Esperanto kaj Libera Scio/Reports/2022

Draft of the Annual report 2021 of the Wikimedia User Group Esperanto and Free Knowledge (in Esperanto Esperanto kaj Libera Scio, shortly ELiSo).

The official version will be published after its approval by General Assebly.

Mision work

Talks, Workshops & Edit-a-Thons

Talks:

• Esperanto Wikivoyage - the free travel guide (SEMEO, Arrout, France)
• Voice keyboard for Esperanto already works - try it yourself! (Retoso, virtual)
  • Wikimedia Strategy 2030 activity for supporting participation of people who can not contribute using computer

Events presentations:

• International Youth Congress: participation in the Youth Movement Foire (Westelbeers, Netherlands)
• participation in the Virtual Movement Foire (Virtual Congress of Esperanto, 2 times, virtual)
• Chat with... Amri Wandel (Virtual Congress of Esperanto, with small participation of KuboF Hromoslav about WUG ELiSo, virtual)

Webinars:

• Automate member recruitment – with CiviCRM

Trainings:

• Wikipedia Workshop (SEMEO, ELiSO was an invited guest, Toulouse, France)
• Wikipedia editing and translation training (project ViPE of Erasmus+, Bialystok, Poland)
• The next level of membership management – with CiviCRM (project MaSO of Erasmus+, Neuendorf, Germany)

Contests, Campaigns

• CEE Spring English (done with some problems that we will solve in 2023)
• African month
  • canceled
• Wiki Loves ZEOs (Zamenhof / Esperanto objects)
  • planned, not done
• campaign about Wikimedia content about developing skills
  • planned, not done
• Eventejo (Wikivoyage competition)
• American month 2021
  • the competition couldn’t be closed because the WMF grant department does not had enough capacity for that

Competitions and edit-a-thons based geographically

• Wiki Loves Earth Slovakia
  • planned, not done

We have also invited our members and community to competitions of other organisations.

Community & Activists Development & Engagement

We have added all wanted roles to our volunteer recruitment tool. It is still needed to add descriptions and additional questions to many of them.

We have succeeded to distribute organisational roles to some more activists, but still insufficiently. More work on this topic was planned to be done during creation of the strategic plan, which itself was postponed.

We have more developed our internal knowledge base. More to be done later. The planned educational portal was postponed to the 1st half of 2023.

Membership recruitment campaign was postponed to 2023. The reason was the need for better preparation - better knowing our members and community members (that is planned to be done as part of creation of the strategic plan) and improvements of our membership application form workflow.

Community Capacity Map evaluation wasn’t done.

The Chair Matúšov participated in a training on management of short-term volunteer activities.

We have published the congratulational video about the Esperanto Wikipedia reaching 300 000 articles.

Sponsored projects

We have applied for 2 project of Erasmus+:

• ViPE - Wiki for Europe - Making The Free Knowledge Even More Accessible
  • collaborative KA210 project with 3 partners (E@I, Toulouse Esperanto Cultural Center, Bialystok Esperanto Society)
  • 3 trainings, 1 competition, educational portal, translation of MediaWiki
• MaSO - Technical and Management Skills for Organisational Sustainability and Quality
  • KA122 individual education of our activists
  • 2 training assignments, 5 job shadowings

Both projects were accepted.

We have applied as a partner in other projects of Erasmus+:

• Creating a sustainable volunteering infrastructure
  • rejected

We have considered to partner in in other projects of Erasmus+:

• Management of non-profit organizations
  • we have decided to not partner because of uncertainty about the program rules
• creation of podcasts
  • we have rejected because of insufficient interest in the needed target group
• series of science presentations
  • we have rejected because of insufficient interest in the needed target group

We have applied for a grant from Esperantic Studies Foundation for creation of a WikiBase based database of ZEOs (Zamenhof / Esperanto objects). The project was accepted, but later stagnated.

Participation in Esperanto meetings

• SEMEO (Toulous / Arrout, France)
  • guest participation in the Wikipedia Workshop
  • talk about Wikivoyage
• IJK (Westelbeers, Netherlands)
  • participation in the Youth Movement Foire
• Bialystok Zamenhof Days
  • talk about the project ViPE of Erasmus+ (project ViPE of Erasmus+)
  • Wikipedia editing and translation training (project ViPE of Erasmus+)
• Virtual Congress of Esperanto / Retoso
  • participation in the Virtual Movement Foire
  • short participation in the Chat with... Amri Wandel
  • talk Voice keyboard for Esperanto already works - try it yourself!
• JES (Neuendorf, Germany)
  • training The next level of membership management – with CiviCRM (project MaSO of Erasmus+)

Other mission work

Advocacy for freeing of materials from other organisations and projects

• planned, not done

Outreach to Esperantists about Wikimedia and its values

• done through the year, mostly on social media

Organisational work

ELiSo inside the Wikimedia Movement

Invitations to global Wikimedia activities.

participation in Wikimedia events:

• Wikimania
• Wikimedia Summit
• Wikimedia CEE Meeting
  • canceled participation because of time conflict

Organisation development

Membership applications in other organisations:

• Recognition as a Wikimedia Thematic Organisation
  • stagnated in 2022, hard communication with AffCom
• Thematic association of Universal Esperanto Association
  • we was accepted by the Committee
• Thematic section of World Esperanto Youth Organization
  • set for voting about acceptance in early 2023
• member of Wikimedia Europe
  • accepted

Web infrastructure was mostly only updated, not developed. That influenced also the planned membership recruitment campaign, as the possibility to pay membership fees directly on the web site was an important part of the planned campaign.

The planned Strategic plan 2022-2023 wasn’t done because of over-occupation of the assigned activist. At the start of the year we studied 3 courses on creation of strategic plan and created our own manual for that.

We have finished the 1st phase of our evaluation of the possibility of accepting cryptocurrencies for paying membership fees and donations. We have elected Nano (XNO) as an ecologically sustainable, feeless, open source, non-profit option. But the uncertain situation about bookkeeping cryptocurrencies in general ultimately paused the full-scale adoption. We are still considering also other cryptocurrencies.

The Board have decided to provide compensation for managing our Erasmus+ projects. The manager wasn’t hired in 2022 - that is planned for 2023.

Organisational situation

The 1st regular General Assembly was done 26th March. The 2nd regular General Assembly (planned every year at the end of the year) wasn’t done. In order to have approved the important management documents (Annual plan, Annual budget) for 2023, the 1st regular General Assembly in 2023 was called for the very beginning of 2023.

We are working on setting up the workflow for creation of our main management documents in a more effective way. We had setbacks in this area in 2022 and plan to update it in 2023.

The Board had problems with real-time meetings because of technical limitations of the internet in the country of one of the Board members. Only in the 2nd half we could do real-time meetings.