Grants:Simple/Applications/Amical Wikimedia/2019

Midpoint report 2019
September 2019

Final report 2019
January 2020

Application or grant stage: grant in progress
Applicant or grantee: Amical Wikimedia
Amount requested: 50,000.00 EUR (56,559.55 USD)
Amount granted: 50,000.00 EUR (56,559.55 USD)
Funding period: 1 July 2019 to 31 December 2019
Application created: 1 May 2019
Recommended application date: 1 May 2019
Midpoint report due: 15 September 2019
Final report due: 31 January 2019

Application edit

Background edit

Link to these documents, for the upcoming funding period, only if you have them.

  1. Link to your organization's staffing plan, for the upcoming funding period. Staffing Plan 2019
  2. Link to your annual plan, for the upcoming funding period. Activities Plan 2019
  3. Link to your strategic plan, which includes the upcoming funding period. Strategic Plan 2019-24 (Being currently voted internally until 29th April)

Please add your grants metrics to this sheet. Note that requirements for shared metrics have changed for grants starting 1 January 2017 or later. Please visit this worksheet to view global metrics targets and progress.

Programs edit

Please describe any changes to your programs for the upcoming funding period, including the addition of new programs or any programs you are no longer doing. Include your rationale for any major changes to your programs here.

Please use the templates provided to add information about each program you are planning for the upcoming funding period.

The organisation

Amical Wikimedia, also known as Amical, is -so far- the one and only themathic organization in the Wikimedia movement. Instead of a territorial scope, ours is cultural: we promote Catalan language and culture. We are a community based, strategy led organisation, since we believe in the communities as the main force of the whole movement. We work to help people from our cultural scope but also from other groups, for example we run our own writing challenges, but also try our best to help the other communities with translations or being a test wiki (Flow, Visual editor, Content Translator...) We also actively promote multilingualism as one of the key factors of our movement, that's why we've run several multilingual writing challenges (eg 288 challenge, CCC, Trace of soul). Community, diversity and multilingualism will keep being some of the core values of our program this year.

The 2019 proposal

Amical Wikimedia has been an active member in the Movement for over a decade. However, last year our Board stepped down and in the beginning of 2019 a new board was formed with the goal of keeping the good work on despite the loss of key pieces like our former director. Since December 2018, Amical Wikimedia has been a completely volunteer-driven organization, in coherence with the values defended by our organization and the Movement that we want.

During five months, Amical has been using its own reserves to fund its activities and rebuild the coordination internal structure; thus it has started as an adaptation year. This new situation forced the organisation to switch from the previous grant program to the Simple Anual one. For this second semester of 2019, Amical wants to endorse those lines that have been successful in the past, in concordance with our new Strategy Plan (which will be approved the 29th of April). We will endorse GLAM programs in areas such as Libraries, we plan to improve our work with education centres and, in order to keep community care in the centre of our association, activities like contests will be held.

For 2019, the organisation doesn't expect to grow in its metrics or start a lot of new project, but stabilise and give the opportunity for new volunteers to lead the community and the share of free knowledge in the Catalan language. Our results are expected to follow the previous track and plan the upcoming years with a serious and reliable route line.

Community

Description

Amical is a community-driven group and it aims to make collaboration easier for the wide user community. For that reason, we collect and promote emerging initiatives coming from our members and provide community support. We aim to reach as many people as possible, so everyone would have their own space to express how they feel, what they would need from Amical and how they could collaborate. For Amical, community care was a priority of our Strategic Plan 14-18, and again we will make it a key point in the Strategic Plan 2019-2024 -so honoring the name of Amical (which means "friendly" in Catalan)-. We will keep investing time and resources to promote a good atmosphere within the community: people care about the community because they are part of it. Our basic strategy is to maintain and improve connection channels online and onsite (viquitrobades, follow-ups, IM, events, workshops, editathons ....) and create personalized spaces of self-governance, often designed by users themselves, so members can propose projects, express doubts and complaints, support among each other and openly discuss issues that affect everyone.

Goal

The goal of the Community program is to keep ensuring members' engagement and commitment and, at the same time, taking care of everybody's emotional welfare. Especially after the departure of our former Chair and Director, we believe more than ever before that people will work better if they feel the project as part of their own and feel appreciated and valued by other members. We want to hear everyone's voice and think about different ways to share ideas and best practices to improve Amical's work. This program seeks to find the places to make this exchange available and to integrate new stakeholders interested in the open free knowledge and the Wikimedia movement. Besides, it also aims to empower users and new young members with the techniques and principles that rule Amical projects, so they can become more active in external outreach and in internal project management -especially to ensure Amical's sustainability with volunteering replacements along the time.

Objectives
  • Rebuild the geographical and activity mapping of our community in order to be able to concentrate its efforts and improve community caring.
  • Implement new activities and scouting methods for young potential wikipedians that can provide generational replacement.
  • Approach other groups interested in Wikipedia (e.g. gender gap), especially through dialogue, new internal protocols and advocacy formation.
  • Keep our microgrants fund to empower users to start their own small size projects, when funding is needed, with a community approval system.
Metrics
  • Organisation of 1 Viquitrobada (our annual meeting) and 1 General Assembly.
  • Organisation of 1 Youth Meeting to engage new generations in the Wikimedia movement.
  • At least 1 internal formative seminars to empower the discourse and the workshop skills of our members.
  • High-touch approach by having personal meetings or calls with at least 30 of our members.


Education

Description

The Education Program has shown all its teaching potential in relation with the Wikimedia projects by introducing them to university professors and other educational staff. They will keep including Wikimedia editing activities as a part of their mandatory course projects and assignments, and they will be encouraged to become active editors themselves to improve their own digital learning methods. They will be trained in Wikimedia contribution and principles, as well as their students, so they can all teach to younger pupils and expand their online skills in relation with free knowledge.

Goal

Wikipedia is used by students to conduct research and by teachers to prepare lessons. However, the criterion for which the contribution becomes fundamental is for the student to develop important skills/competencies (critical thinking, collaboration, motivation), while for teachers it is primarily about sharing knowledge with the wider world. Wikimedia projects are revolutionising the concept and the use of the web, and this change will surely influence the set-up and conduct of trainings/schooling as well. Wikimedia projects offer an interesting platform where students can not only learn how to contribute and to interact with a community but also train more important skills like building up relationships with other active users of the Wikimedia projects and collaborating in order to co-create projects/content.

Objectives
  • New workshops in secondary schools, with other activities further than Wikipedia articles.
  • Continuation of the wikiprojects in university courses, with new official agreements with departments and institutions.
  • Implementation of direct accesses to Catalan Wikimedia projects in order to promote direct visits and increase of readers.
Metrics
  • At least one additional University agreement.
  • Collaboration in at least 20 existing educational wikiprojects and 5 new ones (both secondary and university levels).


GLAM & Culture

Description

In 2019, we will keep focusing our efforts with libraries, where we have had a partnership with almost the 40% of Catalan public libraries. This year we will focus in strengthening our relationship with them, trying to activate as much libraries as possible to be Wikimedia hotspots. Regarding museums, just like with the libraries, our objective is to keep and improve our relationship with our partners in order to improve their wiki layers. We use both local museums and libraries as key nodes for our territorial balancing strategy. We will also keep adding sister projects to our ongoing campaigns, with even more energy that during the last years. Cultural agents are a key node to reach different communities of people interested in knowledge. They act as active agents spreading our values and projects, because they self-organise several projects, workshops and events.

Goal

The goal of the GLAM & Cultural program is to facilitate freely spreading the knowledge held inside the cultural institutions to the humanity. We want to change their mindset from a cultural control environment to a cultural collaboration one, so that they can see a real digital expansion of their content through open knowledge in the Wikimedia projects.

Objectives
  • Reactivate the libraries that have participated in the #bibliowikis project, so they can start becoming a hotspot of wiki activity in areas with low range.
  • Carry out wiki linguistic and cultural activities in Andorra, L'Alguer (Sardinia, Italy) and the Balearic Islands.
  • Take care and build new personal links in the relationship with our key partners in Catalonia and the Land of Valencia, especially after the last change of Board and the departure of our former Director. We aim to keep promoting of content release and advocacy of free knowledge.
Metrics
  • The release of at least 3.000 multimedia files to Wikimedia Commons.
  • 3 workshops, edit-a-thons or other events in collaboration with GLAM partners of Andorra, L'Alguer (Sardinia, Italy) and the Balearic Islands.
  • 8 training sessions of libraries/archives involved in the #bibliowikis project.


Sister projects & Others

Description
We keep focusing our efforts in all the sisters projects in order to balance the different types of content, the diversity of the editors and the needs of every community. The outcomes for these projects, with the exception of Wikidata and Commons, have not grown sufficiently and we aim for better interface, technology and accessibility to undertake a significative improvement for their editors and readers.
Goal

Our main goal is to keep introducing equalized content in the axes of gender, cultural, and linguistic diversity. We will focus in day's anniversaries and long-term contests to build diversified content through contests and edit-a-thons, not just those developed by Amical, but also joining international contests if they fit with our plan. For the sister projects of Wikipedia, we aim to debate and introduce new tech features through engaging participation in the interface changes, as well as keep on promoting them in all our programs and activities.

Objectives
  • Develop a new audiovisual project for the Catalan Wiktionary.
  • Improve the accessibility and user experience of all Catalan Wikimedia projects, especially for contests and presencial events.
  • Promote a debate to implement a tab for kid articles in Catalan Wikipedia.
  • Foster third-party usage of Wikimedia data (e. g. Wikidata) and encourage import and remix with third-party open datasets.
Metrics
  • At least one datathon event and import of at least 5 relevant existing open datasets not present in Wikidata.
  • 3 edit-a-thons & other events to edit across multiple Wikimedia projects.
  • 6 online contests to engage participation and reduction of content biases.


Communication & Outreach

Description

Communication must explain our principles and keep the good initiatives of round-tables, conferences and special sessions where we are invited as an agent expert in knowledge management. We need to develop new communicative systems further than social media. Videos and multimedia comms are getting higher importance and we need to adapt to them, always considering to keep the language. For a new board members, international presence may become a challenge. We have to ensure a correct transmission of institutional knowledge and context maps so they can continue communicating our model among the movement and learning from other chapters.

Goal

Amical needs to continue to combine good relationship in our civic and cultural life, to continue to promote that the Catalan Wikimedians and partners increase the number of research papers related with our work and to continue our discourse towards a movement for open knowledge and free access to digital Catalan culture and language.

Objectives
  • Develop a formal Communication plan for the period 2020-2024.
  • Envigorate blog content and reactivate all social media accounts of Amical Wikimedia and Catalan Wikimedia projects to expand their scope.
  • Presencial attendance and involvement into international Wikimedia events in order to share our values of volunteering, tech/linguistic activism, our stance about movement strategy and exchange ideas and aproaches with other affiliates.
  • Schedule more diverse projects to help us to reach new audiences.
Metrics
  • Publish at least 12 relevant blog posts in one year. This includes blog posts of Wikimedia events or activities where community members or staff participated.
  • Activation of a Mastodont account for Amical Wikimedia and for Catalan Wikipedia.
  • Stabilisation of all our existing social media accounts (2 on Facebook, 6 on Twitter and 1 on Instagram).
  • Attendance and presentation of our projects in 4 national/international events of Wikimedia, tech or free knowledge during the whole year.

Staff and contractors edit

Please describe any changes to your staffing plan for the upcoming funding period. These should include increases in staff or contractor hours, new staff positions, or staff positions you are removing. Include your rationale for any staffing changes here.

Since our former employee (Àlex Hinojo) quit in November 2018, Amical Wikimedia has remained for the first semester of 2019 as a full volunteer-driven association. We intend to hire a new person again from the second semester of 2019 onwards with a brief initial period of adaptation during the upcoming months.

For each new staff or contractor position, please use the template provided to add information about each new staff or contractor you are planning for the upcoming funding period (or to describe significant increases in hours or changes in job descriptions for existing staff). You are not required to provide this information for existing staff where no changes are required.

The specific tasks for the new staff position during 2019 (as a transition year and from the second semester of 2019) is described in the Staffing Plan 2019.

Budget and resource plan edit

Link to a detailed budget for the upcoming funding period. This budget should include all of your organizations expenses. Please specify which expenses will be covered from your APG.

Approved budget · Specific budget lines that apply for the Grant


Midpoint report edit

Final report edit