Grants:PEG/MADe - WM BE/WLM BeLux 2013/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Project and Event grant approved in FY 2012-13 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:PEG/MADe - WM BE/WLM BeLux 2013.

You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
You are welcome to Email grants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Compliance and completion

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?: YES

Is your project completed?: YES

Did you use any of the grant funds?: YES

Activities and lessons learned

This section describes what the grantee did, and what the grantee learned from implementing the project. This section should be useful to others implementing similar projects and is an opportunity for the grantee to reflect on the project's performance.

Activities

Sept 30, 'Last Participation Day': Bribing possible contestants with not just a beer. Only in Belgium!

Mon June 10 - project set up: Preparation of the WLM grant request. Assessing which parties will participate this year.
Sat June 29 - preparatory meeting: Discussion on the steps forward with the project team. Meeting the volunteers. It was combined with the WWI edit-a-thon.
Wed July 17 - meeting KIK-IRPA: Discussing this years approach: venue, reception & drinks. Determining possible dates for the award session.
Wed August 14 - Social Media: Set up of the WikiLoveMonuments.be Twitter account. Main updates on the website.
Thurs August 22 - meeting Herita (Antwerpen): Meeting Herita (heritage organisation), possible future sponsors. Preparing press reports
Sat September 7 - kick-off meeting: Meeting new contributors, explaining the rules, sharing tips and tricks. Meeting at the Halles Saint-Géry, Brussels. Meet fellow contestants, hear tips and tricks from people who participated last year. Learn how to upload and process the images. The event was no succes, no new contributors showed up, so we refocused on the more experienced contributres. We also discussed the steps toward a Belgian chapter.
Mon September 23 - Status meeting: Team meeting. Introduction of the competition to possible new participants. Combined with the Fashion edit-a-thon.
Sat September 28 - upload marathon: Meeting in Gent. We explored the historical inner city of Ghent, en took additional pictures. We met and exchanged experiences. WM BE was discussed, too. The meeting resulted in a serious spike in uploads.
Mon September 30 - last participation day: Online rally to convince people to upload their last and best images.
Sun October 3 - Judging information session: Prepare the online voting system. Explain the system and how the judges should cast their votes.
Tues October 22 - Final judging session: Meeting in Ghent with judges. Final selection of images. Slight adaptations to the pictures. Preparations for the press communiqué
Tues October 23 - Press release: Practical preparations. Communication with winners. Press release, and contact with press contacts
Tues November 5 - Award session: Award session at the office of the Royal Institute at the Cinquantenaire, Brussels. Talks by the director of the institute, the organisors, the jury. Awarding the prices. Reception where we approached new members (can we help them?).; Finalising the Wikimedia Belgium statutes
Tues November 12 - Wrapping up

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects, or that may change the way you are doing this project?

Work together with other people and other organisations. We all have our strongholds and specialities. Collaborate with somebody that is experienced in organising events, collaborate with organisations that have a 'real life' footprint.
KISS - keep it simple, stupid. And be agile
Embrace the media
Determine your focus - we focussed solely on quality

What went well?

Amount of collaborators, amount of participating images
Support by external organisations

What did not go well?

Problems with "Freedom of Panorama", several 100 of images were removed
Not all of our events were a success, we could do much better on marketing them.
We got a lot of media attention, but this did not result in an equivalent number of extra participants or uploads. We need to work on making participating easier for new members.
Lot of work maintaining the websites, Twitter, ...
Have a follow-up programme, in which the images are shared and distributed over Wikipedia articles

Project goal and measures of success

This section should reference the project goals and measures of success described in the approved grant submission. See Grants:PEG/MADe - WM BE/WLM BeLux 2013 to review the goals and metrics listed in the approved submission.

Project goal

Provide the project goal here.: We want to encourage and facilitate the capturing and uploading of photographs of Belgian and Luxembourg heritage sites or monuments in September (goal I). On an organisatorial level, we want to strengthen our organisation (goal IIa), achieve a high media coverage (goal IIb) and anchor our relationship with the different collaborating organisations (goal IIc).

Did you achieve your project goal? How do you know your goal was achieved? Please answer in 1 - 2 paragraphs.: See: #Impact

Measures of success

List the measures of success exactly as provided in the approved grant submission, and evaluate your project according to each measure listed there. Answer only for measures on which you are currently able to report since your project has not been completed.

10,000 uploads We collected 3531 images. This might be considered a low number compared with other countries. We believe this has two reasons:
- Belgian has no "Freedom of Panorama" law, and we noticed that between 500 and 1,000 images were removed during the competition. This includes all images of the Atomium.
- In the past years, we continued focussing on quality images. We do not give prizes for the "most active uploader", only the best images get a reward. This resulted in a lower amount of images, but a high number of high quality images. The judges gave 25 images the "featured image" status and 350 images the "quality images" status. Yes, this means about 10% of the images was a "quality image"!
40 new contributors 143 contributors participated in the Belgian or Luxembourg event, of which 62 participated for the first time, and 49 new users. 61 persons where recurring contributors that participated in earlier editions of WLM. We were happy that three of the winners were new on Commons.
high 'diversity' We got a diverse set of images:
1. geographically: a map overview of the pictured monuments shows a nice distribution over all the provinces. The winning image were nicely distributed over the Flanders, Walloon and Brussels region. One Luxembourg image fell just outside the top-10.
2. on the languages partipating: we went the extra mile to make sure that both Dutch, French or German speaking people would participate to the competition. Our website is four lingual (NL, FR, DE, EN) and we posted multilingual Twitter messages. This resulted in a high participation grade in all language communities.
3. we saw a good distribution between small uploaders and busy uploaders (95 uploaders with <10 images, 37 with <100 images, and 5 with > 100 images).
4. We were baffled by the participation grade of 'non-Belgians', even non-Europeans, at the events. One of our organisators is Bulgarian, we have two (!) Czech winners, German and Israeli people showed up during our events, one of our judges resids in South African, one of the most active uploaders is from India, ...
professional volunteering team For the former organisors this was the biggest difference with the events in 2011 and '12. We felt the presence of a team of people that helped me during the events. Organisation of WLM speeded up the founding of the local chapter.
media impact Media impact was high and comparable with last year.
1. During the period August-November we were active on our Twitter channels. We saw a drastic increase in Twitter followers on these two channels (now about 350 followers).
2. We made contact with press contacts of three different media groups (VRT nieuws, Roularta, Persgroep), and they published our press releases.
3. We contacted them when they published general Wikipedia news, copied from international telexes (eg. on Wiki-PR, visit Jimbo Wales to Brussels), and added local content. This is a very interesting side effect of this project and clearly shows the need for a localised organisation.
4. Thanks to our press contacts, Wikipedia was highlighted about 30 min in a prime time radio programme (Hautekiet).
5. Two media organisations published all 10 winning images on their website. The plan is to continue with the winnners of other countries as well.
6. We made plans with a journalist and a photographer to be present on the award session. Due to organisational problems from their side they were not present. As the award session is an interesting moment for the media, we should try to make sure journalists are present in future versions
organisational commitments One of the reasons for the award session was to show our potential of organising things to different governmental organisations. Two such organisations were present: the KIK-IRPA itself, and Herita, a Flemish Heritage agency. During earlier meetings we explained how we worked and what the way forward could be. This gave them time to think about a possible collaboration and allowed them to make initial budget plans for these projects (the budget of both organisations is under stress; both an advantage and a disadvantage for us). During the Award Session we proposed the future board en proposed a timing. We will organise a new set of meetings after the local chapter has been set up, and we will invite expertise from France of The Netherlands (eg. Wikipedians-in-residence). As a last point, they both promessed to send us a letter of support. We will use this in our discussions with the WMF and the local government.

Provide an overall assessment of how your project went according to these measures.: We think this year's organisation was a succes. I am really proud on how we connected with the different organisations, how we worked in team to get all the work done, and how we also could advance with the setup of the Belgian chapter. One remark; the amount of images was lower then expected. We need to work on our "marketing" to improve this. One of the approached here is the collaboration with existing organisations.

If you were to plan a similar project, would you measure it differently? If yes, please explain how.

Our communication is shattered over multiple ways of communication and social media: website, email, Twitter, private messages on Commons, ... We lacked feedback on the communication, and regularly run into problems (eg. limit on messages sent on Commons). In the organisation of other WLMs, eg. in South Africa, we noticed that Facebook would be a better approach. We will investigate the use of Facebook for future editions.
Our dedicated, multilingual website http://www.wikilovesmonuments.be was very difficult to work with. There were some hosting issues as well. We will avoid using seperate wiki's, and will try to concentrate on our existing website http://be.wikipedia.org

Impact

What impact did this project have on WMF's mission and the strategic goals? Please answer in 1 -2 paragraphs and include specific measures of impact such as the number of readers or editors reached by a particular project, or the number of articles edited or improved.

Regarding the fit of this project to the WMF's mission, we decided to focus on three clearly defined goals:

Increase participation: To my surprise, the competition attracted a high amount of new contributors. These contributors were very diverse: in their participation grade, in their nationality and language, and nicely distributed geographically in Belgium. This opens opportunities for future projects.
Improve quality: Due to our persistent focus, high amount of images of high quality.
Increase reach: Thanks to our press contacts, we were able to promote WLM in the local press, and en passant join into the discussion when Wikipedia 'in general' was discussed.

Reporting and documentation of expenditures

Documentation

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grants at wikimedia dot org, according to the guidelines here? Answer "Yes" or "No".: Yes

Expenses

Please list all project expenses in a table here, with descriptions and dates. Review the instructions here here.: Costs borne by external parties are not specified in the overview

Description	costs requested from WMF (EUR)	Actuals (EUR)	Difference
Part 1: July meeting of the project volunteers
Accomodation	0^[1]	0
Travel expenses	180	172,64	-4%
Part 2: September start-up meeting
Accomodation	0^[1]
Travel expenses	120	163	36%
Part 3: Judging session
Gift packages for the judges	0^[1]
Travel expenses	120	0^[1]
Venue rental
Part 4: October Award Session
Award prices	900	1010	12%
Catering during the reception	0^[1]
Venue rental + crew hire	0^[1]
Travel expenses	600	118,25^[1]^[2]	-80%
Accomodation
Compensation for team (diner)	120	115,25	-4%
Part 5: General costs
Website	0^[1]
Postal address	0^[1]	21,85^[3]	NEW
Cellphone expenses	100	33,89	-66%
Project Management Costs	1750	1500	-14%
Total	4340 EUR	3134,88 EUR	-28%

↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ Borne by an external party. In total, external costs are estimated at 3500 EUR
↑ Thanks to careful planning, the high cost international travel was paid by the company I'm working at. This is a serious reduction in costs. Secondly, by organising the judging meeting in Ghent, again no real travels were necessary. This allowed to really limit travel costs
↑ We incurred 21,85 EUR in postal costs: sending out (registered) postal mail.

Total project budget (from your approved grant submission): 8225 EUR

Total amount requested from WMF (from your approved grant submission, this total will be the same as the total project budget if the WMF grant is your only funding source): 4340 EUR

Total amount spent on this project (this total should be the total calculated from the table above): 6634,88 EUR

Total amount of WMF grant funds spent on this project (this total will be the same as the total amount spent if the WMF grant is your only funding source): 3134,88 EUR (=47% of total amount spent)

Are there additional sources of revenue that funded any part of this project? List them here.

We estimate the total support by additional sources of revenue on 3500 EUR:

Accomodation (Couchsurfing-style);
Gift packages, venue rental, organisational support, catering during reception, printing of the pictures by the KIK-IRPA;
Website, postal address: different GAC project.
International travel

Expenses

List of all expenses will be shared on project finalisation.

Remaining funds

Remaining funds have been used or will be used for other approved mission-aligned activities. This use has been requested in writing and approved by WMF.

Are there any grant funds remaining?

YES

Please list the total amount (specify currency) remaining here. (This is the amount you did not use, or the amount you still have after completing your grant.)

1205,12 EUR

If funds are remaining they must be returned to WMF, reallocated to mission-aligned activities, or applied to another approved grant.

Please state here if you intend to return unused funds to WMF, submit a request for reallocation, or submit a new grant request, and then follow the instructions on your approved grant submission.

We currently have a second GAC project running. We would propose to wait until Wikimedia BE is set up and this second project is finished. We might need extra money for this second project; temporarly keeping the remaining grant fund will avoid moving money back and forth.

The remaining funds were reallocated to cover additional costs for the Start-up Grant. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 22:35, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

[ext-1] ↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ Borne by an external party. In total, external costs are estimated at 3500 EUR

[trans-2] Thanks to careful planning, the high cost international travel was paid by the company I'm working at. This is a serious reduction in costs. Secondly, by organising the judging meeting in Ghent, again no real travels were necessary. This allowed to really limit travel costs

[3] We incurred 21,85 EUR in postal costs: sending out (registered) postal mail.

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