I came back from Wikimania 2019 and worked on various grant applications till now, 30 August 2019. I have been writing grant proposals and doing documentation for grant reporting. I have communication commitments in several active or proposed projects right now – the Wikimedia Foundation, Sloan, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Wellcome Trust, Newmark, Knight, some companies, and then pieces of grants which other people have more leadership role but where I am receiving significant benefit, usually aligning results for my own projects. In the past sometimes I worked on grants and sometimes I did other things. Lately I mostly do administration of grant funded pilot projects, and as I look around, I am seeing that here and now lots of organizations have a sudden and unusual convergence in what I do and know.
I have been engaged to the grants sector since 2012 when I went deep into Wikimedia community organization. Even before that I was in the nonprofit sector organizing other projects. I volunteered with Seattle Hempfest when I was younger (2002-11?) and did things which required reporting to sponsors, I did a stream of community outreach activities including Wikipedia editing with Jeff Fairhall and Theo Chocolate from 2004-6, I was an administrator for the Universal Life Church in 2005-6 where we made promises to sponsors and also funded beyond the organization, I did grant funded medical research in 2007-9, and engaged with lots of science outreach in Seattle typically for biotech and most notably with the Open Science Federation (now existing as @openscience on Twitter) from 2009-12. I still do projects with the HIV Vaccine Trials Network as I have since 2007. Somehow in the mix of all these things I knew that grants were coming in and other funding was going out, but I was not entirely conscious of grantmaking as a social convention. I still have not sorted my thoughts but in retrospect I most of my attention is in the grant-designed environment.
In the Wikimedia community I probably has as much experience in their grants process as anyone else, especially in the context of non-professional small grant requests. The bigger chapters which request several hundred thousand dollars yearly have background which I have never had and professional staffing for this which I have not used in the Wikimedia context. Most of my involvement has either been in small grants, several thousand dollars for events; or medium sized grants up to one hundred thousand dollars for a group to do annual administration of small projects.
Now at the Data Science Institute I am seeing my new and peculiar expertise. Here I can do good projects at the intersection of Wikipedia, community participation, data science education, research advancement, institutional development, and building out the digital public commons. Wikipedia is a nice brand name to drop in grant applications. Wikipedia is well loved and is excellent for accomplishing a mix of useful miracles which funders want. My biggest challenge with Wikipedia is showing the documentation and evidence of its accomplishments, because in competition, Wikipedia can advance communication, research, community ties, and every part of education quickly and inexpensively. I have challenges getting funders to believe this though.
I still join community outreach events. I do some related to wiki, and am joining my colleagues Jon and Felipe in their Code for America groups and the Center for Civic Innovation meetups. Any of us can do community outreach alone, but having a second similar group doing events makes for great collaboration. Having three of us all in sync targeting variations of what the others do is amazing synergy, as any program that one of us runs benefits the others, and collectively we have steady and frequently available community events to support anyone who wants to engage in free and open projects.
I am fortunate to have been editing Wikidata when there is a social trend to make data analysis so much more accessible. Every part of Wikipedia seems ready for integration with digital automation, so whatever interest anyone has in data science either for developing technique or advancing knowledge in a field, there is a Wikipedia application which is easy to propose. Furthermore whatever I propose with Wikipedia is not only a local experiment for people nearby, but is online and has relevance to everyone everywhere. Students like Wikipedia, but developing Wikidata in general fits in better for intense student engagement and their educational goals than editing Wikipedia.
I have been surprised to find just how many features of Wikipedia are competitive against professional alternatives. The best example that I can give of this is the Scholia project, which has 20 killer app functions which make it worthwhile for use. Scholia admittedly has some hard limitations, but by design and if it could perform more consistently on the backend, then it would be a marketplace leader for many functions in many large institutions globally. For universities the key feature is Scholia’s ability to track the publishing accomplishments of faculty and staff, visualize the sorting of all projects in many dimensions, and showcase individuals, departments, and the school at its best. Universities have trouble with their own basic data sorting, and analyzing it, and presenting all this information, and Scholia can almost do all of this right now. We are fortunate that our biggest problem is lack of a small amount of money for backend development, because when money is the major problem but the culture and community is there, the circumstance seems so hopeful.
And the community is so hopeful, and believes so much in this idea of free and open media! When we have places to meet and access to data and expertise, we are able to organize such fun projects to accomplish things as a group which fulfill wishes for other projects. Even larger organizations like companies and university departments often have wishes for project development but hiring dedicated staff to run the projects could be expensive and inefficient, whereas organizing a pilot with some staff community organizers and making a fun social event for community participation produces such better outcomes, at lower cost, and with much more sense of fulfillment for everyone who participates.
When I have gotten funding it is almost always to run pilots. The general circumstance is that I propose some outlandish miracle of modern technology and say that I can organize lots of people to do things which are otherwise impossible outside of meeting in virtual spaces where everyone can produce digital media. To get to this point some of the most challenging insight to acquire was an understanding of the performance limits of many professional fields of practice with regard to their capacity to manage publishing and access to media. As I came to understand more of what others do, I could compare the capabilities of Wikipedia features, and make proposals where Wikipedia could answer someone’s existing problems.
To do a pilot project one typically has to produce a moderately functional system which it would take 10 people to develop, and where instead 2-3 part time contributors and a community of users produce a minimum viable product. In product design the most challenging part of development is getting confirmation that there are enough users who will contribute their attention, engagement, resources, and support to making the product a success. If the use case is correct and people actually want the product, then other details are easier to sort. Wikipedia provides some great support for produce development, including a code of ethics, community base of users, global access to diverse audiences, and integration with a hive of activity. Technical development is often a matter of securing funding assuming that a product idea is even worthwhile. The pilot is supposed to demonstrate that the culture, values, engagement, and feasibility is in place, and the pilot clears the way to establish the new product as part of the environment and normal way of doing things.
Pilots are exciting for me because the projects change frequently, and pilots make lots of people happy because they frequently give a small boost to many other projects. When people join a pilot they put in some of their own resources, which gives them an opportunity to both demonstrate their generosity and invest in making a difference, plus they get the benefit of credit and access to publicly shared resources worth much more than their personal contribution. I find the highly positive, continually collaborative and complementary nature of pilot management in Wikipedia to be fun and encouraging. I enjoy developing projects in this space.
Projects which I do now which I would call pilots are Scholia, Wikicite, the Wiki Education Foundation university product suite, the Wikimedian in Residence role model, AI for archival topic tagging, automated moderation, Internet in a Box, infoboxes, event management in Wikipedia, language translation at scale for general reference information, and introductory courses for learning data science. As I list all these things, I realize that I am lacking landing pages which demonstrate what I do in all these projects. I feel like I document continually and still fall behind, and am storing so much information in my head which is unsustainable.
Sometimes I feel anxious to balance all of these things. In other roles, and when I see my colleagues, I sometimes see people who focus on fewer things and get to refine their contributions. When I think of myself for this time in my life, it is a lot of emotional investment and some stress for me to watch details on so many projects, but I enjoy it more this way. I also am very grateful to be able to work with so many passionate people who of course individually and collective accomplish so much that I could never do. In lots of ways I have the least talent of any of my collaborators. I feel especially modest in my technical skills, since practically everything I do requires software development and my ability in this is nearly zero. At the same time, I appreciate when people accept and use what I have to give, and I feel so fortunate to be in a situation where what I enjoy and what I do well are things which are useful enough to others for me to get paid doing them.