Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2013-2014 round1/Wikimedia Deutschland e.V./Impact report form

Report received

Thank you, colleagues, for submitting this report! We're looking forward to delving in and learning more about the impact of your work this past year. KLove (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Feedback from FDC staff

The FDC staff (Katy and Winifred) shared their thoughts and feedback and asked questions about both the 2013-14 Impact Report and the 2014-15 Progress Report over a Skype call / Hangout held with each organization. What follows is the summary of the conversation covering these two reports. KLove (WMF) (talk) 15:02, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Appreciation

• Thank you for the high quality and informative progress report, which is a significant improvement from previous reports. WMDE has done a good job of balancing providing relevant details while at the same time creating a readable and engaging report. We also appreciate the evidence of deep learning in this report, including adaptations to programs based on learning and quality learning patterns. It helped to see clearer finances, including accounting for APG funds.
• Thanks to improved metrics, we can now see that the results of your programs are indeed impressive. For example, numbers of articles, media added to Commons.
• We appreciate your framework for evaluating policy advocacy work. We liked the detailed table and the infographic you included, as well as the case study you featured on EU-level advocacy work. We recognize that WMDE is a leader in this area.
• Some other notable programs were Coding Da Vinci, which is getting good engagement from new institutions, and connecting communities with institutions to get successful results, and Wiki Loves Earth, which seemed to attract new participants.
• We appreciate your work to grow Wikidata. Thank you for explaining more about the blessing (and challenge) of Freebase donation.

Concerns

• While we appreciate your improved metrics and your revised approach to volunteer support, the cost of supporting volunteers remains high, including costs for staff and volunteer travel, although some of these costs are difficult to understand at the level presented.
• We are concerned to see little reference to your previous work on diversity, and gender in particular. We appreciate some of the background you offered about this in our call together, including discussion of diversity as a way to attract new editors and fill knowledge gaps on the projects, and discussion of successful volunteer-led projects like womenedit. We are still concerned that you don’t have a lot to report in terms of outcomes this year, but hope that we’ll see this in your goals for 2016.

Other discussion

• We discussed WMDE’s APG proposal to the FDC in Round 1. We have long been discussing the possibility of WMDE applying for a restricted grant from the FDC. It appears that this would be the best way to meet all stakeholders needs and align funding to interest.