Grants:APG/Policies/Site visits/2017/Wikimedia Ukraine

Wikimedia Ukraine Site visit - 24-25-26 March 2017 Friday, 24 March

09.30. Arrive at chapter’s office, meet staff and office tour.
10.00. Meet with the Board Chair. - overview of strengths and weaknesses
11.00. Financial review.
12.00 -12.30 Lunch with program managers.
13.00 -14.30 Meeting Oleksiy Vasylyuk (Environment. People. Law. NGO office) (Wikiexpedition to Jarylhach report, Wikiexpedition report 2, Wikiexpedition report 3, Wiki Loves Earth Analysys for Wikiconference 2016)
14.30 -15.00 Transfer
15.00 -16.10. Meeting partners at National Newspaper&Journal Publishing House (media support, publishing project [1])
16.10 -18.00 Walks and having rest
18.00. Community meetup. (“Пузата хата”, Baseina Str.,½, map)
20.00. Dinner with the Board and community members.

Saturday, 25th:

09.30. Arrive at chapter’s office and review agenda for the day.
10.00. Presentation from Education Program volunteers:

user:Андрій Гриценко, educator, researcher, phd in pedagogy, school director (Slout, Poltava region), WMUA wikiworkshop graduate user:Вальдимар, educational methodology specialist at Cherkasy education department user:Kharkivian

12.30. Lunch, Baluvana Galya restaurant
14.00. Meeting with partners from Creative Commons Ukraine: Iryna Kuchma, Open Access Programme Manager for EIFL, Roman Naumko (non confirmed)
15.00. Financial review (continued)
17.00. Site visit wrap up.

Sunday, 26th (Lviv, Winifred):

16.40. Winifred arrives in Lviv via UIA 35 (staying at the Ibis Styles)

Meeting place: (“Пузата хата”, просп. Шевченка 10)

17.30. Presentation about WikiPhysContest (and the idea of article contests) (user:Звірі)
18:30. Meet with key volunteer involved in scanner project (user:Arxivist)
19:30. Dinner with local volunteers

The agenda created by Wikimedia Ukraine may be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PSDnUr63W6aoye7k7xDTTOewUDeTNcYhsLVmxe20jB0/edit?usp=gmail

DAY 0 - 23 March

Delphine was picked up at the airport by Artem and his wife, who brought her to the hotel, and was greeted by Ilya, who toured Kiew with her, to bring her to a community meeting in the evening. This was one of the regular community meetings, where people discuss affairs of the wiki. Interesting and typical wikipedian conversations.

DAY 1 - 24 March 2017

Discussion with Board chair and staff of the strengths and weaknesses of Wikimedia Ukraine

We spent an hour or two discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the organization with Ilya (Board chair), Vira and Anna.

About community: The main Strength of WMUA is its community, and how it is at the heart of online initiatives, and most initiatives that bring the chapter work. WMUA works in collaboration with the community, something that is helmped by the fact that Anna and Vira, the two staff members, are issued from the community and understand the dynamics. We are working as a team, volunteers and staff together.
Managing an NGO and leadership: finding the people with the right skills for managing an NGO is a bit more difficult. It has been difficult to establish sustained leadership within the board. People take responsibilities in turn, but for the long haul is a bit more complicated to keep motivation high to take on tasks that are needed to run the organization. Board members are volunteers respected in the community. All roles and responsibilities are communicated through the Board and Board meetings. This means that board meetings become a part of the workflow and this is probably not the best way to go about managing an NGO. This also makes efficient management of staff difficult. A lot of things are done reactively rather than proactively. Discussion happens a lot, between board and staff, staff and community, board and community, but does not always lead to decisions being made. There we talked about possible solutions to work with the board to take on the project of managing the organization more efficiently (training).
Projects: WMUA has a lot of interesting and cool projects, which are historically part of the landscape of Ukrainian Wikimedia projects. There is however no real training for project management, and the unclear decision making processes make it difficult to run projects well.
Recommendations: we recommend to work on this in various forms. More discussions on the subject among board and staff and community members, find training for board members, participate in international training opportunities, intently look for and recruit people who have the right skills to run an NGO, even if they are not wikipedians to start with. This is something that can be financed within the WMF grant.

EPL - NECU

We went to visit Oleksiy Vasylyuk at Environement. People. Law. EPL/ECU, an international ecology rights association. Their mission is to improve envirnomnemental legislation, help people around environemental laws. The people working with them are volunteers and biologists. Oleksiy became involved with Wiki Loves Earth in 2015 and realized how much information was missing from Wikipedia about Ukraine's natural reserves (more than 8300 natural reserves and protected areas, of which only 60/70 have websites and information online). EPL then became involged and started working on three levels: 1. Taking part in WLE. 2. Creating articles on each and every protected area in Ukraine. 3. WikiExpeditions. Oleksiy tells us about one of the wiki expedition they spearheaded. This was with 9 people, for a few days, on one of the largest Ulrainian inhabited islands that has specific flora and fauna. The expedition was well prepared, lots of books read, and documented with drone pictures, panoramas, animals, underwater filming of flora and fauna. The participants were a mix of scientists and photographers.

One of the reasons for ELP to be supporting these expeditions and participation in Wikipedia is the idea that every picture is valuable because it shows a natural area at one point in time and may be valuable to document the changes that occur. The pictures document potential violations. This can even help enforce laws (in 2016 6 criminal cases were based on pictures taken through WLE, andpeople to be sued for destruction of natural reserves). WLE and WikiExpeditions combine are helping to create the most complete base of photos of all natural protected areas in Ukraine, in all seasons, so that people can learn about them and care about them. Combined with Open Street Map, this can also lead to development of ecotourism in the country, knowing that parks do not have the means to do this on their own. Oleksiy tells us about the challenges sometimes with people who don't want to release their images under a free license, but in the end he says he always persuades them, especially when they see the reach of their work through Wikipedia. Wikiexpediations are a good way to motivate people who might not go there on their own but have a personal interest in going there with a full-fledged team. Oleksiy definitely is en engaged wikipedian who has worked hard to make his passions (zoology, ecology, the History of Nature Protection in the Ukraine and Wikipedia) become a synergy, and it is clear that he is working very hard to make sure that the novelty and usefulness of using Wikipedia is also integrated in his colleagues thinking when they're researching and taking pictures.Those projects bring in different experts and it is important to have this expertise on hand to make sure that the knowledge is kept safe.

National Journal and Newspaper Publishing House

Later that day we met with Yevhen Buket and Andriy Shchekun of the National Journals and Newspaper publishing house. This publishing house has 7 productions, 2 newspaper and 5 journals, all published in Ukrainian, all around Ukrainian Culture and way of life. Each newspaper has their own editorial team and the Director of the Publishing House only grants them resources and organizes distribution, does not interfere in the content. These are paper publications and they have been evolving to a more modern design, as well as benefit from a common online portal.

The publishing house is a State enterprise, and as such is funded 50% by the state, 50% by other sources. A law was passed recently that stipulates that all published press should be privatized by 2019, a challenge for the business model. They have a printed version of the journals that they sell in their online shop and electronic versions are free to download.

In 2016, WMUA and the Publishing House put together a common project, a whole issue of the journal "Monuments of Ukraine" was devoted to Wiki Loves Monuments. In 2017, we are bringing two newspaper under a CC-BY licence (Cultural Life and Crimea). These will be the first printed media under a CC-BY license in Ukraine.

The audience of printed material and the websites do not intersect, and bringing the print version under a CC-BY license is an experiment which will both benefit the media (able to use CC-BY material in the media) and the public (able to reuse the information in the journals). Since the business model has been changed completely, it is interesting to see how this will evolve with time and to see if things are being reused.

DAY 2 - 25 March 2017

Presentation of the education program

Volodymyr Kryzhanivsky- user:Вальдимар https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Вальдимар

We met with Volodimir who gave us a great overview of the Education Program that Wikimedia Ukraine is working on, and the challenges they face.

Volodimir was a teacher and then became director of a school. As teacher, he was using Wikipedia as a tool to further his classes, outside of his teaching time. As a director, he can enable teachers to integrate Wikipedia in their teaching, during class time.

The context of education in Ukraine is one of a frozen system. Learning and teaching methods have been there for ever and are not likely to change any time soon, there's a lot of emphasis on "learning by heart", which makes it easier for the teachers, and this paves the way for a lot of copy/paste of quotes for a lot of the assignments. The whole point of putting together an education program is to try and replace "boring material" with something that matters and the way to do it is to try and get to the people before they are so entrenched in their ways of learning/teaching that they can't get out of it.

The education system in the Ukraine is extremely hierarchical, with directions to the teachers coming "from the top". This is the reason why WMUA actually started from the top as well. Getting anything about Wikipedia approved in the curriculum was paramount to doing anything with teachers. WMUA achieved to have Wikipedia recognized as a learning tool and inscribed into the curriculum. This proved to be a double edged sword. Some people take the teaching through/with Wikipedia as a mandatory teaching and an additional burden, others do make the best of it. This said, this approach allowed an increase of awareness about Wikipedia as a potential teaching tool. Now the next steps reside in trying to make sure that people involved take this as a positive twist on their usual teaching rather than an additional requirement that they will quickly get rid of. This will take some time. The education program faces other problems, such as a lack of digital knowledge among its targeted public.

The trainings address these issues and focus on getting the people to edit, with the assumption that the more confident the teachers are, the easier it is for them to teach how to edit. It is important to note that the education program takes advantage of people who are interested in changing things. Since 2011 there has been a lot of changes, especially about going away from set programs and set-in-stone curricula and teaching plans to more adaptive ones, which might include Wikipedia. The first steps were for some teachers to try and incorporate teaching with Wikipedia outside the classroom, but few students are ready to put in the extra time. So having Wikipedia mentioned as an agreed-upon tool to teach is a good thing. It is then just a matter of finding the balance between the old and new mentalities and ways of teaching.

Volodimir shows us about Wikiprojects. Some, like a biology project, brings students to write alternate versions of Wikipedia articles with information that is in the curriculum (for example WikiProject:School/Biology/Blood). Another type of wikiprojects are typical writing classes where students are graded for the improvements they bring to articles. For example: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiPhoto_Project_WEP_Ukraine,_Spring_2015 where students add photos and add articles to the photos. This particular project yielded about 2000 photos, in categories that lacked content. The students had an incentive to participate as they didn't need to sit the exam if they participated.

Another wikiproject on musicology has students writing articles about Ukrainian composers, doing research to add to the article. They are being supported by a community member to understand Wikipedia rules. Grades are issued depending on how the students interact with the project.

Meeting with Creative Commons Ukraine

We met with Iryna Kuchma from CC Ukraine. CC Ukraine has been operating for a number of years, with a small group of legal experts. Their main task has been to promote more liberal legislation and change the legal framework to mention CC licences. Their partnership with WMUA helps put the issue higher up on agendas by providing context for the use of CC licences, as well as examples. There are quite a few initiatives such as open data portals, libraries and journals which often use licenses or their own making that only mimick CC licenses. Their next big work is freedom of panorama, with campaigns, which goal is to introduce an act around Freedom of Panorama. CC is working on awareness, by asking people who use buildings and such in their work (ads for example) if they have the rights to those images. WMUA is participating on issuing a leaflet about CC licenses, to educate about free licenses being their goal. Most of their requests for explanations about free licenses come from people wanting to use free licensed music in to avoid paying licensing fees. People approach CC because they don't know about copyright.