Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2016-2017 round 1/Wikimedia Sverige/Proposal form

Thank you for your application

Hello, WMSE team! Thank you for submitting your complete application on time. We look forward to reviewing it in the coming weeks, and will contact you if we have questions or need more information. We saw how you completed the tables for the two year format, and we think that makes sense. The proposal form is not designed for a two year application, so I think that interpreting this form for two years will be a learning experience for all of us ;)

If any questions or concerns arise on your end, please do let us know so we can help. Best, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 11:16, 2 October 2016 (UTC)

Important notice: Two year funding

Wikimedia Sverige is applying for a two year funding period, within the frame of the Multi-year funding pilot. Do not hesitate to ask any question you might have about this pilot here or at fdcsupportwikimedia.org. Delphine (WMF) (talk) 11:11, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Independent funding

Thank you WMSE for your independence. You are among a few affiliates who rely for less than fifty percent of total spending on funding by WMF. You are not only an independent affiliate, but a financially independent one as well. I appreciate that. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 07:07, 12 October 2016 (UTC)

Questions from FDC

From Liam

• In the FDC recommendations from last year, we specifically praised the way your measures of success were created. In particular we said: "...we were impressed with the incorporation of an externally-controlled measurement of trust as a goal for the organisation, as this helps to increase the chapter’s level of accountability and public confidence." That was in reference to this section of your plan: "We will measure the trust through a survey called Förtoendebarometern (en. Trust Barometer) that has been carried out for 19 years and where Wikipedia has been included in the data since 5 years."
  

Now, however, in this two-year plan, where you have the ability to incorporate 'grantee defined' metrics for the first time (since the big review of the 'Global metrics') you have instead chosen a quantitative, internally-controlled, "proxy" measure that feels both simplistic and very loosely defined: The number of posts on your blog/newsletter as a "proxy for visibility". A blogpost can mean very different lengths and levels of quality to different people - and just because it is published does not measure how many people read or engaged in a meaningful way with the content. I have a hard time believing that this should be the core measure of success for any Wikimedia organisation, or even a communications department within one. For example, the FDC specifically critiqued the WMF's digital engagement goals for its communications department as being too quantitative.

Do you have a thorough documentation/plan/analysis for why you believe "number of blog posts and newsletters" really is the best "proxy for visibility"? And also, why "visibility" itself [of the Chapter, rather than wikimedia/Swedish wikipedia, I assume?] is one of your key measures? Wittylama (talk) 14:37, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

Hi Liam, thanks for your question. Unfortunately, Förtroendebarometern no longer includes Wikipedia in their annual reports, so we cannot use it.. (With that said, we hope to be able to influence them to bring Wikipedia back in their report coming years.) Also, even when we were included in Förtroendebarometern, there was a rather weak connection between our work and the trust outcome in Förtroendebarometern. There are many things, besides our work, that can impact the overall trust in Wikipedia. In order to develop the grantee defined metrics, and improve our proxy, we have two projects running alongside each other to develop better methods to measure visibility and trust: Visibility Making 2017 and Trust Making 2017. Through these two projects, we will, as we write in our application, "… clarify what our detailed communication goals are, followed by creating a developed communications strategy". Thus, in 2018 we will have developed more qualitative and quantitative ways to measure our communication impact and trust. In 2017 we will work extensively with our external communication. Good external communication is the key to gain both visibility and to grow long term trust, as visibility and trust are closely connected. At the moment, there really is no satisfying way to measure either, but we believe that it can be done and our aim is to find a way. In doing so, we also believe we will be able to more clearly define the impact that our work have on visibility and trust for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. To develop better methods, we need to have something to work with, a base to measure impact against, etc. Therefore we will increase our external communication (media work, social media, newsletters, blog, etc) which will give us enough statistics to identify trends and impact. The ultimate goal is not to just increase our activity on the blog randomly, etc. The ultimate goal is to find ways to measure and connect our efforts to the overall impact that our communication has. Anna Troberg (WMSE) (talk) 14:27, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for the rapid and detailed reply Anna. Is it fair to summarise your reply that Blogposts is being used as the 'visibility' metric until the results of the 'visibility making' project are ready to replace it?

As a further question about measurements: in the Use program area, you explain 4 SMART goals. The first two are both listed as "will be developed" and the third one implies that you targeting the reduction in the total number of bugs across all of mediawiki ["To decrease the number of bugs in the software...Software which is considered is MediaWiki extensions in use on the Wikimedia project"]. Is that correct? Even if you do consider ALL bugs in mediawiki to be a relevant metric, do you have the capacity in WM-Se to positively affect that number? You said, with regards to the Förtroendebarometern that there is a "weak connection between our work and the...outcome" - surely the same would apply in the case of mediawiki bugs?

For those two "to be developed" metrics - is that referring to the "visibility making" and "trust making" projects? Wittylama (talk) 23:00, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Hi Liam,

Yes, you could say that. We want to use blogposts and other external communications to gather enough feedback to develop proper methods to measure the impact of our visibility work. Our hope is to be able to report all the bugs that we encounter and to follow up what happens afterwards. Does the reported bugs get fixed? Great! If not, why and what can we do to make it better? This will of course not solve all bug problems, but at least some. I'm not suggesting that WMSE will singlehandedly reduce bugs with say 25%, but there is still a fairly strong connection between "bug getting reported" and "bug eventually getting fixed" that is not so muddled up by a number of different unknowns. The overall trust people feel for Wikipedia, however, is affected by a huge number of things that are completely out of our hands. For example: If the king, or someone else people look up to, says he uses Wikipedia a lot, people will trust it more. If the king says he doesn't trust it, then many will feel their trust waning. Small things like this can result in a great shift, at least temporarily, that we can not hope to counter effect in any big and equally fast way. So, we feel the connection between our work and the outcome is weaker. And yes, it refers to "visibility making" and "trust making". Anna Troberg (WMSE) (talk) 12:38, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

• Quick question regarding the relative change of two project areas over the two years of the proposed grant. Comparing the 2016 and 2017 planned expenses in Table 7 it says the "access" budget will decrease by 16%, while the "use" budget will increase by 74%. Can you explain why this is? I expect it is related to the timings of the different grant-funded projects, but I just wanted to check. Wittylama (talk) 23:22, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Yes, you are absolutely right. The difference is due to the timing of different grant funded projects.Anna Troberg (WMSE) (talk) 12:38, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Questions from RightCowLeftCoast

Why this amount? What is the minimum amount that the grant submitter believes is needed to accomplish these goals? Can the grant submitter accomplish the goals stated in your proposal, without funding? If the grant submitter can't, why not? If the grant submitters grant request is not approved, what alternative sources of funding are you seeking? If only one grant is approved during this round of grant approvals, why should this grant be approved rather than all the other grant proposals--RightCowLeftCoast (talk) 17:11, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

Hi, RightCowLeftCoast. We have developed a plan building on previous years work and experiences. To reach the goals, we need a secure economic base to build out from. The grant from FDC provides a very good such base. This base is important in many ways. Without it, we could not do some projects that are good for our Wikimedia community, but that is hard to find external money for. We would also not be able to search and apply for other external grants without it, which would be devastating, since slightly more than 60% of our funds come not from the FDC, but from other external sources. So, without base founding from FDC we would have to give up most of the projects we work with. Lastly, I feel very strongly that we are a community. We work together and help each other. Neither WMSE, nor any of the other local chapters are competing for the FDC money. It's not a competition. We are all on the same team. Anna Troberg (WMSE) (talk) 12:52, 2 November 2016 (UTC)