Grants:Project/Rapid/UG ELiSo/American month 2021/Report

Report under review

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Goals

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went?

We have met most of our goals and are very happy about the project results! Part of the results are learning from some experiments, and general experience that will help us make future projects even better.

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets. Please be sure to review and provide metrics required for Rapid Grants.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
Number of participants: 8	11	The target was reached.
Number of articles created or improved: 60	330	The target was highly overreached. Some users were adding a lot of short articles and / or doing technical additions (like needed sections).
Number of partners: 5	4	This was an experimental metric to probe the real interest. The target was not achieved, slightly. It shows that there is some interest, but also that it may be concentrated at a small number of actors. It is encouraging enough to proceed to a similar project (planned for 2022) but with precaution of doing more rigorous community research beforehand as a necessary prerequisite.
Total contribution to Esperanto Wikivoyage: 100 KB	171.125 KB	The target was achieved. Still, participants have contributed to Wikipedia 10x more, despite the focus on Wikivoyage (mostly expected). This still puts a lot of question marks about supporting non-Wikipedia projects.
Proportion of articles about women to all biographical articles: 25%	0%	The target was not achieved at all. Only a few biographical articles were contributed to, so clearly these participants are not interested in biographies. It may suggest not taking part of the focus to biographies for next competitions.
Number of newly registered users	0	Getting new users wasn't the goal, so neither was the focus of this project.

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?

1. contest was generally successful and nice, organization was largely smooth and clear
2. community welcomed the contest
3. setting up the project in OpenProject by copying another project basically worked (but some parts were problematic)
4. most of Americas' related articles on the Esperanto Wikivoyage now have their own basic skeleton
5. as part of the project was created a test "community" project in our OpenProject to develop the Esperanto Wikivoyage
6. a large number of articles related to a partner's meeting were created (even if outside the list of official partner articles)
7. one article in the contest has grown from a little more than a stub to the 11th longest article in the Esperanto Wikipedia
8. number of articles significantly exceeded expectations
9. added content drastically exceeded expectations
10. using the OutreachDashboard was more enjoyable than before to calculate results in multiple Wikimedia projects (thanks to data download)
11. a basis for partnership has been created that we can use for future projects
12. partners brilliantly reacted and collaborated

• What did not work so well?

1. setting up a new project in OpenProject by copying another project created a relationship between work packages of the 2 projects, although they are not really related
2. partners wanted to focus on articles specifically on Wikipedia; less interested in "Wikivoyage only"
3. a very active helper with good contacts in the area could not do organizational work because he wanted to compete
4. communication with participants was less strong than was desired
5. dealing with concrete awards took a very long time and finally 1 award was not even provided (we want to provide it after the project with the consent of the WMF grant team)
6. participation in the main competition categories (original / translated articles) was significantly different, as a result winners received the same prize for a significantly different amount of work
7. participation in the subcategory Gender equality was minimal
8. purchase of prizes contained unforeseen payment costs
9. during the project there were hard deadlines for other important issues, which thinned the focus and attention of an organizer
10. in our project management tool OpenProject, some dates have been misconfigured, apparently due to incorrectly added relations to other work packages (due to copying project instead of creation from a template) and misunderstood parent-child relationships
11. a request for feedback from participants, non-participants and partners is very late
12. communication to partners was not entirely clear, which led to misunderstandings and re-agreement was needed

• What would you do differently next time?

1. more rigorous “market” research on potential partners done in advance
2. earlier start of collaboration with partners
3. prepare a document for a proposed partner that would facilitate the partnership process (eg. a scheme for listing proposed articles, awards, conditions, etc.)
4. create a new project in OpenProject using a template, not by copying
5. would create more accurate (even if more) work packages in OpenProject to more accurately corespond to actual project requirements during the project cycle
6. noting lessons learned throughout the duration of the project
7. preparation of feedback forms for participants, non-participants and partners already in advance using a pre-existing template
8. would have a larger organizational project team (volunteer recruitment is planned for 2022, using strategic planning data)
9. would use volunteers who work long-term outside the project in their specific field
10. allow for a longer time, at least an additional 2 weeks, maybe even 1 month, for calculating results and providing prizes
11. for prizes that require the provision of an on-demand invoice would request the invoice as soon as possible, even without knowing the exact recipients of the prizes
12. would reconsider how to fairly score original and translated articles
13. would reconsider whether at all to make any focus on gender issues
14. in the grant application add a reserve to cover unforeseen or miscalculated costs
15. for outreach would use template pre-scheduled emails using our CiviCRM (after that part of it will be configured)
16. reconsider how to use parent-child relationships in OpenProject (this relates to scheduling individual packages)
17. would create a standalone template for easier creation of SiteNotices
18. request a CentralNotice well in advance (instead of local Notices)
19. check a configured schedule in OpenProject using a Gannt graph
20. would do more individual recruitment

Finances

Grant funds spent

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

Total: 372.06 EUR

• prizes: 352.53 EUR (including payment fees)
• outreach: 19.53 EUR

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

Remaining: 67.94 EUR

We would like to use these remaining funds to:

• 30 EUR: buy a prize for the last winner (several winners refused some prize, the process of proposing it to other winners took too long and finally we haven't managed to receive the invoice in time to buy the prize)
• 37.94 EUR: administration of our organisation

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?

This project is special for us, because it is the first that is managed from the beginning using our new project management tool OpenProject. As OpenProject is used for the whole project cycle, it enables us to evaluate its functional fit for our needs. After the project is closed we will use the gained experience to help us to decide which project management tool to use. Also, we have created and improved a project template, so in case we will continue to use OpenProject we will be able to fully set a new project in 45 minutes.