Grants:PEG/WM CZ/Mediagrant/Report/2012/02

This is the 3rd report on Mediagrant, which aims to summarize our progress as of February 2012. Sice the last report, it has been a calm time for the mediagrant's "eye"; not many new topics were established. One member of the eye (Che) has transferred from our eye to the Presentation & Outreach eye - in an effort to consolidate the state of things in P&O. This means that current members of our eye are Chmee2, Packa and Vojtech.dostal.

We made some effort to raise wikipedistic and public awareness about the Mediagrant, improving our mainpage on Wikipedia and "advertising" on a few occasions (various Facebook pages). We are also trying to encourage several wikipedians to apply for grant, however without significant results yet.

Overview of MG media collection topics

**Current long-term topics** (as of 22 February 2012)
Name	Description	Journeys ("tickets")	Objects	Photographs	Expenditures CZK	Paid out CZK
Foto českých obcí	Documentation of Czech Municipalities including the smallest ones	34	336	2895	7 880 ($420)	5 956
Lidová architektura	Vernacular architecture	1	1	31	728 ($40)	0
Lidové kroje a zvyky	Czech Vernacular Clothes and Customs	2	2	301	2 100 ($120)	2 000
Obrazová dokumentace chráněných území a památných stromů v ČR	Documentation of protected Natural Areas and Memorable Trees in the Czech Republic	17	71	1260	2 787 ($150)	2 713
Odborná fotografie	Scientific Photography	1	0	0	120 ($10)	0
Události	Documentation of important events in the Czech Republic	2	2	93	132 ($10)	97
Vodstvo	Water bodies of the Czech Republic	0	0	0	0	0
Židovské památky	Documentation of Jewish monuments in the Czech Republic	5	44	392	1 150 ($70)	1 150
Summary		62	456	4972	14 897 ($780)	11 916

**Latest one-time requests** (4 November 2011 – 22 February 2012)
Name	Description	Photographs	Expenditures CZK	Paid out CZK
Komponenty k fotoaparátu	Camera components (flash and tripod)	N/A	7 501 ($400)	7 501
Ostrava-Poruba	One-day event documenting architecture in Ostrava	295	665 ($40)	665
Fotoaparát 2 příslušenství	Better equipment for our camera	N/A	2 036 ($110)	2 036
Akumulátor NiMH AA (R6) Sanyo eneloop glitter 1.2V 2000mAh (8ks)	New batteries for our camera	N/A	674 ($40)	674
Summary		295	10 876 ($570)	10 876

Remarks

There will always be some difference between “Expenditures” and “Paid out” because there is always a time delay between recording expenditures into tracker and supporting them by documents and approving them. The second reason for this is that a few expenditures were decided not be approved in full extent.
The amounts in USD was rounded.

We have analyzed the current long-term topic’s difference (2 893 CZK) and we have found that the difference is composed of:

1 616 CZK (7 journeys) – old journeys from Documentation of Czech Municipalities topic; these expenditures have been paid out but they have just not been correctly filed in the tracker
1 032 CZK (4 journeys) – required documents (tickets) have not been added yet
245 CZK (2 journeys) – these tickets have been approved but have not been paid out yet: we will ask our treasurer if there is some problem with them (for instance, the participants have not added their account numbers)

Also, the pay-out process has somewhat accelerated after our board chairman has handed over the treasurer post (due to his lack of free time).

Summary

Total amount of all Mediagrant expenditures: 81 113,85 CZK (approx. 4270 USD)

one-time requests: 66 216,25 CZK (3490 USD)
long-term topics: 14 897,60 CZK (780 USD)

Evaluation

PR efforts

The Czech Wiki-community is fairly small and it proves very difficult to engage new participants. Indeed, most of the active participants in Mediagrant are active members of our chapter. It is hard to attract new people from the Czech Wikipedia (or even from outside the Wiki world) to join and ask for funds. The attractivity of "taking pictures and getting refunds" program is low for many people: for example, each of 30 students of an ambassador project visited a protected area and took pictures of it; however, none of them filed a receipt in the grant we offered to them. It just seems that some people will never be willing to take part in the Mediagrant.

Still, we want to do everything possible to attract new long-term participants and make the Mediagrant more popular. At the moment, we want to "export" the Mediagrant from Prague (where it is fairly well-known thanks to our regular wiki-meetings) to other parts of the Czech Republic (e.g. by speaking about it at Brno's first wiki-meeting in a long time, on 25 March). We are also planning to post an article (on Mediagrant) to a non-wiki webpage targeting on photographing. However, this will be done in next quartal period. Also, the overall PR strategy of our chapter is going to change in many ways after the new Wikimedia CZ homepage is established, enabling easier outreach to both wikipedians and people outside the wiki-world.

Decision-making

We have made our decision-making process more effective. One of the eye's members is in charge of checking new requests and controlling that the decision-making has not stuck. We are able to make quicker decisions now and the smoothness of the process mainly depends on how quickly the applicants answer our questions.