Jump to content

Grants:APG/Proposals/2015-2016 round1/Wikimedia Österreich/Progress report form

Add links
From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki



Purpose of the report

[edit]

This form is for organizations receiving Annual Plan Grants to report on their progress after completing the first 6 months of their grants. The time period covered in this form will be the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). This form includes four sections, addressing global metrics, program stories, financial information, and compliance. Please contact APG/FDC staff if you have questions about this form, or concerns submitting it by the deadline. After submitting the form, organizations will also meet with APG staff to discuss their progress.


Global metrics overview - all programs

[edit]

Global metrics: Community Support

[edit]
Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. # of active editors involved 507 79 + 14 + 30 + 17 + 57 + 1 + 25 + 14 + 3 + 5 + 2 + 12 + 67 + 9 + 2 + 16 + 16 + 12 + 78 + 17 + 31
2. # of new editors 142 23 + 28 + 1 + 42 + 19 + 10 + 19
3. # of individuals involved 771 95 + 4 + 15 + 31 + 17 + 57 + 4 + 26 + 16 + 4 + 5 + 13 + 150 + 10 + 116 + 9 + 16 + 20 + 21 + 88 + 20 + 34
4a. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages n/a
4b. # of new images/media uploaded to Wikimedia Commons 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 157,384,951 By active editors who received direct individual support (in terms of financial resources or technical support/infrastructure).


Global metrics: Free Content

[edit]
Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. # of active editors involved 193 4 + 45 + 16 + 8 + 35 + 13 + 11 + 11 + 25 + 11 + 5 + 1 + 8
2. # of new editors n/a
3. # of individuals involved 524 10 + 6 + 46 + 18 + 10 + 36 + 15 + 64 + 11 + 26 + 13 + 2 + 7 + 250 + 10
4a. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages 3,919 see also table in section #Free Content
4b. # of new images/media uploaded to Wikimedia Commons 22,402 see also table in section #Free Content
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects 3,217 1 + 1413 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 43 + 2 + 55 + 579 + 1121
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects n/a


Global metrics: Reach / Free Knowledge Awareness

[edit]
Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. # of active editors involved 59 4 + 2 + 16 + 3 + 2 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 25
2. # of new editors n/a
3. # of individuals involved 2,879 2092 reached with newsletter and social media (see table in section #Reach / Free Knowledge Awareness) + 28 + 10 + 45 + 23 + 25 + 13 + 37 + 15 + 80 + 400 + 25 + 13 + 31 + 42
4a. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages n/a
4b. # of new images/media uploaded to Wikimedia Commons 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 1,722,839 197691 + 654991 + 5086 + 4060 + 184314 + 582237 + 94460


Global metrics: Learning question

[edit]

Learning question: Did your work increase the motivation of contributors, and how do you know?

[edit]

We assess this question in the context of our annual community survey. 86% of the participants stated that our activities contribute to motivating them for their online work. We receive similar feedback on a regular basis during our community events, in the written reports of volunteers abour their projects, and through personal on- and offline exchange with our volunteers.

Telling your program stories - all programs

[edit]

Community Support

[edit]
A learning community which continuously strives to become better, which is open for newcomers and comprises a broad and diverse variety of skillsets.

What did we achieve so far?

Existing community and active editors

Community survey results I
Community survey results II

An important indicator for the success of our work in this area is our annual community survey. We refined the concept of last year by introducing new questions, especially about skill transfer, capacity building, and general motivation among volunteers, which are of interest for us and helps us to assess the impact of our activities. For the first time we used Qualtrics to set up the survey and we are very grateful to WMCH (with whom we also attune the survey design for better comparability between our chapters) and WMF for their support in this process. We also made an effort to get more people to participate in the survey, resulting in more than twice as many survey participants this year. We were happy to see that this increase also led to a even more positive overall outcome across the survey, with satisfaction rates up to 100% among WMAT members (see info graphics with survey highlights). The results concerning the impact of our events and activities (regarding skill transfer and motivation for online work) are also above target and quite satisfying, showing that our events and activities (e.g. WikiTuesdays, IdeaLab, scholarships for conferences) provide an added value for our existing volunteers. The success of our approach to community work is also reflected in partner organizations building on our concepts in their work (e.g. WMCH adopted our IdeaLab and mission statement workshop).
Another indicator which we introduced this year is the number of bytes generated by the active editors who receive regular support by WMAT: This number is exceeding our expectations, not only is the overall number of people benefiting from our services higher than expected, but also the percentage of very active volunteers within this group. We also actively try to expand the regional scope of our activities where possible, for Wikipedia's 15th birthday we supported many community events outside of Vienna with WP15 packages, which not only attracted local volunteers but also raised awareness on local media and the general public. Our general assembly, which also travels to a different Austrian town or city every year, also attracted some local volunteers and motivated them to engage more in our work.
Last but not least we intensified our collaboration with the other DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) chapters in the area of systematic volunteer support of the German-language community. In two strategy retreats (one in January and one after Wikimania) the community support teams of the three chapters worked on common approaches regarding the appreciation of volunteer work (workshops and learning patterns), improving our support supplies (e.g. book grants for the Wiktionary community), and enhancing the communication with active editors (information material and presence in the German-language Wikipedia).

Newcomers and welcoming culture

Together with some of our volunteer experts we conducted train the trainers sessions for volunteers of our like-minded partner organization SCI (Service Civil International), to make our partnership even more sustainable: Many wiki related activities could be incorporated into other SCI activities - e.g. many other of their workcamps take place in nature reserves, so building in photo hunts to gather natural monuments and uploading them to Commons seems to be an obvious addition to their existing programs. In order to make this possible without having to rely too extensively on our existing community or staff, we decided to train SCI volunteers (project and workcamp leaders) to become trainers for Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

The workshops (GuideCamps) around conflict resolution and welcoming culture stagnated a bit in the last few months, as the high interest and motivation to attend the meetings did not match the activity level afterwards. Not enough people took ownership of working on and advancing the issues and ideas which were generated during these meetings. During WikiCon in fall, we plan a last attempt to revive the concept with clearly communicated responsibilities and expectations concerning involvement for all stakeholders. The future of this initiative will depend on the number of volunteers willing to commit time to this endeavour.

What are our biggest challenges?

Art+Feminism

The Art+Feminism initiative seems to attract a whole new crowd of potential (mostly female) editors - this year this seemed to have become an even more international phenomenon, reaching Austria among other countries. By accident, we learned about two events in the last six months, which were inspired by Art+Feminism - unfortunately, quite last minute in both instances, which made it hard to provide adequate support. The local organizers were not informed by the international team that there might be local Wikimedia groups or affiliates which could be of help (we heard of similar problems in other countries), in one instance the local organizers never even got any response from the international team at all (because the event took place after the peak of events in March) - so both organizers were quite happy when WMAT offered to help. On the one hand, it is very positive to have contacts to new groups which are interested in working on gender issues in the Wikimedia projects - via these two events we established contacts to various feminist groups who are interested in organizing a bigger event next year and push gender-related projects in Austria with more lead time. On the other hand, we still have concerns regarding the sustainability of the Art+Feminism initiative, when there is no connection to local groups or Wikimedians and apparently no ownership of the project and external requests outside of the main event cycle in March. We would strongly suggest that the international project team works together more closely with local groups and chapters in the future and/or mentions them as possible points of contact on their website. We would also be interested in the retention rate of former Art+Feminisim events and good practices to involve the participants beyond the edit-a-thons.

Wiki Loves Earth

WLE Austria in numbers (2014-2016)

Wiki Loves Earth (WLE) remains demanding - apart from the difficulties regarding the retention of newbies as outlined in our Impact Report for 2015, the organization and mobilization for the 2016 WLE edition also proved to be a challenge. Despite an intensified cooperation with our partner the Austrian Alpine Club, and first pilots of running a Google AdWords campaign for the photo contest, we could only mobilize significantly fewer new photographers than in the previous year. One likely reason is that they also conducted a photography competition this year for their anniversary calendar. The shorter upload period (one instead of two months) probably also had an effect in this regard, but given that the first edition in 2014 also only lasted one month but attracted approx. 180 newcomers, the conclusion that we reached a certain saturation curve with the competition seems natural. A similar effect is true for the existing community: While the number of active editors participating in the contest stayed roughly the same since last year, the motivation to participate in the organization and preparation of the project decreased.

What's up next?

For the second half of 2016 we plan activities to support some of the smaller sister projects − a birthday event for Wikivoyage, a Wikivoyage campaign during WikiCon (session and info booth) among other things.

The CEE meeting will be a good opportunity to advance our collaboration with the the communities and affiliates in the region, with a focus on common languages (CEE Spring 2017) and the MediaWiki hackathon in Vienna next year (pre-events in some partner communities), in order to support (tech-)community building beyond the Austrian community. WikiCon, the annual meeting of the German-speaking community, will be a good occasion to initiate new areas of cross-border collaboration, exchange experiences, and to develop strategies for common challenges (welcoming culture). As in the previous year, the Austrian delegation plans to play a very active role in the conference (sharing skills, showcasing projects, hosting sessions).

With this year's edition of the peace camp taking place in Tyrol and the Wiki Loves Parliament project in Styria, we will have two major events outside of the Vienna metropolitan area - a good occasion to involve local volunteers who haven't been part of our activities before.

Last but not least, we plan to launch one or two pilot projects on user retention in fall.


Objectives and progress
Objectives 2016 Last year (if applicable) Progress until Q2 / 2016 Projected (end of 2016)
Supporting the participation of 600 active editors in meetings/workshops for community health, skill transfer and innovation. n/a 302 active editors.
600 active editors.
Community survey: At least 70 % completely agree or are rather inclined to agree that they gained useful skills for their volunteer work. n/a 86 % agree.
86 % agree.
Community survey: At least 70 % completely agree or are rather inclined to agree that they feel appreciated by Wikimedia Österreich. 74 % agree. 84 % agree.
84 % agree.
Community survey: At least 75 % of the respondents completely agree or are rather inclined to agree that they are satisfied with the general direction of Wikimedia Österreich. 79 % agree. 86 % agree.
86 % agree.
Increasing the number of new editors by 200 through our activities. n/a 142 new editors.
200 new editors.
Increasing the number of new editors by 20 that edit a Wikimedia project after four weeks after their registration. n/a 0 new editors.
20 new editors.
  • Detailed reports: –
  • Note: too early to collect data
Community health: Absolute value of 85,000,000 bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects throughout the year by active editors who receive direct individual support (in terms of financial resources or technical support/infrastructure). n/a 157,384,951 bytes.
320,000,000 bytes.
  • Detailed reports: –
Engaging 20 active or new editors who have formerly not been or very rarely been active WMAT volunteers into the planning and/or executing of chapter activities. n/a 15 editors.
20 editors.
Share our learnings: create 3 Learning Patterns on Community Support. 7 Learning Patterns. 4 Learning Patterns.
5 Learning Patterns.
Reports on other activities within the scope of this program:
DACH Volunteer Support Retreat in Vienna (Jan.) + Young Volunteers (Apr.) + Wikipedia Workshops for SCI volunteers (May)

Free Content

[edit]
Generating, liberating and distributing multifaceted and valuable content that fascinates and engages Wikimedia volunteers, partners and readers alike, as evidenced by use in article namespaces and community decorations.

What did we achieve so far?

Photography project Austrian Film

Once again our numbers (see tables below) demonstrate how active and quality aware the Austrian photography community is. The number of quality images reached an all time high of 3,200 in the first six months of the year, summing up to almost 15% of our overall amount of WMAT supported media files - these are outstanding numbers even in international comparison with bigger affiliates and communities. The usage of our pictures in Wikimedia projects is also above target. Factors that contributed to this success are targeted and well-planned and prepared projects such as the photography project Austrian film: Articles about the participating filmmakers and actors we prepared before the project, with a focus on creating missing articles, the improvement of existing articles mainly happened during and after the project. As a result there are high quality articles and pictures of 46 Austrian filmmakers, 40% of which are new or improved female biographies. A similar concept works for the Wiki Loves Parliament projects which we support in Germany and soon also in Austria again. Apart from concrete projects there is a regular on- and offline exchange between our wider community (in the DACH region) on photography skills and know-how, that WMAT facilitates with infrastructure (e.g. coordination of equipment rentals and acquisitions), pairing volunteers with different skill sets, and offline events (such as the WikiTuesdays, see Program 1).

We apply a similarly focused approach to our latest GLAM project with The Vorarlberger Landesrepositorium (Volare). Volare is the photography collection of the Austrian state of Vorarlberg. In 2015, the state of Vorarlberg digitized 17,000 photographies by Helmut Klapper. This photographer had documented the economic, cultural, and political life of Vorarlberg in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s on behalf of the state. Volare released Klapper’s valuable images under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence which made them unusable on Wikimedia projects. A committed WMAT volunteer from Vorarlberg contacted a government employee at first and we finally managed to convince the rightholders to change their licencing to CC-BY. Now the WikiProject Vorarlberg in the German-language Wikipedia is free to pick useful images from Volare and to transfer them to Wikimedia Commons and use them for Wikipedia and other sister projects. This process - instead of just uploading all of Volare’s CC-BY images to Commons at once - ensures quality and usability, e.g. having useful file descriptions.

Number and usage of media files supported by Wikimedia Österreich
2015-12-31 Growth 2016-06-30
Total number of files 193,897 + 22,402 216,299
Distinct images used (main namespace only) 29,809 + 3919 33,728
Decorations for media files supported by Wikimedia Österreich
2015-12-31 Growth 2016-06-30
Featured pictures on Wikimedia Commons 114 + 45 159
Quality images 5657 + 3179 8836
Valued images 157 + 4 161
Featured pictures on Wikipedia, Chinese 1 +/- 0 1
Featured pictures on Wikipedia, English 12 + 1 13
Featured pictures on Wikipedia, German 14 +/- 0 14
Featured pictures on Wikipedia, Hindi 1 +/- 0 1
Featured pictures on Wikipedia, Indonesian 2 +/- 0 2
Featured pictures on Wikipedia, Persian 20 + 1 21
Featured pictures on Wikipedia, Slovenian 2 + 1 3
Featured pictures on Wikipedia, Spanish 1 +/- 0 1
Featured pictures on Wikipedia, Turkish 0 + 1 1
Featured pictures on Wikipedia, Vietnamese 4 + 1 5
Total 5985 + 3233 9218

Another focus of ours is the diversity of content - especially the supplementation of existing text and pictures with video and/or audio files. We believe that this is crucial to keep Wikipedia attractive for audiences who are used to consume information via multimedia channels. We see huge potential in this regard in our cooperation with the simpleshow foundation: Videos have become a popular format for the dissemination of information - especially short animated explainer videos which provide a quick overview over complex topics. The same principle applies to Wikipedia - videos can enrich existing content and provide an entertaining and easily comprehensible access to free knowledge. Together with experts from the simpleshow foundation, Wikimedia Österreich offers workshops for Wikimedians which are designed to learn the tricks of the trade of screenwriting for explainer videos. This year's workshop at Wikimania took our collaboration to the next level, as we developed new freeware, which enables volunteers to produce videos themselves, which also resulted in three videos being completed by the end of the workshop and a lot of enthusiasm on the side of the participants. The cooperation started as an incubator project last year and while we first thought of it mainly in terms of expanding the existing community with newbie film makers, we now see that the main potential lies in the existing community using this as an additional medium to enrich existing formats of knowledge transfer. The mysimpleshow-freeware makes it possible to convert existing material into short videos without any previous knowledge or technical skill regarding filmmaking. While the educational value for Commons has more or less become a consensus, the use of videos in the Wikipedias is still a challenge and requires more extensive discussions with the communities. The cooperation with simpleshow has been embraced by the WikiProject Medicine as useful for their purposes and they currently help us facilitating a discussion on whether and how videos could be embedded in articles on English Wikipedia. Another interesting use case which came up during various discussions at Wikimania is the application of these explainer videos for internal communication within the Wikiverse, to support for example the Wikimedia Foundation in communication complex topics (e.g. grant making related issues) to their stakeholders in a more easily understandable and fun way.

Wikipedia [ˌvikiˈpeːdiːaː] in Austrian German. Female voice. Speaker from Vienna, Austria.

A new project in this regard is our spoken language diversity project. The spoken language as a medium of identity and diversity is of high importance to many Austrian volunteers, who have little representation of "their" language in the German-language Wikipedia, as German is a pluricentric language with slightly different standard German languages in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Therefore having supplementary audio snippets showcasing the diversity of the spoken language is a way of establishing a representation of regional language differences in Wikimedia projects without contesting the rules of the projects. This spoken language diversity project aimed at the production of audio files of authentic pronunciations of names, e.g. of geographical entities and people. Authenticity in this context meant that the speakers were selected because of their place of residence, gender and social background. The focus on names (instead of verbs, adjectives etc.) also allowed a wide use and usability of the audio files in different Wikipedia language versions and not only in Wiktionary or Wikidata. 260 audio files were uploaded. They are being used in roughly 800 main namespace pages of 23 different Wikimedia projects.

What are our biggest challenges?

Establishing cooperations with the big cultural heritage institutions in Austria is one of our biggest challenges. There is a lot of potential for content donations in Austria, but even in the context of projects such as Europeana 280, with a clear framework for cooperation, common goals, international preparation and support and contacts to those GLAMs it seems almost impossible to make progress in this regard. We got in touch with all the institutions which nominated artwork for the Europeana 280 project in Austria, hoping that this would open some doors for us, suggesting various ways of cooperation from edit-a-thons, to expert dialogues or access to literature and received only negative answers or no answer at all. A situation which not exactly motivates volunteers to get involved in a project. Even with support from project manager Liam Wyatt via Europeana or Barbara Fischer from WMDE we couldn't get a single institution to respond. There are various reasons for this situation: Some of the bigger, prestigious institutions (e.g. National Library, Art History Museum) have contracts with Google for their digitization projects. A lot of the smaller institutions on the other hand are lacking the resources and/or know-how to assess the legal and organizational implications, chances and risks of such cooperations and tend to say no, because it seems easier and safer. The future of GLAM and possible ways to address these challenges is also a focus area in our current strategy process.

What's up next?

In July we finally have a Wiki Loves Parliament project in Austria again, with Austrian and German volunteers cooperating in the established fashion. Similar to the Austrian film project, it is a very targeted project, which aims to increase the quality of information on local politicians on Wikipedia for the readers. Together with the other DACH chapters we are also currently assessing a cooperation with an external partner for more freely licensed video material for Wikimedia projects.

Although we finished Wiki Loves Monuments in Austria, we want to keep up our cooperation with the Federal Monuments Office around Austria's cultural heritage. Hence, we plan a leaner, more targeted approach around the National Monuments Day in September, focusing on the cultural heritage which will be featured in the context of this event (historical roads). Concerning our support of sports photography, we have a packed calendar from July to December with a diverse range of sports planned: from soccer over tennis to showjumping, among others.

A new incubator project of 2016 will be launched around macro photography and as a cooperation between Austrian and German photographers. WMAT provides high end equipment to take the generation of macro pictures to the next level. This will be accompanied by skill building activities among the volunteers in order to establish a group of well trained photographers who are able to use the equipment at a professional level and teach others how to use it properly. The first testbed for the incubator project will be miniature mollusc photography.

Objectives and progress
Objectives 2016 Last year (if applicable) Progress until Q2 / 2016 Projected (end of 2016)
Increasing the number of media files supported by Wikimedia Österreich and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by 45,000. 58,188 media files. 22,402 media files.
45,000 media files.
Increasing the number of media files supported by Wikimedia Österreich and added to Wikimedia article pages by 5,000. 7,158 media files. 3,919 media files.
6,000 media files.
Increasing the number of added or improved articles in Wikimedia projects by Wikimedia Österreich support by 10,000. 12,695 articles. 3,217 articles.
10,000 articles.
Increasing the number of community decorated media files (valued, quality, featured) supported by Wikimedia Österreich on Wikimedia Commons by 3,500. 4,601 decorations. 3,233 decorations.
6,000 decorations.
  • Detailed reports: –
  • Note: see also table “Decorations for media files supported by Wikimedia Österreich“ above
Increasing the number of community decorated articles in Wikimedia projects by Wikimedia Österreich support by 20. 42 decorations. 10 decorations.
20 decorations.
Opening 250 new data sets in the context of the Open Data Portal Austria partnerships. 255 data sets. 45 data sets.
150 data sets.
Share our learnings: create 3 Learning Patterns on Free Content. 1 Learning Pattern. 0 Learning Patterns.
3 Learning Patterns.

Reach / Free Knowledge Awareness

[edit]
Creating collective impact on a societal level by working with and through others to achieve more impact than we could ever achieve alone.

What did we achieve so far?

Advocacy

One of the main strategic goals of 2016 on a European level is to broaden our network to cover more organizations beyond our traditional civil society partners. This has lead to first results, as the EDiMA (the association of online platforms such as Facebook, Google, Yelp!, Yahoo) and the largest Czech search and portal site (Seznam.cz) have supported Freedom of Panorama. We are also in the process of establishing close ties with various European library organizations (EBLIDA, LIBER, IFLA). As the copyright file during the fist half of 2016 was dealt with by the European Commission units, and this part of the process is largely on camera, a lot of the effort instead was focused on supporting regional communities in building up structures, skills and achieving legislative change. A major sign that one of our priorities – Freedom of Panorama – has reached the EU policy mainstream was the fact that the European Commission organized a separate consultation on it and a so-called „publishers right“ (instead of broader topics like „copyright“ or „IP rights“). We dedicated a lot of effort in creating answering guides and in motivating individuals and organizations to participate. The numbers for 2016 will be lower than for 2015 for three separate reasons: We ran a very visible and public campaign in 2015 (#saveFoP) involving mainstream media and thousands of volunteers. This sensibly boosted our results. Additionally, after having achieved general prominence in Brussels, we're making an effort to stay on message and focus on our main targets instead of diffusing our efforts. Thirdly, the majority of the public events in Brussels take place in parliament. Our relevant dossiers being in the Commission for more than half the year and the ongoing preoccupation with #Brexit means that there is less attention for copyright/free knowledge issues.
On a national level we decided that it is crucial for our advocacy work to strengthen our network to relevant players in this regard within Austria too. The challenge was to find a way to build such a network with our given resources, i.e. with the little staff time that can be allocated to advocacy work and few volunteers engaged in the topic. We decided that the best way forward would be to partner up with like-minded organizations and individuals in the field of Austrian net politics and find a way for regular and systematic exchange on important topics. The idea was to adopt the concept of regular "net political evenings" – a successful event and exchange platform from Digitale Gesellschaft in Berlin. The Viennese edition of the event has been taking place on every first Thursday evening since December 2015 and is organized by an informal network of net political players in Austria, including WMAT. After seven months we are happy to see that the event is well established with a regular crowd of 60+ participants each month and another regular 30+ on the live stream of the event. Three free radio stations across Austria also broadcast the event every month. Apart from the open scene in Vienna and Austria and like-minded advocacy organizations in Austria, politicians and public administration representatives also have become aware of the event and even participated in some of them.

Partnerships, fundraising, and in-kind donations

Overview of in-kind donations for WMAT (as of June 2016)

Partnerships are an important way to raise awareness for free knowledge in general and Wikimedia projects in particular, on a national and a European level and to increase the impact of our activities by joining forces and using synergies. The netpolitical evening is a good example for this lever effect, but also the Open Data Portal (ODP) Austria, which we have been running together with Open Knowledge Austria and the Cooporation Open Government Data since 2014. Our joint efforts to generate resources for the ODP and related activities have been quite successful in the past few months: WMAT received two grants from the Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG). The first grant is worth approx. 32,000 EUR for an open data hackathon in February 2017, which will serve as a promotion for the Open Data Portal and a scouting event and testbed for the MediaWiki Hackathon in May 2017, which is an immense support for our tech community building efforts. The second grant is an open data research project starting in winter, for which the ODP we will receive approx. 30,000 EUR over the course of three years. A substantial amount of in-kind donations also comes from partnerships, many of them longstanding cooperations over more then one year, summing up to 64% recurring donors. Our events and photography projects and competitions generally provide the biggest potential for in-kind donations, because of their added value regarding publicity or high quality pictures which are free to be re-used by our partners.
WMAT also intensified its general fundraising by offering more money transfer methods (for example a direct bank transfer) and by successfully applying for a Google AdGrant, which we use for fundraising as well as for project related campaigns (e.g. WLE). It is hard to show the direct effect of these measures just yet, as Wikipedia's 15h birthday in January and our public relations around this event led to exceptionally high donation rates in the first two months of 2016, followed directly followed by the annual WMF fundraiser and the DE:WP birthday in March. But for the second quarter of 2016 we could see that the average sum of monthly donations increased at least 20% compared to 2015. We hope this trend will continue over the summer months.

Education

The major part of our education activities took place in the first six months of 2016 and we can already say that we succeeded in achieving the goals we set for this area: We worked with over 100 students, a majority of which were female. This resulted in a number of bytes which exceeded our expectations, which is mainly caused by a new approach towards their work on Wikiversity which now requires a more detailed documentation about how the students approach and structure their research and article work. Thanks to our educational activities at universities we could dispose of specific academic knowledge. For example, history students of the University of Vienna wrote elaborate Wikipedia articles about complex aspects of European history. In addition to our existing partnerships, we also started a new cooperation with the Theological Institute of the Cistercian Abbey Stift Heiligenkreuz in Lower Austria.

What are our biggest challenges?

The European chapters have a shared free knowledge activist in Brussels, which worked quite well in the last few years and also shows the solidarity within the European communities and affiliates when it comes to EU advocacy. However, the current approach also has is weaknesses: the ad-hoc collection of money each year, and the lack of sufficient planning cycles, streamlined reporting, and security concerning funding of staff costs. Hence, the chapters are currently working on a sustainable longterm solution which aims at continuing this initiative as a joint European success story, while providing more sustainable working conditions and establishing a longterm commitment among the stakeholders.

What's up next?

Our Wikipedian in Residence at the Constitutional Court of Justice started on July 1, 2016. Beyond the huge potential for public relations around our work in Austria, this cooperation will hopefully also result in a long-term partnership with our community and as a door opener to other Austrian institutions.

Concerning partnerships and fundraising the 2017 MediaWiki Hackathon in Vienna will be the next big thing to mobilize general support, funds, and in-kind donations. We will start our efforts in this regard in fall after the summer break.

In terms of advocacy, WMAT was invited to curate a panel on net politics during this year's edition of the ELEVATE festival in Graz - Austria's biggest and most important alternative festival for political discourse. The netpolitical evening will also be held in a location outside of Vienna in fall, in order to include an interested public from other parts of Austria.

Individuals reached with newsletter and social media
2015-12-31 Growth 2016-06-30
WMAT Newsletter 171 + 13 184
WMAT Facebook 746 + 91 837
WLE-AT Facebook 284 + 56 340
WMAT Google+ 30 +/- 0 30
WMAT Twitter 580 + 110 690
WMAT YouTube 10 + 1 11
Total 1,821 + 271 2,092
Objectives and progress
Objectives 2016 Last year (if applicable) Progress until Q2 / 2016 Projected (end of 2016)
EDUCATION
Increasing diversity by educational activities on Wikimedia projects at universities with 100 individuals of which 60 % or more are female. n/a 104 individuals (63 % female).
104 individuals (63 % female).
Increasing diversity by disposing of specific academic knowledge from educational activities at universities resulting in 300,000 bytes added or deleted from Wikimedia projects. n/a 1,722,839 bytes.
1,722,839 bytes.
PUBLIC RELATIONS
Gaining 30 media articles about our activities. n/a 28 media articles.
30 media articles.
Reaching out about free knowledge to at least 1,400 subscribers to our newsletter and social media channels throughout the year. 1,821 subscribers. 2,092 subscribers.
2,300 subscribers.
  • Detailed reports: –
  • Note: see also table “Individuals reached with newsletter and social media“ above
Gaining 200 new subscribers to our newsletter and social media channels by the end of the year. n/a 271 new subscribers.
480 new subscribers.
  • Detailed reports: –
  • Note: see also table “Individuals reached with newsletter and social media“ above
Involving 20 individuals from 20 different partner organizations in our activities. 27 individuals, 11 organizations. 40 individuals, 16 organizations.
50 individuals, 25 organizations.
  • Detailed reports: –
Gaining 16,000 EUR in-kind donations from partner organizations. 16,420 EUR. 6,475 EUR.
16,000 EUR.
  • Detailed reports: –
EU ADVOCACY
By the end of 2016 we have established at least 10 more working relationships between Members of Parliament and Wikimedians (regular meetings, e-mail exchange, phone calls). 37 more working relationships. 4 more working relationships.
18 more working relationships.
In 2016 Wikimedia will attend and/or speak at all dialogues, consultations and events on EU level that have an impact on copyright reform (at least 20, no more than 90 events). 203 events. 27 events.
60 events.
At least 2 Wikimedians from the EU communities will receive a scholarship to visit Brussels and gain public policy experience by collaborating with the EU advocacy group. 1.5 scholarships. 0 scholarships.
2 scholarships (planned for end of 2016 when the copyright dossier will be handed over to the European Parliament).
Deepening partnerships and cooperations by having partners co-sign our position papers and gaining 2 for-profit organizations as advocates for free knowledge goals. n/a 2 for-profit organizations.
4 for-profit organizations.
Ensuring that the text of the EU Copyright reform allows for more content on Wikimedia projects. n/a In progress.
The text is still being finalised by the European Commission and so far remains unpublished. We are still confident that there will be a positive outcome in the next couple of months.
LEARNINGS
Share our learnings: create 3 Learning Patterns on Reach / Free Knowledge Awareness. 2 Learning Patterns. 3 Learning Patterns.
4 Learning Patterns.
Reports on other activities within the scope of this program:
Open GLAM workshop (Vernetzte Welten Conference) (Feb.) + Edit-a-thons: Pinkafeld Higher Technical Institute (May) + re:publica 2016 (May) + Open Commons Congress in Linz (May) + Netpolitical Evening (Jun.)

Revenues received during this six-month period

[edit]

Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

Table 2 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

  • Please also include any in-kind contributions or resources that you have received in this revenues table. This might include donated office space, services, prizes, food, etc. If you are to provide a monetary equivalent (e.g. $500 for food from Organization X for service Y), please include it in this table. Otherwise, please highlight the contribution, as well as the name of the partner, in the notes section.
Revenue source Currency Anticipated Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Anticipated ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Explanation of variances from plan
FDC grant EUR 250,000.00 145,801.00 - 145,801.00 280,448.00 163,442.92
Membership fees EUR 1,500.00 - 1,677.00 1,677.00 1,683.00 1,879.92 Thanks to our systematic database cleanup we could collect some outstanding debts of members who have not paid in several years.
Donations EUR 20,000.00 - 10,132.00 10,132.00 22,436.00 11,357.97
In-kind donations EUR 16,000 - 6,475.00 6,475.00 17,949 7,258.48

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


  • Additional revenue sources: In addition to our donations and membership fees we are happy to report that WMAT successfully applied for two grants around the Open Data Portal (ODP) from the Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG). The first grant is worth approx. 32.000 EUR for an open data hackathon in February 2017, which will serve as a promotion for the Open Data Portal and a scouting event and testbed for the MediaWiki Hackathon in May 2017. The first installment will be due in fall. The second grant is an open data research project starting in winter, for which the ODP we will receive approx. 30.000 EUR over the course of three years.

Spending during this six-month period

[edit]

Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

Table 3 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

(The "budgeted" amount is the total planned for the year as submitted in your proposal form or your revised plan, and the "cumulative" column refers to the total spent to date this year. The "percentage spent to date" is the ratio of the cumulative amount spent over the budgeted amount.)
Expense Currency Budgeted Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Budgeted ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Percentage spent to date Explanation of variances from plan
Staff expenses EUR 130,100.00 - 60,390.00 60,390.00 145,945.00 67,697.19 46%
Operations EUR 32,400.00 - 19,003.00 29,003.00 36,346.00 21,302.36 59% Slightly above target, as it currently still includes some expenses that belong to projects (insurances, ODP server costs etc.) but it is easier and less time consuming for our book keeping to sort that out only once a year for our final financial statement.
Community support EUR 69,000.00 - 29,605.00 29,605.00 77,404.00 33,187.00 43%
Free content EUR 22,000.00 - 9,936.00 9,936.00 24,679.00 11,138.25 45%
Reach / Free Knowledge Awareness EUR 18,000.00 - 7,954.00 7,954.00 20,192.00 8,916.43 44%
Wikisource Conference EUR N/A - 463.00 - - 463.00 N/A 519.02 N/A Remaining bills from the Wikisource Conference grant.
TOTAL EUR 271,500.00 - 127,351.00 127,351.00 304,566.00 142,760.47 47% N/A

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


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.

  • No changes.

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.

Resources

[edit]

Resources to plan for measurement

[edit]

Resources for storytelling

[edit]
Retrieved from "https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grants:APG/Proposals/2015-2016_round1/Wikimedia_Österreich/Progress_report_form&oldid=20155196"