Our Whose Knowledge? rivermap has flowed in new, known and exciting ways this year – with moments of pause, internal reflection and grounding, as well as bursts of growth and connection with our friends, allies, co-conspirators and communities. We invite you to reflect on our 2024 journey, and the ways we embody being an organization with a collective heart in increasingly fraught times.
Earlier this year, we held a team conversation about our community relationships, understandings and practices. We were deeply moved by bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hanh’s conversations about the role of love in cultivating and deepening our relationships with a growing Whose Knowledge? constellation of advisors, communities of practice and long-standing partners, and how that is reflected internally. Each year we are grateful for and humbled by the amazing communities we work with, for and alongside.
Towards a community of love
Our Liberatory Archives and Memory (LAMy) team has grown in leaps and bounds since last year, not least in the hiring of Ezrena Marwan who joined as co-lead. In 2024, we had the privilege of engaging in meaningful conversations and building relationships with memory workers and archivists from across the globe, particularly South Africa, India, Syria, Palestine, United States and the United Kingdom.
Through these connections, we’ve been inspired by the decolonial projects, liberatory practices and deep wisdom shared by our community. Their work continues to teach us, challenge us, and deepen our understanding of what it means to preserve and honour collective memory.
Solidarity is not a one time practice and is a vital part of our approach to being in community with, and supporting minoritized communities. Solidarity with queer Africans, in a year that has seen multiple threats to LGBTIQA+ bodies on the continent, is a key anchor for our Decolonizing Wikimedia team. Through our 2024 #VisibleWikiWomen theme of the year, Our Resistance is Plural: Feminist Solidarity, Liberation, and Peace, we continue to learn how to remain in solidarity with all the many feminists movements around the world who are witnessing genocide, exploitation, and many other forms of violence including the regression of our reproductive freedoms. We have also learned to make room for joy and rest as part of our resistance and restoration practice.
This year we had the honor and privilege of co-holding a Queer Africa Wiki edit-a-thon with HOLA Africa. Together with 25+ queer people in Johannesburg, we shared stories and experiences of being people who exist on the margins of power and knowledge; and joined in the collective joy and solidarity of decolonizing Wikipedia by learning, editing, uploading, and sharing rainbow cupcakes.
Related to this is our growing collaboration through community support pilots: this year we partnered with different community organizers in Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Tanzania, each with a unique idea towards our collective dream of decolonizing knowledge and the internet. And we are thrilled to see some of the results of these collaborations so far! This year alone, we, our partners and growing community of editors, have added over 5000 and counting images to Wikimedia Commons through our #VisibleWikiWomen campaign.
Our Radical Communications work has seen deep transformation this year, with the team landing plans which see us moving towards a communications practice that centres community through multi-modality, multilinguality and creativity. We’ve produced and supported new resources about Caste, Tech and Resistance, Cultural Genocide in Palestine (available in English and Arabic), a Whose Voices? podcast season on Decolonizing Structured Data (with a fun podcast listening party!), and in an effort to reach different communities, you can now find us on LinkedIn and Mastodon. Our publications work is also in full swing, with an upcoming title in the spirit of the anthology Defending Our Dreams (co-edited by Anasuya Sengupta and Shamillah Wilson) in the works. This new iteration offers meditations on hope through process work and collaboration with young feminist advisors from across the world, who are shaping and guiding the process.
Honouring (k)new spirals of practice
Our Honouring Our Guardians (HOG) and Language Justice (LJ) programs have been piloting and envisioning different ways of community contact, practice and support. Our HOG program lead, Naomi Simmonds has been stewarding and landing plans for what we call (k)new and known spirals of dreams for the next two years of the program. We are currently working on deepening our HOG network, including a children’s book project with learnings and reflections from our convening in Brazil last year, as well as connective conversations with Indigenous women. These conversations will center life and love in the broader context of climate and knowledge justice – understanding this as both embodied and emplaced but also potentially disembodied and displaced through online spaces and tech.
This year, our LJ program undertook an ambitious research-in-action aiming to understand and improve how people with visual impairments in South Asia navigate the internet, produce and enjoy content in languages of their choice. This effort explores the intersections of disability rights and language justice and is rooted in a community-led approach to research.
With the care and dedication of our program co-leads, our LJ work has also blossomed into a deeper partnership with our friends at DAIR Institute through an ISOC grant to develop a second research-in-action project that explores the features of community-led language technology making. We ask: how can communities own practice, power and outcomes for their peoples through their own tech-making processes? Keep an eye out for both those research findings which are set to be published next year.
Building a culture of care, resilience and hope
As political contexts across the world get more and more fraught, our work towards a liberatory internet created by, and for, minoritised communities (the Global Majority) becomes more and more important. Our internal practices have been sensitive to these shifts and have evolved as we, and the world, have.
One of the joys that these evolutions bring is to our resourcing. With gratitude, our Mellon grant is one way we are able to move forward anchored in hope, as is the hiring of two amazing Resource and Reparations co-leads, élysse marcellin and Cassie Denbow. With their guidance, we want to think about different ways of community-based approaches for resource mobilisation within a reparative framework. Our Radical Operations team has welcomed Bareya Khan to our collective as Operations Coordinator, and the last quarter of the year has been abuzz with settling into the culture and rhythms of Whose Knowledge?, and dreaming and planning for their roles in 2025.
Our commitment to care and rest as the anchor for our dreams is a practice held by our Salsa operational leadership team, and shared leadership is a question that we return to often, as we craft distributed strategies for growth and accountability. Co-leadership is one way of holding each other in increasingly difficult times, and the collaborative nature of co-leads is an important organisational design that facilitates ease and spaciousness, which is aligned with the broader idea of reparative and healing ways of being and working together. This year, we experimented with programmatic mini-retreats to support growth and strategic planning and are in the process of adding to our Board of Directors. If our goal of transforming the internet into a knowledge infrastructure that reflects the full richness and textures of human knowledges, languages, and ways of being and doing finds resonance with you, join us! Apply by January 13 2025.
Centering feminist tech’s radical possibilities at AWID
Finally, in a full circle moment for Whose Knowledge?, many of the members in our collective packed their bags for one of the largest gatherings of feminists in the world, the AWID Forum taking place in Thailand in December — eight years after our launch in the forum’s edition in Bahia, Brazil. We met up with Mexican Wikimedian and friend Carmen Alcázar, who was with us in Brazil, and who has been a friend and co-conspirator on our journey in the years since.
This time round, we celebrated feminist friendship and collaborations by co-holding three spaces and multiple conversations across the forum with our partners APC and Numun Fund (which we co-founded three years ago): our Feminist Tech Gardens and our #VisibleWikiWomxn photo booth. We were thrilled to create room for conversations about feminist technology, and its possibilities for autonomy and liberation, as well as sessions for co-conspirators from different regions to meet and connect on sessions from feminist data to feminist servers. Our #VisibleWikiWomxn photo booth had more feminists visiting it to have their photographs taken by Sirin Muangman – a wonderful Thai photographer – in a single day, than at any other event in the history of the campaign! Our Decolonizing Wikimedia team then held edit-a-thons in which we brought these images onto Wikimedia projects, almost in real time. Our Liberatory Archives and Memory team held sessions on anti-forgetfulness and feminist archiving, while our Organisational Design and Practices team with our Program Co-convenors held a critical session on radical operations, proving that many feel as we do: that how we do is as important as what we do.
While we celebrated the opportunity to connect in person once again, we also recognized the enormous grief, loss, and pain that brought us together at this moment, especially in challenging the industrial military complex and the place of Big Tech in upholding it. As Jac sm Kee, Whose Knowledge? advisor and co-founder of Numun Fund said at the end of the AWID Forum: “The way that technology has been threaded in this forum has been significantly different from all the previous forums I have been a part of. It’s a lot more central, a lot more present, and woven through a lot more conversations. And I think it is because we have moved away from this idea that technology is neutral, a double-edged sword you can wield either way – to critically questioning who made the master’s tool, that crafted the master’s house of digital colonialism, where six to 10 companies, in two countries, own and profit from almost all of the world’s technology platforms, data, hardware and core infrastructures.”
The AWID Forum underlined our work throughout this year in centering our communities and reimagining tech that is feminist, just and liberatory. Jac continued, saying “ […] it has never been more evident our struggles are interconnected, and how digital technology is an underpinning force across our justice struggles.” We honour the reflections that emerged at the Forum and beyond, and will bring highlights and further reflections in the months to come.
We carry the hope we have cultivated this year into the communities of love we grow within our Whose Knowledge? constellation. We will be taking our annual break from December 14 – January 6, and will meet you for new adventures in 2025!
