Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/AvoinGLAM 2022/Midpoint Report

Midterm Learning Report

Report Status: Accepted

Due date: 15 July 2022

Funding program: Wikimedia Community Fund

Report type: Midterm

Application Final Learning Report

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General information

This form is for organizations receiving Wikimedia Community Funds (General Support) or Wikimedia Alliances Funds to report on their mid-term learning and results. See the Wikimedia Community Fund application if you want to review the initial proposal.

• Name of Organization: AvoinGLAM
• Title of Proposal: AvoinGLAM 2022
• Amount awarded: 61885.97 USD, 54573.17 EUR
• Amount spent: 15126.17 EUR

Part 1 Understanding your work

1. Briefly describe how your strategies and activities proposed were implemented and if any changes to what was proposed are worth highlighting?

First of all, I am sorry that the report is late. I strategically caught corona in July and I was a bit disoriented after that. Getting back on track!

We have succeeded well in our mission to become an important partner in discussing open policies in the Finnish GLAM sector. We have produced more impactful webinars than we were preparing for. We are part of many national and international working groups, and we try to foster our expertise in the areas of interest.

Although data and content imports get us the most eligible metrics, we are reducing their number. They redirect a lot resources from what we find is our key mission, to advocate open policies with GLAMs and building community among the various parties in the domain. We focus on those that are strategically important or instrumental to an activity, or where we can educate a third party to run imports.

Changes around us affect our program. The copyright legislation in Finland was complicated and delayed, and we were not able to advocate on implementing it in GLAMs. The Russian aggression in Ukraine lead us to evaluate priorities, and some programs have been postponed, new ideas developed.

Communicating our work has been many times more time-consuming than we thought. We have produced a popular newsletter, but the number of subscribers is still rather low. It is produced for the Finnish community. We will have to get more coverage and balance the workload.

We have planned the course of the year in a way that we apply for funding for an extra 3 months to arrange Hack4OpenGLAM. Our previous partner, Creative Commons, is not organizing CC Summit this year, where Hack4OpenGLAM has been part. This has caused us to look for new partners and to rearrange the existing program constantly. The future of Hack4OpenGLAM is still open, and we are looking for new partners as well as new themes and configurations for it.

We are eagerly waiting to join the European GLAM coordinators' meeting to sync our work with them.

2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you feel are being effective in achieving your goals?

Empowering communities and individuals to contribute to the open ecosystem independently. We have not yet found our best practices, but we are researching that with the GLAM School project. A related ideal is that the Wikimedia communities could share their skills and resources laterally. I think that the Let's connect! is trying to achieve exactly this, and continuing exploring these practices is important.

Defending values behind openness without being dogmatic about it. Issues around ethical sharing are becoming more articulated. We are highlighting it as a key approach in our program. We participate in working groups, talk about it in webinars and presentations and arrange workshops with affected communities. It will be important to find ways to bring ethical sharing considerations in the everyday workflows in the Wikimedia ecosystem, and that is going to require a lot of cross-movement collaboration and building consensus around the issues.

Some call it innovation, but I think we would like to call it creativity. Hack4OpenGLAM is important in many ways. It is a safe space to experiment, work together with unexpected partners, familiarize with open practices etc. We wish to give this approach more space and continuity.

Offering our contributions in solving global challenges. We are interested in how we could create tactics combining cultural heritage, voluntary work, humanitarian and creative activities toward those goals. We explore these questions in workshops (GLAM Together! at Mozfest, Crisis and GLAM at Wikimania) and we are looking into the possibilities or working together with important global institutions in Hack4OpenGLAM.

Participate in workings of related communities beyond Wikimedia. We are joining many working groups in Finland and internationally. It is very powerful in advocating for the values as well as building bridges that help streamlining ideals across communities.

3. What challenges or obstacles have you encountered so far?

It takes time to gain trust in the Wikimedia ecosystem. Involving relevant communities in the work early on in the process is fundamentally important for successful work. However, there will always be conflicting views. In our work, we try to lower the level of tolerance of toxic behavior by adhering to the UCoC and safe space policies.

Our case of community-building and organizational development is a challenging one. We are an old working group, but we have been affiliated in different ways over the course of our existence since 2012. We are combining a strong tradition of Open GLAM and GLAM-Wiki activities in Finland and a devoted international work on GLAM in multiple contexts. In an attempt to stop changing hats all the time, we are on a path to more sovereignty as a group. We look into the possibilities of becoming a Wikimedia User Group, and possibly also of incorporation. That would allow us to look further into the future and to build a basis for sustainable activities.

Some activities are challenging to make commitments about. Working with indigenous communities, for example, happens at their pace and discretion. The outputs and results need to be flexible, since pressuring execution is going to undermine the communities in questions. Often it is good to step back and re-evaluate the initial plan.

4. Please describe how different communities are participating and being informed about your work.

Communicating our work has taken much more time than anticipated.

The newsletter is an addition to our communication channels. Although the number of subscribers is still relatively low, it has been welcomed with enthusiasm. It tries to address the Finnish GLAM community, as the text is in Finnish, and there is focus on local activities. https://www.avoinglam.fi/uutiskirjearkisto/

In the international scope, we use This Month in GLAM as our main information channel. In our own section, we try to report everything we have worked on in an interesting way. It reaches the GLAM community, and informs the WMF in the best possible manner. Additionally, we have published in Open GLAM Medium publication. https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/April_2022/Contents/AvoinGLAM_report https://medium.com/open-glam/avoinglams-response-to-the-writing-of-kimmo-lev%C3%A4-director-general-of-the-finnish-national-gallery-960869a51c45

In Finland, our main display is our Facebook group. We have Twitter and Instagram accounts that are occasionally used. We also publish a web page which also hosts an imperfect archive of our previous publications and posts. There are separate website for our projects. https://www.facebook.com/groups/avoinGLAM https://hack4.fi/ https://hack4openglam.okf.fi/ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM_School https://twitter.com/avoinGLAM

We report on our activities in the group page on Meta and create project pages for relevant activities.

5. Please share reflections on how your efforts are helping to engage participants and/or build content, particularly for underrepresented groups.

We are partnering with the Finnish National Library in their project to translate the General Finnish Ontology into Northern Saami. Related to this context, we are working on the topic of ethical sharing, which will discuss issues around restitution, repatriation, researching indigenous communities, writing about indigenous groups and representing them and their culture in visual communication. We engage with individual rights activists, and through the collaboration with the National Library, we have an exceptional opportunity to engage on a more official level with the communities.

AvoinGLAM is adopting Wikidocumentaries, an Open Knowledge Finland project initiated by Susanna Ånäs. In its current state, it is an aggregation platform for Wikimedia content and related open content in some other repositories. It has not been developed actively for some time, but we are hoping that through AvoinGLAM's new more independent status, we could safely continue developing it. The idea of the platform is to allow citizen historians to contribute to the open ecosystem with the help of tools hosted in the context of the project, and to connect different archival projects to the joint display.

Keeping this in mind, we have already reached out to small communities fostering their heritage and independent archives. Developing Wikidocumentaries and other mechanisms of creating interconnections, we would have a tool that enables our work with the communities.

6. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What have you learned so far about these areas during this period?

1. We wish to uncover a holistic picture of how Wikimedia volunteers can contribute to the preservation and sharing of the world’s cultural heritage from a diverse, equitable, and inclusive point of view. [...]

• The work with GLAM School will continue work after holidays with interviews.
• We have chosen to work with these topics in the workshops we arrange in related events: GLAM Together! at Mozfest, and Crisis and GLAM at Wikimania.
• We are motivated to work on issues in the intersection of global crisis and creative activity / GLAM, and seek collaboration around that.

2. We are especially tuned into learning how we need to address the current structures of sharing to allow more ethically sound ways of sharing cultural heritage online. 3. As a result of this work, we will propose ways of sharing and amplifying best practices in the GLAM community extending beyond the GLAM-Wiki community.

• We engage in several collaborations to draw suggestions for best practices.
• We wish to be able to bring principles of ethical sharing into the daily Wikimedia practices, but we cannot do it alone. We will advocate internally for such changes of practice.

4. In our local role in Finland, we wish to learn how we can meet the needs of GLAMs in tackling the digital transformation by working with them on case studies and lightweight co-creation projects. [...]

• The case studies will be showcased in our webinars, which have become a major channel for our activities locally.

7. What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your work?

We are going to envision how we wish to function in the coming years and finalize pending work within the available working time. Some program parts will need to be reduced as some others and unexpected ones have taken some time from them.

We are maintaining a document that records the changing plans and their time allocations. We wish to be able to work according to those plans.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14hIK2AFFwye-p7gYf0TLGc32H83gexDOS8xfFJL6Ets/edit#gid=1358726357

Part 2: Metrics

8a. Open and additional metrics data.

Open Metrics

Open Metrics	Description	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

Additional Metrics

Additional Metrics	Description	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability	We wish to actively engage the communities and practitioners from diverse backgrounds that we interview, in the broader joint Open GLAM / GLAM-Wiki work, if they are not part of it already.	30	16	The number of partners consists of partners in the ongoing projects, our peer organizations and long-term local collaboration. We have not included upcoming collaborations for the rest of the year and beyond.	N/A
Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Diversity of participants brought in by grantees	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Number of people reached through social media publications	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Number of activities developed	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Number of volunteer hours	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

8b. Additional core metrics data.

Core Metrics Summary

Core metrics	Description	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
Number of participants	* webinars or podcasts // We aim for 30 live participants in each webinar, of which 10 are new and 20 are returning. When the webinar is in Finnish, the participants will be from the Finnish GLAM community. When it is international, they are from the broader Open GLAM community, including the GLAM-Wiki community. AvoinGLAM online meetups in Finland // AvoinGLAM local online meetups are arranged weekly. They do not generally have a thematic focus. We expect around 7 people at a time, with most of them being returning participants. We try to minimize effort for this activity, since there is not much turnout in the meetings. AvoinGLAM community case studies // 3–9 GLAMs, 10 participants in each. The topics are easily of interest to several GLAMs. We encourage crossovers but try to keep the projects agile enough Public domain awareness webinar // The webinar will have 50 participants Public domain handout // The handout will be delivered to 1000 people (not included in the total) Data imports // The Saami place names has a working group of 17 people and 10 organizations. There are around 5 people in the HELDIG / SKS collaboration GLAM School // We will make structured interviews with around 15 GLAM practitioners in the Wikimedia movement and beyond. We expect to have 2 interviewees per organization on average. Global Cine Club can have around 350 participants Hack4OpenGLAM (not included in this application or the total) had 180 participants in 2021.	555	170	We have lost documentation, and we need to make better routines for them. I will be calculating with 25 participants in each webinar and presentation event and collect the stats on this page https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14hIK2AFFwye-p7gYf0TLGc32H83gexDOS8xfFJL6Ets/edit#gid=1303495924	Estimate (should be based on online stats, but the numbers are missing)
Number of editors	* AvoinGLAM community case studies // All 30 participants will produce edits. Public domain handout // The handout will be produced in a translatable format and saved in Wikimedia Commons. There will be 30 translators to the handout Data imports // An estimate of 5 of the participants will themselves do uploads to Wikidata. Import of GLAM data to Wikidata // We aim to educate all GLAMs in creating a user account and maintaining their information in Wikidata. There are 328 Museokortti museums in Finland. GLAM School // Participants are not expected to produce edits to Wikimedia projects at this stage. Global Cine Club // The events can be coupled with global or local campaigns or editathons. This way the campaigns will gain global exposure, and there will be editors globally to the local topics. An estimate of 30 editors, as we do not yet have any experience of the success.	295	60	We have not arranged program involving editing. We wish to develop methods to display how our hard work and advocacy makes our partners work independently on Wikimedia projects. However, the survey questions for GLAM School have been translated to roughly 30 languages, with approximately 2 editors per language.	Xtools
Number of organizers	* Webinars or podcasts // We will arrange 2–4 webinars or podcasts around GLAM issues. Each webinar will have 3–5 panelists, and a podcast generally has one interviewee. The events are organized typically by one person. AvoinGLAM online meetups in Finland // Program coordinator + 2 AvoinGLAM community case studies // Coordinator with organizer representatives. Occasionally volunteer members. Public domain awareness webinar // The seminar will be arranged in collaboration with Finna and possibly other parties. Expected to coordinate between 3–5 organizers. Public domain handout // The program coordinator will write the text, and the layout will be done by a designer. The text can be produced in collaboration with 1–3 volunteer experts. Data imports // Of all the participants around 6 can be considered organizers. GLAM School // This is a collaborative effort where many of the interviewees become collaborators in the project. We expect half of the interviewees to see them this way and participate in the preparation of the work. Global Cine Club // The goal is to arrange screenings monthly in different parts of the world. Each event is organized by 1–3 organizers.	40	32	In some cases the number represents individuals whereas in others it is organizing organizations	Self-reporting on https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14hIK2AFFwye-p7gYf0TLGc32H83gexDOS8xfFJL6Ets/edit#gid=1303495924

Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project

Wikimedia Project	Description	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
Wikipedia	* Wikipedia 40 articles created/improved --- AvoinGLAM community case studies // The case studies will aim to educate GLAM professionals in taking advantage of the Wikimedia platforms for their purposes. Each project produces a varying amount of edits: 20 articles edited, 1000 Wikidata items added or enhanced. 1 article in This Month in GLAM Global Cine Club // Approximately 20 articles will be edited in the context of the event. The results will be reported in This Month in GLAM.	40	N/A
Wikidata	* Wikidata 101 328 items created/improved --- AvoinGLAM community case studies // The case studies will aim to educate GLAM professionals in taking advantage of the Wikimedia platforms for their purposes. Each project produces a varying amount of edits: 20 articles edited, 1000 Wikidata items added or enhanced. 1 article in This Month in GLAM Data imports // The Saami place names project produces items for 80 000 places, and the BiographySampo project produces/enhances items for around 6000 historical figures, their professions, organizations they are involved with etc. We are assisting the uploader in the process, and the result depends on their activity. Import of GLAM data to Wikidata // The items of all Finnish GLAMs will be created and/or enhanced	101328	3700	Wikidata: Wikiproject Intangible Heritage has a bit over 3000 edits and additional 500 in the Wikiproject and a bit in the Property namespace.	Xtools
Wikimedia Commons	* Commons 201 media files uploaded & This Month in GLAM 8 events reported --- AvoinGLAM community case studies // The case studies will aim to educate GLAM professionals in taking advantage of the Wikimedia platforms for their purposes. Each project produces a varying amount of edits: 20 articles edited, 1000 Wikidata items added or enhanced, 200 media files uploaded. 1 article in This Month in GLAM Public domain awareness webinar // A feature in This Month in GLAM Public domain handout // 1 file uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. 20 translations by Wikimedia volunteers not directly participating in the project. GLAM School // The results will be reported in This Month in GLAM Global Cine Club // Approximately 20 articles will be edited in the context of the event. The results will be reported in This Month in GLAM.	200	N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

9. Are you having any difficulties collecting data to measure your results?

A bit, yes. We do need to develop the practices and discuss the most suitable methods for our purposes –that do not undermine the impact we are creating when our work is not directly and immediately visible as edits in Wikimedia projects. Also, we need to create better ways of arranging events that make archiving and reporting easier.

10. Are you collaborating and sharing learning with Wikimedia affiliates or community members?

Yes

10a. Please describe how you have already shared them and if you would like to do more sharing, and if so how?

We regularly publicize our activities and learnings in This Month in GLAM and our newsletter in Finnish. There are documentation pages for all projects under our AvoinGLAM page on Meta, or dedicated project sites or pages.

We aim to store recordings of workshops and webinars that we arrange in YouTube, and make available the slides. Some of this documentation is still pending.

Especially Susanna is active on the GLAM-Wiki Global Telegram group.

For Hack4OpenGLAM we tried setting up a community but we soon realized that such a community was not necessary in addition to general Open GLAM and GLAM-Wiki channels.

We see however, that creating a stronger GLAM community within Wikimedia and across organizational boundaries seems overdue. We are perhaps not the most central part of that, but we definitely wish to contribute to it. Susanna will participate in the upcoming European GLAM coordinators' meeting.

Susanna is part of the newly formed Helpdesk Expert group at WMSE, a part of the Content partnership hub. This context is a great place to understand the challenges individuals and communities face with content uploads, and propose ways of sharing learnings and building capacity.

As we work with our project GLAM School, we can also familiarize with similar challenges within the Wikimedia network, but also beyond Wikimedia in other communities related to Wikimedia projects.

The Crisis and GLAM workshop at Wikimania will hopefully trigger further collaboration around the topic. We are currently already co-organizing with WMCL, with presentations from WMB.

11. Documentation of your work process, story, and impact.

• Below there is a section to upload files, videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, e.g. communications materials, blog posts, compelling quotes, social media posts, etc.). This can be anything that would be useful to understand and show your learning and results to date (e.g., training material, dashboards, presentations, communications material, training material, etc).

• Below is an additional field to type in link URLs.

- The AvoinGLAM Meta page links to all output of our program https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/AvoinGLAM

• We have written a short starfish retrospective of the first 6 months https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B7li0c2Uh2ppaXvDLBnMpiqdEI5vm1JldY8ShrN6KSA/edit#
• The AvoinGLAM newsletters provide information for the Finnish readers about activities around Open Access to cultural heritage https://www.avoinglam.fi/uutiskirjearkisto/
• AvoinGLAM has its own section in This Month in GLAM https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/January_2022/Contents/AvoinGLAM_report

Part 3: Financial reporting and compliance

12. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.

15126.17

13. Local currency type

EUR

14. Please report the funds received and spending in the currency of your fund.

• Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.
• Provide links to your financial reporting documents.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rNSselNsUszaw1PFYsJIvTpsYmRlEBLluMnicvlnBhc/edit#gid=947366597

15. Based on your implementation and learning to date, do you have any plans to make changes to the budget spending?

Yes

15a. Please provide an explanation on how you hope to adjust this.

We would like to be able to reallocate funding reserved for the Public domain printed handout, if necessary. The transposition of the DSM legislation is pending in Finland, and the production of such a leaflet could be transferred to next year. On the other hand, we are lacking funds for any upcoming activities, such as participating in the European GLAM coordinators' meeting, commissioning infographics for several outreach purposes or providing catering at the upcoming Wikimania Watch Party.

16. We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being a grantee has been so far.

We are grateful for the opportunity of being funded as a non-affiliate. We are however strongly considering applying for a User Group status. As a non-affiliate, we need to negotiate for every occasion of being included in discussions within the movement (not included in the Wikimedia Summit, or the EU advocacy discussions, but fortunately accepted to participate in the GLAM coordinators' meeting.) This is a long-awaited opportunity to work ambitiously on our GLAM agenda that tries to fulfill the promise of the GLAM backronym we devised: Global Art, Languages and Memory.