Grants talk:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Korea/2021

APG approved in the amount of 57,768 USD

Congratulations! Your grant is approved in the amount of $57,768, with a grant term starting 1 January 2021 and ending 31 December 2021. This will be the fourth year that Wikimedia Korea has been in the Simple APG program.

In 2020, while many of Wikimedia Korea’s events were postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the chapter was also successful in several respects. They completed their General Meeting in February to reflect on their past work as well as conduct organizational long-term planning. Wikimedia Korea also organized several edit-a-thons to support a broad range of Wikimedia projects including Wikiquote, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata, and focused on culturally salient topics areas such as infectious diseases and the works of film director Bong Joon-ho. We appreciate that the chapter has made efforts to transition many of its edit-a-thons and community discussions to an online format, and are grateful to hear that these events have been surprisingly successful. We also want to congratulate the chapter and volunteers for achieving the 500,000th article on Korean Wikipedia!

In 2021, Wikimedia Korea will be maintaining its program structure from its last grant, and will focus on supporting the practical needs of volunteer editors, establishing partnerships with professional organizations and schools to improve academic content, and support maintenance and development of sister projects. The chapter is also leveraging past and consistent success for its program activities in 2021.The affiliate is continuously identifying ways to innovate in order to invite newcomers and retain their engagement. In particular, the mentor support system seems to have been instrumental in this success. Regarding programmatic work to develop gadgets, we would like to see better metrics and goals to capture the intended impact and purpose of these gadgets. While completion of gadgets is fundamentally important, it does not suggest anything specific about how volunteers use them or what benefits they are likely to provide.

In the coming year, the chapter plans to run its annual WikiConference, WikiCon Seoul. While this has been supported through the organization’s Simple Annual Plan Grant in past years, we request that the chapter seek funding for this need through the Conference & Event Grants program next year, with applications due on 8 February 2021. Affiliates receiving Simple APG funding are eligible and have received these grants to support movement conferences at different scales. Importantly, more financial and logistical support can be provided through the grant program than through Simple APG for these needs. Furthermore, we may not be able to grow this annual event sustainably in the Simple APG program. We have reached out to the program officers for Conference & Event Grants, who will be happy to discuss your request or answer any questions you have (conferencegrantswikimedia.org).

Regarding the proposed budget, Wikimedia Korea is requesting a substantially larger budget -- about a 100% increase -- from the previous year. This is mainly due to increases in staffing salaries as well as the addition of the gadget development work in your programs. The Simple APG program will not be able to support budget increases of this magnitude in general, and so this degree of growth will need to be scaled back. We recommend the following changes, but leave final discretion in allocating these funds to you:

• Removing the budget for WikiCon Seoul and requesting funding for the Conference & Event Grants program-- funding for compensation, volunteer support, and general event planning needs can be requested through this program.
• Reducing the budget for the Supporting development of gadgets & improvement of the user interface
• Reducing the requested salary increases with the Executive Officer and Project Manager positions. An substantial increase for the Project Manager from the previous year is justified based on new programmatic needs, but it may not be possible to support this role at 1.0 FTE this year.

We appreciate your work in the last year, and look forward to supporting Wikimedia Korea and its endeavors in 2021.

Best regards, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 19:23, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Request for extention of the deadline for final report

We want to delay the deadline for our final report, because we don't have enough time to finish it in January. We want to postpone it until the end of February. Motoko (WMKR) (talk) 05:16, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Hello @Motoko (WMKR)Thank you for reaching out. We are happy to support the extension. The new grant end date is 31 Jan 2022 and the final report is due 28 Feb 2022. JChen (WMF) (talk) 02:51, 27 January 2022 (UTC)