Nicole: Welcome to episode 2 of WIKIMOVE. This is a new podcast in audio and video where we discuss the future of the Wikimedia movement. I'm Nicole Ebber and with me is Nikki Zeuner. We both work in Wikimedia Deutschland's Movement Strategy and Global Relations team.
Nikki: This episode was recorded at 2pm UTC on April 29th, 2022. Things may have changed since we recorded this show, but what we still know…
Nicole: …is that by 2030 Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us.
Nikki: So WIKIMOVE is a new podcast for frank Conversations about topics related to movement strategy. It's not about having all the answers, it's more about exploring questions together, about thinking together on stage and on air. And the topics come from the strategic direction. They come from the principles, the recommendations, and whatever topics may arise from all that and the initiatives and the implementation of Movement strategy. Or we can also maybe in the future talk about larger issues in the larger knowledge ecosystem that are relevant to our transformation. So we hope that this space will create opportunities to think together, to exchange, to spread ideas, to maybe develop ideas, dream about our joint future as a Wikimedia Movement. And this home base is not only the audio and the videocast, but we also have a meta page and a web page. And soon we'll be all over the pod-verse. And we try to spread as much as we can. Also, all the relevant links and stuff that we talk about later, there will be links in the show notes. This episode is available with Portuguese subtitles on YouTube and you'll hear in a minute about why that is. Also for those of you watching the video format, you might notice that we've changed home, we've changed surroundings, and we're excited to try out this new space.
Nicole: So on today's show, we have two guests from WikiMovimento Brazil. Because the Brazilian and Portuguese speaking communities, movement strategy is alive and kicking for them. People are actively thinking about what it will take to build a hub for example, about growing the movement and about building capacity. Much of this is thanks to our two wonderful guests in today's show, Erika Azzelini and Lukas Pianta, but more on this later. First, news from the Movement. In this section, we want to share information about events and activities in our Movement. And although I would say that we kind of have a good radar on what is going on, we would love to hear from you. What news should we feature in the next show? So please go to our Meta page and let us know what is happening in your organization or in your community. So, Nikki, what's new?
Nikki: So first, I want to say the annual Wikimedia Hackathon is happening next month or this month, depending on when you're listening to this show. So in May, it'll be from May 20 to 22. And there's an open call for sessions on the schedule page on Meta. If you'd like to host a session, you can simply pick an open slot in the category, which best fits your topic. There's also some suggestions on how to put together fun sessions. So we're moving more and more into doing this online. Apparently I remember live hackathons a while ago and it was a wholly different thing. Another thing I wanted to mention is even though we have our own grants in the Wikimedia movement, the Open Knowledge Foundation is also announcing a launch of Open Data Day 2022 small grants applications. So you can use that money to host open data events and activities across the world. And they're very small depending on the types of events, they support organizations with 500 or a thousand dollars. Deadline for the application is May 13th and the events will take place in June like throughout the summer. And the grants will favor work across disciplines, targeted campaigns, advocacy efforts to support the Paris Agreement, local efforts tackling climate change, and using open data for social impact. That sounds a little bit like topics for impact. One of our recommendations. Sister organization from the open knowledge Movement is also spreading money for good work. Then we have Wiki Loves Earth happening again speaking of impact. So that international photo contest has started. Also, by the time we air this pod, it raises public awareness about protected areas and creates the biggest database of free photos of nature heritage sites all over the world. That's been going on since 2013. The first one was held in the Ukraine, actually. Hundreds of thousands of free photos on Commons, thanks to that. So this runs May 1st to July 31st with different dates for each country. So you can join that by checking out the respective pages on Meta. Also, politically, some things have been happening in Europe. Can you tell us about that, Nicole? Yes. Last weekend, which when you will be listening to this, will be a little bit longer ago. So on April 23rd, the European Union reached an agreement on the Digital Services Act, which you might also know under DSA. And if you follow the news from the free knowledge advocacy group EU, you will be most likely familiar with the term and with what's going on. So the DSA provides quite good approaches already for dealing with illegal content on online platforms without restricting the right to freedom of expression. And what Wikimedia particularly welcomes in the DSA is that it really distinguishes between the moderation of content by commercial service providers and by those by volunteer editing communities. So that is good. But we would still have liked to see even greater recognition of communities and how they actually handle their content moderation. We also find it a little bit problematic that the negotiations have been brought to an end in such a hasty way, and that they are lacking proper public deliberation and transparency, actually.
Nikki: However, I think the fact that they distinguish between the dark side and the light side is a little bit thanks to us and the advocacy work we've done in, not us here, but the colleagues in the Brussels office.
Nicole: That is the case, yes. And shout out to them actually. Dimi, Anna, great work and great connection with all the European affiliates. There's more good news actually since our last episode, the results of the community vote on the enforcement guidelines of the Universal Code of Conduct, formerly also known I think as EDGAR, but I think we stopped using that term. The results have been announced and they have actually received 58.6% yes votes and many comments for improvement actually. And instead of the Wikimedia Foundation Board now just going ahead and moving on to also vote on these guidelines, it has been decided that the drafting committee will actually be brought back together and they will undertake another round of community engagement to refine the enforcement guidelines which will then hopefully be in place. So for me this is really first of all a very strong signal, basically a yes for providing more safety and inclusion across our Movement and also that community voices are being heard to continue to improve the document. And as always you will find all of that on Meta.
Nikki: Your favorite event of all times?
Nicole: That is not a Wikimedia event. Let's put it that way. It's Re:publika. And this is really one of the first in-person events me and some of my colleagues will be attending after 2020. It's Republika. It is a three-day festival for the digital society that takes place in Berlin from 8th to 10th of June. The motto is “Anyway the wind blows”. And it's not only for the great karaoke reference that I like and wholeheartedly recommend this event. It's really a great opportunity to meet and connect with my like-minded people from fields like politics, media, science, activism, climate change, knowledge curation. I could go on and on here. And to discuss also the current challenges of our time. And there will be sessions and talks also in English. So please consider participating and let us know if you go so that we can meet.
Nikki: So is this also gonna be a hybrid event or do you have to do it in person?
Nicole: I actually think you have to kind of have to. It will be both, but I think sessions will be streamed. They have always been streamed live, but the mode of participation is I think not hybrid that you can also connect with speakers and so on.
Nikki: So for a segment we call, is it hope I'm feeling? Can we also sing it?
Nicole: No, I'm not going to go in there. I heard that Wikimedia Commons was mentioned in the recently released Wikimedia Foundation annual plan. Do you know more? Isn't that a surprise and very nice thing? It is indeed in the annual plan draft. And that states clearly the core multimedia infrastructure of Wikimedia Commons is in desperate need of repair. I've never read it in such a clear way probably. Everybody has known this, yes. But it's now really written like this in the draft and that it is a priority they will set for the year ahead. Which is really amazing and it is part of the deepen our commitment to knowledge as a service goal. So yeah, there's hope that Wikimedia Commons, this like vast and unique platform for all kinds of free media, it will get the attention it deserves so it can be accessible and used by everyone.
Nikki: So shout out to the Foundation and shout out to Mariana. I actually feel like the annual plan is, I've read it and I was like, okay, yeah, it covers all the things that are important to us. Now it's a question of getting it done, obviously. But yeah, good start. Okay, so with that, we can move to our interview today. Nicole, and I'm gonna do like a little bit introduction on what we're gonna talk about today. Wikimedia Movimento Brasil has been working hard to make movement strategy a topic of conversation and co-thinking in their country's community, and as well as for the whole Lusophone communities actually across the globe. Our guests today are engaged in Movement strategy and at so many levels, it's going to be a long list, both globally and regionally. And particularly, they have tried to take the strategy to a next level by contextualizing it to the Lusophone or the Brazilian context, and they're making sure that the conversation didn't stop after the recommendations were published. They did a survey recently where they asked a series of questions to the Portuguese-speaking communities about some of the big juicy concepts in the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations, particularly equity and decision-making is one of the things they looked at, leadership development and diversity. By doing that, in doing that, they also reached out to many community members who had not previously had the chance to engage with Movement strategy. So today we want to talk about these issues, ideas, the opportunities and challenges that emerge from the survey and then take it from there. I think these Wikimedians are showing the way of how we can make strategy come to life at a community level and jointly figure out what the next steps are that we have to take locally and regionally. And then of course also what the next steps are that we have to take in terms of governance and resources globally. So Érica Azzellini, I hope I'm saying your name right, has been serving WikiMovimento Brasil in different hats over the last years. As a staff member, she's now in charge of community support, partnerships, and strategy development at WikiMovimento Brasil. Érica is also a member of their diversity committee. She was responsible for re-imagining Wikidata from the margins that happened last year under the context of WikidataCon which they co-organized with Wikimedia Germany. And now she's at the core organization team of Wikicon Brazil. And we'll hear more about that later. Érica is a member of the Movement Chartered Draft in committee and she is joining us from São Paulo today. Hi Érica, welcome.
Érica: Hi everyone, good to be here.
Nicole: Our other guest today is Lucas Piantá,. He has been working as a researcher on the movement strategy implementation in the Lusophone, which is the Portuguese speaking community and the community engaging in topics such as equity and decision making, diversity, governance and leadership development. He is a member of the Latin America and the Caribbean Regional Grants Committee and a member of Wikicon Brazil's 2022 Executive and Scholarship Committees, a member of Wikimovimento Brazil's Strategy Working Group and also a member of Creative Commons Brazil's Open Glam Coordination. So wow, quite a list and Lucas is joining us from Porto Alegre today. So, hi Lucas, welcome.
Lucas: Hello, thank you. Thank you, it's very good to be here.
Nicole: Excellent. And we start right away and dive into the research, Lucas, that you have been doing. Can you give us an overview of the survey that you did and what came out of it and talk probably also a little bit about how you came up with the questions and what you were trying to find out with your research?
Lucas: Well this research we did was mainly about equity in decision making, governance, leadership developing and some other recommendations of the movement strategy. We were trying to find exactly what would be the challenges and possibilities of implementing a hub in our community, mainly a Lusophon hub. We wanted to know how could we build the path to implement a Lusophon hub in our community. So the questions we made in this questionnaire, they were not exactly, or not only about hubs and equity decision making, but about lots of other things about movement strategy. Because we didn't actually know, and we don't actually know yet what exactly hub is, what hubs could do, what hubs couldn't do, even though we have some idea of the very nature of hubs. So we wanted to make it as broad as we could for people to give their answers in lots of topics and for us to identify what could be the challenges and possibilities of a hub. So the questions we made then come from some other researchers that have been made in our community about, for example, leadership development and other topics such as diversity and some other challenges that we see that we could be facing or that we could face in the future what is related to the movement strategy. So those are the questions we made were about those kinds of topics. And we found out in the end that our community is not very aware of what a hub is and our community is not very aware also of what is the Movement strategy. More than half of the people who answered the questionnaire told us that they didn't have any information about the Movement strategy before answering the questionnaire. So we found that before trying to implement a hub, we should face some challenges and some very important things that are related to the information of our community and the way our community is related to the Movement strategy.
Nikki: So that's, to me, it's super interesting because there's so many other communities and groups of Wikimedians around the world who are also looking at hubs and that you had sort of this honest look at, okay, what would it mean and what would be the challenges. And if I understand correctly, also coming to a point where we're saying, well, maybe a hub is not immediately the solution that we need for equity and decision making. So you basically, you basically now have to think of other things you want to do in terms of improving equity and decision making.
Lucas: Yeah, exactly. We found that if you want to talk about equity and decision making, we need to think about it not only in our community, but in the Wikimedia Movement as a whole. And we think that our community not knowing what the Movement strategy is, and our community those kinds of information may be a problem in the web equity in decision making or web equity problem in a wider view on the Wikimedia movement. For example, lots of people in our community don't speak English. So how can we be part of the Wikimedia movement globally or the strategy discussions, for example, if we don't speak English? How can we read the documentation of those meetings if we don't speak English? We cannot read what is the documentation that is in English. So there are lots of problems that lead us to think that we must work on capacity building and we must work on leadership development to make sure that, at least for now, some of the people who have the opportunity of being in those different places or those different sides of the Movement could be there. So I think that we need to make sure before trying to implement a hub that we have a good participation and a good information and a good way of communication about the Movement strategy in our community.
Nikki: I want to turn to Érica here, because you have a little bit, I mean, you have your Brazilian view and Lucifone community view, but you also have, I imagine, a larger movement view as well. What are your thoughts on hubs and how could they shape our movement and how should we go about it?
Érica: Well, I think it's nice to see all the ideas coming up to surface regarding the hubs, because I understand this as a collective effort for bringing materiality to the Movement strategy recommendations, right? So now it's time to think about them locally and see how we can better collaborate in the movement in order to, you know, achieve our abstract purposes of knowledge equity and knowledge as a service. And I see all this conversation around hubs as the community trying to solve that, right? So that's on the positive side. I see good faith and a lot of energy directed to hubs right now. And I'm an advocate for reimagining our structures of governance, right? On the other hand, it leads us to challenges of making things actually happen because it requires coordination across different entities engagement from individuals and communities who have been part of this for a long time now and some others that are just joining the conversation at this point, right? So how do we balance that? And my concerns about hubs that I'll use every opportunity I have to express them is that we need more clarity about the governance models that we are going to use for the hubs. Otherwise, we are just substituting a model for another and will keep excluding marginalized communities from the spaces of decision or for the resources allocation, for example. So my take here is that we should not fasten up this process, although I know that this is very important for the movement to advance on its strategy. But I think that we should focus on our local necessities and try to reimagine what kind of challenges the hubs are really trying to solve, and what does it mean for the communities in case they don't even want to join a hub, for example? What are the consequences, right? So I think that this is the kind of discussion that we should have in the Movement right now, and that we shouldn't rush to, you know, start piloting a hub just to see what happens, because by the end of the day, people only get frustrated and you know, we already had a lot of problems regarding mistrust in the Movement. And we don't want people to disengage at this point. We want them to keep collaborating and thinking together. And I really appreciate this effort of thinking globally, but also locally. And we have to balance that in order to make equity decision-making, not just a concept, but actually a practice.
Nikki: So I want to pick up on one of the things that, um, that Lucas said in the beginning is you said people don't really, you haven't really engaged with Movement strategy and they don't really know what a hub is. We were also talking earlier about the word hub doesn't exist in Portuguese. So they're just using, um, using the English word for lack of a better term. But I think it kind of pointed to maybe we need to build some awareness and some capacity in the communities first before we start with this concept, which makes no sense to anybody. So I want to turn the conversation a little bit to capacity building and hand it back to Nicole because we have a question about that.
Nicole: Yeah, I have a question to Érica. So Wikimedia Deutschland and your organization co-organized Wikidata Con last year. And I kind of heard and felt that you've got the conference bug, so to say, that yeah, and you are now organizing the first ever Wikicon Brazil this year. And yeah, I wanted to hear a little bit from you. What are you hoping to accomplish with this event in terms of building the movement in Brazil?
Érica: Yeah, indeed. I got a conference bug. And I'm realizing that although it is a very stressful process to organize a conference, it is also quite rewarding when you see your loved community having the space they need to connect with each other, strengthen their bonds and collaborate more even though they come from different backgrounds, right? So this is the magic of organizing Wikimedia events. And we were quite experimental with Wikidata count last year because we didn't want to have an ordinary event, right? But instead, we wanted to make it meaningful experience, especially for people in underrepresented communities, even though it was a remote event. And honestly, this kind of reflects the spirit that we have at Wikimovimento Brasil, right? And I hope our friends at Wikimedia Deutschland are not very traumatized by our bold ideas. But yeah, we want to use our first ever in-person conference for the Brazilian community as a platform for connection, of course, but not on a traditional top-down presentation mode, right? So this reflects on how we are building the actual program, right? So for us, it's very important at this point to distribute capacity across our country and Brazil is a continental country with a lot of different regional contexts. And we as Wiki Movement Brazil want to stimulate local empowerment. And we don't want to concentrate all of our wiki activities in the richest regions of Brazil. So we are trying to find ways to make people empowered locally. And this has a lot to do with capacity building, right? So, for example, we just created a scholarship distribution model that is not necessarily attached to a presentation submission and that has a mechanism for prioritizing the different diversities we want to see represented in the event. And we are valuing a lot regional representativeness in the conference, right? And they will be required to participate in different capacity building sessions and strategic discussions. And those strategic discussions will actually revolve around the Movement strategy recommendations as well in our own local context. So, they don't need to understand what happened before, you know, with the Movement strategy. They don't need to have prior knowledge or understand the very details of this amazing thing that we are doing in the Movement, but they will have a space to say what they're thinking and what does it mean for us here locally, right? So they're, of course, welcome to Submit Proposals, but our main goal here with that is to ensure that people who are willing to learn more about how to engage with the community in a meaningful way can do that and feel empowered after the conference itself. So we are using the conference as a platform for connecting people who are more experienced in the movement, but also to bring more diversity to the table and make things move forward in that direction so we can disseminate Wikimedia Movement in Brazil and also have people empowered locally. So we are very bold with our proposal for this conference. It will happen by the end of July. And I hope to share our insights after that with the whole community, because I think that this is very experimental what we are doing here especially for our first ever conference in Brazil.
Nikki: That sounds really awesome. Explain this a little bit. So it sounds like you're creating a hybrid conference, right? So there's local events, but everything is connected through an online system? Or how is it going to work?
Érica: No, it's actually going to happen on site. So we'll be gathering around 100 people here in São Paulo, my city. And this is why we developed this scholarship model, so we could ensure that people could come here because air tickets right now in Brazil are insanely high. So the tickets skyrocketed in its prices. And we wanted to make sure that people would have the resources to be here with us, discussing all these important matters and connecting with us in person.
Nicole: I have one follow-up question. Is it still possible to register for the event? And if so, how could people participate? How can they become involved?
Érica: Yeah, we'll open our subscription for the event on May 15th. But it is a national conference and the program is designing Portuguese. We are setting people who speaks Portuguese. So if anyone in the movement happens to be here in Brazil and speaks Portuguese and wants to join us, please do it.
Nikki: So I want to turn back to Lucas for a minute and because you told me you are also applying for funding from the Wikimedia Foundation, one of those famous movement strategy implementation grants, and that's around leadership. Talk a little bit about what you're proposing there.
Lucas: Well, what we're proposing now is using the Wikicon Brazil 2022 as a platform for us to find what are the main topics of interest of the Brazilian comedians in this leadership development, and who are the people who are interested in being leaderships. And also, one of the most important things that we want to know with the community is, what is leadership? What does it mean? We expect from a leadership, what does a leader do? And how is it related to the Wikimedia movement and how is it related to our reality in Brazil? So we want to talk to people during Wikicon Brazil and we want to listen to people during Wikicon Brazil and be part of as much as conferences and discussions as we can to find out how people think about those topics of interest. And then trying to build with the community a leadership development plan, leadership development plan. So in this plan, we want to know, for example, as I said, who are the people who are interested, what are the topics of interest, and we want to bring Wikimedians from different places, from other communities, to share their expertise and share their learnings in the movement strategy with us. So we want to focus this leadership development plan in the Movement Strategy and what we plan to do at the end of this capacity building period is that we want to help people on asking for Movement implementation strategy grants. So we want to help people on the capacities they want to build, focusing on what our community needs and what our community thinks about leadership, and then spreading all those people and making everyone who participated in this plan to be able to ask for their own movement strategy implementation grants and implement the strategy in our community. So this is wider plan that wants to build capacity for people to be leaderships in the Movement Strategy implementation in our community.
Nikki: So are you also going to provide trainings under this current grant or is that for later grants that people can, after you have the plan, then people can apply for grants that fund trainings?
Lucas: At first we're gonna build the plan, then we will show our community the plan and we'll ask people to be part of it and we wanna know who wants to join and then we'll capacitate people and at the end we are going to help everyone to build their proposals.
Nikki: So I think there's quite a few applicants, Movement Strategy implementation grants who are doing similar things. So it would be also interesting to see what you guys are experiencing and learning doing this and as well as maybe comparable communities in Africa or elsewhere that are also doing capacity assessments and things in that way. It's really interesting that so many people start with this assessment piece and I'm wondering if there's some way maybe that all the data that is gathered could be made sense of in a global manner and not just in a local manner but that might be a question to Yop at the Movement Strategy Implementation Team or to other people working on evaluation and learning around those grants. It feels like you're all learning so much and it should be shared with others in the movement. I know we have a couple other topics that we want to touch on today. We talked about grants and resources. And so I want to kind of steer us into that direction a little bit. So right now we have a system of grant making by which resources are distributed in the movement. And we also have, as an aside, these Movement Strategy implementation grants. When we worked in phase two of the strategy, the resource allocation, what are they called, revenue, resource allocation, yeah, and revenue streams. That was the other, it was two different groups. But anyway, they had a very strong recommendation. Do you remember that, Nicole?
Nicole: Yeah, they actually recommended that a significant amount of resources will be spent for marginalized communities, emerging communities, and those in the so-called global south. But yes, there's no system for that yet and meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation has tried to take a step towards more participatory grant making through the newly established grant committees or regional grant committees. And Lucas, I know you're a member of such a regional committee. And can you talk a little bit about how you think that is working at the moment?
Lucas: Well, in the Latin American and Caribbean grant committee, we are now in the second round of alliances and community funds. So we had the first experience with it. And then we had lots of feedback from the affiliates and from the people who are proposing those grants and also from the members of the committee. And now we're trying to solve some problems and trying to think about how to manage some of the challenges that we have. Some of those challenges are, for example, how can we be sure that we are being fair to the people who are applying for grants, for example. So what are the skills or the capacities that we should have as a community to be fair with those people? How can we communicate better with those people? How can we make sure that, for example, we are being equitable in our Movement? So there are some communities, even in Latin America and the Caribbean, who have more people involved, affiliates that have 20 or 40 people when there are affiliates with much less people. So there are affiliates who have very huge annual plans. There are some affiliates who have plans that are not even for one year because we don't have the experience or they have the resources that we need to make something bigger. So those are some questions that we are asking ourselves, like how to make sure that the really implement this intention that we have. And also things like, how do the affiliates feel about it? How did the process happen? So how our community think participating in the process of implementing those groups. For example, I know that some people ask themselves, is this a hub? So is this gonna work like a hub? Is this gonna be a side of the hub? So there's lots of questions that we have to make yet and to answer yet. But well, I think that we are doing very well in learning and evaluating the process and trying to make it as better as we can do.
Nikki: Érica, do you have two words about how the experience was for you as an affiliate, having an annual plan reviewed by a regional committee?
Érica: Yeah, I definitely have more than two words about it. So being completely honest here, I value a lot this effort in the Movement of trying to make things different while distributing resources. But last year when we were asking for the grant for WikiMovement Brasil, it was a very stressful and traumatic experience for us. So we were experienced on asking for grants, for the annual grants, and it's usually a stressful process, of course, because it's going to define what you're going to do for the next year, right? So it's defining your staff, it's defining your activities, the impact that you will be able to make in your community, right? And we always live here with the sense of urgency because we are the single affiliate recognized in Brazil. So we are the only ones here who have the minimal structure to do something, to outreach, Wikimedia, to support our volunteers, et cetera. And when it comes to asking for resources, it always comes with a level of uncertainty of what we are going to do on the short and on the long run. So, okay, I understand that. But for this particular model that wasn't there last year, it was way more exigent for us. So we had to prove ourselves a lot of times, as if we have never asked for a grant before, right? As if we were unknown to the Movement and we have this particular view that Brazil is part of Latin America, of course, but it's not really on practice of the Wikimedia Movement, for example, because we have more partnerships and connections with other affiliates than they want here in our region. So we don't even edit on the same projects. We speak Portuguese here, my Spanish, for example. So why should we share the resources with this region here if we don't even collaborate much in our own activities? So this felt quite excluded for us, very stressful. We had to do a lot of paperwork and we were constantly uncertain about how we were going to be evaluated by this new committee because we understood that they were not very experienced on evaluating grant proposals, right? And this is quite definitive for our future. And even though I really appreciate that people from different backgrounds are joining this conversation, it is not an experience, right? It actually defines our futures and our activities, our materiality here, right? So throughout the entire process, we were really uncertain about what was going to happen. And it comes with the tiniest details, for example, we could make our proposal in Portuguese and they would provide a translation, but we wrote hundreds of pages for this proposal and we weren't sure that this could be properly translated so the evaluators could have enough time and understanding of what we were actually proposing. So this is the sort of things that need to be corrected in this process. And I don't regret anyone in particular. I think that people involved in this funding were great. They were doing their best, but the process itself, it still has a lot of gaps that need to be solved so we can trust in this process and make sure that we'll be able to accomplish everything that we are proposing here for our community. Because even though we are bold here in Brazil, we are also very realistic to our context, right, and we want to make the major impact possible here. And we are not afraid to do that, but we need the people to believe us, right? So it's hard for us to be constantly proving ourselves when there are those grants around here. So this is my take, and I know that I said more than a couple of words, and I could be talking a lot more. But yeah, so that's it, not short.
Nikki: I'll follow up with something because to me, what this experience sounds, it sounds like it wasn't a great experience from either end of it. And we have both ends sitting here, somebody who's on the regional committee and somebody who's had to write a grant. And so like Nicole said, we added participatory to grant making, but maybe instead of having just grant making without participatory, we should just have participatory without grant making if we catch my drift. What I'm thinking is we're creating a system that is a classic philanthropic model of grant making, and then we're adding this patch onto it to make it more participatory and to have this sort of regional, you know, have the feeling like there's a regional say and there's a regional strategic development, but then you're saying it's for the whole region and it doesn't make sense for us, we need to be our own thing. Anyway, it feels like we're patching something that maybe we shouldn't have to begin with. So I would pose the question maybe to anyone in this room or in this channel. Is grant making maybe not the system that we should use in the future for distributing resources in our Movement? And should we maybe look to other movements who have other systems such as resource sharing agreements, formulas and things like that? What do you guys think?
Érica: Well, as I said before, I love the idea of reimagining what we do in the Movement, right? And I think that we are in a good wave for that at this point. And we are experimenting and we have room to understand what is not working well and how things could be improved, right? So I'm not exactly opposed of this grant making model as it requires you to actually plan what you want to do, right? And this is a good exercise and it's good for accountability as well to the movement because we can't forget that we are talking about resources that come from donation and there's no one size fits all solution when it comes to resource allocation across the Movement. And this has to be very clear when we are talking about it, right? So, given the wide range of contexts that we live. And what I keep thinking is also, should we measure the success be the same for every affiliate or by which standards? Who defines that, right? So, we'll have more clarity about that, those differences in theory, right? Now we have more clarity about those differences in theory, but not in our practices. Because if you're applying for a grant and you want to be approved, you're going to set up bold goals and metrics to prove to the evaluators your impact and how you make it work here, right? So although we have this beautiful discourse of respecting the local context, et cetera, we know that in practice we are going to be evaluated anyway, and we have to show some sort of impact. And we are already overloaded here in the global south and marginalized communities as well. So I don't really have an easy answer because this is not an easy question, right? And this has to be taken into consideration as well. And what I think that is most unrealistic is not the model itself of grant making, but the resource allocation by regions. How it is defined. We should have a more open conversation about what resources exactly does the region needs and specifically the affiliates and any other project that is interested in requiring a grant. It would be way more down to earth and not be something imagined by people who are not living in our own reality.
Nikki: So what you're saying is more of a decentralized model, but maybe a global formula that is based on some kind of needs assessment or assessment of where do we want to grow as a movement. And then, but regional decision making about how monies are allocated and spent. I hear your point about that grants are good because they create accountability. But to me, and this is my personal view. It's grant means I grant you something, right? It's like this philanthropic gesture, because I want to do well for you, so I'm going to give you some money. And I feel like in a Movement where we're talking about equity, knowledge equity, equity decision making, like feeling like you've been being granted something is maybe not the right feeling you should have when you want to feel empowered.
Nicole: We are going to our new part and that is called “How About That?”. And we wanted to separate this a little bit from the interview. And it's like basically a hot take. And we turn to the inner workings of the movement. The Movement Charter Drafting Committee or as some also know it, MCDC, not ACDC of course, MCDC. So this committee will create the movement charter following the Movement Strategy recommendation and sure equity and decision making. And it will define future roles and responsibilities in our Movement. And this committee will of course not just go into a room and write a document, but will do some research, consult with communities, but also with experts and organizations. And then when the document is final at one point, it will eventually also need to gain movement-wide consensus in terms of a ratification probably. And the committee was formed last November in a combination of elections and selections and has 15 members and they are now expected to keep working until the charter is actually ratified. And the current timeline forecasts it to be in late 2023.
Nikki: So for full disclosure, we have among us today a member of said moving charter drafting committee, Érica. We're really glad you're on it. And we're really glad the other people that are on it are also volunteering their time. But when we talk today, obviously you're not speaking on behalf of the committee, but you're expressing your own opinions. Question to all of us, what do you see the movement charter drafting committee sort of, how do you see it working over the next year or so and how do you see it reaching out and what should it do to come up with the best possible product for this Movement that's going to last?
Érica: Yes, I'm excited to talk about the MCDC work here. Although I'm not representing the FU committee, this is my individual take on the work that we are doing and this is definitely something that we are talking about right now. For example, how do we represent the movement charter drafting so this is the sort of discussion that we are diving. And as you said, we started our work in last November and it's already April, almost May, you know? So a lot of things were happening internally in our MCDC. And this may not be very much visible for the entire community because it's a lot of operations and setting how we want to work together because there are people from so many different backgrounds and time zones. So this is a challenge on itself, right? So we have the support from the Movement Strategy Team as well. And they are being respectful on our wishes to make this a movement from the community and not something that is needed by the Movement Strategy Team, right? So we have to balance all of that. And this is taking a while, but we are solving how to work together finally. So, yeah. And what I've been seeing for these last few months is that we need to respect our internal wishes and our internal flows for make the charter happen while at the same time being accountable and transparent to the community because we understand that there is a lot of expectations around what we are going to write on the charter, right? And we want this to be a very iterative process. So we are taking this work seriously in order to make an engagement proposal for the different stakeholders involved in it. So what are the differences between a stakeholder being informed, being engaged, being consulted? So we are diving into all of this right now so we can elaborate a full engagement plan for the stakeholders. So we are not, you know, working on the content on a closed room and suddenly drop the document, hey, they're in it for ratification. So don't worry, this is not going to happen, okay? So we are really taking all these careful measures to make sure that people feel heard in this process. Because although we represent a lot of diversity of backgrounds and you know, of knowledge from the community in this committee. We also know that we still have gaps on it and we will love to receive the inputs from the different people in the community, people who were highly involved in it previously, but also people who didn't have the chance yet to speak in the Movement Strategy, right? So we have to design a strategy for it. This is my take on the MCDC work so far. And please feel free to ask me anything else that you want from the MCDC. I'm glad to do that.
Nikki: I'm a little bit curious of what Lucas thinks, because so Lucas, you did all this research with the Brazilian community or the Lusophone community. Anything that came out of that, any sense you got from these communities on what, on what, not how, how the MCDC should work, but what should be in the charter?
Lucas: Well, I was exactly thinking about this challenge, which is, um, how can we think about the community as big as is the Wikimedia Movement and try to make something that makes sense for everyone or for every community. So I think that, I keep thinking that this may be the main challenge because do we have the real dimension of what are the complexities of the different communities that we have in the Wikimedia movement? So I don't really know what we have in Brazil, this said, I don't know what to say, you only want to feel. This is why I think about it. Well, I think it's a big challenge. And I think that, well, we really must and think about we need to figure out how to make not only the Movement charter, but the whole process of building the charter, of writing this charter, something that is equitable, that is inclusive, that has diversity. And that really represents our community. So something that I would ask, and the big question I like to answer about it is, maybe it will be only answered in the future is, do our community as a whole feel represented and feel listened and watched in this movement charter? Well, I think that this is, for me, success on the movement charter would be if we could answer yes, but I really think, and maybe I'm a pessimist, or maybe I'm just realistic that we won't achieve this now, but maybe we could just build something that will allow us to reach this goal.
Nikki: I have one more curious question to Érica. What do you think are going to be the big topics? I'm trying to get to the content away from the process that are going to be talked about in the movement charter.
Érica: Yeah, so we are actually starting to discuss the Movement charter outline. We'll publish that pretty soon. And the movement charter drafting committee is going together in Berlin in June so we can dive into this topic because we need to have the structure, the summary of the charter, and define the methodology of writing this, the engagement plan, etc. So there's a lot of things that we still need to do, but regarding the content, we'll definitely talk about governance, resources, values and principles that we want to see across the Movement. So yeah, this is basically what you can expect from this document. And, you know, governance itself, it's a major topic. So, yeah, so it's a lot of things to discuss. And as I said, we are going to be very careful about it because we want people to feel represented on it. And I understand that people always complain we can't satisfy 100 percent everyone. But I think that is our duty to at least provide room for conversation and improve this document the most that we can.
Nikki: And that's a wrap for today's conversation and also a wrap of the second episode of WIKIMOVE. Thanks to our listeners for listening. Thank you so much for our two interview guests for being here today, Érica and Lucas. It was a great pleasure to have you and I'm sure we'll talk much more about these issues over the next few years.
Nicole: So WIKIMOVE is a production of Wikimedia Deutschland and its movement strategy and global relations team. And Nikki and me are here on stage, but behind the scenes, Eva Martin pulls all the strings in the background. She makes sure that our technology runs smoothly so that we can create excellent content for you all. And our music was composed and produced by Rory Gregory and is of course available under a free license CC BY SA on Wikimedia Commons. Subscribe to be always notified. If a new episode releases, please also let us know if you have questions, we'll announce the topic for the next show so you can submit questions to the guests and you can also submit news that you want us to spread. If you missed our previous episode, it was about knowledge as a service. So check it out on our Meta page and you can contact us at wikimove@wikimedia.de to continue this discussion and share your suggestions for next episodes. Ciao for now. And tschussi! Bye bye!