibleWikiWomen photo booth to all participants, and invite them to engage with the campaign and with Commons (done).
Think about how to monitor and measure the impact of participation/impact in FIFAfrica 2022.
Identify and organize, physically and/or digitally, around upcoming forums in Africa, like the IGF 2022 and COP27.
Facilitate cross learning from other regions.
Challenges / Obstacles
There was a hunger from participants to do more hands-on session time. We had amazing expertise in the room and it would be great to make time in future convenings for knowledge exchange so we can learn about people’s amazing projects and work.
We recognize the need to be more mindful of issues around accessibility for participants who may need it. We did really well this time, but should be more mindful about this in the planning phase, not necessarily during the event.
Visas created an extra logistical effort that stressed the organizing team. African inherited colonial borders and the whole international State system that imposes travel barriers/privilege according to citizenship, is an important obstacle that we could navigate and afford this time. But we need to acknowledge that this unjust and arbitrary system is making it harder to organize communities across the Global South.
Sônia Guajajara, from the Guajajara people, is one of the indigenous activists, scholars, policy makers and practitioners that take part of Honouring Our Guardians.
Activities
Honouring Our Guardians is an initiative that centers the leadership of Indigenous women activists, policy makers and scholars from different parts of the world through an international/translocal community of praxis for climate justice. It tests frames, policies and practices that are Indigenous in design and execution, through community pilots in three different locations: the Pacific Islands, the Great Basin area of the USA, and the Brazilian Amazon.
Over the last year, the Guardians have been meeting online fairly regularly - every month or sometimes every 6 weeks. We meet as a bilingual group across multiple time zones; English/Brazilian Portuguese (with simultaneous interpretation) with the Guardians from the Yomba Valley, Turtle Island (United States), the Great Ocean States of the Pacific (Fiji and Aotearoa/New Zealand), and the (Brazilian) Amazon.
We hired an Honouring Our Guardians coordinator to support these activities and help hold and facilitate these spaces. Perse(phone) Hooper Lewis, who is a long-time friend and ally and one of the guardians since the beginning of the initiative.
Partners
ANMIGA (National Articulation of Indigenous Women Ancestrality Warriors) and National Articulation of Indigenous Women, Pacific Network on Globalization, Yomba Shoshone Tribe.
Outcomes / metrics
Two videos/recorded conversations about indigenous knowledges, the environment, and climate justice featuring members of the initiative from the Pacific Islands, the (Brazilian) Amazon, and Turtle Island.
The guardians from Turtle Island, Melanie Smokey and Perse(phone) Hooper Lewis, have so far organized five trips with elders. They have recorded ancestral, cultural, and historical stories, traditional knowledge and the Shoshone language (Newe Digwan), particularly around plants and land.
Challenges / Obstacles
For the Guardians, being on land and in physical relationship with each other is really important, and Zoom meetings - however inspiring - don’t feel full enough. It became increasingly clear that we need to have a face-to-face convening of the circle.
The pandemic has disproportionately affected the communities we’re working together for this initiative, and the guardians have actively spoken up about these impacts.
Kelly Foster, wikimedian, public historian and open knowledge advocate. UK coordinator for the Whose (Digital) Archives?
Decolonizing the Internet’s Archives (Whose Digital Archives?)[edit]
Activities
This initiative is building a community of practice that supports and shares approaches to sustainability, development and innovation in digital processes and practice with liberatory-focused independent archives. Focused on co-production and shared learning we will work with and support archives and memory practitioners working both with and for collections.
Over the past year, we have consolidated a committed group of advisors and partners: Dr Hannah Ishmael of Black Cultural Archives, Abira Hussein of Healing Through Archives and Sado Jirde of the Black South West Network. All exciting practitioners making a significant impact in the UK mainstream archive sector and supporting essential liberatory archive collections working with and for Diaspora communities in the UK. We will be expanding the advisory group to achieve more national coverage.
Whose Digital Archives? UK is a relatively new initiative with the first member of the team Kelly Foster, joining Whose Knowledge? as the UK project coordinator in June 2022. Kelly joins us with over 15 years of experience as a public historian, an extensive network in the heritage sector in the UK and a specialism in Black archives and Black Digital Practice. Main activities since Kelly started have been focused on planning and building the programme, and supporting the partners in developing their projects.
Women Win, Black Cultural Archives, Healing Through Archives, Black South West Network. This is a two-pronged initiative: Whose Digital Archives? UK supported by the National Lottery Community Fund and Delcolonsing the Internet’s Archives, which focuses on the Global South and is supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation.
Outcomes / metrics
A new program coordinator, Kelly Foster, joined the team, and started working towards an action plan with our advisors and partners.
More outcomes and metrics would be announced in the upcoming months, since this is a new initiative under development.
Challenges / Obstacles
Maintaining connections and trust with partner organizations.
Building a consolidated identity across the UK and global Whose Digital Archives? initiatives.
Significant impact of Covid-19, the cost of living crisis, Brexit and governmental upheaval of immigration policy has had a significant impact on both the communities our partnership organization work and their capacity. However, despite and certainly because of these challenges our partners have a strong commitment to this project and its vision.
Decolonizing the Internet Structured Data - join the conversation - slides presentation.
In 2022 we engaged in critical conversations in the Wikimedia movement around knowledge justice and the inclusion of the marginalized majority of the world. In this period, we engaged with several processes related to these issues, like the Wikimedia movement’s Universal Code of Conduct, diversity and inclusion in the Board of Trustees, multilinguality in governance spaces, among others.
Wikimedia Summit (September, 2022). We participated online this year. Mariana Fossatti, Kelly Foster and Sunshine Fionah Komusana represented our User Group. Mariana took the opportunity to share about Decolonizing Structured Data in relation to two Movement Strategy Recommendations: Identify Topics for Impact, Coordinate Across Stakeholders and Innovate in Free Knowledge. Kelly and Sunshine raised the topic of reparations and ‘knowledge debt’ in the resources and grant making debate. We added our projects to the Database of Movement Strategy implementation initiatives. Even though we only participated online, the Summit was a time for reconnecting with our peers, friends and allies in the movement, allowing us to identify new opportunities and potential projects related to the MS initiatives we would like to actively support and be part of.
Queering Wikipedia (October, 2022). Mariana Fossatti and Len Appasamy joined online. The event was a good opportunity to connect with the LGBT+ community, know what they’re planning, and share about the work we are doing, especially about our #VisibleWikiWomen campaign. But essentially it was about listening, connecting, and being in solidarity with queer Wikimedians and community organizers.
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