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Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Whose Knowledge? 2022-2023

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Whose Knowledge? 2022-2023
As a feminist, anti-colonial organization, we seek a dramatic transformation in the nature and forms of knowledge that are accepted and shared on Wikipedia and the internet at large, as well as in the backgrounds and identities of knowledge creators and curators online. This proposal seeks to strengthen the programmatic work we have been developing for the last five years in which we support the leadership of marginalized communities to share their own stories and knowledges online.
start date1-Jan-2022
end date31-Dec-2023
budget (local currency)USD
amount requested (USD)168878 USD
grant typeWikimedia Affiliate (chapter, thematic org., or user group)
applicant and people related to proposalAdele Godoy Vrana: User: Aadele Anasuya Sengupta: User: Anasuyas
organization (if applicable)Whose Knowledge?


This is an automatically generated page based on the applicant's application on the Wikimedia Foundation's Grantee Portal on Fluxx.

Overview

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What is the main objective of your proposal?

As a feminist, anti-colonial organization, we seek a dramatic transformation in the nature and forms of knowledge that are accepted and shared on Wikipedia and the internet at large, as well as in the backgrounds and identities of knowledge creators and curators online.
This proposal seeks to strengthen the programmatic work we have been developing for the last five years in which we support the leadership of marginalized communities to share their own stories and knowledges online.

What are the main challenges you are trying to solve and your proposed solution?

Historical and current structures of power and privilege continue to define what is considered “received” or “accepted” knowledge, who creates it, and how. Institutions and individuals embedded in systems of capitalism, colonization, patriarchy, racism, homophobia, and beyond have actively undermined, destroyed, or appropriated the knowledges of much of the world’s populations. This has led to severe knowledge (or “epistemic”) injustices against marginalized communities.
Take Wikipedia for example, the “world’s” encyclopedia, and the foremost source of free public knowledge online: only 20% of the world (primarily white male editors from North America and Europe) edits 80% of Wikipedia currently, and only 1 in 10 of the editors is female. The result is that there are more articles written about Antarctica than about most countries in Africa.
These inequities extend to visual knowledge on Wikipedia. Less than ¼ of Wikipedia biographies represent women. Many biographies of notable women don’t exist or are incomplete. And, when women’s faces are missing from Wikipedia, that invisibility spreads. Wikipedia it is in the top 20 most visited sites in the world, so gaps in Wikipedia have a big impact on the broader internet.
To address these challenges, we are focusing on these 3 main programs for the next 2 years:
Decolonizing Wikipedia
In partnership with Wikimedians, feminist and women’s organizations and GLAM institutions from around the world, we organize #VisibleWikiWomen, an annual campaign to add more diverse and quality images of women to Commons and Wikipedia. Over the last three years, it has brought online 15000 images of diverse women on Commons and Wikipedia, and has become widely recognized for its impact on Wikipedia’s gender gap.
Decolonizing the Internet's Archives
For the next two years, we will focus on expanding our Decolonizing the Internet efforts around digital archives by creating a safe and productive space in which community-based and institutional archivists can come together to share their experiences and develop critical decolonizing practices for archives currently and into the future.
State of the Internet's Languages
As we consider language to be a proxy for knowledge, we’ve partnered with researchers at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and Oxford Internet Institute (OII) to develop an openly-licensed multilingual and multiformat “State of the Internet’s Languages” (STIL) Report to be published in 2022.

In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select a maximum of three options that most apply.

Increase the Sustainability of Our Movement, Provide for Safety and Inclusion, Ensure Equity in Decision-making, Invest in Skills and Leadership Development, Identify Topics for Impact, Innovate in Free Knowledge

Where will this proposal be implemented?

International (more than one country across continents or regions)

Do you want to apply for multi-year funding?

Yes

Project Proposal

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Describe your main strategies to achieve the objective and the activities you will be developing as part of these strategies.

Decolonizing Wikipedia

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Key strategies for this program:

  • Bring new, high-quality images of women to Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia
  • Build partnerships and grow the network of non-Wikimedia partners
  • Increase team’s and local organizers’s capacity

Activities:

  • Create workflows and resources for our campaign kit that especially support uploaders who are new to Wikimedia
  • Use a wide variety of communication channels to promote the campaign and encourage participants
  • Organize and host #VWW edit-a-thons and workshops
  • Hire a Global South-based Decolonizing Wikipedia Coordinator to manage and facilitate all the relevant activities for this program


Decolonizing the Internet's Archives

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Key strategies for this program:

  • Create connections between institutional and community archives
  • Produce new community-led resources

Activities:

  • Organize and host a virtual convening for a Knowledge Sprint to Decolonize Archives
  • Create an Advisory group of community archivists and institutional archivists
  • Hire a DTI Archives program coordinator to manage and facilitate all the relevant activities for this program


State of the Internet's Languages

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Key strategies for this program:

  • Disseminate the “State of the Internet’s Languages” report as an awareness-raising tool, to help build an agenda for action, and to establish a baseline for assessing future actions
  • Build and expand public and institutional knowledge around language as a key proxy for knowledge, with significant mentions in mainstream media, knowledge and technology spaces
  • Expand community-led language initiatives: pilot up community-led language projects to test new approaches to language-related content and tech creation, curation and preservation

Activities:

  • Publish and amplify the State of the Internet’s Languages report through 2022 and track the progress of the multilingual internet, by doing new research in 2023.
  • Create an Advisory group for Languages. We will rely on the expertise and experience of our language advisors as we explore and test new language-based approaches and tools that will come out of our community pilots
  • Hire a Languages Coordinator to manage and facilitate all the relevant activities for this program


What is your organization or group's mission?

We are a global multilingual campaign to center the knowledge of marginalized communities (the minoritized majority of the world) on the internet. With our communities, we are re-imagining and re-designing the internet to be for and from us all, through knowledge justice as a frame, and decolonising as a practice.

Indicate if it is a local, international, or regional proposal and if it involves several countries?

International

Please state if you will be carrying out any of these activities within your programs? Select all that apply.

Organizing Meet-up online, Workshops, Edit-A-Thons, Train-the-Trainer, Photo/Media campaign

Are you running any in-person events or activities?

Yes.

Please state if your proposal aims to work to bridge any of the identified content knowledge gaps?

Content Gender gap, Geography, Language, Socioeconomic Status, Sexual Orientation, Cultural background, ethnicity, religion, racial

Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Select all categories that apply.

Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation, Geographic, Ethnic/racial/religious or cultural background, Disabilities, Linguistic / Language, Socioeconomic status, Digital Access

Please state if your proposal includes any of these areas or thematic focus.

Culture, heritage or GLAM, Advocacy, Human Rights, Open Technology, Diversity

Please tell us more about your target participants.

Our target participants are people from the marginalized majority of the world including women, people of color, LGBTQI communities, Indigenous peoples and Global South communities, as we work together with them to center and amplify their knowledges online.
Our practices are as important as our frames and this translates into intentional, nuanced and powerful activities that center these marginalized communities.
For instance we design events where these communities are first in the room. About 80% of participants in our events are female identifying, in or from the Global South, and Indigenous or people of color.
We create welcoming spaces where these communities feel safe, heard and affirmed. We practice our feminist principles of love, respect and solidarity, by which we support attendees to be fully present in the room in heart, mind and body, while respecting themselves and each other, and being aware of our own privileges.
We seek to build community and create connections as we engage with unlikely allies, within and outside our movement. When we co-host and convene these critical spaces for conversation and reflections, we make sure to create channels for participants to keep having conversations, sharing resources and learning experiences via multiple channels (such as mailing lists, groups in a messaging app, etc).
Our website, podcast and newsletter are also open for guest publications and community features, so members of our communities can share their own work, experiences and reflections more widely.

Do you have plans to work with other Wikimedia communities, groups or affiliates in your country, or in other countries, to implement this proposal?

Yes

Please tell us about these connections online and offline and how you have let Wikimedia communities know about this proposal.

From its founding in 2016 as a global campaign and Wikimedia user group, Whose Knowledge? has been deeply involved in supporting new and experienced Wikimedia communities to challenge our existing knowledge and visual gaps.
We have partnered with a number of Wikimedia organizations and user groups, including through our #VisibleWikiWomen campaigns, served as an equity consultant to working groups in the Wikimedia 2018-20 strategy process, supported the Wikimania 2018 team to develop an equity-focused theme and most recently partnered with Wiki Movemento Brazil and Wikimedia Germany to co-host the Decolonizing The Internet’s Structured Data convening as a pre-conference event of WikidataCon 2021.
Due to limited team capacity, we were unable to build a participatory review process around this proposal as we normally strive to do. That said, we intend to share this proposal and gather feedback from our Board and advisors concurrently with the regional committee review.

Will you be working with other external, non-Wikimedian partners to implement this proposal? Please describe these partnerships.

Yes.
Since 2018 we have partnered with culture and memory institutions, Wikipedia editors, user groups, chapters, and women’s & feminist organizations, including AWID and Word Pulse, to bring more women’s images to Wikipedia.
We will also be focusing on creating and expanding our current network of archivists and people’s archives as part of our Decolonizing the Internet’s Archives, as well as our networks of organizations and individuals who are already working on multilinguality, and would like to amplify the findings and reflections of the State of Internet’s Languages report.
Besides our outreach and awareness work, over the past years we’ve worked to support marginalized communities in multiple ways, including by co-creating Numun Fund, the first dedicated fund for feminist technology in and for the Global South. The fund seeks to seed technological infrastructures for feminist activism, organizations, and movements led by women, non-binary and trans people.

How do you hope to sustain or expand the work carried out in this proposal after the grant?

  • Our shared frames and practices: All our transformative outcomes for knowledge justice on a decolonized internet are based on changing people’s worldviews and practices around knowledge and scholarship. Since decolonization for us is critically about changing the practices of power, we care less for specific attribution of our work, and far more about how useful and effective our work is in practical terms, in different spaces. This means that the work continues far beyond us, in ways that are often unanticipated and powerful.
  • Our learning resources: At the core of our long term sustainability strategy, is the resilience of the learning products and resources created through the support of the Foundation. We will continue to maintain our website with our openly licensed resources and media section, in multiple languages, for the ease of anyone wishing to adapt and use these.
  • Our networks and connections: the relationships of trust and collaboration we have built and are continuing to build ensure that our work and learnings are shared across different institutions, constituencies, and sectors.
  • Our radical, creative forms of communication: we see our communications work at the heart of what we do, as it allows us to share our decolonizing frames beyond our existing communities and amplify the voices, faces, stories, and knowledges of marginalized communities by speaking with and alongside them rather than “for” them.

Have you received grants from the Wikimedia Foundation before?

Applied previously and did receive a grant

Have you received grants from any non-wiki organization before?

Yes

Do you have the team that is needed to implement this proposal?

Team members:
  • Co-Director (Anasuya Sengupta) User: Anasuyas
  • Co-Director (Adele Mara Godoy Vrana) User: Aadele
  • Communications Co-Lead (Claudia Pozo) User: Tinaral
  • Communications Co-Lead (Priscila Bellini) User: Pribellini
  • Communications Co-Lead (Vacant)
  • Operations Lead (Ashima Bhardwaj) User: AshWK
  • Fundraising Lead (Vacant)
  • Decolonizing Wikipedia Coordinator (Mariana Fossatti) User: Señoritaleona
  • VWW Coordinator (Vacant)
  • Decolonizing Digital Archives Coordinator (Vacant)
  • State of the Internet's Languages Coordinator (Vacant)
  • Strategy Consultant (Mandy Van Deven)
  • Organizational Wellness Consultant (Mandisa Mbaligontsi)
Board Members:
  • Amanda Menking (Feminist scholar at the University of Washington Information School, USA) - Secretary
  • Camille Emefa Acey (Mother, wife, tech worker, public speaker, podcaster, and an activist/organizer. Founding member of the Collective for Liberation, Ecology, and Technology) - Chair
  • Dumisani Ndubane (Convenor of first WikiIndaba for African Wikimedians, South Africa) - Director
  • Garfield Byrd (Chief Financial Officer, Kipp Foundation, USA) - Treasurer
  • Karien Bezuidenhout (Director, Shuttleworth Foundation, South Africa) - Director
  • Oona Castro (Digital rights activist and journalist, Brazil) - Director
Advisors:
  • Jac SM Kee (Manager, Women’s Rights Program, Association of Progressive Communications, Malaysia)
  • María Sefidari (Professor of Digital Communications, Culture and Citizenship, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, Spain)
  • Mark Graham (Senior Research Fellow and Associate Professor, Oxford Internet Institute, UK)
  • Nadine Moawad (APC EROTICS Coordinator, Nasawiya, Lebanon)
  • Sucheta Ghoshal (Open source web developer and human-centered computing researcher at Georgia Tech, USA)
  • Wendy Hanamura (Director of Partnerships, The Internet Archive, USA)


Please state if your organization or group has a Strategic Plan that can help us further understand your proposal. You can also upload it here. (optional)

Upload Strategic Plan
Whose Knowledge Prospectus 2021-23

Learning, Sharing, and Evaluation

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What do you hope to learn from your work in this fund proposal?

Our key learning questions are:

1. How do we support marginalized communities to feel safe, secure, and supported in bringing their knowledges onto Wikimedia projects and becoming contributors?

2. How do we work to build greater allyship and understanding within the current Wikimedia communities for the challenges that marginalized communities face in becoming contributors?

3. What are the most useful ways in which our experiences can help shift and transform Wikimedia practices so that they can be grounded in knowledge justice (and multiple epistemologies)?

Core Metrics

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Enter a description of the metric and a number in the target field. If the metric does not apply to you, enter N/A for not applicable.

Core Metrics Summary
Core metrics Description Target
Number of participants This metric includes users who participated in our campaign by joining online or in-person workshops with Whose Knowledge? and partner organizations, from feminist networks to GLAM institutions.

The total for 2022 is 350 participants and for 2023 is 450 participants.

800
Number of editors Newly registered editors who have created their accounts during/as a result of workshops organized/co-organized by Whose Knowledge?. The number will be later complemented with the metric for returning members, as a means to identify who the contributors are, who keep coming back to Wikipedia and what strategies have worked to retain them.

The total for 2022 is 75 editors and the total for 2023 is 100 editors.

175
Number of organizers The total for 2022 is 15 organizers and the total for 2023 is 20 organizers. 35
Wikimedia Commons *5000 images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and at least 150 edits to Wikimedia projects by 2022
  • 7500 images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and at least 200 edits to Wikimedia projects by 2023
  • ⅓ of the images uploaded featuring women from/in the Global South
 12500

If for some reason your proposal will not measure these core metrics please provide an explanation.


Additional Metrics

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Enter a description of the metric and a number in the target field. If the metric does not apply to you, enter N/A for not applicable.

Additional Metrics Description Target
Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities
Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities
Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability Strategic partnerships with organizations that work with Wikimedia projects, as well as community-centered initiatives and GLAM institutions in the Global South.

The total number will be 40 strategic partnerships in 2022 and 60 partnerships in 2023.

100
Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors Post-event forms collected from all activities listed in this application (10 events/year in 2022, 15 events/year in 2023)

Participants’ feedback from pre- and post-event forms and surveys, and other ways of involvement, including quotes and interviews to be featured in reports and blog posts.

35
Diversity of participants brought in by grantees Target: at least ⅓ of participants are in/from the Global South, ½ identify as women or non-binary, are indigenous/black/people of colors in origin.

Number of participants who are in/from the Global South, identify as women or non-binary persons, and are indigenous/black/people of color(s) in origin. Information will be collected as part of registry forms.

Number of people reached through social media publications *6000 followers on Twitter by 2022, and 7000 followers by 2023;
  • 300,000 impressions on Twitter in the months of #VisibleWikiWomen campaign in 2022;
  • 400,000 impressions on Twitter in the months of #VisibleWikiWomen campaign in 2023;
  • 300 mentions on Twitter in the months of the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign in 2022;
  • 400 mentions on Twitter in the months of the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign in 2023
 7000
Number of activities developed Number of workshops and edit-a-thons organized in partnership with organizations in the Global South, GLAM institutions, and feminist networks.

10 #VisibleWikiWomen events organized by 2022 15 #VisibleWikiWomen events organized by 2023

15
Number of volunteer hours

What other information will you be collecting to learn about the impacts of your activities? (optional)

Number of different Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects that we’ll contribute to, and the nature of these contributions

What tools would you use to measure each metric selected?

GLAMorous

Events metrics Social media analytics

How do you hope to share these results so that others can learn from them?

Create a training workshop to show others what we learned, Share results on social media, Share results with our communities, Develop learning material for other users, Share it on Meta-Wiki

Financial Proposal

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What is the amount you are requesting from WMF? Please provide this amount in your local currency. If you are thinking about a multi-year fund, please provide the amount for the first year.

USD

What is this amount in US Currency (to the best of your knowledge)?

168878 USD

Please share your budget for this proposal.

Whose Knowledge? 2022 Budget
Budget breakdown document

By submitting your proposal/funding request you agree that you are in agreement with the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and the Universal Code of Conduct.

I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friend Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.

Yes

Attachments

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