Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wiki Loves Monuments 2022-23 International Coordination and Prizes
Ciell - general WLM communication & Montage Erinamukta - international prizes KCVelaga - general WLM coördination Ndahiro derrick - international jury coordination Romaine - international banners and upload campaigns Slaporte - Montage & website
Extended team:: Effeietsanders - at-large support and advising M.hekmat - Social Media Jean-Frédéric - tools MahmoudHashemi - Montage André Costa (WMSE) - tools
LilyOfTheWest - advisorThis is an automatically generated Meta-Wiki page. The page was copied from Fluxx, the web service of Wikimedia Foundation Funds where the user has submitted their application. Please do not make any changes to this page because all changes will be removed after the next update. Use the discussion page for your feedback. The page was created by CR-FluxxBot.
Applicant details
editWikimedia username(s):
- Wiki Loves Monuments core team:
Ciell - general WLM communication & Montage Erinamukta - international prizes KCVelaga - general WLM coördination Ndahiro derrick - international jury coordination Romaine - international banners and upload campaigns Slaporte - Montage & website
Extended team:: Effeietsanders - at-large support and advising M.hekmat - Social Media Jean-Frédéric - tools MahmoudHashemi - Montage André Costa (WMSE) - tools LilyOfTheWest - advisor
Organization:
- Wiki Loves Monuments International Organizing Team
G. Have you received grants from the Wikimedia Foundation before?
- Applied previously and did receive a grant
H. Have you received grants from any non-wiki organization before?
- No
H.1 Which organization(s) did you receive grants from?
- N/A
M. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?
- Yes
M1. Fiscal organization name.
- Wikimedia Österreich
Additional information
editR. Where will this proposal be implemented?
- International (more than one country across continents or regions)
S. Please indicate whether your work will be focused on one country (local), more than one or several countries in your region (regional) or has a cross-regional (global) scope:
- International
S1. If you have answered regional or international, please write the country names and any other information that is useful for understanding your proposal.
T. If you would like, please share any websites or social media accounts that your group or organization has. (optional)
https://www.instagram.com/wikilovesmonuments/ https://twitter.com/wikimonuments https://www.facebook.com/WikiLovesMonuments/
M. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?
- Yes
M1. Fiscal organization name.
- Wikimedia Österreich
Proposal
edit1. What is the overall vision of your organization and how does this proposal contribute to this? How does this proposal connect to past work and learning?
The international Wiki Loves Monuments team’s mission is to freely document and raise awareness of built cultural heritage, increase contributions to the Wikimedia projects and bolster local Wikimedia communities around the world. We do this by leading and facilitating an annual federated, global, low-barrier photo competition. Based on this mission and experience of the past twelve editions of the competition, the international team has identified that the following will be key areas of focus for the upcoming year:
- Support to national contests: In its current form, the international team needs to support many local teams on a case by case basis (for example on tools, instructions, promotion etc.) thus limiting the scalability and ease of adoption by local communities. While established campaigns, which are generally backed by regional chapters, require minimal to no support from the international team, however, countries participating for the first or initial few times require support from the international team.
- Curation of resources: Both at national and international levels, the competition requires a wide range of resources including but not limited to, documentation (guides on organizing, participating, monuments database etc.), technical tools (mainly Montage), campaign infrastructure (upload wizards and central notices) that needs support for maintenance and to add new developments according to the needs of the campaign.
- Exploring new pathways for engagement to support knowledge equity: During 2021-22, the international team facilitated a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion review of the campaign, which has helped to surface several challenges faced by national organizers and also suggestions on making the campaign more inclusive. We will explore ways to implement recommendations from this and also the final report.
Most of this work is achieved with volunteer efforts. The budget that would be provided through this proposal is primarily used to support international awards, staff support for the volunteer efforts, technical support to the existing tools, and translations. While these may only be part of the work, these are essential puzzle pieces to make the campaign as a whole a success.
2. What is the change that you are trying to bring about and why is this important?
WLM is an on-going effort to improve documentation of media (mostly images) related to cultural heritage on Wikimedia Commons, and sister projects. There are certain components of the campaign which take place year over year with more or less the same approach. That is, areas of work such as documentation, maintaining the Central Notice infrastructure, running the international jury etc. are standard, and each year we would like to explore ways in which these processes can be improved and build a strategic direction for the competition. Apart from the standard components of the campaign, we would like to improve in the following areas:
1) Proactive support to national organizers and new campaigns: While campaigns backed by established affiliates do not usually require much support from the international team, many require regular follow-up from the team and support to set up the necessary infrastructure. During the last couple of years, owing to several reasons including the pandemic and transitions within the international team, the number of countries participating each is on decline. This year, we would like to evaluate that and explore ways where we can establish consistent communications with national organizers and provide necessary support. In addition to stabilizing existing national competitions, it is also important to keep adding a few new countries i.e. countries which have never participated in Wiki Loves Monuments previously. Currently, this is happening organically, but we would like to spend some more focused efforts in this area.
2) Worldwide participation: Participation has always been from countries where national competitions take place, which requires a group of volunteers to organize it. Currently, there is no for countries with no national competitions to take part in the competition even though they might have pictures from the respective countries to upload. We will plan and possibly (depending on the capacity we have) execute a “rest-of-the-world” competition.
3) Furthering the DEI research work: During the last grant period, we have facilitated a DEI review of the competition which identified several challenges and suggestions on solutions that can help the project to be equitable and inclusive. As the final report of this review is expected to be published in June, during the year following we will be exploring ways to implement suggestions from this review in coordination with the national competitions.
3. Describe your main approaches or strategies to achieve these changes and why you think they will be effective.
A) Collect, curate, and share best practices and building blocks: Two conditions are necessary for a successful Wiki Loves Monuments national competition: access to best practices and consistent tools/building blocks of information or technology that local organizers can use or follow out-of-the-box while keeping the barriers for innovation low. Currently, a lot of the limited time and resources of the national (and international) organizers is spent on tasks that can be done more efficiently, through better and more user-friendly documentation as well as templates that are designed based on the learning of organizing the contest over the past 12 years. Currently, much of the documentation is several years old and somewhat outdated, and mainly only available in English. It is one of our priorities to support this area.
B) Having a part-time staff for project coordination: During the last few years we observed that the international team, which has been an all-volunteer team, is overstretched and almost all the time available is being spent on standard components of the campaign. This has left no time to think about the strategic direction of the project, and support it. There is also a risk of volunteer burn-out. Starting this year, we would like to have a part-time staff (project coordinator) to support some of the standard components of the campaign and offload some of that from volunteers, who can spend more time on evolving new areas of the project which are interesting to them. We would like staff members to be from the existing staff of our fiscal sponsor, as it will be easier to set up this model and as the chapter already has experience supporting Wiki Loves Monuments and is well aware of our needs. The job description for the project coordinator is available at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vNqLgD3A_9hOPsS7G2r_bNjGtfBKea4F67eL_IjvBas/edit?usp=sharing
4. What are the activities you will be developing and delivering as part of these approaches or strategies?
A) Collect, curate, and share best practices and building blocks: Inform local organizers and affiliates about the new contest, initiatives, and projects the international team is working on; Collect feedback and suggestions from local organizers; Hold regular internal team meetings to review work done and plan for the work that is ahead; Communicate with the WLM community periodically. Monitor statistics; Set up a clear timeline. Improve Montage based on the feedback from last year in order to offer jury tool services to local and international jury members and coordinators; This year in particular: improve the infrastructure that is used by national competitions. This includes documentation, templates and perhaps some tooling.
B) Having a part-time staff for project coordination: Prepare (or coordinate for others to prepare) communication material in multiple languages that can be used and/or built upon by national organizations; Facilitate communication channels; Update social media channels; Update wikilovesmonuments.org with the necessary/useful information; Update and communicate the international rules; Update and share documentation;
- Having part-time staff support allows more time for the team to:
In coordination with partners, provide support for the technical work in specific parts of the pipeline for the migration of data from Monuments Database to Wikidata. Support national teams with the setup and maintenance of the technical infrastructure for uploading; Support national teams with the setup and maintenance of the CentralNotice; Collect measures and data to be reported at the end of the program. Report on activities to WMF Report on the use of budget at the end of the program; Write grant request Write grant report Disseminate the results of the international jury; Maintain communication with international partners. Give specific suggestions and support to national organizers (mostly online, though additionally we offer onboarding sessions over Hangout to the countries participating for the first time); Collect & answer questions of the national teams; Crisis management for national contests;
- Set up & run the international contest:
Set up jury processes Find suitable jury members for the international jury Collect results of national competitions Support the jury in their process Provide & distribute international prizes, awards and diplomas
- Specific additional tasks this year:
Organize the Special Awards for countries without a national team Organize the Organizers' awards
5. Do you want to apply for multi-year funding?
No
5.1 If yes, provide a brief overview of Year 2 and Year 3 of the proposed plan and how this relates to the current proposal and your strategic plan?
- N/A
6. Please include a timeline (operational calendar) for your proposal.
- For the WLM International Team, the yearly cycle starts around June/July, with active outreach to the (potential) national organizers and communications about the upcoming competition. We help the national teams with setting up landing pages if requested, creating the category structure and the banner- and upload campaigns on Commons.
The photo competition itself runs from September until October, wherein national organizers are free to choose any time period ranging upto 31 days. The international Team is standby for problems that may arise, and in the meantime will prepare the international jury. The top 10 images from the national contest need to be sent to the international team by December, the jury deliberates in Jan/Feb and the winners are typically announced in Feb/Mar of the new year, with prizes being distributed until May.
Q2 of every year is a time where the international team reflects on the past cycle, possibly onboards new members and takes time to prepare and communicate on a more meta level about the upcoming year.
7. Do you have the team that is needed to implement this proposal?
The 2022-2023 team hopes to have staff support for 15h/week for administration, documentation and incidental tasks.
- The following names are all volunteers on the team:
Wiki Loves Monuments core team: Ciell - general WLM communication & campaign creator for Montage Elena Tatiana Chis - social media coordination Erina Mukta- international prizes Krishna Chaitanya - general WLM coördination Ndahiro Derrick - international jury coordination Romaine - international banners and upload campaigns Stephen LaPorte - Montage developer and maintainer
- Advisors for the WLM core team, mainly past core team members:
Lodewijk - at-large support and advising Mohammad - Social Media. Jean-Fred - maintainer wikiloves statistics tool, Erfgoedbot and monuments database Mahmoud - Montage developer and maintainer André Costa - maintainer Erfgoedbot and monuments database LilyOfTheWest - advisor
NB: The core team is a working team, where each member contributes effort as well as expertise. This leaves space to welcome new members to add expertise and effort, such as someone to focus on Wikidata, knowledge transfer, new participant engagement, data analysis etc.
8. Please state if your proposal aims to work to bridge any of the identified CONTENT knowledge gaps (Knowledge Inequity)? Select up to THREE that most apply to your work.
Geography, Important Topics (topics considered to be of impact or important in the specific context), Cultural background, ethnicity, religion, racial
8.1 In a few sentences, explain how your work is specifically addressing this content gap (or Knowledge inequity) to ensure a greater representation of knowledge.
At the moment, our 2021-2022 DEI research is still underway. First results tell us about three different areas where national organizers experience problems in participating [1]. Though some require buy-in from stakeholders besides us as a team to address, the outcomes give us suggestions for these three areas to work on in the upcoming years. Solutions include improving and updating our documentations on the projects, more proactive communications and support peers to connect. [2] With the improvement in these areas, the national organizers will be able to improve their national competitions and a) join the competition for the first time, b) reach more participants, what would result in c) new uploaded content from countries that did not participate in the previous twelve years.
9. Please state if your proposal includes any of these areas or THEMATIC focus. Select up to THREE that most apply to your work and explain the rationale for identifying these themes.
Culture, heritage or GLAM , Diversity, Open Technology
10. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Please note, we had previously asked about inclusion and diversity in terms of CONTENTS, in this question we are asking about the diversity of PARTICIPANTS. Select up to THREE that most apply to your work.
Geographic , Ethnic/racial/religious or cultural background
11. What are your strategies for engaging participants, particularly those that currently are non-Wikimedia?
There are two broad categories here for engagement with Wiki Loves Monuments, participants and organizers. Participants are users who upload images during the competition, and organizers include national organizers, the international team, and other stakeholders.
For participants
- Central Notice is one of the most effective ways to inform the community about the competition when it starts and also newcomers, who are participating in the campaign for the first time. In addition to central notice, we have use our social media channels complementing the channels of national chapters and organizers to inform the non-Wikimedia communities
- Special prizes: Special prizes are ways to encourage contributions/participation from specific groups. For example, in the past, we have seen having a special prize for a region increased participation from the region in terms of the number of national competitions organized. Some of the categories where special prizes can be awarded are newcomers, underrepresented regions, emerging communities etc.
For organizers
- Mailing lists continue to be our main channel of communication with national organizers. Our goal is also to host monthly office hours where national organizers can gather to discuss challenges and share ideas, along with a specific topic of focus. We have been doing this during the last year, but not every month. We hope to make it more regular and consistent. As we previously mentioned, more proactive communications will be done during the outreach phase of the campaign.
12. In what ways are you actively seeking to contribute towards creating a safer, supportive, more equitable environment for participants and promoting the UCOC and Friendly Space Policy, and/or equivalent local policies and processes?
Typically, the International Team does not organize physical events. The only activity the international team hosts at the moment are the online office hours where we ensure friendly space, and we actively monitor our channels including on-wiki pages. The events organized locally related to Wiki Loves Monuments are handled by the respective national / regional teams, chapters, and user groups.
13. Do you have plans to work with Wikimedia communities, groups, or affiliates in your country, or in other countries, to implement this proposal?
Yes
13.1 If yes, please tell us about these connections online and offline and how you have let Wikimedia communities know about this proposal.
We have published the key open-ended questions from this proposal on Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2022/2022-23_Intl_Team_Funding_Proposal) as it it the primary platform for WLM and have informed the community. (https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikilovesmonuments@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/HVVFINV3KOVIE6TP5TYX4Y5WE366Q7G3/)
14. Will you be working with other external, non-Wikimedian partners to implement this proposal?
No
14.1 Please describe these partnerships and what motivates the potential partner to be part of the proposal and how they add value to your work.
N/A
15. How do you hope to sustain or expand the work carried out in this proposal after the grant?
Sustaining the work of Wiki Loves Monuments has been a successful struggle for the past 12 years. However, we need to make additional efforts in maintaining a cooperative community of national organizers, and improve documentation. All focus areas defined this year will help in the sustenance of Wiki Loves Monuments beyond this year.
16. What kind of risks do you anticipate and how would you mitigate these. This can include factors such as external/contextual issues that may affect implementation, as well as internal issues, such as governance/leadership changes.
- One of the current risks on the international team is lack of enough volunteers over the past couple of years. This partly both due to team transitions and also the scale of the project. One of the considerations for this year is to have a paid project coordinator who can help with some of the admin/logistical tasks, and volunteers can focus on areas that interest them.
- After 12 years of WLM, we have a need to develop a strategic direction for the campaign. Currently, we have mapped out some areas of improvement needs in terms of organizing, but the overall strategy for WLM still needs to be worked upon. Not having a strategic direction hinders innovation at the international level, and not having much scope for new areas of the campaign. This will be a priority for the upcoming year.
17. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select a maximum of three options that most apply.
Increase the Sustainability of Our Movement, Identify Topics for Impact, Improve User Experience
18. Please state if your organization or group has a Strategic Plan that can help us further understand your proposal. You can also upload it here.
- No
Learning, Sharing, and Evaluation
edit19. What do you hope to learn from your work in this fund proposal?
- How is WLM experienced by our national organizers and the participants?
- We are going to evaluate the campaign with surveys similar to what we conducted in 2019 and 2020. Surveys help us learn what worked, what didn’t and what areas can be improved. The goal of the surveys is to evaluate the campaign both from the perspective of national organizers and also the participants.
- What is the retention from new participants, both in Commons and maybe in other projects as well?
- In addition to the previous, we are also planning to conduct a brief data analysis on newcomers of the campaign, which will try to understand the behavior of newcomers after the campaign period is over and their retention + activity on Wikimedia projects.
20. Based on these learning questions, what is the information or data you need to collect to answer these questions? Please register this information (as metric description) in the following space provided.
| Main Metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| # of countries participating | As the international team, it is hard to measure participants. We can however measure the number of countries that take part in WLM. | 40 |
| # of countries that did not participate in the three years before | Not every country participates every year, but we love to see them return later! Hopefully the improved and updated documentation will help, as well as the availability in more languages. | 5 |
| % of participants in our evaluation surveys | The idea is to follow-up with participants, especially those who joined Wikimedia through the competition, at regular intervals after the competition is over. This includes a simple message (with help of translations done by the national teams) on talk pages of the participants on what they can possibly do after the competition is over. The goal is to improve retention.
We will be conducting a data analysis to understand the retention of editors after 3, 6, and 12 months after the competition is over. We will average this for last three years and compare it with 2022's. That will help us to understand the impact of follow-up intervention. (the # below is a percentage of the total # of participants in the competition) |
40 |
| Net Promoter Score | Net Promoter Score is one of the metrics that we use to calculate satisfaction rate. According to the 2019’s organizers’ survey (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2019_Organizer_Survey_Report.pdf, page 29), the net promoter score for support received from the international team is -7 (the score is calculated as [promoter% - detractor%] * 100). Generally a score of 50 or above is considered good. For this iteration, our target would be to shift from a negative score to a positive score around 20-25. | 20 |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
Here are some additional metrics that you can use if they are relevant to your work. Please note that this is just an optional list, mostly of quantitative metrics. They may complement the qualitative metrics you have defined in the previous boxes.
| Additional Metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities | N/A | N/A |
| Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities | N/A | N/A |
| Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability | N/A | N/A |
| Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors | N/A | N/A |
| Diversity of participants brought in by grantees | N/A | N/A |
| Number of people reached through social media publications | N/A | N/A |
| Number of activities developed | N/A | N/A |
| Number of volunteer hours | N/A | N/A |
21. Additional core quantitative metrics. These core metrics will not tell the whole story about your work, but they are important for measuring some Movement-wide changes. Please try to include these core metrics if they are relevant to your work. If they are not, please use the space provided to explain why they are not relevant or why you can not capture this data. Your explanation will help us review our core metrics and make sure we are using the best ones for the movement as a whole.
| Core metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | N/A | N/A |
| Number of editors | N/A | N/A |
| Number of organizers | N/A | N/A |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
21.1 If for some reason your proposal will not measure these core metrics please provide an explanation.
Note: Number of participants, number of images uploaded, etc are very much indicative of the effort and success by the national teams. The above mentioned metrics are ones the international team has direct influence over.
22. What tools would you use to measure each metric selected?
https://wikiloves.toolforge.org/ https://quarry.wmflabs.org/ https://montage.toolforge.org/#/ Surveys for which will be using Qualtrics (https://www.qualtrics.com/au/) under WMF-provided license
Financial Proposal
edit23. & 23.1 What is the amount you are requesting from WMF? Please provide this amount in your local currency. If you are thinking about a multi-year fund, please provide the amount for the first year.
- 61500 EUR
23.2 What is this amount in US Currency (to the best of your knowledge)?
- 66723.2 USD
23.3 Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it.
- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZdYHTKiGiLW_H8uWmuqY2d_JYUdW-i5DiIfecP5PtHo/edit#gid=2099383086 spreadsheet in our G-drive, pdf version is available in the uploaded budget attached.
23.4 Please include any additional observations or comments you would like to include about your budget.
- With the first midterm results from the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion research coming up, and the difficulties we had reaching some communities for this, it becomes painfully clear that we need to invest more in offering multi-lingual information to enable more organizers to join in Wiki Loves Monuments. Therefore for the upcoming fiscal year we included paid translations for the DEI research done, and for the onboarding guide that is currently being composed. Connections with the WMF Movement Communications team to make this possible have already been initiated.
Please use this optional space to upload any documents that you feel are important for further understanding your proposal.
- Other public document(s):
Final Message
editBy submitting your proposal/funding request you agree that you are in agreement with the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and the Universal Code of Conduct.
We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.
- Yes
Feedback
edit- Please add any feedback to the grant discussion page only. Any feedback added here will be removed.