Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Empowering Italian GLAMs/Yearly Report (2023)

Yearly Learning Report (Year 2 - 2023)

Report Status: Accepted

Due date: 30 July 2024

Funding program: Wikimedia Community Fund

Report type: Yearly Learning Report (for multi-year fund recipients) , reporting year: 2023

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General information

This form is for organizations, groups, or individuals receiving multi-year Wikimedia Community Funds to report on their yearly results.

Name of Organization: Wikimedia Italia
Title of Proposal: Empowering Italian GLAMs

Part 1 Understanding your work

1. Briefly describe how your proposed activities and strategies were implemented.

We created a scalable system to involve all national GLAMs: design of a workflow, pilot project in Italy involving all Italian museums, evaluation and documentation.

We implemented an awareness-raising campaign focussed on open access and cooperation with the Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. The project has contacted all Italian museums through a communication campaign, press communicates and media relations at a national and local level, conferences webinars, networking with stakeholders, emails (mass mailing managed with Wikimedia Italia’s CRM system, CiviCRM with reports on https://wiki.wikimedia.it/wiki/Empowering_Italian_GLAMs/Invii_email_ai_musei) and direct and personal contacts.
We established a system to monitor the implementation of open access based on Wikidata. https://www.adert.it/musei/report.php, https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progetto:Musei/Liste and we are currently finalising a system to visualize data about all Italian museums and GLAMs (including libraries, archives, theatres and universities)
We developed a tool to collect data from institutions, upload authorisations associated with cultural institutions and to allow them to review Wikidata data. The tool has been translated. https://glams.wmcloud.org/. To further implement the project, we need to design a tool that is more strongly connected to Wikimedia Commons to facilitate the international scalability of the project and the participation of current volunteers.
Results in Italy: 6810 items related to museums improved on Wikidata (the best existing repository of Italian museums), 4344 museums contacted, 304 Italian institutions involved, 86 institutions concluded the entire workflow, 140 surveys about open access completed. 5 case studies fully documented.

2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you felt were effective in achieving your goals?

Collaboration between Wikimedia, ICOM, Creative Commons, a university and an NGO specialised in cultural strategies.

Using Wikidata to analyse, monitor and visualise data related to national GLAMs and creating on Wikidata the best existing national repository of GLAMs with research data and updates related to digitalisations and open access.

3. Would you say that your project had any innovations? Are there things that you did very differently than you have seen them done by others?

A replicable strategy to involve all GLAMs in implementing open access and cooperating with Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects

Full repository of GLAMs on Wikidata to analyse, monitor and visualise data
External system to upload authorisations and images and to manage institutions and their uploads on Wikimedia Commons

4. Please describe how different communities participated and/or were informed about your work.

Professionals working in GLAMs: addressed by the project through communication, training, events and support

Italian volunteers, in particular Wikimedia Italia coordinators and participants to in person edit-a-thon and online events
Wikimedia communities through presentations of the project

5. Documentation of your impact. Please use the two spaces below to share files and links that help tell your story and impact. This can be documentation that shows your results through testimonies, videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, etc.) social media posts, dashboards, etc.

Upload Documents and Files

Here is an additional field to type in URLs.

All the documentation of the project is accessible on meta-wiki (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Empowering_Italian_GLAMs/Documentation) and archived on OSF Open Science Framework https://osf.io/jpnb3/

6. 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	Agree
B. Create a more inclusive and connected culture in our community	Agree
C. Develop content about underrepresented topics/groups	Agree
D. Develop content from underrepresented perspectives	Agree
E. Encourage the retention of editors	Not applicable
F. Encourage the retention of organizers	Neither agree nor disagree
G. Increased participants' feelings of belonging and connection to the movement.	Agree

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?

Implementing a national strategy to involve GLAMs allowed to address 4344 Italian museums and their staff/volunteers. The 304 institutions involved at different degrees represent a very diverse group of institutions for size, location, ownership, and topics. The strategy is shown to be an inclusive strategy capable of creating an entry point for diverse institutions and a replicable system to reach an extensive number of institutions (there are over 100,000 museums in the world).

Part 2: Your main learning

8. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What did you learn about these areas during this period?

We learned:

We can reach the vast majority of GLAMs. We reached 4344 Italian museums: It is not easy but it is feasible. We are currently working in replicating the workflow for libraries, archives, theatres and universities.
Working on a large-scale communication campaign is effective. It supports the understanding of open access and it creates the conditions to implement it and to reinforce collaborations among Wikimedia and GLAMs
The museums in Italy which have already contributed before this project to the Wikimedia projects are 63 (the data is on Wikidata now). In 12 years, around 900 cultural institutions have been contributing to Wiki Loves Monuments and provided an authorisation to take photos of their buildings and collections (which is already a step toward open access). In two years, 300 museums have been involved by the project Empowering Italian GLAMs
We have a system to monitor the institutions that have digital collections: it can be tracked with Property P2283 with value Q212805 based on the data of the Italian national statistics we uploaded on Wikidata. The result of the query can be accessed at https://w.wiki/6kdB
With a dataset and the use of CiviCRM we can indeed differentiate our communication towards institutions, by sending emails to specific regions, thematic networks, institutions which are at different stages of the workflow...

9. Did anything unexpected or surprising happen when implementing your activities?

The Archeological Park of the Colosseum contacted us to collaborate, and we organised a guided tour for Wikipedians and an edit-a-thon together. What is very important is the fact that a major institution which is the most visited in Italy and one of the most visited in the world (12 million visitors in 2023) values the collaboration with Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects and its institutional role in supporting open access and the active involvement of citizens, despite all the specific challenges presented by the Italian legislation.

10. How do you hope to use this learning? For instance, do you have any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future?

Reproduce the method in another country.

Further disseminating the method with articles, presentations and workshops (or online training)
Developing the online form linked to Wikimedia Commons (the online form allows the collection of authorisations and content from institutions and review of their content before uploading it to Wikimedia Commons: this is a relevant step which needs to be developed within Wikimedia Commons to scale the project to all languages and countries). This could be a project which might be submitted for support to the Wikimedia Foundation.

11. If you were sitting with a friend to tell them one thing about your work during this fund, what would it be (think of inspiring or fascinating moments, tough challenges, interesting anecdotes, or anything that feels important to you)?

Can you believe that we contacted 4344 museums and produced on Wikidata the best existing repository of Italian museums? 304 museums involved with 86 completing the entire workflow seems a very limited result... but it is enormous if we think that Wikimedia Italia used to collaborate with a maximum of 5-10 institutions per year. The list of institutions is astonishing: famous ones that have never been heard of, small and large museums, all topics, and located in almost all regions. Addressing all institutions is really a game changer.

12. 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.

List of all the documentation produced with links to the archived material on Open Science Framework https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Empowering_Italian_GLAMs/Documentation

Part 3: Metrics for Year 2

13a. Open and additional metrics data

Open Metrics
Open Metrics	Description	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
N/A	N/A	N/A	4344	Number of museums that received the email contacted region by region. Email opening around 30%. 4344 are the institutions we could contact out of the 6810 item developed on Wikidata.	email sent from CRM
N/A	N/A	N/A	304	Number of musums involved by the project (of which 23 decided not to join). Last update July 2024. 135 started the procedure, 95 withdraw, 86 ended the entire procedure	Through the online form / supported by the team
N/A	N/A	N/A	86	86 are the number of museums which completed the entire workflow of the project (endorsement, authorisation with open access policy, images uploaded on Wikimedia Commons, text provided, Wikidata checked and survey). Please note that we need to add also the institutions involved through Wiki Loves Monuments, Empowering Italian GLAMs, MAB call (Museums, Archives and Libraries - MAB in Italian) and other GLAM project - around 1000	Through the online form / supported by the team
N/A	N/A	N/A	4344	Number of people contacted working with institutions. Contact with at least one referent for each Museum or referent that sent us emails	email sent from CRM
N/A	N/A	N/A	86	Number of people involved indirectly in the Wikimedia projects, by producing content with open licenses and tools. Plus all the people involved in events and training but we don't have the data	The number corresponds to the number of institutions involved

13b. Additional core metrics data.

Core Metrics Summary
Core metrics	Description	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
Number of participants	N/A	N/A	600	People involved in releasing content with open licenses and tools and people involved in events and training - please refer to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Empowering_Italian_GLAMs/Documentation#Events	86 is the number of the institutions completing the project workflow. For the events we don't have specific data: we estimated here https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Empowering_Italian_GLAMs/Documentation#Events
Number of editors	N/A	N/A	103	Writing week’s participants (2023) Editathon at the Braidense National Library with Archivio Ricordi Writing week’s participants (2024) Editathon at the Martinitt e Stelline Museum Editathons at the Milan Natural History Museum Editathon at the Colosseum Archaeological Park	Number of participant signing up at the event and involved
Number of organizers	N/A	N/A	39	Most of the people involved in the project will continue working on it in the future. We are already planning the activities for 2025-2027 within Wikimedia Italia. Collaborations are also confirmed for the future. Few people involved among the 39 have changed occupations and interests.	Project team. Please refer to the credits for full acknowledgement https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Empowering_Italian_GLAMs/Credits

**Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project**
Wikimedia Project	Description	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
N/A	N/A	N/A	11203	No. of institution’s data from ISTAT No. of institution’s data from other databases No. of institutions with a category on Commons (https://w.wiki/6kdQ)	Data on Wikidata
N/A	N/A	N/A	41492	Sum of images received by form (N=77), images from Museo Egizio (N=2383); images from Musei Civici Reggio Emilia (N=309); images from Museo Civico Modena, (N=408), images from other museums (N=828), WLM (N=37487)	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A	150	35 articles created 19 expanded or improved articles 15 articles created or modified 35 articles created 9 expanded or improved articles 7 articles created 6 articles created 13 expanded or improved articles 5 articles created 6 expanded or improved articles	Museum Writing week (2023) Museum Writing week (2023) Editathon at the Braidense National Library with Archivio Ricordi Museum Writing week (2024) Museum Writing week (2024) Editathon at the Martinitt e Stelline Museum Editathons at the Milan Natural History Museum Editathons at the Milan Natural History Museum Editathon at the Colosseum Archaological Park Editathon at the Colosseum Archaological Park
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

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

No

15. 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.

N/A

16. Use this space to link or upload any additional documents that would be useful to understand your data collection (e.g., dashboards, surveys you have carried out, communications material, training material, etc).

Upload Documents and Files

Here is an additional field to type in URLs.

N/A

Part 4: Organizational capacities & partnerships

17. Organizational Capacity

Organizational capacity dimension
A. Financial capacity and management	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
B. Conflict management or transformation	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
C. Leadership (i.e growing in potential leaders, leadership that fit organizational needs and values)	This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
D. Partnership building	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
E. Strategic planning	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
F. Program design, implementation, and management	This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
G. Scoping and testing new approaches, innovation	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
H. Recruiting new contributors (volunteer)	This capacity is low, and we should prioritise developing it
I. Support and growth path for different types of contributors (volunteers)	This capacity is low, and we should prioritise developing it
J. Governance	This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
K. Communications, marketing, and social media	This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
L. Staffing - hiring, monitoring, supporting in the areas needed for program implementation and sustainability	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
M. On-wiki technical skills	This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
N. Accessing and using data	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
O. Evaluating and learning from our work	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
P. Communicating and sharing what we learn with our peers and other stakeholders	This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
Establishing a working team with different competences
Certification for trainers (we developed a system and certified 12 people)

17a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Peer to peer learning with other community members (but that is not continuous or structured), Other

17b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Other

18. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your organizational capacity has grown, and areas where you require support?

The team has been really great. People have contributed with passion, professionalism, and great commitment. Even paid staff have contributed more than expected, offering the project their volunteer time and interest in the initiative's success. Furthermore, it has been fun :)

19. Partnerships over the funding period.

Over the fund period...
A. We built strategic partnerships with other institutions or groups that will help us grow in the medium term (3 year time frame)	Strongly agree
B. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to bring in more contributors from underrepresented groups	Agree
C. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to build out more content on underrepresented topics/groups	Agree

19a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Permanent staff outreach, Staff hired through the fund, Volunteers from our communities, Other

19b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Difficulties specific to our context that hindered partnerships, Local policies or other legal factors, Limited funding period

20. Please share your learning about strategies to build partnerships with other institutions and groups and any other learning about working with partners?

This entire project is about this.

1. Collaborate with ICOM, Creative Commons and the university 2. Create a database of your national GLAMs on Wikidata, including research data 3. Collect contact in collaboration with ICOM and contact all institutions 4. Invite institutions to open a small selection of their content (even only 20 images) and support them in doing it (with a process, a form, templates for authorisations/open access policy and some staff for call back and support)

The key of this approach is a national stategy developped in synergy with other relevant national institutions, aiming at open access and Wikiimedia cooperation, supporting also limited content donation, and including a national communication campaign (emails, press communicates, events, posts).

Part 5: Sense of belonging and collaboration

21. What would it mean for your organization to feel a sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement?

Wikimedia Italia and all its networks of volunteers, members, staff, and board have a strong and profound commitment to free knowledge: it is visible in their work of advocacy, in the number of events organised, in the procedure to plan and monitor impact, in the dialogue among all stakeholders to understand needs and expectations, in the activities to support volunteers implemented by the staff, in the participation in the international movement, and of course in the active Wikimedia online communities in different projects (very active on Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, but also committed to many other projects such as Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage and Wikipedia in dialects).

22. How has your (for individual grantees) or your group/organization’s (for organizational grantees) sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?

Somewhat increased

23. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.

The project Empowering Italian GLAMs has engaged most of the Wikimedia Italia team, collaborators, volunteers and partners in a new approach and strategy. It has required a significant amount of effort, but it has shown relevant results and a new significant impact over time. The project has certainly added stress, work and new challenges, but it has also made people proud of the work done and committed to its vision.

24. How has your group/organization’s sense of personal investment in the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?

Increased significantly

25. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.

The project team has contributed generously and more than expected. It has devoted an incredible amount of time, invested energy and passion. The large majority of the team is still interested in and committed to continuing the project by addressing new institutions (we are already involving libraries, archives, theatres, and universities) and by facilitating the scalability of its methods and workflow.

26. Are there other movements besides the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement that play a central role in your motivation to contribute to Wikimedia projects? (for example, Black Lives Matter, Feminist movement, Climate Justice, or other activism spaces) If so, please describe it below.

The project is based on a formal collaboration with Creative Commons Italia, ICOM Italia, the University of Turin and the association BAM! specialised in cultural strategies: this great partnership has been instrumental to the success of the activities, but it is also a great engine of energy and motivation. The project has contributed to the interest and mission of each group involved by establishing a healthy collaboration designed to respond to each institution's mission: promoting OpenGLAM and Creative Commons licenses, supporting museums, producing research, and creating new approaches to accompany museums in their digital strategies. Furthermore, each partner brought great specific competencies, and working with each person involved was a real pleasure.

Supporting Peer Learning and Collaboration

We are interested in better supporting peer learning and collaboration in the movement.

27. Have you shared these results with Wikimedia affiliates or community members?

Partially

27a. Please describe how you have already shared them. Would you like to do more sharing, and if so how?

We have presented the project in 3 international meetings (Wikimania Singapore 2023, presentation to active members of Creative Commons, video for GLAM Wiki Conference 2023, learning clinic related to advocacy 2024), we have organised an international conference in 2023 focussed on scholars specialised in cultural economy and management, and we participated in ICOM Triennial Conference in Valencia in 2023 with other Wikimedia affiliates (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Empowering_Italian_GLAMs/Documentation#Events). To truly share the method we need to share the findings in a workshop and coach the implementation of it in another country. We have started a few activities with New Zealand, but we didn't complete them; we proposed a workshop at Wikimania Katowice, but it was not selected. So we need to develop better this area to make sure others can take advantage of our work and reuse it easily.

28. How often do you currently share what you have learned with other Wikimedia Foundation grantees, and learn from them?

We do this rarely (less than twice a year)

29. How does your organization currently share mutual learning with other grantees?

We participate in events online and offline: we attend Wikimania and thematic events in particolar in the area of GLAMs, advocacy and education. We are active members of Wikimedia Europe (we collaborate with them also for our advocacy and there is a continuous exchange of information) and we have good relationships with many chapters. In particular we created an international project with Uruguay. We contribute to international Wikimedia newsletters and some news about the project Empowering Italian GLAMs were included in the GLAM newsletter. We contribute to diff in particular with articles related to advocacy.

Part 6: Financial reporting and compliance

30. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.

34970

31. Local currency type

EUR

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

Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.

Report funds received and spent, if template not used.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RE_kT9GEm9GEOtNsoSU3hf4Twe4IUnb2NZd-_eUiiGA/edit?usp=sharing

33. 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.

Please note that the total cost of the project is 100,110 euros, including a contribution from Wikimedia Italia in cash and in-kind. The total request to Wikimedia Foundation was 80,160 euro. In the intermediate report we presented expenses for 45,190 euro and we currently ask with this report the remaining amount of 34,970 euro.

We spent much more than 34,970 euro and the rest is provided by Wikimedia Italia. Wikimedia Italia has increased its contribution to the project of 25,200 euros for 2023 and 25,200 euros for 2024, and it is planning a specific budget for the continuation of the project for 2024-2027.

Please note that we decided to allocate more resources to museum experts and Wikidata and Wikimedia experts; we reduced therefore the budget for travels and for legal advice. The expense for the international researcher (Trilce Navarrete) will be made later on this year or next year because the researcher is still working on her analysis of the data; the cost will be covered by Wikimedia Italia and the amount not spent in Wikimedia Foundation budget has been moved to cover the expenses for the museum experts.

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

34a. Please list the amount and currency you did not use and explain why.

N/A

34b. What are you planning to do with the underspent funds?

N/A

34c. Please provide details of hope to spend these funds.

N/A

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

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.

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

Yes

37. 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

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

Thanks for the financial support. Having support from the Wikimedia Foundation was very important for us to ensure the project had an international approach and addressed the global movement, not only Italian needs. We appreciated the exchanges with the Wikimedia Foundation team and the effort to facilitate our work and ensure we could learn from others and share our experiences.