The external research firm Lafayette Practice has declared that the Wikimedia Foundation is the "largest known participatory grantmaking fund," but several concerns have been raised with their report, the phrase being used (participatory grantmaking), the now-former Wikipedia article on that phrase, and an alleged conflict of interest by WMF staff members.
On February 19 the WMF's blog extolled the release of a new study by the Lafayette Practice, a France-based five-person team of philanthropy advisors. The partners describe themselves as "spanning 50 years of deeply engaged experience solving the complex problems that foundations and nonprofit organizations encounter." This report, funded and commissioned by the WMF, grandly noted that it is by far the largest participatory grantmaker in the world. As defined by the blog post, participatory grantmaking attempts to "include representatives from the population that the funding will serve in the grantmaking process and in decisions about how funds are allocated."
Shortly after the blog post was published, Gregory Kohs, a long-time Wikimedia critic, published an article on Examiner.com alleging misconduct on the part of WMF staffers, specifically regarding Wikipedia's conflict of interest guideline. Kohs, founder and owner of MyWikiBiz, is a banned Wikipedia editor and was a candidate in the 2009 WMF Board of Trustees election. He alleged that the WMF hired Lafayette, which he believes has "basically adopted the phrase 'participatory grantmaking' as a proprietary discussion point," and paid the research firm to declare the WMF as the "winner of sorts in the category it was hired to investigate."
This may be correct, in part: while the term "participatory grantmaking" was certainly used by others before Lafayette, very few besides Lafayette and the WMF use it. Google search results reveal more than half of all mentions presently found online are related to Lafayette and/or Wikimedia.
Kohs stated that based on his analysis of the page history of the Wikipedia article on participatory grantmaking, almost all of the page had been authored by a WMF staffer, Asaf Bartov. Bartov created the page on July 16, 2014 with Ijon, his volunteer username and an account he has been editing with since 2003; he came to the WMF in February 2011 through the Hebrew Wikipedia and Wikimedia Israel. He is now the head of WMF Project and Event Grants.
Two other Wikipedia editors whose user pages identified them as WMF staffers, Jessie Wild and the pseudonymous Opinenow, contributed minor edits to the article that day and the next, respectively; Opinenow returned to the article on July 23 for some further copyedits. Both Opinenow and Katy Love, the author of the Wikimedia blog post, edited the article’s talk page from July 23 through August 25, 2014, listing other grantmakers including the Wikimedia Foundation.
One day after the blog post was published, most likely in response to the criticism, the WMF added a disclaimer to its piece. In part, it stated that "the Wikipedia article on Participatory Grantmaking was written in part [Editor's note: this was later changed to "primarily."] by Wikimedia Foundation staff in their capacity as Wikimedia volunteer editors. This was done on their own time, using their personal editor accounts." Kohs questioned the validity of this statement and further accused Bartov of deliberately neglecting to declare the conflict of interest between the WMF and the Lafayette Practice.
Using the article's edit history, Kohs noted that given a "typical Wednesday workday," Bartov would have edited at 10:25am, 1:00pm, 1:09pm and 1:39pm (Pacific Time/San Francisco). He charged that "the substantial amount of content he ... created is highly unlikely to have been produced only on personal break time."
So, in short, Kohs alleges that there are two separate but related problems within the WMF's transactions with the Lafayette Group. First and foremost, the report's questionable metrics raise questions as to the expectations set down by the WMF. Second, did Bartov create a Wikipedia article with an intent to promote WMF goals on participatory grantmaking, the term popularized and most used by Lafayette?
| “ | My goal was not to promote WMF's practice, or even the general practice, but to document it, in a fair and NPOV way. I still think I achieved that. Indeed, I would welcome concrete criticism of the article text I composed. | ” |
| — Asaf Bartov, speaking about the now-deleted Wikipedia article on participatory grantmaking | ||
Based on Signpost's inquiries, Kohs's assumption that Bartov created the article at his WMF desk was erroneous, as Bartov created the Wikipedia article while he was in New York City attending the 2014 International Human Rights Funders Group conference, held on July 15 and 16. Both Katherine Maher, the WMF's chief communications officer, and Bartov told us so, and we were able to independently confirm this. The conference was Bartov's first chance to attend a professional grantmaking forum in his then-new position as Head of WMF Project and Event Grants, and he took note of Lafayette's presentation of Who Decides? How Participatory Granting Benefits Donors, Communities, and Movements—their initial exploration of participatory grantmaking, created in April 2014 without funding or input from the WMF. He thought that the WMF's grantmaking structure had "interesting parallels" with funders in the human rights space, or what was described in the Lafayette report. On finding that the English Wikipedia had no article on the topic, he composed the majority of the article in his hotel room that night and saved it the next afternoon, Eastern time.
It is unclear whether the WMF had already contracted with the Lafayette Practice at this time. With recent changes within the WMF's grantmaking department's structure, Maher was not able to provide an exact date of when the WMF commissioned Lafayette to write the report. Publicly available information indicates that it was sometime before the London Wikimania conference in August 2014, where the research group presented Who Decides? again and interviewed eight WMF staffers: the earliest edit mentioning Lafayette came on July 22, when Alex Wang, the WMF's Project and Event Grants Program Officer, added them to the Wikimania schedule. Lafayette followed this with a tweet on July 28. These are mere days after Bartov created the participatory grantmaking article on July 16.
Given all of this, we directly asked Bartov about the possibility of a conflict of interest, both in regards to the WMF–Lafayette relationship and within the WMF itself. He told us that he was not aware of any relationship—potential or real—between the two organizations at the time he wrote the article. Had this been otherwise, he wrote in no uncertain terms that he "would not have created the article at the time, given its strong dependence on [Lafayette's] first report as a source." Furthermore, he did not edit the article at any time after being interviewed by Lafayette in London at Wikimania.
On the potential for an internal conflict of interest within the WMF itself, he wrote that he was aware of a potential for breaching the conflict of interest policy and therefore avoided mentioning the organization in his article.
| “ | I would welcome concrete criticism of the article text I composed; I note Kohs did not actually claim the article failed to discuss its subject in a neutral way. I took care that from the very first revision the article did not present the practice as an unalloyed good, stressing that the benefits (largely drawn from [Lafayette's] report) are perceived (i.e. by the practitioners), and including shortcomings and challenges. … I wrote the article entirely of my own volition [and was] neither instructed to by, nor discussing my intention with, anyone else before I posted it directly to mainspace. | ” |
From the WMF, Maher strongly rejected the notion that there was a conflict of interest in this case; in their view, WMF staffers—in their personal capacities, with the goals of Wikipedia in mind—contributed to the article and were never directed to do so by their supervisors or anyone else.
Kohs wrote "You may never have heard of this phrase, participatory grantmaking, because (according to Google Books and Google Scholar) prior to about 2009, the phrase had never been written in any book or any academic paper." Despite having many traits of a trendy, in-vogue neologism, the base concepts of "participatory grantmaking"—which was only used as a single term starting after 2008—have been around for several decades under a myriad of different terms. The concept has roots in participatory budgeting, which started as an experiment in Porto Alegre, Brazil in the 1980s and has since spread to Asia, Europe, and North America. Lafayette points to the 1970s formation of the Funding Exchange, which "worked to provide long-term institutional support for grassroots social justice [and] movement-building work" in the United States until it shut down in 2013. Entities that have used "participatory grantmaking" itself include Harvard University, the Overbrook Foundation, and the Center for Effective Philanthropy. These go back to at least 2010, and the WMF has been using the term to describe its approach to grantmaking since at least May 2013—well before the two reports authored by Lafayette.
All that being said, there is cause for concern with Lafayette's definition of "participatory grantmaking." In their recent report on the WMF, they declare that it is the "largest known participatory grantmaking fund" based purely on the sample it created last year, which contains a total of eight non-profit organizations. For a neologism with such a wide scope, it is inevitable that a plethora of similar grantmaking models have been missed. For example, as noted by Wikipediocracy, the Colorado Trust disbursed $13.9 million in 2013. The WMF, in comparison, disbursed less than $6 million in its 2013/2014 financial year.
On the relationship between the WMF and Lafayette, Maher wrote that they hired the firm based on a Lafayette Practice report released in April 2014. The document, Who Decides?, was used as the main source in Bartov's Wikipedia article and did not have any WMF involvement. She also discounted Kohs' central assertion, that "the Lafayette Practice 'owns' the trade term 'participatory grantmaking', and the Wikimedia Foundation solidified the consultant's lock on that term by authoring a Wikipedia article about it":
| “ | The Lafayette Practice may have written the source that is most easily discoverable online at the moment, but they did not develop the concept. Adoption of the term 'Participatory Grantmaking' may be relatively recent among the philanthropic community, but the concept is well-established. | ” |
The Lafayette Practice did not respond to a Signpost inquiry by press time. The article on participatory grantmaking was nominated for deletion on February 25 and deleted less than 24 hours later per the "snow" clause.
Discuss this story
I haven't read the Lafayette report properly, but it looks as though they weren't given a tight brief for critically focusing on the weaknesses and opportunities for improving outcomes of the WMF's grantmaking schemes. [Disclosure: I regularly review PEG applications at Meta.] Tony (talk) 06:26, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
To avoid this pitfall one might search for other works on the field (which the firm's 12014 paper avers has "proliferated over the past several decades") that do not use the same terminology. Failing that (supposing the same paper is correct that "there has been little research or documentation"), one might look for an existing article on a broader topic that encompasses the subject, to which some brief notes about this aspect might be added. Otherwise the article is prone to be so narrowly focused on one firm's view that neutrality is elusive. A narrow frame is always an attractive place to hang coats.
[Thanks to The ed et al. for a fascinating report.] ~ Ningauble (talk) 18:03, 3 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]