Grants talk:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Suomi/2017

Eligibility

Hello, Wikimedia Suomi colleagues:

We've determined that you are eligible to apply for a Simple Process Annual Plan Grant based on your eligibility evaluation for your most recent grant application that reviews your past work, as well as the midpoint report for your current grant. We understand that you will be requesting a staff person for this current grant, and that you are requesting an 8-month application term in order to align future grant requests with your fiscal year.

Some of this year's achievements at the midpoint include,

1. Holding your long term strategy meeting, to develop your organization's long term strategic planning, electing strong board with expertise in university-level education, primary-level education, GLAM - museums, GLAM - libraries, working to stabilize finances by moving their grant period form May - April to January - December, starting in 2018.
2. Expanding your GLAM work to more institutions, even extending your reach beyond Helsinki. WMFI is seeing some GLAM partners organize events independently, indicating the possibility of a sustainable future for GLAM in Finland with organizations willing to buy in and adopt long term Wikimedia practices. This also lays good groundwork for future collaboration for the WLM contest this spring. Plus, the successful launch of your campaign to document public art in Finland!
3. Planning for the consultation on the education program (with support form WMF), getting ready to launch at two locations this Spring. This will be the first education program to launch in Finland.
4. The energy and initiative coming from the FI Wikipedia community. WMFI has strong connections with the FI Wikipedia community, and FI Wikipedia reached 400000 articles in August of 2016.

Congratulations on these achievements and best of luck with this application for the remainder of 2017.

Cheers, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 18:08, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

WLM and WLE

Hi, guys! Are you sure that you want to organise two large contests in practically same time despite having no prior experience? From my point of view and experience of some other chapters, it could be useful to perform some rotation - WLE one year and WLM next year. Do you plan to organise some website for the contest, use promotional posts in social media? One of the main benefits of such contests is great outreach to the users never involved in Wikimedia before: social media could be useful here rubin16 (talk) 19:43, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Yes, Wikimedia Suomi board decided last Monday not to participate WLE this year. We don't have human resources for this, but instead concentrate into WLM, where the plans are more prepared by now. I take the idea of rotating the competitions to the board. We are planning a website for WLM outreach and thanks for the idea of outreach in social media. I take it to the working group.--Heikkikastemaa (talk) 04:31, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Hey Heikki, I'm glad to hear you are more focused about your work plan - I wholeheartedly support this decision. I would suggest even just strike the part that you're not doing anymore from the original proposal so that future people reading it (including yourselves!) will remember that you didn't actually apply both for WLM and WLE. Also, what are the implications for the budget, if any? Alleycat80 (talk) 22:59, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Where are the metrics?

Hey, thanks for submitting! I see that the metrics' table is empty. Why is that? I like your proposal very much, it's balanced and descriptive, but the metrics seem to be a bit unclear (besides one place not enough differentiation between articles and images, new and existing editors, etc). Putting it all in one table would be perfect, and good record for the future, also for you. Could you perhaps find the time to complete this? If I misunderstood and it's somewhere else, please point me there and I do apologize in advance. Alleycat80 (talk) 23:02, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Hello, Alleycat80. I forgot to remind the applicant about this section of the application when we were working together on it during the Wikimedia Conference. I've been in touch with Heikki and Teemu to make sure they attend to this ASAP. Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 18:21, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks a lot Winifred! Alleycat80 (talk) 20:21, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Clarification on the travelling exhibition

Hi! I would like to explain shortly what the Finnish Wikipedia 15 years travelling exhibiton actually is. It is planned in cooperation with our longtime partner Rupriikki Media Museum in Tampere. The exhibition would tell the history of Finnish Wikipedia through collected material and interviews of Wikipedians from different eras. Travelling would mean that the exhibition would be movable to different museums and public libraries accross Finland, it would have a rotation in different cities. This way we would achieve greater geopgraphic diversity with our outreach, as Finland is a country of long distances. The project would also work in synergy with our growing Library cooperation, which is our focus this year. Me and Heikki will happily answer your questions.--Olimar (talk) 16:16, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

Simple Annual Plan Grant Committee Recommendation

Committee recommendations

Funding recommendations: The committee recommends full funding for Wikimedia Suomi for the 8-month grant period requested. Wikimedia Suomi should continue to ensure that their impact is growing in proportion to increased costs that come with bringing on staff, and continue to explore new strategies for growing their small community. While the committee feels WMFI has addressed past recommendations well, these considerations are ongoing. Based on the concerns identified here, WMFI may need to think about how to better articulate their results through metrics in order to show the value of their work, and to focus more effort on community growth.

Strengths identified by the committee: WMFI has a committed and engaged board, and an excellent track record of participation in the Wikimedia movement over several years. WMFI is particularly strong in the area of GLAM partnerships, which is where this plan is focused. They have managed to nurture effective partnerships and are building capacity in this area, which has a lot of potential for impact beyond their small community size. WMFI has presented a well-balanced plan, which includes a reasonable budget and it is likely they have the capacity to execute this plan successfully. WMFI is taking a reasonable approach to growth and a healthy approach to developing their organization and governance. WMFI knows their community and is focused on engaging their community members.

Concerns identified by the committee: WMFI’s potential to grow their small community is still a major question, and we would like WMFI to focus more actively on this area. For example, it does not yet seem like WMFI has found any activities that will help them make a breakthrough. The amount of funding is growing significantly, and yet it is not clear that impact is growing at the same rate. For example, there is a large focus on measuring event attendance and press mentions. While these may be interesting metrics, they don’t reveal much about immediate impact during the grant period in areas like content or editor engagement. Targets may be too low overall, especially with respect to the amount of funding requested, and targets do not always match what we know about Wikimedia programs. For example, contests are focused on attracting editors rather than gaining content.

For the Simple Annual Plan Grant Committee Chinmayisk (talk) 13:50, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

In line with the committee's recommendations, WMF approves this grant request in the amount of 48,203 EUR for 8 months. Many thanks to the committee for this recommendation and thanks to the WMFI team for your work during the proposal process. Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 12:19, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

Reallocation approved

WMFI has requested that 3178 EUR be reallocated from book fair participation fees (2171), Printing costs for Book fair (600), Wiki Loves Earth Photo Hunts (422.50), Office supplies (200), and Excess from one Wikimania Grant (200), toward the engagement of a temporary contractor working 160 hours, 40h/week for one month in June-July for executing the technical aspects of Wiki Loves Monuments, including 120 hours assigned to working with item lists (in Wikidata and Wikipedia) and documentation and 40 hours assigned to the other tasks such as producing the WLM map and Commons categories. This request has been reviewed by the Simple APG Committee, due to the size and due to the fact that it includes a significant change to this organization's staffing plan.

Upon reviewing this request, the committee agrees this technical assistance may be necessary, but recommends that WMFI create a manual (including, e.g. screenshots) so that less technically experienced contractors or volunteers can take on aspects of this work in the future. Also, the committee notes that it will be critical for WMFI to grow the team of volunteers devoted to this contest work in order to make it more sustainable.

This reallocation is hereby approved.

Best, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 18:00, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

Comments on your final report

Hello, WMFI colleagues! Thank you for this final report, and thank you for submitting it on time. Here are some comments summarizing our conversation yesterday about the report and your achievements in 2017. We appreciated some of the improvements that you made to your reporting style, including the work that you did in describing a meaningful program story and learning story. We think that the improved program structure in your 2018 grant will facilitate better reporting in the future. In the outcomes section for each program, this report still reads like a list of activities, which makes it difficult to get the big picture of your work in 2017. Also, you don't report directly back on the goals for each of your programs that you included in your plan for the year, which makes it difficult to understand what you achieved with respect to your targets.

It would be useful for you to report back here on the following goals you set:

1. For COMMUNITY, you set your goal as, "2 300 new images added to Wikimedia Commons and 300 images in Wikipedia, 500 active editors and 430 new editors involved, and 8 community members participating in 12 international networks." How did you do with respect to these targets?
2. For PARTNERSHIPS, you set your goal for the year as "9 institutions, 30 active editors, and 40 new editors. We expect 30 images used on Wikimedia projects and 30 articles created or improved through our partnerships work." How did you do with respect to these targets?

Overall, we were glad to learn that the board is working well together and that having a staff person in 2017 contributed a lot to WMFI's ability to achieve more. This is very evident in the improvements to your reporting, for example. We liked hearing more about your use of Trello as a project management tool, and about some of the challenges you are encountering with socializing the tool and promoting its use. This may be something other organizations can learn from if they want to try using similar tools to coordinate their work together. As you pointed out in our call together, there may be more opportunities for you to integrate the use of this tool into your regular planning meetings, which may help overcome some of the challenges you are experiencing.

It was great to read the "deep dive" about the Wiki Loves Monuments in your program story. This was the first time you conducted the contest in Finland, and it appears that you were very successful in generating the content you hoped for. We were especially interested in how you are seeing the contest as an opportunity to leverage a longer term strategic partnership with the Finnish National Board of Antiquities. We also greatly appreciate the level of attention you have given to the technical implementation of this project, which is a strength of your chapter. Congratulations also on the successful implementation of Wiki Loves Public Art! Along with celebrating your successes, you were able to identify some key challenges and opportunities for improvement, both in technical areas and in terms of strengthening partnerships. We are interested in learning how the more geographically targeted approach to Wiki Loves Public Art works in 2018, for example.

We appreciate the work you are doing to deepen your work with existing partners, rather than focusing solely on expanding the number of partners you are working with. The collaboration with the national museum network is a major achievement, and we are pleased to know that WMFI is getting increasing recognition in this space. In particular, your ongoing collaborations with Finnish radio and television and your focus on audio files is a unique approach.

On the call we talked a bit about how you could measure and track some of the results of your longer term outreach work. For example, tracking ideas generated by your participation in international networks and collecting stories about the people you are reaching through your outreach-focused work. This will help us all better understand the value of this work in the long term. We didn't have time to discuss this in depth on the call, but we are interested in learning more about the opportunities you see for more Fenno-Swedish collaboration. It would also be useful to delve more into how you are achieving your increase in membership, as this may be something that other organizations can learn from. We were happy to see you achieve your target of a 10% increase in membership.

We know a few things didn't go as planned. In particular, the traveling exhibition wasn't completed during the year and you may have to work on completing it in the current year. Your targets across the board for involving new editors were set much higher than was realistic and so you didn't achieve what you expected in these areas. Finally, you had some significant underspending in operations and administration, which means you may be overbudgeting in these areas.

We can move toward more accuracy in target-setting and in budgeting in future years. Quarterly monitoring of targets and budgets may help us adjust plans and expectations throughout the year. We know you are planning to implement quarterly monitoring of your spending in order to improve this in 2018 and also to improve the transparency of your financial systems, and that's great evidence of your increasing capacities in this area. We will wait to accept the financial portion of this report until you are able to add some final expenses from 2017, since you have let us know that some of these are still missing.

Thank you also for sharing some of your thoughts about how to form a long term strategy for WMFI in 2018. We are looking forward to our work together in the year ahead!

Best, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 22:39, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments. After asking what numbers 500 active editors and 430 were, it seems that they were based on fi.wikipedia.org stats which is, of course, incorrect as a target because they doesn't measure WMFI's work. However, the numbers for those are (based on my notes on metrics and our board meeting notes)

Community

2300 new images added to Wikimedia Commons and 300 images in Wikipedia, 500 active editors and 430 new editors involved, and 8 community members participating in 12 international networks." How did you do with respect to these targets?

• 2300 WLM images (to Wikimedia Commons)
• 700 public art images (to Fiwiki via Exemption Doctrine Policy)
• 800 images added to fiwiki articles (mostly public art)
• There were 55 new editors and almost all of them were involved with Wiki Loves Monuments.
• 10 community members participating in 11 international networks

Partnerships

For PARTNERSHIPS, you set your goal for the year as "9 institutions, 30 active editors, and 40 new editors. We expect 30 images used on Wikimedia projects and 30 articles created or improved through our partnerships work." How did you do with respect to these targets?

• 13 institutions involved in presentations, edithatons, deeper planning etc
• 88 active editors; (no distinction between wikipedians and active editors from institutions in stats; educated guess is that number is mostly wikipedians)
• 23 new editors
• Nice total numbers for image/article edits aren't available from my notes because numbers are including large chunk of election hack edits. However the target was reached because over 30 images and 30 articles (namespace 0 pages) were created or improved in Wikiloikka project by ICT teachers.

--Zache (talk) 20:04, 15 February 2018 (UTC)