Grants talk:PEG/WM US-DC/Summer of Monuments 2014/Report

Thank you for this detailed and thoughtful report. It sounds like this pilot project was a success overall! Congratulations on hitting most of your metrics for success in the majority of the target states. The photos are high quality and cover a significant content gap. We have a number of comments/questions and look forward to your responses:

1. We're curious to know your evaluation of the in-person meetings with cultural institutions. It took significant time, effort, and some amount of expenses to conduct those trips/meetings and it would be great to have more insight from you about if that type of work is of high value, without having the ability to do in-person follow-up. It sounds like one real benefit was gaining knowledge about local historical narratives and sites that are not included on the National Register of Historic Places.
2. It sounds like in terms of institutional partnerships and larger content donations, North Carolina is the most promising. Who is currently holding that relationship for follow-up and do you have a sense of the timeline for moving forward on the project?
3. We realize the focus on the project was on image donation/uploading and content coverage. However, it's really impressive to see that 33.18% of the photos in the category Images from Wikipedia Summer of Monuments have been used in articles (3,606 distinct images and 5,384 image uses out of a total 10,867 images)! This is a very high percentage compared to other photo competitions. Did the organizers do any specific activities around integrating photos into articles? If not, do you have a sense of why this is so high?
4. Does WMUS-DC have any learnings around hiring a full-time contractor for project work that would be useful for other affiliates considering this model?
5. What is next for Summer of Monuments? Is this a model you'd like to replicate in other geographies or in the same geography, but focused on other states? It would be great to have another blog post about the project as other affiliates would most likely be interested in adapting this model to their countries.
6. Thanks for the two helpful Learning Patterns.
7. You may hold on to the remaining funds while your next grant request is under review.

Thanks again, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 02:18, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

Alex,

1. The value of the in-person meetings is to stimulate interest in a partnership with Wikipedia; some potential partners benefit more from an in-person meeting than from a purely online engagement. Leo's meetings in North Carolina and Kentucky resulted in progress on mass-uploads from institutions in those states, held back by either legal or technical challenges. This is how we concluded that longer-term engagement will lead to more effective programs.
2. We are very encouraged by the development of the new user group in the North Carolina Research Triangle and we hope to engage them on this project. Right now we are focused on our long-term strategic planning and on setting up the national partnerships program that will provide "upstream" infrastructure that will support our local and regional programs.
3. I credit WikiProject National Register of Historic Places, which monitors activity around NRHP stuff quite actively. This is the value of having a strong online community to supplement offline efforts.
4. First: make sure the work is scoped very specifically. I think it was ultimately counterproductive to have our project manager be responsible for both online and offline work. Second: figure out whether you benefit more from having a lot of work done very quickly, or less work done over a longer term. The former is suitable for campaign work, while the latter is suitable for what is essentially sales. We modeled the program as a campaign, but it probably would've been more suitable for the latter. But the fundamental orientation of the program affects your project staffing needs. Also, when hiring staff in a volunteer-based organization, there should be one person who is committed to overseeing the staffer; that person was me, and I made sure to have regular meetings where I could.
5. In short: we don't know what's next. Wikimedia DC will not be directly running any photography contests for the foreseeable future due to a lack of volunteer interest. Regarding the outreach half, we are focused on building a national network of volunteers that will help us carry out this kind of work. This includes really mundane stuff like database building, but for a national effort, we need to know who our activists and our stakeholders are in different parts of the country. Additional program work depends on this kind of infrastructure.
6. You're welcome!
7. Noted.

harej (talk) 00:19, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

"lawyers vetoed a large contribution long after it had been promised"

Hi User:Harej! This is a great read. Thanks for your work on this report and presenting your learnings. I wanted to know a bit more about what happened with the lawyers. For partnerships, there are often legal barriers, and I am curious what happened in this case, and if its different from other legal barriers you might have encountered before. Thanks! --EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 22:26, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Unspent Funds

The remaining $3,650.33 from this grant should be applied to the Wikipedia for Health and Safety Research and Data project, which was approved at $3,392. Please follow the instructions here to return the remaining $258.33 to the WMF.--KHarold (WMF) (talk) 21:06, 6 October 2015 (UTC)