Empowering Italian GLAMs/Final report

Final report of the first phase of the project Empowering Italian GLAMs (2022-2024). The project has been co-funded by the Wikimedia Foundation and therefore this report follows its requested format.

Guide to complete the report

Purpose of the report

The new Wikimedia Funds strategy encourages a form of learning and evaluation through reporting that is intended to encourage in depth reflection on what was learned as a result of the processes and outcomes of your work. The focus is on documenting the learning in your reports, and then taking time to share and reflect together as thought partners - between Grantees, Foundation, and Regional Committees. Hopefully, reporting will serve as a tool for learning together, our goal is a collective and iterative learning and evaluation process that allows us all to tell a fuller story of your work and communicate it to others.

What might you be asking?

Q: But if the spaces are reduced, how am I going to express the full story of my work?

R: With a common set of questions and answer formats in the Fluxx portal, we aim to gather this learning and evaluation in a way that helps us categorise the information and aggregate data, both quantitative (the numbers) and qualitative (the descriptions/learning/perceptions, etc). We hope that this aggregated information is returned to you in a way that is useful, not only for reflecting on your work but also about grantees' work as regional and global collectives.

It is important to note that the reporting form, as with the application form:

provides multiple spaces to add additional documents in diverse formats (images, dashboards, documents, videos, etc). Add anything that helps complement the main body of the reporting.
will improve over time based on your feedback. This is an iterative process. We will be reflecting with you to see if this format requires any changes to better capture information and learning.

Q: How do numerical metrics support the focus on learning and metrics?

R: Quantitative data (the numbers) are important indicators to get a wider picture of some of the outcomes of grantee work. With a more structured registration and analysis of this data across all grantees, we can, for instance, aggregate metrics across regions, thematic issues, Wikimedia projects, types of organisations, and movement-wide tendencies. We hope that over time we will develop a better understanding of these numbers that will generate useful insight and perspective into our movement.

However, numbers alone do not tell the complete story of why things happened, what processes worked or didn’t work, and what impact we have on participants' perceptions, and levels of engagement. Also, by some metrics, work that is important for the movement might generate small numbers, despite large efforts, innovations, and outcomes. Documenting this will be very important to give these numbers (large and small) context and value, and to help us develop better ways of measuring what we think is most important

Q: OK, but what if I didn’t have time or capacity to gather a lot of qualitative data to answer these questions or do “in depth” learning?

R: Don’t worry, this is a process for us all! In your application, you asked some very interesting learning questions about your work. Take some time to reflect with your team around these. You may have gathered more information than you think! If you did manage to apply some qualitative tools, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, and storytelling, that is also great! If you didn’t, take this reporting opportunity to reflect if this would be needed in future proposals and how you might consider these in your budget, team, and skills development.

Q: What if I would like to suggest changes to this format in the future?

R: Great, as with the application process, the Community Resources team will be collecting feedback and will create spaces to discuss any future adjustments. This is all about learning, iterating, and adapting together.

Technical note:

This form serves as the Final Report for those receiving one-year funding through the Wikimedia Community Funds (General Support Funds) or Wikimedia Alliances Funds program, or as the Annual Report for those receiving multi-year funds. For final reports, the period for this report will be the full 12 months of the fund, including the period already reported on in the mid-term report. Please reach out to your regional program officer in the Community Resources team if you have any doubts or need support. For annual reports, you should report on one year at a time, rather than the cumulative multi-year period of your award. Following this report, the regional program officer will invite you to a conversation where you will collectively reflect on your results, learning, and future prospects.

Privacy note: All responses except applicant and organization details, will be automatically shared publicly on Meta-Wiki even in the draft status. Please do not add any confidential or sensitive information to your responses. Additionally, all uploaded documents with Story or impact document, Resource document, Evaluation document, Financial report, and Other public document labels will be automatically shared publicly. Please do not upload any confidential files with these labels. Please see the Application Privacy Statement for more information.

Final report

Understanding your work

1. Briefly describe how your proposed activities and strategies were implemented.

We created a scalable system to involve all national GLAMs: design of a workflow, pilot project in Italy involving all Italian museums, evaluation and documentation.
We implemented an awareness-raising campaign focussed on open access and cooperation with the Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. The project has contacted all Italian museums through a communication campaign, press communicates and media relations at a national and local level, conferences webinars, networking with stakeholders, emails (mass mailing managed with Wikimedia Italia’s CRM system, CiviCRM with reports on https://wiki.wikimedia.it/wiki/Empowering_Italian_GLAMs/Invii_email_ai_musei) and direct and personal contacts.
We established a system to monitor the implementation of open access based on Wikidata. https://www.adert.it/musei/report.php, https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progetto:Musei/Liste and we are currently finalising a system to visualize data about all Italian museums and GLAMs (including libraries, archives, theatres and universities)
We developed a tool to collect data from institutions, upload authorisations associated with cultural institutions and to allow them to review Wikidata data. The tool has been translated. https://glams.wmcloud.org/. To further implement the project, we need to design a tool that is more strongly connected to Wikimedia Commons to facilitate the international scalability of the project and the participation of current volunteers.
Results in Italy: 6810 items related to museums improved on Wikidata (the best existing repository of Italian museums), 4344 museums contacted, 304 Italian institutions involved, 86 institutions concluded the entire workflow, 140 surveys about open access completed. 5 case studies fully documented.

Summery of the quantitative results
Uploads on Wikidata in 2022-2024
Museums involved by January 2024 (it)
Museums involved by January 2024 (it)
Strengths and weaknesses

2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you felt were effective in achieving your goals?

Collaboration between Wikimedia, ICOM, Creative Commons, a university and an NGO specialised in cultural strategies.
Using Wikidata to analyse, monitor and visualise data related to national GLAMs and creating on Wikidata the best existing national repository of GLAMs with research data and updates related to digitalisations and open access.

3. Would you say that your project had any innovations? Are there things that you did very differently than you have seen them done by others?

A replicable strategy to involve all GLAMs in implementing open access and cooperating with Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects
Full repository of GLAMs on Wikidata to analyse, monitor and visualise data
External system to upload authorisations and images and to manage institutions and their uploads on Wikimedia Commons

Targeting all institutions
Process for the institutions
Involvement with different contents
Development of an online form

4. Please describe how different communities participated and/or were informed about your work.

Professionals working in GLAMs: addressed by the project through communication, training, events and support
Italian volunteers, in particular Wikimedia Italia coordinators and participants to in person edit-a-thon and online events
Wikimedia communities through presentations of the project

5. Documentation of your impact. Please use the two spaces below to share files and links that help tell your story and impact. This can be documentation that shows your results through testimonies, survey results, videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, etc.) social media posts, dashboards, etc.

All the documentation of the project is accessible on meta-wiki (Empowering Italian GLAMs/Documentation) and archived on OSF Open Science Framework https://osf.io/jpnb3/

6. To what extent do you agree with the following statements regarding the work carried out with the support of this Fund? You can choose “not applicable” if your work does not relate to these goals.

Added directly in the form.

7. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your efforts helped to bring in participants and/or build out content, particularly for underrepresented groups?

Implementing a national strategy to involve GLAMs allowed to address 4344 Italian museums and their staff/volunteers. The 304 institutions involved at different degrees represent a very diverse group of institutions for size, location, ownership, and topics. The strategy is shown to be an inclusive strategy capable of creating an entry point for diverse institutions and a replicable system to reach an extensive number of institutions (there are over 100,000 museums in the world).

Your main learning

8. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What did you learn about these areas during this period?

We learned:

We can reach the vast majority of GLAMs. We reached 4344 Italian museums: It is not easy but it is feasible. We are currently working in replicating the workflow for libraries, archives, theatres and universities.
Working on a large-scale communication campaign is effective. It supports the understanding of open access and it creates the conditions to implement it and to reinforce collaborations among Wikimedia and GLAMs
The museums in Italy which have already contributed before this project to the Wikimedia projects are 63 (the data is on Wikidata now). In 12 years, around 900 cultural institutions have been contributing to Wiki Loves Monuments and provided an authorisation to take photos of their buildings and collections (which is already a step toward open access). In two years, 300 museums have been involved by the project Empowering Italian GLAMs
We have a system to monitor the institutions that have digital collections: it can be tracked with Property P2283 with value Q212805 based on the data of the Italian national statistics we uploaded on Wikidata. The result of the query can be accessed at https://w.wiki/6kdB
With a dataset and the use of CiviCRM we can indeed differentiate our communication towards institutions, by sending emails to specific regions, thematic networks, institutions which are at different stages of the workflow...

9. Did anything unexpected or surprising happen when implementing your activities?

The Archeological Park of the Colosseum contacted us to collaborate and we organised a guided tour for Wikipedians and an edit-a-thon together. What is very important is the fact that a major institution which is the most visited in Italy and one of the most visited in the world (12 million visitors in 2023) values the collaboration with Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects and its institutional role in supporting open access and the active involvement of citizens, despite all the specific challenges presented by the Italian legislation.

10. How do you hope to use this learning? For instance, do you have any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future?

Reproduce the method in another country.
Further disseminating the method with articles, presentations and workshops (or online training)
Developing the online form linked to Wikimedia Commons (the online form allows the collection of authorisations and content from institutions and review of their content before uploading it to Wikimedia Commons: this is a relevant step which needs to be developed within Wikimedia Commons to scale the project to all languages and countries). This could be a project which might be submitted for support to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Replicate the workflow in other countries.

Current tool
How uploads are managed with the current tool
Hypothesis for a new tool directly on Wikimedia Commons

11. If you were sitting with a friend to tell them one thing about your work during this fund, what would it be (think of inspiring or fascinating moments, tough challenges, interesting anecdotes, or anything that feels important to you)?

Can you believe that we contacted 4344 museums and we produced on Wikidata the best existing repository of Italian museums! 304 museums involved with 86 completing the entire workflow seems a very limited result... but it is enormous if we think that Wikimedia Italia used to collaborate with maximum 5-10 institutions per year. And the list of institutions is astonishing: very famous ones, never heard before, small and large museums, all topics and located in almost all regions. Addressing all institutions (and we are now focusing also libraries, archives, theatres and universities) is really a game changer.

12. Please share resources that would be useful to share with other Wikimedian organizations so that they can learn from, adapt or build upon your work.

List of all the documentation produced by the project accessible on meta-wiki (Empowering Italian GLAMs/Documentation) and archived on OSF Open Science Framework https://osf.io/jpnb3/

Metrics

Report in Italian with the institutions involved at June 2024. Some data provided here are updated to July 2024.

Main Open Metrics (1) - Institutions contacted

Number of institutions monitored on Wikidata and contacted to involve them in a Wikipedia communication campaign to collect open content for Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects.

Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
	Database 6810	Many emails are inactive or have changed domain, this value will be more accurate in the second phase	Data retrieved from ISTAT surveys, and where possible, email addresses retrieved from other sources were enriched
3000	4344	Number of museums that received the email contacted region by region. Email opening around 30%.	email sent from CRM

Main Open Metrics (2) - Institutions reached

Number of institutions which reply to us with a positive or negative answer. We collect also attitudes, motivations and needs

Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
900	304	Number of musums involved by the project (of which 23 decided not to join). Last update July 2024	Through the online form / supported by the team
	135	Number of museums network that joined project without starting the procedure	Through the online form / supported by the team
	95	Number of museums that have decided to join but need to start the form	Through the online form / supported by the team
	4344	Number of museums that received the email contacted region by region. Email opening around 30%.	email sent from CRM
	86	Number of museums which completed the entire workflow of the project (endorsement, authorisation with open access policy, images uploaded on Wikimedia Commons, text provided, Wikidata checked and survey)	Through the online form / supported by the team

Main Open Metrics (3) - Institutions involved

Number of institutions which provides us with content

Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
500	1250	Number of museums involved in different extends in Open Access	Through Wiki Loves Monuments, Empowering Italian GLAMs, MAB call (Museums, Archives and Libraries - MAB in Italian) and other GLAM project
500	86	Number of museums which completed the entire workflow of the project (endorsement, authorisation with open access policy, images uploaded on Wikimedia Commons, text provided, Wikidata checked and survey)	Through the online form / supported by the team

Main Open Metrics (4) - People contacted collaborating with institutions

Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
1000	4344	Number of people contacted working with institutions. Contact with at least one referent for each Museum or referent that sent us emails	email sent from CRM

Main Open Metrics (5) - People involved

Number of people involved indirectly in the Wikimedia projects, by producing content with open licenses and tools

Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
600	304	People involved in releasing content with open licenses and tools.	The number corresponds to the number of institutions involved
600	630	People involved in events and training - please refer to Empowering Italian GLAMs/Documentation#Events	We don't have the data. Estimated number Empowering Italian GLAMs/Documentation#Events
	600

Organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities

Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
100	35	Most of the people involved in the project will continue working on it in the future. We are already planning the activities for 2025-2027 within Wikimedia Italia. Collaborations are also confirmed for the future. Few people involved among the 39 have changed occupations and interests.	Project plan for 2025-2027
		Activities with the institutions involved are also continuing

8b. View summary of additional core metrics data

Participants

Number of people involved indirectly in the Wikimedia projects, by producing content with open licenses and tools. We measure their involvement through our form and survey

Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
600	86	People involved in releasing content with open licenses and tools	It is the number of the institutions completing the project workflow
	630	People involved in events and training - please refer to Empowering Italian GLAMs/Documentation#Events	We don't have the data. Estimated number Empowering Italian GLAMs/Documentation#Events
	600

Editors

Please note that the project triggers indirect contribution to the Wikimedia projects (see above). We envision the participation of 15 volunteers

Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
15	14	Writing week’s participants (2023)	Number of participant signing up at the event and involved
	15	Editathon at the Braidense National Library with Archivio Ricordi
	17	Writing week’s participants (2024)
	16	Editathon Egyptian museum
	9	Editathon at the Martinitt e Stelline Museum
	18	Editathons at the Milan Natural History Museum
	14	Editathon at the Colosseum Archaeological Park
	103

Organizers

Please refer to the project team. We also plan to involve other 15 volunteers (not counted in this target)

Target	Results	Comments
13	12	Dario Crespi, Sarah Orlandi, Cristina Dal Min, Alice Fontana, Marco Chemello, Alessia Minella, Federico Benvenuti, Guido Baratta, Deborah De Angelis, Daniele Scasciafratte, Alice Pittini, Tommaso Messina
	2	General staff of Wikimedia Italia engaged in the project: Alice Montrasio (administration 2023) and Paolo Casagrande (communication)
	1	In-kind contribution of University of Torino Enrico Bertacchini (senior researcher)
	17	Wikimedia Italia Regional Coordinator
	3	Other volunteers: Susanna Giaccai, Patafisik, Elena Marangoni
	1	Project lead volunteer Iolanda Pensa
	3	BAM! Strategie Culturali team: Marta Multinu, Elena Bertelli, Federico Borreani
	39

Content contributions to Wikimedia Project (1) - Wikidata

Curated item on Wikidata for all Italian museums and heritage institution with upload of statistical and research data related to the collections, the propriety, the digitalisation process, open access policy... We can monitor the list of curated item with a code but Wikidata doesn't allows us to report details on changes (this is real obstacle for producing relevant metrics)

Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
3000	6810	No. of institution’s data from ISTAT	Data on Wikidata
	4393	No. of institution’s data from other databases
	8739	No. of institutions with a category on Commons (https://w.wiki/6kdQ)
	11203

Content contributions to Wikimedia Project (2) - Wikimedia Commons

Images provided by the institutions involved and uploaded on Wikimedia Commons

Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
12000	41492	Sum of images received by form (N=77), images from Museo Egizio (N=2383); images from Musei Civici Reggio Emilia (N=309); images from Museo Civico Modena, (N=408), images from other museums (N=828), WLM (N=37487)

Content contributions to Wikimedia Project (3) - Wikipedia

We expect articles on Wikipedia in Italian to be improved with data, content and images produced by the projects. We monitor this data. We expect that 20% of the articles related to institutions involved in the project will be improved

Target	Results	Methodology
100	35 articles created	Museum Writing week (2023)
	19 expanded or improved articles	Museum Writing week (2023)
	15 articles created or modified	Editathon at the Braidense National Library with Archivio Ricordi
	35 articles created	Museum Writing week (2024)
	9 expanded or improved articles	Museum Writing week (2024)
	7 articles created	Editathon at the Martinitt e Stelline Museum
	6 articles created	Editathons at the Milan Natural History Museum
	13 expanded or improved articles	Editathons at the Milan Natural History Museum
	5 articles created	Editathon at the Colosseum Archaological Park
	6 expanded or improved articles	Editathon at the Colosseum Archaological Park
	150

14. Were there any metrics in your proposal that you could not collect or that you had to change?

No

15. If you have any difficulties collecting data to measure your results, please describe and add any recommendations on how to address them in the future.

/

Organizational capacities & partnerships

17. Organizational Capacity

Completed in the form

17a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Peer-to-peer learning with community members outside the Wikimedia movement: Creative Commons, ICOM and scholars in universities. Informal meetings, conversations, exchange of ideas and discussions. This was the most important training.

17b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

The project is innovative: there is no formal training to implement it. It required testing a new approach and collaborating with a transdisciplinary team that provided different experiences and expertise.

18. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your organizational capacity has grown, and areas where you require support?

The team has been really great. People have contributed with passion, professionalism, and great commitment. Even paid staff have contributed more than expected, offering the project their volunteer time and interest in the initiative's success. Furthermore, it has been fun :)

19. Partnerships over the funding period

19a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Permanent staff outreach
Staff hired through the fund
Volunteers from our communities
Other: The synergy with ICOM, Creative Commons and university

19b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Difficulties specific to our context that hindered partnerships
Local policies or other legal factors
Limited funding period

20. Please share your learning about strategies to build partnerships with other institutions and groups and any other learning about working with partners?

This entire project is about this.

Collaborate with ICOM, Creative Commons and the university
Create a database of your national GLAMs on Wikidata, including research data
Collect contact in collaboration with ICOM and contact all institutions
Invite institutions to open a small selection of their content (even only 20 images) and support them in doing it (with a workflow, a form, templates for authorisations/open access policy and some staff for call back and support)

The key of this approach is a national stategy developped in synergy with other relevant national institutions, aiming at open access and Wikiimedia cooperation, supporting also limited content donation, and including a national communication campaign (emails, press communicates, events, posts).

Sense of belonging & collaboration

21. What would it mean for your organization to feel a sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement?

Wikimedia Italia and all its networks of volunteers, members, staff, and board have a strong and profound commitment to free knowledge: it is visible in their work of advocacy, in the number of events organised, in the procedure to plan and monitor impact, in the dialogue among all stakeholders to understand needs and expectations, in the activities to support volunteers implemented by the staff, in the participation in the international movement, and of course in the active Wikimedia online communities in different projects (very active on Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, but also committed to many other projects such as Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage and Wikipedia in dialects).

22. How has your (for individual grantees) or your group/organization’s (for organizational grantees) sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?

Somewhat increased

23. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.

The project Empowering Italian GLAMs has engaged most of the Wikimedia Italia team, collaborators, volunteers and partners in a new approach and strategy. It has required a significant amount of effort, but it has shown relevant results and a new significant impact over time. The project has certainly added stress, work and new challenges, but it has also made people proud of the work done and committed to its vision.

24. How has your group/organization’s sense of personal investment in the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?

Increased significantly

25. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.

The project team has contributed generously and more than expected. It has devoted an incredible amount of time, invested energy and passion. The large majority of the team is still interested in and committed to continuing the project by addressing new institutions (we are already involving libraries, archives, theatres, and universities) and by facilitating the scalability of its methods and workflow.

26. Are there other movements besides the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement that play a central role in your motivation to contribute to Wikimedia projects? (for example, Black Lives Matter, Feminist movement, Climate Justice, or other activism spaces). If so, please describe it below.

The project is based on a formal collaboration with Creative Commons Italia, ICOM Italia, the University of Turin and the association BAM! specialised in cultural strategies: this great partnership has been instrumental to the success of the activities, but it is also a great engine of energy and motivation. The project has contributed to the interest and mission of each group involved by establishing a healthy collaboration designed to respond to each institution's mission: promoting OpenGLAM and Creative Commons licenses, supporting museums, producing research, and creating new approaches to accompany museums in their digital strategies. Furthermore, each partner brought great specific competencies, and working with each person involved was a real pleasure.

Supporting Peer Learning and Collaboration

27. Have you shared these results with Wikimedia affiliates or community members? This question is focused on the results and learning tied to this particular fund.

Partially

27a. Please describe how you have already shared them. Would you like to do more sharing, and if so how?

We have presented the project in 3 international meetings (Wikimania Singapore 2023, presentation to active members of Creative Commons, video for GLAM Wiki Conference 2023, learning clinic related to advocacy 2024), we have organised an international conference in 2023 focussed on scholars specialised in cultural economy and management, and we participated in ICOM Triennial Conference in Valencia in 2023 with other Wikimedia affiliates (Empowering Italian GLAMs/Documentation#Events). To truly share the method we need to share the findings in a workshop and coach the implementation of it in another country. We have started a few activities with New Zealand, but we didn't complete them; we proposed a workshop at Wikimania Katowice, but it was not selected. So we need to develop better this area to make sure others can take advantage of our work and reuse it easily.

28. How often do you currently share what you have learned with other Wikimedia Foundation grantees, and learn from them?

We do this rarely (less than twice a year)

29. How does your organization currently share mutual learning with other grantees?

We participate in events online and offline: we attend Wikimania and thematic events in particolar in the area of GLAMs, advocacy and education. We are active members of Wikimedia Europe (we collaborate with them also for our advocacy and there is a continuous exchange of information) and we have good relationships with many chapters. In particular we created an international project with Uruguay. We contribute to international Wikimedia newsletters and some news about the project Empowering Italian GLAMs were included in the GLAM newsletter. We contribute to diff in particular with articles related to advocacy.

Financial reporting and compliance

32. Please report the funds received and spending in the currency of your fund.

We recommend you use the template provided or the format you used to present your initial budget. If you use Google Sheets please remember to provide the link and share access with us in the configuration of the shared document on google. You can leave it as open access for anyone with the link to view or add this email: communityresources@wikimedia.org.

33. If you have not already done so in your budget report, please provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal.

Please note that the total cost of the project is 100,110 euros, including a contribution from Wikimedia Italia in cash and in-kind. The total request to Wikimedia Foundation was 80,160 euro. In the intermediate report we presented expenses for 45,190 euro and we currently ask with this report the remaining amount of 34,970 euro.

We spent much more than 34,970 euro and the rest is provided by Wikimedia Italia. Wikimedia Italia has increased its contribution to the project of 25,200 euros for 2023 and 25,200 euros for 2024, and it is planning a specific budget for the continuation of the project for 2024-2027.

Please note that we decided to allocate more resources to museum experts and Wikidata and Wikimedia experts; we reduced therefore the budget for travels and for legal advice. The expense for the international researcher (Trilce Navarrete) will be made later on this year or next year because the researcher is still working on her analysis of the data; the cost will be covered by Wikimedia Italia and the amount not spent in Wikimedia Foundation budget has been moved to cover the expenses for the museum experts.

38. If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here.

Thanks for the financial support. Having support from the Wikimedia Foundation was very important for us to ensure the project had an international approach and addressed the global movement, not only Italian needs. We appreciated the exchanges with the Wikimedia Foundation team and the effort to facilitate our work and ensure we could learn from others and share our experiences.