Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015 round1/Wikimedia Deutschland e.V./Progress report form
Global Metrics Overview all Programs
[edit]Program 1: Volunteer Support
[edit]Global Metrics: Volunteer Support | ||
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Metric | Achieved outcome | Explanation |
1. # of active editors involved | 326 | Unduplicated, only program leaders (w/o participants) |
2. # of new editors | 809 | |
3. # of individuals involved | 1,944 | Only offline, participants & organizers |
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages | Uploads to Commons total: 45,853
Added to WM pages/articles: 10,231 |
Please note: Usually, use rates of uploaded items do continually increase over time. The unusually high use rate of 22% at end of Q2 is due to the impact of a single Wiktionary project (see program section for more details) which generated 5,000+ files with a use rate of over 95%. |
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects | 18,466 | Based on project documentations regarding articles created/ improved and on integration of media files in articles |
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects | n/a | Please note: WMDE does not track this metric for two reasons: 1) the usability of the Wikimetrics tool is inadequate, making it too time-intensive, especially given a large amount of activities, and 2) the tool would require tracking of user names to aggregate ‘bytes added’. We do not practice this with regard to EU privacy laws and privacy preferences of the German-speaking editing community. |
Please note: Due to the continuous character of our volunteer support and of the supported activities, this is only a preliminary analysis for this Progress Report (‘activities’ refer to all volunteer-led projects/ programs/ initiatives supported by WMDE’s volunteer support department). A more complete analysis will be available for the Impact Report. The table above is based on a partial analysis of 112 directly supported, completed activities (171 acitivities were completed out of 260 total to date). Many other scheduled activities have not been started or completed yet or are not yet due for documentation (see chart on the right).
Roughly half (47%) of the completed activities had a direct focus on content work by existing or new editors directly affecting the Global Metrics.
Program 2: Software Development
[edit]Global Metrics: Software Development | ||
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Metric | Achieved outcome | Explanation |
Please note: Mostly, Global Metrics are not applicable to the activities of the WMDE Software Development Program. For assessment of our online work, e.g. with the Wikidata editor community, see the Wikidata Overview table below.
For more data on our FOSS Outreach and Community Communications activities please refer to the Additional Metrics table below. | ||
1. # of active editors involved | n/a | Not applicable. Our FOSS outreach activities do not target ‘classic’ editors or the acquisition of FOSS developers as ‘new editors’. At ‘Tech on Tour’ workshops, in accordance with our privacy protection practices, staff did not record editor status of participants. |
2. # of new editors | n/a | |
3. # of individuals involved | Offline: 250 | Participants at ‘Tech on Tour’ workshops and at Tech events@WMDE |
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages | n/a | Not applicable. Although there usually are photo documentations of the events which are uploaded to Commons, we do not count theses images for this metric. |
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects | n/a | Not applicable as the activities included here are aimed at mid/long term outcomes (e.g. involvement of FOSS developers with Wikimedia projects or effective community-oriented software development). |
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects | n/a |
Additional Metrics: Wikidata Overview | |||
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Editors | |||
Metric | 06/2015 | 12/2014 | 01-06/2015 |
editors (1+/ 30 days) | 15,074 | 13,344 | +13% |
active editors (5+/ 30 days) | 6,005 | 5,377 | +12% |
very active editors (100+/ 30 days) | 915 | 800 | +14% |
new active editors (10th edit threshold, 01-05/2015) | 3,689 | ||
Content | |||
Metric | 06/2015 | 12/2014 | 01-06/2015 |
pages | 18,284,555 | 16,871,369 | +8% |
items | 17,880,164 | 16,668,610 | +7 |
items with referenced statements | 10,017,235 | 8,423,002 | +19% |
edits (total) | 227,708,671 | 182,571,317 | +25% |
statements (total) | 65,993,797 | 53,020,002 | +24% |
statements referenced to Wikipedia | 20,135,242 | 18,692,336 | +8% |
statements statements referenced to other sources | 11,677,032 | 8,010,042 | +46% |
Additional Metrics: Community Communications and FOSS Outreach | |||||
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Global Metric
equivalent |
Additional Metrics | Q1/Q2 2015 | Q3/Q4 2014 | Change vs. Q3/Q4 2014 (if applicable) | Explanation |
Community Communications | |||||
Individuals involved | Views Technical Wishlist TOP 20 Pageviews (total) | 2,234 | 1,113 | + 101% | Indicating the involvement of Wikidata users, deWP editors, volunteer developers etc. with community-centered software development at WMDE. |
Views Tech on Tour site Page views (total, only Q1/Q2) | 1,578 | n/a | n/a | This page was only active in Q1+Q2 for coordination of the ‘Tech on Tour’ events and during the preparation of the Technical Wishes concept. | |
Participants (on-site): Workshop or event participants (offline only) | 53 | n/a | n/a | Q1+Q2: Refers to the ‘Tech on Tour’ workshops in preparation of the Technical Wishes concept. | |
# of Wikimedia orgs involved | 2 | n/a | n/a | Constant communication and coordination with WMF staff, conversations with Wikimedia Israel about community involvement and WMDE 's experiences with their collaborative approach regarding Software Development. | |
FOSS Outreach and Mentoring | |||||
New Individuals involved | Media Activity | 18 | not tracked | n/a | Number of Tech articles (blogs, other media) published/ initiated by WMDE Software Development. |
Views Software Development page on Wikimedia.de Page views (total) | 843 | 643 | +31 % | Webpage of WMDE Software Development, indicating general interest in software development at WMDE. | |
Social Media Response Number of retweets, followers, Facebook likes | 387 | 58 | + 567 % | Indicating the involvement / exchange of FOSS community with WMDE Software Development. | |
WMDE Tech Events Number of tech events hosted or organized by WMDE Software Development | 24 | 14 | +71 % | Indicating the involvement / exchange of FOSS community with WMDE Software Development. | |
Participants (on-site) / Visitors at tech events | 197 | not tracked | n/a | Indicating the involvement / exchange of FOSS community with WMDE Software Development. | |
Podcast Source Code Berlin | 7,467 | 2,421 | +208 % | Number of listeners to our FOSS Podcast Sourcecode Berlin. | |
Mentees / participants at WMDE mentoring activities | 5 + student group (6 students) | n/a | n/a | We are currently mentoring five individuals (bachelor/ master students, high school interns) and a student group at the Hasso Plattner-Institute. |
Program 3: Institutions
[edit]Global Metrics: Institutions | ||
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Metric | Achieved outcome | Explanation |
1. # of active editors involved | 68 | 68 active Wikimedians as organizers or participants at the ‘GLAM on Tour’ or ‘KulTour’ events. Not applicable to the other events included in this report (Coding da Vinci, events, etc.) as these are not targeted at Wikimedia editors mainly. |
2. # of new editors | 3 | Representatives of GLAMs who started editing at the ‘GLAM on Tour’ and ‘Kultour’ events as documented on the project page. |
3. # of individuals involved | offline: 723
online: 56K |
Please note that the offline count includes very different groups: editors, GLAM representatives, hackers/ developers, participants of panel discussions. Please note: The online count includes many different data sources including video stream viewers (2,617), email contacts (1,609), website visits (50,466), tweets (824) and Facebook followers (1,234). |
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages | New on Commons: 48,309
Files added to WM articles/pages: 416 |
Please note: The large amount of data which became available at the culture hackathon Coding da Vinci completed in July (620K media files / 65M Metadata) has barely started to be uploaded to Commons or to be integrated in Wikimedia pages. |
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects | 84 articles added or improved
430 new pictures added to WP pages |
|
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects | n/a | Please note: WMDE does not track this metric for two reasons: 1) the usability of the Wikimetrics tool is inadequate, making it too time intensive, and 2) the tool would require tracking of user names to aggregate ‘bytes added’. We do not practice this with regard to EU privacy laws and privacy preferences of the German-speaking editing community. |
Program 4: Legal and Social Framework
[edit]Global Metrics: Legal and Social Framework | ||
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Metric | Achieved outcome | Explanation |
1. # of active editors involved | n/a | Please note: Advocacy and policy work – which is the core of WMDE’s Legal and Social Framework program – is aimed at high-level changes in societal and political conditions, supporting the vision, mission and values of the Wikimedia movement by creating conditions in which free knowledge can thrive. Thus, activities in this field are not intended to have a direct impact on the Wikimedia projects in terms of gaining new editors or new content. For an overview about the political work WMDE is supporting, refer to the figures below. |
2. # of new editors | n/a | |
3. # of individuals involved | n/a | |
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages | n/a | |
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects | n/a | |
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects | n/a |
Additional Metrics: Advocacy & Policy Work | ||
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Metric | Q1/Q2 2015 | Explanation |
# of volunteers involved | > 4,500 | EU advocacy: a core group of 7 volunteers, powering up to 46 volunteers at specific events or campaigns; hundreds wrote letters to their MEPs; in June 2015, 4,235 German Wikipedians submitted an open letter to the European Parliament regarding freedom of panorama. They also engaged 4,464 non-authors to support the open letter by signing it. |
# of Wikimedia orgs involved | 19 | EU advocacy: WMF, 14 Chapters/thematic orgs/user groups from the EU, 4 non-EU based |
# of events/ networking meetings staged | 10 | EU advocacy: Freedom of Panorama Workshop hosted by Pavel Svoboda (EPP) / press conference on copyright reform with TACD, EDRi and BEUC / movie screening on "Freedom of Information" hosted by Marietje Schaake (ALDE) and Julia Reda (Greens) / press conference for German press on June 30, 2015
OER and beyond: 6 events about Free Knowledge issues staged at WMDE / 5 events supported informally |
# of allies & partners | > 50 | EU advocacy: 22 national or transnational organizations working with us
OER and beyond: 20 partners at the Free Education Alliance / various stakeholders working with us in the new initiative ‘Mapping OER’ |
# of participations at hearings and expert committees | 93 | EU advocacy: 88 (conservative count)
OER and beyond: 5 |
# of published statements/ position papers | 4 | EU advocacy: 1 position paper / 1 open letter
OER and beyond: 1 position paper / 1 statement |
# of policy decisions/ policy changes happened | 2 | EU advocacy: Enactment of the ‘Reda Report’ by the European Parliament / proposes positive regulations regarding freedom of panorama and other issues affecting the vision, mission and values of the Wikimedia movement
OER and beyond: German Federal Government making funds available to kickstart OER in Germany with a major part of it going to WMDEs ‘Mapping OER’ project |
Telling your program stories - all programs
[edit]Overview
[edit]During the first half of 2015, we revised the annual plan, which was approved by the General Assembly in April. WMDE’s new CEO Christian Rickerts took office and on-boarded in record time, quickly providing strong leadership, clear structures and programmatic direction. The organization received a large government contract to further Open Educational Resources in Germany, hosted the annual Wikimedia Conference and helped to successfully repeal a policy proposal to restrict Freedom of Panorama in Europe. Software Development developed an innovative mechanism to work with communities, and Wikidata grew by leaps and bounds, keeping developers busy integrating large amounts of data from Freebase. Volunteer Support saw the local hubs all across Germany thriving and bursting into activities. Towards the beginning of summer, leadership began a review of the annual planning process, and in a participatory process between community, board and leadership staff, created an Annual Compass 2016, to provide strategic guidance for the annual operative planning that is now underway.
Program Story 1: Supporting Volunteers
[edit]Volunteers and Groups (by June, 30th 2015) | |
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Program leaders / Organizers of activities (conservative count) | > 135 |
Active Wikimedians involved in activities supported by WMDE | > 326 |
Participants at volunteer activities supported by WMDE | > 1,944 |
Local groups cooperating in their respective region | 42 |
of that, local hubs (cities with more formalized Wikimedia groups) | 8 |
Volunteer support went through changes in staff and budget as well as through a continued improvement of strategy and processes. Adjustments were in part implemented to address criticism and suggestions by both the German communities and the FDC. Often these suggestions had pointed in directly opposite directions. Mostly, however, adjustments were made based on WMDE Volunteers Support Department's growing body of knowledge on what works and what does not work. The support structures have been significantly changed and simplified since the writing of the APG Round 1 proposal, as have the targets. The changes can be viewed in the revised 2015 WMDE Annual Plan under 1) Free Knowledge in the Wikimedia Projects.
Ultimately, we measure our success by the outputs and outcomes of the activities that communities and WMDE complete together or independently. In order to improve our systems for measuring outcomes, WMDE volunteer support is working with WMDE’s Partnerships and Development Department (ZEN) on further developing the organization's monitoring and evaluation capacity, so we can report on relevant Global Metrics as well as on the metrics based on goals in the WMDE Annual Plan.
In the first half of 2015, we solidified the realignment of our volunteer support program that began in the second half of 2014. Monetary and non-monetary support now focuses on projects and ideas that have the potential of leading to scalable, sustainable impact, and that promise to provide shared learning for the Free Knowledge movement. Volunteer support is now increasingly based on supporting ideas, rather than single individual efforts, by empowering groups of volunteers to implement projects together: projects that have potential to be scaled, have a sustainability component, are impact-oriented and generate shared learning.
We do this in great part through supporting the building of local capacities and partnerships. It is our vision that local capacity will enable future projects to be conducted independently and with less direct support from the WMDE office in Berlin. Local groups will increasingly acquire and leverage locally available resources - monetary and nonmonetary.
We expect that finite movement resources will be allocated in a more effective and efficient manner though this strategy. Examples:
- Instead of supporting individual volunteer travel cost to take photos, we now encourage local photo tour organizers, creating local infrastructure, activities to attract and welcome new volunteers, on-wiki and off-wiki.
- Instead of only providing serial ad-hoc support of individual volunteers, we are increasingly supporting the transformation of ideas into projects, implemented by local and thematic groups, following serial formats.
- We carefully review and select projects for support that can demonstrate sound planning and active community participation.
What does the WMDE Volunteer Support team do to support volunteers?
- We assist project leaders in drafting their applications according to the guidelines developed by the community.
- We consult with project leaders during all stages of their project life cycle.
- We encourage networking and the continuous exchange of knowledge through designated online spaces:
- Idea portal – this site enables volunteers to present their ideas, recruit partners and solicit votes, similar to a crowdfunding or social media site
- Wissensbörse – through the knowledge exchange, volunteers share learnings and support their peers with hints and practices
- List of all WMDE supported projects on Meta
- Monthly reports of supported volunteer projects, published as a blog and email
- Wikimedia Woche – a weekly newsletter that informs the German communities about happenings around the movement, published as a blog, email and on-wiki
- Our staff acts as a living repository of knowledge and human connections. Our staff members know the highly active people and leaders of activities, and what they are working on. Every day they work with these volunteers, actively connecting the dots between projects, between people, and between ideas. This task is supported not only by personnel, but also by continuously improving information management structures, such as the database for community projects.
- We are promoting the creation of learning patterns and how-tos, in order to facilitate knowledge transfer within the community and into the movement.
- Our support guidelines, structures and programs are developed and updated with and by volunteers: Every six months, we hold a collaborative work session with community members. These offline efforts are connected over time through continuous on-wiki participation formats. Guidelines, project development tools, related discussions, as well as a list of recently supported projects are documented at WP:FÖ.
- Volunteer Support works with WMDE Software Development Department on implementing the community-centered software development approach through connecting the SE Communications Manager with volunteers, local hubs, groups and resources.
- Regional cooperation with WMAT and WMCH to coordinate the work supporting the German-speaking Wikimedia communities.
Success Story: Local hubs and local groups
[edit]The most obvious manifestation of this shift towards community empowered capacity building is the recent rapid development of decentralized local groups and spaces all across Germany. In the past, many activities had depended on coordination and administration by the WMDE office in Berlin, putting volunteers in other cities at a disadvantage in terms of accessing and organizing offline activities. Within the last 12 months, local hubs have become active in Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, Hannover, Bremen, Munich, and Stuttgart. Local hubs take many different forms: they can be store fronts, shared office spaces, and office hours at regular events, located at libraries or partnering nonprofits. Others, such as the Dresden group, are more informal and just exist as groups of highly active people with no fixed location yet. WMDE supports the creation of hubs with subsidies for rent, where appropriate and needed. Given these basic resources, volunteers then initiate and carry out the projects, meetings and activities independently. This leads to a high level of diversity in local activities, because each hub comes up with strategies and activities that are relevant and timely in the local context. Local hubs serve the movement in the following ways:
- Creating local partnerships with communities, libraries, GLAMs, and thus leveraging resources locally
- Providing physical work spaces for groups of volunteers interested in content-driven activities
- Presenting a visible ‘face’ of the movement, attracting new volunteers through scheduled activities and as walk-ins, and uniting groups that had worked in isolation previously
- Providing space for offline social activities of online groups, such as the Jungwikipedianer (young wikipedians), strengthening human connections for online work
- Providing space for workshops and trainings
- While the hubs work in a decentralized, local manner, they do inspire each other and volunteers adopt ideas that they saw implemented at other hubs. We support this cross-fertilization through travel bursaries and by facilitating connections between people.
Young Wikipedians meet in Real Life! The Young Wikipedians (JWP) are a loose association of editors under 18 that has existed in various forms since 2007. They work together in a supportive, comfortable atmosphere, run their own contests and have their own cleanup list. In early June, this group met face to face for the first time at the local hub in Cologne, with costs covered by WMDE. The meeting was accompanied by a few older Wikipedians and recent ex-JWPs, and supported by the Cologne Wikipedians active in the local hub. Two days of productive discussion, presentations, joint meals, walks, ice cream and local sightseeing ensued. The conversation centered on issues regarding youth in Wikipedia - cybermobbing, logistical and safety issues when youth want to participate in offline events, and online encyclopedias for kids (e.g. the WMDE-supported Klexikon). Participants also heard a presentation on Wikidata and were introduced to the Wikidata Game. On the way home on the train, one of the participants completed 1,000 edits in Wikidata. The meetup was commented very enthusiastically on the JWP discussion page. These young people are the future of Wikipedia. The local hub gave them a safe place to meet and connect as people. |
Local groups are active in similar ways to the local hubs, but without a set meeting space and in part working less independently. Currently, there are 42 local groups that are operating on different levels and on a variety of activities. Many of them benefit from our support services. Some of them may be potential new local hubs. In general, the proportion of volunteer activities which are based on the engagement of local volunteer groups has risen to more than 54% (of all activities directly supported by WMDE). If also taking into account the activities of local hubs indirectly supported by WMDE, this proportion is even higher (74%).
Local hubs already have been a success in terms of the number of activities they have sparked. In addition to the activities directly supported by WMDE Volunteer Support, in Q1/Q2 there have been 162 activities which were initiated and conducted at the local hubs rather independently and on a regular, serial basis.
We have begun to analyze the activities and outputs of local hubs for the first half of 2015 in terms of their qualitative outcomes. Here's the picture that is beginning to emerge:
- Many content-driven community activities are taking place, such as regular edit-a-thons, weekly editing sessions or spontaneous photographing sessions (41% of all activities of local hubs).
- Local hubs frequently serve as contact points for like-minded organizations through hosting partner events.
- Off-wiki kick-offs serve as starting points for continued on-wiki cooperation.
- Local hubs with their readily available human and technical resources serve to support the quick start-up of projects without the delay of having to formally apply for assistance with WMDE.
- Locally organized volunteers reach out to local institutional partners and explore connections to the Wikimedia communities and projects.
- New connections with local institutions have emerged: more than 33% of the activities conducted at local hubs involve public institutions or regional organizations as partners.
Example: Lokal K (Cologne hub)
[edit]The Cologne-based ‘Lokal K’ is one of the oldest and most formalized local hubs (opened in April 2014). This hub acts as focal point for volunteers in Cologne and the surrounding areas. In Q1/Q2, there were 61 different activities radiating from this hub (plus nine meetings of other regional or thematic Wikimedia groups coming to Cologne).
One of the main benefits of local hubs - their flexibility - is demonstrated by the quick adoption of the French Wikicheese challenge by Lokal K. Shortly after our friends from France initiated this great project, and gathered additional funds and attention by staging a crowdfunding campaign, the volunteer group at Lokal K set up ‘their’ Wikicheese: a series of photo and editing sessions in Lokal K, using local equipment and much enthusiasm. To date this fast response led to 63 tasty pictures.
Additionally, the local hub in Cologne also functions as an a easily accessible contact point for regional public institutions. In April 2015, for example, several representatives of the Nordrhein-Westfälische Bibliographie (NWBib is an extensive online bibliography for books, journals and other media related to the state of North Rhine-Westphalia) met with Wikipedians at Lokal K to discuss the use of NWBib for Wikipedia, its linkage with Wikidata and its further development with regard to the needs of Wikipedia editors.
To date, the emergence of local hubs and groups is a phenomenon we carefully observe and support. There is a lot still to review, analyze and learn before this local empowerment model can be fully understood and scaled. The Annual Compass 2016 identifies local hubs and groups as a priority, with a focus on further analysis, documentation and sharing with the movement.
Other Success Stories
[edit]The following examples illustrate aspects of our volunteer support approach and how they have led to success:
Attracting new editors – Once again, Wiki Loves Earth Germany attracted numerous new contributors (809 out of 1,000, 81%) who submitted 14,115 pictures of high quality, topographic diversity and excellent encyclopedic value. Nine out of ten of the TOP 10 pictures were submitted by new contributors. Now, the challenge is to retain these new contributors for the Wikimedia projects. The communities are actively discussing how to retain new editors and are starting to test some strategies. New users are marked with a note in the WLE TOP 100 list, so they can be identified and contacted more easily. To test offline strategies for retaining new editors, a WMDE-funded project entitled 'Herb Garden and Monastery Kitchen' will unite ten participants, of which seven are new volunteers (two of which are WLE winners), on a research excursion that will create photos and articles around two protected monastery sites as well as the traditional herbs grown and processed there. In preparation for the upcoming Wiki Loves Monuments at a WLM-community network meeting in July in Weimar (travel cost and organizing supported by WMDE), volunteers will work on identifying concrete new editor retention strategies. New editor recruitment and retention strategies are still being developed and tested. WMDE’s focus in terms of WLE and WLM will be to support this experimentation, help evaluate results and communicate them to the movement.
Low cost, targeted support generating large output – The Festivalsommer, a project in which WMDE supports Wikipedians and contributors to Commons through accreditation to take pictures of performers during summer music festivals, is going into its third year this summer. The project is organized by a community project leader, supported by WMDE. The photos focus on identified gaps in Wikipedia. During the first half of 2015, the project has already generated 7,959 media files on Commons which are used in articles 758 times on 57 Wikipedias.
Focused, time-limited support leading to independent, sustained, multiplying activities – Women Edit, now in its second year, had initially been logistically supported by WMDE staff, but has now stabilized as a group. The Berlin group continues to meet monthly at our offices and a new group has recently formed in the Ruhr region. Edit-a-thons are organized frequently and spontaneously, and online support structures and personal contacts are available and frequently used. In August, women will offer a peer training on how to organize edit-a-thons, creating further potential for scaling this approach.
Quick and easy access to technical equipment leading to immediate outputs – A Wiktionary volunteer has recorded over 5000 sound files for entries in the German Wiktionary, using a high-quality microphone supplied by WMDE. 97% of these sound files are used in German or other Wiktionaries. He also created a wiki page with instructions on how to record high-quality sound files.
Learning Pattern: Audio samples for Wiktionary | Recording high-qualitiy audio samples for Wiktionary |
Incubating ideas, leveraging external resources, reaching out to new audiences – Klexikon is a volunteer project that was funded by a WMDE Volunteer Support grant in 2014. The project aims to create an online encyclopedia appropriate for children ages 6-12. Through our funding, the volunteers created a pedagogical concept and a prototype site, which now has almost 700 articles. When the project leaders approached our Volunteer Support Department for follow-up funding to move the project to the next level, WMDE ZEN staff worked with them to submit an application for public funding through a grant program available for the development of high-quality children’s websites. The application is currently under review. If funded, the project team will recruit and train additional editors, promote the site to teachers and parents, and expand offline and online linkages and partnerships with other free knowledge and OER sites aimed at a younger audience. The Klexikon team presented their project at Wikimania 2015. WMDE sees projects such as Klexikon as potential recruitment pipelines, introducing younger authors to free knowledge projects that will prepare them for engaging in Wikipedia later on.
Learnings
[edit]This year, we are applying our shift in support strategy to larger community projects as well. An example for this is the annual conference of German Wikipedia volunteers, the WikiCon. In the past years, WMDE had invested significant staff time and financial resources into supporting the event, raising questions about the cost-benefit-ratio. Now, the conference is largely organized by volunteers.
In 2015, the volunteer team that organized the conference in Cologne in 2014 supports the 2015 Dresden team. In addition, WMDE facilitates connections with local public and private partners to support the conference and leverage resources, leading to decreased spending of movement funds and at the same time creating the foundations for partnerships that will benefit the local Wikimedia communities beyond the event. We are supporting shared learning and are hoping to connect the WikiCon meetings through themes and local activities throughout the year. WMDE and volunteers will create one or more learning patterns after this year’s event to share what was learned from the conference.
Color Code indicating Progress on Targets |
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On track/ ongoing/ results meeting expectations |
Delayed or falling behind expectations |
Not meeting expectations |
Target changed/ postponed / no results available yet |
Targets: Volunteer Support | |||
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Targets | Progress (at end of Q2) | Projected (end of year)/ Next steps Comments | |
By the end of 2015, 75% of the volunteers who have initiated community projects report that WMDE support packages (e.g. project management assistance, event support, technical assistance) were helpful for managing their project and for making it a success. | This target was revised, aligned with the shift in our approach to volunteer support:
We primarily ensure satisfaction with our support packages by developing the structures with the community. In March, WMDE staff and volunteers met in Hamburg for the 3rd workshop on support structures and needs. This was accompanied by Wikipedia surveys (polls) and resulted in several work packages (e.g. ‘improvements in evaluation and documentation of volunteer activities’) to be addressed by dedicated teams of staff and volunteers. |
In Q3/Q4, we will collaboratively refine WMDE’s support structures further. Whether or not not there is a need for continuing project management assistance will be assessed by the work teams.
We will determine if a community survey at the end of Q4 - like the one conducted by Wikimedia Netherlands - is feasible to measure the overall satisfaction with WMDE’s volunteer support structures. | |
Fostered by the WMDE volunteer support team, the number of collaboratively created learning patterns that describe promising community project practices rises up to 10 until the end of 2015 (learning patterns will be translated and posted to Meta). | End of Q2 still ongoing: several important topics have been commonly identified and are now worked on (e.g. an extensive hands-on guide about the upload of large datasets to Commons).
One jointly written Learning Pattern about recording audio samples for Wiktionary is already available on Meta. |
In the context of the further enhancement of WMDE’s volunteer support structures (pls. see above), we will work on establishing the sharing of lessons learned/ learning patterns as an integral part of the course of volunteer-lead projects.
10 learning patterns will be uploaded by the end of the year. | |
The number of new media items added to Wikimedia Commons in 2015 which are marked as ‘supported by WMDE’ continues at the high levels of 2014 (99K for calendar year 2014). | New media items added to Commons / marked as ‘supported by WMDE’ (Jan-June 2015): 35,714 | ||
Global usage of media items (improving articles in global Wikimedia projects) ‘supported by WMDE’ increases by 20% to ~65K (End of 2014: 68K). | Global usage of media items (improving articles in global Wikimedia projects) ‘supported by WMDE’: 83,476 | ||
Metrics and ways to measure them are established for monitoring the number of articles created or edited as a result of WMDE’s small project support. | Staff is working on finding appropriate ways of measurement in line with EU/ German privacy laws which allow for more time-efficient analysis, also on a large scale (> 300 - 400) volunteer-led projects per year). | Please note: ways to measure article metrics are still limited: 1) the usability of the Wikimetrics tool is still inadequate, making it too time- intensive, especially given a large number of diverse volunteer projects, and 2) the tool would require tracking of user names to aggregate article metrics. We do not practice this with regard to EU privacy laws and privacy preferences of the German-speaking editing community. | |
New objective from the revised WMDE Annual Plan: Strengthen local hubs and local groups to spark sustainable activities, content work, local partnerships and mutual inspiration. | |||
Indicators and criteria of success (from our revised annual plan):
# of cities/ regions with local hubs and activities # of completed local projects and activities Number and quality of sustainable local partnerships which support the work for Wikimedia projects Continued sharing of experiences and success strategies for local Wikimedia involvement |
End of Q2, 8 local hubs are established (to different degrees of formalization). In Q1/Q2, a total of 162 activities were conducted by Wikimedians at the local hubs.
Additionally, 42 different local groups are working on a local level to conduct activities, build partnerships and inspire each other. In total, >54% of all directly supported activities in Q1/Q2 are based on the work of local volunteers cooperating in their respective region (if including indirect support of local hubs: 74%). First examples show fast adoption of successful formats from one region to another and mutual consultation and knowledge sharing of the groups/ hubs. |
Existing hubs and local and thematic groups will be further strengthened and supported in their striving for innovative, impactful activities. |
Program Story 2: Software Development
[edit]Wikidata continued to be a main focus of the WMDE Software Development Department. However, other activities progressed as well:
The APG proposal had outlined the establishment of a new developer team within the Software Development Department for 2015. The team is designed to take care of community technical requests, develop MediaWiki according to the needs of community-initiated projects, and work on software projects commissioned by WMDE departments such as the attribution generator and the WLM upload tool.
During the first half of 2015, the new team called TCB (Team Community Bedarfe, roughly translated as Community Needs Team) was established and developed its internal work processes as well as processes for cooperating effectively within Software Development and with the other WMDE departments. The new team consists of a product owner and engineers, staffing will be complete by the end of July and the team will be working with agile principles in continuous consultation with the WMF engineering team and with interested chapters.
A second, smaller new team was created within the department: The Community Communication Team consists of two positions, the Community Communications Manager and the Community Strategist. The focus of the former has been the participatory development of a new process to improve software products and platforms together with the communities. In the proposal, we had this activity located within the Volunteer Support Department. As the team and its tasks were developed, it quickly became apparent that it made more sense to locate it within Software Development, based on the positive experiences we have gathered with the Wikidata team in the last two years. The Community Communications Team also took on the tasks of providing outreach and mentoring to the FOSS Developer Community, as well as creating recruitment pipelines, ensuring that the growing Berlin Software Development hub is supported by professionals with strong ties to the open source and Wikimedia communities. These tasks are covered by the department’s new Community Strategist position.
Wikidata
[edit]Wikidata has gone through a busy, inspiring and challenging first half of 2015. The project has been blessed and challenged with the planned closing of Google’s Freebase, along with the company’s statement in December 2014 to support Wikidata as the more viable community-based effort for structured knowledge. Freebase data is to be exported into Wikidata.
This has led to a shift of priorities at WMDE Software Development. The Berlin team has strengthened its focus on quality and trust in order to assure that the huge amount of data ‘inherited’ from Freebase can be integrated into Wikidata, while maintaining an overall high level of quality and not overwhelming the Wikidata community.
In turn, the publicity Wikidata has received through the Freebase announcement has led to increased visibility and interest in the project, resulting in 1,000 additional active editors since January. The total number of editors in Wikidata has risen to more than 15k by June 2015 (please see editor charts below). This benefits the project, as the increase in editors allows for curating and integrating more data. However, the tools, infrastructure and processes that enable the editors need to constantly be optimized and new ones need to be developed. Assuring quality and trust, already a focus outlined in the annual plan and APG proposal, in the first half of 2015 has become the central topic for the team. References are part of this: 55% of items in Wikidata now have referenced statements (either in Wikipedia or external sources), up from 49% at the same time in 2014. However, this percentage could still be improved to assure overall trust in the quality of the data.
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Wikidata Edits (Dec-June)
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Wikidata Editors (Dec-June)
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Wikidata Active Editors (Dec-May)
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Wikidata Very Active Editors (Dec-May)
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Wikidata New Editors per Month (Dec-May)
One initiative, aimed at addressing quality and trust, is the work of the Wikidata Quality Team of bachelor students from Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam. These students are also part of the Mentoring Program described below. The students are working on two projects: One, developing a tool that compares the data in Wikidata with other databases (starting with the German National Library) and flags statements for review by an editor in case there are discrepancies; and Two, a project focusing on checking specific constraints (such as: “birth and death date of a person should not be more than 150 years apart”) and indicating issues when someone visits an item’s page, thus helping to identify which statements should be treated with caution and encouraging editors to fix errors. This work is based on an earlier version developed by the community, expanding and improving the feature to make it more integrated, understandable and easy to find.
The overall statistics for pages, statements and items in Wikidata show an impressive growth as well: by late June 2015, the total number of items had increased to 17.8M and statements had risen to almost 65M.
A number of educational and outreach online resources are aimed at assisting institutions to contribute data sets to Wikidata, and are written, for example, for a general audience or GLAMs. Wikidata had already received much visibility through the Open Data Award in 2014. More recently, Wikidata was also chosen as one of 100 winning projects out of 1,000 applications by the prestigious Land of Ideas initiative as an awardee for a competition called ‘Urban Space. Rural Space. Cyberspace!’. The final award ceremony will take place at the WMDE office in Berlin on October 29, 2015.
As a result of targeted outreach, awards, and press coverage, Wikidata is utilized by a growing number of people and institutions in a number of creative ways: Many organizations working with data are now migrating their links from Wikipedia to Wikidata, including Musicbrainz and the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). Other examples include the book inventory Inventaire and Histopedia (a timeline creator).
Europeana’s technical R&D team presented future plans for close integration with Wikidata at the GLAM-WIKI conference in the Netherlands April:
"[Wikidata] emerged as a major theme of the conference, as it is increasingly becoming the hot topic for many GLAM-Wiki projects worldwide. After years of GLAMs creating Linked Open Data and authority-controlled metadata that they wish to share, many GLAM-Wiki collaborations are now looking to Wikidata as the most viable way to connect to others’ work. The potential value of Wikidata to Europeana is clear - potential applications include everything from improving multilingual search results to making connections between records from different partners."
Europeana Blog, April 20, 2015
To summarize, Wikidata has increased its scope, size and reach significantly in the first six months of 2015, both within and outside of the Wikimedia Movement. Given the importance of Wikidata as one of Wikimedia Deutschland’s contributions to the global movement and as the one of the Wikimedia Projects to generate a significant growth in volunteer editors, WMDE is committed to continue investment in the project. This commitment is evidenced by the recently completed WMDE Annual Compass for 2016, which identifies Wikidata and the Software Development Program as one of three first-level priorities of the organization. The related work occurs through continued allocation of human and financial resources, facilities as well as through utilizing and growing WMDE’s expertise in working with the growing editor community. More strategic outreach to and collaboration with external partners that provide data will become an increasingly central focus of the project. Close collaboration with the WMF engineering and management teams will continue and intensify, while integrating and improving processes for planning, development and monitoring.
FOSS Outreach and Mentoring Program
[edit]Open-source software is a prerequisite for the Wikimedia Movement to distribute free knowledge. Open-source software in turn depends, among others, on the dedicated developers, coders and FOSS activists who advance and develop the code. In 2015, WMDE is actively working to support this community, increase awareness about our work (namely, about Wikidata), provide opportunities for shared learning and community building, and identify and support young coders as part of a recruitment pipeline. A website named Sourcecode.Berlin serves to share all information and documentation of activities. The Community Communication Team has planned two events to date that serve as an offline opportunity to build community among coders and increase their awareness of the WMDE software development team and its activities. The first event, EnthusiastiCon, took place in June 2015 at the WMDE office and featured 16 speakers and 50 participants as it was all about sharing the joy of programming among the open source developer community in Berlin. Over two days of short presentations, participants talked about what excites them about programming – the strange, the wonderful, and the clever solutions to unusual problems. The content and format of the event was well received, but the attendance could have been higher. Follow-up will include publishing the videos of presentations on the website of Sourcecode.Berlin and documentation of networking activities that result from the event.
The second event, Free Knowledge Game Jam, is scheduled for October 2015. The desired outcome here is to also increase the visibility of WMDE software development activities in the FOSS scene. The Wikidata API will be the focus of a 24-hour hackathon during which developers will create games under open licences, while using the Wikidata API. This will serve as a way to increase awareness of Wikidata and get more open-source developers to join the Wikidata community.
The Sourcecode.Berlin podcast, created in English, also serves to establish WMDE as a thought leader in the German open-source movement and create new networks for advancing and supporting open source as an issue and a community. The Sourcecode.Berlin podcast sheds more light on Open Source issues in Berlin. Sourcecode.Berlin will be expanded through videos and events, and we hope to make it a well-known brand and an interface to the Berlin WMDE development hub. To date, 19 podcast episodes have been published on a bi-weekly basis. In the first half of 2015, each episode had been downloaded 500 times on average. Until June 2015, 9,941 people had listened to the podcast. The communication strategy for all the FOSS activities extensively utilizes social media, which works well for this target population.
Increasingly, our activities are leading to groups and organizations from the FOSS scene approaching us to host their events and activities at WMDE in Berlin. This also serves to increase WMDE’s visibility and introduce more developers to our work. One example: the node.js meetups with over 100 participants.
WMDE has employed work-study students and engaged interns for several years now. Some of the work-study students use their time with us to complete their theses projects, develop code, or come on board as employees eventually. With the WMDE Mentoring Program, we seek to sustain and scale these great outcomes to the benefit of the young developers and WMDE. The desired outcome of the Mentoring Program is to identify talented young developers and to introduce them to our work, to the principles of open source development and the Open Knowledge movement, and create the beginnings of a recruitment pipeline for the Berlin hub of the movement. The concept for this program is still being developed together with interns and students who already work with us (for example the bachelor students participating in the Wikidata Quality project).
Success Story: Improving Software with Communities
[edit]Wikipedians, editors and all users active on Wikimedia platforms have a large number of suggestions and express a variety of demands, concerns and requests. Not all of them can be addressed. Many of them are crucial to improve our platforms. Therefore, it is crucial to find out what the main technical concerns of the diverse user groups are, and to transparently communicate the prioritization and feasibility of feature requests. The work around incorporating technical requests into software development at WMDE has made significant progress in the first half of 2015.
The work is building on the technical wish list that had been established by a active community member in 2014. The requests on the list had been addressed one by one by the software development department and by community volunteers. The new process will be even more participatory.
The event series Tech on Tour in five German cities served to gather requests and suggestions for the concept from volunteers active in Wikipedia and other movement projects. 53 volunteers participated. The events were organized by local contributors collaboratively with the Community Communication Manager, many of them active in local hubs we support, coordinated closely with the WMDE Volunteer Support Department.
Key findings from these workshops made the wide range of areas of interest of the community, problems and challenges more transparent. Participants’ recommendations led to the following principles for the program:
- Take into account diverse interests and knowledge levels, attitudes and needs.
- Provide transparent communication, clear contacts, and easy-to-understand information.
- Continue to work on tried-and-tested methods and improve them.
- Find new approaches and ways to reach the various user groups.
- Use familiar and tested communication channels and locations.
The new process, developed with the communities through Tech on Tour and further communication, now streamlines and focuses how technical input from the community is received, translated, processed, reviewed and incorporated into engineering work. Based on this, the Community Communications Manager developed a concept paper (in German, English version will be published in Q3) that outlines a structured and transparent approach to address technical requests, which is now under review by the involved stakeholders. A Wikipedia page summarizes all that communities need to know about how to submit requests and contribute to the development of user friendly, relevant software products.
The concept further foresees that technical requests are to be continuously received and prioritized through tried and tested methods: polls and thematic or user-specific workshops. In the polls, users get to vote and thus prioritize the wishes on the list. Then the requests are turned into structured work packages for our new TCB Team. The team works on implementing the prioritized community technical requests. Updates on the feasibility and status of each request are provided on the wikipage of the wish list as well as on phabricator. Other requests are addressed by community members themselves.
Many of the completed requests enhance the editing environment and the user friendliness of the projects. Integration and iteration of community feedback fits well into our established agile processes. Valuable community input is thus turned into code through effective communication and collaboration.
This innovative approach goes far beyond using community input for software development. Instead, the community becomes the leading factor in identifying and prioritizing tech requests, and collaboratively addresses them. Community-centered software development leads to a better product and more satisfied users.
The feedback received so far from the German speaking communities has been extremely positive - people from the communities continue to express their appreciation for the participatory work through social media and on-wiki.
WMDE staff has begun to share the learning from this initiative through a session at the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin and at the Hackathon in Lyon . These international outreach activities are in response to requests of WMF teams and chapters who are interested in replicating this participatory approach when working with their communities.
Wikimedia Commons
[edit]The objectives and targets related to Wikimedia Commons have largely not been addressed in the first half of this year. This is due to two factors: One, the December 2014 ‘data donation’ by Google captured most of the resources of the Wikidata product team. Due to large amounts of data dumped into Wikidata by Freebase, the team was faced with a large amount of additional work that was prioritized over the Commons objectives, in order to maintain the quality and trust in data in Wikidata. Second, the engineering staff at the Wikimedia Foundation responsible for Commons underwent major personnel changes, leading to a situation where our developers no longer had counterparts to work with on Commons issues. We are currently awaiting developments in the WMF engineering department to determine if and what next steps are useful and feasible to tackle Wikimedia Commons.
Color Code indicating Progress on Targets |
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On track/ ongoing/ results meeting expectations |
Delayed or falling behind expectations |
Not meeting expectations |
Target changed/ postponed / no results available yet |
Targets: Software Development | |||
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Targets | Progress (at end of Q2) | Projected (end of year)/ Next steps Comments | |
Wikidata | |||
The improved “Edit References” feature is available for users of Wikidata by the end of 2015 and allows for quick and easy referencing (as indicated by an increase in references to 15 % statements that have non-Wikimedia references by six months after feature roll-out). |
The feature is available, but not yet further improved. Statements referenced to other sources by 2015-06-22: 11,333,403 (17.45%) |
Target has been surpassed. First improvement roll-out is planned for Q3. | |
The new feature “Enhanced Changes List” is available for users of ‘sister’ projects no later than by the end of 2015. | We gathered community feedback regarding watchlist integration improvements (enhanced recent changes is part of that) and investigated the technical efforts needed. | Working on providing more meaningful edit summaries (demanded by community feedback) in Q3 .
Further development of “Enhanced Recent Changes List” also depends on cooperation with WMF development teams working on recent changes and watchlist improvements. | |
The Wikidata feature “Constraint Reports” is improved/ enhanced and made available for users of Wikidata by the end of 2015. | Working on Constraints Reports Stats.
Setting up a “check against third parties” feature by HPI student team. |
Roll-out of a first version of Constraints Reports on 2015-07-08, finalization in Q3 (together with HPI student team). | |
Wikimedia Commons | |||
A topic category function is made available for editors of Wikimedia Commons by the end of Q2 2015. | Changes in prioritization due to a stronger focus on ‘data quality and trust’ and personnel changes at development teams at the WMF (please see detailed explanation above).
Regardless, some minor improvements in the backend were deployed. Further steps regarding this objective will be defined in Q3. | ||
Users of Wikimedia Commons are enabled to search media content by searching for topics and other media data by end of 2015. | |||
Data types to specify e.g. institutions, authors or licenses are made available by end of 2015. | |||
By the end of 2015 optimized user functions (e.g. for ‘new entry’ or ‘edit’) are made available to users of Wikimedia Commons. | |||
Berlin-based Software Development Center | |||
The Community Project Team is established, is working according to agile processes of software deployment, and starts to support the technical needs of community-initiated projects by end of 2015. | Q1/Q2: Establishing the team, setting-up agile processes and cooperation with technical community communications staff | Q3: The TCB (Team Community Bedarfe, roughly translated as Community Needs Team) will be established (in a minimum capacity) in July as planned in our annual plan.
(It also already supports software development tasks for other WMDE program teams e.g. upload tools for photo events like Wiki Loves Monuments 2015) | |
Monthly audio podcasts and videos of technical talks are published, resulting in at least 200+ downloads per episode by the end of Q3. Two hands-on, output-oriented tech events are attended by at least 60 community members. | 13 new english audio podcasts (Sourcecode Berlin) were published January - June with 6,533 listeners total, on average 502 per episode.
The FOSS-Event EnthusiastiCon was conducted in June (16 speakers / 50 participants on-site / 45 viewers via livestream / 175 views on YouTube). More and more developers from the FOSS scene come us to stage their Tech-events at our premises. |
Videos of the technical talks (e.g. from EnthusiatiCon) will be published throughout Q3 on Sourcecode Berlin.
Continued working on utilizing our new contacts to FOSS community members for further cooperations. A second FOSS-Event (Game Jam) is scheduled for October 23-25, 2015: a Hackathon focusing on development of open source games (and potentially utilizing the Wikidata API and APIs for other Wikimedia projects for it). The format of the EnthusiastiCon event proved to be promising for Wikimedia chapters to get in contact with their local FOSS community. | |
By end of 2015, the mentoring program is made publicly accessible and volunteer open source developers receive first support (e.g. scholarships for hackathons or other events, co-working space at WMDE office etc). | As pilots, we are already mentoring a high school student intern and 4 working students (who also work on their bachelor/ master thesis at WMDE) and a project group of 6 students at the HPI. | The mentoring program concept will be developed and formalized iteratively (in consultation with the existing and past interns, working students and student project groups) in Q3/Q4 and made publicly available until end of Q4.
The mentoring of the HPI student group already proved to be highly productive in terms of engaging junior developers in our common work on data quality & trust issues in Wikidata. | |
Community Communications | |||
A mechanism has been established that will enable volunteers to submit software/technical suggestions and ideas, and the Volunteer Support/Software Development teams respond efficiently to these suggestions (Objective, please note: this was under Volunteer Support in the original proposal). | Based on the 2014 “technical wishlist” initiative, in Q1/Q2 we conducted extensive consultations with community members - both, on- and offline (please see success story ‘Improving Software with Communities’ for detailed information):
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A detailed analysis of the community consultations and the proposed measures for community participation were published in German in July and is currently discussed with the involved communities. An English version will be shared with the Movement in Q3.
Building on this work, we will further test and streamline our participatory process regarding community oriented software development - both, in terms of communication and technical processes. By end of 2015, we will share our overall learnings. In Q3/Q4, technical requests from the communities will be processed through this new mechanism and addressed by the TCB team. | |
Passing through the new iterative mechanism, by end of 2015, at least 5 suggestions/ideas/tools will be rolled-out. | Continued work and testing regarding four suggestions/ideas/tools from the 2014 “Top 20 technical wishlist” in close coordination with WMF teams, but not yet finalized.
Other affiliates (e.g. Wikimedia Israel) are interested in an exchange of experiences around community-centered software development. |
The TCB development team was not fully established until end of Q2, due to the time it took to recruit.
In Q3/Q4, the new team (in a minimum personnel setup) will start to support the technical needs of community-initiated projects more and more, so we are positive to meet the target by end of 2015. | |
Continuous monitoring and documentation of community feedback shows predominantly positive assessments of software/technical features and of the process of community participation through the end of 2015. | Continuous monitoring and documentation of community feedback is established through our community communications staff and informs the development and deployment process.
In general, we experienced very positive reactions and good participation. A Wikipedia poll (June 2015) concerning usage of Wikidata in deWP article namespace raised high attention and showed rising trust to work with Wikidata. |
A planned workshop event (“InfoCamp”) in October will be an additional opportunity to gain feedback and deepen discussion.
Further elements of our participatory process will be initiated and tested in Q3/Q4: on-wiki polls around technical wishes, online discussions and off-wiki workshops (“InfoCamp”). | |
Throughout 2015, there is a lively, respectful exchange on software development activities facilitated through the WMDE Community Liaison position and a decrease in controversies upon implementation of software-related changes. | Regular consultation between WMF Community Engagement Team (Engineering Community and Community Liaison Teams) und WMDE Community Communication is established.
Our Technical Community Communications staff takes part in relevant WMF Tech events (e.g. Lyon Hackathon, Wikimania) which already led to over 20 conversations with WMF and affiliates e.g. about our concept of community centered software development. |
Program Story 3: Institutions
[edit]WMDE’s work with institutional partners has grown in quantity, scope and in quality in the first six months of 2015. Our main strategic focus remains the facilitation of collaboration between institutions, movement communities and volunteers, and finding ways to sustain these collaborations in order to liberate content. As described in the WMDE Round 1 proposal, we are putting continued emphasis on GLAM institutions as well as intensifying outreach activities into the science communities. Central projects here have been the 2nd year of the Cultural Hackathon Coding Da Vinci, as well as GLAM on Tour.
Success story: Coding Da Vinci
[edit]The cultural hackathon Coding da Vinci is a collaboration between WMDE, Open Knowledge Foundation Germany (OKFN) and two institutional partners: the German Digital Library and digiS (the Berlin government’s service point for digitalization of cultural heritage). The event was held for the second time this year, with the award ceremony taking place on July 5th at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. The raw materials used by the coders to create apps were exclusively cultural data from German archives, libraries and museums. All data and the newly programmed apps are available under free license. 33 cultural institutions provided data, 22 of which were completely new to the project. 150 hackers participated in the event and a total of 28 project ideas were developed, 20 of which were presented at the award event. All projects demonstrated the endless possibilities and the innovative potential of opening up cultural data. The enthusiastic and productive interaction between GLAMs and the coder community at and around the event was striking. Five projects were selected by the jury and an additional ‘everybody’s darling’ project was selected by the audience.
For the second time, Coding da Vinci demonstrated the incredible potential of connecting the coder/hacker community with cultural institutions. The resulting projects and apps make cultural knowledge more tangible, accessible and more fun to work with, not just for the hackers, but for the general public. Cultural data sets are interlinked and combined with knowledge from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Institutions lose their fear of providing access to their digitized collections and learn to work with volunteers. Connections and relationships form through the event.
In 2015, the coalition of four organizations behind Coding da Vinci has begun to work within a Collective Impact framework. The coalition met in two ZEN-facilitated strategic planning sessions in May and June 2015 to agree on a shared vision for Coding da Vinci beyond the event. As a result, 2016 will be used to scale the project from a once-a-year event to a year-round program that will assure continuous facilitation of coder-institutional relationships, create better infrastructure for working with data, develop a structured approach to gathering and presenting the projects and the data, working on the usability of the data for the Wikimedia projects, and on creating learning materials so that other organizations and coalitions can replicate the practices and scale the activities. A scaled-up version of the event portion of the program, with more locations and more local partners, is envisioned for 2017.
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Berlin's State Secretary for Culture opening Coding da Vinci 2015
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Bringing together institutions and coders
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Art & Technology
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Project presentation
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The audience
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Winners, winners and winners
GLAM on Tour
[edit]GLAM on Tour facilitates networking and collaboration between volunteers active in Wikipedia and GLAMs on the local level. Wikipedians and GLAMs, supported by WMDE staff, jointly organize special guided tours, presentations related to current exhibits, photo tours and writing workshops. Wikipedians also provide introductory and editing workshops for the cultural institutions. Local collaboration often starts with an introductory one-day event, known as 'KulTour', during which Wikipedians are introduced to a specific cultural institution, get a guided tour, first contacts are established, and a Wikipedia workshop is provided.
In the first half of 2015, we have been observing an increase in activities that have taken on their own life - activities that are based on the establishment of local relationships, and that lead to the development of open content without much continued involvement of WMDE staff or resources. This outcome is very much in alignment with our volunteer/idea support strategy described above.
Open Science Model Project
[edit]In the first half of 2015, staff of the WMDE Education, Science and Culture Department worked on identifying opportunities for collaboration with the scientific community. We conducted research to find out which scientific institutions are already integrating open science principles into their work, and which might be suitable partners for a model project. Staff visited conferences and meetings, and conducted interviews with leaders and stakeholders in the scientific community. We tried to identify needs, potential and limitations of Open Science. In a second step we developed a few broad goals for WMDE pertaining to the field of science:
- Principles of Open Science are increasingly applied in research and higher education.
- Wikipedia and Wikidata are integrated into the daily work of scientific institutions.
- Open Licenses become a viable alternative to traditional avenues of scientific publication.
Based on the field research and the WMDE goals, we developed a concept for a model project: A fellowship program aimed at introducing young career scientists to the principles and practices of Open Science. The program will provide information on the philosophy of Open Science, the opportunities the approach holds for scientists and their communities, and introduce tools and services that support applying open science to the daily work of scientists in institutions. A grant program supports the fellows financially, as they apply what they have learned to a research project in their given discipline. Currently, we are actively looking for partners to pilot such a program, addressing universities and institutions that fund research. Negotiations with a few interested potential partners are in the early stages. In the second half of 2015, we will establish a formal partnership and work to finalize the concept and funding of the program to be rolled out in 2016.
Failure
[edit]In order to increase the external resources available to Coding da Vinci 2015, OKFN and WMDE initiated a Crowdfunding campaign on StartNext in early 2015. We were interested in conducting a crowdfunding campaign to gather learnings about this funding strategy, and find out how it can be applied to Free Knowledge projects. The campaign unfortunately failed to reach its financial goal of €10,000. Our somewhat presumptive conclusions are that, in order to attract many supporters, our campaign...:
- failed to communicate a direct benefit and a concrete, tangible thank-you for participants,
- should not have been around a rather abstract issue (such as funding a complex open culture project),
- suffered from the fact that the event was to take place regardless of the outcome of the campaign,
- and could have benefited from more extensive publicity and outreach to additional target groups.
It is well known that a viable communications strategy is crucial to attract enough supporters. Our social media channels and the German Wikipedia homepage ultimately were not enough to reach out to a critical mass of supporters from both the cultural and the open knowledge communities. We have shared more of our learning through a learning pattern on Meta (please see below).
Learning Pattern: Crowdfunding CdV | Failing at a crowdfunding campaign and what we can learn from it |
Color Code indicating Progress on Targets |
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On track/ ongoing/ results meeting expectations |
Delayed or falling behind expectations |
Not meeting expectations |
Target changed/ postponed / no results available yet |
Targets: Institutions | |||
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Targets | Progress (at end of Q2) | Projected (end of year)/ Next steps Comments | |
Volunteers participating in our training workshops and using WMDE’s cooperation guidelines report this support as helpful for establishing sustainable cooperation with institutions. | Not addressed in Q1/Q2. | Due to cuts in budgets (following the FDC decision) and a shift in the allocation of personnel resources towards our major Mapping OER project, we did not pursue the approach of training workshops and dedicated guidelines for volunteers working with GLAM institutions. As supporting material for volunteers and institutions, we published a video tutorial about the GLAM on Tour event format on Commons (German, English subtitles available). | |
Additional high priority institutions participate and ten potential partners engage in follow-up communication and continuous interaction with WMDE. | Especially with regard to GLAM cooperations, Q1/Q2 has been a very dynamic term:
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It is an essential part of the ‘GLAM on Tour’ and ‘KulTour’ event formats that they are based on volunteer’s initiatives and their contacts to local GLAM institutions.
‘KulTour’ is a short event format (low-threshold, flexible, one day) to start cooperations between volunteers and GLAM institutions. ‘CCChange’ is a role-play workshop format helping GLAM representatives to practise content liberation routines and to change their views on it (taking into account the specific situation of their respective institutions). It has been tested by WMDE during the first half of 2015. ‘Prepare your data’ is a direct counselling format to help GLAM institutions to liberate their content. It has been tested by WMDE during the first half of 2015. In general, 2015 is a testing period for different consulting formats which we will analyse and share with movement by end of 2015. | |
By the end of 2015, a renowned science institution commits itself to partner with WMDE in a pilot project regarding open knowledge in the scientific community. | In Q1/Q2, staff reached out to several potential partners (via direct contacts or participation at open science barcamps) to map the landscape of needs and opportunities in the open science field. This resulted in the plan to foster open science via initiating a fellowship program together with partners. | For Q3/Q4, staff will continue to work on setting up an open science fellowship program for young scientists. A draft concept for it is ready to be discussed with potential partnering science institutions. First conversations have been taking place in July. | |
Of our existing GLAM partnerships (baseline: 21 in 2014), at least eight institutions will continue contributing to our content-liberation activities in 2015. We strive to activate at least ten new GLAM institutions to provide access to their data/content. | Coding da Vinci 2015: 11 participating GLAM institutions from 2014 continued to contribute with their data/ content this year. 22 brand new GLAM institutions joined the event in 2015 additionally. Overall 620K media files and 65M Metadata became available under free licenses during the 10 week phase of the competition. | Main focus for Q3/Q4 will be to integrate the liberated data in Wikimedia projects (Commons, Wikipedia) and get them used more and more. This task will be commonly addressed by WMDE staff and volunteers/ editor communities. To date, 48k of the files have been uploaded to Commons. | |
Deployed technical assistance package (info & consultation modules) shared with the movement through publishing on Meta and as learning patterns with practice examples. | Three modules that will support GLAMs in liberating their content have been defined and are being developed. Learning patterns are under construction (incl. an extensive hands-on guide about the upload of large datasets to Commons) and will be published in Q3. | 2015 will be a testing period for these pilot modules. |
Links
[edit]https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/June_2015/Contents/Germany_report
Program Story 4: Legal and Social Framework
[edit]Open Educational Resources
[edit]Open Educational Resources (OER) are a strategically important issue for the Wikimedia movement. Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Commons are open resources that already support education in a variety of ways, and are widely used in secondary and higher education instruction and research. OER have a large potential to increase access to free knowledge for new target populations, and for transferring the Wikimedia values and practices into new arenas.
Since 2013, WMDE has emerged as a major player in Germany in promoting OER as a strategy to open education and provide access to educational materials under free licences. Increasingly, OER has informed and become integrated into the larger policy debates about educational reform in Germany as a way to increase the digital competencies of students and teachers. This has affected all educational arenas from primary and secondary schools to higher education, vocational education and adult education.
WMDE’s goals have been to foster networking, dialogue and knowledge transfer among stakeholders in education, support the development and distribution of policy statements, and to leverage activities and capacities of partners. WMDE had organized the OER Conference in 2013 and 2014, and our staff has been serving on a number of advisory committees, published public statements and co-founded the advocacy group Open Education Alliance.
As a result of two years of building WMDE’s public profile and pushing OER as a crucial part of education reform, the federal Department of Education and Research (BMBF) approached us in December of 2014 to submit concepts on how the use of OER could be promoted and facilitated nationwide. Following our submissions, an intensive period of negotiation followed, with the result being the ‘Mapping OER’ Project, which has been running from April 2015 to April 2016. The project is funded with over € 600,000 through a federal grant.
Mapping OER will establish the conditions that allow to facilitate a comprehensive use of OER in all educational arenas. Areas of focus that have emerged from our work of the past two years include quality assurance, models for qualification, business models and last, but not least, legal/license issues. Participants in the project include experts from the OER community, educational institutions from all arenas, education administrators, representatives of research and instruction, corporations and publishers, as well as as the key decision makers at the federal and state levels - the BMBF and the Conference of Education Ministers (KMK - this is the government body comprised of the educational authorities of all German states, tasked with assuring the coordination of nationwide educational policy).
To implement ‘Mapping OER’, WMDE will conduct a number of work sessions, a public conference and expert interviews. Results will be published on a central website. Towards the end of the project, a practice framework will summarize the findings, and list concrete challenges and opportunities to further the implementation of OER in Germany.
This project will have important benefits for WMDE: It further establishes us as a key stakeholder, and as a driver to bring the German education system up to date with the opportunities and the demands of a digital society. The recent, much quoted ICIL study showed that Germany is far behind in terms of the digital competencies of both teachers and students. This leads to an increased interest in the issue of OER from both policy makers and funders. The fact that WMDE put significant resources into pushing the issue over two years and established itself as an expert and advocate, has now put us in a position in which we get to co-create the policies and concrete activities in the field for the near future. This means that we can advocate for the values of the Wikimedia movement in the educational arena, speaking for open and free licences, for the collaborative generation of knowledge and for equal opportunities in education.
Advocacy at the EU Level
[edit]Our activities in Brussels, implemented by the Wikimedian in Brussels, who is co-funded by nine European Chapters that have joined together in the 14-member Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU, have developed largely according to the targets in the proposal, in many cases exceeding the targets. Wikimedia organizations and interests have been very present for consultations, meetings, policy discussions. Much outreach and collaboration has occurred with like-minded allies from outside of the Wikiverse.
Having a well established network and the Wikimedian in Brussels has contributed to enabling Wikimedians to react in a timely and noticeable manner, when the issue of Freedom of Panorama (FoP) arose as part of the Reda-Report in June. The proposal to limit FoP to non-commercial uses as part of the copyright reform was defeated, for now, on July 9, 2015. WMDE’s own Communications team, however, also played a crucial role:
Highlight: Panorama must be free! An update of EU copyright legislation has been in the making for a couple of years. The current version of the Information Society Directive was passed in 2001, the same year that Wikipedia came into existence. Since then, the world wide web and its usage have changed dramatically. Consequently, copyright reform at the European level is under scrutiny from many interest groups. While FoP is just one of hundreds of aspects when it comes to the copyright reform, it is vital for volunteers who donate images to the Wikimedia projects. Julia Reda, Member of the European Parliament (MEP), authored a report on the current state of EU copyright that called, among other things, for a harmonization of the highly heterogenous national legislations regarding Freedom of Panorama. While some countries, among them Germany, grant Freedom of Panorama, others (such as Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, and Luxembourg) do not. In an unexpected move, Reda's suggested harmonization was altered in wording, just days before a milestone vote on the whole report. While the new wording indeed suggested a harmonization, it reversed the intended effect by virtually making conditions to meet FoP much worse than before, even in countries like Germany. News of the re-wording broke with only days to tackle the problem. Many Wikimedia chapters and European volunteers became active immediately, calling on politicians and starting social media campaigns. At Wikimedia Deutschland, we supported coordination efforts in Brussels, but at the same time devised a complementary strategy: several protest campaigns, including a banner-driven volunteer campaign by German Wikipedians, had formed within hours. The German press was eager to report. Observing these developments, WMDE chose to add to the mix using resources that were unlikely to be available to others. We formed a task force, headed by the WMDE Communications Team, that sent personalized messages to every single German MEP. Each politician was mailed a call to action, including two fake postal cards that displayed a landmark sight from their specific German home state. One card was labeled with a handwritten "seasons greetings without FoP", showing a blacked-out version of the sight. The other card showed the regular image, labeled as "seasons greetings with FoP". The call to action was signed by WMDE's Executive Director. Also included was a list of the more than 4,000 signatures by German Wikipedians from the above mentioned banner-campaign. All mail was hand-delivered by Dimitar Dimitrov, who along with WMDE's Executive Director and an active Wikipedia Germany community member and photographer, had been available for a special in-depth interview with German news agency dpa, coordinated by the Communications team. Upon delivery, various German MEPs, either publicly or by reaching out personally, answered the call to action. One politician put the postcards on Facebook, another took the time to make a long phone call and assure his support of FoP. Every feedback we received was very positive, acknowledging the effort and impact of the personalized messages on the ultimately positive result - defeat of the restricting language in the report. |
Fostering Public Conversation about Free Knowledge
[edit]WMDE’s advocacy strategy includes assuring that there is continuous, high quality, public debate about the cultural, legal, economic and political dimensions of Free Knowledge in Germany. We do this through public panel discussions, hosted at our offices, that feature high-level political decision makers and public figures from culture, education and the internet. The Wikimedia Salon 'ABC of Free Knowledge' in 2015 covered the topics of EU Copyright Reform, Open Culture and Economic Survival of Artists in the Digital Age, to date.
In 2015, these events have created more attention in the media and the live attendance has doubled. All events are recorded and published on YouTube. We believe that our events have created better visibility for Free Knowledge, and have improved the overall quality and sophistication of the conversation around contentious issues such as copyright protection. The events also establish WMDE and the Wikimedia movement as the go-to partner and facilitator of respectful and lively dialogue on Free Knowledge. In turn, this strengthens our position when we sit at the table once policy decisions are made.
There are other, very much intended side effects (related to objective 1.2. under the Program Institutions in the WMDE Round 1 proposal): The participants as well as the audience of our events come from high level, influential institutions that are crucial partners in promoting Open Knowledge. As a result of the discussions, they engage with us on further joint activities or become champions and multipliers in their spheres of influence. In 2015, the Wikimedia Salon has already led to several new and strengthened partnerships, for example with the Humboldt Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz and the Museum of Natural Science. These institutional partners will now collaborate on future events. We also significantly expanded and deepened our media partnerships.
For the future, WMDE is committed to continue policy and advocacy activities in Germany and in Brussels, and put this work on sustainable, strategic and collaborative foundation. This commitment is evidenced by the recently completed Annual Compass 2016, which lists advocacy as one of three priorities of the highest importance. This means that WMDE will provide staff and financial resources to these activities in 2016.
Learning Pattern: Movement communication | Sharing relevant information with the Wikimedia movement |
Color Code indicating Progress on Targets |
---|
On track/ ongoing/ results meeting expectations |
Delayed or falling behind expectations |
Not meeting expectations |
Target changed/ postponed / no results available yet |
Targets: Legal and Social Framework | |||
---|---|---|---|
Targets | Progress (at end of Q2) | Projected (end of year)/ Next steps Comments | |
Open Educational Resources | |||
By the end of 2015, five new partners (organisations or individuals) have joined the Open Education Alliance. Additionally, the diversity of the alliance in terms of type and scope of our partners is increased. |
Until June 2015, four new partners (individuals and organisations) have joined the Open Education Alliance.
Published a position paper on OER in February and a statement regarding a report of the German federal states and government on OER. The mailing list of the alliance serves as a well-used exchange forum about OER. The coalition receives frequent requests e.g. for review of parliamentary requests and for inputs at OER events and expert rounds. |
As the alliance is currently refining its objectives and coordination processes, it paused the acquisition of additional new partners. | |
WMDE continues to be regularly invited to crucial state level open education consultations and hearings in Germany 2015 and plays an active role (provide own position papers, add new agenda points etc.) in most of them. | Participation in 5 hearings/ expert committees (mainly in a consulting role):
|
We are invited to relevant consultations on a regular basis - also due to our new ‘Mapping OER’ project, which gains much attention also by state level authorities.
Whether our positions regarding licensing and potential connections to Wikimedia projects/ communities in the field of OER results in concrete policy changes will become visible end of Q4 and beyond. | |
By the end of 2015, one state level political entity commits itself to partner in an OER pilot project with WMDE. | Q1/Q2: initiation and start of the major ‘Mapping OER’ project (together with the Federal Ministry of Education and Research) | ||
EU Advocacy | |||
An EU advocacy contact database is available for Wikimedians, and policy issue brochures in at least three different languages are shared with the Wikimedia movement. | Our Wikimedian in Brussels provides a database of relevant contacts already grown to 202 entries.
Brochures are not published yet, work-in-progress. |
The contact database will grow to 260+ by end of 2015.
Due to data protection regulations in Belgium and the EU, very few people have direct access. Contact information is provided upon request by the Wikimedian in Brussels. | |
Ten new working contacts to MEPs are established in 2015, which result in ongoing consultations by volunteer Wikimedians (as qualified by meetings, email conversations, phone calls). | End of Q2: 11 volunteer Wikimedians have established contacts with more than 20 MEPs. | ||
WMDE/FKAGEU participates in all relevant EU copyright dialogues, meetings and consultations in 2015 and plays an active role in all opportunities. | FKAGEU and our Wikimedian in Brussels have not missed a single relevant event related to copyright in Brussels so far: 88 discussions/ meetings until end of Q2 (conservative count)
Co-organised a film screening and a FoP Expert Seminar on Wikimedia topics inside the European Parliament, both hosted by MEPs (3 MEPs from 3 different political groups). |
The number of all events is difficult to determine, since it is hard to define what counts as “discussions” and “meetings”. | |
By end of 2015 at least two volunteer Wikimedians have participated in the “Wikimedian in Brussels” work scholarship and our EU advocacy activities. | The first ‘Visiting Weasel’ was Federico Leva from WMIT. | A volunteer from Spain is scheduled to be the next to participate this fall. Others have expressed interest. This activity needs monetary support to be sustainable. | |
Additional working partnerships are established and existing ones are deepened in 2015. | Our Position Paper on Copyright Reform was co-signed by 18 non-Wikimedia organisations.
We have begun participation in Communia (cooperation platform for advocating for the public domain - OKFN, Creative Commons and Kennisland are the lead partners):
Cooperated with Right to Research Coalition/SPARC on drafting plans to jointly lobby for real open access (i.e. cc-by or compatible) in the EU’s Horizon 2020 funding programme:
Organized event with Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue, invited to advise the organisation of OpenCon in Brussels:
Organised a NGO Networking Lunch together with EDRi and Amnesty International:
Advised the Mozilla Foundation on its Brussels activities, goals and on opening its Brussels representation. |
Membership of Communia is currently individual but should be formalized by transferring to Wikimedia Deutschland. |
Wikimedia Deutschland’s Work for the Global Movement
[edit]As the oldest and largest chapter, and as the second-largest Wikimedia organization globally, WMDE is putting increasing emphasis on contributing to the global movement in a variety of ways:
Fundraising for the Movement
[edit]As stated in the Chapter-wide Financial Trends Report 2013, WMDE transferred $6.4M in unrestricted funds to the WMF for the movement’s programmatic work. In 2014, this sum increased to €7.33M (not counting the APG grant and fundraising cost). This is only possible due to the highly sophisticated methods of the Wikimedia Fördergesellschaft (WMDE’s separate fundraising organization), and the fact that German donors are enabled to make their donation to a charity incorporated in Germany, thus making it tax-deductible. WMDE’s own total 2015 operating budget is €4.7M, so the organization raises and shares more than 100% of the value of its own budget with the movement.
Learning Pattern: Fundraising | Developing strong relationships with donors - more than communication via banners |
Wikimedia Conference 2015 and beyond
[edit]In 2014, WMDE agreed to take on the organizing of the annual Conference of Wikimedia organizations for the next three years, funded by a PEG grant. Our goal, beyond providing a smooth, enjoyable conference experience to participants (assured by our professional event management team), has been to assure that the conference maximizes the collaborative potential of the movement leadership, by
- using the time spent together at the conference efficiently to share learning
- working together to advance issues critical to the movement, with a strong orientation on outcomes, and
- bridging the time between conferences by assuring continuous work on the issues online and offline.
At the 2015 Wikimedia Conference, we initiated this approach. Sessions were designed with a strong focus on sustainability and assured year-round follow-up. The WMDE Program and Engagement Coordinator (PEC) has since worked diligently to document sessions, and to facilitate follow-up activities. In some cases, these led directly into further sessions and meetings at the 2015 Wikimania conference. There was a dedicated WMCON Follow-up Day that took place at Wikimania. Themes identified for follow-up at this year’s Wikimedia Conference include Movement Roles, Grantmaking and Impact, Fundraising, Advocacy, Community Support, Communication, and Governance. More information can be found in the PEG Report.
In addition, WMDE staff provided high-quality content to the 2015 conference sessions. Team ZEN, together with WMF staff, co-hosted Wikimedia Conference Learning and Evaluation pre-conference workshop (Blog post) as well as well-received conference sessions on Collective Impact (Blog post) and external fundraising. Our communications, software development and international relations teams also offered sessions to learn, discuss and share with the movement. The Volunteer Supporters Network met with strong leadership from WMDE, and will continue to share learning at conferences and in-between. As the oldest and largest chapter, we have much expertise and experience to share with the smaller organizations of the movement, and intend to continue to do so.
Learning Pattern: Online Surveys | Timing and tenaciousness - How to ensure high participation rates at post-conference surveys |
Software Innovation in a Movement Context
[edit]The WMF’s CEO Call to Action identified the need to support innovation and new knowledge. The WMDE Software Development Department works with a strong focus on supporting innovation for the global movement, Wikidata being the most striking example. With Wikidata, we have bridged the gap between paid software development staff and the open source and developer community, and we have developed collaborative mechanisms and processes that work smoothly, enable innovation and avoid conflict almost all of the time.
The challenge of enabling innovation through participatory software development can be applied to other engineering and platform development arenas as well: The process recently developed and currently tested by the Department’s Community Communications Manager and TCB Team (see Program 2 above) for community technical requests addresses many of the issues brought up in the recent movement discussions on community-led software innovation. It is structured, transparent, and it connects the community ideas and wishes with the realities of implementation in a manner that creates ‘a friendly space’.
We intend to share learnings, failures and successes in this area on a regular basis, and, if requested, assist the other players in engineering and community engagement (such as the WMF Community Tech Team still forming) to apply and scale WMDE’s innovative practices. They are not ‘best practices’ yet, but working and learning together as leaders in the movement, we are confident we can improve the overall climate and processes, with the goal of enabling innovation, creating new knowledge and improving the usability of our products.
Advocacy and Public Policy
[edit]The benefits of successful advocacy for the global Free Knowledge Movement are obvious. The EU is one of the arenas where crucial decisions affecting our mission and our ability to advance Free Knowledge will be made in the immediate future (2015/16), but Germany is also an important policy arena, given the country’s importance as a global leader in policy and technical innovation. WMDE’s leadership is fully aware of the importance of advocacy, and intends to increase its resources and the intensity of our efforts in 2016. This is evidenced by the recently completed Annual Compass 2016, which identifies this work as one of three main priorities.
Sharing of Learnings
[edit]WMDE has increased its efforts to document and share learnings:
Reports and Initiatives:
Volunteer Supporters Network (VSN)
Videos of technicals talks and Podcasts:
Learning Materials and Learning Patterns:
Learning Material: Fundraising Report | WMDE 2014 Fundraising Report |
Learning Material: Wiki Dialogues | Wiki Dialogues - A concept for digital learning in Wikipedia communities |
Learning Material: Klexikon | Klexikon - An Encyclopedia for Kids |
Learning Pattern: Fundraising | Developing strong relationships with donors - more than communication via banners |
Learning Pattern: Movement communication | Sharing relevant information with the Wikimedia movement |
Learning Pattern: Online Surveys | Timing and tenaciousness - How to ensure high participation rates at post-conference surveys |
Learning Pattern: Crowdfunding CdV | Failing at a crowdfunding campaign and what we can learn from it |
Learning Pattern: Audio samples for Wiktionary | Recording high-qualitiy audio samples for Wiktionary |
WMDE input at WMCon15 and pre-conference:
Financial Information
[edit]Financial Information | |||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
EXPENDITURES | |||||||||||||
APG expenses | Q1 expenditures | Q2 expenditures | Q3 expenditures | Q4 expenditures | |||||||||
cost unit | line item | nonpersonnel-costs | personnel-costs | nonpersonnel-costs | personnel-costs | nonpersonnel-costs | personnel-costs | nonpersonnel-costs | personnel-costs | Cumulative | Cumulative in USD | Percentage spent do date | Explanation of variances from plan |
Software Development | |||||||||||||
101 | Program Coordination | 5.542 € | 35.893 € | 15.535 € | 49.944 € | 106.915 € | $119.351 | 63,86% | |||||
104 | Vacation (project-employees) | - | 25.294 € | - | 10.866 € | 36.160 € | $40.366 | 84,95% | |||||
105 | Sick (project-employees) | - | 8.496 € | - | 5.596 € | 14.092 € | $15.731 | 77,87% | |||||
219-221 | Info Camp/Ent Con/Game Jam | 0 € | 6.312 € | 292 € | 11.387 € | 17.991 € | $20.084 | 65,91% | |||||
222 | Communication Networks | 0 € | 1.641 € | 1.734 € | 3.437 € | 6.812 € | $7.605 | 66,01% | |||||
223 | Communication Communities | 258 € | 4.152 € | 1.501 € | 5.657 € | 11.568 € | $12.914 | 52,36% | |||||
224 | technical requests | 0 € | 14.717 € | 0 € | 24.922 € | 39.639 € | $44.250 | 82,53% | |||||
225 | internal projects of WMDE | 0 € | 3.306 € | 0 € | 13.486 € | 16.792 € | $18.745 | 61,10% | |||||
55100 | Wikidata | 4.101 € | 117.632 € | 14.633 € | 111.741 € | 248.107 € | $276.967 | 96,43% | |||||
Lump Sum Project Department | 99.615 € | $111.203 | |||||||||||
Total | 9.901 € | 217.443 € | 33.695 € | 237.037 € | 0 € | 0 € | 0 € | 0 € | 597.692 € | $667.216 | |||
Non APG expenses | Q1 expenditures | Q2 expenditures | Q3 expenditures | Q4 expenditures | |||||||||
cost unit | line item | nonpersonnel-costs | personnel-costs | nonpersonnel-costs | personnel-costs | nonpersonnel-costs | personnel-costs | nonpersonnel-costs | personnel-costs | Cumulative | Cumulative in USD | Percentage spent do date | Explanation of variances from plan |
101 | Program Coordination | 4.819 € | 32.553 € | 3.371 € | 36.396 € | 77.139 € | $86.111 | 87,49% | |||||
104 | Vacation | - | 35.337 € | - | 24.600 € | 59.937 € | $66.909 | 259,06% | |||||
105 | Sick | - | 14.428 € | - | 12.156 € | 26.584 € | $29.676 | 175,42% | |||||
132 | Wikimedia Conference | 1.317 € | 10.024 € | 72.877 € | 18.736 € | 102.953 € | $114.929 | 98,05% | |||||
201 | ABC des Freien Wissens | 2.055 € | 3.393 € | 3.693 € | 4.221 € | 13.362 € | $14.916 | 71,09% | |||||
202 | Beratungsmodule | 841 € | 3.305 € | 1.260 € | 5.596 € | 11.001 € | $12.281 | 85,53% | |||||
203 | Bündnis Freie Bildung | 763 € | 5.094 € | 214 € | 0 € | 6.071 € | $6.777 | 76,87% | |||||
204 | Coding da Vinci | 20.000 € | 6.332 € | 1.790 € | 6.343 € | 34.465 € | $38.474 | 102,27% | |||||
205 | Tools for Volunteers | 0 € | 222 € | 0 € | 0 € | 222 € | $247 | 76,85% | |||||
206 | Glam on Tour | 4.772 € | 2.707 € | 811 € | 1.466 € | 9.756 € | $10.891 | 118,47% | |||||
207 | Development of Materials | 19 € | 3.556 € | 8.333 € | 1.997 € | 13.906 € | $15.523 | 70,28% | |||||
208 | Open Science Project | 300 € | 8.469 € | 630 € | 6.929 € | 16.328 € | $18.227 | 73,10% | |||||
209 | Monsters of Law | 91 € | 707 € | 125 € | 1.650 € | 2.573 € | $2.872 | 73,55% | |||||
210 | OER Project | 221 € | 15.829 € | 455 € | 0 € | 16.505 € | $18.425 | 98,50% | |||||
211 | WikiCon | 0 € | 1.845 € | 1.312 € | 1.018 € | 4.175 € | $4.661 | 284,53% | |||||
213 | Volunteer Support | 37.393 € | 18.205 € | 31.968 € | 20.789 € | 108.355 € | $120.959 | 101,86% | |||||
214 | Development | 90 € | 1.684 € | 11.866 € | 1.990 € | 15.629 € | $17.447 | 105,86% | |||||
215 | Community Events | 0 € | 0 € | 73 € | 90 € | 163 € | $181 | 0,46% | |||||
216 | Large Community Projects | 8.091 € | 70 € | 2.320 € | 69 € | 10.550 € | $11.777 | 8,43% | |||||
217 | Local Community spaces active | 8.813 € | 225 € | 8.355 € | 0 € | 17.393 € | $19.416 | 57,59% | |||||
218 | Local Community spaces development | 730 € | 0 € | 1.831 € | 283 € | 2.844 € | $3.175 | 1131,85% | |||||
226 | Free Knowledge Advocacy Group | 7.312 € | 0 € | 0 € | 0 € | 7.312 € | $8.163 | 104,46% | |||||
227 | Mapping OER | 0 € | 0 € | 8.858 € | 37.746 € | 46.604 € | $52.025 | 114,63% | |||||
Total | 97.627 € | 163.984 € | 160.142 € | 182.074 € | 0 € | 0 € | 0 € | 0 € | 603.827 € | $674.064 | |||
Administrative and Program Support Cost | Q1 expenditures | Q2 expenditures | Q3 expenditures | Q4 expenditures | |||||||||
cost unit | line item | nonpersonnel-costs | personnel-costs | nonpersonnel-costs | personnel-costs | nonpersonnel-costs | personnel-costs | nonpersonnel-costs | personnel-costs | Cumulative | Cumulative in USD | Percentage spent do date | Explanation of variances from plan |
Administration | |||||||||||||
Office of the CEO | 27.059 € | 65.766 € | 11.095 € | 81.196 € | 185.115 € | $206.648 | 76,81% | ||||||
Board of Directors | 9.130 € | 8.043 € | 11.761 € | 8.043 € | 36.978 € | $41.279 | 64,37% | ||||||
Finance, Office, IT and HR | 122.732 € | 52.365 € | 147.061 € | 62.800 € | 384.958 € | $429.736 | 82,76% | ||||||
Event Management | - | 13.599 € | 3.464 € | 12.110 € | 29.173 € | $32.566 | 68,64% | ||||||
Works Council | 249 € | - | 65 € | - | - | - | 315 € | $351 | 4,20% | ||||
Expenses 2014, paid in 2015 | 32.634 € | - | - | - | 32.634 € | $36.430 | |||||||
Program Support | |||||||||||||
Communication | 24.098 € | 43.444 € | 36.362 € | 39.411 € | 143.314 € | $159.985 | 74,68% | ||||||
Partnerships und Development | 2.900 € | 42.051 € | 2.298 € | 56.664 € | 103.913 € | $116.001 | 94,47% | ||||||
Total | 218.802 € | 225.268 € | 212.106 € | 260.224 € | 0 € | 0 € | 0 € | 0 € | 916.400 € | $1.022.997 | |||
REVENUES | |||||||||||||
Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 | Cumulative | Cumulative in USD | Percentage spent do date | Explanation of variances from plan | ||||||
Anticipated | |||||||||||||
Donations | 2.150.000 € | 2.002.590 € | 124.499 € | 2.127.089 € | $2.374.513 | 98,93% | |||||||
APG Grant | 840.000 € | 840.000 € | 840.000 € | $937.709 | 100,00% | ||||||||
Membership fees | 1.100.000 € | 598.776 € | 294.124 € | 228.901 € | 1.121.801 € | $1.252.289 | 101,98% | ||||||
Contracts | 500.000 € | 106.473 € | 106.473 € | $118.858 | 21,29% | ||||||||
Carry-over | 30.000 € | 30.000 € | 30.000 € | $33.490 | 100,00% | ||||||||
Other Revenues | 100.000 € | 42.328 € | 5.836 € | 48.164 € | $53.766 | 48,16% | |||||||
Fundraising lump sum | 150.000 € | 75.000 € | 75.000 € | 150.000 € | $167.448 | 100,00% | |||||||
Wikimedia Conference | 100.000 € | 108.882 € | 108.882 € | $121.547 | 108,88% | ||||||||
Total | 4.970.000 € | 3.588.694 € | 639.814 € | 0 € | 303.901 € | 4.532.409 € | $5.059.622 | ||||||
Wikimedia Fördergesellschaft | |||||||||||||
REVENUES | |||||||||||||
Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 | Cumulative | Cumulative in USD | Percentage spent do date | Explanation of variances from plan | ||||||
Anticipated | |||||||||||||
Donations within the Fundraising Agreement (carry-over 2014) | 6.602.173 € | 6.602.173 € | 6.602.173 € | $7.370.142 | 100,00% | ||||||||
Donations for WMDE (carry-over 2014) | 1.718.145 € | 1.718.145 € | 1.718.145 € | $1.918.001 | 100,00% | ||||||||
Donations within the Fundraising Agreement (first term 2015) | 1.340.832 € | 726.829 € | 336.608 € | 1.063.437 € | $1.187.137 | 79,31% | |||||||
Donations for WMDE (first term 2015) | 434.852 € | 284.445 € | 124.499 € | 408.944 € | $456.513 | 94,04% | |||||||
Donations within the Fundraising Agreement (second term 2015) | 7.629.463 € | 0 € | $- | 0,00% | |||||||||
Donations for WMDE (second term 2015) | 1.907.366 € | 0 € | $- | 0,00% | |||||||||
Interests | 20.000 € | 6.684 € | 1.164 € | 7.848 € | $8.761 | 39,24% | |||||||
Total | 19.652.831 € | 9.338.276 € | 462.271 € | 0 € | 0€ | 9.800.547 € | $10.940.553 | ||||||
EXPENDITURES | |||||||||||||
Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 | Cumulative | Cumulative in USD | Percentage spent do date | Explanation of variances from plan | ||||||
Anticipated | |||||||||||||
Transfer of Donations to WMDE on January 1st | 1.718.145 € | 1.718.145 € | 1.718.145 € | $1.918.001 | 100,00% | ||||||||
Transfer of Donations to WMDE on September 1st | 434.852 € | 284.445 € | 124.499 € | 408.944 € | $456.513 | 94,04% | |||||||
Transfer of Donations to WMF on January 1st | 4.862.173 € | 4.862.173 € | 4.862.173 € | $5.427.744 | 100,00% | ||||||||
Transfer of Donations to WMF on September 1st | 1.340.832 € | 726.829 € | 336.608 € | 1.063.437 € | $1.187.137 | 79,31% | |||||||
Transfer of FDC funds to WMDE | 840.000 € | 840.000 € | 840.000 € | $937.709 | 100,00% | ||||||||
personnel-costs | 306.000 € | 46.969 € | 62.158 € | 109.127 € | $121.821 | 35,66% | |||||||
nonpersonnel-costs | 444.000 € | 59.217 € | 165.313 € | 224.530 € | $250.647 | 50,57% | |||||||
Lump Sum transfer to WMDE | 150.000 € | 75.000 € | 75.000 € | $83.724 | 50,00% | ||||||||
Transfer of donations for WMDE 2016 | 1.927.366 € | 0 € | $- | 0,00% | |||||||||
Transfer of donations for WMF 2016 | 7.629.463 € | 0 € | $- | 0,00% | |||||||||
Total | 19.652.831 € | 8.612.778 € | 564.079 € | 124.499 € | 0€ | 9.301.356 € | $10.383.295 |
Compliance
[edit]Is your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement?
[edit]As required in the grant agreement, please report any deviations from your grant proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.
- YES
Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".
- YES
Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Grant funds as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".
- YES
Signature
[edit]- Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.
- --Christian Rickerts (WMDE) (talk) 15:18, 30 July 2015 (UTC)