Learning and Evaluation/News/2016

Learning and Evaluation

The dashboard helps manage online and offline programs, including editathons, workshops, and education course, and is being designed to work in any language or Wikimedia project. In the dashboard, Wikimedia program leaders can share program information and training materials, participants can pick up articles to edit and review other’s edits, and everyone can see what participants contributed as part of the program and overall contribution statistics for the program. Read more on the blog!

Sometimes the simplest of actions can create unexpected change in the world. In the Wikimedia universe, many contributors have to “be bold” and step up to the challenge of guiding projects and activities to success. What do we understand as leadership in our movement? How can we better support its development? We invite all program leaders to join the conversation on Meta and share ideas. Read more on the Wikimedia blog and on The Signpost.

There will be a new Learning Day during Wikimania Esino Lario which include series of workshops, on Wednesday, June 22, on the first hackathon/pre-conference day. Participants will have the opportunity to further engage in topics such as tracking and reporting, storytelling, organizational development, posters and give lightning talks and other topics in evaluation. The agenda for the event will be available on the event page.

Due to limited space, attendance to these Learning Days is by invitation only. If you have received an invitation email, please be sure to confirm your attendance and remember to fill out the survey! If you have not yet been contacted by someone on the Learning and Evaluation team, and would like to take part, please email us at eval(_AT_)wikimedia · org.

We hosted a two-day long pre-conference, Learning Days, on April 21st and 22nd in advance of the Wikimedia Conference 2016 in Berlin. 51 participants representing their affiliate organizations participated in several sessions. The priority topics selected were: a) Engaging and Retaining Volunteers, b) Best Practice Exchanges with other Leaders, c) Designing Wikimedia Programs and Events, and d) Measuring and Evaluating Impact.

Feedback shared by participants highlighted a number of practices participants planned to bring back home with them; either processes to help their local community to develop, or tools and resources to apply directly to their projects. Find the complete feedback and the resources shared on the event page.

The community review period for this round of the Annual Plan Grants program (APG) is underway. Five movement affiliates; Wikimedia Armenia, Wikimédia France, Wikimedia Norge, The Centre for Internet and Society and Wikimedia Foundation have submitted annual plans and budgets. Community members are welcome to join the review and provide feedback on their submitted plans, ask questions, and offer comments by April 30. Your review will be really valuable when the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) meets in May to make recommendations to WMF's Board of Trustees on how to allocate movement funds to these affiliates in order to achieve the most impact. Additionally, please find our newly integrated team’s, Program Capacity and Learning, annual plan on our space on Meta.
Review WMF Annual Plan proposal!

Towards the end of February, we reached out to the Education Program community to gather education surveys and standardize a typical survey that any program leader can use. After reviewing eight education program surveys, we drew out important data for students and educators involved in the education programs. We are now happy to present a new resource: 3 survey templates for Educators, Educator trainings, and Students. These surveys will help you capture data about: activity/output, learning outcome, behavior outcome, program design, non-program personal questions, and non-program questions on the person’s environment.

If you have follow up questions or need support implementing these surveys, please contact Edward Galvez via email (egalvez(_AT_)wikimedia.org) or on his Talk Page.

Wikimedia Education Collab members met in Stockholm this March to brainstorm about the improvements they had implemented since last summer and set the goals for the upcoming eighteen months. In this blog, you can read more about the goals the Collab members reimagined to take the Collab to the next level and their future plans.

Hashtags have come to Wikipedia edits with this new search tool. Now, including a hashtag in the Wikipedia edit summary will help that edit appear on the search page alongside other similar edits. Read about The Wikipedia Library’s #1lib1ref month-long campaign, during January this year. On the blog, we review this large-scale campaign, and how the use of the hashtag #1lib1ref affects Wikipedia outreach efforts around the world.

The Community Resources team at WMF, in conjunction with the Program Capacity & Learning team, is embarking on a retrospective and update of Global Metrics. We are in the process of collecting feedback on Global metrics from all grantees (IEG, PEG, SAPG, APG), Grant Committee members, interested community members and WMF staff. The on-wiki component of this feedback collection is now open and will last until March 25 2016. The goals are:

  • Understanding how useful the current metrics are to Committee members, grantees, and relevant WMF staff
  • Understanding the major issues
  • Understanding how those issues could be addressed

Share your feedback!

A community consultation to create a roadmap for the Program Capacity and Learning team closed on Feb 19. The synthesis on the comments and feedback received have been updated. All of these will be incorporated into the annual plan. Thanks to all those who participated in this process.

Feedback, inputs and synthesis.

Program Capacity and Learning is a newly integrated team in Community Engagement at the WMF, that brings together the Wikipedia Library, the Wikipedia Education Program and Learning and Evaluation teams. In this integrated team, we will expand our work to include GLAM support and Affiliate relationships. We are reaching out to community members and program leaders to comment on proposed projects, focus areas and criteria to prioritize our work. Join the conversation!

Blog series What I Learned continues to share stories of Wikimedia programs in communities all over the world! In this third blog, we review one lesson shared by Wikimedia Armenia from their latest WikiCamp. Read the blog, comment and share!