Grants talk:PEG/WM US-DC/Outreach 2013/Report

Report Accepted

Thank you for this clear and detailed report. The report and budget variances are accepted. We really appreciate your measurement and evaluation efforts. We hope you continue to use WikiMetrics and surveys to help you measure your impact and prioritize activities. The number of events organized is impressive and the WLM photos are great! Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 18:51, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Can you please explain more about "working toward building institutional knowledge"? What form does this take - on wiki, training? I know you have been working on building event planning guides, can you provide more details on what other types of knowledge you are working to institutionalize? It would be great to see if we can adapt those learnings to a global audience and share them as learning patterns (like your guide to planning an edit-a-thon). Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 18:51, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

At the moment, we're working on sharing our knowledge and experience. This started with the creation of a shared Google Drive folder, "Wikimedia DC Data," containing all the Google Docs created over the past two years. This seems small, but there was a *lot* of information that was split up among different people, including the contact information for dozens of people. I'm currently in the midst of surveying board members and highly active volunteers about their activities and the perceived strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of Wikimedia DC. I am first asking them individually because I am interested in hearing their individual opinions—opinions which may not necessarily be articulated in a group setting. The main deliverable of this process will be a report on what the organizing work of Wikimedia DC entails, including a SWOT analysis. I have also coded every type of project we have carried out, with the goal of developing logic models detailing what is needed to carry out these projects and why we do them. We will also be transitioning to constituent relationship management that will allow us to put all of our contacts in one place. The point of all of this is that all of the stuff we know as individuals should be put in a central location so that when new people join the organization, they can pick up where others left off. This will help us avoid problems like not being able to organize an event because of the departure of a specific individual. harej (talk) 20:53, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the update. It's definitely a good idea to compile and organize institutional knowledge so that it is easily available to all project organizers. It would be great to learn more about the feedback from the SWOT analysis and logic models when they are ready. I'm sure the logic models, while not necessarily 100% applicable in different geographies/communities, will be a useful reference for other program managers. Please let us know if we can support this process in any way. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 21:45, 25 March 2014 (UTC)