Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Conference Fund/GLAM Wiki:The Culture, Heritage and Wikimedia Conference 2023/Final Report

Conference Fund Final Report

Report Status: Under review

Due date: 2024-01-30T00:00:00Z

Funding program: Conference Fund

Report type: Final

Application

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General information

• Title of proposal: GLAM Wiki: The Culture, Heritage and Wikimedia Conference 2023
• Username of applicant: Scann (WDU)
• Name of organization: N/A
• Amount awarded: 158539
• Amount spent: 157991 USD, 6190771 UYU

Part 1: Understanding your work

1. Did your event have any impact that you did not expect, positive or negative?

What is an event if not a succession of positive and negative things you didn’t expect to happen?

First, the School of Information and Communication at the University of the Republic did an amazing job at helping us run a successful Conference. They not only hosted the Conference, we also had dedicated staff for some portions of the event and they were on call before and during the event.

We also want to highlight the success of the visa process & entry into the country. Racist immigration policies prevent our volunteers from fully participating in global Conferences. We only had one participant that couldn’t attend due to a bad judgment call on the airline regarding the visa requirements for in-transit through Brazil.

We were able to secure some funding by L’Oréal to run an edit-a-thon around Women in science through an unexpected partnership that we hadn’t foreseen.

We had some unexpected issues with service providers (food, the recording & live streaming service, and to a lesser extent, with the wifi service provider). We tried to fix these as the Conference was happening, and it improved somehow on Day 2, but these hiccups are always visible to people. On the other hand, we can’t stress enough the fact that the recommendation on using a travel agent was a very good one, but also we got probably the best travel agent in Uruguay we could have asked for. He went above and beyond to make sure people could fly in but also to solve some of the challenges we encountered with participant’s flights.

We received a considerable amount of scholarship applications written with ChatGPT. Although it was easy to detect them, we weren’t expecting this to happen.

We didn’t receive as much media attention as we thought the event was going to bring. We were expecting more interest from the media but aside from a few newspaper articles here and there, for the most part, it didn’t gain much attention.

2. What do you think will be the long term impact of this conference?

For Wikimedistas de Uruguay, the long term impacts of this Conference are the following ones:

• We were able to consolidate and collaborate more closely with all the other three “southern cone” countries (Chile, Brasil, and Argentina).
• We solidified our working relationships with GLAM partners and other allies. They are doing a great job already at being our ambassadors, so even if we didn’t have as many people from Uruguayan GLAM institutions attending the event, we believe that it gave us visibility and helped us gain trust among relevant stakeholders.
• We also used the opportunity brought by this event to organize a separate event with funds from another organization with Wiki for Human Rights regional organizers. Even when not strictly related to this grant, the Conference was a good opportunity to put these two events together and make a better use of funds; we believe there will be lasting impacts to the Wiki 4 HR meeting as well.
• Our team worked well together, despite the inherent tension that these types of events have. Most of the team members were new this year, but we delivered on a large event without ending with burnout or drama.
• The event had a good energy to it and even with hiccups, the overall organization was successful. This helped us build and gain trust from other Wikimedia affiliates, particularly from the region, from our partners and from the Wikimedia Foundation. We’ve now a good track for future opportunities and Conferences, and for providing support and advice to other Conference organizers.

For the Latin American region:

• This was the first time that the GLAM Wiki Conference took place in Latin America, we believe that by itself this will have a long lasting impact. We’ve earned our star in the sky of GLAM Wiki Conferences, so to speak.
• We brought a significant amount of regional energy and connections. Several people from GLAM institutions from Latin America were able to connect with the Wikimedia movement and other peers from the GLAM sector working on Wiki for the first time.
• The Conference featured mainly Spanish & Portuguese speakers and experiences in the main room, which was being interpreted into three languages (Spanish, English and Portuguese) and live streamed. This is an important record of all the amazing work and experiences that come out from the Latin American region and that sometimes don’t get to be known due to language barriers.

For the GLAM Wiki communities:

• This was an important meeting because we were able to meet after 5 long years. It was an interesting experience to see what has stayed the same and what has changed over the course of these years but also with the pandemic. The selection process for the GLAM Wiki to be held in Uruguay raised some important questions around the overall process, which we expect can gain more transparency in the future.
• An immediate outcome of the Conference was a refreshed new identity for GLAM Wiki, which we expect can start using on other community facing places, like Meta!
• We’re collaborating with the Culture & Heritage team on implementing some of the outcomes that came as a result of the conversations being held in the Conference.

For other Conference organizers:

• We’re really not sure if this is true, but apparently there aren’t a lot of international Wikimedia events that open up the Conference with the language spoken in the country. For us it just made sense to open in Spanish (we didn’t even think about it!), and we want to encourage other Conference organizers to do the same in the future.
• Tons of learnings that we are willing to share more broadly on request.

3. Would you say that your work improved participants’ ability to apply new skills and knowledge?

Yes

3a. If yes, please describe how and why you think this was successful. Please describe why you think this is the case.

Yes. In the post-Conference survey, we received a total of 32 responses. One of the questions asked participants “How much do you agree with the following statement: I learned something as part of the program that I can apply in my own context”. Over 32 responses, 19 said they “strongly agree”, 12 “agree” and only 1 participant replied “neither agree nor disagree”.

People shared how the Conference met their expectations by highlighting learnings:

“The GLAM Wiki Conference 2023 has been a moment of listening, learning and very enriching exchanges between experiences developed within the Wikimedia movement and allies in the region. I listened and learned from a variety of experiences from the region.” “I learnt a lot in different sessions, shared experiences with others about GLAM, all will help me to be a good organizer of future GLAM activities in my country.” “I learned about new tools that I would like to use.”

Another question asked participants more specifically about the practical application of what they learned: “How will you apply what you have learned as part of the Conference in your future GLAM Wiki activities?” People responded:

“I think the emphasis on Commons & linked structured data was really important. I've already started looking at how to improve my practice there.” “I will apply it by organizing edithatons and cultural and educational programmes for my institution.” “I learned some issues about campaigns that helped me to make decisions for our next year campaign, and I met people who work with subjects related to mine that I hope we can help each other create activities and learn about Wikimedia projects.”

We also asked them with a several choice options how they felt about their skills after the Conference:

• Use new tools to implement GLAM Wiki in my own context: 17 people
• I have a better sense of who to talk to inside the community: 23 people
• I have a better sense of who to talk to inside the Wikimedia Foundation: 21 people
• I'm better enabled to do partnerships in my local context: 18 people
• I learned how to implement new tactics or programs: 18 people
• I have better sense of the challenges and potential solutions for GLAM Wiki partnerships: 14 people
• I now have a better sense of how my institution / my project can collaborate with the Wikimedia community: 15 people

After the Conference ended, we learned that some of our volunteers were offered additional training opportunities (such as taking a course on Wikidata) and people remained connected around other opportunities. We believe that overall there was a sense of useful exchange among participants.

4. Please use this space to upload media and other files that help tell your story and impact. You can also provide links to them.

Field to type in URLs.

Commons category with photos and videos from the Conference: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:GLAM_Wiki_Conference_2023

Comms report with all the stories that were shared on social media: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BJ_E_0YDzBIQ68GHj88QkCQu_kLeA9JKG9A1vkxryeE/edit#slide=id.g15105b408d_0_287

5. To what extent do you agree with the following statements regarding the work carried out with the support of this Fund? You can choose “not applicable” if your work does not relate to these goals.

Our efforts during the Fund period have helped to...

A. Bring in participants from underrepresented groups
B. Create a more inclusive and connected culture in our community	Strongly agree
C. Develop content about underrepresented topics/groups
D. Develop content from underrepresented perspectives	Agree
E. Encourage the retention of editors	Not applicable to your fund
F. Encourage the retention of organizers	Agree

6. Please share resources that would be useful to share with other Wikimedia organizations so that they can learn from, adapt or build upon your work. For instance, guides, training material, presentations, work processes, or any other material the team has created to document and transfer knowledge about your work and can be useful for others. Please share any specific resources that you are creating, adapting/contextualizing in ways that are unique to your context (i.e. training material).

• Upload Documents and Files

• Here is an additional field to type in URLs.

N/A

7. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your efforts helped to bring in participants and/or build out content, particularly for underrepresented groups?

N/A

Part 2: Your main learning

8. Were there any major challenges or things you found difficult that you would like to share? What would you do differently next time?

1. The Scholarships & Program committee worked well but in retrospect we should have asserted more ownership and control over certain aspects of the process. As an example, we didn’t need the sign off from the Program committee on the final aspects of the Program. That caused some delay on our part.

2. We divided the scholarship evaluation into two rounds because we thought that was going to speed up the evaluation process while allowing for a generous timeline for applicants. We should have done one evaluation round only and give less time for people to apply. This decision made the process more cumbersome than needed to be and added for a few delays here and there.

3. We could have had a bit more scrutiny and communication with certain service providers. An example of this is the food service, we did a tasting and we made sure that the food quality was up to standard, but we (mistakenly so) assumed that they knew how to organize the service to provide for 150 people (which they clearly didn’t). Also, Uruguayans are very informal in general and we should have requested them to have a dress code for the Conference and to be more clearly identified.

3. We had mixed results with the volunteers on-site. Next time we’ll establish a better process for selecting volunteers for on-site activities.

4. We had a good hiring process that made us hire the best person we could have asked for this event. Isaac is knowledgeable and was able to hit the ground running. However, we could have had some better processes for working with the Event Manager, and also with the rest of the team, and in particular we could have had more exchange of ideas on how to set up some working teams, particularly for quick responses during the Conference. That would have also allowed a better participation from the team in the Conference.

5. We could have communicated more and better about certain aspects of the Program, such as the cultural activities or the keynotes. People didn’t understand that the panel on Friday with the cultural institutions from the Southern Cone of Latin America was the keynote.

6. Maybe less sessions? There’s not such a thing as a perfect program, but it’s always hard to strike a balance between the amount of sessions submitted and the different interests that people might have. In this case, maybe the downside was that some sessions had little attendance, but it could also be viewed as an opportunity to have a closer connection with the people attending the session.

7. We should have put a deadline as to when people could ask for a reimbursement of their visa expenses. We were also very generous with the deadline for accepting the scholarships and this caused unnecessary delay on accepting other people, as we were waiting for their responses.

8. It was a good idea to make the Conference in the School of Information and Communication, but we could have made some aspects of the Conference a bit more integrated with the space (i.e., coordinate with the Faculty librarians a visit to the Library).

9. Was there any non-financial support that the Wikimedia Foundation could have provided that would have better supported you in achieving your goals?

1. Timeline: The current timeline of Conference Funds seems a bit tight. We should be able to send proposals in and get them approved a year before the Conference starts. In our case, we had already decided by November that we wanted to do the Conference, but we were asked to present the grant proposal on February. Approval came in on April. That’s around 7-8 months to organize a Conference; it’s a very tight timeline for all the heavy lifting that needs to happen (and the involvement of volunteers), and it doesn’t give us enough time to do important things such as search for additional funding, because most organizations and businesses decide a year out on what initiatives they will support.

2. Process & budgeting: There’s some internal reflection that needs to happen around the role that these Conferences play for the Wikimedia Foundation, and not only for the communities. In the case of the GLAM Wiki Conference, this is an instrumental Conference for a lot of Wikimedia Foundation teams (including several of the teams under Community Growth and Product & Technology). This means reflecting on the different ways in which these teams might get involved and support the Conference (aside from presenting sessions).

In line with this, there needs to be a serious conversation about budgeting decisions for thematic Conferences. We got around 30k less than what we asked for, and we believe that it’s not in line with the value that the Wikimedia Foundation took out of this Conference. There’s not a lot of clarity on how the funds for these tematic Conferences get prioritized, defined and approved. Receiving less money meant that we had to cut some corners and that we weren’t able to invite some strategic partners from GLAM institutions that would have added significant value to the overall conversations.

3. Some logistical aspects of the Conference could be handled directly by the Wikimedia Foundation, such as hotel arrangements. In our case, the difference between the hotel across the street, which was slightly nicer, and the hotel where people stayed was around 2,500 USD for all Conference participants. This difference meant a full scholarship from someone from Africa, so we went with the hotel we did to give out more scholarships, even when the rooms were slightly smaller. We received some complaints about the hotel arrangements, but the price difference was significant enough for us to prioritize it this way. The WMF could get a better deal and better responses from hotel management if they arranged directly with a big global hotel chain, and lift this pressure off the local budget for the event.

4. Some teams at the Wikimedia Foundation need to step earlier in the planning process. If Conference Funds won’t grant the full amount requested for a Conference and local organizers are suggested/required to secure additional funds from other funding sources, the Partnerships team should be called in way earlier, and have dedicated time to help in strategizing ideas and securing those funds.

5. There should be at least one meeting between Conference organizers and anyone from Wikimedia Foundation staff coming to the Conference. This meeting should not only be for the purposes of sharing information, but also so staff can better understand where to show up, support, what needs to be done, etc. This should happen early on in the planning process and probably mid-way through the Conference organizing. In some cases, this would also reduce friction between Wikimedia communities and staff.

6. We received almost zero support from Comms, despite filling in the form to receive Comms support. We didn’t even get a repost of the information we shared on our social media accounts, even when we tagged the Wikimedia Foundation. Additionally, the timelines they have for sharing information beforehand for some of the editorial processes makes it practically impossible to be met in the fast paced, community and volunteer environment we work in. We had an extravagant request around Communications a week before the beginning of the Conference, which could have been fulfilled if given enough time in advance. This is an area that needs significant improvement.

7. Meta is a pain to put together a Conference Program. We needed to have several volunteers just helping us to figure Meta, and we spent a significant amount of time just trying to make the Program look reasonably good. If you’re not a user of wikis (which is the case of many GLAM institutions), it’s hard to navigate the Conference page. A solution to this could be as simple as a script that takes Google Sheets to Meta for Conferences, so at least we can provide a simple, clean, clear interface. We decided not to invest on a new website to avoid future maintenance costs and other potential issues (such as security threats), but Meta could be better for serving Conference organizer’s needs, in particular considering how many Conferences are run across the movement.

10. What would you recommend on a local and/or regional level as the best next step to leverage your success and momentum?

At the regional level:

1. Keep on providing support on organizing other meetings and Conferences. We now have some experience in organizing a Wikimedia meeting that we can bring to the table and be in service of others.

2. Plan for a bi-national or Southern Cone GLAM meeting (potentially next year). Smaller meetings might prove useful to keep the conversation alive but also to focus more on capacity exchange.

3. Strengthen our working relationship with the rest of the Southern Cone countries, which we are doing by collaborating in different ways, in particular with Chile and Argentina.

At the local level:

1. Plan ahead with our current partners. After the Conference ended, our partners reached out to us earlier than in previous years to plan for the year ahead. This is an opportunity we need to use in our favor.

2. Strategize. For 2024, the work of our Wikimedia & Heritage fellows will be centered around creating a strategy for engaging with Culture & Heritage. We decided that we need to step back and review our current GLAM strategy, to engage more institutions and allies.

11. Please add any 3 operational recommendations for future events organizers.

1. Doing pre-online meetings & conversations helps with leveling up and discuss some aspects previously.

2. Less presentations and case studies.

3. Put together a Monitoring, Learning & Evaluation Committee that can help you with data collection for the Conference Metrics, particularly if you focus your metrics on Learning questions rather than on sheer numbers.

Part 3: Metrics

12. Open Metrics reporting

In your application, you defined some open metrics and targets (goals). You will see a table like the one below with your metric in the title and the target you set in your proposal automatically filled in.

Open Metrics Summary

Open Metrics	Description	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
Interest from partners	Representatives from different organizations coming to the event (30 representatives) New partnerships developed after the event (5 new partnerships) Diversity of non-Wikimedia speakers (10 speakers) Participants from outside of the Wikimedia movement (30 participants)	75	72	1. Representatives from different organizations coming to the event. We achieved this metric. We can share a more detailed list, but we had representatives from different GLAM institutions that either received a scholarship or came with their own funds, including people from the Smithsonian, local partners, and other allied organizations such as Creative Commons. 2. We developed one partnership with the organization that brought us the L'Oréal edit-a-thon for Women in science, and we did our first activity with the General Archive of the University. We had set the target to 5 but we only achieved 2. I'm not counting here the cultural activities that we did with other GLAM institutions that we hadn't been working with because they are not long term partnerships. 3. We had more than 10 speakers that weren't part of the Wikimedia movement, including people from GLAM institutions (we even had a full keynote panel that didn't include any Wikimedian!). 4. We had participants from outside of the Wikimedia movement, including the people from Uruguay that received a scholarship.	Registration list
Challenges & solutions	Documentation from the event includes at least 5 concrete challenges and 10 potential solutions Documentation from the event outlines at least 7 “pain points” for collaboration between the Wikimedia movement and the GLAM sector	22	0	This is the metric that we had the hardest time collecting, because we can't tell what was discussed in sessions. However, we did the pre-Conference online sessions, which were *extremely helpful* to carry out this work. Here is a summary of those conversations: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KM8hPMiytyaRE5bIdPZPPzegbVx_AWwnp2K0BqJBBKQ/edit#slide=id.p	Jamboard, Padlet, Mentimeter
Joint learnings GLAM & Wikimedia	Documentation from the event outlines at least 20 different ways in which the Wikimedia movement and the GLAM sector can build more digital skills and learn from each other	20	0	Another good example of something we didn't need to add. This was impossible to capture. We only have anecdotal data for this one.	N/A
20	Documentation form the event outlines at least 10 “pain points” in our most relevant platforms for GLAM work (Wikipedia, Commons, Wikisource & Wikidata) and tools and 10 potential solutions to work around them	N/A	0	See the summary already shared: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KM8hPMiytyaRE5bIdPZPPzegbVx_AWwnp2K0BqJBBKQ/edit#slide=id.p	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

13. Were there any metrics in your proposal that you could not collect or that you had to change?

Yes

13a. If you have any difficulties collecting data to measure your results, please describe and add any recommendations on how to address them in the future. Also mention why you felt you had to change some metrics.

Chen was right that our Metrics were too ambitious. In retrospect, we should have had some sort of "MLE Committee", focused only on helping us gather the data we wanted for this event (we recommended this to Carlo Brescia from WikiAcción Perú for his grant for the Huaraz meeting). In part, because some of the metrics we wanted to capture included documentation, and we thought we were going to be able to actually be in the sessions (nice one). That means that we had a harder time than anticipated for collecting some of these metrics.

14. Here are the templates of registration and survey tools that the Wikimedia Foundation has developed so that you can use in your conference fund work.

5. I used other survey or registration tools

14a. Please share the result(s) with us, provide the link(s) or summarize the main result(s) and insight(s) from them.

N/A

14b. If you used other forms, please share them with us, as these forms might be useful for others to use.

Part 4: Financial reporting and compliance

15. & 16. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.

6190771 UYU

17. Please state the total amount spent in USD.

157991 USD

18. Please report the funds received and spending in the currency of your fund.

Upload a financial report file.

Please provide a link to your financial reporting document.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ac2RliwXgEacO9chc4OV2I1Vu6C6WJeI4fXuMy2IIBs/edit#gid=211992047

As required in the fund agreement, please report any deviations from your fund 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.

19. If you have not already done so in your budget report, please provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal.

We're finishing a detailed financial audit, but I'm submitting the report so we don't delay this any longer. Also, note that the financial spreadsheet is only being shared with Chen Almog, Conference Fund's Program Officer, as a way to avoid disclosing who got a scholarship.

20. Do you have any unspent funds from the Fund?

Yes

20a. Please list the amount and currency you did not use and explain why.

One of the participants couldn't attend because the airline made a mistake regarding the visa requirements, so our travel agent was able to get a refund for the money.

20b. What are you planning to do with the underspent funds?

A. Propose to use the underspent funds within this Fund period with PO approval

20c. Please provide details of hope to spend these funds.

We expect to use these funds for the GLAM Wiki meeting that will take place in Poland, before Wikimania.

21. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement?

Yes

22. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?

Yes

23. 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 Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.

Yes

24. If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here.