Grants:PEG/WM ZA/Administrator bridging funding/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Project and Event grant approved in FY 2014-15 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/WM ZA/Administrator bridging funding.

• 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.

Project status

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

Yes

Is your project completed?

Yes

Activities and lessons learned

Activities

The following activities were administered during this funding period :

• Support to South African Wikimedia communities
• Promotion of local and other African Wikimedia communities
• Engagement with GLAM and educational institutions
• Awareness of the Wikimedia projects as a significant resource
• Support the growth and sustainability of high quality local content
• Chapter Administration in terms of legislative requirements
• Project Coordination and Facilitation
• Monthly Banking Administration
• Grant Applications and Reports
• General increased capacity of Chapter

These activities can be broken down into sub-categories as follows :

Finances

• General Auditor Liaison
• VAT and NPO registration
• Monthly internal bookkeeping
• Project reconciliation
• Banking
• Processing of Expense Claims
• Petty Cash

Administration

• Funder Liaison
• Compilation of grant reports
• Complication of grant applications
• Website and Social Media administration
• Mailing list administration
• Weekly newsletter
• General Office Administration
• Filing system administration
• General correspondence from Chapter
• Management of press database
• Human Resource Management when required
• General Housekeeping
• Survey, Metrics & Evaluation Management
• Request for Geobanner notifications
• Liaison with Wikimedia Foundation
• Membership outreach and management

Small Language Activities

• Daily communication with Afrikaans community on talk page
• Afrikaans Writing Competition
• Afrikaans Wikipedia community on Facebook
• Africa community facilitator
• Chapter outreach

Project Management

• Project facilitation
• Liaison with stakeholders
• Event planning and implementation
• Competition facilitation
• Advertising and Marketing
• Africa outreach coordinator

Lessons learned

What worked well?

The employment of a full time employee dedicated to administering the Chapter has not only increased awareness of WMZA, but also of the Wikimedia movement in general.

As a purely volunteer organisation prior to the appointment of the Administrator, we have not been able to dedicate the required time and attention to the logistical activities surrounding projects and activities. At the same time, we have been aligned with current legislative requirements, and have had a far greater impact on the South African community as originally anticipated.

We have learnt that as a chapter organisation having a paid professional employee is key if the chapter is to grow any further and be able to serve the growing needs of the South African Wikipedia community which includes the growing Afrikaans language Wikipedia community as well as English langauge editors and contributors. We also learnt that it is highly likely that a person in a full time position would likely be necessary to promote the contribution and growth of other African language Wikipedias which are currently inactive.

What didn't work?

As the only full time employee of the Chapter, the Administrator's time was divided between various projects that we tried to get off the ground, as well as complying with all the legislative requirements. We believe that the lack of additional resources in terms of an additional person who could have assisted the Administrator assistant would have increased our capacity even further.

This is particularly true when trying to move to an FDC or annual grant for a chapter. Currently the administrative and bureaucratic burden of applying for and adhering to the requirements of an FDC or APG from the WMF is far too heavy for one full time employee that also has to manage other aspects of running a chapter. Currently no such mechanism or assistance seems to be available for organisations trying to make the shift from relaying on PEG to APG as a source of income.

What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?

Although we have many initiatives that we would have liked to see implemented, we plan to prioritise certain projects in a year to focus specifically on these.

Greatly increase the focus on becoming less reliant on WMF funding for funding for professional staff.

Learning patterns

Asking the right questions: this was particularly important when designing the questionnaire used to survey the Wikipedia community in South Africa. It is also important to know how to ask the right questions so as to learn from past and current experience of projects and funding so as to increase the likelihood of success in the future.

Evaluating Project Outcomes: knowing how to ask the right questions as well as having a clear idea of what relevant data can be collected and what can not before beginning the process and starting a project is very important. Only once we know what to measure upfront can the project organisers know what to record so as to successfully evaluate project outcomes. Additionally there is a limitation of the Foundation almost exclusively relaying on quantitative data to determine success metrics and so evaluation project success. Things such as the increasing awareness that people can edit Wikipedia or that their contributions are very welcome (often despite the often hostile welcome new editors receive from the existing editing community) are an example of a 'soft' metric that is both very important to get an idea of but also hard to quantitatively measure. The ability to use qualitative data so as to better measure 'soft' metrics such as perception, awareness, or conciousness of groups of people would go a long way to improving long term performance of local chapter goals and the objectives of the WMF on the ground and within the editing community as well as with other communities so as to expand the appeal of contributing to Wikipedia by a boarder range of people.

Framing Survey Questions

Let the Media Know: Having access to a media list or list of media publications/stations and journalists is hugely helpful. A great investment is to sign up for a paid media list service. Another even more powerful learning has been that having the right project partners to publicise and promote projects is usually key to project success and is a huge 'force multiplyer'. This however is a long term strategy as partnerships need to be built up over time as well as getting an idea of how best to leverage those partnerships. An example of this would be a recent Wiki Loves Monuments workshop WM ZA ran with project partner ORMS Photographic Warehouse. After two years of experimenting with the right organising structure for putting together these workshops and having limited success at fulling them up with people we found that if ORMS organises the workshops and commits to fulling it up with people and WM ZA pitch up to administer them on the day and plan the event then we experience full workshops running at max capacity with greatly expanded levels of event awareness and interest.

Evaluation Survey

With the assistance of the Administrator we conducted the first evaluation survey in South Africa to ascertain what the wiki-community looks like and what their preferences are when editing Wiki-projects.

The information gathered was very useful for us a Chapter to plan for future projects. A few interesting statistics were extracted from the survey and was on display at Wikimania where other Chapters asked for assistance is compiling a similar questionnaire.

Survey Analysis

The general issue of visibility was highlighted and as mentioned earlier, we aim to use the information gathered from this information to compile and construct future projects.

An additional infographic was also created specially for the Afrikaans editing community.

Afrikaans Community Analysis

The full results of the evaluation survey can be viewed here.

The evaluation survey revealed a number of important insights that will be used by WM ZA to better infrom the chapter of both long term and short term strategic needs. The survey has illustrated that short term strategic needs tend to be focused on the immediate needs of the existing Wikipedia/Wikimedia community whilst long term needs are that the chapter needs to expand the editing and Wikipedia contributing demographic in the country both as areas of likely growth of the community and so as to better represent the 'full' spectrum of knowledge in South Africa.

Some of the policies or focuses coming from the survey:

• Promote Visual Editor: local community finds syntax hard to use and learn.
• Promote awareness of the SA chapter: currently less than 1/3 of existing editors aware that chapter exists - this is to be done by hosting outreach activities such as meetups and hosting competitions as well as by providing services such as a reference library.
• Promote membership in and volunteering for the chapter by existing editors: do this by actively promoting at chapter events such as meetups and during competitions and other outreach actives.
• Outreach activities specifically focused on demographic groups currently not represented within the existing community so as to expand the community such as encouraging female editors and/or black editors.

Outcomes and impact

Outcomes

The organisational capacity brought about by the Administrator has increased the presence of the Chapter in South Africa and has created awareness of the Chapter in Africa.

This position formed the the nucleus of an organised, focused, effective and more professionalised Chapter, that deepened Wikimedia ZA's capabilities to fulfil its objectives and obligations to local Wikimedia Community.

(a) To develop and support the South African Wikimedia communities.

(b) To protect, preserve and promote local cultures, other African Wikimedia communities and the greater communities of free culture and open software.

(c) To support and facilitate the sharing of knowledge in all South African languages, thus contributing to the development of local languages on Wikimedia.

(d) To spread awareness of the Wikimedia projects as a significant resource within universities, archives, museums and other relevant communities, and to also actively engage with them.

(e) Act as the conduit between editors, writers and specialists within the community to support the growth and sustainability of high quality local content.

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

We believe that we have been successful in organising and focusing the efforts of the Chapter over this funding period. We have been able to greatly extend out reach to the SA Community and have made great progress in reaching out to specifically the Afrikaans wiki-community. Through our first ever Evaluation Survey, adopted by other Chapters and user groups, we have been able to, for the first time, reach out to the various communities and have been able to collect interesting statistics on the community as a whole.

We believe that our increased efforts have greatly increased awareness of the Chapter and the movement as a whole. We have managed to increase our membership numbers (from 4 members in 2013 to 16 members in 2015) and have been handling various queries from non-wiki members who want to find out more about editing and using Wikipedia. We believe that in the past year, we have increased our visibility and credibility as a chapter. However due to a previous lack of a quantifiable benchmark we can not currently provide a number for growth. The current level of awareness is around 33% of the existing editing community in South Africa, this is up from a base of almost zero (0) in 2012 when the chapter first became active. We have noticed from anecdotal experience that the greatest increase seems to have been over the time in which the administrator was active which is from mid-2013 onward. This is particularly true with regards to the Afrikaans Wikipedia community.

Progress towards targets and goals

Project metrics

Project metrics	Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
Develop and support SA Wikimedia communities	Created awareness of the Chapter and it's projects as a whole	Prior to our survey, not many editors in the wiki-community were aware of the SA chapter. We believe that we can increase our reach even further by implementing the points raised in the evaluation survey
Protect, preserve and promote culture of free and open software	Though various projects we have been able to contribute content to Wikipedia and introduce new users to access Wikipedia	Recruiting new editors has been our target during the funding period, especially through Joburgpedia and we have been able to introduce them to Wikipedia and teach others how to use Wikipedia as a resource to free knowledge.
Facilitate sharing of knowledge	Through active engagement with various partners we have been able to share knowledge pecifically with regards to the Joburgpedia project.	Through partnerships we have gained access to materials which have not been previously available to the public
Spread awareness of projects	Advertisements, Social Media, Word of Mouth, Edit-a-Thons	Through various activities in our projects and in general, we have been able to recruit more people to contribute to Wikipedia. An example is the Wiki from Above competition which was a project specifically aimed at drone enthusiasts. This created a new opportunity for us to reach that specific community.
Support growth of high quality content	Through various competitions and digitisation projects	We have been working hard to improve the quality of contributions to Wikipedia. This was done through various edit-a-thons, competitions and the work done by our Wikipedian in Residence in the area of heritage in Johannesburg

Global Metrics

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees. In addition to the measures of success for your specific program (in above section), please use the table below to let us know how your project contributed to the Global Metrics. We know that not all projects will have results for each type of metric, so feel free to put "0" where necessary.

1. Next to each required metric, list the actual outcome achieved through this project.
2. Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome. For example, if you were funded for an edit-a-thon which resulted in 0 new images, your explanation might be "This project focused solely on participation and articles written/improved, the goal was not to collect images."

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	16	We have managed to increase our membership to 16 new members. Although there are many more editors involved, the increase in membership numbers can be directly attributed to the work done by us in this funding period.
2. # of new editors	31	Although we have had a higher number of new editors in various projects, we cannot contribute this to the work done by the Administrator, except for instances were new editors became involved through advertising campaigns and general outreach. One exception has been through the edit-a-thons done with partners such as the Book Lounge for the South African Literature Festival and the Western Cape Library Outreach. Both of these events would not have been logistically successful without the support of the Administrator.
3. # of individuals involved	30	This amount a minimum estimate of the amount of contributors / editors to Wikipedia who have been involved with the Administrator in promoting the Afrikaans Wikipedia. This number is greatly increased if all the projects are bundled together.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	0	None of these can be attributed to the Administrator specifically, except in instances where individuals got involved due to advertising and general outreach.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	0	This metric cannot be measured in this instance.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	0	This metric cannot be measured in this instance.

Learning question

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

We believe that the work done by the Administrator through individual and project initiatives contributed to the general motivation of editors. As a Chapter our ability to reach out to the global wiki-community in South Africa was certainly a motivation for others to get involved. We would specifically like to refer here to the Afrikaans wiki-community who have been motivated to support the Chapter and to support the planned activities. We believe that the continuous outreach efforts contributed to a general increase in awareness and participation.

For more information on project specific outcomes, please refer to our Grant Application for the remainder of 2015.

Impact

What impact did this project have on WMF's mission and the strategic priorities?

Option A: How did you increase participation in one or more Wikimedia projects?

As a Chapter we were able to increase participation through general outreach, edit-a-thons and competitions.

Option B: How did you improve quality on one or more Wikimedia projects?

Through our Wiki from Above competition we have been able to contribute quality media to Wikimedia Commons. We have also attracted many new editors who are interested in contributing to Wikipedia. These are mostly subject experts and we believe that they have a huge deal to contribute towards the quality of the wiki's in general.

Option C: How did you increase the reach (readership) of one or more Wikimedia projects?

Through general outreach and marketing activities we have been able to reach more people, specifically int he Afrikaans community.

Reporting and documentation of expenditures

This section describes the grant's use of funds

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".

Will be shared with WMF via Dropbox

Expenses

Number	Category	Item description	Unit	Number of units	Actual cost per unit	Actual total	Budgeted total	Currency	Notes
1	Administrator	Administrator Salary - December 2014 - July 2015	8	8	ZAR 20,148.71	ZAR 161,189.71	ZAR 160,000.00	ZAR
2	Payroll Costs	Payroll Administration Fees - December 2014 - July 2015	8	8	ZAR 733.88	ZAR 5,871.00	ZAR 6,400.00	ZAR
3	Auditing & Legal Fees	Auditing & Legal Fees payable to Auditors - December 2014 - July 2015	1	1	ZAR 9,877.92	ZAR 9,877.92	ZAR 30,000.00	ZAR
4	Office Rental	Rental for 2 people - 1 day per week - December 2014 - July 2015	8	8	ZAR 3,020.25	ZAR 24,162.00	ZAR 24,000.00	ZAR
5	Contingencies	Various expenses - December 2014 - July 2015	1	1	ZAR 15,056.71	ZAR 15,056.71	ZAR 20,000.00	ZAR
6	Telecommunications	Telecommunications - December 2014 - July 2015	8	8	ZAR 1,603.99	ZAR 12,831.90	ZAR 12,000.00	ZAR
7	Equipment & IT Services	Equipment & IT - December 2014 - July 2015	8	8	ZAR 1,065.19	ZAR 8,521.53	ZAR 8,000.00	ZAR
8	Banking Charges	Banking Fees - December 2014 - July 2015	1	1	ZAR 4,477.12	ZAR 4,477.12	ZAR 4,500.00	ZAR
9	Deficit Adjustment	Deficit Adjustment as discussed with WMF	1	1	ZAR 22,912.11	ZAR 22,912.11	ZAR 22,912.11	ZAR

Total project budget (from your approved grant submission)

ZAR 264,900.00 / USD 24,213.89

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

ZAR 264,900.00 / USD 24,213.89

Total amount spent on this project

ZAR 264,900.00 / USD 24,213.89

Total amount of Project and Event grant funds spent on this project

ZAR 264,900.00 / USD 24,213.89

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

No

Remaining funds

Are there any grant funds remaining?

No

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.)

ZAR 0.00 / USD 0.00

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.