Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/WoALUG 2022 Annual Plan of Activities/Midpoint Report

Midterm Learning Report

Report Status: Accepted

Due date: 15 July 2022

Funding program: Wikimedia Community Fund

Report type: Midterm

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General information

This form is for organizations receiving Wikimedia Community Funds (General Support) or Wikimedia Alliances Funds to report on their mid-term learning and results. See the Wikimedia Community Fund application if you want to review the initial proposal.

Name of Organization: Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group
Title of Proposal: WoALUG 2022 Annual Plan of Activities
Amount awarded: 31726.97 USD, 30595.95 EUR
Amount spent: 1576018.53 ALL

Part 1 Understanding your work

1. Briefly describe how your strategies and activities proposed were implemented and if any changes to what was proposed are worth highlighting?

For the first part of 2022, we focused on developing our projects with long-established partners. We collaborated and built partnerships with different organizations. First, we decided to prioritize our proposed activities to make a stronger impact on the community. After project completion, we debriefed on lessons learned.

One of the key success factors was that we worked closely with schools, using the right timing when students and teachers returned to school after a long pandemic period. We realized the need to intensify the in-person information sessions in schools. We were open to suggestions and ideas and aligned our objectives with the schools' needs and interests. We also bridged collaborations between GLAM institutions, organizations, and schools to help our partners increase and strengthen our community's quality and quantity of knowledge.

2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you feel are being effective in achieving your goals?

This year, we worked hard to develop effective strategies to approach the education institutions, such as schools, and partners. One of the approaches we have used so far is through in-person meetings and better promotion of our User Group on social media channels. The other approach we utilized was developing information sessions. For example, once we got in touch with schools, we noticed the information sessions were helpful and successful in giving time to school students and staff to reflect on pros and cons of why participating and building wikiclubs or creating partnerships with them and educating students in our situation to develop their transferable and/ or soft skills.

Another approach was using SMART setting when presenting the Wikimedia projects mission to all the established and new partners by trying to relate our objectives and interests to their needs. We are still in a learning process, and sometimes we need to do more information sessions and pay attention to the need assessment process to achieve our strategic goals effectively.

3. What challenges or obstacles have you encountered so far?

The challenges have been of different kinds in our settings in Albania and Kosovo. One is the lack of participation from marginalized and underrepresented groups as we are doing our best to involve these groups. For example, when we developed the International Roma Day Edit-a-thon 2022, we approached many Roma organizations and tried collaborating with other partners working for the Roma community. Even though the organizations were excited about this project, they did not sign up to participate, justifying themselves this event was developed during Roma Week, 1-8 April, which kept them away from the edit-a-thon. Based on lessons learned, we can change the dates for the next year and collaborate with other international organizations aligning with the same topic.

Another challenge is school technical problems or raising partners' awareness about why computer equipment is so necessary. As mentioned in question 2, we tried to use budgeting to buy extra computers to supply volunteers and new Wikimedians for our activities or use working spaces or internet cafe. Also, in many in-person meetings with GLAM institutions and organizations, we have encountered barriers to effective communication because they do not understand the philosophy of projects, or there is a massive bureaucracy in the offices. Therefore, in an attempt to develop our projects, it is time-consuming for us to enter partnerships and collaborate, which sometimes fails.

4. Please describe how different communities are participating and being informed about your work.

There are several channels our community, volunteers, partners, organizations, schools, and groups of interest on a national level are informed about our work, that is, through village pump, newsletters, social media, website, youtube channel, collaborations between organizations, and in-person meetings.

For our User Group, every contributor and volunteer plays an essential role in motivating and being active in our events, edit-a-thons, and projects. We always invite them to our monthly meetings and events, create FB pages and WhatsApp groups, mention their names when we publish newsletters, email them, meet partner organizations in person, deliver certificates for their contribution to the Wikimedia projects and take them to Wiki field trips.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedians_of_Albanian_Language_User_Group_in_2022

5. Please share reflections on how your efforts are helping to engage participants and/or build content, particularly for underrepresented groups.

At the beginning of this year, as a User Group, we debriefed to engage more marginalized and/or underrepresented communities in Albania and Kosovo. Therefore, we took advantage of contacting organizations, Swedish Embassy in Albania and Kosovo, or institutions that work with underrepresented communities. On the subject of WikiDiversity projects, we had the possibility to include specific groups and raise their awareness of the value of the Wikimedia movement. Our best working strategy at the moment is the information sessions which supply the underrepresented groups with the Wikipedia basics information. Our challenge is to keep such contributors engaged in writing and increasing the content on Wikipedia. Nevertheless, for example, at the WikiGap projects, female contributors improved articles regarding women’s rights activists, artists, and women in science (STEM).

On the other hand, we utilized this idea even while working on wikiclubs. From meetings with teachers and educators, we thought to create a wikiclub with students from remote areas. We wanted to give them a chance to gain soft and transferable, writing, technical, and searching skills. Since this group of students lacked computers in class and at home, we tried to take them to internet cafes. Collaborating with this wikiclub, we noticed that teachers who supported and helped the students perform well while using Wikipedia in class activities would like to continue working with our User Group in the long run.

6. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What have you learned so far about these areas during this period?

We have raised the number of contributors through the events, projects, and activities we have developed in collaboration with organizations so far. Also, we have increased the number of collaborators, such as the Council of Europe in Tirana, Albania, the Public Library of Elbasan in Albania, the National Gallery of Kosovo, the Municipality of Elbasan, the University of Prishtina in Kosovo, Albanian-American Development Foundation, Albania, etc. We have experienced aligning and intertwining the Wikimedia Movement strategies with other organizations' goals and objectives.

On the basis of learning questions, we hope to extend and intensify the collaborations to increase the quality and quantity of content on the Wikimedia projects. Besides this, we aim to organize and develop more iterative edit-a-thons to engage contributors and motivate them as we believe people learn best with our constant support.

7. What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your work?

The next steps for the second half of our work are:

To maintain the number of volunteers we have retained this year, such as students who participated in the wikiclubs and GLAM and Outreach projects.
Be in touch with them and invite them to the following projects in the second half of our work.
Expand the number of organizations,GLAM institutions, and schools aligning their work objective with theirs
Create more visual and video presentations on our communication channels.

Part 2: Metrics

8a. Open and additional metrics data.

Open Metrics
Open Metrics	Description	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
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	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

Additional Metrics
Additional Metrics	Description	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Diversity of participants brought in by grantees	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Number of people reached through social media publications	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Number of activities developed	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Number of volunteer hours	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

8b. Additional core metrics data.

Core Metrics Summary
Core metrics	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
Number of participants	410	198	This number refers to all the people that signed up to participate in our campaigns and editathons through the registration google form. In general, people who register via form they come, but we also had people participating without being registered.	Outreach dashboard and registration google form.
Number of editors	300	131	This number refers to the active editors that were fully engaged during the campaigns.	Outreach Dashboard
Number of organizers	5	6	Outreach Dashboard and focus groups.

**Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project**
Wikimedia Project	Description	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
Wikipedia	N/A	1070	512	Wikipedia: One time, in order for us to collect the exact data of articles and editors we had to count it manually as the tool could not calculate it for one of the campaigns we developed in April-May 2022.	Outreach dashboard platform and categories created on Wikimedia Commons.
Wikimedia Commons	N/A	870	343	Images on Commons	Outreach Dashboard
Wikidata	N/A	400	40	Wikidata: we could only count the items of new articles open in some of the workshops for Wikipedia. But for sure, there are more edits on Wikidata that we have not tracked.	N/A
Wikivoyage	N/A	50	N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

9. Are you having any difficulties collecting data to measure your results?

We have been using the outreach dashboard, google forms & organizations to keep track of data. Most people write nutshell articles on Wikipedia, upload multimedia materials on Wikimedia Commons, and add generic items on Wikidata.

Sometimes we have difficulties collecting data for specific campaigns. For example, for the CEE Spring Campaign, the tool collected all the contributors’ work, and we could not tell the exact data and figures from this campaign. We realized that participants do not like or forget to add the stamps on the articles, so we can use a bot to count them. We had to count data manually. Based on this experience, we would like the Community Resource to improve the tools collecting the specific data involved in certain projects instead of doing it manually on OD

10. Are you collaborating and sharing learning with Wikimedia affiliates or community members?

Partially

10a. Please describe how you have already shared them and if you would like to do more sharing, and if so how?

On an international level, we collaborated with other affiliations in the first 6 months of 2022 for international campaigns such as International Roma Day Edit-a-thon 2022 organized by Wikimedia Serbia, CEE Spring Campaign, Wikimedia Education through Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom Program, or Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos, the latest one we are participating in. At each close collaboration, we have used different ways to inform our audience or promote the campaign through social media posts, events, and newsletters.

Even in the second half of our work, we would follow the same pace by accepting international offers and sharing this type of knowledge with our community and involving them in increasing regional and global knowledge.

11. Documentation of your work process, story, and impact.

Below there is a section to upload files, videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, e.g. communications materials, blog posts, compelling quotes, social media posts, etc.). This can be anything that would be useful to understand and show your learning and results to date (e.g., training material, dashboards, presentations, communications material, training material, etc).

Below is an additional field to type in link URLs.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jMMkin9N8O65g5_VcSgtRDjOdT3nFf6FKQIjxXZzWxA/edit?usp=sharing

Part 3: Financial reporting and compliance

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

1576018.53

13. Local currency type

ALL

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

Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.
Provide links to your financial reporting documents.

Please note related to question 12: Albania operates in Albanian Lekë, while Kosovo has EUR. In EUR the amount is: € 13,422.99

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ivcRjjg9Le9UZURah9_xIxcAQGvIHb4FQft1TZVZV4U/edit?usp=sharing

15. Based on your implementation and learning to date, do you have any plans to make changes to the budget spending?

Yes

15a. Please provide an explanation on how you hope to adjust this.

We assume we would make changes based on international invitations to conferences that require self-funding and self-management.

16. We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being a grantee has been so far.