Lori Phillips (CC-by-sa by Lori Phillips)

The Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce Lori Byrd Phillips as the United States Cultural Partnerships Coordinator in 2012. Through this new position within the Global Development department, the US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator will lead in building the infrastructure needed to support the growing interest in Wikimedia partnerships among cultural institutions in the United States, ultimately working to make cultural partnerships in the US self-sustaining starting 2013.

Thanks to the efforts of the global GLAM-Wiki initiative over the past two years, much inspired and aided by Liam Wyatt’s Wikimedia GLAM Fellowship, just now coming to its scheduled end, professionals from galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) have begun to seriously discuss partnership with Wikimedia as a means to increase accessibility to cultural resources, and to draw new audiences to their collections. Significant press about partnerships at respected institutions such as the British Museum [NY Times], the National Archives and Records Administration [Yahoo!], and the Smithsonian Institution [Chronicle of Philanthropy] has led cultural professionals to consider Wikimedia partnerships a cutting-edge trend. This resulted in demand from museums and other institutions to establish relationships with Wikimedia through Wikipedians in Residence and other projects. In the US, however, this growing interest from cultural institutions is quickly outpacing the current capacity of the present volunteer community to support these needs.

Interest is continuing to explode in the US, with plans for grant projects and for Wikimedia-museum partnerships to be featured in a number of upcoming conferences, most significantly a dedicated panel discussion at the American Association of Museums annual conference and Museum Expo.

While there is much interest among US Wikimedians to assist with cultural partnerships, a systematic structure is needed to connect these volunteers with cultural institutions and to provide the resources needed to establish successful partnerships. In order to accomplish this, the priorities of the Coordinator’s one-year project include: (more…)

Wikipedia is powered by the dedication and generosity of volunteers.  They share their knowledge, language skills, photography, artwork, even their own voices and music, with the rest of the world, for free.  This all happens online.  But Wikipedians can often make additional progress toward our vision of free knowledge freely available for everyone in the world, by participating in physical meetings, events, or conferences.  Such participation often entails travel costs, and sometimes accommodation, visa, and other costs too.  These costs are often prohibitively expensive for a volunteer’s personal budget, who is already donating valuable time and effort.

Therefore, in the interest of enabling this potential impact by members of our editing communities around the world, the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland are announcing the new Wikimedia Participation Grants program (see also the German chapter’s blog post).  Participation Grants are funds made available to Wikimedia community members to cover travel, accommodation, registration, and other costs associated with participating in an event or activity, in furtherance of the Wikimedia Mission.

Other Wikimedia chapters with individual revenue sources (i.e. those not themselves funded by grants from the Wikimedia Foundation) are welcome to commit some funds to the Participation Grants pool.  We already consider this participation to be “made possible by the Wikimedia movement” rather than by any of the participating bodies, and this will become more obvious as other chapters chip in.

To receive a Participation Grant, community members are encouraged to apply, following the instructions, citing the event they wish to participate in, a little background about themselves, and the expected impact for our movement’s mission. We deliberately do not inquire into the applicant’s financial situation.  By accepting a participation grant, the applicant commits to writing up a public report about the participation the grant enabled.

A committee composed of representatives of the funding organizations meets weekly to discuss open requests.  The goal is to resolve all open requests each week, so often decisions would be made within days of making the request.  However, some requests require additional information, or consultation with other organizations (e.g. the event organizers, or a local Wikimedia chapter), which may increase the turnaround time of the committee.

In the past month, we have been discussing, reviewing, and setting up the program, and have already awarded some participation grants.  Like the general Wikimedia Grants program, all participation grants are requested and resolved in public, and may be perused, along with reports about past grants (as those come in), at the requests page.

We look forward to seeing all the inspiring work this program can now make possible!

Asaf Bartov, Head of Global South Relationships

In my presentation on the new Wikimedia Grants program, at the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin last March, I mentioned the intention to create a Grant Advisory Committee (its friends can call it the GAC) to help the movement generate effective program plans and bring community experience and perspectives to bear on the evaluation and assessment of funding requests.

Today we announce the formation of this Grant Advisory Committee, and thank all the Wikimedians who volunteered their time and good will to help the movement in yet another way.

The committee’s goals are twofold:

1. Encourage and mentor chapters and other groups to:

• Learn about and understand the Wikimedia Grants program
• Draw up compelling project plans with an emphasis on strategy alignment and measures of success
• Request funding, i.e. submit a grant request on Meta

2. Help the Foundation evaluate requested grants, not by a yes/no vote, but by deliberation and evaluation of strengths and weaknesses of individual proposals in public, i.e. on the Talk pages of the proposals. The aggregate experience and know-how represented by the committee should be able to provide excellent feedback and assessment of proposed projects and plans, and thereby help the Foundation decide how the movement’s resources may best be allocated.

I think an important aspect of the Wikimedia Grants program in general, and of the GAC’s work in particular, is the fact that it is done in public.  Grantmaking, like most activities involving money, tends to happen behind closed doors: money is a sensitive topic, real names need to be used for the actual transactions, there are legal aspects, etc.  But the Wikimedia way is one of public conversation, and I intend to devote attention to ensuring as much of the debate about grants and grantmaking does indeed happen in public.

I am pleased to be able to introduce this new avenue for community involvement in strategic decisions, and I look forward to working with the GAC to strengthen chapters and groups worldwide, and further our mission through judicious use of funds.

Your suggestions and feedback are most welcome.  Please don’t hesitate to submit a grant request, comment on this post, or contact me directly.

Asaf Bartov, Head of Global South Relationships, asaf@wikimedia.org, User:Ijon