Grants talk:Conference/GLAM-WIKI 2018

Conference grant committee input

The grants committee has reviewed the proposal for the GLAM Wiki 2018 Conference, and supports funding for the event. Below are comments and questions from the community relating to the program and participation:

• The committee suggests further prioritization of the priorities listed in the proposal, so that the organizers and the community are able to achieve its most important goals during and after the event. This can be done a few months before the event, after the organizers have gathered additional input from the GLAM community.
• One suggestion is to identify goals for the GLAM community that can be supported by this event.
• Prior to the event, the committee would like to see the GLAM community focus on completing (and updating) documentation on tracking tools and other important learning patterns used by GLAM project organizers.
• The committee feels confident that the organizers will include the international community in planning the program, however, they think it is important that more people respond to the survey. More responses to the survey should also help the GLAM community identify what kinds of goals and projects it should be focusing on before the conference. One option is to send the survey out to a much larger group of people, and follow up with people who have not completed it. Alternately, questions from the survey could be included in the application for the conference, so that all participants give their input about the program and community priorities.
• How will diversity will be reached? GLAM seems to be a very strong European topic. How Africa, Latin America or Asia people will be represented?
• It would be good to see goals that GLAM programs and conference participants can focus on after the event, and identify participants who will be responsible for following up on those projects and tracking progress toward those goals.

Overall, it is important for conference organizers, WMF GLAM staff and leaders in the GLAM community to gather more input from communities about what to focus on at the conference, and work that should be done in the months leading up to the event. Some projects, such as documentation and clarifying the GLAM 'brand', should be started before the conference. We look forward to seeing the way the goals for this conference evolve as organizers gather more input. Please let us know if there are ways the conference grant committee could support you over the next year. --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 21:52, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

WMIL reply

First, we’d like to thank the grants committee and everyone else for approving our grant request and for your thoughtful and helpful comments. We apologize for the slow response to this message. It certainly is no indication to how excited we are about hosting the GLAM Wiki 2018 Conference. Below are our responses to the above issues:

• Prioritization of goals: we fully agree that the goals for the conference as indicated by the community should be further prioritised. Indeed, we view this prioritization as a crucial part of the process in which the program committee and the organizing committee translate the goals into concrete plans and activities for the conference and after it.
• Tools documentation: while we would also like the GLAM community to develop complete and up-to-date documentation on tracking tools used by GLAM project organizers, we do not view this as a strong prerequisite that must be fulfilled before the conference, nor as a goal within the scope of organizing the conference.
• Community input: the community survey was sent to a large group of people involved in GLAM – volunteers, professionals and GLAM coordinators – through mailing lists that reached hundreds of people, and advertised through several dedicated Facebook groups. Furthermore, in identifying the main topics for the conference we consulted community members as well as WMF GLAM staff, and were encouraged by the fact that their answers seemed to converge on similar topics. Therefore we are quite confident that the topics that came up in the community engagement survey are indeed representative, despite the small sample. Moreover, according to our timeline leading up to the conference, application to the conference will only begin after we have a finalized the program. We are not sure that including questions from the survey in the application for the conference is a feasible plan with regards to being able to change the conference program accordingly.
• Diversity: We are fully committed to promote diversity as part of the impact of WIKI GLAM 2018. Currently we are in contact with Anasuya Sengupta and Anna Torres (WMAR) who have already given us several suggestions for speakers that would increase diversity and be highly relevant for Global South participants. We also intend to have a Global South representative in the conference program committee.

We wish all of you a happy new year. We will of course regularly update you on our progress and any developments. Keren - WMIL (talk) 12:18, 1 January 2018 (UTC)

Scholarship update and additional budget request

We are very excited to have received more than 500 (!) scholarships application. Reviewing these was quite a challenge and a major effort was required to finalize the 45 scholars list.

Having said that, we were quite disappointed to discover that the original budget for scholarships would not allow us to include as many scholars from emerging communities as we believe there should be. We would therefore like to request an addition 10K$ which will allow us to invite more scholars from emerging communities to the GLAM conference, thereby supporting GLAM work within these communities in accordance with Wikimedia's strategic direction. Keren - WMIL (talk) 14:51, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

Hello, Keren - WMIL! This request for an increase of $10K toward supporting scholarships for participants from emerging communities is approved. The new total amount approved for this grant will be $81,543. Please note that it takes some time to execute an amendment to finalize this approval. We will be in touch to provide more details about how and when this will happen.

Thank you for your work in reviewing these applications. We realize the scholarships process was complex and that you encountered some unexpected costs. In general, it is difficult to make amendments to grants of this size, so let's work to avoid that in the future if we can, perhaps by increasing the amounts we are budgeting for scholarships in cases where we think travel for participants from emerging communities and determining in advance that this is a priority. We understand that was not possible in this case, and so we agree with your decision to make this request. I am just noting this here so that others can consider this when planning future events.

Best, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 22:27, 21 August 2018 (UTC)