Grants talk:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Eesti/2020

Staffing plan questions by WMF

Hello colleagues at WMEE!

Following our conversation per email about the staffing changes you are looking at, I have a few questions I need you to answer to clarify some of the things you are proposing.

FTE equivalents

• You write: "We want to move from 1 full position (0.75 project manager + 0.25 volunteer coordinator) to 2 (0.5 executive director, 0.5 GLAM manager, 0.5 education manager, 0.5 communication/outreach manager).

I understand this as meaning:

• 0.75 FTE Project manager will be changed into a 1 FTE Project manager with ½ their time in Education, ½ in GLAM, with a longer term vision wanting to separate those two functions into 2 FTE when and if this makes sense. The ED position will be 0.5 FTE and there is a new communication/outreach manager position. In our email exchange, it was not clear to me where the responsibilities fulfilled by the volunteer coordinator end up. I seem to understand maybe under both the ED (who you called a Chieof of Operations also) and the communication and outreach manager? It would be great to understand this better. Are you looking at hiring for both the ED and the communication/outreach manager? Are ½ FTEs common in Estonia for a position such as that of the ED? From experience I know that a position like this is often something people want to have full time. How easy do you reckon recruiting for this position will be? Thank you for clarifying all these points! Best, Delphine (WMF) (talk) 15:17, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
  • Hi! We'd be looking to hire for both of those positions, yes. We feel that given our size, 0.5 FTE should be enough for the ED position, but on the other hand we agree it would probably be much easier to hire if we offered 0.75 or even 1 FTE. It just felt like asking for more than 2 FTE at the moment was a big jump that we pretty much assumed wouldn't be acceptable, and we really need outreach / communication work as well.
  • The volunteer coordinator tasks are basically of two kinds. One is volunteer finding / recruiting (which would now fall under the communication/outreach position) and the other is actually managing those volunteers in their tasks corresponding to a specific project (which would now be done by the appropriate project manager, be it GLAM, education, communication, or in some specific projects a board member or even other volunteer). --Reosarevok (talk) 15:40, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

    Reosarevok thank you for these answers.

Budget remarks from WMF

Hello Reosarevok and colleagues at WMEE. We will not be using the 10% contingency any more this year, so I would be grateful if you could delete the contingency line from your budget. You are allowed to add some contingency in various positions of your budget as you may see them making sense. For example, here are a number of places where *some* contingency/miscellaneous/unforeseen expenses may make sense:

• exchange rate risk if applicable
• misc operating expenses
• misc program expenses
• building operational reserves

The total of thes unforeseen expenses should be kept at a minimum level. Don't hesitate to tell me if you need more information. Delphine (WMF) (talk) 12:27, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

• Done Kruusamägi (talk) 13:09, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
  • Kruusamägi Thank you. Can you also update the remarks in the "Transportation" part of the budget, because they don't make sense, they were for last year I think (as far as I know, Bangkok is more than "a few hundred km from Estonia") :), and all meetings in "Other meetings" are already passed. Delphine (WMF) (talk) 14:18, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Yes, sure. Those two comments were there from the last year and I forgot to delete/edit them. Should be ok now.Kruusamägi (talk) 19:00, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Program questions from WMF

1. Education program:
   1. Higher education: while the goal of this part of the program is quite clear and thoughtful, it is not clear what it is that you are doing exactly. Wikipedia-related work does not tell us whether you work with teachers, students, in classroom, outside etc. Can you give a little more info on this?
   2. same applies for elementary and highschools. Examples of activities would help clarify.
2. Program Open culture
   1. You mention a website that "would serve as a user-friendly introduction to what is available". It is not clear to me what kind of website you are looking at and since there is not correlation with anything in the budget about this, I am not sure what this website actually is. Can you please clarify?
3. Program Community and Outreach
   1. Can you point me to a description of what framework you have been putting together for the wikiclubs and how WMEE has been supporting their creation? What was / is your role in this?
   2. What is rephotography?
4. Metrics and targets
   1. Your target this year for Content pages is lower than your achievement in 2018 (18,000, vs 11,500 this year). Is there a reason for this? What is not reproducible in the results from 2018 that you are aiming at about half the number? 2019 has a rather
   2. In the metrics worksheet, you have questions marks, I supposed that these are rather the equivalent of n/a (non applicable/ Non available) rather than "I don't know what this will yield"? If that is the case, please change the question marks into hyphens or 0 for clarity. Thanks :)
   3. Actually, your targets this year are almost exactly the same as last year. Is that after careful consideration and looking at your results at the mid-point, or was that just a copy/paste?

Thank you. Delphine (WMF) (talk) 15:22, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Hi! I'll go point by point:

Education program:

Higher education: while the goal of this part of the program is quite clear and thoughtful, it is not clear what it is that you are doing exactly. Wikipedia-related work does not tell us whether you work with teachers, students, in classroom, outside etc. Can you give a little more info on this?

We work with either lecturers directly or (most commonly) an organisational group inside the university. From there, it goes down through the organisation: new lecturers are usually trained by their colleagues rather than by us directly, with us stepping in if there are questions that need external help. The work the students do as part of the courses is usually to write an article related to the topic of the course, which then the lecturer will review - this means it's important that the lecturers actually understand what a good article looks like. This is also one of the reasons we make videos and other help materials (although Tartu University has also made some videos already)

same applies for elementary and highschools. Examples of activities would help clarify.

For now, pretty much the same as above (for high schools, which is where we've already had collaborations in 2019). Other activities we've considered are things like photowalks (possibly using WikiShootMe or rephotography tool Ajapaik), and things like recording the pronunciation of Estonian words, but we haven't done the first in a while and the second is still just an idea. The lack of freedom of panorama makes photowalks more complicated than they should be, since we'd need to figure out what can and can not be photographed freely.

Program Open culture

You mention a website that "would serve as a user-friendly introduction to what is available". It is not clear to me what kind of website you are looking at and since there is not correlation with anything in the budget about this, I am not sure what this website actually is. Can you please clarify?

This is a site I'm working on myself (and I'm hoping to use as part of my masters' project, if all works out), that's why it's not in the budget as its own item (as far as I know, we couldn't pay me even if we wanted to?). What I have been working on at the moment is mostly a wrapper on top of Wikidata, showing works by an artist and whether they're in the public domain or not. From there the idea is to also show whether they are already in Commons / Wikisource (and other relevant sites like IMSLP for music scores), and if they're not we will have a clearer idea of what is missing from the digitised public domain and we can work on it. Add images and whatnot to it, and it should already be much more user-friendly than the usual options we have, which are just searching a library database or a similar tool and require more knowledge of how to do that :)

Program Community and Outreach

Can you point me to a description of what framework you have been putting together for the wikiclubs and how WMEE has been supporting their creation? What was / is your role in this?

Previously we have had a very top-down approach to community meetings, where we tried to organize a meetup in Tartu and Tallinn (our two biggest cities) every month ourselves, but this didn't really work as well as we hoped, and attendances were very low. What we're looking into right now is promoting the idea of having small "wikiclubs" (mostly but not only in smaller cities and rural areas, which are currently not as well covered as the bigger cities) getting people who are interested in their local history to document it in Wikipedia. We plan to work with local museums and libraries (and try to get help from the National Heritage Board) for organising the clubs and giving them a place to meet, and we hope that the clubs will operate mostly independently (meet on their own schedule, etc.), while we can for example support them with technical help (coming, especially in the beginning, to show people how to use Wikipedia) and with some snacks or whatnot to serve for attendees. Two of these have more or less existed on their own (in Vana-Vigala and in Otepää), but it would be interesting to promote it as an actual framework that can be applied in multiple places. We plan to test this in 2020. For bigger cities, the idea is to concentrate more on interest groups (try to get wiki-photographers together, or people interested on a specific topic) and have a similar project with them, rather than just trying to get people to get together and write.

What is rephotography?

That point has a link, because we assumed it might not be clear - en:Rephotography is a pretty good short explanation :)

Metrics and targets

Your target this year for Content pages is lower than your achievement in 2018 (18,000, vs 11,500 this year). Is there a reason for this? What is not reproducible in the results from 2018 that you are aiming at about half the number?

The targets for content vary a lot depending on existing projects. For example, when importing painting data from museum databases it's easy to create or improve thousands of pages in one import. When uploading images for the same paintings, the numbers will be much lower if only because many of them aren't yet in the public domain and the images can't be uploaded. As such, the amount of effort vs amount of content produced is different from project to project (a project that is more hands-on for example limits the amount of content edited to however much humans can process, which will always be less than machines unless we're coding things wrong!).

Actually, your targets this year are almost exactly the same as last year. Is that after careful consideration and looking at your results at the mid-point, or was that just a copy/paste?

Bit of column a, bit of column b :) We thought of the targets as "how much would we need to be satisfied with the year", not as "what is the absolute best that we could manage" (we usually do that anyway, but especially this year since we're trying to consolidate what we're doing already). As such, they don't need to change much year on year (we did reduce the number of new museums we expect to interact with this year because we interacted with a lot last year, for example, leaving less that we haven't contacted yet and are of interest for our current projects). If you'd rather we changed the metrics to "best we could manage", we can do that: some numbers, like content pages, would likely go up by a fair amount, while others would probably just stay the same.--Reosarevok (talk) 10:08, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

Simple APG Committee recommendation

We recommend that Wikimedia Estonia receive a grant of 54,000 EUR for one year.

We understand that WMEE is looking at streamlining further their management processes, which they have been working on for the past year, but we do not see in WMEE results and impact a compelling case for the increase they are asking for. We think that there are possibilities in streamlining their programs, for example combining some of the outreach work with GLAM work, or reduce some of the Education work. We urge WMEE to review the ratio of their impact vs their budget needs and revamp some of their programs to prioritize differently and maybe think about working on a multi year scheme rather than trying to do all their activities at once.

For the committee, Philip Kopetzky (talk) 12:25, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

The previous message may require a longer description of what specifically are we doing, as this may not be clear. To avoid possible misunderstandings, then we will describe what do we prioritize, why do we do the things we do and why do we ask for more staff.

Over the years we have prioritized dealing with images and work with education. As a result, 2% of Featured Pictures in Wikipedia Commons are now from Estonia (only a very small number of big countries have more) and university students in Estonia have written about 4000 articles to Wikipedia (as far as we know, that’s more or less 10% of the world total). Pretty amazing results considering we’re a country of 1 million people.

We do understand that in absolute terms the numbers we report may not be that fantastic. But here it is also necessary to look at per capita results.

For example, with the 10th HELP (nature) photography collecting campaign (that recently ended) we collected 221 images, and this Monday the winners of the Eesti Loodus photo competition (where 909 images were submitted) will be announced. So in total, we have collected 1130 nature images in 2019 with a budget of 300€. Organizing a photo collecting campaign in any country takes a similar amount of work. For instance, in Germany, there are 83 million people (that is 63 times what we have in Estonia). 1130*63=71190... but let's round that to a smaller number of only 50.000 and let us also assume that life in Germany is a lot more expensive, so let's triple the budget to 1000€. That is something that should be perfectly natural result in Germany taking into account their size. If you think this is a lot, then it is only so because the number of images in Estonia was unnaturally big as the comparison itself is perfectly valid. If that is not a good impact vs budget than we don't know what is.

Or to keep going with that same example, then Wiki Loves Earth in 2018 took place in 32 countries and they got 89.683 images. What was the total budget for all the countries involved? 100x of what we just stated about Estonia? We need to be insanely effective to compete with the big countries. That is why we do the things the way we do them. And even then our absolute numbers would not be that fancy.

We have been shifting our priorities from photos to GLAM work and from education to general Wikimedia promotion. That is a rather natural development of things. And due to the changing situation in the copyright field, we have also been pretty active in advocacy and are known for that in the movement.

Our GLAM work is now 2 years old and we are in the position where our only limitation in bringing in massive image donations is that we don't have the staff to work on that. We virtually have museums waiting in line!

In the field of education we are running a massive nation-wide Wikipedia promotion campaign miljon+ together with the biggest university in Estonia and we have reached the point where writing a Wikipedia article is widely considered a perfectly natural task for university students. Our main difficulty in expanding article writing in universities is that we already cooperate with almost all of the Estonian higher education institutions and that there are hardly any courses left where university students write something that could be easily replaced to writing a wiki article. So naturally, we need to look for other fields to work on.

If you look at the list of our cooperation partners, we'd say it is pretty impressive. For example, at a present moment we are running one article writing competition and in there we have 4 sponsors: the biggest bank in Estonia, the European Commission representation in Estonia, the state-owned energy grid company and the Government Office of the Republic of Estonia. And this is just one article competition. We have many. Not to mention other projects.

So it should be no surprise that Estonia ranks number one on the number of wikipedians per capita and why we are so heavily present in Wikimedia Commons and active in Wikidata. And all this is done with a staff of one FTE.

Ideally, we should be asking for at least three FTE to avoid burning out our people (again), but we do understand that Estonia is a small country and WMF has to support others as well. So we try to be modest and ask only for two FTE for our staff. We have even trimmed down our budget a lot to make this increase as small as possible.

Where else should we make budget cuts? If we make a comparison with Germany, then even plane tickets to the next Wikimania are likely more expensive from Estonia that from Germany (Tallinn airport just isn't among the biggest and best-connected airports in the world). Or if we look at travel costs in Estonia then the territory of Estonia is bigger than Denmark or the Nederlands.

It isn’t also so that we look only at our own gains and don't give back to the wider Wikimedia movement. For instance, in 2019 alone we organized the Wikimedia Northern Europe Meeting 2019 with 32 participants and Wikimedia 2030 Strategy event with 45 participants (mainly from Russia). There's also the international image competition we are organizing for the 3rd time, which has gotten around 2200 participants on both of the two previous times we have held it; this might make it the 3rd biggest photo collecting campaign in the Wikimedia universe.

Maybe we are bit overly ambitious but we feel the need to remind you that even big languages like French and German are feeling that English is pushing them aside. What should the speakers of a small language feel? What if you only have 1 million speakers? How do you keep your language alive for the next century is not an irrelevant question, but a rather pressing one. "Let's do even less" feels like asking for cultural genocide. We are already not doing enough. And supporting smaller languages is always going to be more costly as they have more limited resources and are therefore needing more help just to keep up.

So Philip, are you still absolutely sure that this increase of 10k what we ask is unjustified? Kruusamägi (talk) 23:36, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

@Kruusamägi: I think using phrases like "cultural genocide" is uncalled for - Wikimedia is not the cultural ministry of the world and the existence of Estonian language and culture can not possibly depend on 10.000 Euros more or less. From a personal point of view I can only advise you to keep in mind that the strategy process should make it easier in the future and that the current processes demonstrate our shortcomings when engaging with affiliates about their yearly grants or organisational development. I'm aware that WMEE has improved compared to previous years but that that work is not finished and that WMEE still has issues when it comes to volunteer participation and the impact the money has compared to other comparable affiliates. It is increasingly tough to argue why affiliates in Africa or Asia should receive way less in funds when the work they're doing as volunteers (especially in countries where volunteerism is very rare) is producing more promising results.

During our discussions, I volunteered to have more direct and hopefully face-to-face discussion with WMEE, if you would like to carry on these discussions. This does not relate to the simpleAPG in any form or shape though, because it is still unclear what will happen next year. It would simply be an offer to work with you to imrpove the organisational strategic work and processes :-) Best, Philip Kopetzky (talk) 12:22, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

This specific phrase is there to indicate that the idea of doing less is not really a realistic option to us and never will be. You can just think of it as doing our best to keep our language and culture alive against the overwhelming force of English (where, sadly and ironically, the English Wikipedia is also playing its part on increasing the dominance of the language above most others). It means we have to take this very seriously, as otherwise there is no other way it will work. That’s the reason why there’s many activities we have done before anyone else in the world, and in some fields we are 5...10 years ahead of a lot of the chapters as we are constantly looking on how to play against all odds. By now, in the Estonian society Wikipedia is the mainstream and we can and want to push the limits even further. But this isn't the main topic here. So let us go back to the main story.

The original claim was that WMEE results are mediocre and therefore it is unreasonable to ask for more funding. Our reply is that we feel the truth is nowhere near this and our results are far above average, especially given the constraints we have to deal with. Don’t get me wrong, I'd truly love to hear about examples of communities doing significantly better work in one aspect or another, as that could provide ideas for improvement for us as well... but after that many years of looking for good examples, I've become rather skeptical about their existence, as they are surprisingly rare to find. So please, prove me wrong! But do not underestimate the ingenuity of desperate people.

It could also easily be claimed that in countries where volunteerism is very rare it is actually a lot easier to acquire volunteers and stand out. There just happens to be almost no competition for volunteers. Not so in countries like Estonia, where people interested in volunteering have hundreds of options to choose from and a lot of that is run by big organizations. There are things like volunteer sea rescue, volunteer firefighters, volunteer policemen, possibilities helping to organize festivals and sports events and so-so much more. Estonians even organize international campaigns like Let's Do It! World etc. Now how should a small NGO with a staff of one FTE compete with dozens of well known and highly professionalized options? It is very difficult to partner big organizations with a volunteer-only approach all of the time (since that means a lot of work depends on someone having enough free time and it is a lot harder to keep constant communication going). This is severely inhibiting our growth and influence.

We are not here to demand that others should get less, but to point out that we are doing good work and that the financing system isn't supporting it in a way that is sustainable. I even specifically pointed that out in the previous message. So I'm not sure why the "producing more promising results" bit is relevant. Or do you think we lack the will and knowledge to make good use of WMF funding? Kruusamägi (talk) 22:41, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

----

Hi Philip!

You’re right that Wikimedia is not “the cultural ministry of the world” (and that’s a good thing!), but it does play a very important role in helping keep smaller languages relevant (which, by the way, is why the attitude towards smaller communities we’ve often seen from WMF is quite frustrating). And this is also why we as a chapter are very active about helping out other smaller Finno-Ugric peoples and putting a lot of effort there as we believe in the importance of it.

We’re not sure where the idea that we don’t have volunteers comes from. We don’t have a lot of people willing to come together just to sit and write articles, that’s true, but that’s very far from having no volunteers. That is, after all, how we run a lot of our chapter activities. As Ivo mentioned above, it’s harder to compete for volunteers in Estonia than it is in many other countries. What we are asking for is not a way to replace the volunteers, but a way to better promote our activities to them and recruit them, and then direct them as needed.

As a reminder, what we are asking for is the restoration of previous funding levels, not some huge increase in funding: we were tasked to make budget cuts a few years back while we fixed things, and now we ask to get back a "reasonable" early level (we’d say the original levels, but it’s not even really the same level of funding as it used to be, even if the numbers are similar, since inflation has been fairly high in Estonia for all these years). If the claims are that we haven't improved our work in recent years fast enough, then we can’t fully disagree, we’d like to have done it much better and faster, but a fair amount of that is related to those same budget cuts and the forced restructuring of the chapter required by WMF, adding significant workload while reducing the available resources. We feel we’ve done quite well with the possibilities we had.

That said, as Ivo mentioned, we are absolutely not claiming that we should be getting more than others. In fact, we’d expect bigger Asian and African countries to have chapters with significantly higher funding than us, and if that’s not the case right now, that’s another problematic sign of the Anglocentric approach of WMF leading to too much money going to English-language resources and too little to the Global South (and to other smaller, underserved languages and areas, like with the previous Finno-Ugric example), and we’d happily join you in requesting the higher echelons in WMF to reconsider how much funding they’re providing for grants and specifically to consider providing additional grant funding earmarked specifically for the Global South and/or languages even more underserved than Estonian (or Latvian or Lithuanian) are.

We’re simply pointing out that we feel we’re doing good work and need a small increase in financing to make it sustainable in the long term. In fact, many times when we’ve spoken to people on slightly bigger chapters, they’ve mentioned how our current situation (big enough to need continuous direction, but small enough to have the board risk burnout trying to provide that continuous direction) is pretty much the worst situation to be in and it gets significantly less stressful as soon as you get out of that. We’d really like not to burn out, so if, as you say, 10.000€ is such a small amount of money that nothing too big can depend on that, then we would suggest that it must also be true the other way - and if so, that makes avoiding board / worker burnout seem very cheap, to be honest! So why would you then choose to make us suffer another year of this (or give up on our vision for the sake of our health) instead? Reosarevok (talk) 07:39, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

WMEE SAPG approved in the amount of 54,000 EUR

Wikimedia Estonia (WMEE) is approved in the amount of 54,000 EUR with a grant term starting 1 January 2020 and ending 31 December 2020.

WMEE has an ambitious and important goal: to make Wikimedia projects an entry point where sharing of knowledge happens, for all of Estonia and Estonian language knowledge. This mission is one that is well aligned with larger movement strategy, and is specific enough to help guide thoughtful choices in programming and activity prioritization. We applaud WMEE’s commitment to promoting open and shared culture, and believe your organization is well-positioned to achieve recognition as being an authority in this domain. Past collaborations with UNESCO, Internet Society, Open Knowledge, as well as direct discussions with political representatives show good momentum of WMEE’s status as a key educator and promoter of open culture.

This marks WMEE’s 4th year in the APG program, and we have observed that the organization’s results have been inconsistent in the past few years. We shared some concerns expressed by the committee regarding WMEE’s impact and targets, and appreciate your responses above to these matters. They provide important cases of impact and context for why some targets are shifting from last year. For example, you note that because planned GLAM work will focus more on uploading images instead of importing image data, this places necessary limits on how much content can be improved compared to last year. That said, we would like WMEE to more carefully consider how their activities are designed to achieve their objectives and targets, and how their targets and metrics support their program objectives. This is an important next step in developing capacity for effective evaluation in your organization.

Those concerns aside, in working with a limited budget this year, we are not able fund all requests fully even if you have a sound strategy with impactful projects. It is our responsibility to look across the entire portfolio of proposals and make difficult decisions regarding prioritization. In order to move towards a more equitable and diverse funding model across the movement, we are prioritizing support for emerging communities where annual plan funding will support organizational stability and put them on a path towards more sustainable programs.

We understand that this reduction in funding will affect some of your activities, and that you may not be able to pursue all the opportunities you have proposed. However, you are best placed to propose the most appropriate prioritization of these funds. As you finalize planning given this funding decision, please update your plan, budget, and metrics accordingly.

We appreciate your work across your programmatic areas in community, education, GLAM, and open culture, and look forward to working with you in 2020.

With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 20:48, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Midpoint Report Accepted

Hello Kruusamägi, Reosarevok and Wikimedia Eesti Colleagues, thanks for submitting your midpoint report. We have reviewed the metrics, budget, and report and marked them as accepted. Thank you for your work for the Wikimedia Movement! Best regards, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 11:57, 7 August 2020 (UTC)