Welcome to the first grantees of the Knowledge Equity Fund

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Welcome to the first grantees of the Knowledge Equity Fund

This article was originally published in Diff on September 8, 2021. The author is Chief Advancement Officer, Wikimedia Foundation.

On September 8, the Wikimedia Foundation announced the first round of grantees for the Knowledge Equity Fund, a pilot program created by the Wikimedia Foundation in June 2020 to address the barriers to free knowledge experienced by Black, Indigenous, and communities of color around the world. The Equity Fund is a new approach to support external organizations that are working at the intersection of racial equity and free knowledge in ways to increase access to knowledge for all.

In order to achieve the movement’s vision of a world in which all people can freely participate in the sum of all knowledge, we must work towards knowledge equity, one of the two core pillars of the movement’s strategic direction. Knowledge equity is about welcoming the knowledge and communities that have been excluded by historical structures of power and privilege, structures that are often directly connected to systems of racial oppression.

However, the work of addressing racial injustice is not something that our movement alone can solve. Our projects can only do so much when, for example, academic and mass media representation of marginalized communities remains insufficient, which in turn limits citations and primary sources for us to build from. The Equity Fund will help us to build a robust ecosystem of free knowledge partners working to address the barriers to knowledge equity.

The Equity Fund complements existing grants programs such as the new grants funding strategy. With this new strategy, Wikimedia Community Funds are available for individual volunteers and affiliates within our movement in a variety of areas. The Wikimedia Foundation also provides grants for external organizations that have a direct tie to our movement and are working to support underrepresented communities under the Wikimedia Alliances Fund. The Equity Fund will target organizations that are working towards racial equity but who are not yet working directly with the free knowledge movement.

In order to identify grantee organizations, we assembled a Committee of Wikimedia Foundation staff and community members to manage the fund. Over the past several months, the Committee has been meeting weekly to define the scope of the Equity Fund, ensure that the work will be representative of the global nature of our movement, and discuss and select potential grantees for our first round of funding. Each grantee was required to align to one or more of five areas of focus that were identified as areas that are most beneficial to the larger ecosystem of open knowledge.

Today, we are announcing the inaugural round of grants from the Equity Fund. We have chosen six grantees across the Middle East, Africa, and North and South America that focus on issues of access, education, and equity within the regions they support. Each grantee supports an established organization with a track record of success in their field. Each is also new to the Wikimedia movement, and we are excited by the prospects of closer collaboration with groups throughout the free knowledge movement.

These grantees are:

Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism: The Arab Reporters in Journalism (ARIJ) is a nonprofit investigative journalism organization based in Jordan. ARIJ has built an expansive network of journalists across the Middle East and North Africa and has supported over 650 investigative projects on topics ranging from threats to freedom of expression, to systemic patterns of bias and discrimination. This grant will support ARIJ’s continued work in training and coaching media on how to report on issues of equity and institutional accountability, with dedicated workshops that tackle the skills, tools, and knowledge required for Arab journalists to address racial inequity in the region. Through their work, ARIJ will continue to grow the breadth of investigative journalism about inequity throughout the Arab World based on journalistic principles of facts, research, and multiple sources.
Borealis Racial Equity in Journalism Fund: Borealis is a philanthropic intermediary that takes a community-led approach to addressing injustices and driving transformative change across the United States. This grant will be provided to their Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, which invests in local news organizations led by people of color that have built long-standing relationships and trust with the diverse communities they serve. With this investment, Borealis will invest in local community-based journalism with a focus on improving how communities of color are represented and reported on throughout the media. Through this work, they will increase the amount of citable articles about leaders of color and community issues and further knowledge equity.
Howard University and the Institute of Intellectual Property and Social Justice: The Institute of Intellectual Property and Social Justice (IIPSJ) is a nonprofit organization that was established to promote social justice in the field of intellectual property law. IIPSJ is led by professors from and graduates of the Howard University School of Law (HUSL), the oldest historically black college or university law school in the United States and a leading institution in civil rights and social justice advocacy. IIPSJ advocates for equity and inclusion throughout the intellectual property (IP) ecosystem, including shaping IP law, policies, and initiatives to promote awareness of IP protections and possibilities among communities of color. With this grant, IIPSJ will create a two-year fellowship at HUSL led by a Wikimedia Race and Knowledge Equity Fellow to explore how systemic racism and injustice impacts how marginalized communities can participate in free knowledge (including in the intellectual property ecosystem), recommendations to address these gaps in knowledge, and how knowledge can be used to advance racial equity and empowerment.
InternetLab: InternetLab is a nonprofit think tank focused on internet policy and research around critical digital issues of inclusivity and equal rights, based in São Paulo, Brazil. With this grant, InternetLab will create a two-year fellowship led by a Wikimedia Race and Knowledge Equity Fellow that will produce scholarly writings and publications, as well as educational programming on the intersection between racial equity and free knowledge in Brazil. The Fellow will conduct research on topics including what barriers impact the participation of Black and Indigenous peoples in online knowledge, and identify national and local policy solutions across the fields of intellectual property, access to technologies, education and research, affirmative action, funding and incentives, among others. This fellowship will expand the available research about how racial inequity has impacted communities of color in Brazil.
Media Foundation for West Africa: The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) is a non-governmental organization dedicated to protecting and defending the right to freedom of expression, particularly for media and human rights defenders, throughout the 16 countries in West Africa. This grant will support the MFWA’s continued work to protect the public’s right to access information and advocacy for equitable policies throughout the region. MFWA will promote investigative journalism on issues of equity and injustice as part of their focus on freedom of expression and access to information. The grant will also support the organization’s press freedom and independent journalism advocacy to help build a favorable and enabling environment for in-depth investigative reporting that encourages transparency and accountability — the lack of which often result in injustices and marginalisation of the poor, underrepresented, and minority groups.
The SeRCH Foundation: The STEM en Route to Change Foundation (SeRCH Foundation) is a non-profit organization based in the United States that focuses on the intersection of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as a tool for social justice. This grant will be used to support their flagship program, #VanguardSTEM, which asserts the value of non-traditional knowledge alongside technical expertise and uses storytelling as a means of cultural production to amplify the contributions of Black, Indigenous, women of color and non-binary people of color in STEM fields. With this investment, #VanguardSTEM will grow their collection of featured BIPOC STEM creatives, adding multimedia to each profile to enhance the storytelling capacity. This collection of open and freely licensed audio, video, and written content about women and non-binary innovators and inventors of color will expand the repository of rich content in the Commons centering the experiences and expertise people of color in STEM and support non-traditional methods of storytelling.

Our work does not end with the selection of these grantees. We will be doing check-ins with each grantee over the course of the next 12 months to see how their work is progressing. Each grantee is expected to share their impact annually through a read-out of activities completed throughout the year. This will vary based on each grantee – for some, it may be producing original research and written materials; for others, it may be training journalists on addressing issues of racial equity and producing media focused on communities that have been underrepresented in traditional media sources.

Moving forward, the Equity Fund will provide one more round of grants in the Wikimedia Foundation’s fiscal year, likely in early 2022. Our plan is to identify, evaluate, and select these grantees among ideas from the Wikimedia movement, and we welcome recommendations through this form. (If you have already submitted suggestions, thank you!) We will be exploring options for new grantees over the next six months.

We will also be looking at the gaps we have in terms of capacity, awareness and skills on the Equity Fund Committee, and opening it up to additional community members to get involved working with the Committee on choosing future grantees. Our goal is to create a fund that is more participatory and more inclusive of the communities that we wish to impact with this work. We will be sharing more about ways to get involved with the Committee as we approach our next round of funding.

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26 September 2021 (all comments)

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Knowledge equity "around the world" actually means 3/6 of the grantees are American focused on American issues and a complete ignorance of the Indian subcontinent. This is obviously because America is the most important and worst country in the world. Also pretty much everyone in the Indian subcontinent is brown anyways right?? So they must all love each other and are basically the same why would there ever be equity gaps between different communities over there that need to be remediated? After all skin colour appears to be the overriding factor, given that in America it is the number one separator between communities it follows that the rest of the world also has that exact same issue. I hope the WMF in the future switches to spending all of their money on America, after all, how else are they supposed to get street cred at their San Francisco parties? Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 03:26, 27 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I do understand what you are trying to say and I do agree as an Indian, but it sounds (reads?) like you are ranting instead of calmly explaining your point (but then again your mood is understandable given that it's been years). Tube·of·Light 04:01, 27 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

While I sympathize with Chess that much of what the WMF does these days plays very well in "woke" virtue signaling circles (the blurb for SeRCH Foundation checks all the boxes a San Fran PR person could ever dream of), I'm willing to give the organisation some of the benefit of the doubt here. The favoring of US organizations probably emanates some from practical concerns; the US nonprofit community talks to each other and there are interlocking boards of directors and staff connections, so making those grants was probably relatively easy, not to mention the WMF and Wikipedia have higher standing in the US (both at a common social level and among the media and professional nonprofit sector) relative to some other places in the world. That said, I think it is totally appropriate to push for more grants to different organizations and initiatives around the world, the foundation certainly has the money for it! I for one am excited about the grants to the Arab & West African investigative journalism centers. And on the whole, the end goal of these grants should be to produce more reliable secondary sources that can be used to build Wikipedia articles about undercovered subjects. I think that is cause for celebration! I hope the WMF will make sure of that. Chess' criticism of the focus on racial matters is fair enough in the sense that the WMF is tackling something from a very US point of view. Race and the challenges it can present vary across the world, and it many places it is eclipsed by more pressing social categories and concerns. -Indy beetle (talk) 10:42, 27 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure I understand the sarcastic part of skin colour appears to be the overriding factor ... it follows that the rest of the world also has that exact same issue given that, from the experience of people I know, across Asia and Africa there is often more overt colourism than in America, whether that manifests as a small amount of white people in the country experiencing immense privilege (South Africa) or discrimination against darker-skinned people in a country of more homogeneous race (India, Jamaica). I might say it's internalised prejudice as a consequence of European colonialism, but regardless of the cause, I have to say that Black, Indigenous, and communities of color around the world seem like a good focus for the WMF globally. — Bilorv (talk) 16:57, 29 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Non-transparent process

The way this fund came about was highly irregular. $5 million were diverted to non-WMF ends at some point during the 2019/2020 financial year. This decision was taken without community involvement, bypassed all the usual grants processes, and only became public months later, when the audited financial statements were published. See discussion on Meta for further details (including a little more info on the grantees): meta:Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund. --Andreas JN 466 20:29, 27 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I concur. While all projects seem like worthy causes, I am concerned that many do not seem to have much connection to the Wikimedia movement. Who approved this? Community or just the board? Ping User:Pundit, maybe you can answer my question? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:10, 3 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Me too. I'm puzzled that the Foundation would fund these outside groups before even acknowledging the obvious & growing need for resources to write articles. Which, IIRC is what draws people to Wikipedia & our related projects.
Over the years I've had to use my own money to obtain books, articles, & more recently interlibrary loan materials. Which has blocked be from writing any number of articles. Meanwhile, the Foundation grants process appears aimed at every conceivable needs except enabling access to information. You want to have an Edit-thon? The Foundation will buy you pizza & drinks, no problem. You need an expensive book to write a series of articles? There is no hint the Foundation will even consider the request. -- llywrch (talk) 19:25, 4 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- @Llywrch and Jayen466: The discussion here seems stalled, but I think we need to continue it somewhere. Village pump, anyone? Or meta? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:10, 21 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  - Piotrus, it's stalled on Meta as well. If you'd like to raise community awareness of the equity fund and related issues, beyond the individuals who have commented on Meta and Wikimedia-l to date, one of the busier Village Pump sections probably makes the most sense at this point.
  - llywrch, I feel you ... much the same sentiments here. However, the WMF and/or affiliates do occasionally approve microgrants for expensive books. Here is an example: https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Microgrants/KFC And you're probably aware of the Wikipedia Library, the offer of free JSTOR subscriptions etc. It's not nothing, though it all seemed "little and late", almost like an afterthought, when one might have thought it would have been one of the first things to come to mind. Best, --Andreas JN 466 13:42, 21 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    @Jayen466 Can you link the meta discussion?
    @Llywrch Are you aware of Z-library? Great resource. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:49, 23 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    Piotrus: See meta:Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund Best, --Andreas JN 466 14:19, 23 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    Jayen466, Thank you. I posted some questions there. I am in general quite pro-WMF, but this strikes me as a terrible idea that was very badly executed. I don't wan to say "corruption", but this is far from "best practices". Frankly, what it looks to me would be plainly described as "irresponsible waste of money" tied to some very bad "mission creep", and WMF should apologize, perhaps fire whoever was responsible for this, and introduce regulations that community money is not wasted like this. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:30, 24 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    Piotrus, great. It will be good to have a bit more discussion. However, note that in one of her earlier replies Nadee Gunasena clarified that there was no open call for applications, and in fact no organisations submitted any grant applications. The entire process was driven by WMF staff, who invited two community members to join them on the EF committee. As for diverting funds away from the Wikimedia Community, you might find this mailing list post from Guillaume Paumier (Principal Program Manager, WMF Advancement) of interest: [1] The way I understand his post, Wikipedia is to serve as a cash cow, with a medium-term goal of having it bring in as much as a billion dollars per year (the goal for next year is $150M, up from $108M), most of which will go to initiatives outside the Wikimedia universe. Would you agree that's a reasonable inference? --Andreas JN 466 11:50, 24 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    @Jayen466 This is... not the direction for the WMF that I support. Not unless we really exhaust options for spending funds to improve Wikimedia community (and software). Which, IMHO, we are still far from. This needs a major community review. Will you start an RfC in the Village Pump? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 15:10, 24 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    Piotrus I'd be happy to see and contribute to any further discussion of this topic, but I don't think I should be the person starting a Request for Comment process on the Village Pump. I've already written about this off-wiki, on the mailing list and on Meta ... it becomes counterproductive (not to mention exhausting ...) if it's "always the same guy" banging on about this. Actually, from the WMF's point of view, I believe this is all part and parcel of the 2030 Strategic Direction, and it's taken as read that this expresses the will of the community, or the "Wikimedia Movement" as a whole. Best, --Andreas JN 466 15:44, 24 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    A number of people have questioned the amount of money the Foundation raises besides Andreas, but these discussions have never coalesced into any grass-roots action because, like the RfA process, no one has come up with a workable proposal to address the issue. But unlike the RfA process, for the average volunteer it's easy to overlook or ignore the Foundation's pile of cash & how it is harming the projects: we don't see the money, so we don't think about it.
    IMHO, one reason the Foundation keeps raising more money is the inherent structure of the fundraising department. In order to keep their jobs &/or receive money, the fundraisers must raise more money this year than last, despite the fact the Foundation has no need of more money. Then faced with this excess money -- which can't be distributed to the volunteer base for numerous reasons (some reasonable, some not, & which I won't go into here) -- the response of Foundation management is to use these excess funds to hire more employees, which encourages empire-building inside the Foundation. (As well as dubious activities as "re-branding" the Foundation.) Which all would agree is not a healthy path to take. -- llywrch (talk) 17:01, 25 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    @Llywrch I think it's totally fine for WMF to raise funds, the more the better, since I see plenty of ways in which such funds can be spend. To just name one example that I suggested in my peer reviewed research about Wikipedia, WMF should hire therapists/mediators/etc. who would carry out an active outreach targeted at volunteers who have been burning out. They could also fund more physical awards (clothing, plaques, etc.) that could be given out to prolific volunteers. Etc. There's plenty of ways to spend $$$ on the community before we have the need to disperse it among random social justice projects, which while in general commendable have little to do with Wikimedia. The goal of WMF is to make the world better through improving Wikimedia projects, not by becoming some fort of disbursement funds for random other NGOS. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:55, 27 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    @Piotrus: I'm not opposed to the WMF raising funds to provide services to the volunteer communities. That is a big unmet need, & here we are in agreement -- especially on your examples. But what I've seen is that (1) the fundraising group increases the amount they take in without any idea what the money will be used for (IMHO, they raise more money to justify raises in their pay); (2) all of the projects more or less muddle on without receiving services from the Foundation other than hardware/software support (at least in the short term); (3) it is difficult for Foundation employees to identify how which services they should provide without encountering legal issues (most notably section 230); thus (4) the extra money ends up spent on internal Foundation stuff (e.g. more pay, more headcount, re-branding, donations to outside groups).
    I believe that, in the short term, the Foundation needs to put a cap on their fundraising, perhaps even cut back on staff, until they find a way to constructively engage with the volunteer communities, thus knowing exactly what needs to be done to (if I may quote you) "make the world better through improving Wikimedia projects". -- llywrch (talk) 16:10, 27 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for that link, very informative. -Indy beetle (talk) 01:25, 28 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Draft RfC

I don't mind being the person to start a WP:VP RfC about this. Below is my short draft, please let me know if anyone has any remarks/comments, I'll review them before starting the RfC in a few more days (maybe I got some of my facts wrong, which would be good to catch before RfC starts...). Ping editors involved in the discussion here and on meta: @Llywrch, Jayen466, Pundit, Yair rand, Nemo bis, and ThurnerRupert:. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:20, 27 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, User:Piotrus. I've made some copyedits below, in particular integrating what transpired in the WMF responses in the Meta discussion (i.e. that none of the grantees applied, so there were none that were rejected, etc., as outlined in this reply on Meta). I will also ping User:Theklan who I believe might also be interested in this topic. Best, --Andreas JN 466 17:30, 27 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Draft 1:

Recently the Signpost published an article (Welcome to the first grantees of the Knowledge Equity Fund) about the WMF's pilot program, the meta:Knowledge Equity Fund, in which the WMF disbursed some funds (~1M USD total) to several grantee NGOs. This was done with what I and some others ([2]) believe may be insufficient transparency and oversight, coupled with mission creep, i.e. 1) there was no open competition for the funds; 2) their recipients were chosen based on unclear criteria in a non-public discussion by WMF staffers - no scoring criteria were published; and 3) the chosen recipients are both unlikely and in fact not required at all to produce any tangible benefits for our community - there is no indication that any of the grantees will produce content usable on Wikimedia projects (be it Wikipedia articles, images or other media, code, or whatever). Please note that I am speaking as someone who in the past and even now is still pro-WMF in general, but from where I am sitting this looks like a few WMF staffers and two arbitrarily chosen volunteers constituting the Equity Fund Committee decided to give away over a million dollars (with at least three more earmarked for further rounds) that people donated to Wikimedia to a few random organizations with zero oversight involved. This is a far cry from any best practices I can imagine (it seems extremely unprofessional and even corruption-prone) and should lead to both tightening the oversight on how WMF money is spent to avoid any malpractices, as well as cutting down on mission creep (WMF goal is to make the world better through improving Wikimedia projects, not by becoming some sort of disbursement fund for random other NGOs). --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:20, 27 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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