Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia France-Funding request 2023-2026
Feedback from the Northern and Western Europe (NWE) Regional Funding Committee on your proposal
editHello Rémy Gerbet and Wikimedia France,
Thank you for taking the time to submit your General Support Fund proposal in the Northern and Western Europe region again this year. We are pleased to have reviewed your application and have the following comments and questions:
- We first wanted to express appreciation for how you have developed good support for other Francophone communities around the world. Your innovations around this have been interesting and your micro lending program appears to be doing well.
- You show clarity around Knowledge Equity and your environment with clear directions about your intentions. It’s especially obvious around the area of the application dealing with retention, growth and diversity of newcomers. We appreciate creative thinking around how to engage a wider community with the movement.
- It's interesting to see the proposals from Wikimedia France move further towards information literacy and your role in supporting education in France. It's a wider conceptualisation of the work of the movement and it will be really interesting to see how this continues. The project with Guyana Creole seems to have potential, could be interesting to expand to other French based creoles. Do you have plans to cooperate with other French-based creole speaking communities, besides the Guyana University project?
Areas where we would like a bit more information were:
- Has there been any report or metrics on the work done around harassment, was there any obvious indication of a positive effect of the solutions such as the phone line and work with the police?
- We would like to hear more detail around the plans to work with the ministry of science, and equally, more information on the GLAM deliverables planned would be useful.
- And while the focus and work on the French language is explicit, we would like to hear more about plans to work with languages other than French spoken in France, which we found less evident in the proposal. How do you plan to provide support for the various non French language communities within France? Which languages do Lingua Libre target?
- There is a comment in the proposal which we would like Wikimedia France to expand on - "a gradual evolution of Wikimedia France towards a sort of federation of association capable of carrying the voice of the free knowledge movement in France by also supporting the emergence of new strong organizations." How do you see the future of the organisation being affected by this?
- Finally while the higher level risks are identified, it would be good to hear slightly more detail on how to mitigate concern about the reputational risk mentioned.
Thank you and we look forward to hearing from you. On behalf of the NWE Regional Committee,
Answers to the Northern and Western Europe (NWE) Regional Funding Committee
editHello @Antiqueight,
Thank you for your questions and I am delighted to have the opportunity to provide additional information.
Do you have plans to cooperate with other French-based creole speaking communities, besides the Guyana University project?
Yes indeed, we have already identified three relevant territories because we already have Wikimedians on site who wish to develop new actions. These are the departments of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Réunion. These volunteers have already declared themselves ready to support this type of action locally. This will surely not take place before the end of 2024. We want to be sure that the dynamic is clearly set in motion in Guyana before concentrating our forces on other territories. The University of Guyana is in the process of increasing its skills, the contribution to Wikimedia projects is becoming an annualized educational path and we are starting to build partnerships with other local actors such as the Archives of Guyana and speaker associations. But we have to face a difficulty of lack of digital skills. This means that before contributing to Wikipedia we often have to train participants in simple internet usage. It is on these aspects that the project takes the most time. We need to solidify what has already been done. It is in this context that we are considering a collaboration with Wiki Movimento Brasil (Wikimedia Brazil) to organize a joint action around the languages and cultures of Amazonia. .
Has there been any report or metrics on the work done around harassment, was there any obvious indication of a positive effect of the solutions such as the phone line and work with the police?
We do have information on the use of the psychological support line, which is used 2 to 3 times a month on average for problems, above all voluntary burn-out. Concerning the legal support, we have thanks from the volunteers to whom we provided the support of the lawyer of the association but once the contact is made, the association has no more information since it is then a question of the special relationship between the lawyer and his or her client. Last year, 2 Wikimedian volunteers benefited from this support. As for the partnership with the French Police, we had really great difficulties in setting up this partnership because of the lack of availability of our contact to explain to us concretely the expectations and analyze the tools to which we would have access. We should finally sign the agreement this month of May 2023. From there, 4 people within WMFr (3 employees and 1 administrator) will have access to a dedicated platform to report harassment problems more quickly to the police but also criminal content detected by the community. The Pharos agents also offered to train certain administrators of the community as well as the employees concerned by the project. We hope to see results by next year. But, and I think you will agree, we only act when the damage is done. It is also important to act upstream. This is why, even if we already have a fairly extensive volunteer training program, we are in the process of extending it to the online community, in particular so that the community acquires good practices in terms of conflict management. Here again the result will be seen in the long term. In particular, we will discuss it on April 22, 2023 during the AdminConf that we are organizing with several patrollers and administrators of Wikipedia Fr.
We would like to hear more detail around the plans to work with the ministry of science, and equally, more information on the GLAM deliverables planned would be useful.
In 2021, the French government published two important plans: - The second national plan for open science - France's commitments within the framework of Open Governments Partnerships
In these two documents, Wikimedia France is integrated as a partner of the ministry in favor of the development of open science. This program, which has a budget of approximately €240,000 over at least 2 years, includes: - The establishment of 3 Wikimedian residences in regional training units (these are structures in charge of offering training to teacher-researchers and doctoral students). - The recruitment of a project coordinator within Wikimedia France financed by the Ministry - The establishment of a national committee for open science bringing together Wikimedia, the Ministry and researchers - The development of national campaigns and a national training program in favor of open science and particularly the contribution to Wikimedia projects.
In conjunction with the ministry, we managed to launch the three residences in Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse in February 2023. We are currently in the phase of recruiting the person in charge of coordination.
The three Wikimedians have inaugurated a monthly WikiL@b newsletter in charge of informing researchers about Wikimedia projects, organize an online café every two weeks to answer questions from teachers and researchers and develop training at the regional level. .
The program is planned to last with surely three or even four other residences in other establishments next year. certain structures such as the CNRS have already been mentioned. We are still in the implementation phase, the evaluation will surely take place at the end of 2023. The objective is to achieve a massive accumulation of Wikimedia projects and the use of free licenses in the world of research in a few years.
Concerning the GLAMs and in particular the Culture Libre label, the first winners will be announced this Tuesday, April 25 during the new edition of the Culture and Digital Days. 16 institutions will be labeled but only two in gold (the highest level of certification). I intend to share during Wikimania 2023, our first evaluation grid for this first edition and make an initial assessment of this process. Some institutions were simply rejected. We will do a post on diff I think. Some advisers from the Ministry of Culture are expected to participate in the label award ceremony.
The evaluation and follow-up of applications takes time, but makes it possible to ensure the sincerity of the institution's approach. The next step will be to involve some volunteers as godfathers or godmothers of labeled institutions to help them seek another level of label and thus continue to progress in their approach to openness and free sharing of knowledge.
And while the focus and work on the French language is explicit, we would like to hear more about plans to work with languages other than French spoken in France, which we found less evident in the proposal. How do you plan to provide support for the various non French language communities within France? Which languages do Lingua Libre target?
Lingua Libre is directly linked to WikiData. It is therefore possible to register all the languages that are listed on Wikidata. Today, 720 have been imported into Lingua Libre and approximately 180 have at least 1 word recorded. Lingua libre also allows contribution in sign language and via an extension in a web browser "SignIt" Lingua Libre makes it easier for people who are deaf or hard of hearing to read. With this extension, by highlighting a problem word, a person can see a video showing the word in question in the sign language of their choice. We recently conducted a workshop at the University of Picardy to encourage contribution in Picard on Lingua libre. The platform now registers 25 contributors in Picard on Lingua Libre. Today we have 1,151 people registered on the platform and more than 800,000 registrations. However, as I had already mentioned, this project is becoming very big for us and we are facing significant technical issues. We should pass the million during the year. However, we have reduced our communication on the tool because there are some bugs that we need to fix. For example, a click noise in some recordings that renders them unusable. The volunteer community is very active but we need dedicated employee time and especially people with web development skills to fix identified bugs. We have called on sponsorship and are hosting a project volunteer for a few months on an internship. In addition to this, we organize each year in partnership with INALCO and Wikimedia Morocco, the Contribuling event around the issue of digital technology and minority languages. Lingua Libre is a tool reused by scientific research (A researcher studied certain variants of Polish using Lingua libre recordings and published a scientific paper) and by projects such as Mozilla Voice or the French-speaking dictionary. However, we try to limit the actions the time to solve certain technical problems. We still maintain very good links with the Occitan-speaking world, for example, and thanks to the University of Toulouse, we are in the process of resuming the project in sign language. But it is true that Lingua Libre has gone far beyond the borders of France. We see in the statistics of the project many contributions from the Indian subcontinent. If I had to summarize all this, we will in the next 6 months try to solve the biggest technical problems before relaunching contribution campaigns and actions towards the communities. In the meantime, the project continues to live and develop thanks to its community.
There is a comment in the proposal which we would like Wikimedia France to expand on - "a gradual evolution of Wikimedia France towards a sort of federation of association capable of carrying the voice of the free knowledge movement in France by also supporting the emergence of new strong organizations." How do you see the future of the organisation being affected by this?
It is difficult to anticipate the form that Wikimedia France will take in a few years, but here is the context on which this statement is based and what we would like to do in the years to come.
There is a very rich and varied network of associations and activists in France around free software and digital commons. But it is clear that very often it is small organizations that have difficulty in developing while it sometimes manages very important and highly consulted projects. For most of these organizations, the Wikimedia movement is a model to follow and hope for our help and support. Thus, in 2022, Wikimedia France signed a partnership with Vikidia, the encyclopedia for 8-13 year olds, built on the same principle as Wikipedia, in which we are committed to:
- Dedicated salaried time to help the Vikidia association to strengthen its governance and its projects - Help the organization find the necessary funds for its future development
For this, with the agreement of Vikidia, we acted on their behalf to develop actions in schools to train in Vikidia and imagine contribution actions from primary school.
In terms of advocacy, we have chosen to bring together a multitude of actors from associations and the world of the social and solidarity economy to convey common messages. We lead this alliance of free software and digital commons.
Like Wikimedia Italy, which is also an Open Street map chapter, we plan in the long term to continue to get closer to these friendly associations and organizations by helping them to structure and develop. For Wikimedia France, this allows us to move forward in the vision of the strategic direction of the movement to "become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge". By creating increasingly close relationships with these players, we are building a long-term alliance that allows us to defend and promote free knowledge in France.
Within Wikimedia France, this reflection also leads us to consider the local groups of Wikimedian volunteers in France in a slightly different way by considering in the medium term a greater decentralization of the association by drawing inspiration from other NGOs which operate more federatively with local associations united within a national structure. This would undoubtedly make it possible to reinforce the voluntary commitment by reinforcing the reception of new members thanks to a high degree of autonomy to these local structures which could have offices, staff and their own board gathered within Wikimedia France. We inform ourselves and talk a lot with other NGOs to understand their operating model and see what we could learn.
This is a double reflection therefore concerning both free and open source organizations on the one hand and our local groups of volunteers on the other. We are in the process of structuring an organization incubator project in order to continue to move forward in this direction. This is an integral part of our new strategy. This makes all the more sense, if we think of the question of overseas territories. It is illusory or even harmful to imagine that in the long term the Wikimedian actions which will take place in these territories should be validated from Paris. While the establishment of an autonomous local organization in connection with Wikimedia France will allow greater flexibility and agility. This is also in line with the movement's 2030 strategy, which poses the question of subsidiarity in governance as a principle. This is true at the global level when we are probably talking about the WMF or hubs but this must also, in my opinion, apply to chapters like Wikimedia France which may lead to intervention from New Caledonia to Polynesia France via Guyana but also Corsica, Aquitaine or Brittany.
This is why I mentioned the possibility that in the long term Wikimedia France will no longer be a single and simple organization but a group of local organizations headed by a national body in a federal model. We'll see what the future holds for us.
Finally while the higher level risks are identified, it would be good to hear slightly more detail on how to mitigate concern about the reputational risk mentioned.
In our continuous improvement process, we are improving our crisis communication procedure in order to be able to react quickly and correctly to potential bad buzz. It is indeed not uncommon for certain intra-community issues to end up in the press. A recent example concerns Wikimedia France's support for the Sans PagEs association, which fights to reduce gender bias in Wikimedia projects. This support was questioned on the French Wikipedia in September, taken up in the press and some donors announced that they no longer wanted to support Wikimedia France which, according to them, "had betrayed its mission by supporting a feminist association". This represents a few people and has had no major consequences but it demonstrates the porosity of information between what is happening within the community and the general public. We know that journalists scrutinize discussions on the village pump with interest and if a major problem were to appear (for example, a manipulation of agents of influence on Wikipedia not detected by the community) and that the image of Wikipedia s found affected, that of Wikimedia France would certainly suffer a backlash. This is why we must certainly prepare ourselves with clear processes but also continue to support the community as best we can. This is why Wikimedia France is committed to supporting the development of a new moderation tool for the French Wikipedia or that we are organizing this adminconf to identify certain specific needs on which the association could work.
I hope I have correctly answered your questions and your expectations. It is so difficult to talk about all that we are doing and all that we want to do in the next few years and so I have indeed made certain choices in the drafting of our application. But I hope I have been able to give you a more precise idea of all of our projects and I would obviously be happy to answer other questions if necessary. Rémy Gerbet WMFr (talk) 14:54, 21 April 2023 (UTC)