Grants:APG/Proposals/2020-2021 round 1/Wikimedia CH/Impact report form

Purpose of the report

This form reports on Wikimedia CH's results for 2021 (1 January - 31 December). Wikimedia CH has recently become financially independent and does not rely on an Annual Plan Grant (APG) from the Wikimedia Foundation. Therefore, this report provides an overview of the year without strictly adhering to the APG format.

Metrics and results overview - all programs

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
Participants	1'200
Newly registered users	300
Content pages created or improved	30'000
Content reused by other Wikimedia projects	10'000
People reached in Switzerland	1'500'000

Program impacts

Executive Summary

Despite the continuing pandemic and the challenges it presented, 2021 was a successful year for Wikimedia CH in terms of both impact and learning. We took lessons learned in 2020 and put them into practice for various activities while learning new lessons along the way. Many activities remained virtual, but the slow shift from remote to in-person events presented opportunities to test and adapt our ways of working. We will continue to leverage these learnings and our agility as an organization into 2022 and the next five-year strategic period.

Wikimedia CH Strategy 2022-2026

Our impact

Our programmatic activities in 2021 centered around three main focal points: Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary, 50 years of women’s suffrage in Switzerland and our new five-year strategy.

Program GLAM was busy with events around women’s suffrage that attracted new GLAM partners and volunteers. It also developed and strengthened GLAM partnerships and continued its holistic program approach to ensure scalability and sustainability.

Program Community focused on 20th-anniversary celebrations and the inaugural in-person WikiSwiss Awards, as well as the first-ever bilingual workshop in collaboration with Program GLAM. These efforts attracted new volunteers while recognizing and engaging long-term Wikipedians.

Program Education continued building and supporting scalable, innovative models for free educational content, including improving the openedu.ch platform. The work around these projects will create the foundation for our future Innovation Lab.

Last, our Outreach efforts built on existing relationships and started new ones to advocate for free knowledge. This work included successful collaboration with Parldigi to further our progress on ensuring free access to images created for the Confederation on the Swiss Open Government Data Portal.

Our people

In terms of personnel, we welcomed a new Fundraising Manager, Stéphane Maffli. Stéphane maintains communication with our donors and collaborates in overseeing fundraising campaigns, including a successful end-of-year donation appeal by post and email.

Meanwhile, some members of the team took on new responsibilities. Marie-Louise Cognard began working at 80%, overseeing finance and business intelligence. She also took on a more active role in strategy development. Directly working with Marie-Louise is Marta Vidal our accountant, who first supported us as an external consultant and became a staff member in January 2021. She stepped up to 70% at the end of the year and has been very involved in our chapter’s internal workings. Additionally, we hired Ylva Liligren as our administration officer, who is now working at 70%.

Looking forward to 2022 and beyond, we plan to build capacity by growing organically to be able to continue delivering high quality and having an impact where our community expects us to.

Our organization

Organizationally, much of our behind-the-scenes work focused on developing and finalizing our new five-year strategy, which is in line with the Wikimedia Movement Strategy 2030. The final strategic plan will guide where to focus our resources and how to make the greatest impact over the next five years. It will also help us become a learning organization that continuously engages in four-step cycles of build, measure, test and learn. The strategic plan was developed over nearly two years with a select group of internal and external stakeholders. Experts in both strategy and mindfulness facilitated the process to ensure the result was a living document that serves as our North Star going forward.

We also spent 2021 ramping up and professionalizing our communication and fundraising efforts. This work included creating new communication and fundraising plans, improving our donor database, allowing donations through Twint and ensuring outreach tools are compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We also began developing messaging that articulates our value proposition and impact to ensure consistency and alignment when communicating about our work.

Our future

Looking forward to 2022, we will begin implementing the new five-year strategy while continuing to adapt our activities to the ever-changing business environment. We will also shape our organization to best fit our environment and multilingual needs. As the pandemic enters its third year, we aim to leverage our team’s flexible, virtual nature and expertise navigating the digital landscape to continue to build our reputation as a trustworthy partner in online knowledge.

Strategy at a glance

Our mission

Wikimedia CH’s mission is to:

• Collect, curate and disseminate free knowledge.
• Promote the work of contributors.
• Help Swiss memory institutions share their knowledge, collections and curatorial resources digitally with a global community through a global platform – all this to make the (Swiss) cultural heritage and its diversity more accessible to the world.
• Sensitize all education levels to sustainable use of digital information.
• Advocate for free knowledge, also at the political level.

Our strategy

The Wikimedia Foundation officially recognizes Wikimedia CH as the Swiss chapter of the global Wikimedia Movement. We support and advance free knowledge, focusing on four impact directions.

Impact directions

1. Program GLAM – We collaborate with galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) throughout Switzerland to provide digital access to memory institutions’ collections and artifacts. We aim to share the country’s culture and history in a sustainable format and across all borders.
2. Program Education – We deliver and collaborate on education programs that advance learning for children and adults at every level. Our work supports lifelong learning as well as teachers and trainers at schools, universities and other higher education institutions.
3. Program Community – We help the Wikimedia CH community grow, supporting existing members and cultivating new Wikipedians. Among other activities, we train and mentor Wikipedia editors and support our community’s diverse and multicultural interests with targeted programming.
4. Partnership & Outreach – We believe in using our unique position in the field of information exchange to be an influencer on national and international issues concerning open access and open knowledge. We offer our viewpoints on copyright, technology and more.

Program GLAM

Overview

In 2021, Program GLAM partnered with GLAM institutions in and outside Switzerland, collaborated with fellow chapters and built digital competence and technologies to improve access to cultural heritage and diversity. This year’s GLAM program was packed with events celebrating 50 years of women’s suffrage in Switzerland. Existing and new collaborations coalesced around this theme. For example, we joined longtime partner Who writes his_tory? to lead an edit-a-thon concentrating on Swiss women filmmakers, described in detail in GLAM’s upcoming highlight section.

While we strengthened and developed partnerships around the women’s suffrage celebration, we also ensured a holistic Program GLAM and investigated ways to sustainably scale the program and build team capacity. One of many examples is Program GLAM’s work to share technological knowledge, which we achieved via two different approaches. First, we offered events that made tech-related knowledge more accessible, such as GLAM on Tour at the Enter Museum (a museum of technological artifacts and their manuals) and our various activities with the library of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Library). Second, we further advanced our own technologies and continued sharing them with the GLAM community, Wikipedia chapters and people around the world. They include the WMCH Map Service and GLAM Statistical Tool, allowing users to learn about GLAM resources throughout Switzerland and other countries and to easily discern how best to improve related knowledge shared on Wikipedia.

Highlight activity

Frauenbewegungen Mouvements féministes Biel-Bienne

50 years women suffrage

50 Years Swiss Women’s Suffrage was a hallmark of Program GLAM in 2021. Multiple events contributed to a year-long celebration that inspired fantastic community engagement and helped develop new GLAM partnerships under a unifying theme. In fact, a new opportunity emerged as professionals from participating GLAM institutions asked us to repeat a similar event in their own organization. All event formats worked well – online, hybrid and in-person.

Of particular interest was a virtual edit-a-thon about Swiss women filmmakers that was part of the schedule for the Solothurn Film Festival. Led by representatives of Who writes his_tory? and Wikimedia CH, the workshop focused on Wikipedia articles about women in film and women’s suffrage in three languages (German, French and Italian). This edit-a-thon was our chapter’s first bilingual workshop, taking place in both French and German. (Italian was also an option. While there were no Italian-speaking participants, articles in Italian were created and edited during the event.)

In 2016, volunteer group Who writes his_tory? began a German-language initiative to increase and improve Wikipedia information about art and feminism. With this 2021 event, Programs GLAM and Community partnered to reach German- and French-speaking community members alike. Furthermore, the writing workshop was a fantastic way to integrate the Wikiverse into the film festival, continuing the Who writes his_tory? partnership with this decades-old heritage institution that celebrates Swiss film productions.

Key program activities

Map Service

Femmes du Jura bernois

• Offered GLAM on Tour at the Enter Museum, allowing participants to interact with thousands of technological artifacts. Technical manuals and reference books helped to improve Wikipedia articles.
• Readied the GLAM Statistical Tool for a global rollout as it continues to garner great feedback from other chapters.
• Improved the WMCH Map Service software so that international cards can load faster, making the application more user-friendly for chapters and GLAM institutions outside Switzerland. Also, formulated new requirements for the WMCH Map Service, to be implemented in early 2022.
• Following the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, set up a project page to share the International Council of Museums (ICOM) appeal to preserve the country’s art and cultural treasures on Wikipedia and other Wiki platforms. We have worked closely with ICOM on past International Museum Day events and did the same this year.
• With the German and Austrian chapters, joined #1Lib1Ref for the first time and created project pages in German and French, issuing a call to add reliable evidence to Wikipedia articles where it is missing.
• Produced various activities with the ETH Library – e.g. GLAMHack 2021 and WikiProject ETH Portraits. Uploaded library content onto Wikimedia projects (including a complete gallery of women elected to the national parliament in 1971) and organized workshops.
• Led activities for International Museum Day 2021 in collaboration with border chapters, including a Wikidata Contest, a social media campaign and an article with ICOM.
• Supported International Archives Week 2021, focusing on the theme “Empowering Archives.”
• Contributed to the Memoriav OpenGLAM Online Symposium with an opening speech, a Wikiverse presentation and a Wikimedia Commons workshop in French with simultaneous translation in German.
• Collaborated to ensure that the world-famous fossil collection of Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle Neuchâtel is now available on Wikimedia Commons and its attached scientific data is searchable on Wikidata.
• Developed and financed Wikidata introduction courses for GLAM in German and English in cooperation with the OpenGLAM CH working group.
• Facilitated a successful event with the political think tank Foraus to create and edit Wikipedia articles about women in foreign politics.

Program impact

Key accomplishments

• We created a thematic focus that tied back to the mission: 50 years of women’s suffrage in Switzerland. It gave many of the year’s activities cohesion and focus, which helped us reach new GLAMs and volunteers with a subject that interested them.
• Part of the women’s suffrage events included a collaboration with Program Community to lead the first bilingual (French/German) workshop, ensuring that a larger part of the Wikipedia community could join the event.
• We also developed new partnerships, including a partnership with the Swiss Jesuits, who have a first-class library in Zurich and a large archive on the order’s activities in Switzerland. They showed great interest in strengthening their partnership with Wikimedia CH. The first Wikipedia workshop took place in 2021, with a continuation planned for 2022.
• Our GLAM Statistical Tool continued to receive great feedback from other chapters. This feedback helps us ready the tool for a global rollout.

Lessons learned

• Build engagement and interest with a thematic focus. The 2021 topic of women’s suffrage piqued our GLAM community’s interest and provided an excellent opportunity to develop new GLAM partnerships and collaborate on a common goal.
• Engage co-organizers, such as the Wikipedia community and GLAM institutions, to marshal needed resources and extend the impact of thematic programming. We did so for the women’s suffrage celebration, and our approach worked well and strengthened relations and collaboration among all parties involved.
• Define clear roles and responsibilities for activities with other chapters to achieve better, more organized, more efficient collaborations.

Looking ahead

As Program GLAM turns its focus to 2022, we will introduce a new theme to leverage this year’s lessons. The Year of Sound celebrates the 100th year of radio in Switzerland and focuses on music, soundwaves, and other audio heritage. Just as with our women’s suffrage celebration, we intend to engage co-organizers and build a cohesive set of events around the new theme. We’ve already issued a call to Wikimedians, GLAMs and partners to participate, edit related Wiki content and/or plan events. Also, a workshop at the Swiss Postal Services, Telegraphy and Telephony (PTT) archives is already planned, as is a conference at the Enter Museum.

Of course, we will continue serving the interests across the spectrum of GLAM topics beyond the Year of Sound. Our longtime practice has been to scale programming that has proven successful in the past. The structure of GLAM on Tour events — whereby Wikipedians are invited to an exclusive, multi-day excursion at a select GLAM institution — is one that our community has always favored. As such, we are planning four GLAM on Tour events for 2022, including one confirmed with the Zurich Central Library.

Along with programmatic planning, Program GLAM will focus on improving and scaling operations in 2022. We will explore how to build the team’s capacity to manage our expanding program. Also, we will help integrate Wikimedia tools and workflows into Swiss GLAM institutions.

Program Education

Overview

As in past years, Program Education supported education for all age levels in 2021, particularly around tools for educators, digital innovation and access to education. We continued building and supporting scalable, reusable partnership models and free platforms for educational content. We also explored how to build the team to manage both educational activities and a new innovation space starting in 2022. Last, we helped teach learners how to write Wikipedia articles and evaluate an article’s quality to build digital skills and literacy.

This work was in line with Program Education’s strategy providing material and tools to trainers, emphasizing the Theory of Change model where teachers can leverage their unique relationships with students to transform education. In Switzerland, educators are hungry for technology and new methodologies, and Wikimedia CH can provide solutions, particularly around online learning and open knowledge. These interests align with Wikimedia CH’s new five-year strategy (2022-2026), which adds Experimentation & Innovation as a fifth impact direction (in addition to the four current directions). As such, much of Program Education’s work in 2021 centered on building the foundation for innovation going forward.

Highlight activity

Klexikon logo

Program Education provided consistent funding to several free platforms that are pursuing their own independent programs to make educational content accessible to kids: (1) Wikimini, an online encyclopedia for and by students (older children help younger ones write entries); (2) Dicoado, a dictionary for and by students available in Switzerland’s French linguistic area; (3) Chinderzytig, a newspaper for young people published by an association of teachers; and (4) Klexikon, a German online encyclopedia for children aged six to twelve years modeled after Wikipedia. Wikimedia CH’s own openedu.ch offers even more tools for educators, providing them with a platform to search which Wikimedia and associated projects are available for their lessons.

Thanks in part to our support, several of the platforms were improved in 2021. Of note:

• Wikimini was migrated to a new data center to ensure reliability and improved performance.
• Dicoado received a complete restyling and improved user interface. The team is also planning to open the platform in other languages.
• Chinderzytig instituted a new strategy to propose more solutions to Switzerland’s German-speaking schools.

This work was essential to lay the groundwork for launching an Innovation Lab in 2022 as part of our Experimentation & Innovation impact direction. Our partnership model supports innovative projects and aims to advance innovation in the field of education. Each platform reports back to Wikimedia CH on its progress. Already, we have created a synergy with Chinderzytig and Dicoado by championing the new ideas they have shared with us. For example, Dicoado made software improvements in 2021, including implementing a chat feature, and the project leader shared with us the lessons learned from their implementation and related training.

Key program activities

• 
  Editathon women in science
• 
  EPFL Diversithaton
• 
  EPFL Sustainabilithon
• 
  Wikipedia for peace

Wiki Science competition

• Continued work on openedu.ch by mapping the European key competences to Wikimedia projects so that educators understand and use our platforms.
• Supported three Wikipedia for Peace camps in collaboration with ongoing partner Service Civil International (SCI). An online camp about women’s suffrage was held in February, and another online camp about SCI history took place in April. In September, we supported the week-long in-person camp Wikipedia for Peace: Climate Justice. At each camp, participants learned how to write Wikipedia articles and learned about inspiring activists, events and organizations.
• Financially supported Switzerland’s participation in the international Wiki Science Competition, the largest photo contest in the world. For the second time, Switzerland also held a national contest with its own jury and prizes; the contest included Liechtenstein.
• Advanced lifelong learning in science through edit-a-thons in partnership with the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).
• Contributed to a scientific paper on Wikipedia as a tool for academic teaching, working with the University of Zurich and garnering interest from other chapters.
• Partnered with institutions to support university-level education, helping students learn to contribute to Wikipedia. Some examples include:
  • Partner: University of Bern. Program: Bachelor-level seminar about “Women at the PTT” in cooperation with the historical PTT archives.
  • Partner: University of Neuchâtel. Program: Bimonthly online WikiNeocomensia meetups for future GLAM professionals.
  • Partner: Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW). Program: A joint project for students in the Applied Languages program to undertake real translation assignments from Wikipedia.
• Collaborated with educators to support learning at the high school level and below, leading lessons and workshops for both teachers and students about using Wikipedia and other projects in an academic context. For example, we taught students how to evaluate the quality of a Wikipedia article and create their own articles with Lernfeld Wikipedia, a project of the 3BZ class of Muttenz High School. We will have a follow-up in 2022 with the same ambassador.

Program impact

Key accomplishments

• Our work with Wikimini, Klexikon, Chinderzytig and Dicoado as tools that can operate in the academic context created a strong model, learnings and synergies in 2021 to develop an Innovation Lab starting in 2022.
• Also in preparation for the forthcoming innovation space, we continued to improve and promote openedu.ch by ensuring that educators relying on the European Union’s educational rubric can see how openedu.ch and Wikimedia projects align with the key competences.
• Finally, in 2021, we began developing an Education strategy that focuses on free learning platforms to make education more accessible.

Lessons learned

• Provide long-term support to partners, a necessity to grow and consolidate innovative free educational resources. A single grant is insufficient to support them, and they need more than merely financial assistance.
• For workshops, give students better guidelines about suitable topics for a future Wikipedia article.

Looking ahead

In 2022, Program Education will incorporate a substantial portion of its work into Wikimedia CH’s new Experimentation & Innovation impact direction to enable innovation in education. We will build the team’s capacity with a dedicated resource to create the Innovation Lab.

This work aligns with the Wikipedia Movement Strategy. One of the strategy’s priority initiatives is to “enhance communication and collaboration capacity with partners and collaborators” (under the recommendation “coordinate across stakeholders”). The Innovation Lab will provide a sandbox where collaborators can invent and explore together. Another priority initiative is “continuous experimentation, technology, and partnerships for content, formats, and devices” (under the recommendation “innovate in free knowledge”). Similarly, the Innovation Lab’s reason for being is to inspire new educational technologies that make learning more accessible.

Throughout 2021, we worked closely with relevant partners and stakeholders to amplify our efforts and augment our sustainability and efficiency without reinventing the wheel. We’ll do the same in 2022. Our goal is to identify promising tools gaining momentum in Switzerland’s education community and help them flourish without competing with one another.

Program Community

Overview

As in past years, Program Community focused its activities on community health, community building, recruitment and international collaboration. Our 2021 activities were dominated by the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia, 50 years of women’s suffrage in Switzerland and the WikiSwiss Awards. In collaboration with Program GLAM, we held our first-ever bilingual workshop as part of the women’s suffrage theme, making the event more accessible to Switzerland’s German- and French-speaking communities. Thematic events also included the sixth edition of Women for Wikipedia.

Program Community also launched a flagship event with our first-ever awards ceremony to honor key volunteers throughout Switzerland, as explained in Community’s highlight section. We enhanced our international relationships at WikiCons and Wikimania, and we promoted interests valued by our community, including the topic of Black people and culture, as well as climate change. We hope the WikiSwiss Awards and all our activities will continue to build connections and show our gratitude for years to come.

Highlight activity

• 
  Wikipedia 20 logo
• 
  WikiSwiss Award ceremony
• 
  Winner of Wiki Loves Switzerland
• 
  Wiki Swiss Award documents
• 
  Wiki Swiss Award
• 
  Marie-Christine Doffey

In 2021, Wikimedia CH conceived of and realized the first-ever WikiSwiss Awards and the accompanying in-person celebration on 12 June in Lucerne. We welcomed 55 guests to the event, and many of the attendees met in person for the first time. It received almost universally positive feedback and was a valuable networking opportunity. In addition to the awards, the half-day ceremony included a celebration of Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary, a networking lunch, two keynote presentations and a panel discussion. Read more about the speakers and the future of data in the Partnership & Outreach highlight later in this report. Or watch our video about the ceremony.

The WikiSwiss Awards honored the extraordinary work and dedication of the community’s volunteers. In particular, this year’s awards were given to those Wikipedians living in Switzerland who’d been active for at least the past five years and enhanced Wikimedia projects in German, Italian, French, Alemannic or Romansh. The winners contributed a minimum of 10,000 edits, including contributing consistently to Swiss-related content (at least 50 edits and 1,000 bytes in a single article) in the main categories related to Switzerland.

At the awards ceremony, we also celebrated the winner of Wiki Loves Switzerland 2020. While this contest actually occurred the year before, we handed out the award at our 2021 ceremony. You can read more about Wiki Loves Switzerland in Wikimedia CH’s Impact Report 2020.

We took away some key learnings from our first edition of the WikiSwiss Awards. First, organizing such an event should be a collaboration between the chapter’s staff and our community. Second, the ceremony should focus squarely on the honorees and be rooted in their interests and needs – we should have a separate event(s) for donors, as necessary. Third, a single event for all linguistic areas – like this year’s event – seems like a good approach in the future. However, centralized events will need to ensure accommodations for everyone (e.g. hotel accommodations, translation services, babysitting).

Fourth, it may be best to give awards with less frequency, particularly in light of the ongoing pandemic. The challenges of planning a large in-person event during the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be understated. Restrictions on gatherings limited how many people could attend this year (we could have hosted over twice as many guests without the restrictions). And we faced some criticism for holding an in-person event at all even though we followed all of Switzerland’s protocols. Finally, combining future ceremonies with the General Assembly may be interesting.

Key program activities

• Supported various celebrations for Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary (in addition to the event highlighted above):
  • Sang “Happy Birthday” on Zoom with Jimmy Wales (access via Facebook).
  • Produced a video (see it at 57:34 of this YouTube video) for Wikipedia’s global virtual birthday party.
• Celebrated 50 years of women’s suffrage in Switzerland with a yearlong schedule of events, including several edit-a-thons to enhance open knowledge about the right to vote and women’s history in Switzerland, as well as the sixth edition of Women for Wikipedia. Of note:
  • In response to a clear demand from our community, we held the first-ever bilingual event: the January 2021 virtual edit-a-thon about women in film presented in German and French. This same event was the first time a community group had evolved to create a dual-language event. The Who writes his_tory? initiative has been a German-language volunteer group for years but changed their typical programming to offer a more explicit welcome to the French-speaking community. The event’s successes included 11 articles created and 20 more improved by the 12 or so French-language participants (see the event dashboard). Moreover, Programs GLAM and Community collaborated to support the event, lending expertise in both fields. (More details about the edit-a-thon are in GLAM’s highlight section.)
• Participated in WikiCons. WikiCon Francophone was a 100% virtual event organized by a team out of Tunis, Tunisia. A hybrid German WikiCon included live activities in Erfurt, Germany, and worldwide online participation. Ulrich Lantermann, Community Manager, shed light on the topic “Wikipedia in Education” and presented current projects from Switzerland.
• Supported weekly online meetups and an edit-a-thon with Noircir Wikipedia to improve articles about Black people and culture, recruit new Wikipedians and support international outreach.
• Organized workshops around climate change topics as part of the WikiProjekt Schweiz Klima.
• Helped organize the #WikiGap edit-a-thon in cooperation with the Swedish Embassy and the German and Austrian chapters.
• Supported several other workshops and edit-a-thons with new and existing partners, including Nau.ch and the Jesuit Library in Zurich.
• Presented openedu.ch and the Cassandra project at the online Wikimania in August.
• Organized the Priroda Dossier editing contest with Swiss OpenStreetMap to improve and add entries under the category “Protected Areas of Switzerland.” Participants were active in German, French and Italian, and we cross-linked with Wikidata and OpenStreetMap.

Program impact

Key accomplishments

• In 2021, Program Community held the chapter’s biggest in-person event ever (hosting 55 people) to celebrate Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary and the WikiSwiss Awards.
• In another first, we supported the first-ever bilingual activity, meeting a clear need from the community. The edit-a-thon about Swiss women filmmakers at the Solothurn Film Festival was held in German and French, expanding access to the Who writes his_tory? events that have been offered only in German for years.
• Program Community attracted new editors and re-energized existing ones with the chapter’s thematic focus. Even workshop series that have been offered for years supported the theme. For example, WikiProjekt Schweiz, a series of writing ateliers, included a workshop at the Historical Museum in Baden on women’s historical biographies and another workshop at the Gosteli Foundation, the archive on the history of the Swiss women’s movement in Worblaufen near Bern.
• Throughout the year, we continued to build our experience around successful virtual and hybrid events.

Lessons learned

• Involve the community when organizing large in-person events like the WikiSwiss Awards Ceremony because they require significant work.
• Conversely, recognize that digital workshops require more upfront preparation to organize digital resources, both for the organizing partners and for Wikipedians.
• Acknowledge and continue to respond to Wikipedians’ strong appetite for bilingual (French/German) workshops and events.
• Carefully consider the theme for editing contests and edit-a-thons to generate interest and participation. For example, the theme of women’s suffrage generated significant interest. In contrast, for the Priroda Dossier editing contest, the theme of “Protected Areas of Switzerland” was less successful than the previous year’s theme of “Castles and Palaces.”

Looking ahead

In 2022, we plan to further explore how to scale our Community efforts to better engage volunteers. As mentioned in Program GLAM, we learned in 2021 that our chapter can build engagement and interest with a thematic focus and that we should engage co-organizers to marshal needed resources and extend the impact of thematic programming. These same lessons apply to Program Community. As part of our efforts, we will recruit a junior-level Community Manager to involve community members more actively. We will also promote community members’ ongoing involvement in yearlong thematic events centered around the Year of Sound.

Operationally, we will look at revamping some or all train-the-trainer programs so that trainers who prepare institutions’ instructors to host future workshops on their own are compensated for their time and effort – a clear demand from our community.

Partnerships & Outreach

Overview

ATED 50 years

PTT-vortrag

Wikimedia CH believes in using its unique position in the field of information exchange to be an influencer on issues concerning open access and open knowledge — in Switzerland, throughout Europe and across the globe. We offer our viewpoints on copyright, digital sustainability, technology and more, creating partnerships and reaching out to other actors in the various fields wherever possible. In 2021, our activities focused on national advocacy to influence policy while building upon existing relationships and starting new ones with like-minded organizations. For example, we continued our longtime affiliation with Parldigi, the Swiss parliamentary group on digital sustainability founded in 2009 that became an association in 2021. We also presented projects and examples of our work promoting free knowledge at the first Swiss Virtual Expo.

Furthermore, we began exploring a new focus on environmental issues and climate change. We collaborated with Klima-Allianz Schweiz, a new alliance for our chapter, and Alliance Digitale, which added the topic of climate change to its activities.

Our fundraising remained crucial to obtain a budget for 2022 activities, while our communication activities supported all our initiatives.

Highlight activity

As the Program Community highlight mentioned, the WikiSwiss Awards Ceremony was a half-day event that brought the community, donors and partners together for meaningful discussions and networking opportunities. While honoring the dedication of our volunteers, we also took time to discuss the future of data. Attendees were given the following prompt ahead of the event to spark discussion.

The monopolization and capitalization of knowledge: What is knowledge worth in the digital age? Who will control access to knowledge in the future? How can knowledge be made more democratic?

Two keynote speakers addressed this theme. The first was Monique Morrow, an American telecommunications engineer and president and co-founder of Humanized Internet, a nonprofit organization active in protecting the digital identities of underrepresented populations. The second speaker was Hannes Grassegger, who is, among other things, a technology reporter, economist, former financial analyst, member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Experts Community and author of “Das Kapital bin Ich” (Kein & Aber Verlag, Berlin/Zürich, 2014) about why we should own our data. After the keynotes, four panelists discussed the same theme with attendees. (Watch our video about the ceremony, which includes highlights of the presentations.)

Key program activities

WM CH new website

WikiGAP

• Participated in Parldigi meetings around topics like open knowledge, electronic identification devices and data privacy. Attended a hybrid online parliamentarian dinner on artificial intelligence. Of note:
  • As part of Parldigi, Wikimedia CH has worked for years at the political level to shape opinions about open knowledge. A key example is our advocacy for free access to images made on behalf of the government (e.g. see the 2019 impact report discussing our past work). The issue won major support this year when the Federal Council supported a motion approving the copyright release of images created on behalf of the Confederation.
• As a founding member, officially launched WikiFranca under Swiss legislation at the French-speaking WikiCon in November. The nonprofit association will build partnerships with institutions and cultural networks, providing the French-speaking community with reliable and diversified sources.
• Conducted significant outreach around Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary. Activities included (1) singing “Happy Birthday” live on Zoom with the team, partners and Jimmy Wales (access via Facebook); (2) producing a video (see it at 57:34 of this YouTube video) for Wikipedia’s global virtual birthday party, which we shared on all channels; and (3) incorporating a celebration for longtime Wikipedians at the first-ever WikiSwiss Awards (described in the Community and Outreach highlight sections).
• Joined online meetings for the Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU (FKAGEU) and the Alliance Digitale, the latter of which included adding the topic of climate change to the alliance’s activities.
• Joined the Klima-Allianz Schweiz, an alliance of civil society organizations committed to climate justice. Also worked with other diverse stakeholders on environmental topics related to data.
• Continued professionalizing our communication and fundraising practices, including creating new plans, sending out successful fundraising campaigns, improving our donor database, allowing donations through Twint and ensuring outreach tools are compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
• Spoke at Swiss Post in Bern as well as on other occasions to share best practices around transparency, virtual work, women in leadership and organization.
• Presented projects and examples of our work to promote free knowledge at the first Swiss Virtual Expo, a virtual 3D exhibition for companies, people and projects that animate the Swiss business scene. Our partner organization ated - ICT Ticino hosted the expo for its 50th anniversary.
• Continued supporting Kiwix, which was selected as a finalist for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MIT Solve Challenge in Digital Inclusion, coming out on top of 1,800 other applicants this year.
• Collaborated on international public relations concerning China blocking the Wikimedia Foundation request for observer status at the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), issuing media releases in Switzerland in German, French, Italian and English: China again blocks Wikimedia Foundation’s accreditation - Wikimedia.
• Launched Wikimedia CH’s new YouTube channel in August – a useful outlet for video material.
• Began work on key messages around Wikimedia CH’s vision, mission and work. This work is critical to better position the chapter, communicate the value of its work and develop consistent, cohesive outreach messages for the whole team.

Program impact

Key accomplishments

• Wikimedia CH helped attain a positive result from advocacy work around free access to images, earning the Federal Council’s support of Motion 21.4195 to release Confederation images on the Open Government Data Portal. This motion was on the agenda of the National Council on 18 December. Since a member of parliament opposed it, any decision was postponed. However, the principle of public access defined in the Open Government Data Strategy should be applied to images. In the future, they should be accessible to all and usable free of charge.
• We built up our newsletter outreach, increasing our subscribers by more than 7,000, a 33% increase from January 2021 to January 2022.
• We collaborated closely with the Wikimedia Foundation’s communication team for the first time. As a result, Jimmy Wales joined our Zoom celebration of Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary. Plus, we got a global echo on our awareness campaign with ICOM to protect Afghanistan’s cultural heritage.
• The chapter advanced our climate change activities by creating a new partnership with Klima-Allianz Schweiz and strengthening our existing partnership with Alliance Digitale.
• We emphasized a collaborative approach with partners to communicate about events, even teaming up to create several key visuals for our social media campaigns. Examples are the edit-a-thons at the EPFL and the edit-a-thon Les femmes du Jura with the Canton of Bern and Memoires d’ici.

Lessons learned

• To ensure an activity’s success, focus on clear project management, precisely delegate tasks and be flexible. The entire Wikimedia CH team routinely exercises these skills, particularly since the pandemic has hampered advance planning, making event planning more rushed than usual. For future events, we need to ensure adequate event planning and follow-up to maintain momentum and engagement from participants.
• Define clear language about who we are and what we want to achieve to communicate more effectively. The work of establishing a clear communication position starts with Wikimedia CH’s internal alignment to ensure the team is “singing the same song.” Our process of creating a five-year strategy helped create collective language around what we do and why.
• Coordinate communication activities directly with our partners’ communication colleagues to ensure that Wikimedia CH is better represented and more visible in the media and in the public’s awareness.
• Continue aligning our efforts with same-language and like-minded chapters to ensure efforts are synchronized and impacts are tangible. These collaborations will include contributing and participating in hub discussions currently ongoing in the Movement, such as the Innovation Lab our chapter is pursuing.

Looking ahead

Wikimedia CH is a founding member of WikiFranca. As such, in 2022, we will continue supporting and helping to develop its new structure as a nonprofit association, aiming to build a viable partnership that continues to grow in its service to the French-speaking Wiki community.

More broadly, our chapter will continue maintaining and expanding current activities and advocating for issues important to the Wikimedia Movement, such as copyrights, freedom of panorama and net neutrality. We’ll also remain committed to environmental issues and climate change – a topic we began exploring in 2021 – especially as they relate to data and open knowledge. Wikimedia CH will analyze how to support and align with the Wikimedia Environmental Sustainability Covenant. Finally, we will proceed with defining the chapter’s key messaging to align with our vision, mission and values.

Looking ahead as a chapter

Our four impact directions – GLAM, Education, Community and Partnership & Outreach – intertwine with and support one another. And just as each program makes Wikimedia CH more than a sum of its parts, we strive to grow together to enhance the chapter as a whole. Beginning in 2022, Wikimedia CH plans to pursue a new five-year strategy, which includes the new Experimentation & Innovation impact direction. We also aim to become a learning organization that advances continuous, collective learning within our organization and with partners.

Specific to our programming, we will capitalize on our 2021 lessons learned by offering our community a theme around which we can build common interests, partnerships and engagement. To celebrate 100 years of radio in Switzerland, we will highlight 2022’s theme, Year of Sound, throughout many of our activities.

Beyond thematic activities, we’ll remain committed to scaling and leveraging past success rather than “recreating the wheel.” These include activities like the GLAM on Tour series, Lernfeld Wikipedia, the WikiSwiss Awards and our advocacy work with Parldigi. Similarly, we’ll continue advancing successful technologies, including the GLAM Statistical Tool, WMCH Map Service and openedu.ch.

Finally, we plan to build capacity in several areas, which is key to enabling our team. We recognize that with our chapter’s success comes more responsibility to follow through with similar programming. So, we will explore how to build the team’s capacity to expand Program GLAM’s activities, support Program Education’s work in the Innovation Lab and advance Program Community’s recruitment efforts. We’ll also foster more co-sponsorship opportunities and explore compensation for our train-the-trainer program(s) to extend our reach in partner organizations.

Revenues received during this 12-month period

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
Exchange Rate								1,0385	1,0385
Membership fees	CHF	15'000,00	12'476,52	2'784,69	120,00	315,00	15'696,21	15'577,50	16'300,51
WMF Fundraising Costs	CHF	130'000,00	1'529,50	841,89	416,52	125'993,87	127'993,87	135'005,00	132'921,63	The final amount always varies slightly compared to the original planned amount, as it depends upon the real amount of money raised for the WMF at the end of the year.
Donations WMCH	CHF	1'050'000,00	254'737,95	278'737,28	120'945,01	1'868'184,12	2'522'604,36	1'090'475,00	2'619'724,63	WMCH was able to conduct email marketing campaigns and letter campaigns in a professional way as our systems become more effective. What is more, the whole year, WMCH communicated a lot about the 20 years of Wikipedia, so did the Foundation and other Chapters; we were thus were very present in the press in Switzerland and abroad. We believe that this helped tremendously in the public eye and drove donors to respond in a very positive way to our fundraising efforts in Switzerland.
Pro Bono / In-kind donations	CHF	10'000,00	10,40	2'733,16	183,00	1'789,40	4'715,96	10'385,00	4'897,52	Unfortunately, due to COVID, not many meetings took place, therefore not many pro-bono donations were possible from that side. WMCH continues of course to work with providers who do offer us a pro-bono.
TOTAL	CHF	1'205'000,00	268'754,37	285'097,02	121'664,53	1'995'494,48	2'671'010,40	1'251'395,50	2'773'844,30

|} * Provide estimates in US Dollars

Spending during this 12-month period

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
Exchange Rate								1,00498	1,00498
PROGRAM 1 - GLAM		122'000,00	302,98	9'573,05	19'391,65	25'891,19	55'158,87	120'597,60	55'433,56	45,97	Many of the programs got cancelled unfortunately or could not be conducted f2f because of the COVID restrictions and related uncertainty.
PROGRAM 2 - Education	CHF	151'500,00	50'238,03	12'542,22	20'763,79	15'905,29	99'449,33	152'254,47	99'944,59	65,64	During 2021 and in line with reflections concerning our new 5 year strategy, we decided to outsource the drafting of a new education strategy so that we could better reflect the realities and needs in Switzerland and abroad. Some activites in 2021 could not be conducted and hence supported because of the ongoing uncertainty of the COVID pandemic.
PROGRAM 3 - Community	CHF	148'500,00	12'200,95	39'570,32	23'314,56	29'232,31	104'318,14	149'239,53	104'837,64	70,25	Whereas we were able to hold a very successful in person conference in honour of the 20 years of Wikipedia as well as a wiki award ceremony for our community, the German speaking Wikicon was held in a hybrid format and the French Wikicon was conducted online only. Therefore much less money has been spent than expeceted due to these circumstances.
Program 4: International and National (Public) Relations	CHF	92'000,00	11'695,85	12'482,81	12'387,59	22'366,21	58'932,46	92'458,16	59'225,94	64,06	The WMF and Chapter Collaboration as well as the collaboration with the wider Wikiverse (Iberocoop, Wikidata, Wikifranca creation etc.) was restricted to online encounters, hence saving money on travels and support of meetings. No in person "friendraising" event could be conducted apart from the broader conference around the 20 years of Wikipedia. This explains the underspent.
Staff Wages & Expenses	CHF	754'500,00	186'633,60	189'334,71	200'298,95	244'210,19	820'477,45	758'257,41	824'563,43	108,74	During 2021 we hired one new collborator and had to find a replacement for someone who resigned; we also changed our HR policies in order to offer a better compensation scheme and therefore retain our employees. This explains the overspent that can be noticed.
Operations (excludes staff and programs)	CHF	329'240,00	77'899,25	71'863,86	80'832,12	113'476,39	344'071,62	330'879,62	345'785,10	104,50	Whereas we could reduce quite a number of costs, we had to slightly increase budgets in terms of communication around the 20 years of Wikipedia (more than foreseen); we also needed to legally accompany a number of questions, which led to a rise in expenses in that regard. What is more, fundraising costs went up as we realised that we needed an additional contract to ensure that the different platforms that we are using (Raisenow, Salesforce, Campaign Monitor etc.) are attuned and correctly configured. This explains the slightly higher operational costs than previously foreseen.
TOTAL	CHF	1'597'740,00	338'970,66	335'366,97	356'988,66	451'081,58	1'482'407,87	1'603'686,79	1'489'790,26	92,90

|} * Provide estimates in US Dollars

Signature

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• Jenny WMCH (talk) 16:46, 3 March 2022 (UTC)