Title: When the communities speak for themselves - how bring knowledge equity into policy discussions and advocacy activities?
Speaker: Anna Mazgal, Lilli Iliev
Abstract: This workshop will showcase the process of defining the scope of a knowledge equity audit, questions we had and ways we opened up the process to look into unconscious bias and ensure that we don’t miss what we don’t see. We will involve participants into discussing lessons learned, offering feedback and jointly learning what it means to transform our movement to serve communities that experience systemic oppression in the knowledge and information ecosystem and distribute the privilege that we have in accessing the ways in changing the oppressive system.

The Wikimedia Movement 2030 Strategy takes knowledge equity as pivotal to its direction. After many iterations of discussions that resulted in defining knowledge equity and integrating it into our value set, many members of our communities ask questions about applying it in practice into their strategic work.

In our advocacy in Europe we are looking into evaluating opportunities and challenges in reshaping EU public policy work and practices around advocacy for knowledge equity impact in the EU. In order to do so, we are carrying out a comprehensive audit of our work identifying missed opportunities, blind spots and recommending necessary processes and capacities to align with the objective.

The audit focuses on the following questions:

• How can we truly be of service to a range of communities that don’t have the platform to advocate for themselves?
• How do we move from the frame to the action plan towards an equitable balance of power in the free knowledge ecosystem?
• How do we plan for impact and resources to follow the redistribution of power?

These questions are applicable to any change in our movement beyond policy and advocacy. Together we want to learn, exchange and inspire each other based on our and other examples of processes in the movement.
Presented at: Suntec Singapore Convention and Exhibition Centre, 2023-08-17 04:00 to 04:45 UTC