Grants:PEG/Wikimedia Community Ireland/2015 Outreach/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Project and Event grant approved in FY Pending 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/Wikimedia Community Ireland/2015 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.

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

Edit-a-thons

Women in Engineering(Feb)-hosted by Engineers Ireland-2 participants; 48 edits
Ireland in WWI (Feb)-hosted by National Museum of Ireland-3 participants (1 new); 61 edits
Women in History (2 events in Mar & Apr)-hosted by NUI Galway-8 participants over the 2 events (5 new); 179 edits
Women in STEM (June)-hosted by WITS-Women in Science and Technology-7 participants (4 new); 189 edits
Irish Design (Oct)-hosted by IDxA-3 participants (1 new); 107 edits

Conferences

CESI Annual Conference (Feb)-Intro to Wikipedia paper presented-The goal of attending this conference was to expose the education community in Ireland to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects, for use in schools. We had approximately 30 attendees to the talk with several approaching us afterwards to find out more. We were unable to attend the 2016 Conference, but we plan to apply to hold a workshop at the 2017 Conference.
EdTech Conference (May)-Intro to Wikipedia paper presented-We presented a talk on using Wikipedia in the classroom at this event. It was so successful that we are planning to run a workshop at the 2016 Conference.
Valletta Conference, Cultural Mapping: Debating Spaces and Places (Oct)-Wiki Loves Monuments paper presented-A paper on crowd sourcing in the context of Wiki Loves Monuments was presented at the conference.
Citizen Science Meetup (Sept)-co-hosted a night of talks on Bit-coin-In conjunction with Open Knowledge Ireland and hosted at the Science Gallery in Dublin, this was the first of a recurring Citizen Science Meetup we are hosting. We had about 50 attendees. This recurring event gives us the opportunity to make people aware of our group and promote Open Knowledge in Ireland.

Trainings

Cochrane Symposium (Apr)-ran an Intro to Wikipedia workshop focusing on updating medical articles in Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine-8 participants; 22159 edits
CELT Symposium (June)-ran an Intro to Wikipedia workshop in conjunction with NUI Galway focusing on Irish articles-11 participants (9 new); 276 edits
Intro to Wikipedia Workshop (Oct)-2 day training with a third level class at University College Dublin (UCD) on writing Wikipedia articles using the Education extension-This is the 2nd year we have worked with this professor at UCD but the first year we have used the Education extension. We don't have metrics on this, but there were approximately 50 students in the class working on groups of 4 or 5. We estimate that 5-6 new articles were created.

Lessons learned

What worked well?

Most of our training/edit-a-thon events generated a lot of interest, especially the events that were held in conjunction with Universities. Having members present at conferences helped to expand our reach to a variety of groups. We had a average of 59% of new editors recruited during our trainings/edit-a-thons still editing after 6 months.

What didn't work?

We struggled with turning participants at our events into volunteers. This is an ongoing issue for the group. Several of our edit-a-thons had poor turnout.

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

We need to determine why some of our events have poor attendance and what we can do to change that. We also need to find a better way to recruit and retain volunteers. We have put out a user survey to the user base in Ireland. We should have the results back by early April 2016.

Learning patterns

Grants:Learning_patterns/Outreach_to_educators Grants:Learning_patterns/Understand_local_volunteers'_characteristics_and_behavior_to_develop_an_effective_program

Outcomes and impact

Outcomes

Provide the original project goal here.

The goal of the activities in 2015 is to grow the Wikimedia Community Ireland User Group by adding volunteers; recruit more Wikipedia editors in Ireland, specifically women and Irish speakers; and to create relationships with GLAM organisations and schools/universities in Ireland.

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

We recruited 5 new volunteers in 2015, but we lost 3 with a net gain of 2. This is something we have been struggling with. We seem to get a lot of interest in our events and outreach, but we're struggling to turn that into volunteers. In March of 2016 we have put out a survey to Irish editors which should help us understand the community and what type of events they would like to see us run.
We had a total of 20 new editors come from events in 2015 (excluding the UCD workshops). A majority of those editors were working on articles covering Irish Women as we held 4 events specifically targeting that subject matter. It is unclear how many more editors we have in the Irish language.
We have created a strong relationship with NUI Galway, UCD, and the National Museum of Ireland, holding several events with each in 2015. We plan to continue that trend in 2016. We held 7 events outside of Dublin, increasing our outreach into the rest of Ireland.

Progress towards targets and goals

Project metrics

Project metrics	Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
CESI Conference-Outreach into the education community	We had approximately 30 attendees to this talk. Several have reached out to us since in regard to using Wikimedia in the classroom
Irish Women in History Edit-a-thon-10 participants; create or expand 5 articles on Irish Women; 50% participants still contributing after 6 months	7 participants (4 new); 14 new pages created; 57% of the participants active after 6 months	We had less participants than we wanted, but exceeded the page creation goal. We also exceeded our retention goal
NUI Galway edit-a-thons-15 participants; create 10 articles; 60% of participants still contributing after 6 months; continue relationship with NUI Galway	8 participants; 24 new articles; 62% of participants active after 6 months	We had less participants but exceeded the page creation goal and the continuing participation gaol
National Museum of Ireland (NMI) Edit-a-thon-foster relationship with NMI	We have several contacts at NMI that are interested in running more events
Cochrane Symposium-create of improve at least 10 articles; 15 participants; reach out to medical community in Ireland	8 participants; 2 new articles and 22159 edits	We had only 8 participants and 2 new articles, but with 22159 edits we improved more than 10 articles
3 additional edit-a-thons	2 additional edit-a-thons

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.

Next to each required metric, list the actual outcome achieved through this project.
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	14	This excludes the UCD events
2. # of new editors	20	This excludes the UCD events
3. # of individuals involved	169	This excludes the UCD events but includes attendance at the talks we presented in 2015
4a. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	0	We did not collect images with any of these events
4b. # of new images/media uploaded to Wikimedia Commons (Optional)	0
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	88 new articles	This covers all of our events except the UCD events
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	7485117	This excludes the UCD events

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

It's obvious that some of our events motivated people to come out and learn how to edit. And when we did get them editing we have approximately 60% of these new users still editing after 6 months.

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?

We introduced 20 new editors to Wikipedia (that is excluding our UCD events) and created 89 new pages through our edit-a-thons/workshops. An average of 60% of our new editors were still editing Wikipedia after 6 months.

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?

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.

Number	Category	Item description	Unit	Number of units	Actual cost per unit	Actual total	Budgeted total	Currency	Notes
1	Office Supplies	Laptop Stickers	200	1	70	70	160	EUR	90 EUR under budget. We only purchased 1 unit (200 stickers) instead of 2 (400 stickers).
2	Office Supplies	Printing Costs				204.75	200	EUR	4.75 EUR over budget. These funds were combined with funds from Grants:PEG/Wikimedia_Community_Ireland/WLM_Ireland_2015 to purchase magnets and pens with the user group logo on it for use at events
3	Technology	Chromebook Laptops	1	4	398.49	1593.56	1600	EUR	6.44 EUR under budget
4	Technology	4G WiFi Boxes	1	1	199.00	199.00	360	EUR	161 EUR under budget. We budgeted for 2 boxes but we found a box that could host 32 users and it was decided that was enough.
5	Miscellaneous	Travel Costs				265.98	300	EUR	34.02 EUR under budget. We funded 5 trips for attendance to conferences and to run training events
6	Miscellaneous	Contingency				71.88	74.67	EUR	These funds were used to renew the wikimedia.ie domain which was close to expiring

Total project budget (from your approved grant submission): 2694.67 EUR

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): 0 EUR-Funds are remaining from WLM Grant

Total amount spent on this project: 2405.17 EUR

Total amount of Project and Event grant funds spent on this project: 2405.17 EUR

Are there additional sources that funded any part of this project? List them here.: No

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.)

289.50 EUR

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 request a reallocation of the funds to the User Group