Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia Finlands Community Funds application 2022

Feedback

Dear Wikimedia Suomi,

Thanks so much for your application the NWE committee really appreciated the time and effort put into it, we really liked your focus on encouraging women to edit and your focus on the languages of Finland. However, we would like some further information or clarification on the following points:

1) Please could you share how you evaluate the business changes that Wikimedia Suomi proposes to make?

2) Please could you provide some clarification on your internships programme. In the application you describe “non-paid student internships”, but you also set aside a budget for internships and placements. The NWE committee would like to see a strong rationale for the use of exploitative unpaid internships, and clarification on the budget.

3) We would like further clarification on how the goals for the number of new participants will be achieved?

4) Please could you add further detail of evaluation that has taken place on the photowalks initiatives that are mentioned in the application?

5) Please could provide further information on editor retention, especially in regard to those from previously marginalized communities?

With our very best wishes Lajmmoore (talk) 20:56, 20 December 2021 (UTC) on behalf of the NWE Grants Committee

Hi @Lajmmoore:, below are our answers. Thanks. --Zache (talk) 07:49, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

Thanks so much @Zache: - your quick response is really appreciated. Lajmmoore (talk) 17:23, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

1) Please could you share how you evaluate the business changes that Wikimedia Suomi proposes to make?

Meaningful evaluations would be linked to tangible actions and comparing difference to previous year.

An example:

• how many discussed internal upgrades (ie. documentation, contracts, web page updates … ) have been made during 2022
• how many actions are postponed to the next meeting at board meetings compared to 2021
• how many board members are participating in projects counted as the number of board members who made edits related to a specific project to wiki
• how many successful student collaborations we had (webinars, workshops, course works, internships, thesis works …. )
• did we find funding for next project after Helsinki rephotography

--Zache (talk) 07:49, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

2) Please could you provide some clarification on your internships programme...

... In the application you describe “non-paid student internships”, but you also set aside a budget for internships and placements. The NWE committee would like to see a strong rationale for the use of exploitative unpaid internships, and clarification on the budget.

Maybe it helps if we explain how we are doing currently and what our targets are so far. This next is based on the current internships in the Helsinki rephotography project with:

• Henry (currently doing an internship on Flutter) from the University of applied sciences of Hämeenlinna
• Siru (former intern, currently doing her thesis work on Linux administration) from the University of applied sciences of Vaasa

Work placement agreement

Bachelor’s degrees completed at a university of applied sciences in Finland include practical studies that increase professional competence. Which is either employment contract (= paid internship) between workplace and student OR a work placement agreement (= unpaid internship) between the school, workplace, and the student. In the work placement agreement, the student stays organizationally under the school which means that (example guidelines, agreement, reporting):

• the school's insurance policy covers students against accidents that occur during work placements
• trainee student is covered by a schools liability insurance policy that is valid for the work placement period which covers deficiencies in or the lack of the placement company's policy
• trainee student is covered by student health care
• trainee student is entitled to study grants by the Finnish government for their internship time

These are major reasons for WMFI. It is also important that a work placement agreement is a lightweight method for everybody for implementing a geographically distributed work environment where people meet only online. Work placement agreement also allows flexibility on the targets we seek with the internships. For example, in the Flutter project, we are creating a tool for uploading rephotos to Ajapaik and Wikimedia Commons, but at the same time, the person whose coding background is in school courses can take his time to learn coding with Flutter without time or budget pressures.

We do not seek the most efficient result with this but that student (and other participants also) can learn new skills and there is steady progress in our targets. WMFI is also interested in developing methods of transferring knowledge which could be used in in-wiki too. This is something where we can learn from students.

One thing that should be noted is that unpaid internships are not “free”. The work that interns will do requires resources. The internship also aims to support interns professional growth and in becoming experts in their field. This is not automatic and will take time from the person in the supervisor(s) position but it is also rewarding and with more hands, we can do more things than what we could do alone.

About the funding.

General costs per student in our calculations is 1500€. The reward for the thesis work is 1500€ - 3500€. This is a maximum of 5000€ per student.

breakdown:

The internship and thesis work will need basic funding. For example, students may need tools, office supplies, software licenses, hardware, etc. For this, we have reserved 1500€ per student and it is 200-300€ per month as average. This doesn’t mean that all internships or thesis works will need 1500€. Some could require more and some less.

In the third month of the internship, the intern can start to formulate the thesis work topic based on experiences and learnings. When the thesis work topic is formally approved by the school then the person will get 1000€ as a grant for doing the thesis work.

When thesis work is successfully returned to the school they will get a bounty based on the grade of the thesis work. The size of the bounty is 500€ * grade. (500€-2500€ as the grades are between 1-5)

About the exploitativeness.

What we try to give back to the students is:

• possibility to learn skills that are wanted, interesting and useful
• valid work experience
• continuous grant system for Wikimedia and open data related thesis works

With these, they are in a much better position for getting a job after their studies.

Also, the form of the planned internships is not static. We develop the format based on feedback from Siru and Henry. If they think that based on their experiences it would not be financially or in other ways viable for the students then we will address problems in the next internships.

One clear place for development is that we would like that interns would work as pairs (from the same city/school/class) so peer learning would be included. This could also improve the social sides of remote work as they can meet in IRL if they want. With Siru and Henry this was not possible as we were in different cities.

--Zache (talk) 07:49, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

3) We would like further clarification on how the goals for the number of new participants will be achieved?

These are more detailed estimations from our notes.

• Science night: 40
• Womens week + Punaisten linkkien naiset: 75
• Photographic outreach/photowalks: 400
• Wiki Loves Monuments: 75
• Library development group workshops: 30
• Meetings: 5
• Benin Bilateral Companionship: 25
• Public art project: 5

The number of new participants of the Science night event, Women's week, Punaisten linkkien naiset and Library development group workshops are expected to be at the same level as previous years. This is directly estimated from the number of editors on those events.

With Wiki Loves Monuments it is expected that the number of new participants will increase from ~50 to 75. We are thinking that this would happen because we are doing photowalks before the event, and European heritage days will give visibility.

For public art projects and meetings, it was estimated that the participants are mostly existing wikipedists and not new ones.

In photographic outreach, it was counted as so that if we are doing 15 photowalks/outdoor workshops with 15-20 participants there would be 10 new participants for each. This would be 150 new participants. An estimate is based on 5 Helsinki rephoto walks in autumn 2021 where our limit for participants was 15 and a little bit over half were new.

“Educational” target was that participants will install the app and take re-photos from targets which are defined by us. This is comparable to installing an app, registering a Wikimedia account, and uploading photos to commons directly from mobile phones.

250 new participants would be from photography-related online events like workshops and from crowdsourcing tasks such as photograph specific things or finding photos for articles or geotagging of the photos or organizing photos in commons.

--Zache (talk) 07:49, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

4) Please could you add further detail of evaluation that has taken place on the photowalks initiatives that are mentioned in the application?

Helsinki rephoto has yearly reported for the city of Helsinki on what we have achieved in the previous year, how we have reached our target groups, and what are our plans for the next year. The city of Helsinki also requires a financial audit report as part of the reporting. In previous years we also had requests to give status information for the cultural board of Helsinki.

The city of Helsinki has been interested specifically in the reaching of the target groups but also in how much we have increased the casual movement of the people and how it is measured. Other measured things are how well we have been able to find new collaborations (like with schools and students or local history groups) and if our methods have been utilized outside of Helsinki and if there have been presentations on our methods.

About photowalks we have tracked how well we are reaching the participants and how we reached them. We are asking for the names and contact information of the participants as we do need to know who they are because of COVID-19 tracking. We also follow on a general level on how many of the participants are using iPhones and Android phones. We also roughly follow if the users will publish the rephotos as it is not mandatory in our events.

--Zache (talk) 07:49, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

5) Please could provide further information on editor retention, especially in regard to those from previously marginalized communities?

Finnish Wikipedia’s long-time issue has been an erosion of the editor base. There was a clear decline between 2009 - 2016 and after 2016 it has been stabilized to a permanently lower level.

As a result, the community not only needs new good writers, but it will need new byrocrats, new arbcom members, new administrators, new checkusers, new coders, new template editors, new botusers … as when experienced ones leave there are not so many new ones to fill the gap.

We think that editors, in general, don't expect that everything is welcoming, ready, or working, but it is frustrating if they feel that there is no progress for better. It is also frustrating for them if they feel that they don't have the power to affect the environment. This will give a feeling that editing wikis is waste of time and they will leave. (this is especially true with editors from previously marginalized communities)

Mainly change what is needed to change the atmosphere so that it would be more supportive. WMFI can support the development by getting background information, facilitating the discussions, and helping when the proposals are prepared. Same kind of support we are doing with tools/templates/modules. Another method that WMFI does is to give help via email. Email is a more familiar contact method to seniors than in-wiki talk pages.

Another method is to support community projects so Wikimedia volunteers can achieve things that they cannot do by themselves. For example, we have been sharing access to our development server with GPU to students who have been doing machine learning courses. WMFI also acquired drones based on community requests which can be borrowed for aerial photography. So this is a kind of hacklab style environment where participants can access hardware even if they don’t have financial resources for it.

Another thing is that we try to model WMFI competitions should be open for participating with smaller languages too and in the example our women's months program is defined so that you can participate by writing biographies on any other gender than males. We are also following the exciting women of history Facebook group (which was our women's day partner in 2020) for finding topics for new articles.

--Zache (talk) 07:49, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

Final recommendation

Thank you for your application and for replying to the questions posted by the NWE Committee, they were very helpful in enabling us to come to our decision.

Congratulations - your application for 119000 EUR from 1 January 2022 to 31 December 2022 is successful. However, this funding comes with the proviso that part of 2022 is used to develop a new strategic plan, bearing in mind the emergence of the new AvoinGLAM organization.

The NWE Committee did have great reservations about the proposed spin-off of AvoinGLAM. Taking into account this spin-off, the budget of Wikimedia Finland increases twofold, while the impact does not necessarily follow. We think, judging from the submitted application, the affiliate needs to use some of this year to implement a strategic review, both to evaluate projects and organisational practices (e.g. explore options of fundraising). We will be looking for the results of that, in any future applications.

Nevertheless, we appreciate the recognition of the needs of different language communities that you show. It appears from your application that the organisation runs a number of initiatives, some of which are more successful than others and we wish you good luck in the development of your programming. Your focus on improving the organisational structure to be a better employer is an important step forward. Lajmmoore (talk) 14:58, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you very much! Zache (talk) 18:50, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you from me too! -Yupik (talk) 20:02, 12 January 2022 (UTC)