Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/WMAT Multi-Year-Plan Grant 2025-2027

Concerns about program activity

I have concerns over the budget allocation towards program activities run by WMAT and recommend a reduction in the requested funding request in section 18. In section 9.5, they listed Coordinate Me as one of their campaign achievements. But there were multiple concerns raised in the talk page. These concerns were sometimes solved long after the campaign ended, or not fixed at all by ignoring the problem despite €4500 being awarded as prizes in this campaign. This example shows poor fiscal management and lack of governance in WMAT to oversee campaigns, which brings risks to program activities that it manages. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 16:22, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

First of all, I'm sorry that there still seems to be an open question regarding your contributions. I will ask my colleagues about it after the weekend and we will get back to you. Summer, especially August was a difficult time for us, one of the project leads was on long-term sick leave and the other person had to fill in for him, while there was also Wikimania and other bigger projects. However, as Manfred told you, the problem here was the technical tool. It cost us a lot of manual work and extra time to deal with the situation. It's not our tool, we flagged the problems repeatedly and did our best to make a mend. We also mentioned these issues in the mid-term conversations with the grants team.

While I understand your frustration, I find this message here irritating and inappropriate. Us having to deal with and suffer from inadequate tools, has nothing to do with our ability to responsibly handle movement funds and our track record as fiscal sponsor for all kinds of projects and groups in the global Wikiverse speaks for itself. In addition, I must inform you that WMAT pays this project in particular out of it's own pocket as marked in our budget. It's third party funding we raised for open data projects in the movement. So this money would not even come out of this grant. I really hope, that we will find more productive ways to resolve conflicts and frustrations in future, by assuming good faith and providing constructive criticism, which we are always häppy to receive. CDG (WMAT staff) (talk) 18:58, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

@OhanaUnited: On the event's results talk page I left a longer note for you in the thread you started. In short, also for others reading here: The problem was that the Programs & Events Dashboard delivered delayed and, due to the amount of data that had to be evaluated for this contest, in some cases incorrect results. In the meantime the backend of the boards has been updated - Thank you to the team maintaining it! - and there are new numbers for Canada finally (for details please see the talk page there). Best, Manfred Werner (WMAT) (talk) 15:09, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Feedback from the Global Advocacy Team on the Public Policy Advocacy part of the application

Dear Wikimedia Österreich,

Thank you for explaining in the application your plans concerning public policy advocacy.

The Global Advocacy Team reviewed the plans, and found the topical priorities you listed very important. However, they found the number/range of topics outlined to be too wide to be fully achievable, considering that WM Europe after 12 years still works on only a subset of these issues. Another aspect they were missing was the national level implementation of the EU level issues described. They also considered DSA compliance and challenges not falling under the responsibility of individual chapters. They would like to gain more understanding of your plans, can you please provide more details so they can make an informed recommendation for the Regional Funds Committee:

• Of the topics that you mentioned in your application, which three would you prioritise? For example, are there any bills that have already been proposed in government about one of these topics, or allies outside of the Wikimedia movement that are already working on some of the issues that you mentioned like copyright reform or open access legislation?
• How do you plan to engage in the discussion around child safety legislation, and which regulation are they targeting? Which bill in Austria is addressing Child Sexual Abuse Material CSAM that you plan to work on, and what are the versatile solutions you/others are considering in Austria? What opportunities or existing relationships do you plan to leverage? If there are no existing relationships, then how do you plan to build these?
• What government entities and relevant parties in Austria do you plan to engage for Anti-SLAPP work, and how?
• Can you please provide us more information about the Wiki Loves Broadcast campaign plans?

Thank you very much for your clarifications! Kind regards, Agnes - on behalf of the GA team ABruszik-WMF (talk) 18:00, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

The list of European topics in the proposal is the list of topics that WMEU will deal with in the upcoming year (I received this input from Dimi as preparation of a meeting in Brussels in September). WMAT supports WMEU financially, but also substantially with me as the president of the WMEU board. This does not mean however, that all the topics will be equally important or relevant on the national level. As we pointed out, we just had elections and cannot at this point make any detailed plans before we know more about the new coalition and their plans regarding various topics. Together with our partners in Austria, we are currently working on a statement that we would like to send to the various parties, hoping that it can inform the coalition negotiations. The main topics we will focus on in this paper, are EU ID ("protection of minors vs protection of data"), content moderation for online platforms as well as digital media literacy in schools. We support Wiki Loves Broadcast by sending volunteers, including board members to the regular working meetings in Germany. In Austria we had a campaign a few years back, when there was legislation on the future of public broadcasting in the making. Currently, we do not plan to have another local campaign in Austria.

I'm also a bit disappointed, that the WMF advocacy team seems to be ignorant of the fact, that DSA does influence affilliates. For example if we host our own wikis (in our case e.g RegioWiki.at / ÖsterreichWiki.org), public mailing lists etc. On my initiative, WMEU produced an overview on the topic for affiliates and members, listing potential activities where issues could arise, so affilaites can get local legal advice if necessary and make adjustments to their terms of use, moderation policies etc. CDG (WMAT staff) (talk) 19:34, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

On a second thought, I find it quite peculiar that the GA team advises the grants team on this matter, as historically many affiliates pay for their advocacy work with funds outside of the Wikimedia grants (in our case we use our own money, donations that we receive directly) in order not to get into any conflict with the grant agreement. But for full disclosure and to put things into perspective: of the 10.000 EUR for advocacy in our budget, 7,000 EUR are WMEU contributions and only 3,000 EUR are spent on activities in Austria. However, we are good in leveraging impact through networks (netpolitical evening) and partnerships with like-minded organisations. CDG (WMAT staff) (talk) 20:01, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Feedback from the NWE Regional Funds Committee

Dear Wikimedia Österreich Team,

Thank you for your application to the General Support Fund, describing your activities and projects in support of the Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia movement. The Northern and Western European Regional Committee has initially reviewed the proposal, and wishes to offer some initial feedback and questions for your review.

The committee felt that the overall direction of this proposal is productive and positive. In particular, responding to recent developments like AI, and the approach taken in youth engagement through climate change related projects, through developing a youth strategy for DE:WP, and planned support for youth engagement through fundraising looks an efficient approach to take by WM AT. Regarding AI, are you considering outreach to one or more of the design schools in Vienna, whose students could be engaged in thinking about the implications of AI for Wikipedia?

We were glad to see GLAM corporations and partnerships built that have the potential to upscale thematic areas (e.g. The Belvedere Museum, UNESCO). Does the new UNESCO data partnership build on the Living Heritage initiative from last year, or is it something different in 2025?

Given that the Committee only reviews Wikimedia Österreich’s application every 3 years in depth, and you have a complex programming, we are a bit out of understanding of some of your programs’ details. We would like to receive short background information (or an external link to the description) of some of the mentioned plans to improve our understanding:

• Can you please explain briefly the rationale and type of support provided to the VSN and the CEE hub in 2025?
• You mentioned Knowledge equity and queer content under the first strategic theme, can you please help us understand which activities support this aim from the list that follows?
• Can you please tell us a little about your planned approach with the Science Communicators Network?
• Would you please provide a short narrative to us about the Online Event Series GLAM digital? Who are the partners involved, and what is the goal of this series?
• Is the mentioned International Wikidata Contest related to the previous Museum WikiData project?

Lastly, we would also like to gain insight into the current state of the volunteer community: what measures are planned for ensuring good community health, diversity and inclusivity of the community, and their engagement in your activities and planning of the next strategy in 2025?

For the Committee, it made good sense to consolidate WLM's requests into the ongoing fiscal sponsorship and budget of Wikimedia Austria. This structure provides continuity and certainty on a high impact campaign that requires consistent support. We would like to understand two aspects of their planned budget:

• Development work in the Montage tool: In the budget, there is a moderate amount set aside for this much needed work, can you please explain the current barriers the team is facing to significantly improve the tool?
• International meeting: can the team please explain the high cost of this meeting, and if some of these meeting costs could be re-directed to development work above?

In terms of the schedule for our review process, please complete your responses to committee feedback by November 20th, 2024. After this time, the Regional Committee will begin a final review of the proposal to make a formal decision. Thanks again for your work on the proposal and supporting our review.

On behalf of the NWE Regional Funds committee, ABruszik-WMF (talk) 16:07, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

Thänk you for the feedback and thoughful comments on our proposal!

Regarding your questions:

• On the topic of AI: Our main goal is to support our communities on a very practical level, regarding challenges and opportunities through AI in their work. So we are looking into expertise that helps them navigate this complex field, ideally with some understanding of the Wikiverse (i.e. experts from or closely related to the communities). The idea with design students sounds interesting but more conceptual, and might be another iteration in the future.
• Regarding our GLAM cooperation with UNESCO: We are continuing to expand our strategic partnership with the Austrian UNESCO Commission: There will be another photo, audio and video competition on intangible cultural heritage, at least one large community project for creating free content about intangible cultural heritage on site and a project to liberate UNESCO Commission data on one of our government's internet platforms. These are just the confirmed projects for 2025, we are in talks about further projects for the next few years
• Clarification regarding our involvement with the VSN and CEE Hub:
  • We plan to continue to support the VSN both at the project level and in organizational development. We will again offer several skills-sharing activities for the VSN in multiple languages. The VSN’s current internal regulations were written by WMAT (together with WMPL); we therefore see it as our responsibility to actively support the VSN’s potential development into a Hub.
  • The CEE Hub still prefers WMAT to be the fiscal sponsor for the CEE Spring and we agreed to support at least one more edition of the contest. WMAT also provides advice and expertise when needed, in 2024 we supported the SelCom (selection committee) for the next CEE Meeting with our ED on the committee. For next year we plan a close cooperation around the planned youth conference.
• How we adress knowledge equity and queer content: WMAT launched a newcomer project around translate queer content last year and we plan to continue working with the group that formed in the wake of this project: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Queere_Bewegungen_%C3%BCbersetzen

In addition, knowledge equity will inform our youth strategy and climate related projects in the sense, that will look into ways to attract a diverse group of contributors.

• Additional information regarding the Science Communicators Network: It is important to us that ownership and responsibility for the initiative remains primarily with the universities involved. We contribute with our expertise from the Wikimedia perspective: We advise on all planned activities, connect with other Wikimedia affiliates, participate in position papers and other publications and can also offer small-scale workshops if required.
• More information regarding GLAM digital: We are sorry that this information was not prominent enough in the proposal, but we created a Diff post on this topic that should answer the questions and provide a more detailed understanding: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2024/09/08/celebrating-100-guest-speakers-and-their-audience/ In a nutshell, the main goals are to train our community through external experts and to consolidate our strategic partnerships through networking.
• Clarification regarding our Wikidata contest: It is related in the sense that we took the experiences and learnings from the Museum’s Day competition to create this contest. The Museum’s Day contest showed us the huge potential there is for Wikidata competitions that the movement hasn’t tapped into yet. But Coordinate Me was designed from scratch with a different scope.
• Additional information regarding our community work: These are key areas of most of our activities, so we are just giving a broad overview and are happy to answer more detailed questions. In-person events of various types play a central role in our community building, especially in networking new and existing contributors. Events for our volunteer community also include trainings in social and technical skills. We strengthen motivation and identification by awarding prizes and rewards - and by listening to the concerns of our community members. Diversity is promoted through diverse thematic approaches in our activities, which are intended to appeal to different target groups, through several multinational projects in which we bring together communities with different backgrounds, and by specifically appointing women to key positions in the organisation. Inclusivity is based on a strong and proven set of rules in our codes of conduct. In addition, our various reimbursements in community support have the effect of balancing social differences and thus enabling participation. Regarding participation in our strategy processes, we involve community members in our expert groups, hold a hybrid event called PlanningLab once a year and enable anonymous participation in our planning through our annual community survey. We expect that the future process we started with WMDE will result in further community related initiatives in the upcoming three years, with the aim of strengthen the resilience of DE:WP in the face of increasing external challenges.

CDG (WMAT staff) (talk) 21:22, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

Concerning the questions in regard to WLM international:

• Development of tools: There is a number of tools that have been developed as part of the WLM international scaling, the Montage jury tool being the most prominent one. Montage in particular is being used in various other photo competitions, which often leads to requests to expand its functionality. Like many tools in our ecosystem, it was developed by a small group of volunteers. The front end was written in a now-outdated framework, acquired technical debt and the original core of volunteer developers retired or became less available. It became too hard to find volunteers to help keep the tool up to standards, let alone build out requested features and improvements.

We decided and were funded to hire a contractor to bring Montage back to a healthy starting point. After it took longer than planned to set up the process (find a developer, agree on the specifications, formulate the contract) work started and the update of the Python back-end to 3.0 happened last April. The front-end is being updated at the moment to reflect some of the previous back-end changes. We are now in the first and early stages of UX interface testings. There is more functionality available in the backend and possible in general; for this we will attract a front-end dev with a more extended skill set. So while we made good progress on rewriting the front end to an more current framework that more volunteers are comfortable with, we want to take some more steps.

Going forward, there is still a long list of bugs, requested improvements and new functionality; more than the small group of volunteers can handle - and a contractor will be valuable to really bring the tool forward, and make it easier to add new functionality. Examples include giving jurors the option to 'favorite' images, improving the ranking interface and creating export/public result pages. When more volunteer development capacity becomes available, there are a few other tools in our ecosystem, that may benefit from this paid development capacity.

• In-person team meeting: The requested budget covers three years and encompasses two meetings, in 2025 and 2027. Our last in-person team meeting (9 participants) took place in 2023. The volunteers involved in the current international team, as well as potential experts and guests we would invite to attend to broaden the input at the in-person meeting come from different regions all over the world. While it is comparatively easy and economical for those of us living in Europe to travel to Vienna (most likely the city where we will meet), the costs are often high when travelling from other continents as about half of our team does. For example the costs for flights for participants from sub-Saharan Africa alone may amount to approximately EUR 1,500.
  The budget we had requested for the 2023 meeting is not a representative guestimate for the expected costs of these two next in-person meetings, since it was not yet adjusted for the world wide inflation that also hit the travel and tourism businesses. The actual amount spent on the meeting back in 2023 was just over EUR 14,000 which served as a basis for our current request. It is our goal to organise one in-person meeting every third year, and as we are currently still working to further align the timing of the processes within the international team with those of Wikimedia Austria, including the shift in the grant application cycle, we think an extra in-person meeting between 2023 and 2027 is justified.
  Funds not spent for the meetings will be reallocated, if needed and in accordance with the grants committee, to the technical development, or returned.

Manfred Werner (WMAT) (talk) 16:52, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

Round 1 - 2025 decision

Congratulations! The Northern and Western Europe Regional Funds Committee has recommended your proposal for funding!

The Wikimedia Foundation has approved the committee's recommendation to partially fund your proposal for 1,273,998.00 EUR for the period of 1st January 2025 - 31st December 2027.

Comments regarding this decision:
The funding decision of the Committee is to fund WM Österreich in an annual amount of 368,000.00 EUR for three years, Y2 and Y3 additional inflation compensation remaining subject to regional budget information in FY26 and FY27. We hope this can increase WM AT’s much needed capacity with an additional 0.5 FTE. The total funding amount therefore for 2025-27 is 1,104,000.00 EUR for the chapter.

Additionally, the Committee decided to award the Wiki Loves Monument campaign team with a total amount of 170,000 EUR, and annual budget of 56,667 EUR.

The Committee felt that WM Österreich’s plan is well aligned with the uttermost priorities of the movement, of the wider region and of Austria and its editing communities. It particularly valued the maintained community support, venturing into new and relevant fields just as youth engagement, climate change and AI, while continuing to contribute to large scale campaigns (e.g. WikiData) and maintaining important relationships such as the one with UNESCO. It is particularly appreciated that efforts are made to maintain staff health. Equally, the close cooperation with WM Deutschland in aligning and collaborating to ensure timely responses to rapidly evolving threats to the sustainability and the future of the movement and of the DE:WP was found to benefit the communities beyond the German speaking world. We thank the chapter for the support that it provides in other regions and to the SVN. We very much look forward to the new strategy and learning about the work of the chapter during the mid-term conversation.

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement.
2. If you have questions, you can contact the Regional Program Officer for the Northern and Western Europe Region.

Posted on behalf of the Northern and Western Europe (NWE) Funding Committee, ABruszik-WMF (talk) 17:02, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Hi @ABruszik-WMF,

Thank you so much for this answer, and thank you grants committee for your efforts!

I understand there were a few more questions the regional grants commmittee had about our two in-person meetings, and I'd like to explain our ideas behind it.

The current WLM-i (core) team is a small group of volunteers, who rely on the support of an also small group of (mainly former WLM-i) supporting team members. Because of the vulnerability a small group like this entails we have previously already done work to grow the volunteer base, without much succes. We tried to find more people through calls for applicants on Commons, the mailing list and in our TG Group, and by presence and presentations at conferences and events around the world when and where we could, not in the least at the various Wikimedia and Wikimania hackathons. As your committee observed correctly, we have technical tools that have more than just the WLM participants and WLM organizers relying on them.

In 2023 we requested WMF support in organizing our meeting around the same time in Athens as the WM Hack was happening, but this wasn't possible. For 2025, we have again reached out to the organizers behind the Wikimedia hackathon event, because again we'd like to try to meet in Istanbul around the same time as the hackathon will happen. We think there are several benefits by concentrating our meeting alongside an event like the WM-hack, most important: we have several people in, and liaised to, our team that would like to attend the technical event. By combining the travel, they can save money because it's only one flight, it's only one visa application process they have to go through, and they save vacation days because they will have less travel days and spend less time away from home. At the hackathon, they can help bridge between the needs of our team, our national organizers, our participants and the technical participants. They can help explain the needs behind technical asks we have. And of course if we are around and can attend, we will make sure to prepare a beautiful technical wish list, preferably already broken down in hackathon-sized chunks!

The other way around, it works the same way. The WLM-i team has the good habit of inviting two or three guests to our international meeting. These guests are invited for instance to broaden our own horizon, to help fill a lacunae in knowledge/insights/understanding we may have, or to help find new approaches for technical challenges. In 2023 for instance, our meeting was attended by technical staff from affiliates from Brazil, Sweden, and from our host in Vienna; Wikimedia Austria.

I think this is the same line of thinking the committee has as well, but please let me know if there are any more questions, ideas, or concerns from your side.
Have a great festive holiday! Ciell (talk) 16:08, 15 December 2024 (UTC)