Grants:APG/Proposals/2012-2013 round1/Wikimedia Österreich/Impact report form


Purpose of the report

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FDC funds are allocated to improve the alignment between the Wikimedia movement's strategy and spending; support greater impact and progress towards achieving shared goals; and enable all parts of the movement to learn how to achieve shared goals better and faster.

Funding should lead to increased access to and quality of content on Wikimedia project sites – the two ultimate goals of the Wikimedia movement strategic priorities, individually and as a whole. Funded activities must be consistent with the WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, must be reported to WMF, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement. The WMF mission is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."

Each entity that receives FDC funding will need to complete this report, which seeks to determine how the funding received by the entity is leading towards these goals. The information you provide will help us to:

  • Identify lessons learned, in terms of both what the entity learned that could benefit the broader movement, and how the entity used movement-wide best practices to accomplish its stated objectives.
  • Assess the performance of the entity over the course of the funded period against the stated objectives in the entity's annual plan.
  • Ensure accountability over how the money was spent. The FDC distributes "general funds", for both ongoing and programmatic expenses; these funds can be spent as the entity best sees fit to accomplish its stated goals. Therefore, although line-item expenses are not expected to be exactly as outlined in the entity's proposal, the FDC wants to ensure that money was spent in a way that led to movement goals.

For more information, please review FDC portal/Reporting requirements or reference your entity's grant agreement.

Basic entity information

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Note you can copy this from your recent progress report if the information is the same.

Table 1

Entity information Legal name of entity Wikimedia Österreich
Entity's fiscal year (mm/dd–mm/dd) 09/01/12-08/31/13
12 month timeframe of funds awarded (mm/dd/yy-mm/dd/yy) 01/01/13-12/31/13
Contact information (primary) Primary contact name Claudia Garad
Primary contact position in entity Executive Director
Primary contact username Claudia.Garad
Primary contact email claudia.garad@wikimedia.at
Contact information (secondary) Secondary contact name Kurt Kulac
Secondary contact position in entity President
Secondary contact username Kulac
Secondary contact email kulac@wikimedia.at


Overview of the past year

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The purpose of this section is to provide a brief overview of this report. Please use no more than 2–3 paragraphs to address the questions outlined below. You will have an opportunity to address these questions in detail elsewhere in this report. Also, we encourage you to share photographs, videos, and sound files in this report to make it more interactive, and include links to reports, blog posts, plans, etc as these will add context for the readers.

  • HIGHLIGHTS: What were 2–3 important highlights of the past year? (These may include successes, challenges, lessons learned. Please note which you are describing)
    • Success: WMAT succeeded in creating a constructive working environment between volunteers, board and staff. We can look back on some good practice projects like our so-called Landtagsprojekt, where we could implement effective divison of tasks between volunteers and staff that provide a sound basis for future cooperation. The WMAT team also received a lot of positive feedback on their work and volunteer support during the general assembly in November and is happy to see that a number of long-term volunteers decided to become a member of the chapter last year, which is a positive indicator that we are on the right track.
    • Challenge: Implementing a more systematic project planning and evaluation process was a major challenge in 2013 that will also be of big importance in 2014. The challenges comprise raising awareness and foster according skills among our volunteers and finding ways to implement processes which create and measure effectiveness that suit the various types and sizes of our projects.
    • Lessons learned: WMAT could learn and draw on the experiences of other chapters regarding the importance of a sound governance structure and hence implemented a viable governance codex which was discussed and approved of by all relevant stakeholders in the chapter. We believe that a reliable governance structure is the best basis for becoming an effective and solid chapter. We also want to share our learnings and experiences in this regard with the wider movement.
  • SWOT: Reflecting on the context outlined for your entity in the FDC proposal, what were some of the contextual elements that either enabled or inhibited the plan? Feel free to include factors unanticipated in the proposal.
    • Strengths: Organizational strengths that enabled the plan
      • Committed volunteers, board, staff: Although or perhaps even because we are a small chapter, WMAT is flexible and strong enough to cope with unplanned situations and conditions. In our board and also among the volunteers, we have many involved people with a very good portfolio of core skills that can be triggered if required. The spirit of collaboration between staff and board / volunteers is very good and additionally adds to this strength. Since our last general assembly, our board also shows a good mixture of "old hands" and new representatives who bring in fresh ideas and perspectives. In addition, WMAT has a good rapport with the community that is cherished beyond Austria in the wider German-speaking community and we constantly put a lot of thought and effort into retaining this relationship.
      • Governance: We only hired our first staff member a year ago and measured against this early stage of an increase in professionalism we believe that we have a quite solid governance structure in place. In June we drafted our Good Governance Codex in order to provide a sound basis for our further development. This involved discussing the status quo of collaboration between the different stakeholders of the chapter and setting up standards for the future. Another aim was to suggest proceedings in cases of conflicts of interests.
      • Experience: WMAT has been around for five years now and by now we are able look back on several successful programs, projects and initiatives and draw on these experiences when it comes to planning new activities. Success stories are also the best way to win new partners and / or supporters.
    • Weaknesses: Organizational weaknesses that inhibited the plan
      • Process management: Although the collaboration between staff and volunteers is generally good and constructive, there is still potential for improvement concerning efficiency and quality management. This comprises mainly issues of communication, coordination and getting used to the "new" structures (especially in projects that have been in place before staff members came in as new players).
      • Reporting and evaluation: Not all of our highly active volunteers are project management professionals and generally there is a lack of awareness and sometimes willingness to thoroughly plan, document and evaluate a project. On the other hand, the expectations regarding our reporting increase more and more and not all of it can be absorbed by staff and board (especially when it comes to projects that we are not closely involved with (organisationally or otherwise)) - as much as we endeavor to take the "not so much fun stuff" off our volunteers. These requirements can also constitute a major additional hurdle for volunteer engagement.
    • Opportunities: External opportunities that enabled the plan
      • Strong partnerships: WMAT has established some very fruitful, long-term partnerships with GLAM institutions (e.g. Federal Monuments Office), like-minded organizations (e.g. Open Knowledge Foundation Austria) and public administration (e.g. City of Vienna, Federal Chancellor's Office) which enable sustainable, long-term project planning and innovative initiatives (open data portal) and often serve as a door opener for new projects and initiatives. In addition to the impact of the specific projects, they also contribute to a positive image of Wikipedia and Wikimedia and an increased general free knowledge awareness in Austria.
      • Resources: We think that there is generally good fundraising potential in Austria, for project-specific funding as well as for general fundraising. There's also a small, but very loyal group of long-term donors, that could and should be expanded.
      • Broader movement: WMAT considers the good relationships to other entities and individuals within the international movement as very valuable and beneficial. Within the German-speaking community we have strong partners in WMDE and WMCH and can use synergies to achieve common goals. Due to its geographical location and history, WMAT has close bonds to Western and Central / Eastern European communities and can act as a link between these cultures. We also appreciate what we can learn from older and more developed chapters like for example WMUK and last but not least the expertise offered by the WMF.
    • Threats: Risks or threats that inhibited the plan
      • Internal technical limitations: Our internal technical infrastructure has the potential to limit our growth and success. While CiviCRM is definitely a mighty tool, quite a few weaknesses became apparent in the last two years, so that we seriously had to reconsider this decision. In order to enjoy the full range of possibilities and to ensure security in the long run, several updates are necessary. However, at the moment, it is almost impossible to upgrade the system (to the standard WMSE has), as there is not sufficient documentation and the responsible developers are lacking the time to handle all the questions and requests. In addition, we learned that the WMF finance department has some severe concerns regarding CiviCRM as an accounting system. Hence, we will definitely change to a professional accounting system in 2014. As CiviCRM is also integrated to our website and donation tool, this also had an impact on our fundraising. Technical difficulties contributed to the fact, that we couldn't raise the planned amount of money.
      • External technical limitations: Looking at our mature and well-running WLM-project in September we have strong worries about the upcomming deactivation of the toolserver, where our jury tools and some important database-systems are running on. Regarding the transfer of this systems to WikimediaLabs there are still some concerns of our developers and a smooth transfer seems to be at least unlikely. This might cause troubles in next years WLM-contest and the ongoing work of our community regarding the Austrian monuments lists.
  • WIKI-FOCUS: What Wikimedia projects was your entity focused on (e.g., Wiki Commons, French Wiktionary) this year?
    • Wikipedia (German language)
    • Wikimedia Commons
  • GROWTH: How did your entity grow over the past year (e.g., Number of active editors reached/involved/added, number of articles created, number of events held, number of partipants reached through workshops)? And what were the long term affects of this growth (e.g. relationships with new editors, more returned editors, higher quality articles, etc)?
  • We only started to develop adequate project monitoring and evaluation tools in 2013, when we submitted the proposal for this grant the expectations on the side of WMF and FDC in this regard were not yet very clear. When it comes to reliable numbers and figures, we can only provide some answers to these questions. We are working to improve this in 2014.
  • The fact that three chapters work with the community of the German-language Wikipedia also makes it difficult to assess the precise impact of our work.
  • Numbers which show our growth of content and volunteers are listed below in the respective programs.

Response:

Financial summary

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The FDC requires information about how your entity received and spent money over the past year. The FDC distributes general funds, so your entity is not required to use funds exactly as outlined in the proposal. While line-item expenses will not be examined, the FDC and movement wants to understand why the entity spent money in the way it did. If variance in budgeted vs. actual is greater than 20%, please provide explanation in more detail. This helps the FDC understand the rationale behind any significant changes. Note that any changes from the Grant proposal, among other things, must be consistent with the WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, must be reported to WMF, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement. The WMF mission is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."

If you'd prefer to share a budget created in Google or another tool and import it to wiki, you can do so in the tables below instead of using wiki tables. You can link to an external document, but we ask that you do include a table in this form. We are testing this approach in this form.

Revenues

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Provide exchange rate used:

  • 1 Euro : 1.3 US$

Table 2 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

  • Please also include any in-kind contributions or resources that you have received in this revenues table. This might include donated office space, services, prizes, food, etc. If you are to provide a monetary equivalent (e.g. $500 for food from Organization X for service Y), please include it in this table. Otherwise, please highlight the contribution, as well as the name of the partner, in the notes section.
Revenue source Currency Anticipated Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Anticipated ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Explanation of variances from plan
Membership fees Euro 2,100.00 230.00 80.00 1,090.00 670.00 2,070.00 $ 2,730.00 $ 2,691.00
Donations Euro 25,000.00 4,271.78 2,400.71 2,301.50 11,004.83 19,978,82 $ 32,500.00 $ 25,972.47 Technical problems on our donation website. Cancelation of the Christmas fundraising project.
WMF/FDC Euro 186,890.00 99,483.00 0.00 71,060.00 0.00 170,543.00 $ 242,957.00 $ 221,705.90
"netidee" grant Euro - 0.00 0.00 0.00 25,000.00 25,000.00 - $ 32,500.00 First payment of a 50,000 EUR grant for implementing an open data portal in Austria. Funds will be mainly used in 2014.
Interests Euro - 1,182.54 7.35 14.71 98.01 1,302.61 - $ 1,693,39

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Spending

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Table 3 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

(The "budgeted" amount is the total planned for the year as submitted in your proposal form or your revised plan, and the "cumulative" column refers to the total spent to date this year. The "percentage spent to date" is the ratio of the cumulative amount spent over the budgeted amount.)
Expense Currency Budgeted Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Budgeted ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Percentage spent to date Explanation of variances from plan
Staff expenses (including on-costs, labour taxes, etc.) Euro 74,000 9,443.35 29,577.11 15,570.77 29,664,44 84,255.67 $ 96,200 $ 109,532,37 113,86 % The total amount also comprises expenses for project-related contractors from 2012, as it was included in the forecast budget. Without that, staff expenses for our employees sum up to 73,215.16 EUR. See also Q2 report.
Community support Euro 40,610 3,762.97 17,149.91 8,185.93 7,393.20 36,492.01 $ 52,793 $ 47,439.61 89,86 % Reduced as we received less FDC funds and donations than planned.
Free content generation Euro 40,610 602,14 11,790.76 1,315.89 16,912.45 30,621.24 $ 52,793 $ 39,807.61 75,4 % Reduced as we received less FDC funds and donations than planned.
Resources Euro 7,770 6,615.18 1,330.23 899,89 5,642.60 14,487.90 $ 10,101 $ 18,834.27 186,5 % The amount of administration and accounting was much higher than expected. This increased costs for external auditing amongst others.
Organisation Euro 51,000 9,444.38 16,178.84 6,246.79 15,257.41 47,127.42 $ 66,300 $ 61,265.65 92,4 % Reduced as we received less FDC funds and donations than planned.
TOTAL Euro 213,990 29,868.02 76,026.85 32,219.27 71,870.10 212,984.24 $ 278,187 $ 276,879.51 99,53 % Programms reduced as we received less FDC funds and donations than planned. Increased expenses for staff and administration.

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Progress against past year's goals/objectives

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The FDC needs to understand the impact of the initiatives your entity has implemented over the past year. Because the FDC distributes general funds, entities are not required to implement the exact initiatives proposed in the FDC proposal; the FDC expects each entity to spend money in the way it best sees fit to achieve its goals and those of the movement. However, please point out any significant changes from the original proposal, and the reasons for the changes. Note that any changes from the Grant proposal, among other things, must be consistent with the WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, must be reported to WMF, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement. The WMF mission is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."


Community Support

What were the stated objectives of this program? Please use SMART criteria to explain these goals.
  • Expand and diversify the community of editors and volunteers
  • Community building
What is your progress against these objectives? (Include metrics and number of volunteers/staff involved.)
 
Community event in Upper Austria
picture: Isiwal, CC-BY-SA 3.0 AT
 
Wikimedians in action at our "Wiki Loves Food" editor meet-up
picture: 80686, CC-BY-SA 3.0 AT
  • Wiki Loves Monuments contest: WLM 2013 in Austria had 190 participants. 73 of them (38 %) never contributed to any Wikimedia project before. An additional 11 users (6 %) were active only in other Wikimedia projects than Wikimedia Commons (de.wp mostly) before participating in WLM 2013. – Editing activities of the 73 new users (last update: 2014-03-29): 61 users made their last edits in a Wikimedia project in 2013-09, 54 of them only in Commons, 6 also in de.wp and 1 in hu.wp. 12 users continued contributing to Wikimedia projects after 2013-09 (last edits: 8 users in 2013-10, 1 user in 2013-12, 2 users in 2014-02 and 1 user in 2014-03), all of them to Commons and 3 of them also to other Wikimedia projects (de.wp, en.wp, simple.wp, de.wikivoyage, de.wiktionary, en.wiktionary and/or simple.wiktionary). Our jury system additionally enables recurring participants to get even more involved in the project: 3 of our 5 most active members of the pre-jury were only participants in 2012's WLM contest. Overall 18 users participated as members of our pre-jury. Each of them reviewed and rated several hundred or in case of the most active users thousands of pictures.
  • Wiki Loves Public Art contest: 66 participants of Wiki Loves Public Art in Austria contributed to a Wikimedia project for the first time. (22 contributed to WLM before and another 22 were established users either from our Commons or Wikipedia community.)
  • Social media: In 2013, WMAT's social media activities (Facebook, Google+, Twitter) began to have a substantial impact in terms of the number of people reached by these activities. WMAT's Facebook page had under 10 “likes“ by the beginning of the year and nearly 300 by the end of the year – this growth has been continuous and uninterrupted.
  • Very positive feedback from members and non-members concerning our services to the community.
Which Wikimedia movement strategic priority (or priorities) did this program address and how?
  • Increase Participation: Our activities aim at increasing the number of volunteers but also put a high priority into supporting existing volunteers to unfold their full potential and to maintain or even increase their motivation to contribute.
  • Encourage Innovation: We offer financial and organisational support as well as expertise for new ideas.
What key activities were conducted and/or milestones achieved with this program?
  • Diversifying communication channels to community and interested public by improving and increasing our communication through social networks (e.g. facebook and twitter), the members' wiki, mailinglists and our websites.
  • Minigrants to support community members in their work or with new ideas.
  • Assistance of Wikipedians in organizing local meet-ups all over Austria. In addition, board members and staff are regularly visiting these events, in order to inform about WMAT's activities and to collect ideas and stimuli for our work from the community.
  • Donation of prizes as incentives and appreciation for the Schreibwettbewerb, WikiCup and Wartungsbausteinwettbewerb participants (see "free content generation").
  • WMAT supported several authors by providing necessary literature resources with book grants.
  • Support of interested Wikimedians from Austria to participate in the Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong. The goal of WMAT's support was to enable the Austrian Wikimedians to get in contact with the international community, get a feeling for which topics rank internationally on a high level of attention and to gather ideas and input for current and future projects. Therefore, Wikimedia Österreich supported seven scholarship holders by covering for their travel costs, accommodation and the attendance fees.
  • Travel grants and travel coordination for 9 Austrian community members to attend WikiCON 2013 in Karlsruhe.
  • Support of two international thematic editor meet-ups.
If your entity did not achieve the desired objectives, why not? If it did, what enabled this? If the initiative was not in your plan, why did you pursue it?
  • We altered our plans to create a print newsletter (Wikimedium) and decided to save time and costs for layout and printing by implementing an online newsletter for our community which is complemented by occasional leaflets for community meet-ups.

Any additional details:


Free content generation

What were the stated objectives of this program? Please use SMART criteria to explain these goals.
  • Increase content in the Wikimedia projects, especially articles for de.wikipedia and pictures for Commons.
  • Valorization of the volunteer's work and involvement
What is your progress against these objectives? (Include metrics and number of volunteers/staff involved.)
 
WLM winning picture 2013
picture: GuentherZ, CC-BY-SA 3.0 AT
 
One of many pictures "supported by WMAT": Life Ball 2013
picture: Manfred Werner (Tsui) CC-BY-SA-3.0
  • 27,837 new files categorized as “Supported by Wikimedia Österreich“ were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by 93 individual users in 2013. This was a significant growth compared to 10,665 new files in 2012. 4,308 (15.5 %) of the 27,837 files of 2013 are used in at least one Wikimedia project. 4 images of 2013 are acknowledged as featured pictures and 483 as quality images by the Commons community, 2 each as featured pictures on the German language Wikipedia, the English language Wikipedia and the Persian language Wikipedia.
  • Wiki Loves Public Art contest (see Case Study Challenges for more information)
  • Wiki Loves Monuments contest: 11,074 pictures were uploaded during the 2013 edition of Wiki Loves Monuments in Austria. That's a growth of 238 pictures compared to 2012's WLM results. Austria got the 10th place regarding the nations with most uploaded pictures during WLM 2013, which is quite remarkable considering the size of the country. 1265 files of WLM 2013 in Austria are embedded in at least one Wikimedia project.
  • Landtagsprojekt Lower Austria (see Case Study Success for more details)
  • Wiki Loves Food Cooking Project: During the Wiki Loves Food Cooking Project (“Redaktionstreffen Essen und Trinken Wien 2013“) in Vienna 558 pictures of meals and groceries have been made. 98 of them are used in at least one Wikimedia project.
  • Wiki Loves Memories, a new project for scanning 20th century slides of everyday life was launched. In 2013, 423 slides were digitized and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. 10 of them are used in at least one Wikimedia project. The project is still running.
  • Supporting photographers at over 40 (mainly sport and cultural) events by lending equipment, organizing accreditations, travel grants etc.
  • Creation of new articles and/or improvement of existing articles connected to WMAT activities:
    • Wiki Loves Public Art contest: 34 lists on public art in Austria were created from the beginning of the year until the start of the competition.
    • Wiki Loves Monuments contest: 95 new articles on cultural heritage monuments in Austria were created from March 11th (creation of the Wikipedia page of WLM 2013 in Austria) to September 30th (end of competition).
    • Landtagsprojekt Lower Austria: 17 new articles on members of the State Parliament of Lower Austria were created from the beginning of the year (the Wikipedia page of the Landestagsprojekt Lower Austria was created on December 25th, 2012) to May 23th (the day the pictures were made).
    • Support by donating prizes to de.wp community contests: 18 new articles and 26 improved articles at the 19th Schreibwettbewerb (high-quality writing contest), thousands of new/improved articles (including 16 featured articles, 23 good articles and 1 featured list) at de.wp's WikiCup, and 4815 improved articles at the four editions of the Wartungsbausteinwettbewerb (contest for removing cleanup templates) in 2013.
  • QR Codes in the Botanical Garden in Graz: A cooperation that was started in 2012 finally fruited last year. The botanical garden of the university in Graz introduced signs with QR Codes linked to the Wikipedia articles of the respective plants. Beforehand, the required 300 articles were compiled in a list and created or revised by the biology community.
Which Wikimedia movement strategic priority (or priorities) did this program address and how?
  • Increase participation: Photography projects on the other hand are often the perfect low-threshold join-in activity for newbies to get involved in Wikimedia projects.
  • Increase reach: Especially GLAM activities often reach out to target groups that otherwise don't have many points of contact with online projects and communities. Successful GLAM projects can be a door opener to even more organizations and individuals that would otherwise be hard to reach.
What key activities were conducted and/or milestones achieved with this program?
  • Wiki Loves Public Art contest
  • Wiki Loves Monuments contest
  • Landtagsprojekt Lower Austria
  • Wiki Loves Food Cooking Project
  • Wiki Loves Memories
  • QR Codes in the Botanical Garden in Graz
  • Supporting photographers at events
  • Schools and University projects: Researching and creating teaching materials resulted in a pilot school workshop at the end of year. By doing this preliminary work we are prepared to conduct and support school and university workshops in the future.
If your entity did not achieve the desired objectives, why not? If it did, what enabled this? If the initiative was not in your plan, why did you pursue it?
  • WMAT is happy to support many enthusiastic photographers who enabled the great results in this program - so there are strong links to program 1. Especially photography contests are also a good way to attract new contributors, although our evaluation showed that we have to put further effort into involving them into our activities between the contests and that we have to improve our communication to make our services and support initiatives known to a broader part of our community. We should also extend our activities to gain more writers / editors in future. Evaluating the quality and use of our content has been another important challenge.

Any additional details:


Resources

What were the stated objectives of this program? Please use SMART criteria to explain these goals.
  • Generate € 25.000 funding for Wikimedia Österreich mission and activities
  • Extend the base of loyal donors
What is your progress against these objectives? (Include metrics and number of volunteers/staff involved.)
 
Our ED Claudia Garád at the netidee kick-off event in October 2013
picture: CC 0
  • We were not able to collect the planned 25.000 EUR donations because of difficulties with our technical infrastructure (donation tool) and a lack of time and resources. However, by acquiring the netidee grant, we managed to diversify our funds beyond our expectations.
Which Wikimedia movement strategic priority (or priorities) did this program address and how?
  • Stabilize infrastructure
What key activities were conducted and/or milestones achieved with this program?
  • WMAT successfully applied for the Austrian Fundraising Certificate, an important and generally accepted quality seal for fundraising organizations
  • Updating donor data in CiviCRM and establishing a process for donor communication
  • Diversifying funds with the successful application for the 50.000 EUR "netidee" grant
If your entity did not achieve the desired objectives, why not? If it did, what enabled this? If the initiative was not in your plan, why did you pursue it?
  • Our good relations to public administration organizations (e.g. Federal Chancellor's Office, City of Vienna) and the Open Knowledge Foundation Austria were key to our success of getting the netidee grant mentioned above. Problems with our technical infrastructure and a lack of time and resources were the main reasons for the lower sum of donations. We cancelled our Christmas fundraising campaign and learned that training staff and volunteers in fundraising skills is limited, as there too many other administrative and project-related tasks they need to handle.

Any additional details:


Organisation

What were the stated objectives of this program? Please use SMART criteria to explain these goals.
  • Professional acting of the organization
  • Improve administrative task treatment
  • Meet reporting requirements of Wikimedia Foundation, certification body and other donors
What is your progress against these objectives? (Include metrics and number of volunteers/staff involved.)
 
The board of WMAT at a strategy meeting on October 6th, 2013
picture: Claudia Garad, CC-BY-SA 3.0
  • The positive feedback of community members from in- and outside of our chapter and the growth of our members (many of them established, formerly sceptical Wikimedians) shows that we are on the right track.
  • 11 % growth in memberships.
  • Establishing the Good Governance Kodex provided a good basis for our further organisational development.
  • WMAT has a impeccable track record when it comes to FDC reporting and all our internal and external audits have been successful and didn't bring any major problems to light. However, there is room for improvement concerning efficient accounting, quality management and evaluation - challenges that will be addressed in 2014.
  • Approx. 30 national news accounts on our projects and initiatives (this is a plus of approx. 40 % compared to 2012).
Which Wikimedia movement strategic priority (or priorities) did this program address and how?
  • Improve quality: By enabling all stakeholders involved to carefully plan and evaluate our activities, we enhance the quality of the results in the long run. It also contributes to making sure that donation money is spent effectively, which is also an indicator for the quality of our projects.
What key activities were conducted and/or milestones achieved with this program?
  • Establishing an office in Vienna as a service center for Wikimedia volunteers
  • General assembly with approx. 25 participants, which also attracted approximately 10% non-members
  • Providing information and marketing material for our projects
  • 5 PR campaigns to promote our projects
  • Building an effective team of volunteers and staff
  • Implementing good governance structures
If your entity did not achieve the desired objectives, why not? If it did, what enabled this? If the initiative was not in your plan, why did you pursue it?
  • We made progress within the bounds of possibility, given the manifold tasks and challenges we faced during the last year (establishing a chapter office, setting up internal processes and structures, meeting reporting obligations while at the same time implementing a workplan and supporting the community). The main factor for our positive development in the last year is that we were able to build trust between staff, board and volunteers. There is room for improvement concerning effective administration and accounting, as well as in project planning and evaluation (see also the SWOT analysis above).

Any additional details:


Lessons learned

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Lessons from the past

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A key objective of the funding is to enable the movement as a whole to understand how to achieve shared goals better and faster. An important way of doing this is to identify lessons learned and insights from entities who receive funds, and to share these lessons across the movement. Please answer the following questions in 1–2 paragraphs each.

1. What were your major accomplishments in the past year, and how did you help to achieve movement goals?
  • We were able to strengthen our relationship to the Austrian Wikimedia community by proving that having a chapter with an office and staff has an added value for our volunteers. Attendance in events and projects increased, we could motivate new volunteers and got positive feedback from various sides, including former chapter critics. The result is a generally productive and constructive working environment for all stakeholders, the time and energy that must be invested into resolving conflicts are at an all time low.
  • WMAT managed to diversify its funds beyond expectations by acquiring the netidee grant (50.000 EUR). This enables us to launch a bold project together with the Open Knowledge Foundation Austria and the Cooperation Open Government Data Austria: the Open Data Portal Austria draws on Austria's pioneer role in regard of open government data. Access to open data is an important part of free knowledge and a valuable resource for Wikimedia projects.
2. What were your major setbacks in the past year (e.g., programs that were not successful)?
  • We wanted to conduct a survey among our volunteers concerning their view and satisfaction with our work. Unfortunately we were not able to accomplish the survey in 2013. As we wanted to do it thoroughly and generate comparability among chapters, we also looked into surveys of other chapters (in order to have a set of questions that are congruent across chapters). It was not always easy to find and get access to the information in English and also the overall survey design and technical implementation were major challenges that we were not able to overcome in 2013, also due to a lack of time and resources. We plan to do the survey in 2014 and would appreciate some help and guidance in this regard from the WMF program and evaluation team.
  • Our cooperation with the Austrian public broadcasting (ORF) is still on hold at the moment. The main reason is a lack of organizational readiness on the side of the ORF (concerning open culture, free licenses) that can not easily be overcome by one or two dedicated employees. We learned from other projects that the timing is pretty important for successful cooperations and that quite often a "dormant phase" is followed by very productive collaboration once the institution is "ready" for us.
  • Although WMAT offered travel scholarships for interested community members, no Austrian volunteer took part in this year's hackathon in Amsterdam. We are now looking for ways to broaden our technical / engineering community by cooperations with like-minded organizations which have a higher percentage of technophiliacs, such as OKFN Austria.
3. What factors (organizational, environmental) enabled your success?
  • Since we established an office and have employees, WMAT was capable to intensify its networking efforts regarding like-minded organizations. In this course, we etablished good relations to public administration organizations (e.g. Federal Chancellor's Office, City of Vienna) and the Open Knowledge Foundation Austria which were key to our success of getting the netidee grant mentioned above. We benefited from their expertise, resources and wider network regarding open data and the open data community which will also be helpful in the course of the project itself.
  • We entertain a long and fruitful cooperation with the Austrian Federal Monuments Office, which is together with our experienced project team a cruical factor of success especially for Wiki Loves Monuments. The cooperation was a door opener for many other partners and projects and is a constant source for new ideas and areas of collaboration.
  • WMUK's openness concerning their governance audit and the resources they provided to the movement was very helpful for us, in order to gain an understanding of the issues and challenges and possible ways to address them in our governance strategy.
  • WMSE facilitated the organization of WLPA a great deal and provided us with many useful information and resources. Our own experiences, processes and tools from WLM were also very beneficial.
  • For the Landtagsprojekt project we benefited from Austrian members who participated in various similar projects of WMDE and used their experiences to modify the concept for WMAT.
4. What unanticipated challenges did you encounter and how did this affect what you were able to accomplish?
  • We came across some unanticipated technical challenges (for details see threats in the SWOT analysis above) they limited our ability to diversify funds and set up an effective administration in our office.
  • Short-term planning of major community events (e.g. WikiCON 2013) in the wider German-speaking community influenced our project planning, especially during the traditionally busy months in fall. As result we decided to waive our second Landtagsprojekt in 2013.
5. What are the 2–3 most important lessons that other entities can learn from your experience? Consider learning from both the programmatic and institutional (what you have learned about professionalizing your entity, if you have done so) points of view.
  • See links to learning patterns below.

Lessons for the future

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The Wikimedia movement grows as each entity in the movement reflects and adapts its approaches to changing needs and contexts. The questions below encourage you to apply your thinking in the sections above of "how well have we done" and "what have we learned" to the development and execution of future organisational and program strategies. The questions below can be informed both by your own entities' learnings, as well as the learnings of other movement entities (e.g., adding a new program that appears to have caused significant impact in several other countries or communities).

1. What organisational or program strategies would you continue?
  • We want to continue our initiatives concerning organisational development, governance and program effectiveness. Hence, we created a program in our 2014 plan to address these topics. WMUK's openness concerning their governance audit and the resources they provided to the movement were very helpful for us, in order to gain an understanding of the issues and challenges and possible ways to address them in our governance strategy. Accordingly, we plan to elaborate on our strategies but also to share experiences and learnings in this field across the movement.
  • We will continue our broad support in the context of our photography projects - comprising equipment, support (e.g. organizing accreditations for various events), know-how transfer and coordinating photography contests. The evaluation of our past activities showed that there is a lot of potential for gaining new contributors and contributor retention. However, we also learned that there is still room for improvement, e.g. communicating the full scope of our services on a broader level and thereby further increasing participation in our projects.
2. What might you change in organisational and program strategies in order to improve the effectiveness of your entity?
  • We plan to introduce a more systematic project management and evaluation process and introduce a more outcomes-focused approach to our activities in general.
  • We introduced CiviCRM not only as an address management system, but also to handle our accounting. For several reasons (e.g. maintenance, security issues) we decided to move our accounting to a professional accounting tool. As outlined in our proposal, we plan to outsource the book keeping to a "professional" company. We already picked a suitable service provider, at the moment we are redefining our processes together with them and move our accounting from CiviCRM to a new accounting system. We are also revising the structure of our accounts to somehow fit the demands of all our auditors (FDC, external auditor, Fundraising Certificate) as best as possible and to create synergies and make the whole process more efficient. To further reduce complexity we also decided to change our business year to match the calendar year.
3. Please create at least one learning pattern from your entity's experiences this year and link to it here.

Stories of success and challenge

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Of all the accomplishments highlighted through this report, please share two detailed stories: one story of a success and one story of a challenge that your entity experienced over the past year in a few paragraphs each. Provide any details that might be helpful to others in the movement on the context, strategy, and impact of this initiative. We suggest you write this as you would tell a story to a friend or colleague. Please refrain from using bullet points or making a list, and rather focus on telling us about your organization's experience.

Case study: success

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  • Landtagsprojekt Lower Austria
 
Project leader Andrea with politician
picture: AleXXw, CC-BY-SA 3.0 AT
 
Wikimedians explaining Wikipedia to a politician
picture: Ralf Roletschek, CC-BY-SA 3.0 AT

In May 2013 WMAT conducted its first "independent" Landtagsprojekt (photographing members of the State Parliaments). A joint pilot project with the well established WMDE Landtagsprojekt team took place in November 2012 in Salzburg. One of our most active photography volunteers and board member Andrea Kareth, who took part in several Landtagsprojekte of WMDE, used her experience in order to design the Austrian edition of the project.

The launch of the project was carefully prepared in several meetings with representatives of the State Parliaments and an information event / photography workshop for interested volunteers in Austria. The workshop participants not only learned about flash photography and other technical tricks of the trade but also obtained first-hand knowledge from community members who attended and organized similar projects in Germany and shared their lessons learned. The aim of the project was to attract mostly Austrian volunteers for the project, to have WP articles of all the members of the Lower Austria State Parliament and to add photographs to most of these articles. Another target was to present and explain Wikipedia and free licenses to the politicians and administrative staff.

The project was very successful: As there were elections taking place in March, it was a goal to complete all new articles about first-time elected politicians until the photography-session took place. All the required articles have been created by our volunteers and roughly 85 percent of the politicians could be photographed. In the end, the project resulted in 744 photos, of which 574 were portrait pictures of the politicians. 118 images are used in at least one Wikimedia project. Our joint PR activities resulted in regional and national news coverage. The event was conducted almost completely with Austrian volunteers (six people) and one member from Germany, who assisted the project mainly with his technical expertise (illumination etc.). One staff member was involved with assisting the project leader regarding infrastructure and planning. Most volunteers who participated in the project have been to our preparatory workshop before and found it very helpful. The atmosphere was great, the support of the State Parliament administration unconditional and the politicians were very interested and constructive. All parties agreed that the project was very well prepared from all sides and were quite satisfied with the output. Nevertheless, the project team held an evaluation session to gather lessons learned and to further improve the quality and effectiveness of future projects. Although there were no major shortcomings, we found it helpful to document learnings in order to ensure that all the details run smoothly. As a result we documented several learning patterns on what went well and should be repeated and what could be improved and might need further attention when planning the next projects. The lessons learned cover the areas of communication, technical equipment, team building and practical advice for photographing.

For our internal organisation the Landtagsprojekt was also quite important: As it was a new project that we started from scratch, it was also a test run how volunteers, staff and external partners (State Parliament administration) could work together effectively. Especially the division of tasks between volunteers and staff worked really well. In order to keep it a volunteer project, staff resources mainly went into financial administration, reporting and public relations. The project manager was further assisted in networking and some organizational tasks.

In our view, this was the most successful start for the project which provides the perfect basis for future projects.

Results and further information: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Landtagsprojekt/Nieder%C3%B6sterreich/Ergebnisse

Case study: challenge

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  • Wiki Loves Public Art
 
 
WLPA Austria 2nd place
picture: Sucher, CC-BY-SA 3.0 AT

Together with four other countries Wikimedia Austria participated in the first Wiki Loves Public Art contest in May 2013. The goal of Wiki Loves Public Art was not only to get free-licensed and high-quality pictures of public art, but also to increase the general awareness for public art and available open data as well as attracting new photographers/editors to the Wikimedia-projects. The contest inlcuded only the cities of Vienna and Linz, as there was no comprehensive data on public art available for other parts of Austria.

There were great expectations, when at Wikimania 2012 Wiki Loves Public Art was announced on an international level. Wikimedia Austria had conducted Wiki Loves Monuments in 2011 and 2012 and received 12.000 photos every year, so that the lists of monuments in Wikipedia were filled to a high percentage with pictures. Members of our communties hoped to get more in touch with contemporary art now.

First challenge: Copyright. Though Freedom of Panorama (FoP) in Austria is very strong, there werde rumours, that pictures of contemporary artwork could be deleted on WM Commons for copyright violation according to the Uruguay Round within te framework of GATT and agreements of the WTO. Consultations with the WMF led to the conclusion, that such deletions should not be made in advance, but only by request of the artists. Though these regulations were sufficient for Austria, other European countries had difficulties with different laws concerning the publishing of photos of contemporary artwork in public areas. Sweden decided to get photographs only from inside museums.

Second challenge: Incomplete data. Another difficulty was to get lists of the artwork in public areas from the municipalities, who are responsible for the installations of public art. It turned out, that most of them were at the very beginning of publishing those data. At last we got lists of two big cities in Austria, Vienna and Linz. The lists proved to be incomplete, especially in respect for contemporary artwork. So we got lists of old statues and fountains, some of them we knew already, if they had been in the lists of protected monuments too. But it turned out, that a lot of them did not appear in Wikipedia yet, and we got some new authors who wrote about them, giving descriptions and appealing for photos. For the organizing team it was a new experience dealing with incomplete lists, accomplishing them on the fly, as long as the authorities provided new data.

Third challenge: Organisation. Due to the uncertainty during the preparations, the enthusiasm of the community dimished to a certain extend and lead to difficulties for the organisation of the project. While there was a lot of approval in the community to conduct another competition besides WLM in 2013 there was not the same level of commitment on the side of our volunteer organizers. As one result, there was no project leader. To compensate the situation completely by assigning more staff was out of question, as for WMAT it is very important that our Wikimedia projects are volunteer-driven endeavours and that staff intervention should be restricted to certain areas and should not represent the major part of the project. Hence, the project demanded more communication and coordination on all sides than usually necessary.

Contrast to WLM: We also realized that transferring the success story of WLM to similar project like WLPA is not that easy. Firstly, the context was different: By the time WLM started, the project had already gained considerable momentum within the community by collaboratively preparing the monuments lists. The time frame for preparing WLPA was considerably shorter and the available data less comprehensive. We were only able to obtain open data on public art for two Austrian cities, a fact that constituted a major constraint for the competition. Secondly, the subject was not different enough: We had difficulties to establish WLPA as a competition with a unique characteristic and not just a smaller edition of WLM. Public Art in many of the other participating countries consists of modern sculptures which are quite distinct from WLM monuments. In Austria this is not the case and we believe that this is one reason why none of our pictures made it to the international top 10 of WLPA.

Results: Overall there have been 2.416 files uploaded by 110 uploaders in Austria. Of these about 60 % contributed to a Wikimedia project for the first time, 20 % contributed to WLM before and another 20 % were established users either from our Commons- or Wikipedia-community. Of 1.233 public art objects in our de.Wikipedia-lists from Vienna and Linz, 1.002 have been illustrated with at least one picture after the contest. Many of the Austrian uploaders have not contributed to a Wikimedia-project before. Of all participating countries, Austria came second regarding the total amount of uploaded photographs and first regarding total amount of participants. All this despite the fact, that the contest was limited to two Austrian cities. This shows once more the outstanding popularity of photography projects in the Austrian community. In addition, we could generate press coverage in regional and national media.

Conclusions: The discussion about public art in Wikipedia is going on. For many participants and organisers the biggest challenge was to do pioneer work. The local authorities in Austria became aware of an increased interest in public art. Since the end of the contest another important city of Austria, Salzburg, has provided data for lists of public art. The other cities show increasing efforts to accomplish their data with an emphasis on modern and contemporary art. Wikipedians are entering new data to Wikipedia, and there is a team of new users arranging the photos of WLPA into categories and completing the descriptions there. Though the international organisation team of WLPA has resigned and there is a pause in 2014 for that contest, most of the participants in Austria agree, that there should be another edition of WLPA on the next level, improving the content of Wikipedia and WM Commons step by step.

More information:
http://wikilovespublicart.at
http://wikilovespublicart.org
http://stats.wlpa.at

Additional learning

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1. What are some of the activities that are happening in your community that are not chapter-led? What are the most successful among these, and why?
  • We have a very active volunteer who puts a lot of effort into bringing Wikipedia into his local community in Upper Austria, some initiatives were supported by WMAT (e.g. the so-called "Ortsbildmesse" fair). In addition there are some activities, where WMAT is not involved, such as Wikipedia courses in the local training institute of the Roman Catholic Church. This Wikipedia education program won the second place of an innovation prize awarded by the Upper Austrian training insititute union: http://wikipedia-wikimedia.blogspot.co.at/2013/04/2-preis-beim-innovationspreis-des.html
  • A couple of well established Austrian Wikipedians started what they call the "RegioWiki" project last year. The target is to get in contact with authors of local or regional wikis, exchange experiences and learnings and evaluate how Wikimedia projects can benefit from them and vice versa. In the long run they aim at gaining new authors, enable the exchange of content by harmonizing the legal framework / licenses and establishing a overarching wiki as a common platform for gathering valuable regional or local knowledge in Austria that would not be relevant for Wikipedia.
  • There are two very interesting university projects, which have been successfully conducted over a couple of years now: Prof. Falko Wilms from the University of Dornbirn is a power user of Wikiversity and has established it as an inherent part of his teaching. Prof. Thorsten Schwerte from the University of Innsbruck together with his team designed their own internal MediaWiki platform as a "playground" for biology students and in order to enable them to prepare articles there that can later be transfered to Wikipedia. With the support of Prof. Wilms and Prof. Schwerte, WMAT is currently using these success stories to motivate other universities to implement similar models (see for example the documentation (in German) of our recent "Wikipedia Meets University" event in Vienna: https://www.wikimedia.at/content/15-m%C3%A4rz-2014-wikipedia-meets-university).
2. Provide any links to any media coverage, blog posts, more detailed reports, more detailed financial information that you haven't already, as well as at least one photograph or video that captures the impact your entity had this past year.
 
Wikimedians and representatives of the Federal Monuments Office at the 2013 WLM award ceremony (in the background our common slogan "Working together for our cultural heritage").
picture: Udo Somma, CC-BY-SA 3.0 AT

Compliance

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Is your organization compliant with the terms defined in the grant agreement?

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1. As required in the grant agreement, please report any deviations from your grant proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.
2. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".
  • Yes.
3. Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Grant funds as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".
  • Yes.

Financial information

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1. Report any Grant funds that are unexpended fifteen (15) months after the Effective Date of the Grant Agreement. These funds must be returned to WMF or otherwise transferred or deployed as directed by WMF.
  • We don't have any unexpended grant funds.
2. Any interest earned on the Grant funds by Grantee will be used by Grantee to support the Mission and Purposes as set out in this Grant Agreement. Please report any interest earned during the reporting period and cumulatively over the duration of the Grant and Grant Agreement.
  • See table with revenues above.

Signature

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Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes. --CDG (talk) 21:03, 31 March 2014 (UTC)