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Grants:APG/Proposals/2018-2019 round 1/Wikimedia CH/Progress report form

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Purpose of the report

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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 grant 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.

Metrics and results overview - all programs

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Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. number of total participants 128 + 494 + 146 = 768 of 1'700 (45%) This metric is aligned with the 2019 goal. Some programs compensated for others and globally the goal has been reached.
2. number of newly registered users 14 + 127 + 31 = 172 of 250 (69%) This metric is aligned with the 2019 goal. Some programs compensated for others and globally the goal has been reached.
3. number of content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects 5'243 + 1'000 + 8'533 = 14'776 of 75'500 (20%) This metric is under the goal but we anticipate increasing content in the 2nd half of 2019. That said, in our effort to focus on quality rather than mass uploading, we will likely not reach the total amount we set out in the annual plan.
4. Content reused by other Wikimedia projects 2'764 + 554 + 825 = 3'318 of 4'100 (101%) This metric has been reached quickly and it supports our decision to focus on quality regarding the "number of content pages created or improved." Instead of proceeding with mass uploading, we are focusing more on impact in all Wikimedia projects, which means that the "Content reused by other Wikimedia projects" metric will have more value.
5. Number of people reached in Switzerland 500'000 + 202'000 + 200'000 + 150'000 = 1'052'000 of 1'400'000 - 1'500'000 (75%) This metric is aligned with the 2019 goal.


Telling your program stories - all programs

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Summary/ overview

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In the first six months of the year, we have focused on forging new relationships and building on existing partnerships to support fundraising, as well as our various programs to share free knowledge. We have been able to build significant partnerships with a range of new stakeholders, such as UNESCO and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. We've also expanded our collaboration with the wider Wikiverse through our work with Argentina around their excellent WikiDerechosHumanos efforts, which we are now trying to replicate and link within WikiFranca.

In particular, we have made tremendous efforts toward building up fundraising and customer relationship management systems that will allow Wikimedia Switzerland (WMCH) to ensure operations in the future. As mentioned in previous reports, WMCH continues to move along a path of automation, ensuring that our various databases and tools are linked. We are now on the right path to becoming more professional and effective in terms of servicing our members, donors and other stakeholders by delivering timely information, updates, donation receipts, etc., with specific attention to data security.

The following provides a highlight of the various activities that defined the first half of the year:

Our people

Again this year, we faced the unforeseen resignation of two staff members before the summer. This always means a huge investment of time for recruiting and onboarding new staff members as well as a certain amount of destabilization within the team, given that we are a small organization. Our Admin/Fundraising Manager — who had worked for a year at a 60% rate — left us in mid-July. Meanwhile, our Communications and Outreach Manager will also leave WMCH at the beginning of September. Two issues play important roles in WMCH’s high turnover rate: First, the unique attributes necessary in our team members (virtual, multilingual, highly flexible, part-time and a specialist and generalist at the same time) narrow the pool of qualified applicants. Second, low remuneration levels in Switzerland’s nongovernmental organizations affect our competitiveness in the job market. Undergoing staff changes every year truly represents a high risk to WMCH’s long-term stability. Being able to recruit people full-time, if fundraising is professionalized and permits it, is viewed as one key option to reduce turnover in the future. We are thus very pleased that Ms. Catrin Vimercati, a very active volunteer in the Wiki world who is already collaborating closely with us, has stepped up to work on a 50% basis on administration and fundraising. This ensures that we don't encounter any gaps in terms of communication with stakeholders and donors and that operations can continue to run smoothly. We still need to recruit a new communication/outreach team member.

Our organization

This year’s General Assembly was very well organized and structured, and many steps forward were taken. With one resignation – we herewith would like to extend a warm “thank you” to Matthias Heck, who also played a crucial role on the Organization Team of the German-speaking WikiCon in St. Gallen in 2018 – we are happy to welcome one new Board Member, M. Jon Becker, a lawyer living in the canton of Ticino and holding Swiss, Italian and American citizenship. Our long-time Board Member and President in 2018, M. Bagawathram Maheswaran, has been re-elected and confirmed as our ongoing President, helping ensure stability and continuity at the Board level.

The Board Governance workshop envisaged for 2018, which ultimately did not take place, is again being considered for 2019, if time permits. Board members are working closely alongside the WMCH Executive Director and staff if needed, in order to support operations and fundraising. In terms of the latter, we have stepped up the efforts and are working to establish a clearer fundraising strategy going forward. WMCH has had many significant meetings and has established important contacts this year. Our next "Friend-raising" events will take place in October in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. Important influencers and stakeholders will be invited to an exclusive location in Lugano in order to network and to learn more about Wikimedia and its projects.

Our programs

All programs are again moving forward this year. In our Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) strategic impact direction, activities have been strategically aligned since the arrival of our new GLAM Program Manager. In fact, partners are even starting to reach out to WMCH now for help and assistance. The GLAM Coordination Group has expanded its reach to the French-speaking part of Switzerland where many archives and libraries are now also actively taking part in the activities. The new partnership with the Montreux Jazz Archives is, among others, an important and exciting project to mention in this area. What is more, the optimized GLAM Statistical Tool has earned a lot of compliments from our various stakeholders.

In terms of Education, we are in the process of articulating our various key focus areas in this area to better be able to address potential donors and stakeholders. We are already establishing important relationships — such as those with Science et Cité, UNESCO and Service Civil International — which will see interesting projects come to life in the future. Wikidata continues to play an important role both in Education and in GLAM and we have been reaching out to both education experts and students to create and nurture hubs of expertise going forward. The close collaboration between the GLAM and Education Program Managers as well as the linguistic and regional Community Officers allows for coherent, Swiss-wide initiatives.

Regarding Community, we have made particular efforts to go out and create new bonds with like-minded organizations and groups in order to extend the active community and focus more on diversity (culture, language, gender, age, digital literacy, disabilities). We have also welcomed many more members this year, showing the fruits of our relentless outreach efforts. On top of that, we have nurtured relationships with partners and volunteers with whom we already collaborated in the past – allowing for the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with OpenStreetMap Switzerland (SOSM), for example – and have brought to life new projects. As usual, we are closely collaborating with WikiFranca, France, Germany, Austria and Italy, not to mention other chapters and groups that don’t necessarily share our same languages. Exchanging, learning and sharing in order not to reinvent the wheel are of extreme importance to us.

Finally, concerning Partnership & Outreach, we have been very active during the first part of the year. Our collaboration with ParlDigi offers plenty of possibilities to meet with high-ranking officials and partners in Switzerland. Meanwhile, thanks to our various other activities nationally, WMCH is now becoming recognized as a viable partner and professional actor in the digital and free knowledge field, leading to many promising opportunities to network and align forces. WMCH now has access to parliamentarians, influencers and other organizations in Switzerland following the same or a similar mission and is beginning to actively use these contacts to support fundraising and community-building.

Our technology

As already mentioned at the beginning, we have stepped up our efforts this year to move along a path of automation. We will publish what we’ve learned in this regard as soon as the implementation is over. The first half of the year has been dedicated to researching and evaluating the right partners. The second half of the year will be reserved for implementation and testing. All of our data have already been integrated into one system, which is a major step forward for our small association.

Finally, as a result of our strategic efforts, a new website will soon be released. Following the communication plan, a GLAM and Education microsite site will subsequently be set up in order to streamline information and become more effective in terms of external relations and outreach.

Strategic context for Wikimedia CH

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WMCH is the Swiss chapter of the global Wikimedia Movement and is officially recognized as such by the Wikimedia Foundation. Our chapter is on track to meet the targets defined in our annual plan proposal form, and we’re glad to have the opportunity to submit this report on progress in the first six months of 2019. This section provides a summary, and the remainder of the report tells the story of our work in four strategic impact directions:


Strategic impact directions

  1. GLAM – We collaborate with galleries, libraries, archives and museums throughout Switzerland to provide digital access to memory institutions’ collections and artifacts. We aim to share the country’s culture and history in a sustainable format and across all borders.
  2. Education – We deliver and collaborate on education programs that advance learning at every level, for both children and adults. Our work supports lifelong learning as well as teachers and trainers at schools, universities and other institutions of higher education.
  3. Community – We nurture the WMCH community, supporting existing members and cultivating new Wikimedians. Among other activities, we revitalize old projects and pursue new ones, mentor WMCH editors, offer member rewards and promote leadership among our volunteers.
  4. Partnership & Outreach – We believe in using our unique position in the field of information exchange to be an influencer on issues concerning open access and open knowledge — in Switzerland, throughout Europe and across the globe. We offer our viewpoints on copyright, digital sustainability, technology and more.

WMCH uses the metaphor of a house to represent our work



We use the image of a house to represent our work. The roof represents our mission of curating and disseminating free knowledge. The house itself is filled with the four strategic impact directions: GLAM, Education, Community and Partnership & Outreach. The stories shared later in this progress report are organized around these four strategic themes.

The walls and windows of the WMCH house encompass and give form to our strategic directions. The walls are our technology, processes (financial policies, guidelines, etc.) and soft skills (human resources, people development). The windows give us transparency, representing good governance and collaboration. The house rests securely on the foundation of our solid legal background. And our house is surrounded by a neighborhood of like-minded organizations, chapters, the Wikiverse and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Program GLAM

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A1.Metrics

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Write here the table of the metrics.

Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (at end of Q2) Explanation Comments
1. # Total participants 133 of 400 (34%) 128 of 400 (32%) 128 + 0 Mainly running either online sensibilization campaigns, such as International Museum Day and International Archive Week, or working on projects within the GLAM organization, where the GLAM organization has one user account. Therefore, the exact number of participants is difficult to measure.
2. # of new editors 11 of 50 (8%) 14 of 50 (28%) 11 + 3 The events have involved mainly existing users and most projects were related to Wikidata, collaborating with experts.
3. # of Number of content pages created or improved 14'527 of 55'000 (26%) 5'243 of 55'000 (10%) 2'743 + 2'500 Mainly working on GLAM + Wikidata projects.
4. Content reused by other Wikimedia projects 2'855 of 1'000 (286%) 2'764 of 1'100 (251%) 2'764 + 0 This is the first year we use this metric and for GLAM, it has been reached quickly
5. Number of people reached in Switzerland 204'548 of 200'000 (102%) 500'000 of 200'000 (250%) 500'000 + 0

Color coding

Achieved Target has been achieved or exceeded
Space for improvement Good progress but the target has not been reached
Attention required Null or little progress has been made to achieve the target

A2.Background and overview of achievement

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Per this year’s GLAM Annual Plan, WMCH focuses on three main pillars ‘GLAM Organization’, ‘GLAM Partnerships & Projects’ and ‘GLAM Digital Competence & Technology’. Since 2018 we have been in the process of consolidation in order to build a more sustainable project environment for Swiss-wide GLAM projects, which will allow us to grow again in the near future. Our long-term objective in building up a HUB organization is to integrate Wikimedia projects and knowledge directly into GLAM institutions.

In terms of GLAM Partnerships & Projects, we aim to strengthen and expand our GLAM partnership network and interconnect the GLAM partners across all Switzerland. We bring GLAM institutions together to share their knowledge and collaborate with each other and by doing so, supporting the ongoing convergence between Museums, Libraries and Archives. In terms of GLAM projects, we follow the Wikimedia Movement Strategy and focus on ‘Continuity’, by building on long-term relationships and scalable formats, and ‘Diversity’ to expand our impact to new GLAM institutions and regions. Our culture of multilingualism offers an opportunity to support diversity, which we want to build on. Furthermore, we actively foster the collaboration and exchange of knowledge with other chapters, especially the ones close to us such as WMDE and WMAT and, hopefully in the near future, WMIT and WMFR.

With the third leg, ‘Digital Competence & Technology’, we aim to offer services requested by our GLAM partners and GLAM community members. Moreover, by sharing our technical solutions with other chapters and community members from other countries as well as the WMF, we collect and implement feedback in order to make the results accessible for everybody.

References
GLAM Strategy one pager: WMCH GLAM Strategy Overview

GLAM Strategy Articulation Map one pager: GLAM Strategy Articulation Map

GLAM Strategy full version: WMCH GLAM Strategy

A3.Highlights of program activity

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1: Continuity
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PROJECTS
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Under Continuity, we include the partnerships and projects that we have supported over serveral years or that build on existing programs. Our aim is to focus our efforts on nurturing long-term, scalable programs and relationships that build on past work to create greater impact.

International Museum Day 2019

WMCH actively involved two other chapters in this project — WMAT and WMDE — to run a common online campaign on 19 May under the theme “Museums as Cultural Hubs: The Future of Tradition.” More details are available in the GLAM case studies section of this report. The success of last year’s event also inspired us to launch a similar program for archives, described next.

Geographic Map of Swiss Archives

International Archives Week 2019
WMCH supported International Archives Week 2019 with outreach and promotions in June. By working with our ongoing partner, the Association of Swiss Archivists, we advanced the theme “Designing the Archives in the 21st Century” to encourage contributors to enhance the presence of Swiss archives on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. So that contributors could see where their help was needed, we created a geographical map of the archives. It shows where archives already have a Wikipedia article and, perhaps more importantly, where they don’t. The map is akin to the museum map that we created last year for International Museum Day 2018. The community’s enthusiasm for the museum map led us to create WMCH Map Service and use it for the new archives map. (Get details on WMCH Map Service later in this highlight section.)

GLAM on Tour

Glam on Tour event at the Iron Library

Since 2016, WMCH has organized GLAM on Tour, an event series that allows Wikimedians and memory institutions to network at a local level. From 20 to 23 June, we held another event at the Iron Library in the Paradies Monastery, near Schaffhausen. (See the project page; see the invitation.) We have been collaborating with the library for several years now. The library houses an abundance of literature on the history of iron and steel as well as the corporate archives for Georg Fischer (GF), a Swiss manufacturing company with global reach. Along with exhibitions on the library and the corporation, participants could explore former GF factories. Our hosts benefited by raising awareness about their archives. Our chapter profited by advancing Program GLAM’s goals, while the participants appreciated the opportunity to have a glimpse behind the curtain of a corporate giant such as GF. The event was a continuation of one of our 2018 GLAM on Tours held in another corporate archive, the Migros Archives in 2018.

Swiss Foundation Public Domain

Swiss Foundation Public Domain project

The Swiss Foundation Public Domain owns about 70,000 shellac records and is in the process of photographing the record labels and digitizing the music tracks. Whenever Swiss copyright permits, they publish the digitized tracks online to preserve and improve access to Switzerland’s music heritage. The music is made available on Wikimedia Commons, and the Wikimedia Foundation supports the project in association with WMCH. WMCH members visited with the Swiss Foundation Public Domain this year and gained firsthand knowledge about how the music is digitized and liberated for open access. The resources for making the inventory of the collection is limited as well as the technical devices for cleaning, repairing and digitalizing shellac records. Building on our efforts to support digitization, we have begun a new collaboration with the Swiss National Sound Archives, which has the resources and technical equipment needed to preserve audio records. Our aim is to connect the two organizations for a possible collaboration.

Michael Gasser, ETH Library
Feedback day on GLAM/Wikimedia+Wikidata collaboration

Volunteers organized a feedback day in Bern that focused on what Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata offer to Swiss archives, libraries and museums. The roughly 45 panelists and attendees agreed that GLAM should no longer rely solely on volunteers to contribute to related Wikimedia projects. The projects belong in GLAM outreach missions and, therefore, GLAM professionals should be taught, as part of their on-the-job training, to contribute.



Metrics

  • Musique et musiciennes à Genève: 6 participants, 2 new editors, 173 articles modified/created and media uploaded, 21 used in other articles.
  • GLAM network 1st 2019: 10 participants, 5 new editors, 2,306 articles modified/created and media uploaded
  • Around 100 GLAM participating to GLAM & WMCH as reported by organizers
  • GLAM on Tour Eisenbibliothek: 12 participants, 4 new users, 1'851 articles modified/created and media uploaded
  • GLAM Statistical Tool reports these distinct media used in Wikimedia projects: 669 media of the National Library, 1,736 of the WTH Library, 268 of SBB Historic, 44 of University of Basel, 359 of the Swiss Federal Archives, 127 of the Library of Solothurn, 16 of the PTT Archiv, 74 of the Central Library of Zurich, 82 of the Archives de Vaud, 37 of the Georg Fischer Archives. Total= 2,743.
  • It is difficult to evaluate the impact of the International Museum Day and the International Archives Week, but we ran a banner for two weeks for both events. We estimate that 20% of the visitors came through the banners and that we reached at least half a million views.


2: Diversity
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PROJECTS
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Under Diversity, we include programs and projects that expand our impact to new GLAM institutions and regions. Our aim is to ensure we are reaching institutions and users throughout the country, while supporting institutions with diverse missions and audiences.

GLAM on Tour at the Swiss National Sound Archives (Italian-speaking area)

Historical sound carriers / Swiss National Sound Archives

With the upcoming GLAM on Tour: Swiss National Sound Archives event, WMCH demonstrates the diversity of our activities. We’ve planned an event for October in Switzerland’s Italian-speaking area, focusing on a medium that commonly receives less attention: audio artifacts. Participants will tour the Swiss National Sound Archives in Lugano, which are not ordinarily open to the public. They’ll gain exclusive access to the full physical and digital collection and learn how experts go about protecting Switzerland’s sound heritage. We’ve explicitly invited people who speak every language to edit Wikimedia content in their own languages. More details are available in the GLAM case studies section of this report.


Montreux Jazz Festival archives

Another vital sound archive is that of the Montreux Jazz Festival, located in the French-speaking part of Switzerland at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), a major national university. The Montreux Jazz Digital Project is working to preserve and celebrate over 5,000 concerts from the Montreux Jazz Festival stretching back 50 years, with more than 11,000 hours of video, 6,000 hours of audio, and 80,000 photos. Based on the competencies we’ve built up in the digital preservation of audio artifacts, we have the opportunity to launch a project (GLAM + Wikidata) with the Montreux Jazz Digital Project. We are defining the project now and expect to run it in the second half of 2019. In terms of process consolidation (GLAM Organization), we have formalized collaboration by finalizing a ‘Partnership Agreement’ in all languages, which has to be signed by the parties involved in any Wikimedia project. We have been implementing this procedure with every new partner so far.

Metrics

  • 2,500 items uploaded. 2,000 new items.



3: Digital Competence & Technology
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PROJECTS
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Under Digital Competence & Technology, we aim to support and share technical solutions with GLAM institutions, community members and other chapters to make relevant technology and data available to everyone.

GLAM Statistical Tool

GLAM Statistical Tool

In June, we released the GLAM Statistical Tool version 2.0, optimizing it based on feedback from our GLAM partners and the GLAM program manager. The new version has a modern design and includes new statistical features and functionalities. For example, we developed a dashboard that allows administrators to add new cultural partners to the tool without the involvement of an IT company.

We have also performed a stress test, based on the input of the Wikimedia Foundation, on 10 big GLAM institutions to analyze the feasibility of the GLAM Statistical Tool handling high data volume. We tested to ensure the tool is ready to receive significant amounts of data simultaneously. We will share the results with the Wikimedia Foundation and discuss the next steps to make the tool available to other chapters and the international community.

WMCH Map Service

WMCH Map Service

For last year’s International Museum Day, we created an online geographical map of Swiss museums that visualizes GLAM locations and the related digital content that’s available (and missing) across Wikimedia projects. Over the past year, the map has captured the hearts of everyone in the community. We gave presentations about it at the WikiCon 2018 in St. Gallen, the GLAMWiki Conference 2018 in Tel Aviv, the German Community Meeting in Berlin in February 2019 and the WMCH General Assembly on 13 April 2019.

Due to its popularity, we were motivated to develop an independent tool — one with the freedom to create whatever maps we want — for GLAM-related work or for other strategic impact directions. Consequently, this year, we launched WMCH Map Service. The tool is based on the Wikidata Query Service and allows us to create and manage different geographical maps interlinked with Wikimedia project content. The tool is available on GitHub for further development and for others to use. We hope to expand it outside our borders, involving chapters in other countries.


A4.Progress toward the plan

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The GLAM Annual Plan defines our work for 2019 by grouping it into three focus areas. We’ll use these same three areas to discuss our progress thus far:

1.Organization

Creating a HUB Organization is a long-term strategic initiative. Our first step is to analyze different concepts, learn from other chapters and discuss with GLAM institutions the requirements to make it work. One important outcome of this discussion, is the integration of Wikimedia project into the digital strategies of a GLAM institution, providing training and tools, transfer our knowledge to GLAM employees.

In terms of Process Consolidation, we have finally finalized our ‘Partnership Agreement’ in all Swiss languages to formalize our collaboration with GLAM partners. Moreover, we are working together with WMDE and WMAT to define a common concept and policies for the Wikimedian in Residence program.

In terms of Marketing & Communication, we have produced several video interviews on a variety of topics with testimonials from community members, directors of GLAM institutions and employees of other chapters. For example, we interviewed Nicole Ebber on the Wikimedia Movement Strategy. Moreover, we have recorded Insight GLAM work, visualizing how we collaborate with GLAM institutions, as well as our presentation at the GLAM + Wikidata Event. All this content will be used for the new GLAM website, which hopefully will be ready by next year. Our objectives are to leverage all the relationships we have built to speak for themselves and motivate other GLAM and volunteers to contact us and work with us. The GLAM website should also reflect our Swiss identity and diversity.

2. Partnerships and Projects

In the first half of this year, we built upon the success of existing partnerships and projects to deliver both continuity and diversity in our GLAM strategic impact direction. We strengthened our GLAM Network on a Swiss-wide level and crafted two new partnerships with the Swiss National Sound Archives and Montreux Jazz Archives. While enhancing our outreach to museums and archives, we also engaged in cross-border activities, forging partnerships with WMAT and WMDE for International Museum Day 2019 and expanding the WMCH Map Service across borders. Moreover, we participated actively in the GLAM Community Meeting in Berlin together with WMDE and WMAT.

2019 GLAM Community Meeting in Berlin

3. Digital Competence & Technology

We relied on feedback from GLAM Institutions, community members, other chapters and WMF to guide our activities in this focus area. In the first half of the year, we released the new version of the GLAM Statistical Tool. We are on track with this development. We also released the WMCH Map Service, a tool that's been well received in national and international circles. At first, it was used only to visualize Wikimedia content (or lack thereof) concerning Swiss museums. But now the service is available for any type of geographical metadata interlinked with Wikimedia content. The tool can also be used for Community projects and educational purposes. In the first half of the year, we were not able to dedicate time to research on digital trends and new GLAM technology.

Learning and sharing

With so many GLAM highlights and case studies to share, it’s difficult to distill the lessons into a brief list, but we’ve tried here:

  • Minimum effort, maximum result - Projects and formats can work or can fail; it is the matter of actively implementing new scalable projects and then formatting and learning from the results. This means a bigger amount of investment/resources in the beginning, but if the project works out, it can be easily expanded with a minimum amount of effort. Rather than spreading our resources thin on many different but unrelated events, we’re making an effort this year to focus and build upon those activities and partnerships that have bred success.
  • Knowledge as a service for GLAM professionals - It is worth mentioning again the feedback concerning GLAM/Wikimedia+Wikidata collaboration. Attendees and panelists agreed that GLAM professionals must become expert contributors, and WMCH members should strive to help train them. (For more, see details about the feedback day in this report’s GLAM highlights.)
  • Share and learn from other chapters – Working with other chapters, sharing knowledge and learning from them is always enriching for both sides. We are actively collaborating with the chapters that are geographically close to us but should also broaden our perspective to other countries and chapters that have experiences in the areas we want to develop in the Swiss GLAM landscape.
  • Encourage partner institutions to promote events - We saw that when partner institutions promoted edit-a-thons and events through their own channels, we had more participants and better results than if just WMCH promoted the event.

Looking ahead

Based on the lessons above, we’re looking ahead to future work on the following GLAM activities:

  • Continue expanding on international celebrations to promote continuity and diversity – Next year, we want to actively involve WMIT and WMFR in International Museum Day – if they like to participate – while continuing our partnerships with WMAT and WMDE. The goal is to bring together the countries that are associated with all the languages spoken in Switzerland. We also want to involve the other chapters in International Archives Week.
  • Knowledge as a service for GLAM professionals – We aim to establish a HUB organization in Switzerland and respond to the valuable feedback that our volunteers have given to us. We want to offer Knowledge as a service to GLAM institutions and professionals as well as integrate Wikimedia projects into GLAM organizations and their digital strategies.
  • Share and learn from other Chapters – We will continue to get in contact with chapters who have established a HUB organization and learn from their experience on how to implement it best. We will share knowledge about projects with similar GLAM institutions, and discuss how to develop further projects. We'll also collaborate in developing common projects across borders and contribute to projects.

A5.Case Studies

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International Museum Day

Online map of museums
Aerial view of the Natural History Museum in Geneva

Last year, for the first time, WMCH decided to be proactive about improving museum-related content on Swiss Wikimedia projects. We launched a sensibilization campaign for International Museum Day 2018 and received positive responses from the national and international communities and from cultural institutions and chapters alike. Especially popular was our online geographical map of Swiss museums that visualizes GLAM locations and associated Wikimedia content. (See details about WMCH Map Service in this report’s GLAM highlights.)

Because the 2018 celebration was such a success, we pursued similar events for International Museum Day 2019 and even expanded our activities. We partnered with WMAT and WMDE to run a coordinated sensibilization campaign, with banners across our sites that encouraged people to help us complete and improve the presence of museums on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. We pointed to our museum map so that contributors could quickly identify where Wikipedia’s information about Swiss museums was lacking and help us fill in the gaps. Along with our online campaign, we supported two physical events, one at the SBB Historic train depot in Olten and the other at the Natural History Museum of Geneva. WMCH expanded our map tool to include museums in the other two countries.

The success of International Museum Day also led us to pursue similar activities for archives. We supported International Archives Week 2019 and, next year, hope to repeat and enhance our activities for museums and archives alike. This cluster of related activities is an excellent example of the lesson “minimum effort, maximum result” (described in this report’s GLAM learning and sharing section). We capitalized on the success of last year’s International Museum Day to ensure the same with this year’s celebration and expand into International Archives Week. What’s more, we leveraged the success of the museum map to craft a standalone new tool that any chapter can use: WMCH Map Service. Then we used the tool to create a map of Swiss archives for International Archives Week. Rather than spreading our resources thin on many different but unrelated events, we focused in and expanded upon success stories.


Swiss National Sound Archives

Historical sound carriers / Swiss National Sound Archives
Centro San Carlo in Lugano and the headquarter of the Swiss National Sound Archives.
WMCH has partnered with many cultural institutions in Switzerland, but until now, we have been less active in the Italian-speaking area. Likewise, our partnerships have not focused as heavily on the country’s audio heritage. This year, we took steps to strengthen these two aspects of Program GLAM.

Our collaboration with the Swiss Foundation Public Domain, which has expertise in liberating audio files and sharing them in the public domain (see details about the Swiss Foundation Public Domain in this report’s GLAM highlights), has brought us to the conclusion that we want to foster collaborations around audio-visual heritage material. We actively contacted the Swiss National Sound Archives, which serves as the most important federal repository for the preservation of Swiss audio and audio-visual heritage. The archive is located in the city of Lugano, in the Italian-speaking area of Switzerland.

Our first meeting took place during the transition phase of a change to a new director at the Swiss National Sound Archives. Afterward, we were able to submit a first proposal for a Wikidata-related project with success. Moreover, we agreed to partner on a GLAM on Tour event, which is planned for the second half of the year. (See details about GLAM on Tour: Swiss National Sound Archives in this report’s GLAM highlights.) This event will be the first in the GLAM on Tour series to focus on audio artifacts. The Swiss National Sound Archives are not ordinarily open to the public. Participants will gain exclusive access to the full physical and digital collection and speak with the institution’s experts. The GLAM on Tour event will deepen our relationship, and we hope to interconnect the Swiss National Sound Archives with the Swiss Foundation Public Domain and other GLAM institutions holding collections on audio-visual heritage.

Program Education

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B1.Metrics

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Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (at end of Q2) Explanations Comments
1. # Total participants 602 of 550 (110%) 494 of 600 (82%) 220 + 126 + 32 + 6 This metric was reached quickly thanks to the partnerships we created during the 1st half of 2019.
2. # of new editors 70 of 60 (116%) 127 of 100 (127%) 100 + 27 + x + 0 This metric was reached quickly because we began training students to create an account to have more capacity to monitor the program afterwards.
3. # of Number of content pages created or improved 105 of 300 (35%) 1'000 of 500 (200%) 100 + 162 + 708 + 0 This metric was reached quickly because we had several edit-a-thons.
4. Content reused by other Wikimedia projects 0 of 1'000 (0%) 554 of 2'000 (28%) 0 + 72 + 482 + 0 This metric was more of a focus than last year but it's still not a main goal of this programme.
5. Number of people reached in Switzerland 240'000 of 300'000 (80%) 202'000 of 400'000 (51%) 150'000 + 2'000 + 50'000 + 0

Color coding

Achieved Target has been achieved or exceeded
Space for improvement Good progress but the target has not been reached
Attention required Null or little progress has been made to achieve the target

B2.Background and Context

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The strategic framework: Establishing Wikimedia projects as important technological tools to acquire key skills.

We spread the concept that open content and open education are advantages for everyone. Our education-related activities foster learning at every level — for adults as well as children, for personal as well as professional advancement.

Over the past six months, we have worked on reorganizing the education activities across the Swiss Wikiverse by identifying existing projects and contributors and proposing that they operate under the umbrella of WMCH. The purpose of this work is to make these activities more professional and focused. Our overall goal is to raise the visibility of our strategic impact direction and increase WMCH’s engagement in educational institutions so that Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects become go-to resources for objective information and learning (read details in the WMCH Education Strategy Overview).

WMCH bases its pedagogical activities — for schools (high, middle and elementary) as well as universities or lifelong training — upon the overarching goals and curricula of the Swiss federal and cantonal guidelines. We focus on training trainers and teachers, instead of trying to work directly in the classrooms, to avoid the challenges of adhering to varying guidelines in the different cantons and universities. While many of our activities are explicitly for formal learning institutions, we are working hard to better define and expand our work in the realm of personal and professional development, known as lifelong learning.

References

B3.Highlights of program activity

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1: Schools
[edit]
PROJECTS
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While we're continuing certain activities from 2018, we're also aligning them with the new strategy. The goal is to create continuity with the past while also reviewing activities with a new perspective that can build best practices and appropriate solutions for schools.

Scientific committee

This is a new project introduced in 2019. We have brought together several Wikipedians who are active in Wikimedia projects while also being experienced with schools and training to build a scientific committee. The first meeting took place in April for the German-speaking area, while several small meetings took place in the Italian-speaking area. A meeting will follow in the French-speaking area later this year. The committee will help us understand the digital transformation facing schools and education and how to approach this change.

Media in Piazza: Collaborating with other associations

Media in Piazza is an ongoing format, now in its 4th edition, that promotes education in the fields of media and digital technologies. WMCH helps to fund and support annual free events in the canton of Ticino. The goal is to help teachers and schools deliver “soft lessons” that make it fun for students to learn about new media and technologies by presenting the lessons in the form of games. We have kept this project in the 2019 plan because the format, which brings together several different associations over three days, can be replicated. The Swiss Federal Commission for Child and Youth Affairs named the project among the most innovative projects in education for Switzerland in its report called "Growing Up in the Digital Age".

#theLab
#theLab in Locarno

As a consequence of Media in Piazza, this year the Faculty of Pedagogy of Locarno proposed to support and collaborate with #theLab to promote education in the digital humanities, making lessons fun by turning them into games. Students from elementary to high school can attend free workshops on robotics, stop-motion animation, information literacy and more. See details in the Education case studies section of this report.

Devoxx4kids
Devoxx4kids 2018

We again supported Devoxx4kids this year, an event held on 6 April in Lugano. Among other topics, WMCH participated in lessons to teach mapping using OpenStreetMap Switzerland. Five tutors trained approximately 100 students on how to use the tool and how to map Wikipedia articles.

Classroom in a Box

This year we also experimented with the concept of the "Classroom in a Box". Basically, we provided schools with a box containing laptops and network material to quickly and easily set up a computer classroom. Some schools, specifically elementary schools and some middle schools, are financed by the local municipalities, which often have scarce financial resources and cannot buy IT equipment so students don't have the opportunity to experiment with computers. In a nation as rich as Switzerland, this happens mainly in mountain areas. In September 2018, we first provided an elementary school with this equipment when we did not use it for our activities or edit-a-thons. This created a stable link with the school, which then accepted to be part of our "experimental activities".

Metrics

  • Devoxx4kids had around 100 students at our workshops and 200 in total as reported by the organizers. The event was advertised in the canton of Ticino in the main newspapers: around 100,000 people were reached. All participants were new editors and modified at least one article.
  • #theLab hosted 4 classes that concerned our workshops (total 100 students) and 286 students plus 28 teachers. It was advertised in all schools in the canton of Ticino: around 50,000 people were reached.
  • 20 students for Classroom in a Box.


2: Universities and high schools
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PROJECTS
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This area of the strategy has had few changes, but has been adapted to include high schools. As most of the key activities were moved to the second half of the year, we used the first six months of 2019 to investigate new potential partnerships and follow-up on activities from 2018.

Basecamp: Open education platform

WMCH is part of a large network to produce the first prototype for high schools in Open Education, called Basecamp. The project follows the Lehrplan 21 and brings together several partners, including the faculty of pedagogy of Bern and of Chur. It will be focused on the III cycle of schools (high schools).

Science et Cité and Open Science

Wikimedia workshop at ETH
To consolidate the activities with universities, mainly in the field of Open Science, we have set up a collaboration with Science et Cité to run a test phase during the second half of 2019. The partnership will invite experts and researchers to contribute to the fields of climate change and biodiversity in Switzerland.

This project has given a framework to other activities, such as a two-day Wikimedia workshop at ETH Zurich, a science, technology, engineering and mathematics university, in collaboration with AMB, the university’s association of non-faculty academic staff, and AVETH, the association of scientific staff. The workshop focused on the role of Wikimedia platforms in the current ecosystem of research, specifically targeting English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. Participants discussed the general architecture of the platforms and new frontiers in open-access bibliometrics. The workshops also addressed topics of interest to scientific authors, including articles for English Wikipedia, key aspects of copyright law, the metrics and strategy for disseminating scientific results and relevant gender-gap initiatives.

WikiNeoComensia

Support materials for the WikiNeoComensia Seminar

This project is a follow-up of 2018 and has been kept because it represents a good merger of GLAM and Education. From March through April, community member LuciOle trained nine museology students from the University of Neuchâtel during their seminar at the Laténium, an archaeological museum, along with their seminar director, who is also the head of the museum. The goal of this WikiNeoComensia seminar was to improve content about local archaeology, cultivate connections with a local museum, and, hopefully, train future museum professionals on how to edit Wikipedia, giving them valuable skills when applying to future jobs.

Open access to high school science teaching materials and curricular internship

Luino, Switzerland
Last year, WMCH started a collaboration with the Cantonal Department of Digital Resources (CERRD) in Canton Ticino. The goal was to make teaching materials available via Wikimedia projects. The material is already in open license but in a protected area and is specifically for high school biology, chemistry and physics. As part of this project, WMCH will train a community manager to migrate this material to Wikiversity and Wikibooks with the aim of creating a case study to invite teachers to release their materials that are already in open license on an open platform.

From 27 May to 15 July, WMCH and WMIT joined their efforts to have a curricular internship in Luino, a small town based in Lake Maggiore that once hosted the Schweizer Schule Luino. During these activities, four students studying Tourism and 15 students studying Computer Science at the local Technical High School worked to write articles on Wikivoyage about the villages around the small town. Finally Luino, Laveno-Mombello, Porto Valtravaglia, Germignaga and Cittiglio have their own Wikivoyage articles. The experiment has been important for WMCH, demonstrating that students with learning problems can contribute easily to Wikimedia projects while significantly improving their skills in communication. We report those result in the area of diversity in education.

Both activities have the potential for case studies to submit to other cantonal departments or schools demonstrating the impact that those experiences can produce.

New outreach to schools and teachers

As part of our goal to reach more cantonal institutions and schools, we experimented with various activities. Through contacts made at WikiCon 2018, teachers reached out to us and asked that we speak at the Rämischule in Zurich and Burggraben-Gymnasium in St. Gallen. We spoke to their classes about Wikipedia, and the feedback was positive for the most part. We also supported an initiative by a community member, Gabriel Thullen, who gave a workshop to teachers in Geneva about using Wikimedia projects in their curriculums.

Metrics

  • WikiNeoComensia: 17 participants, 95 articles modified/created and media uploaded. 32 files used in other articles. Communication was shared in our newsletter and via the university: around 2,000 people reached.
  • Curricular internship: 19 participants, 27 articles modified/created and media uploaded, 6 files used in other articles.
  • CERRD: 10 participants (teachers even if only 1 uploaded), 1 new user, 40 articles modified/created and media uploaded and 39 media used in other articles (the Dashboard doesn't include the Sandbox].
  • Rämischule in Zurich and Burggraben-Gymnasium in St Gallen had around 80 participants.


3: Lifelong training
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PROJECTS
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Wikipedia for Peace 2019
This section of the program is the most complicated to realize because it was not historically included in the Education program and is sometimes managed under other programs. The work to reform this area and create a framework is difficult, but the idea is to have a vision of education as something that is not only delivered in schools, but throughout a person's entire life. This vision is shared by the Swiss Confederation and the European Union. We therefore spent the first half of 2019 creating a framework to propose trainings and certifications.


Wikipedia for Peace Wikipedia for Peace is a movement that seeks to strengthen peace on Wikipedia and its sister projects. We helped to host a 10-day event this year. See details in the Education case studies section of this report.


Wikidata workshop in Lausanne

This Wikidata workshop was held on 29 March for Wikimedians interested in learning how to use Wikidata. Participants learned about data entry, tools and SparQL queries. As a result of the workshop, 17 participants learned to edit information on works of art, creating 64 articles and editing 162 articles. Course support was published on Wikidata to allow for open access.


Metrics

  • Wikipedia for Peace: 15 participants, 482 articles modified/created and media uploaded. 6 media are used by other articles but the event was mainly a translate-a-thon. In this case, we consider all the content to be "Content reused by other Wikimedia projects". The event has been published by SCI in their blog and we consider that it has reached around 50,000 people.
  • Wikidata Lausanne: 17 participants, 226 articles modified/created and media uploaded


4: Partnerships, diversity and tools
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PROJECTS
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Partnerships

SOSM Logo

We are currently discussing several partnerships in education, as well as exploring how to consolidate existing ones. For example, we have created multiple contacts with the EPFL (see the Partnership & Outreach section for more details) to explore how to partner with them at different levels. An informal agreement has been reached with Science et Cité (see the section about Universities) and OpenStreetMap in terms of education. With Service Civil International, we have strengthened the collaboration and will propose more activities for 2020. We have also met with the Faculty of Pedagogy of Locarno to continue to build that relationship. Drawing on our experiences with those institutions, we are in discussions with several other universities or like-minded associations.

Diversity

In terms of diversity, we are continuing our collaboration with Albinit. We are mostly working to identify how we can make things easier for people with visual impairments, as most of them are students and face many challenges to complete their studies. The first step of the project was done using a defined process for evaluating accessibility and the results were presented in Wikimedia+Education in San Sebastian, Spain. In the second half of 2019, we will run the second step of the project analyzing the accessibility and usability of Wikimedia projects for these kinds of disabilities.

The curricular internship project(as reported here) was a good opportunity to experiment with using Wikimedia projects to help students with disabilities or learning problems to complete the internship. Through the program, the students completed their activities by working in Wikivoyage and OpenStreetMap to write articles about their area. The results were satisfactory, with students having the opportunity to demonstrate to their teachers their abilities with a different approach to problem-solving and to the curriculum. Many of these students will eventually work in Switzerland as frontier workers. The possibility of collaborating with WMIT was also a stimulus to improve the results of the tutoring.

Tools

Tools are an important topic for schools and for education because they can improve the use of Wikimedia projects at school and can make learning more interesting for children. The first half of 2019 was a good opportunity to explore and select various tools. One of those tools, Dico des ados is quite interesting. We attended an event showcasing the project, which is similar to the Wiktionary for teenagers, to discover the tool's capabilities and explore potential collaboration opportunities. While the event was for French-language children from 8 to 14, adults — especially teachers — were welcome. We established a link with the leader of the project, who is an elementary school teacher, and we will support it.
Wikipedia + Education 2019

We are also discussing how we can better help Wikimini and, after the Wikipedia+Education conference in San Sebastian, we participated in discussions around various tools used for schools, like Klexikon and the Basque community's version of Txikipedia. The Italian community started discussing a possible solution similar to Txikipedia, which we are looking into supporting.

Metrics

  • With the Albinit project, we involved 6 students with visual impairments.


B4.Progress towards the plan

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This year’s Education Annual Plan defines our work in the Education strategic impact direction. It lists six focus areas, which we also use here to discuss progress:

  1. Schools – In this focus area, we’ve supported learning that is defined by the Swiss cantons, allowing educators to define what works to meet educational requirements. An example is #theLab, which lets teachers decide how to connect their classes with experts in the digital humanities.
  2. Universities and high schools – We are progressing well toward our planned objectives for universities and high schools. We’ve developed a hive for student researchers interested in open publication on Wikimedia platforms. Also, we’ve furthered existing projects, such as the WikiNeoComensia event we began last year for archeological students.
  3. Lifelong training – We had strong results from our Wikidata and Wikipedia for Peace events (see details in the lifelong learning section and case studies of this report). That said, our main objective in this focus area is to train trainers and certify they are professional and proficient in WMCH’s education activities and tools. Progress is slow, but we are moving forward. We have identified the Swiss MOOC Service as our platform, and while it won’t be online for another two years, we are looking long-term to be sure we do it right.
  4. Partnerships & Tools – We work with like-minded groups to better leverage our efforts, such as partnering with the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI). Positive outcomes from working with SUPSI on Media in Piazza led us to #theLab. In terms of technologies and tools, we’ve developed education materials for open, free distribution. For instance, in collaboration with CERRD, we are giving open access to high school teaching materials for biology, chemistry and physics. We also used the Devoxx4kids project as an opportunity to teach students how to use OpenStreetMap to geographically plot Wikipedia articles.

In summary, we’ve seen mixed results in the Education strategic impact direction. We've provided open access learning materials to teachers and helped them educate students according to the federal and cantonal guidelines for elementary through high schools. For both university-level and lifelong learners, we've successfully built engagement by creating hives of like-minded people to support peace, art, archaeology and open scientific publications. These are all positive steps. And we continue to work toward professionalizing our cadre of education-focused Wikimedians by crafting a certification program to ensure proficiency. But the journey has been slow going, and we are searching for solutions that will help us implement the certification program faster.

Learning and sharing
The following is a brief list of the lessons we’ve learned while delivering our Education activities:

  • Pay attention to change – Be aware of changes in the cantonal and federal education guidelines and be proactive in offering tools or models that are responsive to the changes. We receive more attention and appreciation when we help to make change easier.
  • Build stronger relationships – Strong relationships help us rationalize changes in curriculum and in some cases, help institutions address them. Collaboration is essential at all levels, for example, not just directly with universities, but also with students, and can lead to new relationships and activities. For example, educators and Wikimedians involved in our work in the German-speaking area met in this reporting period to discuss how to reorganize related projects and to define needs and priorities. Another example is meeting with student groups at EPFL to discuss new ways to collaborate.
  • Build better tools for teachers – Teachers have a high degree of freedom to adopt educational tools and technologies (i.e., the “how” of teaching), even though they must closely adhere to the cantonal guidelines about the content they teach (i.e., the “what”). Therefore, building and sharing useful tools will help WMCH collaborate with educators in ways that work best for them.
  • Give lifelong learning more structure – We must refine the lifelong learning focus, giving a backbone to the loosely connected programs that have thus far informed our activities. If we are to become a trusted partner, then the WMCH members and volunteers who create and deliver our tools and projects must be professional and knowledgeable. One way to look at it is that if the train-the-trainer and other lifelong learning projects do not succeed, then the entirety of WMCH’s strategic impact direction will be operating on a shaky foundation.

Looking ahead
Based on the lessons above, we’re looking ahead to future work on the following objective:

  • Continue building high-quality relationships – This year is defined by thoughtful change and consolidation, which takes time. In the second half of 2019, we plan to continue our work building trust and quality relationships so that we can respond quickly to change but in a rational way that is useful to educators.

B5.Case Studies

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#theLab

#theLab in Locarno

Like Media in Piazza, #theLab is a project produced in partnership with the faculty of the Department of Education and Learning at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Italian Switzerland (SUPSI) and makes learning fun through “soft projects” (i.e., gamification of learning). Kids in elementary through high school attend free workshops on topics such as robotics, stop-motion animation, coding and more. Teachers select topics that best fit their classes’ learning objectives. It’s called #theLab because the workshops are held at the Technology and Media Laboratory in Education in the beautiful Palacinema in Locarno.

WMCH at #theLab
WMCH is helping to fund #theLab this year and also teaching workshops on information literacy. The first of our workshops was held on 21 January for middle-schoolers. Students were divided into four teams and competed to win a prize by completing virtual treasure hunts, quests to find fake news and similar games. This same type of event was repeated for students in elementary school in February and again in March. Questionnaires completed by participating children and their teachers revealed that a high percentage thought the events were interesting and would repeat them.

In total, the activities included 286 students and 28 teachers from southern Switzerland (the cantons of Ticino and Grisons). The lab sessions will be repeated in 2020.

This project is an excellent example of how we’ve been able to build out our relationships with existing partners, creating new projects based on the goodwill from past successes. Because of the Media in Piazza project, we already had a strong working relationship with SUPSI’s Department of Education and Learning. We used this relationship to launch our collaboration with #theLab. (See details about Media in Piazza in this report’s Education highlights.)

Wikipedia for Peace

Wiki4Peace Group Photo 2019

Service Civil International (SCI) is a network of nonprofit organizations that promote peace. Together with SCI Switzerland, we hosted the country’s second event for the Wikipedia for Peace movement. This year, we moved it under Education because the participating group comprises young people and most of them are students.

Wiki4Peace 2019
For ten days in April and May, 12 people from around the world came together at a camp called Wikipedia for Peace Switzerland 2019. The participants wrote and edited Wikipedia content about topics related to peace, social justice and Earth's climate. The camp’s strong results yielded 108 new translations, three new articles and 13 improved articles. The group had a high percentage of women and many came from Eastern Europe or Asia, adding to the diversity of the output. That said, in one case, a woman from Laos had some difficulties translating in her language because Lao Wikipedia is very small and there was no one to help her.

Participants were members of SCI all around the world and new to Wikimedia. They joined the event not because of their interest in the platform but because of their support for peace. We hope to maintain their engagement so that they continue improving and expanding relevant Wikimedia content. The experience gave us an important reminder: People rarely join Wikimedia because of a love for the open-access movement or philosophy. They join because they’re invested in a particular cause or interest area, and they want to share it with like-minded people — they want to find their tribe. Events like Wikipedia for Peace are important, first and definitely foremost, because they help to seek the betterment of humanity. But not all tribes congregate on Wikimedia to change the world; sometimes, folks just want to share their expertise on topics that others consider trivial, an obscure type of cheese or a unique 18th-century philosopher, for example. Regardless of the loftiness of Wikimedians’ goals, WMCH must be an open and free place for them to gather. And when we pay attention to the topics of most interest and deliver events to support them, we can also leverage these events to increase engagement. We benefit the community as a whole as well as the chapter.

Video Wikipedia for peace 2018 - Mont Soleil
Video Wikipedia for peace 2018 - Mont Soleil

Video of 2018 Wikicamp


Program Community

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C1.Metrics

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Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (at end of Q2) Explanation Comments
1. # Total participants 168 of 650 (26%) 146 of 800 (18%) 88 + 41 + 17 This metric is smaller because we estimate that the events planned in the 2nd half of 2019 will bring more numbers.
2. # of new editors 45 of 100 (45%) 31 of 100 (31%) 13 + 10 + 8 This metric is slightly lower because we estimate that the events planned in the 2nd half of 2019 will bring more numbers.
3. # of Number of content pages created or improved 14'936 of 20'000 (75%) 8'533 of 25'000 (34%) 831 + 7'655 + 46
4. Content reused by other Wikimedia projects 12'683 of 1'000 (>100%) 825 of 1'000 (83%) 65 + 759 + 1
5. Number of people reached in Switzerland 300'000 of 200'000 (150%) 200'000 of 500'000 (40%) 100'000 + 100'000 + 2'000 This metric is lower than expected because we plan to increase it consistently with the Wikicons.

Color coding

Achieved Target has been achieved or exceeded
Space for improvement Good progress but the target has not been reached
Attention required Null or little progress has been made to achieve the target

C2.Background and Context

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We nurture and grow the WMCH community by supporting existing members and cultivating new Wikimedians. Our work centers on the themes of (1) community-building and health (member engagement, retention, conflict resolution and support), (2) knowledge equity and diversity and (3) collaboration.

Our approach to community ensures that WMCH’s support is offered not only to a specific category of users but to the community as a whole. We place particular emphasis on knowledge equity, supporting underserved groups to ensure equal opportunities for participation. In the first half of 2019, these groups included members with visual impairments, members who identify as women and members who identify as Black. Throughout our projects, we’ve emphasized that the word “community” means more than simply the members in our chapter. It embraces anyone who shares the knowledge of Switzerland.

In terms of collaboration, we aim to both empower community members to collaborate with each other and to strengthen collaboration with other chapters and like-minded organizations.

C3.Highlights of program activity

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1: Community-building & health
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PROJECTS
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This specific area aims to create new volunteers (building) and support existing ones (health). Under this section, we include all services to support the community, like microgrants, calls for projects, scholarships and legal support.

New Year's Brunches

Wikimedia birthday cake at the New Year's Brunch

WMCH marked the occasion of Wikimedia's 18th birthday on 15 January with our annual New Year’s Brunch to foster community health. At local brunch events around the country, we thanked volunteers and gave them an opportunity to network. Community members, who often only know each other online, shared valuable face-to-face time, enjoying a chance to learn about the humans behind the usernames. Also, many members went on to meet up again, subsequent to the brunches, for various other activities.

WikiDienstag

WikiDienstag (WikiTuesday) are monthly virtual meetings held on the first Tuesday of the month where beginners and people who are brand new to being a Wikimedian learn how to produce articles and add text. Topics include syntax, discussion culture, social behavior, research and more. Even though WikiDienstag is always hosted in Zurich-Hottingen, the meetings are streamed online so that the whole community can join. The first meeting was held on February 5, and they will continue through July. So far participation has been low; evaluation will follow after July’s final session.

Winterthur Libraries

In the Steps of Carlo Amoretti: A new format for edit-a-thons

We’ve fostered cross-border collaboration with numerous edit-a-thons in the Italian-speaking area of Switzerland, including the border regions of Italy. A local group, Insubria, has organized many Italian-speaking events. For example, on 11 May, the community began a series of tours and edit-a-thons called In the Steps of Carlo Amoretti mixing activities on Wikidata, Wikipedia, Wikivoyage and OpenStreetMap. The series focuses on the 18th-century intellectual’s manuscript titled "Journey from Milan to the three lakes Maggiore, Lugano and Como and the mountains that surround them.

WikiProjekt Schweiz/Atelier

WikiProject Switzerland/Atelier supports ateliers in several locations in the German-speaking area. They offer how-to lessons for beginners and long-time volunteers alike. Interest in the workshops has been low, but they are worthwhile nonetheless because WMCH receives several requests per year for these kinds of “information days.” So far this year, the project has delivered three ateliers. The first was in February at the Winterthur Libraries. At the event, 50 new pictures from the Winterthur Collection were uploaded to Wikipedia articles. Participants integrated half into articles, and at least five new articles were created. Another atelier, in April at the SBB Historic train depot in Windisch, yielded 522 pictures of Swiss railway stations uploaded to Wikimedia Commons (see the archive for SBB Historic photos and the archive for SBB stations in Switzerland). The Swiss National Library in Bern hosted a June atelier; results will be posted soon. Three more workshops are planned for the latter half of the year.
Group Photo: 300 years of the Principality of Liechtenstein

WikiAlpenforum
The WikiAlpenforum (WikiAlp Forum) is a group of German, Austrian, Italian and Swiss Wikimedians dedicated to creating content about the Alps. On 10 June, the project sponsored 300 Years of the Principality of Liechtenstein, in honor of the country’s 300th anniversary. More than 20 participants from Germany, Switzerland and Austria traveled to the principality and joined an edit-a-thon to improve and expand Liechtenstein’s articles.

GCN Visit

Edit-a-thons in Switzerland’s French-speaking areas
Likewise, French-speaking members of the community have hosted and participated in many edit-a-thons. For example, a two-day workshop in Geneva focused on boats and navigation on Lake Geneva. Participants were able to tour a shipyard with a former nautical mechanic before the editing session. He even pointed out some mistakes on French Wikipedia regarding boats owned by CGN (the Lake Geneva General Navigation Company). All the errors were corrected at the next day’s workshop.

New scholarships policy
We published a new policy on scholarships on Meta. It has helped us to advertise the terms of scholarships more clearly and reduce the number of member questions. It’s raising awareness about the assistance that members can receive when they wish to participate in WMCH events.

Metrics

  • Amoretti: Nesso: 18 participants (4 were new users or users not contributing to the projects for a long time), 400 articles modified/created and media uploaded. 29 media used by other projects.
  • Amoretti: Lonate Pozzolo: 13 participants, 100 articles modified/created and media uploaded. 13 media used by other projects.
  • CGN: La navigation lémanique: 7 participants, 41 articles modified/created and media uploaded.
  • Genève sur Wikipédia: 6 participants, 1 new editor, 214 articles modified/created and media uploaded. 15 media used by other projects. 8 media used by other projects.
  • 300 Jahre Fürstentum Liechtenstein: 23 participants (8 were new users or users not contributing to the projects for a long time), 76 articles modified/created and media uploaded. The event was advertised in all newspaper within Liechtenstein and the northeastern Swiss cantons. We estimate that around 100,000 people were reached.
  • Ateliers: 21 participants.
2: Knowledge equity & diversity
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PROJECTS
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Editathon Art+Feminisme in Geneva

This area covers all of our projects that aim to make the Wikiverse more equal, inclusive and accessible. The idea is to hightlight this topic in a diverse country where integration and inclusivity are important points of discussion.

Project for community members who are blind or visually impaired

WMCH began a project in support of community members with visual impairments in 2018 by partnering with Albinit. Recently, the project completed the first phase to understand the needs of people with visual impairments as passive users. We presented the test results at the Wikipedia + Education Conference in San Sebastian, Spain in April. The project helped us understand that these users require not only accessibility but accessibility+usability, which can be summarized with "energy spent."

Les sans pagEs workshops

WikiMercredi event at MAMCO in Geneva

Les sans pagEs (Without Pages) is a community-led project working to fill the gender gap on Wikipedia through edit-a-thons and other events with a feminist focus. In the first half of 2019, the project organized four events. In March, the Art+Feminisme event was hosted by our longtime partner, the Bibliothèque d'art et d'archéologie (the art and archeology library in Geneva). On this occasion, three new participants learned how to edit Wikipedia, and two librarians joined in. The 12 participants created nine new articles about women artists.

Les sans pagEs held their other workshops at Musée d'art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO; the contemporary art museum in Geneva), with whom we partnered in 2018. Two beginners from the March workshop returned in April, and two more joined the project for the first time. Three new artists from MAMCO were added to Wikipedia, and many articles were improved. After coaching, one of our chapter members had the opportunity to give an introduction about Wikipedia for the first time, providing a new opportunity for community leadership.

Noircir Wikipedia

Born from discussions among les sans pagEs members, Noircir Wikipedia is a new project that advances the goal of improving racial equity and diversity in Wikipedia content. While it was not planned for 2019, it presented a good opportunity to support our objectives of community engagement and increased diversity among editors and Wikipedia content. Get details in the Community case studies section.

Photo contests and photographers WMCH is continuing to support photographers and photo contests and to build partnerships on that topic. This continuity of support aims to diversify the community and attract people with interests other than editing. We have committed to continue to support photographers to ensure more continuity and quality by supporting the high cost of photo equipment and running at least one national Swiss photo contest per year.

Metrics

3: Collaboration with other chapters/ communities
[edit]
PROJECTS
[edit]

This area covers all partnerships we have with like-minded associations. The action plan of the community for 2019 considers this topic very important so we started the discussion to formalize all those collaborations.

WikiConvention Francophone 2018
WikiCon2019
Italian WikiCon 2018

Castles Dossier, a collaboration with OpenStreetMap

We hare partnering with OpenStreetMap Switzerland on the Castles Dossier project, which aims to create a better representation of Swiss castles and palaces on Wikipedia by supplementing the Wiki content with geographic information from OpenStreetMap. Learn more about this project in the Community case studies section.

WikiCons in German, French and Italian communities

We are already promoting the upcoming WikiCons to further collaboration in our cross-border communities. First, in our February newsletter, we announced the dates for WikiConvention Francophone, coming in September, and the WikiCon 2019 in Wuppertal, scheduled for October. Additionally, WMCH had an active role in defining the third edition of the Italian WikiCon which will be held in Rome from 15 to 17 November.

For all of these Wikicons, WMCH will actively contribute with scholarships and financial support.


Metrics

  • Castles Dossier: 17 participants (8 new participants or those who have not been active in a long time), 102 articles modified/created and media uploaded. The event was advertised in both communities and we think to have reached around 2,000 people.


C4.Progress toward the plan

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Our Community Management Plan includes objectives in the following five focus areas:

  1. Community health (retain existing members) – We've made progress in nurturing community health by providing opportunities to network as well as how-to events (e.g., ateliers and WikiDienstag meetings) that help community members learn the culture and social behaviors on Wikimedia projects along with the nuts and bolts of making contributions.
  2. Community-building (retain newly acquired members) – We have attracted new volunteers with events that advance the interests of groups in our community, such as people passionate about the Italian- or French-speaking areas in and surrounding Switzerland, or people advocating for gender equality in WMCH content.
  3. Community recruitment (outreach to grow the community) – The interest-group events described in the previous focus area have allowed us to engage new community members. Concurrently, they’ve helped to advance projects for underrepresented subcommunities (people with visual impairments as well as those identifying as women or Black).
  4. Collaboration with border chapters/communities – In the first half of this year, we’ve held many edit-a-thons that cross the Italian-Swiss border, launched a pilot project with the like-minded organization OpenStreetMap and promoted WikiCons in neighboring countries. Along with such projects, which are described in this report’s highlights, many less formal or behind-the-scenes activities also help us to stay in touch with our community neighbors. For example, WMCH participates in biweekly calls with WMAT and WMDE, allowing for a productive partnership with other German-speaking chapters. The community members discuss ways to equitably share expenses related to German-speaking goals and projects.
  5. Technologies and tools – The Castles Dossier pilot with OpenStreetMap is using existing technologies in new ways to enhance the organizations’ complementary information. The project also leverages the strengths of two communities dedicated to open access.

Learning and sharing

  • Attract new Wikimedians with their passions - To build engagement and attract new Wikimedia contributors, events should provide an opportunity for participants to learn about what matters to them. We can better engage new editors if we keep our finger on the pulse of what the people of Switzerland care about most and most wish to share in the Wikiverse.
  • Support community-driven projects - With attendance at events varying wildly, we learned that community-driven initiatives are the most successful. It's not always a matter of marketing or promotion, but of meeting a real need within our community. We should prioritize these kinds of projects going forward because they inspire greater engagement.

Looking ahead
As 2019 progresses and we look ahead to 2020, we are focused on following through with our successful community activities:

  • Continue outreach to current and previous contributors.
  • Sustain the les sans pagEs project by supporting their events throughout the second half of the year.
  • Build on the Noircir Wikipedia project, hopefully by creating monthly workshops.
  • Make progress on Castles Dossier: We delayed this project to ensure success with Noircir Wikipedia, which was not a project we’d planned for 2019. We plan to revitalize the Castles Dossier project in the remainder of this year.

C5.Case Studies

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Castles Dossier

Lenzburg Castle
WMCH Map Service- https://map.wikimedia.swiss/v/swiss-castles

OpenStreetMap Switzerland (SOSM) is a like-minded organization that has many volunteers who are also Wikipedians or involved in other Wiki projects. WMCH defined a Memorandum of Understanding with OSM to establish a long-term partnership, of which the Castles Dossier project is a part. The project is expected to create a better representation of Swiss castles and palaces on Wikipedia by supplementing the Wiki content with geographic information from OSM, while improving OSM with Wikimedia information (data, articles and photos). The two groups’ members will also benefit from better networking opportunities. What is more, OSM and Wikimedia CH will present a joint speech for Dinacon 2019.

At the end of April, a working meeting of both communities (and other interested parties) took place at Lenzburg Castle to coordinate the various tasks and to bring the different projects and subprojects closer together. The pilot will initially focus on building a register of castles in the Zurich and Aargau cantons, but can be scaled to other cantons and events. The kick-off event was a success, with 17 participants (of which eight were new or hadn't been active in a long time), 102 articles modified/created and media uploaded. The event was advertised in both communities and we estimate that we reached around 2'000 people.

A second pilot will be deployed in Grisons in August and we also expect to join the effort for Wiki Loves Monuments 2019 contest, where the main topic will be castles. We will apply the WMCH Map Service that we use in the GLAM context to this project, which will help us to improve the contest.

This pilot project uses existing technologies in new ways to enhance the two organizations’ complementary information. It also leverages the strengths of two communities dedicated to open access. By continuing to build on our relationship with OSM through projects like the Castles Dossier, we are focusing our efforts on proven partnerships and building our community with like-minded members of other organizations.


Noircir Wikipedia

Noicir event in Geneva

Noircir Wikipedia (Making Wikipedia Blacker) is a project to address the lack of articles and references to the heritages and personalities celebrated in African countries and among the Afro-descendent cultures situated across the globe. The project was born out of the les sans pagEs project, when participants contributing to reducing the lack of female representation on Wikipedia turned their attention to Wikipedia’s lack of Black representation.

Les sans pagEs was first established to address gender equity and diversity on Wikipedia, but gender equity and diversity are only two checkpoints along the long path leading toward equality for everyone. In other words, gender equity and racial equity are both critical for true diversity. Likewise, les sans pagEs and Noircir Wikipedia both help make the Wikiverse more diverse, open and fair. It was only natural that the latter group grew up from the groundswell of support among the members of the former. By working with socially-minded groups like Wikipedia for Peace, les sans pagEs and now Noircir Wikipedia, WMCH is helping to make the Wikimedia Movement more inclusive for all.

The first Noircir Wikipedia event in Switzerland was held in Geneva on 25 May, the date of the internationally celebrated Africa Day. The results of the event’s edit-a-thon yielded six new Wikipedia articles and 82 edits by nine participants. Three events in June were held in Paris, and another Geneva workshop was held in July.

While Noircir Wikipedia was not a planned project in 2019, it has helped us move towards our objective of greater diversity and inclusion. As such, we plan to continue supporting the initiative and hopefully scaling it to include monthly workshops.

Partnership & Outreach

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D1.Metrics

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Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (at end of Q2) Explanation Comments
1. # Total participants NA NA
2. # of new editors NA NA
3. # of Number of content pages created or improved NA NA
4. Content reused by other Wikimedia projects NA NA
5. Number of people reached in Switzerland 200'000 of 300'000 (150%) 150'000 of 300'000 (50%) This is a rough number considering all activities and joint communication.

Color coding

Achieved Target has been achieved or exceeded
Space for improvement Good progress but the target has not been reached
Attention required Null or little progress has been made to achieve the target

D2.Background and Context

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Our goal is to be a trusted resource on issues concerning a free, open and fair internet and broader digital universe. WMCH has summarized and given strategic coherence to the activities tied to international and national outreach and public relations by grouping them under the strategic impact direction “Partnership & Outreach.”

Our work includes three focus areas: the international community (i.e., the Wikipedia Movement), the national community (i.e., our fellow Swiss residents) and the more specialized WMCH community in and around Switzerland. We are in a unique position to inform policies concerning open access to digital knowledge because Switzerland is home to many internationally recognized organizations (e.g., the World Health Organization, World Trade Organization and World Intellectual Property Organization), nonprofits, academic centers and corporations. We partner with institutions in all sectors and at all levels of cultural, political and socio-economic policy-making.

Our work over the beginning of 2019 focused on building new relationships and strengthening existing ones, both for fundraising and collaboration with other organizations. To this end, we made significant progress, with many new and important contacts to report on. That said relationship-building is a slow, long-term process, so we will continue to foster these contacts throughout the rest of the year.

D3.Highlights of program activity

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1: International outreach
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OUTREACH
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New copyright law (Article 17)
Article 17 is one of several articles in a European Union directive called the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (EU Copyright Directive), which came into force on 7 June. This reporting period, we provided objective information as well as our positions on Article 17 while it was being drafted. (It was numbered as Article 13 during the drafting phases.) We used the controversial debates as an opportunity to raise awareness about Swiss and European copyright laws and to expand relevant articles. Much of our advocacy was behind the scenes, as part of the Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU (FKAGEU) and on the website for the Allianz faires Urheberrecht (alliance for fair copyright in Switzerland).

Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU

FKAGEU Logo

FKAGEU is an advocacy group for Europe’s Wikimedia chapters. It articulates clear and coherent positions on major legislative and political changes of relevance to the Wikimedia Movement. Over the last year, as part of FKAGEU, WMCH has been engaged in EU-level public policy activities. While Switzerland is not part of the European Union, the country is influenced by the EU’s legislative process in two ways:

  1. As part of the European Free Trade Association, Switzerland is required to implement some of the EU's rules, including with regards to copyright.
  2. The national debate in Switzerland is often directly impacted by discussions in Brussels.

The Swiss Parliament discussed introducing a press publishers’ right akin to the one in the EU’s Article 15. The Swiss effort was ultimately rejected, but we shared notes and talking points with civil society partners in Switzerland while Parliament was in deliberations. Also, Parliament asked WMCH, among others, to comment on the EU’s Article 17. The opportunity was used to advocate for future Swiss copyright law reforms that avoid such provisions.

2: National outreach
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OUTREACH
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Fundraising
This reporting period, we’ve explored new ways to raise funds, including contacting funding institutes directly and applying for grants from major foundations. We are becoming more active in the sphere of Swiss foundations to position the chapter to secure future, non-earmarked assistance. Generally, our efforts have been well received. For example, we met with the CEO of SwissFoundations, an initiative that gives Swiss nonprofits a united, independent voice and network. She was excited to learn about the WMCH mission and put us in touch with several foundations. She also invited us to Stiftungssymposium 2019 (the Swiss Foundation Symposium), which we attended in May. We met important players in fundraising and plan to explore more opportunities via the contacts we made.

Matthias Stürmer from ParlDigi and Edith Graf-Litscher, member of the Swiss National Council at a Parldigi dinner in Bern

Parldigi
Since 2018, we’ve successfully partnered with Parldigi, the Parliamentary group for digital sustainability that comprises more than 50 national and state council members. This year, we’ve continued participating in discussions about Swiss copyright and the future of the Swiss internet. We met with Parldigi at an event in Bern, where the two groups agreed that WMCH should join Parldigi more often — in planning conversations, not just formal events — to pursue open-source projects and policies. We intend to share outreach efforts and hope to follow through on these intentions in the second half of the year.

Motion in Swiss Parliament for public access to federally commissioned photos
WMCH supported a motion to the Federal Council, Interpellation 19.3247: Release of pictures of the federal government. The aim was to make all photos commissioned by the Swiss government accessible for free use. The reason for the motion was that Swiss taxpayers have paid for the photos and should be able to use them. Long-time Wikipedian and user Hadi was instrumental in leading WMCH’s support for the motion, which yielded a positive response from the Federal Council. The response of the Swiss government on Interpellation 19.3247 was published at the end of May. Here is a summary of three essential passages:

  1. In accordance with its open government data strategy, the Federal Council is, in principle, prepared to release images of the Confederation unless their use is restricted for reasons of data protection, copyright or information protection.
  2. From a legal viewpoint, it is therefore possible to make photos taken by federal employees or on behalf of the federal administration available as part of Switzerland’s Open Government Data initiative.
  3. The Federal Council is prepared to regulate the rights of use for future external photo commissions in such a way that handling is simplified on the basis of standard contracts and is generally open for free further use.
3: Collaborations with community
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OUTREACH
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We’ve found that many of our collaborations with like-minded organizations, other Wikimedia chapters and the Wikimedia Foundation begin at higher levels of the WMCH chapter and cascade down to the community level. This section shares several highlights.

Work with like-minded organizations
Collaborating with like-minded organizations allows all of us to speak with a louder, unified voice and be more effective in achieving our goals. For these reasons, we partner with a multitude of organizations that advocate for the same positions we do regarding open access to digital knowledge. In the first half of 2019, we accomplished the following activities:

  • SCI Switzerland – We collaborated with SCI Switzerland to host the Wikipedia for Peace event in April and May (get the details of Wikipedia for Peace Switzerland 2019 in this report’s Education highlights). We are now discussing a similar partnership for next year and considering ways to expand the project to include the topic of climate change. While community-level activities are underway, the organizations’ leaders are discussing ways to establish an organization-wide partnership.
  • OpenStreetMap – We met with board members in Zurich to explore different ways to continue our long-time collaboration, discussing the possibility of co-working on projects (i.e., our two communities’ members working on each other’s projects). We agreed to sign a memorandum of understanding to outline a framework for future collaboration. We are currently developing it and hope to formalize the partnership in the next six months. Meanwhile, community members from both groups are working on a pilot project, Castles Dossier, to expand and improve Wiki information about Switzerland’s castles and palaces.
UN Sustainable Development Goals
  • Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (EPFL) – We made four new contacts this year, creating partnerships and exciting new projects, such our work with the Montreux Jazz Digital Project. For details, jump to this report’s case study for international and national (public relations).
  • Swiss National Library – We joined a brainstorming meeting about the future of the library.
  • Foraus – At the Swiss National Library’s brainstorming session, we met the founder of Foraus, a Swiss think tank on foreign policy. We’re discussing a pilot project in Bern that would likely center around edit-a-thons.
  • United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) – WMCH members attended two events hosted by the Swiss Commission for UNESCO, both of which prompted talks for how we can partner. The first was the Swiss Commission's 70th-anniversary celebration. The second was a meeting concerning Global Citizenship Education, a part of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. We plan to schedule a meeting soon to discuss a potential partnership and projects.
Climate strike in Bern March 15
  • International Federation of the Red Cross – Our partnership agreement still needs to be signed, but Red Cross members collaborated with us by attending a Wikidata workshop.
  • World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) – Based in Geneva, WIPO serves as a global forum for intellectual property services, policy, information and cooperation. WMCH is currently pursuing discussions about how the two organizations can collaborate.
  • Fridays for Future / Climate-Strike Switzerland – Through our board member, Muriel Staub, we are talking with Fridays for Future and Climate-Strike Switzerland about how to help the organizations with their Climate-Strike Switzerland Wiki. They are using it to coordinate their work and create a climate-related knowledgebase for the people of Switzerland.


Wikimedia Summit

Work with the Wikimedia Foundation and other chapters

  • Wikimedia Summit – We attended the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin and met with other chapters and Foundation staff. The summit led us to a meeting in Prague to discuss a potential collaboration on the WikiLead project, aimed at building leadership capacity. The summit also put us into discussions about development and capacity-building with Germany.
  • WikiDerechos Humanos – To support WikiDerechos Humanos, we are working with the executive director of Wikimedia Argentina, contacts at WikiFranca and the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Office of the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights. The wiki seeks to build memories in digital territories for the defense of human rights. We hope to leverage the chapters’ various skills and experiences to expand the project.
  • Chapters in Germany, Italy, Austria, France and Sweden – We work closely with WMDE and WMIT, as well as the chapters in Austria, France and Sweden, to benefit the entire Wikiverse and the regional community in Europe. As an example, see details about our work with WMDE and WMAT on International Museum Day in this report’s GLAM section.


D4.Progress towards the plan

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WMCH is fortunate that the name Wikipedia precedes us. We’re often invited to join the critical projects and discussions that advance our mission. Our excellent reputation usually helps us avoid chasing after others in the open-access movement or asking for a seat at the table. While it is a wonderful position to be in, it sometimes strains our limited resources, making it challenging to keep up with demand.

Our Partnership & Outreach Annual Plan focuses on the following three areas. The progress we’ve made in each demonstrates just how busy we’ve been this year so far:

  • International outreach – We continued to work closely with FKAGEU to ensure coordinated action on the EU Copyright Directive and related national action.
  • National outreach – Our successful ParlDigi collaboration from 2018 continued into this year. We also forged a relationship with the CEO of SwissFoundations, which promises to expand our network with grantmaking institutions. Last, we supported a successful motion in the Swiss Parliament to make publicly-commissioned photos available to the public. Through efforts like these, we see the impact of our involvement in public policy. Last, we have ramped up our fundraising efforts with new contacts and outreach, as well as technology and systems (described in the summary of this report) that will support our outreach.
  • Collaboration and partnerships – We have continued to strengthen our collaborations with the Wikiverse, including the Wikimedia Foundation and neighboring chapters. This year, our collaboration went beyond neighboring countries to include Argentina and Sweden. Outside of the Wikiverse, we made several new contacts, both with Swiss-focused organizations as well as Geneva-based international organizations.

Learning and sharing

  • Take a long-term approach - From our fundraising work, we’ve learned that grants and other new avenues of funding don’t just come to us. We must dedicate ourselves to meeting as many people as possible and building a stable but ever-expanding network. It’s a long-term approach, but one that can snowball into new opportunities to explore. Sometimes we run into just as many dead ends as we do new paths for progress. The key is to remain attuned to possibilities and think creatively about how to form new partnerships.
  • Networking is exponential - As with donors, we must take a long-term approach to collaborations by identifying contacts who can make our projects a success by introducing us to new contacts. Our relationship with EPFL’s Senior Philanthropy Officer led to a WMCH project to help share sound archives, videos and photos from 50 years of the Montreux Jazz Festival. At a brainstorming session about the Swiss National Library, we formed a new partnership with the founder of Foraus, one which is hopefully going to lead to edit-a-thons on foreign policy topics. Making one connection at a time ensures that we create authentic, thoughtful partnerships founded on both creativity and integrity. It is the only way to enhance our standing as a trusted resource on issues concerning open access to digital knowledge.

Looking ahead
In the second half of the year, we will continue building our funders network one relationship at a time. As we just said, it’s a process that takes time, but we’re encouraged by our progress thus far. Likewise, we’ll continue piecing together our community network to identify opportunities for new and expanded projects that fulfill our mission.

We are looking forward to two upcoming events as well. First, we’ll be attending the Global Youth Summit 2019 from 13 to 19 July in Aarau. The conference involves young people from 18 to 23 years old who are working to achieve sustainable development goals and will participate in a week of learning and networking. Second, we’re preparing for the Conference on Digital Sustainability coming up in October: DINAcon 2019.

D5.Case Studies

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EPFL

EPFL Logo
This case study is one of our foremost examples showcasing how one new contact can become a veritable wellspring of new opportunities. From one new EPFL contact that we made this year, we made four further connections, all of which have yielded or are likely to yield exciting new collaborations with the university. Our initial contact was EPFL’s Senior Philanthropy Officer.
Aerial view of EPFL campus in Lausanne
Through her, we formed several productive relationships that are opening up avenues for advancing our GLAM and Education strategic impact directions. First, we met with Dr. Alain Dufaux, the expert responsible for digitizing the archives of the Montreux Jazz Festival (get the details of the Montreux Jazz Digital Project in this report’s GLAM section). It was incredible learning from Dr. Dufaux’s experiences. As a result, we are planning a project with the archive (GLAM + Wikidata) and expect to run it in the second half of 2019.

Second, at the Philanthropy Officer’s suggestion, we joined a 50/50 fundraising event in May that allowed us to meet EPFL’s Vice President of Education, Pierre Vandergheynst, for the first time. And third, on another occasion, we talked with relevant staff about LEARN, EPFL’s new Center for Learning Sciences. LEARN aims to contribute to excellence in Swiss education and to the digital transformation of society. We expect to craft mutually beneficial projects out of both relationships.

Fourth, we met the current and future presidents of the EPFL student association. We’re exploring (a) ways to facilitate edit-a-thons for EPFL students and (b) the possibility of an EPFL data group that would allow EPFL students to work on Wikidata and open data projects. We think of these potential collaborations as pilot projects. If they come to fruition and are successful, we will replicate them at other universities.

Revenues received during this six-month period

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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
Exchange Rate 1.0385 1.0385
Membership fees (3000) CHF 12,000.00 2,010.00 13,321.77 0.00 0.00 15,331.77 12,462.00 15,922.04 Very good results because of the reminder letters sent to the members as well as to active outreach.
APG (Annual Plan Grant) CHF 150,000.00 87,500.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 87,500.00 155,775.00 90,868.75 Second part of APG (62'500.00) expected for after progress report delivery (August 2018)
WMF Fundraising Costs (3402) CHF 70,000.00 0.00 32,034.29 0.00 0.00 32,034.29 72,695.00 33,267.61 1st half 2019: amount in June covers Jan-June 2019 and depended on funds received.
Donations WMCH (3410) CHF 350,000.00 155,603.33 108,614.11 0.00 0.00 264,217.44 363,475.00 274,389.81 We are currently still not able to do the separation between Donations WMCH and External fundraising. All donations to WMCH will be listed here.
Pro Bono / In-kind donations (3420) CHF 25,000.00 1,006.09 8,864.65 0.00 0.00 9,890.74 25,962.50 10,271.53 ID est avocats (legal advice); TranslatMe (translations); Alternation school (computers and meeting rooms); Amoretti (Events free of charge); Wiki Education (Training). We are always trying to secure as much pro-bono as we can.
External fundraising (3430) CHF 90,000.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 93,465.00 0.00 We are currently still not able to do the separation between Donations WMCH and External fundraising. We will have a solution ready for the next report. All external fundraising income is listed under donations WMCH
Income of courses (Conferences, Trainings) (3610) CHF 500.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 519.25 0.00 We have not run any courses so far; this is not part of our main fundraising strategy for the moment.
Sponsorship (3652) CHF 500.00 0.00 500.00 0.00 0.00 500.00 519.25 519.25 Sponsorship for wikialpenforum
TOTAL CHF 698,000.00 246,119.42 163,354.82 0.00 0.00 409,474.24 724,873.00 425,239.00

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Spending during this six-month period

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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
Exchange Rate 1.04 1.04
PROGRAM 1 - GLAM CHF 120,000.00 2,164.77 27,905.99 0.00 0.00 30,070.76 124,620.00 31,228.48 25.06 In line with the budget, most operations to be expected within the 2nd half of 2019. What is more, some program money will be spent on the Fundraising IT infrastructure that had to be put in place.
PROGRAM 2 - Education CHF 140,000.00 3,812.50 13,560.93 0.00 0.00 17,373.43 145,390.00 18,042.31 12.41 In line with the budget, most operations to be expected within the 2nd half of 2019. What is more, some program money will be spent on the Fundraising IT infrastructure that had to be put in place.
PROGRAM 3 - Community CHF 101,500.00 18,422.15 7,705.57 0.00 0.00 26,127.72 105,407.75 27,133.64 25.74 In line with the budget; Wikimania and the language Wikicons are still to take place in the second half of the year.
Program 4: Partnership & Outreach CHF 68,000.00 5,472.20 14,546.53 0.00 0.00 20,018.73 70,618.00 20,789.45 29.44 Operations ongoing; one friend-raising event to take place in autumn as well as other important conferences.
Staff Wages & Expenses CHF 644,100.00 188,612.94 160,866.30 0.00 0.00 349,479.24 668,897.85 362,934.19 54.26 In line with the budget. Two people have resigned in the first half of the year.
Operations (excludes staff and programs) CHF 201,000.00 47,289.61 65,050.58 0.00 0.00 112,340.19 208,738.50 116,665.29 55.89
TOTAL CHF 1,274,600.00 265,774.17 289,635.90 0.00 0.00 555,410.07 1,323,672.10 576,793.36 43.58 N/A

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Compliance

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Is your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement?

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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

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Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.

Resources

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Resources to plan for measurement

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Resources for storytelling

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