Funding utopia when you’re already a free knowledge utopia
Resource allocation within the Wikimedia movement
I’m the Director of Programmes at Wikimedia UK, a local chapter of the global Wikimedia movement. For the last year I’ve led an international ‘Resource Allocation’ working group, tasked to redefine the way money (and other resources) is given and received within the global Wikimedia movement.
Wikipedia is often pegged as a paragon of grassroots, participatory decision making — so it may be illuminating to explore the issues and process we’ve been grappling with.
What happens when your starting point is radical openness, transparency, participation in decision making and global collaboration?
These are all Wikimedia’s lived values. But 18 years in (yes, Wikipedia is older than secondary school graduates), we needed a rethink of our ‘product’, Wikipedia, to remain relevant to global, growing audiences. Our new strategic direction of knowledge equity called for new movement structures, as it became clear that what we’ve built organically over the years is actually entrenching existing power.
For example, in the context of funding: despite our commitment to participation and transparency, it can be incredibly hard for a newcomer to navigate (or even know of) the Wikimedia funding system. There are opaque pockets of power, and a dedicated, longstanding community, which can be suspicious to newcomers, anxious about changes and unhappy about shifts in its privileges.
And so we looked to redesign resource allocation (ie movement of funds within Wikimedia). My working group put forward recommendations for change within structures and culture, focusing on centering on people at the margins, equity driven by participation, and addressing existing privileges and barriers to participation. Knowledge equity for us meant that we are centering on people who have been traditionally left out of structures of power and privilege, and we wanted to design a funding model which reflects this commitment.
Below is the process that got us there.
1. Wikimedia movement — our starting place
Wikipedia is the free knowledge project, available in hundreds of languages, supplied by a range of parallel projects (e.g. data), and a global movement/community. Parts of the movement are organised, parts are not. It is often organically grown, and consists of a global body of individual volunteers, contributor, developer and organiser communities, expanding and emerging regional and thematic collaboratives as well as diverse range of movement organisations from smallest ‘user groups’ to biggest ‘chapters’ and the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikimedia Foundation is the nominal central place which collects much of the donations coming in (the fundraising banner you’ve probably seen), and distributes some of it across the world. However, the Foundation is not the designated central decision making space or a coordination centre for the whole movement — such place doesn’t really exist.
2. Wikimedia 2030 Strategy — impetus for reflection and change
When Wikipedia marked 15 years in 2016, we as a movement began to think about the future and what we want to build or achieve by 2030. Wikipedia is ubiquitous today, and our funding streams are solid, but this could change. We are also well aware of some of the deep-seated issues with Wikipedia’s content — for example a well publicised issue of gender gap.
We decided that to remain relevant and reach new communities, we need to have a global conversation about our future. Through a year-long, global process, we defined what Wikimedia will look like in 2030:
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. We, the Wikimedia contributors, communities, and organisations, will advance our world by collecting knowledge that fully represents human diversity, and by building the services and structures that enable others to do the same.
Representing human diversity means, for us, supporting ‘Knowledge equity’:
As a social movement, we will focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege. We will welcome people from every background to build strong and diverse communities. We will break down the social, political, and technical barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge.
3. Resource allocation strategy — the process
What does knowledge equity and knowledge as a service mean for allocating resources? To answer this question we established a Resource Allocation working group to facilitate discussion, research, and ultimately produce recommendations of how the movement should be structured in the future, and how the changes should be implemented. (Other working groups were established to tackle other aspects of our movement, such as Technology).
Each working group consisted of around eight to 15 people and features a mix of volunteers, Wikimedia staff, and Board members from different backgrounds and regions, with a diversity of viewpoints brought in by design.
4. Aspirations for Wikimedia resource allocation
Our remit was to build a new system from scratch, focusing on what we want to be in the future rather than the details we want to change in the present. We weren’t working in void, though — grantmaking has been happening in the movement for at least ten years, and there was a lot to reflect on.
For example, this is how the main grantmaking body of our movement, Wikimedia Foundation, was reflecting from its resource allocation experiences. For example:
Due to this reactive nature, while we have been able to shift some resources toward work that increases diversity in content, participation and leadership in our movement, the amount of resources shifted over all is marginal.
With this background in mind, our working group has been exploring the following aspects of allocating resources within the movement:
- Structures for resource allocation
- Decision-making and power
- Values and Principles (purpose)
- Communities that have been left out
- User/recipients
- Innovation
- Leveraging resources (sustainability)
- Impact (movement and society)
- Accountability
5. Working group recommendations —a recipe for change
As a starting point, we understood equity to be about Opportunities (e.g. access to systems and resources), Power (e.g. ability to make decisions about resources, ability to change culture) and Outcomes. By ‘resources’ we mean finances, but also staff time, capacities, data. The system we were designing was being constructed with funders, recipients, existing movement actors, and future potential participants.
Our group arrived at nine recommendations for change:
A. Set Common Framework of Principles for Resource Allocation
B. Design participatory decision making for Resource Allocation
C. Recognise privileges / Design for diversity
D. Distribute existing structures — build Regional hubs
E. Build Thematic hubs — to provide services to the free knowledge movement long term
F. Ensure flexible approach to resource allocation in a complex, fast moving and changeable space
G. Allocate resources for capacity and sustainability
H. Allocate resources to new types of partners/organisations
I. Include knowledge consumers
The key concepts we are championing throughout our recommendations are:
- Equity
- Participatory grantmaking
- Privilege
- Center
Our foundational starting point is: the right decision making process is key for driving equity. To achieve knowledge equity we need to design an equitable decision making process for resource allocation [Recommendation B].
Participatory grantmaking will put the right people in power and support self-determination. However, without addressing privileges and barriers to participation, we won’t be able to drive real change [Recommendation C]. A particular barrier to participation we hold important is lack of absorption capacity, and something that needs resources to develop [Recommendation G].
Power and privilege sits within, is protected and reinforced by a certain structure. If we are to shift power, there needs to be a different structure that supports it. We need to address the issue of the centre of power and its disempowering effect. For this, we need to redistribute/decentralise/deunify in terms of geography [Recommendation D] and functions [Recommendation E].
Two things inform how these structures should be created and run — flexibility and overarching principles. A lightweight structure is most appropriate in our fast-changing context [Recommendation F] and we must be careful against creating an inflexible, bureaucratic system. Instead, what will help us make decisions and provide a compass for a future direction is a set of overarching principles and values [Recommendation A].
Finally, we need to define who is included or affected by the structures and systems above. Wikimedia movement is nebulous and potentially porous — we make a point of including any entities working within the broad open knowledge movement in the resource allocation system [Recommendation H]. We also include knowledge consumers (e.g. Wikipedia readers, current and future), as the key stakeholder and ultimate reason for this movement’s existence [Recommendation I].
6. Reflections — under the bonnet of Wikimedia strategy
This process was new for the whole movement. My working groups is proud of its recommendations and firmly supportive of the new strategic directions — but the process was difficult. Here are some of the challenges we experienced:
- Wikimedia movement can be seen as a paragon of user participation. This is true in some ways, and our existing grantmaking practices do reflect many principles of user participation. However, we keep on being drawn back to the centre, control, top down accountability. In our recommendations, we struggled to let go of top-down control of grants. While we made deliberate efforts to get away from the current power structure with power centre in the North, we still take back to the centre as an overseeing and signing-off authority. We want to move to an accountability system that is co-created and cross-checked with all the hubs across the world — but it’s a significant mental leap for us.
- Our espoused value of knowledge equity urges us to bring in (to quote our strategic direction) people who have been left out. It’s been difficult to see how we could design for who’s not yet here, while holding up our value of self-determination. Wikimedians are knowledge driven and it’s hard to accept that there is something others know better than us. Further, the existing community cares deeply about the movement in its current shape and principles, so in fact there is limited flexibility to redesign and make space for others.
- Many of the original parts of the movement come from privileged contexts. The resources and positions we’ve been given have not really been stress tested. We are not used to difficult conversations about privilege, giving up space, doing internal work. This is hard — and somewhat unexpected––since we wouldn’t see ourselves as representatives of the global elite. For example, many communities in Europe are struggling with the concept of needing to give up their privilege, where they feel they only just got access to the movement resources.
- The movement loves consensus and it’s one of its key strengths but this makes any strategy decisions fiendishly difficult . If your constituency is the global Wikimedia movement, including people who are yet to join, how do you consult? Where does the decision mandate come from? Who decides in a process where we are radically redesigning the decision making structure and aiming to break up the ‘centre’?
We aren’t done yet. Next year will bring the start of the implementation phase, where the real hard work and conversations will need to happen. Wish us luck!
For more info
- Daria Cybulska — Director of Programmes and Evaluation, Wikimedia UK daria.cybulska@wikimedia.org.uk
- Explore Wikimedia’s the strategy process
- Resource Allocation recommendations in full
