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


Purpose of the report edit

This form is for organizations receiving Annual Plan Grants to report on their results to date. For progress reports, the time period for this report will the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). For impact reports, the time period for this report will be the full 12 months of this grant, including the period already reported on in the progress report (e.g. 1 January - 31 December of the current year). This form includes four sections, addressing global metrics, program stories, financial information, and compliance. Please contact APG/FDC staff if you have questions about this form, or concerns submitting it by the deadline. After submitting the form, organizations will also meet with APG staff to discuss their progress.

Metrics and results overview - all programs edit

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees' programs. Please use the table below to let us know how your programs contributed to the Grant Metrics. We understand not all Grant or grantee-defined Metrics will be relevant for all programs, so feel free to put "0" where necessary. For each program include the following table and

  1. Next to each required metric, list the outcome/results achieved for all of your programs included in your proposal.
  2. Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome.
  3. In addition to the Global Metrics as measures of success for your programs, there is another table format in which you may report on any OTHER relevant measures of your programs' success

For more information and a sample, see Grant Metrics.

Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. Number of total participants 3,025 (out of the yearly goal of 1,600) Breakdown by gender:
Women: 1,004
Men: 623
Non-binary: 7
Un-known: 1,391
The goal was signifantly over-achived. This was partly explained because of our many internationally oriented activities and possibilities to reach large groups of participants in international digital events. The majority of the participants took part in the WikiGap events across the world which we supported. We also had a significant participation in the events organized around Structured Data on Commons as part of the Tools for partnerships project. The photo contests Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth also contributed to the overall success. The different membership events we organized to increase involvement and long term support from our members and donors, our activities with the educational and GLAM sector made up the rest. The compilation of gender data is especially hard when it is an event that we are not organizing each part of, and as such we have a large number of participants where the gender is un-known. Of the ones we know, the WikiGap campaign stands out as it contributed with over half of all women in our events in 2021.
2. Number of newly registered users 248 (out of the yearly goal of 600) Breakdown by gender:
Women: 63
Men: 40
Non-binary: 0
Un-known: 145
The two projects Wikipedia in Education and A Community for Everybody contributed to the majority of newly registered users. Our initial plans for SDC editing events were scrapped as we saw a larger need to communicate the basics to a larger group, when considering the limitations created by the pandemic. This led to a larger group of participants, but fewer edits and thereby newly registered users.
3. Number of content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects 658,011 (out of the yearly goal of 295,525) Breakdown by project:
Wikipedia: 16,172
Commons: 607,140
Wikidata: 34,475
Other: 224
Our focus on improving the searchability and accessibility of the media files on Wikimedia Commons through the addition of Structured Data on Commons (SDC) meant that we have reach a new record for Wikimedia Sverige. This is the highest number of improved content pages in a year for us. During the year the number kept on climbing as we worked with affiliates across the world to add structured data to photos taken during Wiki Loves contests. This was even more successful than we expected and we more than doubled the number of improvements we had as our goal for the year. We also did some exploratory work with media files from GLAM institutions and added more built cultural heritage data to Wikidata, opening up for a similarly large number of edits in 2022.
4. Diversity[1] 1,131 (non-unique) (out of the yearly goal of 1,200) We nearly reached our goal, with WikiGap being the largest contributor.
5. Reach[2] (new grantee defined metric) 3,397 (non-unique) (out of the yearly goal of 4,000) We feel just short of reaching our goal. The majority of the reach was through participants at events that we took part in organizing. Around 10 % of the reach was through external events where we gave presentations etc.


Introduction edit

As the pandemic continues we have in many ways been forward-looking and we continued our preparations for the future.


The four programmatic areas developed in 2016 – Access, Use, Community and Enabling – have continued to form the base of the project structure. This year has in many ways been a time of stabilization, continuation and finalization of the long-term efforts we have worked on during many years. Some major trends so far this year are that:

  1. We thought and planned for the future
    1. As the chapter’s current 4-year strategy came to its end in 2021 we formed a number of working groups to build consensus about the strategy for the next 4 years. The strategy was unanimously approved by the Annual General Assembly and the organization has a clear path forward until 2025.
    2. We refocused our hub plans based on the changing opportunities and are in the process of adjusting the ideas we worked on in 2020 to fit the new 4-year strategy. We will refocus our efforts with a more limited focus on software development as we, in the current environment, see fewer opportunities for us to contribute efficiently. Instead we will pivot and work to develop our capabilities around international partnerships, investigate the needs around content partnerships from Wikimedia affiliates and GLAM-Wiki volunteers, support affiliates with technical support, e.g. batch uploads, and capacity building etc. We will, however, provide limited development support for a selected few strategic tools that are of high value for content partnerships.
    3. The WikiGap campaign has been organized successfully since 2018. We have seen it expand and refocus due to the pandemic, and many great ideas have been developed by the communities across the world. We are constantly thinking about how we can further refine the WikiGap campaign and as we are approached by a myriad of organizations that are interested in contributing to these efforts we are planning to expand and experiment even more in 2022. We successfully applied for an external grant to experiment and scale up and to form interesting new partnerships. We are also aiming to combine the strength of WikiGap with the content donations we are working on as part of the thematic hub we hope to form.
    4. Preparatory work has been done to allow for an expansion of the volunteer engagement with the development of a long term plan and new training material. We are in the process of applying for a major grant to hopefully scale this work with a dedicated team in 2022–2024.
  2. We are finally launching some of our key initiatives
    1. Wikispeech has been under development since 2015 and in June 2021 we finalized the software so that we could launch Wikispeech on Swedish Wikipedia. That marked the start of a period of feedback and refinement which will allow us to continue scaling, and hopefully present a stronger case for the Wikimedia Foundation to integrate the tool as a MediaWiki extension.
    2. Our plans for a future thematic hub around content partnerships in Sweden have been developing since 2019. However, our intentions and plans with the hub have not been possible to communicate in the way we would have preferred because of a number of ambiguities and uncertainties. When we now – finally – have funding secured until mid-2023, and we know that any future funding will be through the soon-to-be-established Grant Committees we can actively start communicating in a more direct way and investigate what needs and interest Wikimedia affiliates across the world have.
    3. In 2020 we started experimenting more seriously with a national fundraising initiative. We have analyzed and processed the results from the early experiment. The plans we had to scale up the work in late 2021 had to be put on hold because of the pandemic taking a turn for the worse.

Major financial developments edit

One of the major changes this year from our expectations was the continued uncertainty and unclarity about long-term funding for the thematic hub work. The promises around significant multi-year funding that we were given in the beginning of the year were not fulfilled. Instead, a large single grant was provided in June 2021. This allowed us to continue to prepare for the hub in 2021 and we will hopefully keep this momentum up until a structure for the funding is established in late 2022 or 2023.

We continued to work on increasing national fundraising in Sweden. Even though the majority of our work was about preparing for larger initiatives post-COVID, we did increase the donations by nearly 50 %. Furthermore, in 2021 we received our first legacy gift. This was a significant gift of around 400,000 USD in stocks and cash.

The overall spending this year was reduced compared to both the projected costs in the APG application as well as the finalized 2020 costs. The reduction was in large part caused by reduced staff costs as multiple staff members have had periods of parental leave or leave of absence etc. combined with the fact that we had a somewhat increased staff size in 2020 as we were preparing for launching the thematic hub.

The funding secured during this year, and the first months of 2022, will last until November 2024 at our current costs. However, that includes our reserves and we will still need to actively work to raise funds in 2022 to keep the organization stable long-term. Whilst the fundraising efforts can not slow down, it does allow us to be more strategic and long-term with our fundraising.

Overall, the financial security that was reached during the year has helped to reduce uncertainty and stress for the organization and allows us to think longer and more strategically.


Access edit

  Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (at end of Q4) Comments
Access A.1.1 Enrich the Wikimedia projects,[3] with 25 new resources, through the creation and distribution of materials and by providing support and performing batch uploads. 20 23 resources out of 25
We nearly reached the goal. The uploads are a mix of datasets and media files from Sweden as well as internationally. During the year we also did a lot of preparatory work to make it possible to increase the number of uploads in 2022. Even though they do not get reported as new datasets we also invested significant resources into the continued effort to improve earlier uploads with Structure Data on Commons. In total we worked on adding SDC to files in 31 different datasets.
A.1.2 150 identified[4] subject experts contribute to the Wikimedia projects with at least 1 productive edit each, through the dissemination of information, maintaining relationships or arranging thematic edit-a-thons. 194 81 experts out of 150
The goal was not achieved. Due to the pandemic we have reduced the editing activities as we see less success with them. Instead we have focused on presentations and seminars as well as developing better educational material and tools.
A.1.3 Involve 10 courses in the Wikipedia Education Program,[5] through educating motivated teachers and providing expertise on the Wikipedia tools for education. 11 10 courses out of 10
We reached the goal. The last few years we have seen more courses work with Wikipedia in the autumn and this was the case also this year. This is especially positive since we are focusing a lot of effort into developing digital course materials and an international exchange program. This meant that the time available was more limited than previous years.
A.2.1 To increase the use of free licenses ensure that 50 organizations[6] are reached with information on free licenses. 179 306 organizations out of 50
We significantly overachieved in this area. This was because we increased our focus on presentations in an international setting this year. We focused on sharing information about the opportunities with Structure Data on Commons which was well received. We also actively reached out to intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and delivered presentations to e.g. UN agencies.
A.2.2 Work actively to nurture and develop the relevant networks and contacts with people who can influence license choice of material in order to safeguard the topicality of the issue. This is achieved, in addition to regular activities, through active participation in or the organization of at least 10 new events and at least 10 new direct contacts with content owners, organizations and politicians. 23 events, 54 contacts 56 new events out of 10

45 new direct contacts out of 10

Our definition of someone belonging to our network is when they have had a personal interaction with a representative of the association and our staff has some way of contacting them, and they have received information about what we do as an organization and how they can reach us. The external projects we received funding for allowed us to participate in far more events than expected, and thus reach far more people and organizations than expected.

Our Access program focuses on improving the free content on, or available to, the Wikimedia projects in both the short and long term. This continues to be our largest program, considering both the number of ongoing projects and initiatives, and the budget. During the year preparations to further scale this program in 2022 and onwards took place. However, it is worth noting that some larger projects in this program also contribute significantly to other programs in the organization. For example, a lot of work around the development of the organization happens as an integrated part of the program – e.g. in the Tools for partnerships project we worked to develop our fundraising capacities.

We are very aware that the needs in many parts of the world are very different from the Swedish context; e.g. in some countries, cutting-edge data processing technology might not be the top priority for GLAM institutions and other potential content partners. We knew that we needed to deepen our understanding of the different needs across the Wikimedia movement to be able to provide support the best way possible. Therefore we started a series of interviews and conversations to investigate what type of hands-on support would be most needed. The insights gathered from this work influenced our planing and experimentation around the Thematic hub for content partnerships we are working to establish.

We have over the years built strong practices around expert engagement, partnerships and technical support and we have successfully continued to build upon them this year. We are now hoping to find ways to support the global community with hands-on help around content partnerships. The importance of not just receiving financial support, but expertise, technical support and more was highlighted numerous times in the Wikimedia 2030 strategic process. To that end we started the work to organize a helpdesk, where support will be provided to affiliates and volunteers struggling with a content partnership. We also supported the technical development and maintenance of three key software tools that are of strategic importance for the Wikimedia community’s work with content partners.

We also hope to use our experience to form new content partnerships with intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and to coordinate the work in this area. We also see new exciting opportunities around structured data and will work on developing our skills around both Wikibase and Structured data on Commons.

Wikimedia Sverige is in this for the long run. We aim to change the way organizations and society think about knowledge dissemination and production. Creating that kind of change in attitudes will allow for the full impact of free knowledge. By convincing decision makers to adopt different forms of policies around openness we are laying the foundations for accessing new material in the future.

Story: Crowdsourcing names in WikiGap edit

 
Building Wikipedia together.

In this Story we are focusing on the crowdsourcing campaign organized as part of WikiGap in 2021. Several partners took part in attempts to get examples of women missing from Wikipedia. So far, a few thousand names have been proposed.

WikiGap is organized each year, with the long term goal of closing the gender gap on Wikipedia. The WikiGap method, attempting to lower thresholds for writing new articles for Wikipedia, has proven very successful, with more than 50,000 new or improved articles.

But the further the campaign has come, the more we – as organizers – have realized the difficulty of knowing which women are actually missing. Writers need to know who they should write about, before they can contribute towards the closing of the gap. Wikimedians try to build a global encyclopedia covering all notable aspects, but in many areas – geographically and thematically – there is a lack of knowledge on women who would be relevant, but who still have no article.

Initiatives such as Women in Red have made tremendous progress on this issue, and have built large sources with missing women. Their lists of missing women is valuable material for anyone that wants to help close the gender gap. But the lists are of course incomplete.

For the WikiGap campaign in 2021, we – as WikiGap organizers – tried to contribute to a partial solution to this problem. We teamed up with global partners such as UNESCO and UNFPA, and used our and their social media channels to crowdsource names on missing women for Wikipedia from the general public.

The campaign started with a tweet from the Wikipedia account, developed by us, Wikimedia Foundation and in communication with partners. The tweet was retweeted by partners such as UNESCO. UNFPA and Global Citizen also partnered for the initiative, and opened up a platform for proposing names that ran throughout the year. More than 10,000 names were finally proposed. This will be a substantial source to build upon and use, when Wikipedians want examples of missing women to write about.

The crowdsourcing is the first part of the campaign. Many of the names might lack good references or notability, or might even already exist. That is one of the obstacles to overcome when it comes to crowdsourcing. Still, we think that we can turn this into an opportunity rather than a problem. We aim to solve the problem by organizing some kind of WikiGap & Wikidata challenge during 2022, to encourage new communities, specifically on Wikidata, to take part in and help out with the WikiGap campaign, to improve coverage of women on the Wikimedia platforms.

In this way, we are inviting both new Wikimedia communities, such as the Wikidata community, to the WikiGap campaign, and external audiences with little or no experience of contributing to Wikipedia. In this sense, we are widening the WikiGap campaign, and opening up for people to take part, no matter their capacity or previous level of experience.

Story: Connecting Wikidata to the GLAM institutions’ databases edit

 
Connecting museum collections to Wikidata encourages creative visualizations – like this one, showing the life trajectories of artists represented in Nationalmuseum.

In this Story we share our experience from assisting GLAMs in developing a long-term strategy to include Wikidata as a natural part of their data ecosystems. We have been providing them with the skills and tools they need to independently work to utilize Wikidata as a central tool for authority data and connect their different collections.

Over many years, Wikimedia Sverige has been supporting GLAMs in their efforts to share and showcase their collections on the Wikimedia platforms. A common scenario is us uploading files to Wikimedia Commons and data to Wikidata. But our resources are limited, and at the same time, GLAM professionals are more aware of the benefits of developing in-house Wikimedia expertise in their own institutions. That's why we're happy to assist two highly influential Swedish GLAM institutions in taking the steps to become active Wikimedians and develop long-term strategies to work with Wikidata.

Over the last year, Nationalmuseum and the National Historical Museums have been working to better align their authority databases with the Linked Open Data landscape. One part of this endeavor is adding their respective identifiers to the Wikidata items of the people whose works are in the museums' collection. Once that's done, the Wikidata ID's are being fed back to the museums' own systems.

With the help of a consultant, Albin Larsson, we prototyped several interactive visualizations that demonstrate the richness of data on Wikidata and make it clear why engaging with this platform is worthwhile for anyone interested in museum collections.

Having watched the growth of Wikidata from a new, small platform, with all the doubt about its purpose and possible influence, to an authority hub for cultural heritage and other institutions, participating in this project has been nothing but exciting. It will achieve two outcomes. First of all, obviously, more data from the museums has been, and will be shared on the Wikimedia platforms. But secondly, and even more importantly, it allows the GLAMs' project team to acquire and hone all the skills they need to understand and work with Wikidata – how the Wikimedia platforms are structured and interconnected, how to build SPARQL queries to retrieve interesting data and how to use OpenRefine to clean up and upload large datasets.

This means that they are able to share this knowledge with other GLAMs both in Sweden and abroad, further spreading the message of Wikimedia and Linked Open Data. In particular, the visualizations made a big impression on other GLAM experts, as they convey the value of Wikidata without requiring any previous experience working with it. The message of Wikimedia and Linked Open Data carries so much more weight when conveyed by those who themselves have crossed the threshold from being passive consumers of Wikimedia content to contributing to it actively. It's not as hard as it seems!

The next step in this process is looking at other tools that make it easier for data owners to structure their content and link it to other global datasets. Wikibase is an obvious candidate, as the development of Wikibase Cloud, which we are keeping a close eye on, holds a lot of promise for organizations that need a simple yet efficient platform to host their data on.

Story: Investigating what the Wikimedia movement is wishing for regarding partnerships edit

The API workshop that we organized for Trackuback was an open event, with a dozen members of the Swedish Wikimedia and open source communities participating.

In this Story we focus on the work done to investigate how the Wikimedia affiliates are working with content partners, what they want to do more of, where their issues are and what they would like to support with, or coordinate around. Content partnerships is an area where many affiliates have experiences and see a need for more exchange and to co-develop a common vision.

The needs assessments aim to identify the areas and the competence we already have and see how we can help each other more to utilize this knowledge. We need to better understand the needs of the Wikimedia movement when it comes to partnerships. To find out these needs, we need to compile knowledge from issues about how we work with institutions in the cultural sector in different regions.

The interviews are an open conversation and the questions start with “what and how” in the current partnership situation, to later move on to the needs and we want in the future. An important part is that we try to identify new collaborations within the Wikimedia movement and to make the work more global across borders. We also see this as an introduction and development to the thematic hubs and the opportunities connected to it.

We have had discussions and interviews with people from nearly 40 affiliates and sorted the answers in themes that are based on needs and how support could look like.

We have also documented interviews with video to be able to follow longer reasoning. During discussions, ideas and suggestions can emerge from experiences. These reasonings can be more qualitative than quantitative, which is also valuable to include in the conclusions. The discussions can be a starting point for building a network and working groups that can support delimited thematic areas in the existing structure.

One need that is requested is to have a network of people around you with different skills. Work on the platforms works like many other industries that the network grows during the years you are active in the business. What may differ slightly is that we are located over larger areas and there are many channels that are possible to follow. There is a need to be able to navigate among knowledge and information and find faster ways to get a network.

Something that also is important in a longer view, but there is the dissemination and marketing of work and results. By receiving confirmation in several different places, in different channels and from different actors, it can create knowledge about the benefit that arises through free knowledge. This facilitates the continuation and creation of new projects.

We are working with a Summary section of discussions and interviews. Next step is to analyze the result and start to prototype some tests for different solutions. This work must be done in close cooperation with the respondents since we are working towards the same vision.

This work is also material for a report that will be used for further external discussion on what is possible to implement during 2022. The work process will now have more prototyping, testing, analyzing and refining within the community. One practical way is to define areas for development and start working groups with more defined goals.

Story: A structured effort on Structured Data on Commons edit

 
After adding participation info to Wiki Loves Monuments photos in Sweden, we can run all sorts of queries on the data – for example visualizing the location of the photos and the competitions they were submitted to.

In this Story, we give an overview of our large-scale work with Structured Data on Commons, which included data uploads, outreach and documentation.

Structured Data on Commons (SDC), a modern, structured and machine-readable way of describing the millions of pictures, audio clips and videos on Wikimedia Commons, has gone a long way since it was first implemented in 2017. SDC makes the files easier to view, search, edit, organize and re-use, in many languages. It has become something of a household name among the Wikimedia Community, with more users actively adding data to the files they upload.

But there is still a lot to do. Out of the 80 million files on Wikimedia Commons, 7 million have a depicts statement and 1.7 million have a creator statement. Many community members have been diligently chipping away at these numbers, but what we really need are tools and workflows to quickly and efficiently work with large amounts of files – both for the Wikimedia community and for our GLAM partners, who can benefit from SDC making their collections easier to find and analyze. By adding the basic information through bots, the volunteer community can focus their efforts on the type of work where a human intellect is needed.

That's why at the start of our project Content partnerships support 2021, we committed ourselves to uploading 1 million SDC statements to files on Wikimedia Commons. Our goal, apart from contributing with valuable data to the Wikimedia project, was to strengthen our skills in the related areas in preparation for further work as a hub, as well as to test the available tools and develop efficient workflows for processing and uploading large amounts of structured data to Wikimedia Commons. We achieved this goal in December 2021, halfway through the project, and so we are preparing to upload another 1 million SDC statements in 2022, building on this initial success.

We focused our efforts primarily on Wiki Loves Monuments photos from all around the world. Once enriched with SDC, the photos contributed by thousands of volunteer photographers become more valuable, as they are easier to find and understand. Thanks to the development and release of MediaSearch, a new search engine for Wikimedia Commons that makes use of SDC, all the structured data can now be used to deliver better search results to everyone.

In order to further share our experiences and networks with others interested in SDC, we participated in several events, such as conferences and workshops. We hope that this will help spur some interest amongst the participants to contribute to the data in a more active way. The workload is enormous and we need to work together to create significant value.

Structured Data on Commons is still developing. While the technical side is in place – anyone can add and edit statements – the best practices in regards to modeling, tools etc. are a living process. One particular tool that will give Wikimedians improved possibilities to contribute to SDC is OpenRefine, which has received a grant to implement Wikimedia Commons functionalities. The development work started mid-2021, and WMSE has been following it closely, participating in design discussions and sharing our experiences from training Wikimedians and GLAM professionals about SDC. As we watch the software grow and improve in real time, we are among the first to see and test the new functionalities, which will enable us to participate in developing documentation and training others. We are proud to be able to contribute to the further development of this tool, which we already use a lot for our Wikidata work. We have also helped out in improving other important software such as the ISA tool and Pattypan, which are both crucial tools for Wikimedians and GLAM professionals who want to contribute to the Wikimedia platforms (see also [[:wmse:Annual_Report_2021/Story:_Starting_to_support_volunteer_software_developers/en|our Story about support for volunteer developers).

Story: Continuing the work to document the world’s cultural heritage sites and GLAM institutions edit

 
Thanks to SDC, it's easy to see the photos from Wiki Loves Monuments in one country, like Iran, on a map. An added benefit is that the visualization makes it possible to spot erroneous data, like bad coordinates.

In this Story we give an overview of the renewed efforts we are doing with cultural heritage data on the Wikimedia platforms. This strategic and long-term work will help to develop a knowledge base that will be valuable for future content partnerships and renew the interest to work with the Wikimedia movement from existing content partners.

Cultural heritage has always had a special place on the Wikimedia platforms with a large group of active volunteers working with material connected to it. A lot of Wikimedia Sverige's activities have also centered around cultural heritage. In our earlier projects, we worked a lot with data about cultural heritage institutions and historical monuments and identified a lot of opportunities and possibilities connected to the work. So it's no surprise that cultural heritage data is one of the focus areas of the future Content Partnership Hub, helping Wikimedians and Wikimedia affiliates around the world improve the coverage of our shared heritage on our platforms.

In 2021, we focused on surveying the state of cultural heritage data on the Wikimedia platforms, evaluating the tools and processes that we had tested previously, as well as picking up several loose threads from our previous initiatives and putting them in context. Structured Data on Commons is a particularly interesting area to work with, as it is relatively new and a lot of work needs to be done in order to clear the backlog of the millions of files that Wikimedians had uploaded over the years.

From September to December 2021, we added over 1 million SDC statements, mainly to photos from the Wiki Loves Monuments competitions in over a dozen countries. Now that these photos have been enriched with information on what they depict and which WLM competitions they participated in, they are easier to find and analyze than before. It is, for example, easier to find out which users have uploaded photos of which monuments to which competition. The local competitions themselves have got their own Wikidata items. This creates new possibilities for collaboration and events, as it makes it easier to get an overview of the competitions over the years.

A prerequisite to linking the photos to the monuments is, of course, that they also have Wikidata items. The coverage of cultural heritage monuments on Wikidata varies wildly by country. Since WLM was started many years ago, the infrastructure it relies on – the Wikipedia-based lists of monuments – is quite old and not aligned with Wikidata. Importing the monuments to Wikidata is something we started with already a couple years ago, and are continuing to do within the Content Partnerships Hub project. As a hub, we will be able to increase our outreach in this area, and provide assistance to Wikimedians and other affiliates in a more structured, sustainable way.

Story: Developing a Helpdesk for the movement’s content partnerships edit

 
In order to create a successful Helpdesk, we need to find out what the global community needs. Many issues are the same across the world.

In this Story we are focusing on how we have laid the foundation of a new type of service for the Wikimedia movement, a helpdesk. We have worked hard to make sure that the helpdesk we are developing cater to the needs of the movement, gives support do a diverse set of actors, and makes sure that the support given is useful on the platforms.

During 2021, Wikimedia Sverige started experimenting with an initiative for a thematic hub for content partnerships. While thematic hubs are not formally implemented within the movement yet, we had the capacity, the funding and the willingness to try out different methods, and see what could work and what would not.

One central part of the initiative is a helpdesk. Many affiliates and volunteers within the movement want to work with partners to make content available on the platforms, but may lack the know-how or the resources. The idea is to make it possible for affiliates and volunteers to request help from the helpdesk, in order to overcome hurdles on their way to successful content partnerships.

As simple as the idea may sound, several challenges arise immediately:

  • How do we know what help is needed?
  • How do we know who to help?
  • How can we channel the help so that the result is useful for the platforms?

In order to answer the first question, we took on the endeavor of a comprehensive needs assessment. Staff interviewed more than 50 people from the movement, representing close to 40 affiliates. The insights from the interviews were summarized, showing that there is a shared understanding among many that more resources, know-how, training and hands-on work together are needed, and that support around collaboration, capacity, tools and learning is requested. These insights will guide the work of the helpdesk in 2022 and beyond.

The needs assessment is, however, only the start of an answer. Resources are scarce, and help needs to be given where it is the most urgent. So, how do we know who to help? For us, it is crucial that the answer to this question is not answered by staff at Wikimedia Sverige, who only knows part of the movement, and with an understanding limited by the context we are working in. So in order for the content partnerships initiative to be able to give support to a diverse set of actors within the movement, we developed a concept for an expert committee, to guide the content partnerships initiative around the order of priority for who to help. During the latter part of 2021, the expert committee was formed, with the goal of launching their work in the first quarter of 2022.

As we are still waiting for the launch of the expert committee, we have not communicated widely about the helpdesk. In order to find a good working model for the expert committee, we wanted, however, to work with a real example. A large Wikimedia affiliate reached out to us with a comprehensive request, and the first work of the expert committee will be to find a good way of responding to that.

The expert committee will define the overarching principles and priorities according to which they will work. One central point from us, however, is that the content made available through the content partnerships initiative should be useful on the platforms: only making hundreds of thousands of files available with no further plan looks good in numbers, but means relatively little for volunteers or readers. As a way of overcoming this problem, we have also initiated conversations with thematic groups within the movement, such as the global Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth organizers, to see how the work of the content partnerships hub can help them in their work.

All in all, we have been working hard during 2021 to develop the concept of a helpdesk, so that the content partnerships hub can be a service for the entire movement and not only a few. A final point to add to this is that, of course, there is a limit to the scope of the content partnerships hub as well. We could and should not do everything. Other actors need to gain capacities, and others have know-how and experiences we lack. So a central part of the content partnerships hub will also be to engage experts from other parts of the movement, as soon as we see a request that could better be handled by someone else. We also hope that this helpdesk model, if successful, can be a positive example and potential model for other hubs in the movement, where hands-on support in other areas can be provided.

Story: Opening up the UN to the Wikimedia movement edit

 
UNEP became the first UN program to publish several of their flagship publications under a Wikimedia compatible license

In this Story we are focusing on our work to push the agencies of the United Nations (UN) towards more free content, and in turn, how to make best use of this content on the Wikimedia platforms together with global Wikimedia communities.

As part of the initiative for a content partnerships hub, we are experimenting with how we can work together with international governmental organizations (IGOs) and international NGOs (INGOs) on making high quality content available on the Wikimedia platforms.

Wikimedia Sverige has been working with UN agencies such as UNESCO, UN Women, OHCHR and UNFPA for several years. On an advocacy level, we are building upon this work, these contacts and networks to try to push for a general shift towards open access policies within and across UN agencies. Already in 2021, we could see several concrete outcomes. FAO and WIPO, to name just two agencies, made freely licensed material available on the Wikimedia platforms; and UNEP , as the first UN program,[7] published several of their flagship publications under a Wikimedia compatible license.

When it comes to making content available on the platforms, however, there is no limit on how much work that could be done. We could hire someone full time for the rest of their life, and they would probably still not have time to get all UN content onto the Wikimedia platforms. So, what rationale can we use to guide us in our work?

Building upon the work we have done to map our activities to the Sustainable Development Goals, the upcoming work with topics for impact emanating from the movement strategy, and conversations with leaders of the Wikimedia movement and the UN agencies, we decided to develop two concept papers for working with content related to biodiversity and gender together with IGOs and INGOs. The background for the rationale is that there are groups within the movement that work on these topics, and that high quality content would enrich their work; that the topics are vital for the general quality of the content on the Wikimedia platforms, and the information that readers and users can expect to find; and that the IGOs and INGOs that we are working with have a lot of content covering the topics.

Based on these concept papers, we have started collaborating with both Wikimedia affiliates and UN agencies to initiate the work. We are collaborating with UNEP to explore the possibilities of making their Protected Planet freely licensed so that it can be used on Wikidata; and we are working with the Wiki Loves Earth team, if such an upload is possible, to explore how their database can enrich the Wiki Loves Earth campaigns. We are working with UNEP and FAO to make content around biodiversity and health available on the platforms, to enrich the WikiForHumanRights campaign, which focuses on “right to a healthy environment” this year. We are working with Encyclopedia of Life and Wikimedia volunteers, to turn species data into Wikipedia articles, an area where there is a large gap existing on the platforms.

We have also initiated several projects related to the gender gap on the Wikimedia platforms. We are working with FAO to improve the coverage of women in agriculture, and the impact of biodiversity, agriculture and food production on women; we are working with UNFPA, UNESCO and OHCHR to identify women missing from Wikipedia; and we are working with the Swedish Institute and several partners to identify ways of scaling up the work with closing the gender gap for upcoming years.

All in all, work is underway, partnerships are formed and we are having conversations with movement organizers. Given the fact that the UN is a large and relatively slowly moving organization, we are positively surprised to see the results that we already have had. There is a need to clarify roles and responsibilities in the movement on how to work with UN agencies around content partnerships, i.e. what is needed from the hub and what should be done by other actors in the movement. More coordination and cooperation in this area would create increased opportunities to deliver free knowledge from the agencies to the Wikimedia platforms and to ensure reuse and integration.

One final opportunity, which we were unaware of at the start of the project, has been that several UN agencies are interested in hiring Wikimedians in Residence to make their content available on the platforms. We believe that this can be scaled, and in 2022, we will investigate how to do this in a sustainable and diverse way, and how we can work together with partners and other actors in the movement to draw on each others’ experiences.

Story: Coordinating around the Copyright Directive edit

 
Copyright restrictions can seriously impede our work on the Wikimedia platforms, for example by limiting how photos of architecture and public art can be spread. A strong freedom of panorama is needed to document the world around us on Wikipedia.

In this Story we are focusing on how we used the implementation process of the EU Copyright Directive to establish networks with important partners, connect our national and international advocacy efforts, and push for more exceptions and limitations to the copyright regime.

During the last few years, our work around advocacy has revolved around the EU Copyright Directive. Several parts of the directive affect us directly, and other parts indirectly affect the free and open internet, which is essential for our platforms to thrive.

In October 2021, after a long delay, the Swedish Ministry of Legal Affairs finally released their ministry memorandum on how to implement the directive in Swedish law. We had taken part in the implementation process since 2019, and given our views and thoughts on several parts of the directive. During 2021, we also initiated a network of cultural heritage, education and free knowledge organizations and actors, to be able to coordinate our responses and try to push the narrative and conversation in the same direction.

Our goal in the work has been to be a reliable, constructive and concrete actor, towards both our partners and the ministry. This has resulted in a relatively high degree of influence: other partners have directly referred to or cited us in their formal feedback on the ministry memorandum, and officials from the ministry called us on several occasions to help understand our points of views. When the draft law is presented in early April of 2022, our hope is that we can build upon this position to influence the final legislation in the best direction.

In 2021, we also got the opportunity to scale this work to an international level. We got funding to work together with Wikimedia Deutschland, Communia, Centrum Cyfrowe, Intellectual Property Institute of Slovenia and the Italian DDA Studio Legale, on a European level, to push for an internationalization of the exceptions and limitations (E&Ls) to copyright proposed in the Copyright Directive, and especially the E&Ls relating to research and education. For us, this is both an important opportunity of learning how to work in international copyright environments, especially WIPO, and also how to bridge the work that we are doing nationally and internationally. As we are experimenting with an initiative of a content partnerships hub, where questions around copyright are completely at the core, we believe that this will be an important learning opportunity for Wikimedia Sverige.

Sweden is an interesting case in the international context, due to the prevalence of extended collective licenses. We will develop briefings on how to work to increase the amount of free knowledge in such an environment, and see how that relates to other copyright cultures globally. Copyright is increasingly international; our work is national and international at the same time. In 2021, we had the opportunity to bridge the national and international advocacy work that we are doing, and in 2022, we will deepen this work.

Story: Highlighting Open Educational Resources in Sweden edit

In this Story we are focusing on how the field of Open Educational Resources can be expanded in Sweden. Through a network, a conference and a response to a governmental report, we aim to reach decision makers in academia and cultural heritage, as well as on the governmental level.

Open Educational Resources, OER, has been almost invisible in Swedish society over the years. This is something Wikimedia Sverige wanted to change, hence starting the network Mötesplats OER (“Meeting point OER”). We have gathered participants from the education and GLAM sectors respectively, and are a core team of 5-6 people who coordinate the network activities.

During the fall of 2021, we organized a conference under the same name as the network, Meeting point OER. The date was set to the two year anniversary of the adoption of the UNESCO OER Recommendation: 25 November. We invited decision makers and experts on several levels to discuss the strategic implementation of OER in Sweden, an area lacking in almost every aspect. The knowledge on what OER is, how it works and its potential impact on society (including reaching the Sustainable Development Goals), is low. There are some positive examples but these are mainly initiatives by individuals rather than by organizations, and the legislative work is still in an early phase. Conference speakers included the secretary general of the Swedish UNESCO Council, the general director of the UNESCO OER Dynamic Coalition and the secretary general of the International Council for Open and Distance Education, as well as other representatives from the education, GLAM, government and free knowledge sectors in Sweden and Europe. Around 40 people participated as organizers, speakers and participants.

At the end of the year, Wikimedia Sverige was asked to file a response to a Swedish Government Official Report on teaching materials. These kinds of reports are written at the request of the Government to investigate a specific given topic. Respondents working in the field of what is reported on are asked to comment on the reports and state whether they agree or disagree with the content in the report, and suggest changes to the proposals in the report. Wikimedia Sverige was asked by the government to be one of the respondents to this report.

The report on teaching materials had a heavy focus on the status of physical books in the role of teaching and education, which contradicts the current statement from the government to be a leading digital country. Furthermore, the report did not address OER at all. In our response we saw a chance to educate the government, as well as all other respondents, about OER in general and the UNESCO OER Recommendation specifically. We wrote about how OER can be an integral part of the education system in Sweden. The Mötesplats OER network helped in the process of writing the response.

Detailed project overview edit

Below all the projects belonging to the program will be briefly explained and the current status presented. Synergies between the projects will be described. A few selected stories have been presented more in depth as case studies above.

For all the projects, we will state whether they are small, medium or large. In this context, a small project is defined as one where the total budget is less than 100,000 SEK (about 12,500 USD); a medium sized project is defined as one where the total budget is between 100,000 SEK and 300,000 SEK (12,500 to about 37,500 USD); finally, a large project is defined as one where the total budget exceeds 300,000 SEK (about 37,500 USD).

We are also outlining where the project will have an impact in the Wikimedia universe and who we are partnering with to deliver the best possible result.

We also include information about the importance of each project, e.g. if the project is core, essential, one-off or experimental. In this context, a project is considered to be core if it is part of our identity as an organization. The project will be organized even if impact is less in the short term and will only be canceled after a consensus has been reached amongst our community. A project is essential if it actively contributes to one or many of the goals that have been outlined for the year or the long term strategy. Most projects should belong here. A project that is considered a one-off is organized because it is delivering a specific benefit to the organization but it is unlikely that we will repeat it in its current form. The type of project might continue over the years, but the content will intentionally change significantly over time. The experimental projects are testing a new idea, method or technology and are often externally financed. They might be a one-off or if successful become an essential project.

Free music on Wikipedia 2019 edit

What is the project: We made some of Sweden’s historical music treasures available and we focused on including structured information about music and audio files on Wikimedia projects. This included making available collections that are digitized which contain material that has an extinguished copyright, or high quality contemporary recordings performed by professional musicians who release their works under free licenses. The project ended June 30, 2021.

What’s been done: We continued and expanded our collaboration with the Swedish Performing Arts Agency with uploads of both audio files and metadata, and have also been running a number of edit-a-thons with their staff. We have also, with help from the Swedish Performing Arts Agency, found new partners in some regional music library archives and groups for folk musicians who have participated in training and editing articles. At the end of the project our work was summarized in a report.

What’s next:The focus for the project was on describing and analyzing experiences from the various processes surrounding the work with music on Wikimedia's platforms, how to engage new volunteers, how to improve searchability and connect different types of material connected to music. As part of this project we looked into modules for musicians and we looked for new ways to build on our experiences in working with free music in projects. Our collaboration with the Swedish Performing Arts Agency will continue.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Large

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia

Partners: Swedish Performing Arts Agency

Link to the project: Fri musik på Wikipedia 2019

Content partnerships support 2021 edit

What is the project: The project is the continuation of the project Tools for Partnerships 2020 and focuses on the efforts to implement the strategic recommendations and to develop our association into a thematic hub. The work started in July 2021 and will last for around three years.

The work in 2021 focused on preparing experiments in six areas which were to be executed in 2022. The six areas are:

  • Work to better understand the needs of the Wikimedia movement through a needs assessment.
  • Provide hands-on support through the Helpdesk for Wikimedia organizations and volunteers (especially emerging communities) working on content partnerships.
  • Develop and collate resources for capacity building, and organize an inter-affiliate exchange program.
  • Develop a partnership program for UN agencies and other international content partners by supporting global coordination and cooperation.
  • Develop better tools so that we can work more efficiently with content partners. We will support existing tools with developer time to solve long term problems and help with maintenance.
  • Develop collaborations and lower the threshold to sharing important data on Wikidata. The Wikimedia movement is building a global database of built cultural heritage and a database of GLAM institutions across the world.

What’s been done: Work started in all six areas:

  • A larger number of conversations and semi-structured interviews took place in 2021 to learn about the needs and interests of affiliates and key volunteers across the world.
  • The basic concept of the Helpdesk was developed and initial communication about the idea started.
  • The main efforts around capacity building were focused on preparing the Grand Tour of Wikimedia, an initiative which was highly successful at a number of events. Three other affiliates have stated their intent to co-fund the initiative.
  • A large number of contacts were taken with UN agencies to probe their interest and initiate work with them. We have also discussed what content to prioritize with actors such as the Wiki Loves Earth international team.
  • The work to support the development of a few key strategic tools, such as Pattypan and the ISA Tool started at the end of 2021.
  • Over 500,000 improvements were made to media files on Wikimedia Commons and a few more countries’ built cultural heritage was added to Wikidata.

'What’s next: The experimentation within all of the six areas listed above will continue. We put particular focus on engaging Wikimedia affiliates directly in the work and creating co-ownership and support for our Thematic hub ideation.

Size of project: Large

Project impact: Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons

Importance: Core

Partners: Wikimedia organizations globally, UN agencies

Link to the project: Stöd för innehållspartnerskap 2021

Wikipedia in Education 2021 edit

What is the project: This project was aimed at engaging the educational sector in contributing to free knowledge and to develop ways for us to work together.

What’s been done: The previous work laid a strong foundation with many established partnerships and good knowledge about Wikimedia amongst educators, and for 2021 the project shifted focus. The work this year was aimed at forming long-term strategic partnerships, affecting policies, developing insights through research and building capacity for other actors (non-staff) to work with educators across the country.

One area that we wanted to continue expanding was our work within Open Educational Resources (OER). We continued the work through our new network Mötesplats OER, including organizing a digital conference on OER in November celebrating two years since the UNESCO OER Recommendation was adopted. The conference was aimed at decision makers and focused on how to implement OER work on all levels of society, mainly focusing on the education and GLAM sectors. We also tried to get more people to become involved in the network, to increase our outreach and continued the work of implementing UNESCO’s OER Recommendation on both the strategic and operational level in Sweden.

Furthermore, we continued to support educators in implementing Wikipedia-based assignments where students improve Wikipedia as part of their curricular activities. We actively highlighted and communicated Wikipedia in classroom settings. Less staff focus was directed to support educators to organize events; instead, we concentrated on supporting peer-to-peer learning and on empowering educators, volunteers, students and WiRs to work with the courses. To increase reach we aimed to educate university teachers and folk high school teachers as part of their official educational programs (where we have well established contacts).

A key part of the project was starting to develop a modular digital educational package where the basic material is the same, but where additions can be made where relevant to different target groups. Some work this year included finding funding to cover the costs for a module for the specific audience or use case the project was trying to reach or achieve. These target groups included e.g. the interested public, different expert groups, teachers/trainers, volunteers and staff. We developed a joint application for an Erasmus+ project together with our sister organizations in Czechia, Poland and Slovakia. The funding was not granted in this round, but we will investigate resubmitting the application in order to jointly develop multilingual online learning material.

We identified a few courses and classes that were strategically prioritized. We focused some extra efforts on students studying cultural heritage, as we wanted to bring together our educational and GLAM programs, and on translations as we see a potential possibility to support smaller language versions of Wikipedia in that way in the future.

What’s next: We will continue to develop the modular digital educational package to be able to train educational staff across the country. The material will also allow us to engage more volunteers in the work and to quicker onboard staff and board members.

We will work on supporting and expanding the OER network as Sweden is just starting to increase the OER work on the national level and we have momentum in our work. We will also start gathering positive examples on implementation of OER, preparing academy and society for how to work practically with open educational resources.

Furthermore, we will also uphold our work with educational institutions on different levels. This will ensure more teachers and students learning how to use our platforms to gain and share free knowledge.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Medium

Importance: Core

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners:

Link to the project: Wikipedia i utbildning 2021

GLAM 2021 edit

What is the project: This project maintains interaction with GLAM partners and seeks out new collaborations. It serves also as an umbrella for projects funded by individual GLAM institutions, where they want help with a certain task within a limited time period.

These projects are usually aimed at making a particular collection of images or data available through the Wikimedia projects, at increasing the Wikimedia competency of an institution by having a staff member embedded at the institution over some time span or by building bespoke tools to facilitate the interaction, or the analysis thereof, between the GLAM and Wikimedia.

What’s been done: The situation with the pandemic shifted our focus to work through digital solutions for communication with the Swedish GLAMs and we continued to develop the digital training material we started with in 2020 to allow for asynchronous preparations of the participants. Outside of the ordinary GLAM work we do, such as supporting experts to contribute with content, or uploading images there are some activities that stand out this year. During the year we worked to re-energize our strategic partnerships with central and strategic actors. We have looked into how Wikidata is an enabler and a platform for institutions that are interested in connecting cultural heritage with each other with linked open data.

We worked with four museums in Gothenburg and developed teaching materials that focus on tools that facilitated large uploads of image files with associated metadata to Wikimedia's platforms. We reached the goal of this project and equipped the museums with tools and skills to contribute to the Wikimedia platforms on their own. The museums uploaded more than 2021 high quality images in celebration of the city of Gothenburg turning 400 years.

The LGBT project started last year by some of the librarians who were part of the library training earlier. With minor support from us they are running edit-a-thons, planning weekly writing contests and adding wikipedia training modules to Digiteket, the-learning platform run by the national library. We conducted a survey to find out what GLAM institutions need and want in their work with open and free knowledge. With the results of the survey as an excuse we can approach new partners and offer training, help with uploads or basic discussions about copyright to have them open up their collections.

We worked with a group of tourist companies and local heritage organizations in Kalmar and had both digital and safe physical meetings during the autumn. This project will continue with new workshops that build on the work that started during 2021.

What's next: We continue to support partners and follow up the projects that we have been working with, the museums in Göteborg, with the LGBT project and the local community association around Kalmar. We plan more outreach to organizations who responded to the survey to see what new partnerships we can build.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Medium

Project impact: Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata

Importance: Core

Partners: Nordic Museum, Swedish National Heritage Board, Swedish Performing Arts Agency

Link to the project: GLAM 2020

Wikidata for authority control 2021 edit

What is the project: The aim of this project was to develop and evaluate methods of linking museums' authority data to Wikidata, with the ultimate goal of making it easier for researchers and other users to find, understand and analyze relevant information distributed across different museum collections. The learnings from this project were shared with other GLAM institutions in Sweden to demonstrate the benefits of Linked Open Data.

The project was a collaboration between Wikimedia Sverige, Nationalmuseum, the National Historical Museums and Digital Humanities Uppsala and Department of Information Technology (both part of Uppsala University). It was financed with a grant from the Swedish National Heritage Board.

What’s been done: This project put a heavy emphasis on the two museums' staff acquiring new skills and applying them to their institutions' databases. That's why our role focused on providing training and support while the team members did their work independently. We met regularly throughout the year in order to provide training on Wikidata, SPARQL and, most importantly, OpenRefine.

The team members at the two museums gained skills to use OpenRefine for internal work with their authority datasets, such as getting more insight into the data and discovering and rectifying errors and duplicate entries. They expressed that they were happy with the power and flexibility the tool offers, even admitting that it makes some internal tasks easier than the software they used before. In this blog post, one of the team members at the National Historical Museums gives an overview of their work.

The team members have also become more comfortable using and editing Wikidata. For example, they have successfully created a new property, National Historical Museums of Sweden agent ID, and populated it with over 9,000 items. They are now able to edit, analyze and correct the data that has been uploaded to Wikidata, as well as use SPARQL to get deeper insights into it.

A big challenge when working with Linked Open Data is presenting its benefits in an interesting and understandable way that makes others want to learn more. That's why we hired a consultant, Albin Larsson, to prototype a couple of visualizations that make it clear how Wikidata adds to the knowledge housed by the museums, for example by highlighting interconnections between the artists and their works in the museums' collections.

In July, we introduced the project to the international GLAM community in a lightning talk at the 2021 LD4 Conference on Linked Data. In the fall, we organized a small seminar for the Swedish GLAM community, where we focused on the practical work the museums had to do in order to make their data cleaner and better structured. We also demonstrated the value of Wikidata and Linked Open Data using the visualizations.

What's next: The work started in the project will continue as "Wikidata for authority control 2022", as funding for the second year has been secured from the Swedish National Heritage Board. Our ideas include working with more datasets from other GLAM institutions, possibly internationally, data roundtripping and expanding our training and communication work to other actors in the Swedish cultural heritage sector.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Medium

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: Wikidata

Partners: Nationalmuseum, the National Historical Museums, Digital Humanities Uppsala and Department of Information Technology (both part of Uppsala University)

Link to the project: Wikidata för auktoritetskontroll 2021|

Presentations 2021 edit

What is the project: This project includes different one-off presentations by WMSE staff, that are paid for by an external organization. The project exists to simplify taxation of our work.

What’s been done: Six presentations were given during the year.

What’s next: We will create packages that are suitable for different stakeholders about areas of our expertise and proactively contact them about it, e.g. through our networks, through social media posts or when we approach e.g. companies to become supporters of our work.

Size of project: Small

Project impact: N/A

Importance: Essential

Partners: -

Link to the project: Föreläsningar 2021

Advocacy 2021 edit

What is the project: Through this project we ensure that the Internet user perspective and the free knowledge perspective are heard in the legislative process and by politicians. The project is funded by donations and membership fees to keep them separate from FDC funded projects.

What’s been done: In 2021, the main focus of the advocacy project was the final part of the implementation of the EU Copyright Directive into Swedish legislation. In this work, we worked hard to defend the user perspective, and at the same time pushing for Freedom of Panorama.

The implementation of the copyright was much delayed for several reasons, among others that the EU Commission guidelines on how to implement some of the most contested parts of the legislation in turn was much delayed too. The responsible government agency only released its ministry memorandum in October 2021.

The main part of our 2021 Advocacy project thus took place between October and December 2021. After the ministry memorandum was released, we had until mid-December to provide our analysis and written response. Our response focused primarily on the safeguarding of the public domain provision (which will be of huge benefit for the digitization of the cultural heritage), on defending the rights of the users on internet platforms, and in widening the scope of the exceptions and limitations to copyright. At the same time, we tried to have a constructive approach, something which was successful in the sense that several actors, including the relevant ministry, reached out to us several times and asked for further details and understanding. That is, we could provide insights and feedback that was deemed to be of big value for the implementation process.

As a positive long term outcome of this work, we also aimed to create a network of Swedish organizations that have a stake in these issues to work together. The copyright societies are already highly coordinated, and a similar coordination among defenders of a user perspective would be important in the long term.

Other than the copyright directive, we also carefully monitored the implementation of UNESCO’s OER recommendation into Swedish legislation carefully. A network for OER (Open Educational Resources) was established, and in November 2021, we were also invited to the formal consultation on an official report from the government around educational material, where we had the possibility to give feedback and points of view. This feedback focused primarily on OER.

We were also invited to the formal consultation on the proposed EU regulation on the harmonization of AI rules. As the proposed regulation touches upon a few of the projects we are running, such as the speech synthesis Wikispeech, we decided to give our views. We were one of just a very few civil society organizations that replied to the consultation, probably due to its high complexity and extensive scope – the proposed regulation exceeds 100 pages of complicated legal text. That, however, also meant that our responses got even more important, as sole representatives of an important perspective.

Finally, support was given for the work done by staff in Brussels.

What’s next: We will finalize the work with the implementation of the EU Copyright Directive in Swedish law. The ministry memorandum from late 2021 proposed that exceptions and limitations to copyright should be revisited after the implementation is done, as a thorough process for these aspects would be too comprehensive for the directive implementation. This would be a great opportunity for us to enable more free knowledge, and thus we will work hard to make sure that this proposal is realized.

Size of project: Small

Project impact: All Wikimedia projects

Importance: Essential

Partners: Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU, Swedish cultural heritage sector

Link to the project: Påverkansarbete 2021

Use edit

  Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (at end of Q2) Comments
Use U.1.1 To inform the public about Wikimedia projects and free knowledge, good media relations are central. This is achieved through active work with press releases, op-eds, commentaries, newsletter and presence on social media. Based on the key figures identified as metrics by the office the measured media activities for November 2021 will increase by 10 % compared to November 2020. 0 out of 1 0 out of 1

Comparing the month of November for 2020 and 2021 we saw an increase in followers on all of our tracked platforms, however only one showed a 10%+ increase. Comparing the aggregate data for each year we see an increase in reach on most platforms albeit less than 10%. We also see that we had a decrease in the number of posts and engagement on our social media platforms and a reduction in media mentions internationally.

U.1.2 To increase awareness of the usage and trust, clearer measurement methods for how the Wikimedia projects are used, in general and by specific user groups, will be developed during the year. No work was done Not achieved
Postponed to 2022 for financial reasons. We had negotiated with a research group to conduct the work, but we lacked certainty about funding and had to postpone the work until next year.
U.2.1 To decrease the number of bugs in the software and increase clarity all identified and verified bugs shall be reported on Phabricator within one week of being encountered and critical system messages will be translated.[8] The result is monitored annually. 100% (7 new bugs and 0 translation messages) 100% (6 new bugs and 0 translation messages)
We have reported all the bugs that we have encountered in the MediaWiki software. We have not included bugs that we have reported in external Wikimedia related tools. Without physical events with beginners the possibility of identifying bugs to report is reduced.
U.2.2 In order to make content available for more people the Wikispeech extension shall be activated as a beta function on three language versions of Wikipedia</ref> before the end of the year, and supporting functionality/tools will be developed to add more languages. 0 of 3 languages activated, no supporting functionality/tool has been finalized 1 of 3 languages activated

No supporting functionality/tool has been finalized

We have gone through all the feedback from the initial code review and have activated Wikispeech as a gadget on Swedish Wikipedia. English, Arabic, Basque and Norwegian are all ready to be activated as well. However, since Wikispeech is not integrated as a MediaWiki extension Wikimedia Sverige is covering the server costs, instead of the Wikimedia Foundation. Therefore, we decided to not activate Wikispeech on Wikipedia in Arabic or English. We are however looking for funding opportunities to cover these costs going forward.

We are hopeful that we will receive funding in 2022 to finalize the Speech Data Collector tools we have worked on since 2020. Many of the functionalities are close to ready and with a few months of development they should be possible to activate.

The focus of the program is to make the platforms and activities known, appreciated and trusted. It also includes our work to make the platforms easy to use and both our platforms and activities accessible to everyone.

Making the platforms and activities known and appreciated edit

Previously, with more limited resources invested, we mainly targeted different expert groups and similar in our communication, for example posting in Facebook groups for GLAM professionals. In 2021 we invested resources in developing our social media presence so that our activities and messaging can reach a significantly larger audience. This was part of our preparations for an increased focus on fundraising in 2022.

We believe that more communication will, amongst other things, improve our possibilities for increasing participation at our events, help us find more partners, increase funding opportunities and prevent misunderstandings about our work and the Wikimedia platforms.

We have also worked on ensuring that our activities are noticed and highlighted by the media by issuing press releases and providing expert support to journalists.

Our goal of reaching 5,000 members in 3 years is dependent on developing clearer communication that highlights the value of the work we do.

Making usage easy and accessible to everyone edit

Through our efforts we hope to make the platforms easier to use for our readers. We focus both on our in-house development, mainly through the ambitious Wikispeech project, and on informing other developer teams about issues that we encounter during workshops and other events that we organize.

Story: Usage of MediaWiki amongst Swedish authorities edit

In this Story we are focusing on the inventory we made on how Swedish authorities use MediaWiki. It turned out that several authorities either used, had used, or were interested in using MediaWiki for their internal work.

 
MediaWiki logo.

One of the major projects of Wikimedia Sverige is the development of Wikispeech, a speech synthesis for MediaWiki. EU legislation requires that all public authorities make their platforms accessible also for people with disabilities, and it was our hypothesis that Wikispeech therefore could make MediaWiki more interesting as software for public authorities in Sweden.

Thus, we reached out to all public authorities in Sweden, and asked if they knew of MediaWiki, and if they had used it, used it, or would be interested in knowing how to use it. While many public authorities had never heard of MediaWiki, it turned out that several public authorities either use it today, or had used it previously. Several also expressed their interest in using it in the future. As a consequence, we are planning events to cater for this interest.

It also turned out that wikis in general is an appreciated tool for authorities to use. The lack of interoperability between MediaWiki and other platforms used by agencies made, however, a few authorities move from MediaWiki to proprietary solutions. This is also relevant information, as it affects how we can work ahead in order to get more authorities interested in using MediaWiki.

Another learning from the inventory was that amongst the authorities that use MediaWiki, most of them use it for internal purposes. No authority explicitly answered that they used MediaWiki for communication or interaction with an external audience.

We will use this inventory to develop a series of events in the future, to compile, if possible, case studies for increased usage, and to see if there are possibilities for applying for funds for this kind of development. The report can be found here.

Story: Wikispeech is activated! edit

 
Wikispeech is now a gadget on Swedish language Wikipedia. Logged-in users can activate it in their settings, and start listening to the articles in Swedish. The menu is shown in the bottom of the page.

In this Story we are focusing on how we, after 5 years of development, finally were able to launch Wikispeech on Swedish Wikipedia. By doing so we have increased accessibility of the content for people who, for different reasons, have a hard time reading. It was not a straight path at all and the initiative was close to fall apart at the very end.

In 2015 we started conceptualizing a future software solution to make Wikipedia accessible to the millions upon millions of people for whom it is hard to access written text, such as people with visual impairment or dyslexia, or those who simply prefer listening to reading. But how could such a tool handle the quickly changing texts on Wikipedia covering all kinds of topics? How could we build a tool that was possible to improve by the volunteer community so that it would be really useful and possible to scale to different languages over time?

What we ended up with was Wikispeech, a text-to-speech solution built on a computer voice that is created with machine learning (when people talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) they are often thinking of machine learning). However, back in 2015 the focus on machine learning was not as clear-cut a choice as it is today with the rapid improvements that we have seen.

After researching the topic for some time we realized that the international Wikimedia movement, jam-packed as it is with tech and linguistic savvy volunteers, would not only be able to help improve the Wikispeech solution, but that our movement could help solve a major problem with unethical AI – that is the lack of data available from people other than white English-speaking men which prevents AI solutions from working equally well for everybody. Collecting data at scale from a massive amount of people is hard but needs to be tackled.

So we started the development of Wikispeech with the clear intention to identify paths for the volunteer community to contribute with this data. The first step, which has now been achieved, was to develop a fully functional text-to-speech solution so that people can listen to Wikipedia. When they hear mistakes they will be inclined to provide solutions and by doing so helping to improve the available data. In June 2021 the solution was presented to the Swedish Wikipedia for early feedback and in the coming weeks the bugs identified were solved. On the 22 July 2021 Wikispeech was activated as a gadget on Swedish Wikipedia. Testing continued in 2021 to measure performance, solve reported bugs and add more requested features. In 2022 we will organize an official launch event and start scaling to more language versions of Wikipedia.

We are also continuing developing the tools needed to contribute with speech data so that AI over time will work for everybody, regardless of your gender, if you have a pronounced dialect or an accent, a speech impairment, the darkness of your voice etc.

In time we hope that Wikispeech will be added as an official extension of MediaWiki, as was our original intention. The code has already gone through a security review by Wikimedia Foundation so we are hopeful that this will be achieved in time. If you would like to test Wikispeech in Swedish you can visit sv.wikipedia.org, log into your Wikipedia account and in the user settings activate the gadget. Then you just pick a page you want to listen to and press play!

Detailed project overview edit

Below all the projects belonging to the program will be briefly explained and the current status presented. Synergies between the projects will be described. A few selected stories have been presented more in depth as case studies above.

For all the projects, we will state whether they are small, medium or large. In this context, a small project is defined as one where the total budget is less than 100,000 SEK (about 12,500 USD); a medium sized project is defined as one where the total budget is between 100,000 SEK and 300,000 SEK (12,500 to about 37,500 USD); finally, a large project is defined as one where the total budget exceeds 300,000 SEK (about 37,500 USD).

We are also outlining where the project will have an impact in the Wikimedia universe and who we are partnering with to deliver the best possible result.

We also include information about the importance of each project, e.g. if the project is core, essential, one-off or experimental. In this context, a project is considered to be core if it is part of our identity as an organization. The project will be organized even if impact is less in the short term and will only be canceled after a consensus has been reached amongst our community. A project is essential if it actively contributes to one or many of the goals that have been outlined for the year or the long term strategy. Most projects should belong here. A project that is considered a one-off is organized because it is delivering a specific benefit to the organization but it is unlikely that we will repeat it in its current form. The type of project might continue over the years, but the content will intentionally change significantly over time. The experimental projects are testing a new idea, method or technology and are often externally financed. They might be a one-off or if successful become an essential project.

Wikispeech – Speech Data Collector 2019 edit

What is the project: The main aim of the project was to develop a MediaWiki extension that makes it possible to collect speech data through crowdsourcing, to connect this to the Wikispeech extension and to finalize the text-to-speech functionality and finally activate it on Wikipedia. The idea is that the Speech Data Collector will be used to improve the quality of the text-to-speech software and to make it possible to extend the text-to-speech to more languages in the future. Furthermore, the data collected will be a resource and a service to the entire FOSS community. The project ended on 30 April 2021.

What’s been done: In 2021 the focus of the project was adjusted to the finalization of as many parts of the text-to-speech solution as possible. As WMF unexpectedly limited their commitment to only conduct code, security and performance reviews, but not to launch the extension (as was previously expected) the focus had to be adjusted to ensure that as much of the software was ready for the review.

This meant that the development of the Speech Data Collector had to be halted, even though an early version of it was reaching completion.

At the end of the project, the text-to-speech solution was well functioning and we really wanted to activate it and welcome feedback from real users. As WMF was unwilling to activate it as an extension, we re-developed it into a so-called gadget for Wikipedia, which allowed us to launch Wikispeech as a standalone tool on our own servers. A gadget is a program that can be enabled simply by checking an option in the user preferences.

Due to limited resources we decided to only launch it for Swedish Wikipedia initially to be able to evaluate the needs and to solve the most pressing issues when the volunteers started testing Wikispeech and reported bugs.

What’s next: The project ended in April 2021. We are working on identifying further funding opportunities to continue developing the speech data collection tools. We will present the project and its outcomes for the project funder, the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority, in April 2022.

Size of project: Large

Project impact: Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons

Importance: Core

Partners: The Royal institute of technology (KTH), Södermalm Talteknologiservice AB (STTS), The Swedish Dyslexia Association

Link to the project: Wikispeech – Talresursinsamlaren 2019

Wikispeech for AI 2020 edit

What is the project: The aim of Wikispeech for AI 2020 is to act as a reference and tester for a larger project aiming to use AI to create a free text-to-speech voice suitable for reading longer texts.

What’s been done: The focus has been on investigating if and how the Wikispeech software could use the new voices developed by the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The project also allowed us to continue to further develop Wikispeech as part of the preparatory work.

What’s next: In 2022 we will support KTH around text corpuses from Wikipedia that they can use for their machine learning efforts.

Size of project: Medium

Project impact: Wikipedia

Importance: Experimental

Partners: -

Link to the project: Wikispeech för AI 2020

Trust Making 2021 edit

What is the project: The focus of the project is to start compiling data on the trust of the Wikimedia projects in general and Wikipedia specifically, among the general public as well as among specific target groups.

What’s been done: We looked into three different ways of organizing the work:

  1. Coordinating with the team at the Swedish Internet Foundation who publish their yearly report “Svenskarna och Internet” (The Swedes and the Internet). The answer from the Swedish Internet Foundation was that they had not included us this year, but would look into including us for the 2022 survey.
  1. We investigated our participation in the SOM Surveys facilitated by Gothenburg University, in order to retrieve sufficient data on questions concerning trust in Wikipedia and related topics, among the general public. We hoped this would create valuable insights that would have a good reach and visibility. However, we had to postpone our participation in the SOM Surveys facilitated by Gothenburg University as the report had an upfront cost and the finances of the association did not allow our participation this year. The discussions will continue for 2022.

What’s next: Our first step will be to contact the survey Mediebarometern, that already investigates the trust in Wikipedia. We will ask them what kind of data they have collected and if we could get access to that data. After that, we will look into becoming a part of the SOM Surveys in 2022, investigating the trust in the Wikimedia platforms (mainly Wikipedia) rather than in the association.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: -

Partners: -

Link to the project: Förtroende 2021

Visibility Making 2021 edit

What is the project: This project aimed at coordinating our communication work and on building up the platforms that we use for external communication. Much of the actual communication efforts in the association (social media posts, blog posts and press releases) are developed as parts of the projects that they cover. This project coordinated the publication of the material and ensured that it was consistent in quality and design.

What’s been done: We kept our blog and social media accounts active with general communication to ensure awareness about our work. This included increasing the amount of people we reach through our channels, reporting in line with the digital communication reporting guidelines. The content on our websites was updated regularly through the work in this project. We worked more proactively in our digital channels, using the capacity of the entire staff. Therefore, we had a special focus on how visibility is an integrated part of the other projects, with this project coordinating the work across the organization.

We have scaled up our social media activities over the last year. In 2021 we increased our reach and now engagement has been the key focus. We did an experimental campaign in connection with Swedish Wikipedia turning 20 years. This topic was used to highlight the impact of volunteers. We also focused on communicating what Wikimedia is, increasing the knowledge among the general public of who we are and what we do in order to gain more members and donors. This was considered successful, but we also learned a lot and will continue to experiment and organize similar activities on social media.

We had support from Anna, an intern studying social media communication, for the larger part of the year, with content production and with a social media strategy.

We launched a couple of social media campaigns to increase the chapter’s visibility, including a campaign at the end of the year focusing on gaining more followers, members and donors. We identified three target groups: people active in the GLAM sector, photographers, and people with an interest in gender equality, that all had specific ads directed at them. We gained the most attention for the GLAM ads, and also learned that the Facebook ads manager tool can be quite a struggle.

What’s next: Our continued focus is building visibility for the organization Wikimedia Sverige as well as our ideology and the work we do for free knowledge. The visibility project will work to showcase what is being done in fulfilling the new organizational Strategy, rather than having its own agenda or focus.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Importance: Core

Project impact: -

Partners: -

Link to the project: Synlighet 2021

Wikidata for genealogy 2021 edit

What is the project: The aim of this project was to provide consulting services to a Swedish startup, Trackuback, who are developing a platform for hobby genealogists with an emphasis on visualization. They were interested in using the data on Wikidata, such as the dates and places of battles, locations of graveyards lists of monarchs, as well links to relevant Wikipedia articles, to provide added value to the users of the platform. Furthermore, they were interested in the multilingual aspect of Wikidata as a possible tool to translate the platform to other languages and reach an international user base.

As this was the first time WMSE is working together with a startup, we used this project as an opportunity to evaluate this form of collaboration.

What’s been done: In the first stage of our collaboration, we focused on providing training and support on Wikidata. We organized two training sessions, a general one on Wikidata, aimed at the project group at Trackuback, and a more technical one, on Wikimedia's API's and SPARQL. Its goal was to provide the participants with enough knowledge to start ingesting data from the Wikimedia projects using the various tools available and implement it in their own applications. The API workshop was an open event, and we invited members of the Swedish Wikimedia and open source communities to participate. The workshop was recorded and shared on Wikimedia Commons (part 1, part 2).

We were also available for regular check-ins and answered questions from the Trackuback developers as they implemented the new functionalities. A lot of them centered around building SPARQL queries to extract the data they needed from Wikidata in an efficient way, for example limited to a coordinate border on a map.

In order to make the users of the Trackuback platform more aware of where the data comes from, as well as how they can start using and contributing to them themselves, we produced a couple of short educational films about editing Wikidata. These will be used by Trackuback in their marketing channels, increasing the possibility that hobby genealogists take the first steps towards becoming Wikimedians.

What's next: No further work is planned.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: Wikidata

Partners: Trackuback

Link to the project: Wikidata för genealogi 2021

Bug Reporting and Translation 2021 edit

What is the project: The main purpose of this project is to decrease the number of errors in the software used on the Wikimedia projects by reporting bugs and correcting erroneous translations in the software.

What’s been done: The main focus was continuous bug reporting, including capturing and documenting bugs encountered by participants in our events. A translate-a-thon was organized for the staff at Deloitte.

What's next: We will scale-up the work on organizing events focusing on translations.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Importance: Essential

Project impact: N/A

Partners: N/A

Link to the project: Buggrapportering och översättning 2021

Knowledge in Crisis Situations 2021 edit

What is the project: Through previous collaborations, the value of free knowledge in crisis situations has been identified as an interesting area for the association to operate within. Both to take part of the enormous amount of material that various aid organizations and the like develop, and also to provide people who, for various reasons, are in a crisis situation with freely licensed material. At present, the knowledge amongst those working in the humanitarian aid sector is limited. In this project the methods and material needed to change this are created. The current Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of this project.

What’s been done: We have discussed the possibilities of a new round of work on Covid-19 related issues together with the UN Population Fund, UNFPA. This would mainly look into more long-term issues, and try to identify what setup of articles would need to be in order for any upcoming or future epidemics or pandemics. Due to time constraints, we were however not able to put these plans into action during 2021.

We started working together with Statistics Sweden, who recently marked all of their open data with CC0, on data relating to Agenda 30 and the Sustainable Development Goals. We conducted a pilot study to identify ways of modeling such data on Wikidata and the Wikimedia platforms. These pilots can hopefully pave the way both for a more extensive import of SDG data to Wikidata from Sweden, and inspire similar work in other countries.

During the latter part of the year, we initiated conversations with the Swedish Afghanistan Committee, on making knowledge and information on Afghanistan available on the Wikimedia platforms in relation to the Taliban offensive of 2021.

What’s next: We have also started preparing for a more strategic approach to work with this project, setting goals and frameworks for what we want to achieve and how. This work will continue in 2022.

Size of project: Small

Project impact: Wikipedia

Importance: Experimental

Partners: UNFPA, Statistics Sweden

Link to the project: Kunskap i krissituationer 2021

Wikispeech Maintenance and Support 2021 edit

What is the project: The main purpose of this project was to maintain and support the Wikispeech software which was built using external funding. The project ensured that the software continued to function, that security concerns could be addressed, and that community feedback was triaged.

What’s been done: The project got off the ground directly after the Wikispeech – Speech Data Collector 2019 project ended. At that time the Wikispeech text-to-speech solution was about to be launched as a gadget and we needed to act fast and respond to the issues identified by the community out of respect for their engagement and to gain support for the next steps. The quick improvements we provided to solve the major issues identified led to the community being in favor of fully activating the gadgeton the Swedish Wikipedia on the 22 July 2021. The work to monitor and act on feedback from the community continued during the year.

The work also focused on starting to collect data on the usage to better understand what the costs associated with the tool would be, e.g. the demands on the server infrastructure.

What’s next: The work to ensure a positive experience for the users will continue. In the process we will compile data on the usage and costs associated to better understand the costs to implement the tool onto all Wikimedia wikis over time.

We will ensure that the unique features around crowdsourcing are activated so that the users can help to improve the quality of the text-to-speech by improving the lexicon.

We have identified a number of interesting partnership opportunities that could ensure long-term funding and wider adoption of the tool and we will continue to work on developing those.

Size of project: Medium

Project impact: Wikipedia

Importance: Core

Partners: -

Link to the project: Wikispeech – Underhåll och support 2021

Community edit

  Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (at end of Q2) Comments
Community C.1.1 To make work easier, support will be given, by the office, 365 times to at least 100 Wikimedians (or others who advocate for free knowledge) through expertise, financing or other resources.[9] 294 occasions to 79 Wikimedians 327 out of 365 occasions

81 out of 100 Wikimedians

The COVID-19 situation has limited the type of support we can offer. Our technology equipment is also getting old, which makes it less relevant for our volunteers to borrow. We did however provide long-term loans of equipment to a number of volunteers who used it regularly. For those we have marked each week of usage as an occasion. We also launched a new initiative where we provide access to a media archive, which proved very successful. This metric has always had an ambitious goal and this year we got closer to fulfilling it than ever before.
C.1.2 To strengthen the community the chapter will support at least 75 recurring meet-ups[10] for Wikimedians 62 65 of 75
We did not reach the goal. The meet-ups continued online, but the frequency has been reduced. We expect this trend to change as COVID-19 restrictions are lifted.
C.1.3 To facilitate the use of new technical solutions on Wikipedia, a project shall be carried out around implementation, based on the Community's needs and desires. 1 0 technical wish implemented
Due to staff changes we did not work on any new technical solutions but instead we invested a limited amount of time into updating and improving upon the solutions we activated in previous years.
C.2 To increase participation from Wikimedia's underrepresented groups[11], targeted initiatives organized by the association shall result in one productive edit from 365 unique users belonging to one or more of those groups. 1279 589 out of 365
The majority of women and non-binary participants took part in the WikiGap events that were organized across the world. As surveys are not required for participating organizations of the events we have, what we believe is conservatively, estimated that ⅔ of the participants were women, but that not all of them ended up editing. Our work with educational institutions is also an important way to engage people from underrepresented groups with a high percentage of participants being women or non-binary.

Supporting existing community edit

We work to support the volunteer community in a number of ways, which is possible thanks to staff members with a wide variety of skills and because of the infrastructure we have built up in the last few years.

We see the Wikimedia movement needing two different sets of volunteers, that to some degree overlap: 1. the online contributors who, for example, edit Wikipedia, photograph for Wikimedia Commons or add data to Wikidata, and 2. the volunteers who are interested in supporting free knowledge offline in different ways, such as organizing events, giving lectures, soliciting new members or forming new partnerships. We have historically focused on the first group, but now we are aiming to create resources needed to grow the second group.

This year we have therefore focused on building a stronger foundation by developing communication tools, a strategy and training material.

We still continue to create meeting spaces and cover the costs associated with volunteer work. We have also provided technical support to create tools (requested solutions for long-standing technical problems) for the most active volunteers.

The work to support the volunteer community with requested technical solutions has shifted focus to maintenance of previously developed tools due to competing priorities from externally funded projects coupled with a smaller developer staff than expected during the year.

Due to COVID-19, these efforts have however been hampered as the volunteer community has not been able organize events – for example the yearly Wikimedia camps we have organized had to be canceled. Still, other parts have been possible to move online, at least partly, e.g. the regular edit-a-thons hosted by some of the volunteers.

Fail fest: An extra AGM adds complexity edit

 
Slides for the extra AGM 2021.

In this Fail fest we are focusing on the extra Annual General Meeting (AGM) we held in May 2021, and what led us to the extraordinary decision to have two, and not one, AGM during the same spring.

Wikimedia Sverige is currently experimenting with how to increase the involvement of volunteers and members in the work of the chapter. A strategy was developed, by and for the members, and several working groups were organized to further develop different aspects of how the organization works, e.g. to identify new areas for development, or to discuss possible solutions to identified problems. An important motivation behind this is to gain support for any major changes from the members, and to listen to their views and opinions.

In the first quarter of the year there were still some uncertainties about the outcome of some very large grant applications, which would affect the work done by the chapter for years to come. This would affect not only the activities and budget for the year, but also a number of key documents needed for the AGM. This was a challenge, as all members were to be informed about both the activities plan and the budget during the AGM, which, according to the statutes, is to be organized before the end of April each year.

It would have been possible for the board and staff to write a schematic budget and activities plan for the first AGM, but chances would have been high that we would have needed to revise these documents almost entirely, just shortly after the AGM.

Our solution to this problem was to split the AGM into two parts: the first AGM was held in late April, and the second in late May, when the required documents for the AGM had been prepared. This setup was not ideal, but still, it made it possible for us to focus more on the reporting and closing of the previous year in the first AGM, and more on the future in the second. In a sense, the ordinary and the extra AGM thus got relatively clearly defined aims and themes.

This two-part AGM needed to be accepted by the members. There was initially some skepticism towards the approach from some members, but in the end, the reasons behind it were generally well understood, and approved at the first AGM. The board was open with the difficulties and problems beforehand, and informed about the wish for this setup already in the summoning to the first AGM. The members expressed support for the fact that this allowed them to actively influence the final documents, and not just some paperwork that would have been prepared merely for formal reasons. The wish from the chapter’s board and staff was to give real influence to members.

Hopefully, this kind of split is something that we do not need to do many times. Still, we learned a lot about organizing AGMs, about formal procedures, about democracy and decision-making within the organization, and how to deal with organizational problems. We identified several things we can improve for the future when it comes to organizing AGMs and involving members in the decision-making, and it strengthened our understanding of how important it is to involve members not only in the formal decision-making process but also in the direction and development of the organization.

Story: Verifying Wikipedia – with the help of Mediearkivet edit

 
Sifting through shelves of microfilm is a thing of the past now that Wikipedians can access a digital news archive from home.

In this story we focus on the work done by editors to verify and add high quality sources to articles using the digital news archive Mediearkivet as a resource.

As any Wikipedian knows, reliable sources are the key to building a trustworthy encyclopedia. One of the most relevant resources for Swedish Wikipedians is Mediearkivet, a digital news archive covering all the major media outlets going back to 1981. Mediearkivet is paywalled; it can be accessed at public and university libraries, which is how many Wikipedians started to use it, but using it from home is not cheap.

At the request from an editor we investigated the interest from the editor community to see if signing a contract with the Retriever group, who owns Mediearkivet, would be worth the cost for getting access to all news articles, magazines and papers. With the interest shown, and as Retriever group offered a discount on the price, we signed a three year deal that allows up to 100 user accounts. To ensure the anonymity and integrity of the users we have a special set up where neither we nor the service providers can see what articles individual users are reading, and we are only counting the number of user accounts as a metric.

Starting in September we had opened 34 accounts until the end of the year, and those accounts had read a total of around 4,500 articles during 2021. Several users have expressed the value of access to the articles and that the variety makes it easy to use both in writing new articles and in verifying statements in old articles.

Story: Starting to support volunteer software developers edit

 
The ISA Tool lowers the threshold to enriching images with structured data. That's why it's among the tools whose development we're supporting.

In this Story we outline the first steps taken on the path to creating a qualitative support structure for the volunteer developers in the Wikimedia movement to ensure that they thrive and that long-term maintenance of key software is ensured over time.

The volunteer developer community is an amazing part of the Wikimedia movement. Their work with developing innovative open source solutions has allowed volunteers across the world to more effectively contribute with free knowledge. They are key to the success of our platforms. But little work and efforts have been done to help the volunteers to survive, grow and flourish. We want to change this.

Over the last years we have had countless discussions with the volunteers to understand their wants and needs. Also, a number of volunteer developers have been hired by Wikimedia Sverige and shared their experience. These discussions have provided us with some insights and we want to try the development of the support structures.

Many of the tools that volunteer developers have created have been so successful that they nowadays are of strategic importance for Wikimedia affiliates across the world, as they are extensively used in content partnerships. If the tools do not work, the content partnership is damaged.

OpenRefine, an open-source application for working with large datasets and Wikidata, is a great example. For a couple of years, we have supported its continuous development. We use it extensively in our own work and champion its use in the GLAM community, which has given us plenty of experience and knowledge about various use cases and quirks. The development project focused on implementing Wikimedia Commons functionalities in OpenRefine, which started mid-2021, was a great opportunity for us to get to know the developers better. One of our staff members has been regularly participating in their meetings, sharing their experiences from the point of view of both an editor and a trainer, and testing the new functionalities as they get implemented. This close partnership benefits both sides, as it will make it easier for us to train our current and future GLAM partners on the new software, as well as it provides the developers with the users' perspective.

In the second half of 2021 we had identified two key tools, the ISA Tool and Pattypan, that had technical issues that needed to be solved quickly – or else they would not be possible to use anymore. Therefore our first step was to provide hands-on developer work, with one of our in-house developers spending a few months providing patches and improvements to the two tools. The work needed to be done was rather different for the two tools.

ISA is a tool for adding structured data to Wikimedia Commons through crowdsourcing. With it, users can add campaigns with a set of categories to include images from them. Other users can then participate in the campaign by adding depicts statements (linking the images to the Wikidata items of the objects they show) and captions for the images. It was developed by Wiki In Africa, Histropedia and the Structured Data on Commons project, and deployed in 2019.

Because it had seen little maintenance since deployment, there were a few issues with the tool. We investigated the state of the tool by looking at Phabricator tasks and talking with the creators, and made a list of what we should focus on. So far we have managed to fix a couple of security holes that could have led to the tool being deactivated. We also worked on a few performance issues that manifested in the shape of slow page loading and made it possible to contribute with translation of the UI through translatewiki.net.

Pattypan is a batch upload tool that is heavily used by both Wikimedians and GLAM staff. Pattypan is, as many other useful tools, developed by volunteers. Over the years their work on the tool has made it possible to upload more than 1 million media files, and many GLAM institutions have added the tool as a part of their toolbox.

Pattypan stopped working after a change made in the MediaWiki APIs. At the same time there were issues with the version of Java that Pattypan depended on. This meant that end users had to go through a complicated installation process.

The volunteer developer working on Pattypan was asking for help specifically with packaging the new version. We helped out with this, making it easier both to test the tool during the process of fixing the other issues, and to use the tool by the end users. We have also made a rough estimate of how much work it would be to fix some of the prioritized issues that have been reported.

These efforts were valuable to keep the tools working in the near time, and to add some improvements that further have increased their usefulness for volunteers and affiliates.

But this was really just a band-aid solution. What the movement really needs is effective and reliable maintenance over years to come. It was not a good and comprehensive support structure for the volunteer developers (it was not the village that has been requested); and it was not based on a solid analysis on the long-term needs and wants of the Wikimedia affiliates and volunteers. We want to provide this missing infrastructure and service to our amazing volunteer developers – and we want to provide it in close partnership with the affiliates that are using the tools. Therefore we developed a new position as Product strategist for our team. We hope that this will allow us to take the next strategic steps so that we will be able to move forward with this work in 2022/2023.

The Wikimedia movement must become better at providing support to its volunteers, whose life situations, priorities and interests can and may change. Otherwise, it can create problems for our content partners who want, and need, to be able to work with long-term projects. Let's start building that village together.

Expanding the community edit

To grow the community on the Wikimedia platforms, we are organizing a number of activities aimed at creating interest among groups of people who have yet to engage on our platforms, or around free knowledge in general.

We work to raise awareness of the Wikimedia projects in order for new participants to engage. When new participants start to contribute, we make sure to lower barriers and create an inclusive environment and to provide direct support in different forms.

Our cooperation with different organizations has been a cornerstone in achieving success in community growth. By involving the communities of our partners in our projects, some of their community members have joined the Wikimedia community in some capacity.

Both the WikiGap initiative and the Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments contests have continued to be strong vehicles for engagement from new volunteers and we will continue to develop these concepts further.

Story: Trio of ambassadors in WikiGap edit

 
Slides for WikiGap 2021 Global Kickoff.

In this Story we are focusing on the first attempt ever to kick off the WikiGap Campaign with a global WikiGap event. With almost 70 participants, and more than 200 content pages created or improved, the event, which was opened by speeches from three Swedish women diplomats, was one of the most successful WikiGap events we have organized so far.

The Covid-19 pandemic remained a big obstacle for organizing WikiGap events in 2021, as the campaign historically has had a heavy focus on physical events. With this in mind, we wanted to support the global WikiGap organizers with the short-term transition to a virtual campaign. As a way of doing this, we decided to organize a global, virtual kick-off event.

We teamed up with competent partners: Wikimedia in Washington D.C. joined and supported with the organizing of an English-language virtual editathon; the Swedish Embassy to Washington D.C., the Swedish Representation to the United Nations and the Swedish Consulate General in New York all joined in and helped with communication and logistics. Our goal was to encourage and support virtual WikiGap editathons, show how a WikiGap event can be organized virtually in practice, and, finally, to provide a meaningful event in a difficult time.

A substantial amount of time was put into preparations for the event, and all three top diplomats – the Swedish ambassador to the United States, the Swedish permanent representative to the United Nations, and the Swedish honorary consul in New York – opened the event together with a speech. As all of them are female, it was also a declaration of equality in itself.

A staff member at Wikimedia D.C. gave an extensive introduction on how to edit English Wikipedia with the Visual Editor. The purpose of this introduction was twofold: partly to show a global audience how to, in the easiest way possible, create new articles on English Wikipedia, and partly to show WikiGap organizers globally a good way of introducing Wikipedia to beginners. More than half of the participants took part in this introduction. The other half were able to start writing immediately, as the event was divided up, virtually, into different rooms.

The event in itself became a hallmark of the WikiGap Campaign in 2021. Several participants also reached out to us afterwards, and said that it was one of the first global editathons they had taken part of, and that they wished to see more possibilities of engaging and taking part in Wikimedia events on a global level in the future, and not only locally or nationally.

Hopefully, we can use this insight to continue to provide the global Wikimedia movement with meaningful activities, during the pandemic and onwards. We are also hoping that the launch event for WikiGap will be an event that will tour different continents and by doing so create even more visibility and engagement in the campaign.

Detailed project overview edit

Below all the projects belonging to the program will be briefly explained and the current status presented. Synergies between the projects will be described. A few selected stories have been presented more in depth as case studies above.

For all the projects, we will state whether they are small, medium or large. In this context, a small project is defined as one where the total budget is less than 100,000 SEK (about 12,500 USD); a medium sized project is defined as one where the total budget is between 100,000 SEK and 300,000 SEK (12,500 to about 37,500 USD); finally, a large project is defined as one where the total budget exceeds 300,000 SEK (about 37,500 USD).

We are also outlining where the project will have an impact in the Wikimedia universe and who we are partnering with to deliver the best possible result.

We also include information about the importance of each project, e.g. if the project is core, essential, one-off or experimental. In this context, a project is considered to be core if it is part of our identity as an organization. The project will be organized even if impact is less in the short term and will only be canceled after a consensus has been reached amongst our community. A project is essential if it actively contributes to one or many of the goals that have been outlined for the year or the long term strategy. Most projects should belong here. A project that is considered a one-off is organized because it is delivering a specific benefit to the organization but it is unlikely that we will repeat it in its current form. The type of project might continue over the years, but the content will intentionally change significantly over time. The experimental projects are testing a new idea, method or technology and are often externally financed. They might be a one-off or if successful become an essential project.

Community Support 2021 edit

What is the project: This project is directed directly towards the Swedish Wikimedia community to support their efforts and ideas through a minor grants program, with hands-on support and through providing necessary technology.

What’s been done: The Covid-19 pandemic is still affecting the project. During the year, we have been lending cameras to a few projects, and organized accreditation to a few events (mainly sports). We were still not communicating actively about physical projects, however, in order to be careful in the midst of a pandemic.

We gave long term support to two standing projects, the Wikipedia podcast run by two volunteers, and an ongoing series of events on women characters in literature and culture. We supported with technical infrastructure and communication. We also supported a new group of volunteers that have live streamed via, for example, Twitch, in order to reach out to new target groups.

During the fall, we negotiated a license agreement with Mediearkivet, a media archive with access to most Swedish dailies during the last few decades. This proved to be a great resource for Wikipedians, in finding and adding sources to Wikipedia articles, and by the end of the year, more than 30 Wikipedians had applied for one of the licensed accounts.

What’s next: We will continue to provide support to the community. We will also try to identify new areas where support is requested, in order to open up for more possibilities. The example of Mediearkivet is a guiding example in that regard.

Size of project: Medium

Project impact: Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, Wikisource

Importance: Core

Partners: -

Link to the project: Stöd till gemenskapen 2021

Development Support 2021 edit

What is the project: The project focuses on giving technical (development) support to the Swedish-speaking volunteer community by solving technical problems that they have asked us to work on. From 2021 onwards this project has also taken ownership of any previously developed tools which are still supported but were developed within the frames of now discontinued projects.

What’s been done: Since community engagement with our wishlists has been limited in the last few years, we decided to postpone further development until we have found a better path forward. Due to limited staff resources available we focused on updating and improving the software we worked on previous years.

What’s next: We will continue to maintain the tools developed and identify other, or complementing, ways than a wishlist to identify the technical needs of the Swedish Wikipedia community.

Size of project: Small

Project impact: Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons

Importance: Core

Partners: -

Link to the project: Projekt:Utvecklingsstöd 2021

Wiki Loves 2021 edit

What is the project: The project aims to coordinate different Wiki Loves campaigns, a type of photo contest, in Sweden in 2021.

What’s been done: In May, we organized a successful fifth round of the Wiki Loves Earth campaign. The number of submitted photos remains on a substantially higher level than what used to be the case, even if the number of participants and newly registered decreased compared to the previous year. This was most likely due to the fact that we innovated less in 2021, and the main innovations in 2020 – with an interactive map, new partnerships and channels for communication and thousands of new objects to photograph – had lost their news value. We have evaluated the campaign, and look into how we can innovate both the Wiki Loves Earth campaign further, and the Wiki Loves project in general.

In September, we organized the eleventh round of Wiki Loves Monuments in Sweden. As part of the preparations for the contest, we reached out to the community to ask how we could improve the campaign during the upcoming years. This conversation rendered quite some insights, to bring with us to 2022.

We also started experimenting with and planning for a new campaign, with the work name “Wiki Loves Hembygd”. The campaign will focus on local history, and will be a means to forge new local partnerships for content on the Wikimedia platforms. The planning was not finalized during 2021, but will continue in 2022.

What’s next: Organize Wiki Loves Earth and Monuments in 2022, identify other potential Wiki Loves competitions, find opportunities for volunteers to engage in the organization of the competitions, and innovate the competitions in themselves.

Size of project: Small

Project impact: Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata

Importance: Experimental

Partners:

  • UNESCO Sweden
  • The Working Life Museums Co-operation Council (ArbetSam)
  • The National Maritime Museum of Sweden
  • The National Heritage Board of Sweden
  • The Swedish Local Heritage Federation

Link to the project: Wiki Loves 2021

A Community for Everybody 2021 edit

What is the project: This project focused on inviting diverse participation in Wikimedia’s activities and platforms. A key focus is on organizing and coordinating the international WikiGap campaign.

What’s been done: The main focus in 2021 was the international WikiGap campaign, which we coordinated for the fourth time. In 2021, 12,500 articles were created or improved in events that took place in around 40 countries.

The Covid-19 pandemic forced us to rethink the global WikiGap campaign for the second year in a row. To encourage participation and involvement, we kicked off the WikiGap campaign with a global, virtual event, for the first time. The Swedish Ambassador to the United Nations, the Swedish Ambassador to the United States and the Swedish honorary consul to New York – all women – opened the event with some brief remarks.

After that, we coordinated and supported endeavors across the world to organize events, some of them physical and many of them virtual. In line with this, we developed guidance on how to organize virtual WikiGap events. With this support, the number of events were kept on almost the same level as previous years.

We also engaged new partners on a global level, both UN agencies and civil society organizations. Their primary role was to support with external communication, and to provide us with lists of women lacking biographies within various sectors, a new type of content partnership for us. The latter proved to be an engaging way for partners to join the movement. The names they provided were widely used in the WikiGap Challenge, which we organized for the third year in a row.

For the first time, we introduced a qualitative part of the challenge, giving an award for the best new article. A jury was summoned, to define both the process for choosing, and then finally making a decision. This approach was appreciated by many contestants. We also reorganized the pointing system, following some input from previous years’ participants, with a higher focus on quality and good rather than quick contributions.

What’s next: We hope that the Covid-19 pandemic will fade out during 2022, to enable local organizers to host long-awaited physical events. We will engage with more partners, to identify gaps and ways of closing them. We also aim to find ways of scaling up the campaign, together with new partners and means.

Size of project: Medium

Project impact: Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons

Importance: Core

Partners: UNFPA, UN Human Rights, Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Global Citizen

Link to the project: En gemenskap för alla 2021

Lowering barriers for WikiGap 2021 edit

What is the project: In Lowering barriers for WikiGap 2021, we work together with the Wikimedia user group in Uganda, both to organize a series of WikiGap events, and to find formats for these events that are easy to replicate in Uganda and Eastern Africa, especially focusing on lowering the barriers.

What’s been done: The main part of the project will take place in Spring 2022. The work we did in 2021 was preparations: developing a toolkit, finding partners, identifying gaps, preparing communication materials and clarifying all parts of the budget.

What’s next: In 2022, the actual events will take place, and we will use the experience from the events to improve the toolkit, and to find ways of scaling the concept to neighboring countries, if such funding will be provided from external partners for 2023.

Size of project: Medium

Project impact: Wikipedia, Wikidata

Importance: Experimental

Partners: Wikimedia Community User Group Uganda

Link to the project: Sänkta trösklar för WikiGap 2021


Enabling edit

  Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (at end of Q2) Comments
Enabling E.1 For the association to work competently the office staff shall be given the opportunity to develop their skills in relevant fields and the members of the board shall strive to develop their competences. 1/9 board members and 5/9 staff members. 0 out of 9 board members.

2 out of 12 staff members.

Here we only measure when staff and board members participate in external trainings. We do not include the internal training that is organized for staff and board members nor do we include participation at e.g. conferences. Only seven out of 11 staff members worked the entire year, with three staff members on parental leave and one staff member drastically cutting down their engagement with the organization in the middle of the year. The interest in participating in training and courses that are entirely online seems to be lower amongst both staff and board members.
E.2 To strengthen the transparency of the organisation and offer insight to international Wikimedia movement the members of the board or office staff shall participate in at least 5 international Wikimedia events and on a monthly basis update international newsletters[12] and key wikiportals etc. 12 int. events and 12 newsletters. 18 int. events out of 5.

13 newsletters out of 12.

The Wikimedia events were online and we have been able to participate in many of them. That way we have reached new groups with information about our work. However, it is worth noting that online events are not efficient in building personal relationships, which risks the transparency in the long-run as direct contacts and quick questions are less likely to take place. We have published our GLAM reports in This Month in GLAM on a monthly basis as well as in one issue of the Education newsletter.
E.3.1 To ensure organizational stability the chapter shall work towards broad and sustainable funding where no donor exceeds 50 %, a 100 % increase in membership from the 31 December previous year, increase volunteer involvement by 30 % compared to the total amount for the previous calendar year. WMF is the largest donor at 58%. 496 out of 1,008 members. 70 out of 125 volunteers. WMF is the largest donor with 45%.

450 out of 1,000 members.

51 out of 91 volunteers.

WMF is the largest donor at 45%, as we received both an Annual Plan Grant as well as a project grant in 2021. The external grants we applied for however mainly affect the budget of 2022. A big source of funding was the legacy gift (at 35%) if this is not taken into account the share of the funding from the WMF becomes 70%. The distribution of funding does not take in-kind donations into account.

We saw the membership number drop compared to 2020. This was likely caused, in part, by the pandemic which resulted in less events and opportunities to publicize ourselves. It however happened despite an increase in our social media presence. In 2022 we will investigate the cause of the drop and renew our member recruitment efforts.

Most of the volunteer involvement occurred through our photo contests, and our efforts to develop a new strategy and with the work around the Open Educational Resources network. Overall it was reduced compared to 2020 as we had fewer physical events where volunteer engagement was possible.

E.3.2 To ensure organizational stability the office shall actively work to increase the amount of overlapping competencies in business-critical areas. Fulfilled the goal. Fulfilled the goal.
Efforts include improved documentation around finances, usage of our wiki and information about our new tools. Technical staff that has traditionally not been working with batch upload tools have been able to experiment with them in order to to develop a deeper understanding. We have also continued our efforts to organize small working groups at the office instead of delegating the responsibilities to one person and on documenting the work on Phabricator.

The chapter aims to be a relevant actor for years to come and is actively working towards building the organizational capacity needed for long term activities and commitments. We need to be a good employer, a strong partner, and a well functioning democratic and transparent membership organization with close cooperation with a strong volunteer community. The chapter is also intending to not be an isolated player but be actively involved in the international movement.

These intentions demand projects that are more long term oriented and strategic. The projects in this program therefore contribute only marginally to content production in a given year, but over time will ensure the success and sustainability of all our activities.

Increasing competence edit

To be able to develop skills in relevant fields, board and staff members must be given the opportunity to develop their skills. More than half of the staff members have participated in different types of trainings in 2021, a few in multiple ones. The work with developing educational material for new volunteers and members to easier use our tools and join our projects has continued.

As Wikimedia Sverige intends to grow in the coming years we see a great need to ensure that we ongoingly identify and take notice of suitable board members, potential new staff members, and volunteers who have the capacity to take leadership roles in different initiatives. We are in the process of developing a more comprehensive set of training materials for both volunteers and staff. We are also planning for more internal capacity building with staff members where they can share their expertise with their colleagues.

As part of a global movement filled with innovative organizations and volunteers we believe that we have a lot to learn from others and are keen on ensuring that our staff, board and volunteers receive the possibility to meet, listen and discuss with representatives from around the world. As an organization, it is our responsibility to develop the infrastructure needed for this to take place effectively and at scale.

Story: Establishing The Grand Tour of Europe edit

We talked about the Grand Tour concept at Wikimania 2021.

In this Story we are focusing on how knowledge, resources and experience can be shared within the Wikimedia Movement through a capacity building tour for volunteers and staff. We are laying the foundation for a world-wide program, strengthening the possibility of even more free knowledge.

We strongly believe that meeting and sharing knowledge is the key to growing. This is the foundational idea of the Grand Tour of Wikimedia – an exchange program for volunteers and staff within the Wikimedia movement.

The idea is that a small group of travelers will set out on a journey together, coming from different parts of the world (and the movement) and visiting chapters, user groups and affiliates that will share their methods, material and knowledge. The tour will take place over the course of some weeks, giving enough time to really get in contact with other parts of the Movement. Each traveler will set their own goals for the journey, but each tour will follow the same theme (being GLAM, education, community support, or other). The receiving affiliates will plan the visit with activities such as workshops, study visits, partner meetings or active work in their ongoing projects. The travelers will be active participants in sharing their experiences and knowledge both between themselves and the partners they visit.

Thus far, Wikimedia Sverige, Wikimedia France and Wikimedia Deutschland are on board to receive participants that will sign up for the tour. A number of other affiliates have stated interest to either send or receive participants. We have participated in several meetings to launch the idea and hope to get several applications for participation when we open up for this. Of course, the pandemic has pushed our plans forward to some extent, but our hope is to start the concrete planning during 2022.

As a way of financing the Tour, we have found that there is an Erasmus+ Mobility project for adult education. This goes straight in line with the aims of the project, making it possible for affiliates to apply for funding for the travelers to cover all extra costs. However, the plan is that the receiving countries will fund the Tour for the time period where the travelers stay with them.

Now, a big focus lies ahead on getting more affiliates to join the project and sign up to become hosts and send away travelers for the tours to come. It will be an amazing chance for capacity exchange as well as meeting new and old friends physically again.

Fail fest: Wikimedia Northern Europe Meeting struggling to find its form edit

 
The Wikimedia Northern Europe Meeting 2021 took place online.

In this Fail fest we are focusing on experiences from a digital conference and workshop. The event was a continuation of two previous physical meetings where the social parts very much were in focus. One of the goals was to find new projects and areas to work with between the countries in northern Europe.

In mid-November 2021, we conducted an open digital workshop to resume contact with former Wikimedia Northern Europe participants. The meeting in 2020 was canceled due to the pandemic and this new start was an invitation to join a digital meeting with the opportunity to exchange information about current plans and projects.

Unfortunately, many of the previous participating affiliates did not have the time or opportunity to participate this year, so it was only three countries out of eight that were represented this time. We still wanted to carry out the event as it is relatively easy to have an open digital meeting

For two days we met for a couple hours for discussions and worked together on an idea that is about collecting 1,000 articles from each country that are considered of great interest to translate into several languages. The idea came from Wikimedia Eesti and participants from both Wikimedia Denmark and Wikimedia Sweden participated in the work. The work was a good way to find areas together where we need each other's help and have a common project with a lot of aspects.

Now that the restrictions are disappearing and the pandemic is calming down, maybe we can start planning a new meeting where we can see each other again and resume relations. It's something else to really meet together and the social part can often be a little better outside the digital world. An outcome of the event is that we continue to work on the project with 1,000 important articles and this can be connected with the upcoming Wikipedia Art Month in October 2022.

Being transparent edit

Ensuring that our work is transparent is core to how we plan our projects and day-to-day work. Transparency is inherently valuable as more people can give feedback, point out problems, suggest solutions and contribute in other ways. It allows other organizations to learn from our work and replicate what we do, and it also allows anyone interested in our organization to better understand us which makes it easier to join the work.

However, working in such a transparent manner is something that takes a bit of getting used to for new team members, new volunteers, consultants and external partners. It also comes with an increased cost to ensure that all documentation is understandable, summarized and presented in the different places where our members might expect to find it. Simply making materials available without ensuring that it is understandable is arguably a false transparency.

While acknowledging the issues, our conclusion is that the value of transparency is much higher and we are working to increase our transparency even further. The aim for transparency affects many of the choices regarding what tools we use and it is also something that has to be done while respecting privacy.

Quarterly reviews by the ED and COO have been instigated since 2020. During these reviews we ensure that all content has been uploaded and shared as planned and that the financial information etc. is up-to-date.

Improve organizational quality edit

For the chapter to continue to improve its quality and efficiency we worked to keep our broad and sustainable funding, with the aim of no donor exceeding 50%, and to find new financial options, including a long term increase in paid memberships and donations. We also aim to increase volunteer involvement which can help ensure high quality projects for a limited cost.

Our work to secure funding from external grants has continued in 2021 and we developed applications for several large grants.

Significant investments were made into establishing a donor-based fundraising model through different fundraising methods, such as Face2Face campaigns and social media campaigns.


Story: Wills, estates, legacies and all the preparatory work edit

In this Story a generous gift to the Wikimedia movement is presented and the many steps that were needed to secure it are outlined.

In August 2021 an estate reached out to us out of the blue and introduced us to the fact that we were one of the beneficiaries in a will. The donated amount was significant, with around 400,000 USD in stocks and money being donated to the association. This type of funding will allow us to think and plan long-term as our buffer for unexpected expenses now has reached a comfortable level.

To be able to receive such a large sum of money a number of steps had to be taken. As this was the first legacy that Wikimedia Sverige was to receive and because there were some unclarities of how to process this gift this was a non-trivial exercise. The legacy led to a flurry of activities in 2021 and a lot of exchange with, and generous support from, the fundraising team at Wikimedia Foundation. Amongst other things, we needed to prepare supporting policies and guidelines. We also initiated the work of a legacy program where we outlined what steps future donors should take if they want to mention Wikimedia Sverige in their wills. The work on how to handle legacy gifts in the future will continue in 2022.

Developing a dedicated landing page on our website was a priority. As an organization we are now ready to actively, but respectfully, communicate about this possibility to our donors and members.

Story: Adding interns into the mix edit

In this Story we are focusing on how we have started to develop a new internship program, that creates values and opportunities both for the organization and for the interns.

Earlier years we have had interns coming from different sources and working with different tasks. One who did outreach before Wiki Loves Monuments and clean-up of images after, one who did a user survey, some who did proofreading and translations of reports and documents. What we did not have was a common thread running through what interns we accepted and tasks we gave them.

Without a clear structure and plan we had to start over with every intern, and could not build on previous experiences and outcome. Even though most of our interns added value, we had to work hard to get that extra out of it.

Looking back at it, and looking forward to the planned expansion of our organization and the tasks coming ahead, we are in a good position to add structure to our work with interns to get a better outcome with less input. We are making sure checklists are up to date and who is responsible for ticking off the boxes, we are adding both small recurring tasks and bigger one off tasks suitable for interns to work with to our list.

We are also looking into ways to work with educational institutions where internship is part of the education. That will both ensure we have a steady supply of interns in the right field and allow for a more diverse group of interns as they can use student loans and not carry their expenses themselves.

During 2021 the structures for the internship program were put in place and we expect to start promoting this new opportunity a number of times per year.

Story: Experimenting with different types of corporate partnerships edit

The API workshop that we organized for Trackuback was an open event, with a dozen members of the Swedish Wikimedia and open source communities participating.

In this Story, we are focusing on the new types of partnerships Wikimedia Sverige has been developing. We believe that commercial actors has the potential to make positive contributions to the Wikimedia platforms and help our organization in other ways and has started to pilot a few different approaches.

Through its history, Wikimedia Sverige has been collaborating with various types of actors, from schools to GLAM institutions to public agencies. But they are not the only ones with a keen interest in the Wikimedia platforms. Ever since Wikipedia has become a household name, commercial actors have been eager to get involved, to the chagrin of many Wikipedians. After all, it looks like a perfect – and free! – advertising platform.

The line between objective, well-sourced information and advertising is indeed thin, but it does not mean that commercial actors are inherently unable to stand on the right side of it. Quite the opposite, many are genuinely interested in learning more about the Wikimedia platforms and contributing to them in a constructive way. That's why Wikimedia Sverige has been dipping its toes in different types of corporate partnerships.

One of them was the project Unique Historical Kalmar County (Unika historiska Kalmar län), which was organized by the Kalmar County Museum and aimed at local businesses and associations in the tourism and cultural heritage sectors. Those actors have a lot of expert knowledge about local history and culture and are eager to contribute to Wikipedia in a constructive way. Wikimedia Sverige provided them with a workshop series where we went through everything they needed to know – from the basics of how Wikipedia works, to writing, editing and publishing articles. All with the hope that they can become full-fledged Wikipedians, writing well-sourced, informative articles about the local tourist attractions.

Another commercial actor we worked with 2021 was Trackuback, a young Swedish company developing a web application for genealogists with a focus on maps and visualizations. Sweden has well-maintained public records going long back in time, so genealogy is a popular hobby. Many people, young and old, are interested in their roots, and there's plenty of resources and software available to them. Some of them are also Wikipedians. Others are possible future Wikipedians; they have excellent skills in researching historical material, handling sources and summarizing their findings. WMSE has long been aware of the potential this group has for the Wikimedia platforms.

The goal of our partnership was to support Trackuback in including data from Wikidata in their platforms. We provided a Wikimedian in Residence-type service, with one staff member acting as a contact person throughout the year, teaching the Trackuback team about the Wikimedia ecosystem and Wikidata, answering questions as they came along and assisting with technical issues like developing SPARQL queries. As a result, the Trackuback team gained the necessary skills to work with data from Wikidata on their own. In order to promote the use of open data in software, we also held a workshop about the Wikimedia API's and Wikidata, which was open to the public, and attracted participants from outside of the Wikimedia community. We also created a set of instructional videos about editing Wikidata that the Trackuback team will include in their materials, to encourage the users of their platform who, after seeing how much data from Wikidata it uses, might want to take the step to becoming Wikimedians themselves and improving it.

2021 was the second year we worked together with Deloitte, a professional services network. Every year, Deloitte organizes an Impact Day, when their workers spend the day volunteering for NGOs in their community. During the 2020 Impact Day, they worked, among other things, on our visibility and communication plan. In 2021, the Impact Day took place in October. Together, we set up a structure for a climate impact report, as well as translated a large number of software messages on Translatewiki from English to Swedish and policy documents on Wikipedia from Swedish to English. We are excited to have had this opportunity again; bringing in an external pair (or a dozen!) of eyes is not only about solving the concrete task at hand, but also enables us to look at our organization from a fresh perspective.

Corporate partnerships are a new area for us, but it is also one that is worth exploring. Commercial actors are going to edit Wikipedia no matter what, but with our assistance, they can learn to do it in a responsible way. We are going to evaluate this partnership model to see whether it's something we want to pursue more actively.

Detailed project overview edit

Below all the projects belonging to the program will be briefly explained and the current status presented. Synergies between the projects will be described. A few selected stories have been presented more in depth as case studies above.

For all the projects, we will state whether they are small, medium or large. In this context, a small project is defined as one where the total budget is less than 100,000 SEK (about 12,500 USD); a medium sized project is defined as one where the total budget is between 100,000 SEK and 300,000 SEK (12,500 to about 37,500 USD); finally, a large project is defined as one where the total budget exceeds 300,000 SEK (about 37,500 USD).

We are also outlining where the project will have an impact in the Wikimedia universe and who we are partnering with to deliver the best possible result.

We also include information about the importance of each project, e.g. if the project is core, essential, one-off or experimental. In this context, a project is considered to be core if it is part of our identity as an organization. The project will be organized even if impact is less in the short term and will only be canceled after a consensus has been reached amongst our community. A project is essential if it actively contributes to one or many of the goals that have been outlined for the year or the long term strategy. Most projects should belong here. A project that is considered a one-off is organized because it is delivering a specific benefit to the organization but it is unlikely that we will repeat it in its current form. The type of project might continue over the years, but the content will intentionally change significantly over time. The experimental projects are testing a new idea, method or technology and are often externally financed. They might be a one-off or if successful become an essential project.

Tools for Partnerships 2020 edit

What is the project: This is the continuation of the project Tools for Partnerships 2019 – Blueprinting. The project started in July 2020 and continued the work to prepare for the formation of a Thematic hub in Sweden. The activation of the Thematic hub was delayed due to COVID-19 and its effect on the Wikimedia Foundation’s fundraising and later due to swift changes in the leadership at the Wikimedia Foundation.

What’s been done: In the first half of 2021 the focus has been on supporting the Wikimedia movement with activities connected to Structured Data on Commons (SDC). We initiated the work by evaluating the current information available around SDC. We already knew that there was a lot of material missing and worked closely and efficiently with the GLAM and Culture team at the Wikimedia Foundation. We participated in eight events across the world with over 230 participants in total. During the events we shared the possibilities, opportunities and challenges around Structured Data on Commons. Apart from keeping the international Wikimedia community informed about our work and plans, our goal was to reach out to both current and potential GLAM partners to make them aware of how SDC can help them spread their collections on the Wikimedia platforms, and to ensure them that the time and effort invested in learning about and participating in the platforms will benefit them in the long run.

Through the project we could also practically experiment with batch editing of data on Commons. We made over 260,000 improvements to images from Wiki Loves Monuments and from different GLAM institutions. This will make the images more easily accessible and easier to find by enabling more advanced and exact queries. As the batch editing initiatives in the community are still few and not very well documented we worked to develop in-depth case studies about the different uploads.

The project also allowed us to continue our work on developing ways to support the global GLAM-Wiki community and other people involved in different types of content partnerships and for Wikimedia Sverige to be able to take on a larger role. To prepare for international hires we improved, clarified and updated our documentation and policies and started preparations on a few new policies identified as currently missing and relevant to our increased international work. We also started to look into which of all of our documentation should be translated into English. The information provided on the association’s wiki was reviewed and evaluated systematically to add missing pieces of information, increase the searchability and structure and prepare for translations.

In preparation for new initiatives we developed a number of concept papers, e.g. about capacity building and an exchange program called The Grand Tour of Europe (later refocused to The Grand Tour of Wikimedia); about possible future partnerships with IGOs/INGOs; around software development to lower the threshold of content partnerships; about local fundraising in Sweden to cover parts of the costs, with a special focus on Face2Face fundraising, an area where the Wikimedia movement has very limited experience; and about what we call The Helpdesk, where affiliates and volunteers can receive support to develop or deepen content partnerships (e.g. technical support around batch uploads).

What’s next: The project ended 30 June, 2021 and the work was partly continued with the new project Content Partnerships Support 2021.

Size of project: Large

Project impact: Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons

Importance: Core

Partners: Wikimedia Foundation

Link to the project: Verktyg för partnerskap 2020

Organizational Development 2021 edit

What is the project: This project aims to improve the functioning of the association and the efficiency of its work through targeted activities against identified bottlenecks.

What’s been done: A significant amount of effort was given to the new 4-year strategy that was adopted by the Annual General Meeting of Wikimedia Sverige. See also #Association Involvement 2021 for details about the interactive method used.

As the chapter is intending to grow in size the preparations to develop a formalized trainee program, and a more developed structure for in-house training/education have been a major focus. These initiatives will help with identifying good candidates for positions and ensure a quicker onboarding process. With a growing group of employees the work to develop a team spirit is key and a more structured approach to team building activities is being developed.

We started the work to investigate the technical systems for donations on our website to reduce the time needed to process the donor data when scaling up our fundraising campaigns.

What’s next: The implementation of the next 4-year strategy for Wikimedia Sverige into the existing work and planning will be done. We are having regular meetings with Wikimedia Deutschland to discuss and share learnings around this.

A number of new policies and guidelines are being finalized in 2022. We will also start to prepare training material related to our policies to ease the onboarding of new staff, board members and volunteers.

We will focus on developing the organization’s crisis preparedness, which is growing ever more important with a larger staff, with more international work and with more visibility of our work.

We expect to invest significantly to increase the number of donors and members in Sweden. A new CRM system will be adopted and we will do a number of experiments during the year.

We will finalize the reporting structure for the association’s environmental impact and present it at the AGM.

Size of project: Medium

Project impact: -

Importance: Core

Partners: -

Link to the project: Organisationsutveckling 2021

Exchange of Experiences 2021 edit

What is the project: The project’s aim is to ensure that we share our experiences and learn from other affiliates through available events and platforms. We will participate in relevant international Wikimedia events to share experience, to coordinate and plan and to learn from others.

What’s been done: Due to COVID-19 and the fact that other projects have carried the cost of event participation, limited work was done as part of the project the first half of the year. We also scaled back our participation at the digital version of Wikimania 2021. We presented our hub ideas for affiliates in Europe with the hope of inspiring more affiliates to initiate other hub initiatives. We also co-organized the Wikimedia Northern Europe Meeting 2021 with Estonia.

'What’s next: We expect the majority of Wikimedia events to be digital in 2022 and we will participate in a number of them to learn and to share our experiences.

Size of project: Small

Project impact: -

Importance: Core

Partners: -

Link to the project: Erfarenhetsutbyte 2021

Association Involvement 2021 edit

What is the project: The project aims to increase the number of members and volunteers, and to find tasks and the necessary support to keep them engaged.

What’s been done: 2021 marked the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia. Wikimedia Sverige organized two celebrations, one large-scale celebration on 15 January, with some 70 participants and interventions by a famous Swedish comedian, a scholar of the history of technology, prominent Wikimedians and other VIPs. We also organized a celebration on 23 May, which marked the birthday of Swedish language Wikipedia. For the second celebration, we had, among other things, interviewed the person who started the Swedish language edition in 2001.

In the 20 days leading up to the celebration of the 20-year anniversary, we organized a micro tasks campaign, where participants were encouraged to perform at least one task per day. We put together a daily schedule, with tasks for Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata and Wikisource, and it ranged from identifying an unknown sportsperson on a photo, to proofreading a book page, improving a Wikidata object, creating a lexeme, etc. The campaign was appreciated by the online community, of which several took part, and was also successful in social media.

Early on during the year, we decided to opt for a solution with two General Assemblies, where the first focused more on the previous year and the second focused more on the upcoming year. In order to open up for input on both aspects, we invited all participants to workshops after each General Assembly, where members were able to give input and propose future directions for Wikimedia Sverige.

During the first General Assembly, the members adopted the new four years strategy for Wikimedia Sverige. The strategy was the result of a member-driven work during large parts of 2020 and 2021, where members worked in working groups to identify areas of strategic importance, and propose the suitable direction. That means that the strategy was both developed and adopted by members, which was important for the chapter as a way to get support for and involvement by the members in the future work with the implementation of the strategy and the work to fulfill it.

When the strategy was adopted, the implementation phase began, in which we workshopped with members, board and staff to turn the strategy into tangible operational plans etc., the first of which is to be adopted at the General Assembly of 2022.

A comprehensive area of work during the year has been the development of new strategies for volunteer involvement and education for the chapter. The chapter has lacked an updated structured and strategic approach on how to increase volunteer involvement and open up for possibilities to deepen the involvement for all volunteers. We came a long way with this work during the year. During the end of the year, workshops were held with the board of Wikimedia Sverige, to make it possible to reach the end of this work during 2022.

In December, we organized the first physical Wikipedia Day since the Covid-19 pandemic began. The Wikipedia Day is an annual event where panelists and keynote speakers put the work of Wikimedians into perspective, and where Wikimedians are invited to take part, listen in – and socialize. Due to the fact that many of the attendees had not met for a long time, we put a lot of focus on the social aspects of the event.

What’s next: Except for the standing events – like the General Assembly and the Wikipedia Day – we aim to finalize the work with guidelines for involvement and education, to methodically scale up the members’ involvement in the association. We will also implement and operationalize the strategy that the members of the association developed in 2020 and 2021, the first part of which will be the operational plan of 2022.

Size of project: Medium

Project impact: -

Importance: Core

Partners: -

Link to the project: Föreningsengagemang 2021

FOSS for the Association 2021 edit

What is the project: Here we investigate how we can support the development of the FOSS (Free and open-source software) tools that we use as an organization. Through the project we will engage consultants to solve the specific issues so that we can improve the FOSS alternatives.

What’s been done: In 2020 we identified several needs, in particular related to our new website (in WordPress). In preparation for engaging an external WordPress web developer a list of missing functionalities have been created.

What’s next: We will contract a web developer to develop the new open source functionality to our website.

Size of project: Small

Project impact: -

Importance: Experimental

Partners: -

Link to the project: FOSS för föreningen 2021

Notes edit

  1. Definition: The number of participants and/or organizers of activities conducted or supported by Wikimedia Sverige who belong to underrepresented genders in the Wikimedia movement in Sweden (non-unique as we are not tracking them with names). These groups are defined as women and people identifying themselves as something other than male or female.
  2. Definition: The total number of people who have heard us talk about Wikimedia related topics through participation at events or activities, either in person or virtually (non-unique as we are not tracking them with names). Does not include reach through Social media.
  3. The Wikimedia projects mean those platforms within the Wikimedia Family that are usually called sister projects of Wikipedia:
    • Wikipedia The free encyclopedia
    • Wikimedia Commons The free media database
    • Wiktionary The free dictionary
    • Wikisource The free library
    • Wikibooks Free textbook collections
    • Wikiquote The free quote compendium
    • Wikivoyage The free travel guide
    • Wikispecies The free species directory
    • Wikiversity Free learning resources
    • Wikidata The free database
    • Meta-Wiki About the projects
    • We also include translatewiki.net.
  4. Identification can be via user names systematically connected with the institution, special user templates showing the connection to an institution, registration in a Wikiproject, or possibly through personal knowledge etc.
  5. This includes the Wikimedia projects, translatewiki.net and Wikimini, according to the principle that we train a pedagogue who uses the creation of content as a part of the pedagogical process.
  6. An organisational unit with self-governing power is included here; however, units that have been included in previous years are not.
  7. UNEP is a programme under the headquarters, and not a specialized agency. That means that their copyright marks are decided upon at the headquarters, and not at UNEP itself. FAO and WIPO, on the other hand, decide on their own copyright policies. The UNEP shift is thus a major shift, in the sense that it can work as a role model for other programs.
  8. Software which is considered is MediaWiki extensions in use on the Wikimedia project or on translatewiki.net. This is in accordance with the priority order: bugs, erroneous translations, untranslated.
  9. We are counting occasions and Wikimedians as follows:
    • Only activities outside of other project related goals count. I.e. a Bot Academy focusing on cultural heritage and as part of Connected Open Heritage does not count, but an event focused on running bots but not related to a specific project count.
    • Wikimedians and advocates for free knowledge who got support count, regardless of if they used the information or not. The important part is that they asked for help/resources. I.e. people contributing to FOSS-projects count.
    • We count occasions as when someone got help from a WMSE staff member. I.e. if Volunteer 1 works for two weeks they have not gotten support, but if they send an email with some follow-up questions after a week then that requires a contribution which corresponds to one occasion.
    Questions related to memberships, donations or administrative matters does not count towards the goals.
  10. With recurring meetups we are referring to some type of face-to-face meetings that are repeated over time.
  11. Underrepresented groups are here defined as:
    • women
    • contributors whose native language are different than the 10 largest Wikipedias (per 5+ edits/month (3m avg.) according to https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm) or Swedish
    • contributors 60 years or older
  12. GLAM Newsletter.

Revenues received during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report) edit

Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

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 SEK 115,000 - 59,650 - 1,700 61,350 13,323 7,107 We had a drop, rather than the anticipated increase, in membership this year. This was likely caused, in part, by the pandemic which resulted in less events and opportunities to publicise ourselves. It however happened despite an increase in our social media presence. In 2022 we will investigate the cause of the drop and renew our member recruitment efforts.
Donations SEK 200,000 - 151,130 - 4,036,254 4,187,384 23,170 485,112 The donations this year nearly reached our goal of 200,000 SEK before we recieved a very generous legacy gift of 4 million SEK. We re-focused a lot of fundraising time in Q4 on preparing for this gift which reduced our focus on the general fundraising.
FDC SEK 3,038,500 - 2,126,950 - 911,550 3,038,500 352,013 352,013
Interest, misc SEK 15,000 - 13,204 - 916 14,120 1,738 1,636
Other grants SEK 920,000 - 13,333 - 188,558 201,891 106,583 23,389 As the staff responsible for grant applications were on parental leave the focus was shifted towards the larger grant opportunities that had been identified. The small grants that typically made up the bulk of this budget post were not applied for. We also had less technical staff available to work on consultancy assignments than was originally expected.
Trackuback/Vinnova SEK 75,000 - 0 - 48,000 48,000 8,689 5,561 This project was reduced in size due to our partner needing less support from us, instead managing more on their own after we provided initial training.
National Library of Sweden SEK 300,000 - 0 - 0 0 34,755 0 This planned for project never materialised as no call for proposals were published for project grants.
Kulturbryggan SEK 348,749 - 247,756 - 0 247,756 40,403 28,703 More of this grant was used in 2020, reducing the amount left for 2021.
Vinnova SEK 179,000 - 114,346 - 110,000 224,346 20,737 25,991 Less of this grant was used in 2020, increasing the amount left for 2021.
Swedish Institute SEK 200,000 - 0 - 3,227 3,227 23,170 374 Only one of the two planned grant applications were finalized. The finalized application was succesful and the grant was approved. The approved project started late meaning less of this grant was used in 2021, the remainder will be used in 2022.
Swedish National Heritage Board SEK 205,121 - 0 - 108,615 108,615 23,763 12,583 Less of this grant was used in 2021, the remainder will be used in 2022.
Wikimedia Foundation (special grant for Tools for Partnerships 2020-2021) SEK 608,524 - 816,016 - 0 816,016 70,498 94,536 Less of this grant was used in 2020, increasing the amount left for 2021.
Wikimedia Foundation (special grant(s) around Strategic recommendations implementation 2021) SEK 2,300,000 - 0 - 1,276,428 1,276,428 266,457 147,875 The originally budgeted for grant was changed in character instead becoming a grant for the period 2021–2023. As a result more of the funds were saved for the latter years of the project.
Swedish Post and Telecom Authority SEK 1,042,693 - 848,537 - 200,000 1,048,537 120,797 121,474

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Notes:

  • Exchange rate: 1 SEK = 0.11585 USD (per 1 USD = 8.63179 SEK in APG proposal).
  • All numbers rounded to whole SEK/USD.
  • The Anticipated column refers to the numbers included in our original APG proposal.
  • We also received in-kind donation of about 2,088 SEK (242 USD) by FSData for server hosting, 316,680 SEK (36,688 USD) by The Internet Foundation In Sweden for office space, 32,016 SEK (3,709 USD) by Google for Google Workspace for Non-profits, 1,086 SEK (126 USD) by Canva for Canva for Nonprofits and 900 SEK (104 USD) by The Generation for web hosting. Deloitte donated a full work day of 18ish of their employees to provide organisational support through their Impact Day. Nationalmuseum and National Museum of Science and Technology both provided venue space for our All-hands event.

Spending during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report) edit

Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

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
Access SEK 4,063,739 - 570,058 - 1,883,731 2,453,789 470,788 284,274 60.4% Three of the new externally financed projects included in the budget never materialised. Additionally the planned for WMF financed project changed it's character to instead become a multi-year project, but with less financing for 2021. In addition we actively searched for less opportunities to do smaller projects (see Revenues above). For the remaining projects we ended up increasing the budgets through funds made available by reducing our operational costs.
Use SEK 1,358,763 - 1,322,344 - 228,355 1,550,700 157,414 179,650 114.1% Even though we increased our spending in this program overall, we ended up decreasing our APG spending on it. The reduced APG spending was compensated for by an increased spending of external funds, which had been underspent in 2020.
Community SEK 780,819 - 160,602 - 121,505 282,108 90,459 32,682 36.1% The spending of external funds was reduced in part because one project was never realised and a second started much later in the year with the majority of the funding being saved for 2022. One of our planned new initiatives was postponed to 2022 to benefit from synergies of an external grant application we are making. Every year we earmark funds to be spent on Community support as and if such is requested from us. This year, likely due to the pandemic, there were less such requests and a few already made requests had to be cancelled, resulting in decreased overall spending. The remaining reduction was largely due to a reduced workforce, coupled with parental leave, requiring one of the projects to be cut back significantly.
Enabling SEK 882,419 - 1,249,686 - 251,139 1,500,825 102,229 173,872 170.1% The spending was in part increased because of a 2020 underspend in an externally financed project. Additionally our work with implementing Wikimedia Sverige's new strategy required an increase in funds to allow for the necessary community consultations and workshops. We invested heavily in our work to incrase our member and volunteer engagement. We also had the opportunity to scale up our work with fundraising activities and preparations for larger initiatives in 2022. Finally, unexpected news that our current office space is closing down in Q2 2022 prompted us to investigate post-pandemic oportunities for remote work and how this might affect our office needs.
Operational costs SEK 1,911,847 - 528,842 - 554,270 1,083,112 221,489 125,479 56.7% The COVID-19 pandemic continued to mean significant decreases in the operational costs as Board and Member meetings were moved online. We had originally budgeted for a Membership and Fundraising drive through Face2Face fundraising, which never took place due to the pandemic.

Our work with grant applications were in line with what we expected. The administration costs were somewhat higher than calculated in part due to costs associated with receiving the legacy gift and in part due to increased costs associated with the tools needed to support remote work. The operational staff costs were reduced as we were able to do more work within the projects, thus significantly reducing the operational staff costs.

To reserves SEK 550,000 - 0 - 4,406,544 4,406,544 63,718 510,502 801.2% We decided to reduce the amount of non-APG funds (donations and membership fees) set aside for our reserves as we were presented with the legacy gift. The gift was completely unexpected and the board decided that it was to be added, in whole, to the reserves.
TOTAL SEK 9,547,587 - 3,831,533 - 7,445,544 11,277,077 1,106,096 1,306,459 118.1% N/A

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Notes:

  • Exchange rate: 1 SEK = 0.11585 USD (per 1 USD = 8.63179 SEK in APG proposal).
  • All numbers rounded to whole SEK/USD.
  • The Budgeted column refers to the relevant numbers for the whole year as included in our original APG proposal.

Compliance edit

Is your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement? edit

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.

  • No deviations.

Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

  • Yes

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

Signature edit

Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.

Resources edit

Resources to plan for measurement edit

Resources for storytelling edit