Grants:Project/Rapid/Chairpersons meeting in November 2018/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2018-19 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

• To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Rapid/Chairpersons meeting in November 2018.
• You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
• You are welcome to Email rapidgrants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Goals

For four years now, since Wikimania 2014 in London, the chairpersons of the recognized chapters have met as a group twice a year, during Wikimania and the Wikimedia Conference (now the Wikimedia Summit), usually for 1 - 2 hours during one of the lunch breaks.

We started to arrange these meetings as an opportunity for the chairpersons to meet, and the concept of these meetings at the beginning was to host every time a different person from our movement.

Later on, as result from the feedback of the chairs, we changed the concept to discussions and presentations format in order to speak about issues related to the organizations we represent and our movement in general.

About half a year ago, we thought we had to take these meetings to a higher level, and, for the first time, we proposed to organize a two days meeting, where we can have a dedicated time, without interruptions (and lunch on our tables...) in order to focus on bigger issues.

We already have board trainings for new board members, but we don’t have any program which supports the chairpersons as leaders of their boards and their organizations. So we decided to focus on improving the interpersonal skills and leadership competencies of chairpersons and give them other tools to become better and more effective in their roles.

In order to achieve this, we decided to contract an experienced external trainer & facilitator.

In the beginning, we planned to have this meeting with all the chairpersons, from the big and from the small chapters. But as the WMF’s grants program were temporarily not accepting new grants requests, we weren't able to get support to finance the participation of the small chapters which didn’t have the budget to cover the costs.

So in the end, we hold a smaller meeting a week ago (hosted by WMCZ in Prague), with 17 chairpersons which could cover the travel and meeting costs (with a small grant from the WMF to help to support part of the facilitator's fee).

During the meeting (or you can also call it a retreat) we had workshops and sessions to know each other better, to speak about effective and accountable boards, team dynamics, failures (and how to continue) and work on interpersonal skills and more.

We decided to share with you the results and feedback we received, which may be used by other groups or similar events

And also the notes of some of the sessions.

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
At least 15 participations	17 participations
Sessions will be lead professionally by a facilitator	80% of the participants rated the facilitator has very or extremely professional
Having at least one social event during the retreat and allowing the participants to know each other better	One social dinner and 100% agree/strongly agree that they know each other better after the retreat

Learning

Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

• What worked well? Answer: The meeting was prepared well in advance which gave us ample time to select the topics that we wanted to discuss and find an experienced moderator.
• What did not work so well? Answer: Some chairs could not attend the meeting because of a lack of resources at their affiliate.
• What would you do differently next time? Answer: Try to find a way for distance participation.

Finances

Grant funds spent

Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on.

No	Item	Quantity	Rate (CZK)	Total (CZK)	Total (Euro)	Notes
1	Facilitator - Total	1	60720.70	60,720.70	2361.73
2	Office expenses	1	373	373	14.51
3	Lunch + catering	20	512.10	10,242	398.37
4	Dinner event + social event (on the 1st day)	18	?	11,937	464.29
5	Public transport	12	24	288	11.20
6	Venue rent	1	6,038	6,038	236.41
7	Banking costs	-	760	780	30.33
8	Total			90378.70	3514.54

The expenses differ very slightly from the original expectations (overspend of €39). Total income was somewhat higher than expected due to higher number of participants. There are no remaining grant funds but on the whole, a part of funds raised for this event was saved; these remaining (unspent) 14057.35 CZK (about 545 EUR) will be used to organize the 2019 Chairpersons Meeting.

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

Answer: No.

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?

The notes of the sessions were distributed afterward to all the chairs.