Wikimedia CH/2015 annual plan

2015-2016 strategic Plan

Support contributors	We want to increase user retention by supporting contributors where and when they need us Encourage cross-border linguistic communities (A1) Add significant value to volunteer projects (A2)
Support content	Content creation is by definition user-based Support rather than initiate volunteer projects (B1) Encourage like-minded content creation (B2)
Develop Tools	Build on our existing know-how Grow Kiwix (C1) Facilitate offline dissemination (C2)
Outreach	Bringing Wiki to the non-Wiki world GLAM partnerships (D1) Secondary education (D2) Raise awareness of Public domain and alternative licences (D3)

Details of the annual plan

Tabular view of the whole Annual Plan

Community Support

German speaking Volunteer projects

Improve Swiss specific content on DE:WP

Who: Livio Crameri, Wikipedian on DE:WP
What: Improve quality of articles related to the topics Alters- und Hinterlassenenversicherungen / Assurance-viellesse et survivantes in Wikipedia in order to provide encyclopedic information about this subject from a neutral point of view.
How: Purchase of 5 books and organization of 2 Edit-a-thons or similar events to support the creation of highly qualitative content
Why: There’s a need among the Swiss population to get this information.

Swiss Public Domain Project

Who: Public Domain Project
What: Digitizing Music Records for Commons in collaboration with autists
How: People with asperger-syndrom are supporting the Swiss Public Domain Project in digitizing the Music Records. This collaboration already started by July 2014 and will go on until the end of the year 2014 (Budget 2014 for this collaboration: 5’000CHF). We’re asking for a budget for 2015 in order to continue the collaboration with autists who do the digitizing work.
Why: Increase the number of qualitative music records for Wikimedia Commons by 370 files.

Women Edit Switzerland

Who: Muriel in collaboration with FemWiss & other women’s association in Switzerland
What: Expand the „WomenEdit“ initiative from the german communtiy to the swiss-german Community in Switzerland. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel and are choosing the same name and program to establish in Switzerland.
How: Host 12 Writing-Ateliers during 2015, e.g. each month, where women can participate and create and share knowledge.
Why: Increase Diversity in our Community

Wikivillage: Collaborations with schools

Who: Lantus, Micha L. Rieser, Muriel
What: Expand WikiVillage to a canton in the german-speaking part of Switzerland
How: Set up collaborations with gymnasiums/schools in order to let students contribute to local content on Wikipedia
Why: Bring Wikipedia closer to schools and gain local content.

Improve Accessibility of content

Who: Foundation "Zugang für Alle", Patuluslab & Muriel
What: Improve Accessibility of Wikipedia
How: Organize several Edit-a-thons (around 2-4) in 2015 in order to improve the accessibility of DE:WP. The Foundation „Zugang für Alle“ is on its way to develop a tool that will enable Wikipedians to easily identify accessibility-weaknesses.
Why: Make Wikipedia accessible for everyone.

Wikipedia-Workshops/Ateliers/Introductions

Who: Diego Hättenschwiler, further volunteers (tbc), and Muriel
What: Host Wikipedia-Workshops/Intro-sessions/Writing Ateliers in the german-speaking part of Switzerland, like Bern, Solothurn, Winterthur and Biel
How: Organize regular Wikipedia-Ateliers in order to attract new Wikipedians and establish good relations with libraries.
Why: The concept has been proven successful in the french-speaking part as well as Solothurn and is now being expanded to the rest of the german-speaking part

Wkipedia Study

Who: Professor Wiebke Weber (University of Applied Science in Winterthur (ZHAW))
What: Set up a study to evaluate how players in the Swiss Communication Industry use Wikipedia. The study would research the user-habits as well as the skills that are applied when using Wikipedia. Thesis: Journalists only use Wikipedia in “reading mode” and don’t oconsider the discussion-pages or history of an article during their research. As a result, the ZHAW could develop an offer of Advanced Training for players in the Swiss Communication Industry.
Why: Ongoing studies - and also studies from the past - mostly only focus on social media and only research facebook, twitter and Co.
How: Research Study done by ZHAW and Wikipedia courses set up by the educational institution.

Italian speaking Volunteer projects

Wikimedia CH seek to support Italian speaking volunteers everywhere in the world, therefore you will find here project plan to be done in Italy.

Raetho-rumantsch wikisource

User: Mizardellorsa
The project: The project aim to transfer in Wikisource all the important texts of the Ladin languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladin_language) which is considered closer to the Rumantsch forming with it the Rhaeto-Rumantsch family (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhaeto-Romance_languages). The project is already running and need support to move forward
actions

digitization of the books not digitized so far
online edit-a-thon or contests in order to complete the transfer in Wikisource.
feasibility study for rhaeto-rumantsch wikisource.

Qualitative targets: improving the Ladin languages representation in Wikimedia projects
Quantitative Targets: 10 000 pages?

French speaking Volunteer projects

Rebooting WMCH Communications Strategy!

Objectives

This project belongs to the programs Outreach and Association sustainability too, but has been initiated by volunteers

Rationalize and better prepare WMCH’s Board, Staff and volunteers for regular and exceptional communications
Be better at engaging our own community and strategic partners, along with futur Wikimedia projects contributors and mass media/a broader audience

Strategy

2-days « Reboot » workshop
Propose Editorial Guidelines & Calendar!
Rationalize use of strategic channels like official and personal twitter accounts
Business methodologies to better understand and address our audiences needs, and adapt our communications accordingly (e.g. SWOT, Business Model Canvas…)
Reboot of Board & Staff workflow, accordingly
Experiment with better use of Meta as a HQ/API for other documentation needs (e.g. internal or public blogs for staff members reporting their efforts, then preparing annual reports)
Engage reflexion for new WMCH website and better use of Members’ Wiki
Test and document, generate data
Analyse, production of a whitepaper to engage discussion further with the Movement present results to WMCH GA
Present results of the experiment at Wikimania 2015 or 2016

needs

1 and 2, staff and board time!
3 to 6 is a mix between staff time (to be determined thanks to 1 and 2) and volunteer experts from the community time!
Conversation with other chapters facing the same issues at the moment

Outreach Program

Offline Dissemination program

Plan

WMCH has launched the Offline Dissemination Program (ODP) in 2014 with the aim to make Wikipedia accessible (with KIWIX software) in areas with no internet connection or where the internet is being cenzored or filtered. This program has been strongly welcomed by both the community and stakeholders outside the movement. Offline solutions are not only a way to improve our outreach, but also to provide a possibiltiy to acquire new members to our movement: the moment people start using Wikipeida offline, they see it's added value and want to contribute themselves.

Due to the ("offline") nature of technology, gathering usage statistics is complicated & challenging. But, even with only a few metrics available, we are able to proove the past success of the program:

Nearly 50K Android App Downloads
Country-wide deployment of Wikipedia offline in swiss prisons
Further numbers (TODO to complete)

Based on these facts, Wikimedia CH wants to continue investing in offline dissemination of Wikipedia in 2015 and make its development a high priority of the associations overall activities.

It's important to understand that the added value of the ODP is to provide technical offline solutions to third parties. Therefore, it's not only important to have the best technology available, but also to develop strong partnerships with organizations operating on the field. In 2015, the ODP will consequently be based on the following 3 pilars: Projects collaboration, R&D and Communication & External Funding.

Projects collaboration

Here are an overview of the planned activities and deliverables.

Develop partnerships with NGOs which are on place, to deploy Wikipedia offline

Having a network of NGOs which are there on place near to the population suffering of lack of connectivity is essential. Therefore, we need to increase our number of "partner big deployments". Here are a short list of potential projects we are currently in talk with:

Wikipedia zero: The successful WMF project currently evaluates the opportunity to make deal with operators/vendors to pre-ship the Wikipedia app with content (for example Wikipedia medicine articles in Africa).
Malebooks: This project plans to rollout 3000 e-ink readers in Mali. We have ported Kiwix to an e-ink device and the pilot is currently ongoing.
Afripédia: This project has deployed Wikipedia offline in more than 50 African universities for the last two years. Discussions have started to design a new version of the project, one of the key point is to find solution to allow any organisation to easily get the tech and deploy it.
Outernet: Outernet plans to provide Wikipedia offline via satellite, we are currently evaluating with them the best technical solution.

In addition, we want to support 10 grass-root partnership-initiatives of volunteers. That means that if wikimedians come with small deployments initiatives, we want to be able to support them too.

Wikipedia in Jail

Wikipedia in Jail is a success in Switzerland, we want to scale it:

In Switzerland: Accompany and further develop the partnership
Worldwide: Try to scale best-practice of "Wikipedia offline in Jail in Switzerland" to at least 2 other countries.

R&D

The ODP program is mainly based on softwares (Kiwix and openZIM) which are developed and maintained by volunteers. Although we are pretty satisfied by this volunteer run projects, there are important things which are difficult (and partly impossible) to get done correctly:

"Boring task" (sysadmin work, testing, release management, ...), due to the lack of motivated volunteers (they prefer to work on challenging technical problems).
Reliable support, because volunteers are not always available during office hours and cannot be contracted.
Internships, because there is nobody to recruit and mentor them.
Customer oriented developments/polishing, because the interest of the market is not always the interest of the code hackers.

Due to these weaknesses, professional offers or big partnerships are impossible, even though the demand is there. These big deals/deployments are essential to push the software development. Worse, without them it's really difficult to reach big amounts of people and simply impossible to measure our impact on site. That's why the ODP wants to recruit two people in 2015: a developer (100%) and a R&D manager (20%).

This small team will have the following main technical goals for 2015:

Get Wikimedia project ZIM files generated in the Wikimedia datacenter. This is essential to be able to release quickly, often and without any hand work new ZIM files for all our projects. By doing this we will stop one of the most frequently criticised aspects with regard to the Kiwix project.
Introduce automated tests in the project. Kiwix supports 5 different operating systems and with the probable introduction of iOS in 2015 the project is going to be unmaintainable without a rigorous test automation. One of the first tasks will be to set up a test strategy and start to implement it with Kiwix for Android.
Improving Kiwix for Android is a tech. priority for 2015
Having improved the Kiwix Android app. in 2014, more smartphones than personal computers were sold. It's essential that we start to fill the feature and quality gap between the Android app and the Kiwix desktop version. To introduce a download manager and a fulltext search is a priority.
Improve ZIM updatability: the ZIM files which store the offline wikipedia articles are not easy to update at the moment. This is a repeated feature request from customers in order to be able to do incremental updates. This is, for example, a requirement of the "Wikipedia Zero" team which thinks about shipping a content package with the Wikipedia app.
Improve the ZIM file creation toolset. The ZIM format is recognized to be an efficient solution. Although many people are interested to use the toolset, its ways of usage are quite limited. To push the publication of new ZIM files (non Wikimedia content) and encourage new developers to join in, we need to improve it. The top priority is to help in the development of the OCG and add the support for ZIM, that probably means the creation of the nodezim binding. The second priority is to create phpzim, a binding which is mandatory to create new export plugin for CMS (like Wordpress for example).

But, having a professional's taskforce on Kiwix does not mean that the project abandons his volunteer based development model. Replacing volunteer workforce by professional workforces is simply not affordable and against the philosophy of both the movement and WMCH. That's why we will still continue to focus on volunteers and will:

organize at least two offline hackathons during the year (focus will be given on package additional free content in the ZIM format),
sponsor volunteer venues to Wikimania & Wikimedia hackathons,
sponsor hardware to push Kiwix development on mobile devices,
push the tech. communication and documentation in direction of volunteers.

Communication & External Funding

The main driver behind our "Communication & External Funding" move is to ensure that our ODP program is fully independent of FDC funding. Though these goals are set long term, we believe that today's actions will be the very first milestone to a sustainable financial model.

Professional offer

In order to achieve this goal, we will provide a "professional offer" package:

Offering an online, easy-to-use web-shop to order the Kiwix offerings as a whole fro the autumn 2015
Create sub-offering such as consulting services (as-is state analysis, gap analysis, technical support, general consulting regarding the product and design)
Create SLA-based product support (On-site/Off-site delivery and maintenance support)
Ensure an dedicated marketing and sales communication channel with existing and prospective customers, while dynamically steering our sales strategy

Our KPI: Total Sales Rev +20k

Institutional donors

We will also dedicate part of our energy to raise money from "institutional/big donors":

Develop a big donators strategy
Create communication material dedicated to institution
Take contact with at least 20 institution and advert the ODP and build a donators network

Our KPI: Find external funding of at least 20K$ from foundations and/or other institutions

Other

To support this effort we will attend at least two non-tech and non-wikimedians events.

GLAM

Education

wikivillage
University: University of Fribourg, Basel and St.Gallen as well as the University of Applied Science in Winterthur and probably Basel will be part of Wikimedia CH's educational activities in 2015.

Thematic Approach

Neuchatelpedia