Page:Funding Free Knowledge the Wiki Way - Wikimedia Foundation Participatory Grantmaking.pdf/19

 WMF also demonstrates systemic commitment to evaluation of their own experiments and innovations, maintaining a culture of self-assessment, critical thinking, and knowledge sharing within the Wikimedia movement. The Foundation's Learning and Evaluation team uses both quantitative and qualitative research to measure the outcomes and impacts of grant-funded projects, reporting findings back to proposal applicants, committee members, staff, and the larger community.

Transparency and Accountability

Peer Review, Participatory Grantmaking, is important because it is accountability and transparency, totally in alignment with the Wikimeclia values. It's how a Wikipeclia article gets macle: everyone looks at it and strolls by and tells you whether it's right or wrong. It's a collaborative process of creating—"the Wiki Way."

— Anasuya Sengupta, Senior Director of Grantmaking

With participation by a large number of people with diverse experiences, Participatory Grantmaking requires a shared understanding and clarity about all parts of the process, which in turn necessitates transparency, accessibility, and authenticity.

At Wikimedia Foundation, the core value of transparency is demonstrated everywhere from the mission of encouraging development of free-content educational resources, to the wiki's opensource infrastructure, to the publicly available documentation of many internal WMF decisionmaking bodies." So, too, are all grantmaking decisions deliberated and documented publicly, with mechanisms for discussing or appealing a decision that is perceived as unfair.

In our conversations with "Who Decides" interviewees, as in our conversations with WM F, transparency correlated to accountability. Respondents spoke about perceived fears that committee members would vote in their own interests, for example prioritizing groups in their own country above other applicants. Asaf Bartov shares that, "Unlike a lot of traditional grantmaking, there are significant ways in which the wider community has visibility, and therefore potentially accountability and oversight, on what gets done. We absolutely appreciate and depend on the fact that we have volunteers paying attention to what we fund."

Volunteer funding committees and open comment/feedback processes are core functions of that accountability. And the process is complex - committee members and all who give input on the ideas are not only keeping the funding accountable and responsive to the wisdom of the movement, but also serve a dynamic function of filtering the learning from the committee work back out to the

45 https://wikimediafoundation.org/wikiNalues