Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia Poland Accelerated Service Growth

statusCompleted
Wikimedia Poland Accelerated Service Growth
start date2022-01-012022-01-01T00:00:00Z
end date2023-12-312023-12-31T00:00:00Z
budget (local currency)825000 PLN
amount requested (USD)202882 USD
amount recommended (USD)202882
grant typeWikimedia Affiliate (chapter, thematic org., or user group)
funding regionCEECA
decision fiscal year2021-22
funding program roundRound 1
applicant and people related to proposaln/a since this is an affiliate application
organization (if applicable)Stowarzyszenie Wikimedia Polska
Midpoint Learning Report 

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Applicant details edit

Wikimedia username(s):

n/a since this is an affiliate application

Organization:

Stowarzyszenie Wikimedia Polska

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?

No

M1. Fiscal organization name.

N/A

Additional information edit

R. Where will this proposal be implemented?

Poland

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:

Local

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)

N/A

M. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?

No

M1. Fiscal organization name.

N/A

Proposal edit

1. 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 mission was created in 2018 as a result of the internal audit process. It reflects the earliest phase of our maturing process. Due to its length we’re only sharing the link here: https://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Misja/en

2. What is the change that you are trying to bring about and why is this important?

The Polish Wikipedia is a community with a very high barrier of entry, with over 97% of newly registered accounts not coming back to edit after the first 7 days (7 day retention).

This stems from very high quality requirements (rightly so), but also a lack of people dedicated to ensuring newbie success, patrolling Recent Changes, etc. – this lack of capacity has led the few community members to prioritize expediency over emphatic human-to-human interactions, in order to keep up. Hence we now have an increasingly stagnant, overworked, burned out and frustrated group of volunteers, with very slim chances of the group being joined by new community members.

3. Describe your main approaches or strategies to achieve these changes and why you think they will be effective.

We aim to lower the overall stress level within the community, decrease the number of interpersonal conflicts, and speed up conflict resolution when they do happen. This is a continuation of our work in 2021, which was focused on training mediators to support the Polish version of the ArbCom Process.

We also aim to start embedding a Wikipedia-friendly presence in each school, by working with school librarians, a highly underappreciated and underdeveloped role within the Polish educational system. Through building a network of contacts and a set of trainings and resources, we aim to transform these spaces into a safe haven helping equip young people with media analysis tools to combat fake news, learn how to judge sources, and more.

4. What are the activities you will be developing and delivering as part of these approaches or strategies?

We aim to to grow our Community Support team in order to better serve the needs of our editing community, while at the same time expanding our educational activities in order to raise the next generation of Wikimedians.

Through a combination of trainings, organizational support and integration-oriented events, we hope to open up and strengthen the community, while preserving our commitment to high quality.

5. Do you want to apply for multi-year funding?      

Yes

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.

7. Do you have the team that is needed to implement this proposal?

Yes.

Natalia Szafran-Kozakowska, Community Support Officer (User:Natalia Szafran-Kozakowska (WMPL) & User:Magalia) Paulina Studniczka, Junior Community Support Officer (User:Paulina Studniczka (WMPL)) Klara Sielicka-Baryłka, Educational Projects Specialist (User:Klarqa & User:Klara Sielicka-Baryłka (WMPL)) Wioletta Matusiak, Educational Trainer Kamila Neuman, Open Culture Specialist Nina Gabryś, Social Media Specialist & Spokesperson Grzegorz Kopaczewski, Office Manager & Admin Support Łukasz Garczewski, Chief Operating Officer (User:TOR)

The team also includes a group of ~10 volunteers trained as mediators in 2021.

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.

Content Gender gap

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.


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.

Education, Culture, heritage or GLAM

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.

Disabilities

11. What are your strategies for engaging participants, particularly those that currently are non-Wikimedia?

There are no specific requirements to participate in most of our planned activities other than (a) be a part of a Wikimedia project community or be willing to join and contribute and (b) be a librarian or teacher in a Polish public school (for the Wiki Library Spaces program). Some events, trainings or services conducted by staff hired as part of this grant may be addressed to specific group (e.g. Wikipedia admins), which will mean more selective participation criteria.

We are working with the Polish communities of Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wiktionary. This has been a continued partnership over the last 15 years, based around contest organization event management and general support. This has been expanded in 2021 through the creation of an on-wiki service center and support services catalog.

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?

(1) We have adapted the Friendly Space Policy and adjusted it to online spaces. Information of these rules is made known and easily accessible to all attendees. At each event, there are a few FSP experts whose names are made known to all attendees. Other related processes are in place.

(2) When the global UCoC enforcement rules are established, we will develop and adapt local rules. We have begun the collaboration between the board, the audit committee, and the peer tribunal members, as well as the community support staff on that matter. We will ask the General Assembly to make the compliance with the UCoC a statutory requirement for each member.

(3) In order to go past the minimal norms, we invest financially in the psychological resilience of Wikimedians. We collaborate with a professional psychotherapist. We also organize professional mental health and soft skills-related trainings for the community functionaries.

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 will conduct community consultations with our members and the Polish Wikimedia projects' communities. The consultations will be for the entirety of our annual plan, of which this grant request is about 33% (in financial terms).

The consultations happen at pl.wikimedia.org and are announced on Wikipedia and other projects, mailing lists, Discord and Facebook.

14. Will you be working with other external, non-Wikimedian partners to implement this proposal?

Yes

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.

As part of our Wiki Library Spaces program we will be working with school libraries all over Poland. We will be supported by the Polish Librarians' Association, which we have a working relationship with and we organize #1Lib1Ref every year.

15. How do you hope to sustain or expand the work carried out in this proposal after the grant?

The work detailed in this grant request is part of a 3-year strategic development plan for Wikimedia Poland and is a continuation of the organization's evolution. Thanks to our work on improving fundraising, continued close collaboration with our community, and a board composed of active Wikimedians, we are confident that the work completed within 2022 will serve as a foundation for our next strategic development plan, and the learnings are incorporated into our processes and institutional memory.

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.

N/A (inflation risk, tax risk and a humanitarian risk to name a few...)

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, Provide for Safety and Inclusion, Invest in Skills and Leadership Development, 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.  

Yes

Learning, Sharing, and Evaluation edit

19. What do you hope to learn from your work in this fund proposal?

We expect to come out of 2022 with two key learnings and new or improved capabilities: (1) How to best work alongside the community, helping members achieve meaningful needed changes to improve key processes within Wikipedia. This includes, but is not limited to, various touch points between new editors and established community members (first edits, sandbox, early conflicts around process), as well as Articles for Deletion and other community-driven processes.

(2) How to run an education-focused project pilot in a way as to prepare for scaling (regional or national) in the following year. This relates to our wiki with school libraries and transforming them into true knowledge resources (as opposed to a storage space for books).

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
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

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 20
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 Activities within the Wiki Library Spaces project, to be run by librarians after being developed by our team. 3
Number of volunteer hours N/A 100

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 Summary
Core metrics Description Target
Number of participants New participants: 250

Returning participants: 200

450
Number of editors This will be measured via the growth of the median of active editors in Q4 as compared to Q4 2021. Target number is TBD once we have full date for 2021. We will be targeting a 2.5% growth year over year. N/A
Number of organizers We understand "organizers" as community leaders, self-organizing volunteers, and people who can animate the community in line with community needs and Wikimedia Poland's mission. Currently we have a small number of such volunteers, working on a variety of working groups. We intend to make these people more effective and engaged, rather than expanding it too quickly.

However, our hope is to also develop several people who would be able to organize editing contests with minimal support (see section d. below.

6
Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project
Wikimedia Project Description Target
Wikipedia Wikimedia Poland's community animation work has resulted in a large array of editing contests and great engagement (5000 pages created or significantly improved as part of contests in 2021 so far). However, a negative result of our work in this area was the gradual retreat of wikipedians from the tasks surrounding the organization and running of contests. In 2021, we have started to reverse this by gradually giving more power and responsibilities back to volunteers, and we would want to continue this trend with the help of additional staff in 2022.

This is a crucial change since we see organizational work (of which on-wiki contests are the easiest form) to be the beginning of a path towards leadership and coordination roles within the Wikimedia movement, both locally and internationally. And we desperately need fresh blood in these more "meta" roles, to enable succession and ensure sustainability.

3000
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.


22. What tools would you use to measure each metric selected?

We a use a combination of Salesforce and a Google Spreadsheets to record metrics and volunteer activities.

The most tricky part is measuring retention, since it's very difficult to gauge impact of retention-related activities, based on an event (leaving the project) that did not happen. For this reason we would like to spend the first part of 2022 to define a way of measuring "continued participation" affected by us.

Financial Proposal edit

23. & 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.

825000 PLN

23.2 What is this amount in US Currency (to the best of your knowledge)?

202882 USD

23.3 Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it.

See attached budget file

23.4 Please include any additional observations or comments you would like to include about your budget.

N/A

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 edit

By 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

Year 2 Plan

Annual Plan for Year 2

1.1. Please upload or indicate a link for Year 2 Annual Plan. (required)


1.2. Please describe any major changes in your Annual Plan. If there are changes that require a budget change, please specify. (required)

There were few changes we had to make. Due to the long-lasting vacancies in the positions of executive director, communication coordinator, junior community support officer and junior education officer and the process of onboarding a new board, we had to postpone some activities to 2023. Filling these positions at the end of the year brought big change to our budged. Postponing some programs to 2023 made them more costly due to inflation.

In December 2022 we created a new three-year strategy. The board adopted the document in January 2023. All actions planned were reviewed and assessed in terms of the implementation of strategic objectives. In January 2023 the board accepted the plan for 2023, budget and the employment plan. Live events are the major positions in our 2023 plan. Community missed them, and looking forward to participating. Therefore, we planned more such opportunities in the Year 2. A major change was filling all the vacant positions and adjusting the team to new challenges. First - having settled a new, solid organizational structure (full planned employment of 11 people working in a matrix non-hierarchical structure) we can now fully implement planned initiatives. Secondly, we can add new elements which will make the new structure more resilient in the future. Therefore, we are planning to spend the amount that is left together with the funds for the Year 2. Our main inner organizational goal for the year 2023 is to enhance our capacity by strengthening our structure, employee wellbeing and overall management standards. We see those pillars as crucial for Wikimedia Polska to become a resilient partner within the Wikimedia Movement in the long term.

Budget for Year 2

2.1. Do you request an increase or decrease from what has been approved for Year 2? (required)

No, my budget request for Year 2 has not changed

2.2. Please upload a detailed budget file or indicate a link to it for the Year 2 proposal. The revised budget should show your anticipated yearly budget from the beginning of Year 2 through the end date of the grant. (required)

  • Link:


Metrics for Year 2

3.1. Main open metrics (required)

Main Open Metrics
Metrics Name Description Target
Safe community We aim to lower the number of conflicts within the community We want to train 20 volunteers on conflict response and improve general atmosphere in community
Open community Introducing new methodology of training the trainers and lower the entry barriers for newcomers. We want to train 10 wiki-trainers to deliver knowledge to newcomers in a new, attractive and more efficient way and deliver a gamification platform for newcomers. 10
Inclusive community Attracting new participants from underrepresented groups; keeping whose already engaged with special needs. Women - at least half of participants in our actions. Improve user experience for the blind

and visually impaired. Include whose with special needs and financially disadvantaged. Tagret: % of female participants.

50
Resilient team and board Providing anti-burnout program for employees and board members. Short term goal: lower the number of sick-leave. Long term goal: keep at least a middle level of engagement in Wikimedia Projects among board members when they leave the board. Tagret: number of anti-burnour programs implemented. 1
N/A N/A N/A

3.2. Core metrics (required)

Core Metrics Summary
Core metrics Description Target
Number of participants General number of participants of planned events in 2023 1400
Number of editors Editors with more than one edtis/month 14000
Number of organizers Community leaders, self-organizing volunteers, and people who can animate the community in line with community needs and Wikimedia Poland's mission 5
Number of new content contributions to Wikimedia projects
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

3.4. If you are introducing new metrics related to a major change in your budget or programmatic plans, please describe them below. (optional)

Improved or new articles in Polish Wikipedia - target for 2023: 4640

Additional information for Year 2

4.2. If there are additional links, files, or information you would like to share related to Year 2 planning, please add them here. (optional)

Additional funding request: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FnfajlhpTN55yzAtBbiQMC0NFzgVI5ePTdgVNhP6x9k/edit#gid=0


Feedback edit