Grants:PEG/WM UA/CEE Meeting 2014/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Project and Event grant approved in FY 2014-15 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 UA/CEE Meeting 2014.

• 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.

Project status

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?

YES

Is your project completed?

YES

Activities and lessons learned

Activities

We organised the Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2014 on 19-21 December 2014 in Kyiv, Ukraine. This was an occasion to develop links within the community of Wikimedians of Central and Eastern Europe, share experiences and receive new skills for the participants.

The main hall at the Wikimedia Central and Eastern European Meeting 2014 in Kyiv, Ukraine.
"Main hall panorama" by Taras r, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Group photo of the conference participants

Our participants were coming 25 different countries (including Ukraine). We had a total of 31 participants from Ukraine and 41 participants from other countries (45 registered but 4 could not attend, including a Romanian who could have raised the number of countries to 26). Most of Central and Eastern European communities were represented, namely (20 out of 28):

• Chapters: Armenia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine
• User groups: Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Greece
• Other organisations: Albania, Belarus, Croatia, Kazakhstan, Macedonia, Slovakia
• Local communities: Georgia, Latvia, Moldova, Turkey

We have also invited representatives of Wikimedia Foundation (Asaf Bartov and Anna Koval) and of the Affilations Committee (Bence Damokos).

We have made efforts to make sure that as much communities as possible will attend, in particular by providing scholarships (2 per country) to those who is unable to get local funding and by promoting the event in local village pumps. Unfortuantely, despite our best efforts some countries remained unrepresented: Austria (timing conflict with local event), Bosnia & Herzegovina, Hungary, Romania and Slovenia (people who were interested finally could not make it), Cyprus, Lithuania and Montenegro (no established local community or local community unresponsive).

Wikiexpeditions in Czech Republic presentation by Honza Groh (Jagro)

The programme of the conference covered the topics that were most mentioned among the needs of various local communities. In particular, we worked on the following topics:

• Projects that can be replicated across the region, such as Education Programme, Wikiexpeditions, Lobbying for Freedom of Panorama and others. We wanted successful project leaders to share their experience and innovations and help other communities implement new projects or improve existing projects.
• Community-building, with sessions about creating a movement organisation, recruiting volunteers or hiring staff for more mature organisations, or a session about gender gap (the first discussion on this topic in CEE community).
• Regional cooperation, with sessions about cross-border initiatives, common legal threats and future of the CEE.

In general, we appointed for each session an experienced moderator (typically a representative of the community who is successful in this sphere) and invited representatives of other communities to make presentations during the panel, usually concluding by a discussion. In addition, we wanted to make sure that there will be sessions interesting both for representatives of experienced and emerging groups, to make sure the interests are well-balanced.

We also organised a social event on Friday, a city tour (incl. Christmas fair) on Saturday and two smaller social events, a pre-conference one on Thursday (with our WikiThursday) and a post-conference one on Sunday.

We arranged the annual general meeting of Wikimedia Ukraine during the conference (Saturday evening), which helped us to save costs.

CEE Spring banner

The main outcome of the conference is the launch of the full-scale regional cooperation involving most of the communities of the region.

• We have an increased cooperation between the communities of Central and Eastern Europe, with a number of online meetings and a peak of activity of our mailing list.
• We already have a first project involving over 20 countries: Wikimedia CEE Spring 2015, an article contest where each community will write in their own language about other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. This is probably the first example of the article contest organised in federative way in some 20 language editions.
• We also have successful initiatives growing across the region, in particular, we are looking forward to seeing a WikiCamp in Macedonia this summer. Another initiative the 100wikidays project launched in Bulgaria that went viral accross the community with participants all over the region from Latvia to Greece.
• Some communities have already obtained a user group after the conference status, such as Wikimedians of Latvia User Group and Shared Knowledge. We also have an active plan of the community development in Georgia with Wikimedia Community User Group Georgia, and in other countries, such as Albania, Belarus and Turkey.
• Numerous other initiatives are being replicated across the movement, starting from Wiki Loves Earth where we are happy to see Wikimedia Polska joining the international organising team and to Freedom of Panorama where different countries, such as Georgia and Estonia, are starting active lobbying activities.
• Many participants also shared their new skills and ideas with their local communities, both during in-person meetings and via online reports (Albania, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Poland, Turkey, Ukraine etc.)
• A post was published on Wikimedia blog.
• Preparation for Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2015 was launched.

Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe gathered in Kyiv, Ukraine for their third annual meeting.
"Closing ceremony photo" by Ilya, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

We have also organised a post-conference survey that showed that all attendees have found the event useful and learned at least one new thing from it. A majority of participants have found ideas of new projects for their communities, learned about community building and found potential partnerships with individuals or groups they want to collaborate with. All participants have also identified the sessions they have found most and least useful, provided commitments about things they want to do next and gave some ideas for future improvement.

Lessons learned

Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2014 Leaflet.
A useful tip: participants are to get the Leaflet with the info how to get to the venue before they actually get to the venue themselves. It can be done upon arrival (if/when they are met) or in the hotel

What worked well?

• We managed to launch a continued cooperation within the region involving about 20 countries with people working around common projects
• Great representation of the communities of the region: 20 countries were represented and most of participants were very interested in developing cooperation; in addition, we had valuable experiences from WMF and AffCom.
• Many countries had their representative at the movement event for the first time, like Albania, Latvia and Moldova.
• We had a good level of involvement from the participants that allowed us to develop interesting and innovative projects.
• We had a conference programme and a choice of topics that covered interests of all represented communities
• We gained a very valuable experience of event management and teamwork and significantly improved our conference organising experience. Organising such conference was a great opportunity to learn for us.
• Despite short notice, we organised everything on time and arranged all ticket bookings on time thanks to the help of Wikimedia Polska.
• We provided scholarships to ensure representation of as many communities as possible. All communities who wanted to attend managed to do it.
• Appropriate cost estimation: we made a good estimation of accommodation and travel costs and even underspent elsewhere.
• Overall the conference was appreciated by the participants, and they were generally satisfied with logistics, hotel, food, social events etc.

What didn't work?

• A few sessions were poorly structured or organised and did not have concrete outcomes.
• A few sessions did not have enough speakers.
• Some people attended sessions they were neither prepared to nor interested in
• Low participation rate in the survey (33%), probably due to the launch in the middle of Christmas holidays

Logo of CEE Meeting 2015 (published a year ahead of the event!)

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

• We would definitely start preparing the meeting earlier. We were designated as hosts just four months ahead of the event, and this time was definitely not sufficient to prepare everything in the best way. We would definitely encourage Estonia, the 2015 hosts, to apply for funding at least 3 months in advance and proceed scholarship applications at least 2 months in advance.
• We would enforce better timing of the presentations and we will ask moderators to have a look at the presentations in advance to make sure they are relevant.
• We would better define the outcomes of the sessions to make sure people have the right expectations.
• We would consider involving external speakers in case we do not have enough speakers about particular problem or skill.
• We would send the survey immediately after the end of the conference to encourage higher participation.

Learning patterns

We are sharing our experience about arranging meals during the conference, as this topic is not well covered yet and our attendees were quite happy with it: Grants:Learning patterns/Meals during conferences.

We will also planning to share our experience at Wikimania (wm2015:Submissions/How to Build a Regional Cooperation: A Story from CEE Region).

Outcomes and impact

Outcomes

Provide the original project goal here.

Our goal is to develop CEE community, share experience and receive new skills by organising Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2014. We want to fortify interstate and international collaboration between various Wikimedia chapters, thematic organisations, user groups and other communities in Central and East Europe and its regions. After two successful editions in 2012 and 2013 we want to improve international cooperation and develop links with CEE countries that are still in process of developing local communities.

Did you achieve your project goal? How do you know your goal was achieved? Please answer in 1 - 2 short paragraphs.

We completely achieved our goal. We managed to develop the collaboration in the CEE community, help local communities share experiences and represent new skills during Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2014. We have a good collaboration involving about 20 countries with active cross-border initiatives (the most important one is Wikimedia CEE Spring 2015]). We also observe an increase in activity in some local communities, in particular in Latvia, Macedonia and Georgia where user groups were created, and we see that many countries are successfully implementing experience in projects from Wiki Loves Earth to WikiCamp. We are also happy to see that people actively shared their experience both with other communities during the event and with their local communities after the event.

Progress towards targets and goals

Project metrics

Project metrics	Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
45 participants	72 participants	We made a good work involving more participants both in other countries (we managed to involve countries that were not previously active in the movement) and in Ukraine (owing to promotion on-wiki and within the chapter)
30 participants not living in Ukraine	41 participants not living in Ukraine	Per above: we involved Wikipedians from many countries and communities. We could have had 45 participants, but 4 of those registered could not attend
At least 15 countries or language editions of Wikipedia represented	25 countries represented	We manage to involve Wikipedians from more countries than we expected, in particular by active contacts with these communities.
At least 20 attendees making presentations or talks as speakers	33 attendees made presentations or talks	We asked each community to send representatives who were most prepared to share the achievements of their communities.
80% of presentations shared either as video, audio recordings or by publishing presentation slides	60% of presentations shared in slides	Not all people uploaded slides of their presentations. We have made video and audio recordings but we are yet to upload it (and to find their copyright status, as it was not always the same person who put the camera or recorder in place). On the other side, most of sessions are well documented at Etherpad (see Programme)
80% of attendees find the conference useful	100% of attendees find the conference useful	We are happy that we designed the conference programme in order to make it useful for everyone.
60% of attendees confirm having new ideas or better vision of the projects they want to work on	96% of attendees confirm having new ideas or better vision of the projects they want to work on	We represented a wide variety of projects and we are happy that almost all attendees found the projects they are interested in.
60% of attendees confirm having learned new information regarding project management, running chapter projects or community building	79% of attendees confirm having learned new information regarding project management, running chapter projects or community building	We have met the target, and the people who did not state they have learned anything new about it mostly had an extensive experience in the movement.
Information collected about questions and needs of most of the region's chapters	Target met	See Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2014/Questions&Needs for the questions and needs. These will need to be updated for the next event as the movement evolves, however.
Countries without established chapters improve their organisation and activities of their communities	Target met	Two countries received a status of a user group (Wikimedians of Latvia User Group and Shared Knowledge) and one more launched it but not receieved the status yet (Wikimedia Community User Group Georgia), and we see more activities in such countries as Albania, Belarus and Turkey
New projects launched or existing projects improved in most of CEE countries	Target met	Wikimedia CEE Spring 2015 is the project involving most of CEE countries, and countries are also active in other projects, like Wiki Loves Earth, WikiCamp, lobbying Freedom of Panorama and others
Improved regional cooperation, with launch of new cross-border activities	Target met	Much more active regional cooperation (see peak of activity of our mailing list), Wikimedia CEE Spring 2015 as a new cross-border project involving most CEE countries
Designed working patterns for "standard" projects in the CEE region, such as WEP, GLAM and photo contests	Target partly met	We managed to work on the common challenges, approaches to resolve them and innovative ideas in WEP and photo contests, however, we did not manage to find concrete outcomes about GLAM.

Global Metrics

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees. In addition to the measures of success for your specific program (in above section), please use the table below to let us know how your project contributed to the Global Metrics. We know that not all projects will have results for each type of metric, so feel free to put "0" where necessary.

1. Next to each required metric, list the actual outcome achieved through this project.
2. Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome. For example, if you were funded for an edit-a-thon which resulted in 0 new images, your explanation might be "This project focused solely on participation and articles written/improved, the goal was not to collect images."

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	73	73 out of 76 participants (incl. those who registered but did not attend) of the conference were active editors
2. # of new editors	3	3 participants (all Ukrainian) were not active editors before
3. # of individuals involved	ca. 90	76 participants (incl. those who registered but did not attend) and other people involved (chapter members, sponsors and partners etc.)
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	263	The images of the event were used on Wikimedia projects, mostly in Wikinews. Some participants also uploaded images of Ukraine from their visit, but this is impossible to track.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	5	Only 5 Wikinews articles (Ukrainian and interwikis) are direct consequences of the event. Articles from Wikimedia CEE Spring 2015, partially 100wikidays and all articles about Ukraine created by the attendees are indirect consequences of the event.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	N/A	Not measurable.

Learning question

Did your work increase the motivation of contributors, and how do you know?

Yes, our meeting definitely increased the motivation of participants. We think that we managed to achieve the real success here, in particular, we asked each participant to make a commitment about something they want to do after the event and then we asked participants to list further actions they are feeling motivated about doing after the event. We are happy to find out that almost all attendees felt motivated to work on new or improving existing projects.

Impact

What impact did this project have on WMF's mission and the strategic priorities?

Option A: How did you increase participation in one or more Wikimedia projects?

Option B: How did you improve quality on one or more Wikimedia projects?

Option C: How did you increase the reach (readership) of one or more Wikimedia projects?

• Increasing reach and participation. We provided help in developing local communities in a number of countries (Georgia, Latvia and others) that will encourage more people to participate in Wikimedia projects and Wikimedia offline activities in these countries. We also discussed projects and approaches that will help local communities across the entire regions to organise events targeting increase in participation to Wikimedia projects, such as Wikimedia Education Programme, wikiworkshops and others. In addition, as Central and Eastern Europe still observe a growth in the number of Internet participants, our discussions will also help local communities reach more readers of projects in their local languages in their countries, for example via CEE Spring which presents a number of partnership opportunities with cultural institutions (like Polish Institutes or Hellenic Funds, for example).
• Encouraging innovation. Although this is not a default strategic priority for grantmaking, we think that it was relevant for our project and that we have made an impact here. On one hand, we have launch a new collaborative activity, the Wikimedia CEE Spring 2015 article contest, which is a new type of collaboration between the countries and is to our knowledge the first attempt ever to organise a writing contest in some 20 languages. On the other hand, we encouraged people to share their innovative initiatives across the movement, which was impactful both during the event (WikiCamp is an example of such successful innovative project in the region) and after the event (for example, 100wikidays project). In our view, such events encourage countries in the region to develop innovative projects.

Reporting and documentation of expenditures

This section describes the grant's use of funds

Documentation

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.

Exchange rate: 1 USD = 15.85 UAH (as of January 19, 2015)

Number	Category	Item description	Unit	Number of units	Actual cost per unit	Actual total	Budgeted total	Currency	Notes
1.1	Travel costs & visas	International travel costs	participant	16	368.00	-	8700.00	USD	5885.00 USD (See WMPL's report). A small amount (28.98 USD) is covered in Unforeseen, as the money was paid by WMUA, not WMPL Some participants have used their own resources (their chapters')
1.2	Travel costs & visas	Domestic travel costs	participant	-	-	-	250.00	USD	The costs for this budget line are covered in Unforeseen (162 USD)
1.3	Travel costs & visas	Visas	person	1	170	-	255	USD	170 USD. A speedy visa for an Albanian participant (See WMPL's report)
2.1	Accommodation and meals	Accomodation	participant	27	50.26	1357.14	2733.80	USD	27 participants have been staying in the hotel for the period from December 18 to 22 for different number of nights
2.2	Accommodation and meals	Meals	participant x meal	60 x 3	4.65	836.43	1651.25	USD	Three dinners
2.3	Accommodation and meals	Coffee breaks	participant x break	50 x 5	3.03	757.10	660.50	USD	Five coffee breaks were organized
2.4	Accommodation and meals	Main social event	participant	50	5.52	276.17	660.50	USD	The supper on December 19, 2015
3.1	Venue	Hall rent	day	3	252.37	-	792.60	USD	757.11 USD, was covered by the University itself
3.2	Venue	Wi-Fi	set of equipment	2	78.93	78.93	244.38	USD	78.93 USD was covered by volunteers
3.3	Venue	Transportation expenses	project	1	51.01	51.01	23.78	USD	The line includes taxi to/from venue (materials etc), and covers the bus expenses to/from airport
4.1	Materials and gifts	Conference programme leaflets	participant	60	1.06	63.60	79.26	USD
4.2	Materials and gifts	Name tags	participant	60	0.43	25.89	31.70	USD
4.3	Materials and gifts	Conference bags	participant	60	9.15	548.90	594.45	USD
4.4	Materials and gifts	Notebooks	participant	60	1.18	70.98	118.89	USD
4.4	Materials and gifts	Pens	participant	60	0.55	33.12	59.45	USD
5.1	Administrative expenses	Bank expenses	project	1	29.23	29.23	29.73	USD
5.2	Administrative expenses	Communications fee	project	1	40.27	40.27	33.02	USD	Internet, telephone and post expenses
5.3	Administrative expenses	Unforseen	project	1	879.78	879.78	1283.70	USD	The line covers the expenses that were not included initially (like a laser printer cartridge for printing, some small souvenirs, covering 6000 UAH of the University's personnel salary (some people were to work during their days off or stay longer) etc) or the expenses that were included, but then were believed to be covered by WMPL or other sources (local transport for Ukrainian participants (we have planned to cover these expenses from another grant, as we wanted to reduce costs of this one, but it was not necessary); we have covered the international travel expenses of some participants)

Total project budget (from your approved grant submission)

18,202.01 USD

Total amount requested from WMF (from your approved grant submission, this total will be the same as the total project budget if PEG is your only funding source)

14,137.22 USD (8082.22 USD were for WMUA and 6055.00 USD for WMPL)

Total amount spent on this project

11,939.59 USD (5048.55 USD by WMUA and 6891.04 USD by WMPL&partners)

Total amount of Project and Event grant funds spent on this project

11,103.55 USD (5048.55 USD by WMUA and 6055.00 USD by WMPL)

Are there additional sources that funded any part of this project? List them here.

• Kyiv National Linguistic University provided venue and two wifi hotspots
• Kyivstar provided two more wifi hotspots

Remaining funds

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.)

3033.67 USD

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 want the money to be applied to our another approved grant, namely to Grants:PEG/WM UA/Programs in Ukraine 2015-1.