Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Wikimedia Finland Annual Plan 2024

The bot-uploaded version of the text on metawiki seems rather hard to read so I will link to our last Google Docs draft. The text should be nearly identical except for some whitespace ym stylistic changes when I copied text to Fluxx. There are also some texts which were filled to Fluxx only and is not in Google Docs, such as metrics.

• WMFI Community grant 2024 application (latest Google docs draft)

--Zache (talk) 10:26, 5 October 2023 (UTC) Reply

This is so cool, thank you Zache, for future translations of application this will be extremely useful. With gratitude, Agnes ABruszik-WMF (talk) 10:35, 23 October 2023 (UTC) Reply

Hei Wikimedia Suomi team, Thank you very much for your proposal, for your continuous work supporting the Wikimedia movement in Finland and for sharing your programme plans for 2024. The Northern and Western Europe Regional Committee has made an initial review and we are happy to share our feedback:

• We appreciate the clear presentation of the challenges the organisation is facing, the goals for the year to address them and the expected results from fulfilling them. The structure around three priorities is well-explained and also shows connections with relevant partners.
• The committee is grateful to see that while the proposal has a significant focus on correcting biases (notably with supporting minority languages and increasing the number of articles about women), it also includes support for editors working on mainstream topics.
• We found that Wikimedia Suomi adds significant value to Wikimedia editors in Finland, especially with a strong technical expertise to address the needs of Finnish editors.
• Finally, we recognise that 2023 was a difficult year for the chapter, so we hope that you will be stronger and avoid unexpected troubles in the years to come.

During the committee discussion of your grant proposal, members identified the following points:

• Wikimedia Suomi would greatly benefit from a strategic review in order to identify long-term goals and prioritise activities in your plan accordingly. We hope that affiliates who went through similar developments or external advisors would be able to help should there be an interest from your side.
• We appreciate the interesting and innovative approach to hiring (notably around students and unemployed). However, we feel like the staff capacity is reaching a limit due to hiring only part-time staff and having chiefly technical skills in the team. We understand that changing the status-quo is not easy, but we would appreciate more thoughts around this. (Once again, this might require external help particularly around leadership development - we hope this can be provided by Wikimedia Foundation if needed).
• The proposal would be stronger if you provide more information around your volunteer involvement, particularly how Wikimedia Suomi works with volunteer organisers, recruits and retains them.
• While it is obvious from the proposal that WMFI's programmes do address community needs, it would be useful to have more information about the involvement of on-wiki and volunteer community in programmatic planning.

In order to be in a better position to make a final decision on your proposal, the committee would like to get more details on the following points:

• Is the organisation considering a strategic review and does it need any support for it? How is the team considering impact and ensuring that this drives prioritisation?
• Can you please clarify your approach to external funding? Unlike previous years, we did not find any mention of external funding received in 2024 beyond government and municipal compensation for hiring an unemployed person, is this funding something you consider scaling? Are there any obstacles (in terms of legal constraints, capacity, members' priorities etc.) to getting non-WMF grants or collecting donations from the general public (fundraising)?
• What is your longer-term plan regarding staffing? Did you explore the options of moving to at least one full-time staff? Would you consider working with students and/or unemployed people with skill sets other than technical (e.g. fundraising)?
• While Wiki Loves Monuments was previously mentioned as a key project for Wikimedia Suomi, you provided a good explanation why you consider shifting away from it. What are your alternatives as major outreach opportunities should WLM not be organised in 2024?

In order to stick to the review process schedule, we would appreciate it if you would be able to provide your feedback by the end of the day of 13 November 2023.

If you feel like the wiki talk page is not the best medium to address our questions and concerns, please reach out. We can organise a (video) meeting with committee members if you consider it useful.

Finally, we unfortunately have to inform you that due to the General Support Fund budget limits for this round, we might not be able to fully find all proposals (and it might also concern yours). Do you have any thoughts on how an eventual partial funding decision would impact your budget, activity plan and operations?

Thank you very much and we look forward to hearing from you.

On behalf of the NWE Regional Committee — NickK (talk) 12:08, 4 November 2023 (UTC) Reply