Grants:PEG/WM CZ/Presentation & Outreach/Final report

Report accepted

This report for a Project and Event grant approved in FY 2010-11 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:PEG/WM CZ/Presentation & Outreach.

You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
You are welcome to Email grants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Wikimedia Czech Republic's Presentation & Outreach grant grouped almost every aspect of the chapter efforts targeting promotion of Wikimedia projects to outsiders in the Czech Republic. Based on mostly non-published discussions, its uniquely vague proposal, covering four previously separate grant requests, was approved for funding of 15,600 EUR in December 2010, and ran for three years until November 2013.

Compliance and completion

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?: Answer YES or NO.; NO. No written agreement was signed for this grant. All we have is a Deed of Donation, which does not have any requirements besides "This grant is for the purpose of (...) promoting of those projects described at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_CZ/Presentation_%26_Outreach".

Is your project completed?: Answer YES or NO.; YES (but it continues with second phase)

Did you use any of the grant funds?: Answer YES or NO.; YES

Activities and lessons learned

This section describes what the grantee did, and what the grantee learned from implementing the project. This section should be useful to others implementing similar projects and is an opportunity for the grantee to reflect on the project's performance.

Activities

Provide a detailed list of activities performed to complete this project, descriptions of these activities, and the amount of time spent on each activity. This section should also include a list of participants, or a link to pictures, blog posts, or videos from the project or event.

As there were quite a lot of activities done as part of this grant, this section presents only an overview. For details, please see interim reports, or click through to ~80 P&O tickets in our grant tracker.

Bambiriáda, one of our less typical events

Exhibitions: These activities roughly fit into scenario "WM/WP volunteers set up a booth at an event and talk to people". We attended 14 such events during the course of our grant, ranging from book fairs (in Prague, Ostrava and Havlíčkův Brod) to Open Source and general NGO-themed events.; Apart from talking to members of general public (the attendance for easy event was hundreds or thousands of visitors), our presence allowed us to collect media (such photos of writers), and establish contacts with publishers, as well as like-minded institutions. Museum nights were very useful in this.

Wikiconferences: As part of P&O, we have organized conferences every year of the grant, i.e. from 2010 to 2013, with attendance ranging from 60 to about a hundred every year.

Wiki Love Monuments: We have organized Czech version of Wiki Loves Monuments competition, bringing around 20 thousand of photos from hundreds of participants to Wikimedia Commons, for combined expenses of 730 EUR. Notably, this activity would be very complicated to pull off without a grant like P&O because it was completely new for us, and it's likely we'd rather abandon it if the organizers had to propose a budget write a special request beforehand, and then deal with money transfers are returns afterwards.

GLAM: GLAM stands for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (and other cultural institutions) and thus WMCZ supported activities of this Czech Wikipedia group namely support on transportation, where the goal was negotiation or presentation. A typical reimbursement was under 30 EUR, an amount which is not worth the hassle of requesting a grant for, but still makes a difference for a volunteer who spends whole day travelling to some museum to talk about Wikipedia.

Student Write Wikipedia: Born as a project in 2011, this program has gradually grown into one of the best organized and most concise Wikipedia collaborations with universities. Similarly to GLAM, it has quite a potential and costs virtually nothing (with the possible exception of contibuting to printing costs).

Presentation Equipment

We have bought a laptop with a projector for use on exhibitions and meetups, as well as a few roll-ups with project logos. All of this is usable even after the conclusion of the grant.

Banner of Milady Horakove street

Printing: Printing is the biggest expense from all those mentioned here, providing material for all activities we've done within- and outside of the grant. Apart from usual stuff like leaflets and Wikimedium magazine, this included "Pexeso" (a memory game) and a banner we hanged on a busy Prague street on a space provided to NGO's by a friendly private company.

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects? Consider the following questions and respond with 1 - 2 paragraphs.

What went well?

The grant as a whole allowed to do us a lot of useful activities that would not be feasible within a stricter framework. In the end we had a system that allows to keep track of what has been spent (and reimbursed) in a clear and transparent way. Even though a chapter with a non-specific 15,000 EUR project description is probably a nightmare of every Foundation employee, we feel that a system of "get rough approval, give receipts, we'll give you the money" can work pretty well for most activities, removing unnecessary bureaucracy while preserving necessary oversight.

What did not go well?

P&O grant gave us a lot of examples of how not to do things. First of all, the formal submission is vague as best. The specific conditions of the grant were negotiated without any kind of written records, so now we can only guess what was the exact scope WMF gave us approval for. In the early months of the project, the governing committee of the grant were the people who have been spending the money, which is something which should be avoided in most sane settings. Nevertheless, finding people who are not actively organizing anything, but are able and willing to work in local grant committees might a challenge in a small community.
Also, having a useful communication platform for grant committee proved difficult. MediaWiki does not work well for this, as it has no support for to-do lists, e-mail notifications and so on. We've tried Basecamp, which is nice, but tends to duplicate information in our existing wikis, and is not accessible for people who are not directly invited. In the end we've made most decisions via e-mail, IRC, and over phone, recording the decisions in grant tracker (where, someone always needs to set the ticket as "approved" in the end).
We did not keep track of how much money from the available amount was used. The money we have received from WMF (in EUR) was not the only part of funding, as other part (in CZK) was reallocated from earlier projects, original project included tracker, which was done separately, and the funds we got were combined for Mediagrant and P&O. Furthermore, the EUR amount was converted to CZK in several parts, one ticket was paid in EUR, so it took us a lot of work to figure out how much money we had for which grant, how much was spent, and so on.
For lots of activities, measures of success were either fuzzy or completely lacking, so while many activities gave as the warm feeling we did something useful, we don't know for sure it actually achieved anything.

What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?

We'd make sure the terms are written down (while still allowing some leeway on the side of the grantee; new opportunities arise, and while having every activity set in stone is good for budgets and projections, it also means anything that was not anticipated will not be possible),
We'd avoid conflict of interest in grant committees.
For such "big" grants, we'd make sure there is one account per grant, used for the grant and nothing else, that has all the grant money at the beginning, and all the remaining money at the end.

Project goal and measures of success

This section should reference the project goals and measures of success described in the approved grant submission. See Grants:PEG/WM CZ/Presentation & Outreach to review the goals and metrics listed in the approved submission.

Project goal

Provide the project goal here.

This is wrapper for several related "subgrants" which purposes are:

presentation of Wikipedia, Wikimedia projects and Wikimedia in general to a wide public
attracting new users, editors as well as random professional partners, experts, data providers, donors, sponsors and similar contacts
collecting of feedback, suggestions and opinions
improvement and professionalization of the public presentation
volunteers appreciation
WikiX activities

Did you achieve your project goal? How do you know your goal was achieved? Please answer in 1 - 2 paragraphs.: As a wrapper, Presentation & Outreach went very well; it provided support and funding to diverse range of activities detailed above. It drove our chapter forward not only in terms of having equipment for presentation, but also in terms of governance (see the pains described in Kevin's report), and especially from a largely inwards-focused group of volunteers to an chapter capable of organizing a successful conference for under 300 EUR.

Measures of success

List the measures of success exactly as provided in the approved grant submission, and evaluate your project according to each measure listed there.

N/a globally, specified separately in subgrants.

Digital Projector with Equipment: We will buy the digital projector with equipment. It will be used on 6 major events done by Wikimedia Czech Republic in the first year after purchase.
Evaluation: The projector was bought in August 2011, and was used on two photographic workshops, two exhibitions, and seven community meetings. It's still being used as of February 2014, so it looks like a good buy.
Fairs, exhibitions, conferences: Empirical measurement of the impact of public presentations is quite impossible, however there are certain indicators which could give some ideas about it though: the size of / the number of visitors at the event we'll participate on, the number of visitors at the booth / stand, the number of visitors at the speech / lecture / workshop, the size of feedback, the feedback itself, the number of established collaborations and partnerships, the number of gained contacts etc. ...
Evaluation: We have participated on several exhibitions throughout the duration of the grant, some (especially early ones) with no reports at all, later reporting up to 400 people entering our booth in Museum Night at Silesian Museum in 2012. Our Silesian Museum Night participation has also helped in establishing our cooperation with the museum (later participating in Czech WLM).
Unified visual identity of presenters: The purpose and effect of this project is pretty self-evident and like in our other presentational grant, empirical measurement of the impact is quite impossible. However there are certain indicators which could give some ideas about it though: the number of events we'll attend using the stuff from this project, the number of people there who will see us this way, concerning other benefits also the number of satisfied volunteers appreciated this way. Also feedback from people.
Evaluation: In 2012 we made 30 polo shirts for our volunteers, which were seen on several of our public events.
Wikimedia Academy: Realization of academia, getting feed back, making long-term relations.
Evaluation: No such seminar was ever organized. The ideas melted into later Students Write Wikipedia project (with eleven classes on seven institutions as in December 2013) and Wikiconference.
Wikiconference: no details provided
Evaluation: There were four Wikiconferences organized, the latest one in November 2013, attracted more than 100 participants.
Exhibition presentation (continuation from previous year): During the period of the running project, the equipment will be used during at least 10 public events in the Czech Republic with total potential impact on at least 50.000 people.
Evaluation: Apart from the projector, we have also bought a screen, roll-up posters with project logos, and laptop for use on exhibitions and other events. This equipment was used on most of our public events (exhibitions, Wikiconference).
Grant tracker: no details provided
Evaluation: Tracker software was developed outside of the scope of the grant.

Provide an overall assessment of how your project went according to these measures.: Given the measures that were provided in the original approved request, the project went partly well, partly in direction totally divergent from the original sub-project descriptions and metrics.
If you were to plan a similar project, would you measure it differently? If yes, please explain how.: For a similarly wide project, the suggestion would be to have specific and sensible measures of success for every individual sub-projects, such as in Grants:PEG/WM CZ/Presentation & Outreach II#Project scope and activities, but have the structure less fixed, so new sub-projects can be formed and described, without going through a lengthy approval process. This way, grantees might benefit from having a measurable outcome (as opposed to dealing with vague statements in the request of this grant), but will also enable them to exploit new opportunities.; For example, only in 2011 we found our about the whole GLAM thing, and we were able to included that in P&O, mostly because the original grant description was so vague that it allowed almost anything. And we were able to support mostly minimal GLAM cooperation expenses, which now lead to these institutions accepting us as partners. This would be difficult to achieve in regular and strict grant scheme, mainly because we wouldn't be able to imagine what negotiation opportunities would show up, and what the budget for all this should be. If we were able to add sub-project to existing wider grant, it might be the best way to ensure such activities can be supported, while also providing the right amount of guidance into assessing what's useful.

Impact

This section ties this project to Wikimedia's broader goals, and shows what the project accomplished.

What impact did this project have on WMF's mission and the strategic goals? Please answer in 1 -2 paragraphs and include specific measures of impact such as the number of readers or editors reached by a particular project, or the number of articles edited or improved.

Stabilize infrastructure: Thanks to the equipment/accessories bought we are able now to better and independently fulfill our presentations goals (on small and middle sized events); we can even say, that grant helped us to stabilize the management of the chapter.

Increase participation: Direct impact on number of new people writing Wikipedia has Students write Wikipedia program, although most of participant discontinue with editing after finishing university course. On the other hand most of this people at least know how to edit and background of WP, so it can be much more easier to reapproach WP in the future. In long term we know only about percent units of students still successfully writing WP.; Indirect impact and unfortunately hardly measurable effect on WP have other our programs - which are based on PR effect like exhibitions, ads, and press.

Improve quality: We believe that as a side SWW and GLAM bring some experts to editing of the Wikipedia, but it was not our primary goal.

Increase reach: We do not have any metric to measure it, so we should say - probably not.

Encourage innovation: P&O and MG enabled to fund local projects whose leaders would probably failed to overcome bureaucratic and language barrier if tried to ask money directly from the WMF grant system, thereby MG and P&O enhanced the involvement of the local community.

Reporting and documentation of expenditures

This section describes the grant's use of funds

Documentation

Documentation of expenditures has been received by WMF.

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grants at wikimedia dot org, according to the guidelines here? Answer "Yes" or "No".: Yes

Expenses

Please list all project expenses in a table here, with descriptions and dates. Review the instructions here.: These expenses should be listed in the same format as the budget table in your approved submission so that anyone reading this report may be able to easily compare budgeted vs. actual expenses.; Note that variances in the project budget over 10% per expense category must be approved in advance by WMF Grants Program staff. For all other variances, please provide an explanation in the table below.

The following is a per-topic summary, the complete list contains more than 80 individual tickets with even more expense items. If you need details please click through to WMCZ grant tracker (or off-line copy submitted to WMF in case the former site is unavailable).

topic	tickets	expenses
Ambassador program / Students Write Wikipedia	9	2,259 CZK
GLAM	8	6,760 CZK
Conferences, talks, lectures	13	43,421.87 CZK
Presentation toolkit	7	49,299.80 CZK
Exhibitions 2010-2011	8	65,215 CZK
Exhibitions 2012	4	30,659 CZK
Exhibitions 2013	3	30,580.95 CZK
Printing	17	106,944 CZK
Various (such as WLM, one exhibition and some printing)	22	57,522.31 CZK
Total		392,661.93 CZK

Total project budget (from your approved grant submission): 15,600 EUR

Total amount requested from WMF (from your approved grant submission): 15,600 EUR

Total amount spent on this project (this total should be the total calculated from the table above): 392,661.93 CZK

Total amount of WMF grant funds spent on this project (this total will be the same as the total amount spent if the WMF grant is your only funding source): 392,661.93 CZK

Are there additional sources of revenue that funded any part of this project? List them here.: There are no other sources.

Remaining funds

Remaining funds have been used or will be used for other approved mission-aligned activities. This use has been requested in writing and approved by WMF.

Are there any grant funds remaining?: Answer YES or NO.; Yes

Please list the total amount (specify currency) remaining here. (This is the amount you did not use, or the amount you still have after completing your grant.)

4805 CZK

If funds are remaining they must be returned to WMF, reallocated to mission-aligned activities, or applied to another approved grant.

Please state here if you intend to return unused funds to WMF, submit a request for reallocation, or submit a new grant request, and then follow the instructions on your approved grant submission.

We would like to add these funds as a reserve for our second round grant.