Grants talk:PEG/Shared Knowledge/Annual plan 2014-15/Report/Interim

Some questions about your report from WMF

Hello, colleagues at Shared Knowledge! Thank you for submitting this interim report to update us about your progress on you current grant. We enjoyed learning about you work so far, and hope you can answer a few questions about your report.

1. We would like to know more about how the attendance at CEE has benefited your work. Have you done some work to share what you learned there with the broader community (e.g. through a blog post), and would you please share it with us here?
2. Congratulations on exceeding your goal for the number of photos uploaded through Wiki Loves Monument! At the same time, it seems like the number of photos in use is much lower than you expected in proportion to the number actually uploaded (considering that you more than tripled your goal for photos uploaded but didn’t meet your original goal for photos used). Are you considering adjusting your strategies for future photo contests to encourage a higher rate for use of content?
3. We would love to hear a little more about your decision to extend the Holocaust Memorial Project, and how you consider the project successful so far. Have you set any goals for this next phase of the project? Would you tell us more about what you mean by “significant expansion” of the program?
4. We were interested to learn about your challenges with edit-a-thons and your hypothesis that different topics may attract a wider audience to future events. Would you please tell us more about how you plan to pick topics to attract more contributors? Are you planning to target certain audiences? Will you also change your communications strategy? Is this a process that the broader community is involved in at all?
5. We look forward to seeing the results of your education program in the coming months, now that you have laid the groundwork and are building some momentum. Would you tell us more about how you decided to expand the program even though you are still awaiting results in terms of articles created? Is that because there are significant opportunities available to you for expansion right now?
6. Did you decide to cancel or postpone the WikiCrafts project and the editing competitions, which were scheduled to begin in December? We didn’t see anything about those activities mentioned here in this report, although we know you postponed some other activities due to the later start of your grant.

In future reports, we’d encourage you to share some images that tell us about your work. For example, we enjoyed looking at the contest winners here and it would be nice to include some images like this in your future reports. Thanks again, and looking forward to learning more from your responses! Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 00:20, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your questions Winifred. Please find the answers in turn:

1. Our representatives, Violetova and Cibrev, have already submitted reports from their participation at the Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2014 internally. I can tell you that they brought experiences from other countries which could particularly benefit our educational programme, the Wikiexpeditions, the promotion on the social networks and also strengthen the capacities of our organisation. Shared Knowledge will also coordinate Wikimedia CEE Spring 2015 in Macedonia and we also plan to organise the Wikimedia CEE Meeting in 2016. I hope that either Violetova or Cibrev will join the discussion and share more details.
2. The number of photographs used on the Wikimedia projects is rising and we expect to attain the specified goal very quickly. One of the reasons for the current figure being bellow the minimum requirement might be the insufficient involvement from our community and we consider to adjust our strategy in future towards achieving this goal by better promoting the competition and its importance to the community or even organising edit-a-thons aiming at connecting the uploaded images with the correspondent articles.
3. The decision to extend the project with the Holocaust Memorial Center for the Jews of Macedonia was made after we concluded that there is a growing interest for further cooperation among the people employed in this institution. In the next phase, we plan to continue with releasing materials and creating articles as well as releasing some images to illustrate the generated content.
4. We always tend to select interesting topics that may attract wide audience for our edit-a-thons. Sticking to a single topic may significantly increase the amount of content about it but it makes our edit-a-thons less dynamic as we would target the same audience all the time. In the near future, we also plan to target more women, also part of our efforts in reducing the gender gap, and to invite students from our educational programme. The community is aware of the edit-a-thons as we notify our users on the top of the main page on the Macedonian Wikipedia. Most of the participants on the two edit-a-thons we've organised so far are also part of the community.
5. I see that there are clear numerical figures in the table reporting on the project metrics. Since our educational programme is assigned high priority in our annual plan, we're working hard on maintaining the cooperation with the educational institutions we've been working with in the past and seeking for new opportunities in expanding our programme. Awaiting results from activities at one institution before starting cooperation with another one is not the right method and we use all our capacities available to satisfy the needs of more institutions at the same time.
6. The project Wikicrafts and the editing competitions were not cancelled and will take place very soon. We decided to postpone Wikicrafts for the upcoming spring because of the bad weather conditions (source). The first editing competition was deliberately postponed to March in order to better materialise our activities fro the educational programme and increase participation by promoting the contest to the students.

I'm glad to accept your suggestion on using more images to illustrate our future reports. Please feel free to request further clarification if needed. Best regards.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 22:46, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for the timely and clear responses, Kiril. This report is accepted and Janice will be contacting you soon to arrange the next installment of grant funds. We do encourage you to share your learning from CEE publicly if that's possible so that we can better understand how the conference has been valuable to you, and also so that others can learn from your experiences. We see your point about building momentum in the education program right now, and look forward to a more thorough evaluation of its impact at the conclusion of the grant. Thanks again! Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 18:32, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks again for your interim report and responding to our questions. I just wanted to make one more suggestion regarding the editathons. We have seen that one-off editathons don't really produce much in terms of content or support longer-term engagement of editors. We have seen that multiple-session themed editathons do tend to generate more content and sustained editors. These are especially successful when hosted at a GLAM institution that already has a community of people that are interested in a specific topic (women, art, history, science, film, etc.) and resources readily available. You are already doing this in working with the Holocaust Museums, but we would encourage you to think of other institutions you could partner with. Your idea to organize an editathon around photo competitions is also great! I've sent Anna Koval your report so she can follow-up with any questions or support regarding the education program. Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 02:42, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your suggestion Alex. We're going to follow it up with Anna. Best regards.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 10:44, 15 February 2015 (UTC)