Grants talk:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Community Ireland/2018

Questions from SAPG members

Questions from Siarus1074 / Kai

Hey now WCI, I really like the programs and outreach you have done especially the educational partnerships. I understand students learn Gaelic language in school. This could be a great resource to WCI for getting contributions to Vicipeid and to build WCI.

Hi Siarus, thanks so much for your interest in Vicipéid, I'll answer your questions inline.

• How is WCI doing outreach to those areas (high school)?

This is something that we have certainly considered, there are two issues with doing this successfully at the moment. Firstly we have been focusing on training adult trainers as at the moment we have had a lack of trainers who could deliver a workshop through Irish. There is a year that many teenagers take called transition year, which falls between the two major state exams when secondary school students are about age 15-17. We plan on liaising with Irish language advocacy groups and our Irish language speakers to start planning how Vicipéid could be offered as a learning tool for these students. The second issue we have been trying to remedy with this in mind is the lack of certain functionality on Vicipéid. The citation tools are limited, meaning that simple improvements of articles require knowledge of mark up or more complex understanding of correct citation styles. We are working on getting Citiod rolled out on Vicipéid at the moment, which should make the editing experience much better for younger or novice editors.

• Have you worked with professors on incorporating lesson plans into the class or facilitating edit-a-thons for students in Vicipeid?
• At the moment one of our group in DCU is using Vicipéid in the classroom with journalism students. To our knowledge he is also the first lecturer to use the Dashboard (which is now mostly translated into Irish) with such a group in Ireland. Again, issues with the lack of certain tools and functionality on Vicipéid has been a challenge, so that is primarily how we have been supported her in this endeavour.
• What plan do you have for outreach to academic institutions over the next year? Please be specific.

We will continue to work with the group of volunteers in DCU, to use Vicipéid in the classroom, but also to foster use by those who speak Irish outside of their academic work. There are national events that centre around Irish, such as Seachtain na Gaeilge (week of Irish) that provide an avenue to host events for a broader Irish speaking community within colleges. We have also been in contact with an advocacy group, Conradh na Gaeilge (CnaG), which work with Irish language university societies nationwide. This will involve the preparation of a pack for societies (part of the printing budget) with examples of activities or partnerships that they could undertake. CnaG are also going to promote working with WCI and on Vicipéid as a tool for improving and continuing engagement with the Irish language by students and staff in universities.

I agree that since WCI has a paid staff member, the focus should be about building the volunteer engagement. The bar is higher. I really look forward to the educational programs growing. I'd like to know

• What does success look like in the areas of outreach to high school and college level outreach?

Whilst content is always a fantastic result of working with groups of students, there are wider and more important skills that students can learn from the experience. For us as a group, better understanding of Wikipedia/Wikimedia and how it works is a huge element of the learning. Within this there is the empowerment of the students, and becoming aware of the special and privileged position they occupy in being able to access pay-walled and harder to access information. For lecturers and library staff, using Wikipedia as a very real and pragmatic tool to learn about correct citations, assessing information and sources, and plagiarism has been very exciting for them. We have discovered that whilst these things can be discussed and highlighted by university staff, having their mistakes corrected or edits removed due to poor citations etc students learn these lessons in a far more powerful way.

Overall, the work with students has been powerful in expanding, strengthening and deepening the amount of Irish related content on Wikipedia, which is of course available to the world. Due to the nature of Irish history, many Irish topics on Wikipedia have tended to be written from a British or American perspective. Enabling students to address this bias, whilst also teaching them about such biases in knowledge structures has been a topic of discussion in many sessions we have held.

Looking forward to your responses.

I hope I have one some way to addressing your questions! Smirkybec (talk) 12:18, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Siarus1074 (talk) 01:39, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Questions from Alleycat80 / Ido

Hello WCI, thanks for submitting your application - it's well built and easy to understand. I have a few questions regarding the application:

Thanks for the encouragement. I’ll answer each question in-line.

• In 2017, when your first S-APG grant was approved, the committee pointed out that your material weakness is a very small volunteer force:

"There may not be enough volunteers to support WCI’s plan, which is dependent on staff. Some committee members are concerned that WCI does not yet have a strong enough track record in growing or engaging their volunteer community, and funding staff to do this work is a risk. Overstaffing programs that are traditionally volunteer-run, like WLE and WLM, and hiring FTEs to encourage volunteer growth in small communities, may create a bad precedent for other small groups that are eager to grow."

And:

"WCI will need to demonstrate more growth in their volunteer community and achieve sufficient measurable results to justify ongoing staffing costs at this level. This decision to fund staff should be considered an experiment, and not a model that all movement groups should follow"

I remember our discussions, I'm glad to see some emphasis for this on current application, but your 2017 application had the same promise and your midpoint report hints that the number of active volunteers has not significantly increased for this concluding grant period. This does not leave me optimistic about your ability to remedy the situation. How and what are you going to do differently this year? I understand more open events that cater for diverse audiences, but how do you intend to actually support returning users and "convert" them into regular volunteers?

Obviously our midterm report does not paint the full picture. We have seen large growth in our volunteer base in the past year. Out of our contacts in the Irish speaking community we have recruited 4 new Irish speaking volunteers. Our Project Coordinator held a Train the Trainer event for these Irish speakers who have already starting running workshops as Gaelige (in Irish). In addition to the Irish speaking volunteers we have recruited another professor in Maynooth University who is using Wikipedia in the classroom. He has also organised a Conference on Wikipedia in Academia to take place in June, which we are co-sponsoring. In the Irish Royal College of Surgeons we have another volunteer who is looking to get funding from the Health Service Executive (the Irish health service) for a WIkipedian in Residence in their library. So, in the last year with just these 3 projects we have gained 6 very active volunteers who are running events and getting funding with support for WCI.

All of that being said, we know we have further to go. Ideally we would like to have more volunteers in our core group to take on some of the administration duties. Holding open events will allow us to reach those who don’t know about us yet and give them a way to get involved. We also want to continue growing the Irish Speaking community and our contacts within universities and GLAMs. What we have learned in this past year is that we just have to plan the seed and many volunteers will tend them and bring them to harvest. We just need to let them know that we are here to support them. Open events will help with that outreach.

• Staff requirements - moreover, some of the Project Coordinator staff requirements look like things volunteers should do (event facilitation and planning for example). I would be concerned that having someone get paid for things that are usually done by volunteers elsewhere in the Movement, which might in turn lead volunteers to shy away from doing these things like facilitating events, because "the staff would do it", thus reinforcing my former point. What are your thoughts about staff-volunteer relations in that context?

Honestly, if it wasn’t for the work that our Project Coordinator has done in the last year I don’t think we would have grown at all. It is because of her outreach into the Irish speaking community that we recruited 4 new volunteers who are eager and excited to run events. The professor running the conference in Maynooth University got the idea through contact with our Project Coordinator. The Wikimedian in Residence idea came from one of our volunteers contacting a colleague in the college. While some of the Project Coordinator’s duties overlap with those of the volunteers, her main priority is to support and grow the volunteer community in Ireland. But in a community as small as ours, there will always be an overlap.

• low targets - finally, I find your targets around content creation (still) relatively low for the amount of funding. Again, this is recurring from 2017, and just a symptom of having many projects and not focusing on one strategic goal. I would consider reducing scope where there are less changes for more volunteers, and more changes for existing volunteer burnout. I would love to hear your thoughts around this matter.

As our application states our strategic goal is not content creation but growing the Irish community. As we grow the community these new volunteers will be able to facilitate more events to create content. The content numbers we provided reflect a modest increase over previous years with the exception of WLM. Sameichel (talk) 21:57, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

Thank you, Sameichel!

Alleycat80 (talk) 23:56, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Questions from Philip Kopetzky

Thanks for your application! I won't repeat the questions that Ido has asked already, but I do see them as important questions. Here are a few questions regarding some aspects of your application (please feel free to answer every question in-line): Thanks for your questions. I will answer them in-line

• Shared-space office - the idea of having a local space to meet up in is a very good one and given the current setup in Ireland makes a lot of sense. I am curious though as to why you chose a shared-space office for startup companies. Usually the overlap in interests between Wikimedia and startups is minimal and sometimes even quite the opposite - finding office space near or with like-minded communities/organisations would be more likely to create synergies.

Our main reason for choosing Dogpatch (besides the cost) is its proximity to Dublin City centre. It’s very easy to get to with public transportation which will be ideal for holding events and meeting with stakeholders. The space has a fair mix of start-ups and volunteer driven communities. For instance, CoderDojo, which is a volunteer run computer club charity, is located in Dogpatch. It’s also a centre for the tech industry which is a good environment for us to be in.

• New volunteers in Gaelic - you state that you would like to expand your volunteer base in Gaelic Wikipedia from 3 to 8 volunteers this year and have them act as liaisons to the Gaelic community in Ireland. While the former would be a very good step forward considering the current user base of Gaelic, do you think that new volunteers you don't know yet will be willing to take on such an important and time-consuming role that quickly? To me that sounds more like a multi-year project.

One thing we have learned in our interactions with the Irish speaking community is that they are very passionate about what they do. For example, two of the volunteers we recruited this past year funded their own trip to attend the Celtic Knot Conference in Edinburgh. Since the Train the Trainer in October that have been actively organising and running Irish language events and coordinating with the Irish speaking community about tools that Vicipéid need. With a concerted effort in this area by our Project Coordinator and with the assistance of our new volunteers we don’t anticipate any issues with reaching that goal.

@Sameichel: - looking at the stats for Irish language Wikipedia, the number of editors has grown by 25% over the last year. Is there a way of linking your activities to this increase? Philip Kopetzky (talk) 12:08, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

P.S.: These stats may offer a more detailed view of the same number, the increase is mainly due to more editors making 1-4 edits a month. Philip Kopetzky (talk) 12:11, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

@Philip Kopetzky: Hi there, I'm not that familiar using this stats tool, and my first thought is that it would be hard to say definitively where the increase has come from. However, given that activity is generally quite static on Vicipéid historically (as far as I'm aware), it probably is due to our work. I know that the researchers from DCU we are working with have been editing themselves more often in their spare time of late. They have only started teaching with Vicipéid since the new year. Some of the staff in NUIG have taken up editing themselves to get used to the platform in advance of teaching with it after a workshop I did with them in October 2017. Smirkybec (talk) 18:18, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

On further reflection, given that the time period takes in the two workshops we have held on Vicipéid (February and October 2017), there is a strong likelihood of a correlation there. Thanks for pointing out that information to me! Smirkybec (talk) 18:51, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

• WLM 2018 - you mention a decline in number of participants and pictures, which is disheartening after all the work you put in last year. :-( Questions were raised about contracting someone to create lists and information on Wikidata last year - were you successful in finding volunteers to continue the work this year or is there a different solution to this problem?

A large part of engaging the contractor last year was to incorporate the work that had been done from 2014-2016 on the data relating to monuments in Ireland into WIkidata. We had already seen a decline in participation in 2016, and wanted to be confident that if we decided to take a break from running it for a year or two, that the entries would be there in Wikidata and available through Monumental ready to use. This would mean that if a completely new group of volunteers wanted to run WLM in Ireland, they would not have to start from scratch. That said, we have been in contact with a number of Wikimedians on Commons who have expressed interest in helping with a number of elements of WLM this year. This includes running photo walks in some of the smaller towns in Ireland, and working further on the data. Through initial discussions with the local Open Street Map, we are also investigating how some of their contributors might work on adding more listed structures in Ireland, such as old post boxes, street furniture and more niche structures like that.

We plan on running WLM in 2018 with this extended group of volunteers and will re-evaluate afterwards. We accept that we may have reached saturation in Ireland for the moment, and that we may need to shift the focus away from photography towards content on Wikidata, Wikipedia, and Vicipéid for a time. We are certainly open to any suggestions others in the movement we have to best capitalise on the rich data we are developing. Sameichel (talk) 14:01, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for your time and commitment! Best, Philip Kopetzky (talk) 09:40, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

Addressing the recommendations and concerns from the 2017 grant

Dear all, based on an email conversation with Delphine, it has been suggested that it might add some clarity if we were to address the Funding Recommendations and Concerns identified last year. In particular as there are some common themes that we feel have been answered in the meantime.

Funding Recommendations

WCI will need to demonstrate more growth in their volunteer community and achieve sufficient measurable results to justify ongoing staffing costs at this level. This decision to fund staff should be considered an experiment, and not a model that all movement groups should follow.

Growth of the volunteer community has always been an important objective as there is a concern that the core group of volunteers could become burnt out. We expected that the outreach work done by our Project Coordinator would generate volunteer engagement. At the beginning of the grant period we had 12 volunteers, with 6-7 very active (running events and doing the administrative work.) A year later (after further and closer review) we have 20, a growth of 66%. We think this validates our hiring of a Project Coordinator. As our application shows, our focus on growing the volunteer community will increase this year, looking to get towards 25+ volunteers this coming year.

The committee recommends that WCI choose between contract help for WLM and WLE this year, rather than hire two contractors.

We chose the WLM contractor as we felt this was the more important of the two. Though we did see a decrease in the participation in WLM on last year, we were still happy with the work the contractor did. A large part of engaging the contractor last year was to incorporate the work that had been done from 2014-2016 on the data relating to monuments in Ireland into Wikidata. We had already seen a decline in participation in 2016, and wanted to be confident that if we decided to take a break from running it for a year or two, that the entries would be there in Wikidata and available through Monumental ready to use. This would mean that if a completely new group of volunteers ever wanted to run WLM in Ireland, they would not have to start from scratch, aside from the further reaching benefits of this data being available to the wider community.

WCI should run a public and open hiring process for staff and contractors, and carefully address any staff-volunteer transitions if a volunteer is selected to fill a staff position.

We did run a open hiring process for both the Project Coordinator and WLM contractor positions. Our hiring report can be found here.

WCI should take care to ensure that any contractors are able to keep permanent staff and committed volunteers up-to-date with their work and set aside time for documentation, to avoid the loss of knowledge gained if people who are engaged temporarily leave.

The WLM contractor met several times with the Chair and Project Coordinator during the contract. He also published reports at the midway point and the end of the contract. The project coordinator has been in contact with Open Street Map in Ireland about continuing the expansion with Wikidata.

WCI is advised to consider which of its programs will lead to the most impact when planning how to allocate staff, budget, and volunteer resources across different programs. For example, results from WLM may yield less in the long term than investments in the education program, and investments in each program should be continually monitored to ensure they correspond to impact.

Our current grant more focused on outreach within all of the communities with which we have developed a relationship over the past four years.

Concerns

WCI is requesting a large amount of funding relative to the size of their geographic focus, and the size of their volunteer community.

While we cannot change our geography, we have grown our volunteer base by 66% since the last grant.

There may not be enough volunteers to support WCI’s plan, which is dependent on staff. Some committee members are concerned that WCI does not yet have a strong enough track record in growing or engaging their volunteer community, and funding staff to do this work is a risk. Overstaffing programs that are traditionally volunteer-run, like WLE and WLM, and hiring FTEs to encourage volunteer growth in small communities, may create a bad precedent for other small groups that are eager to grow.

We have seen a 66% growth in our volunteer base during the grant period and it is thanks to the outreach conducted by our Project Coordinator. It is because of her outreach into the Irish speaking community that we recruited 4 new volunteers who are eager and excited to run events, and engage in developing Vicipéid. A professor in Maynooth University got the idea to run a conference on Wikipedia in Academia through contact with our Project Coordinator. We also have volunteers doing outreach and running events, within the National University of Ireland Galway, University of Maynooth and University of College Cork. A volunteer contacted a colleague in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland about the editing of Wikipedia by doctors and other health professionals. This has led to a new volunteer asking our assistance to seek funding from the Health Service Executive for the first Wikipedian in Residence in Ireland. WLM is also run by the core group of volunteers. One volunteer in National University of Ireland, Galway has run a photography event, several Introduction to Wikipedia workshops and is currently assisting one professor with using Wikipedia in the classroom. While some of the Project Coordinator’s duties overlap with those of the volunteers, her main priority is to support and grow the volunteer community in Ireland. The Project Coordinator also has continued her own editing and personal volunteer work outside of her paid work.

Staff costs are high, and staff are doing work that volunteers often do. Many hours are budgeted for the work of contractors and staff, which seems inefficient compared with similar activities happening in other parts of the movement, and it is not clear that these staff expenses will lead to results.

During the grant period we have recruited 8 new volunteers, 4 of which are fluent Irish speakers. As stated above, these volunteers are running editing events in Irish and English, organising conferences and seeking funding for a Wikipedian in Residence. Events initiated or fostered by our Project Coordinator include:

• 2 events with the Digital Repository of Ireland on copyright and CC licences
• 1 workshop on copyright and CC licences in the National Library of Ireland
• 2 editing workshops in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin
• A Train the Trainer for the new Irish Speaking volunteers in National University of Ireland Galway
• 2 Art + Feminism events - 1 in University College Cork and 1 in the National Gallery of Ireland

Without the outreach of our Project Coordinator, many if not all of these projects would not have happened. While it would be ideal to have more strictly volunteer-led events, we are a small country, and it is a challenge to find volunteers who can conduct events during working hours.

Number of staff and activities proposed are too high for a first APG, especially for an organization that does not yet have experience managing any paid staff. Some work is being done by contractors that ideally should be done by a long term staff person (due to FTE limits imposed by WMF and WCI’s decision not to integrate them into a single FTE’s job description), and there is a risk that the organization will lose knowledge when these temporary contractors leave the organization.

We again seem to be getting conflicting feedback on this. We’re being told that we are trying to do too much and we’re also being told that we aren’t doing enough. The issue raised with losing the knowledge from the contractor never materialised.

WCI has not proposed an open and public hiring process, and may intend to hire volunteers who are already active within the organization. Closed hiring practices are not recommended as they may prohibit organizations from securing the best candidates for each position and may encourage other bad hiring practices. Bringing on a long time volunteer as staff, even through a public process, may cause difficulties and conflicts within the group.

Again, the hiring process was open and our hiring report can be found here.

WCI has not yet demonstrated sufficient experience measuring and evaluating the results of their work, and only has two past grants for WLM with results that were not exceptional.

We feel that the definition of exceptional is debatable here, the first 2 years of WLM were exceptional for Ireland. Firstly it was a project initiated by a largely new group of Wikimedia volunteers within 4 months of forming a group in 2014, and was the first such Wikimedia event attempted in Ireland. Prior to 2014 there was no easily accessible or usable comprehensive listing of Irish monuments. Not only did our volunteers create such a list, but they negotiated with government heritage departments to post the information on Wikipedia along with location data. This information was previously under state copyright. That list has been expanding over the past 4 years and now is also in Wikidata which represents a huge move forward in the state of Irish heritage data.

Sameichel (talk)
Smirkybec (talk) 11:07, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

Simple Annual Plan Grant Committee Recommendation

Committee recommendations

Funding recommendations: We recommend that this application is fully funded in the amount of 42,321.07 EUR for 12 months.

Strengths identified by the committee: Upon reviewing this grant request, the committee members have agreed that WCI has done a good job of outlining their plans and focus for the year to come and that this application paints a more complete picture than that of last year of what their plans for the future are. The committee recognizes that there was a lot of work done to grow offline activities and partnerships and that efforts to involve volunteers from the Irish Language Wikipedia have been promising. While the numbers of volunteers working on and around WCI activities is still very low, it has grown in comparison to last year. The committee wants to encourage this to continue to show how the WCI model may be a pilot in growing offline activities and volunteer engagement on the ground and in a particular language context through staff support. The committee has also noted with interest the growth in partnerships, such as the work done with the Digital Repository of Ireland in educating the public about free licenses and copyright, as well as the growing relationships with educational institutions, such as the National University of Ireland Galway, or through the Library at Trinity College in Dublin.

Concerns identified by the committee: However, several committee members have pointed out that the results obtained at midpoint are very low considering the amount of funding provided, and hardly deliver on the promise outlined in the previous grant request. Unfortunately, targets set for this coming grant period are also quite low and the committee would like to spend some time between now and the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin to review those targets with WCI and work on additional metrics and targets to better capture the impact of WCI in their context and make sure that these are both realistic and commensurate to funding. For example, since there is a real overlap between language and geography, it would be interesting for WCI to make better use of statistics around visits and editor activity in Irish Language Wikimedia projects to measure the real impact of their offline activities and partnerships, and that there is a specific focus (that is reflected in metrics) on recruiting active community members around Irish language related projects. Committee members also want to find an agreement with WCI about how the results at mid-point and at the end of the grant period (2018) will affect future funding. It is paramount that the use of a staff position to grow a volunteer community shows concrete effects for the committee to agree to fund it past this next grant period.

On behalf of the Simple Annual Plan Grants Committee. Siarus1074 (talk) 15:05, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

WMF decision

Decision from WMF

Funding decision: Thanks to the Simple Annual Plan Grants Committee for these thoughtful recommendations, to WCI for their application and the hard work put into it. This grant is approved in the recommended amount of 42,321.07 EUR for 12 months. WCI operates in an environment that poses a few challenges, well outlined by the committee, and we are looking forward to the work the committee and WCI are planning to do to strengthen the annual plan and targets for this coming grant period. I am especially looking forward to seeing what we can learn from WCI's experience about their work in motivating and growing their volunteer community in a minority language and evaluate what kind of impact their activities will have in the longer run. Go raibh maith agat! Delphine (WMF) (talk) 19:36, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

Extension for midpoint report

An extension until October 29th has been given due to exceptional circumstances. Best, Delphine (WMF) (talk) 21:48, 22 October 2018 (UTC)