Grants:Simple/Applications/Amical Wikimedia/2019/Final report
- 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.
- Link to your organization's staffing plan, for the upcoming funding period. Staffing Plan 2019
- Link to your annual plan, for the upcoming funding period. Activities Plan 2019
- Link to your strategic plan, which includes the upcoming funding period. Strategic Plan 2019-24
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.
Full list of Amical Wikimedia metrics, segregated by activity:
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 one of the two thematic organisations 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 (e.g. 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, our previous Board stepped down and at the beginning of 2019 and 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 organisation, in coherence with the values defended by our organisation 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 2019 had started as an adaptation year. This new situation forced the organisation to switch from the previous grant program to the Simple Annual one. For the 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 had been approved the 29th of April). We will endorse GLAM programs in areas such as Libraries, and 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 projects 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
- Progress of our objectives
During the first half of the funding period we stated that despite being in a low moment when it comes to participation, three Amical members hosted a total of nine sessions in Wikimania. Although some of these projects are independent of Amical Wikimedia, these phenomena prove that the Catalan-speaking community, even if it is undergoing a rest-time or a transition period, can still prove muscle, skills, and capacity building.
Despite performing at a lower intensity compared with its best times, the Catalan-speaking community is regaining momentum. An example is the organisation of Viquitrobada, the Catalan community yearly meeting, which took place in Cervera from November the 30th till December the 1st. We consider that it was a highly successful meeting, which brought together 70 people in a small city, rather far away from other main cities of the Catalan-speaking area, a factor which required a complex organisation and almost all participants to plan their transportation and accommodation within a limited -and not always a completely enough comfortable set of options.
Viquitrobada was planned as a two-day event (Viquitrobada 2018 was a single-day event) with several time slots devoted to social gatherings in order to strengthen the bonds between our members, a change that apparently was welcomed by the participants. Many of them were long-term members of our community, but we were delighted to welcome quite a few first-timers, among whom there were many women and young people. The noticeable amount of young participants facilitated the creation of a "young working group", since they had the chance to spend some time getting acquainted in real life and that sparked some feeling of belongingness that we had been longing for some time. We are looking forward to seeing it getting stronger in the upcoming months.
During Viquitrobada, Amical Wikimedia held its General Assembly, and also a training seminar was delivered. The latter was aimed at improving our volunteers' skillset regarding workshop conducting. This kind of sessions is usually scheduled in each Viquitrobada, but it shall be stressed that this edition received a remarkable acclaim by the participants that answered the follow-up survey about the event.
During this last quarter, Amical Wikimedia's board has undergone a renewal by welcoming two new members, Ton Creus and Francesc Palacio. Both are long-time members of the Catalan community, active & experienced Wikipedia editors, and part of the younger segment of the community.
We also keep our high-touch approach and watch over our members and volunteers either by personal meetings and in-depth phone calls or IM discussions. Between September and December, Viquitrobada has proven an excellent ground for community care, since it facilitated many personal meetings between community members, board members, and the coordinator, which have been complemented by subsequent meetings and conversations with at least 20 more people, so our goal in this matter can be considered as fully achieved.
Overall, among our c. 120 members, circa 75 people have participated to some extent in Amical activities so far this year.
After some time in which most members of the community had decreased their involvement with the association, the new board is about to reach cruising speed regarding follow-up tasks of both the movement and our community. Our analysis is that after being awarded the National Culture Award of 2014 and having reached some peak achievements, some volunteers saw the end of their cycle in the movement.
However, in early September we were able to hold a Strategy Meeting with 11 people participating at any point (both onsite and online). We have a feeling of arriving very late to some debates, but being able to analyse all 9 Working Group recommendations in an almost 10-hour long meeting is another indicator that our community still has some muscle.
We feel that we still have some work to do to get back our community members' confidence and engagement, since despite our member figures keep growing at a stable pace we find it difficult to get them involved in onsite events or online discussions. Hopefully, we can rely on some very active members who are always willing to help, but care must be taken in order not to burn them out or make them feel overwhelmed. An interesting example of this is a volunteer who has become engaged in several initiatives at the same time (an eduwiki project, Viquidones, and making the first steps to set up a node in Minorca), which we are closely following for obtaining a positive outcome for everyone. Furthermore, we have an updated mapping of our volunteers' locations, which will allow us to make better decisions for activity planning and for boosting their interest and commitment.
During the first half of the funding period we were learning how much we could demand our members without consuming their interaction both with Amical and the Wikimedia projects they participate, since we cannot afford any more burnouts. Our main concerns were (and still are) focused in making a successful appeal to more women and younger people (<20 years), even if this is a well-known shared circumstance within the whole Wikimedia movement. However, the participants' demographics of the last Viquitrobada (a fair amount of young people and women) look encouraging and further efforts in nurturing these prospect new members and volunteers will be needed. Further efforts and planning will also be needed regarding the reactivation of some territorial nodes, which haven't moved forward due to unmatching schedules.
- Highlighted activities
-
In 2019 we defined our strategic plan for the upcoming five yers. -
Viquitrobada, the Catalan community annual meeting was a huge success, with many first-timers in a two-day event in a peripheral location. It has been the most active of the last years. -
After a kick-off event in August, Minorca is about to become a new node for the Catalan community thanks to an engaged volunteer's commitment.
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- Community program against its targeted metrics
| Objective | Description | Final status | Final expected status |
|---|---|---|---|
| High-touch approach by having personal meetings or calls with at least 30 of our members. | Our projects coordinator has had at least 30 in-person meetings with either Amical members or Catalan editors since her onboarding in July. The board has been in touch (either in person or over the phone) with over 70 members and/or Catalan editors. | 100% |
> 100% |
| Organisation of 1 Viquitrobada (our annual meeting) and 1 General Assembly. | Viquitrobada 2019 took place in Cervera the 30th November and the 1st December. Participation was surprisingly high, especially regarding newcomers, women, and youngsters. A General Assembly was scheduled in one of Viquitrobada's timeslots. | 100% |
100% |
| Organisation of 1 Youth Meeting to engage new generations in the Wikimedia movement. | On our way. The young segment of our community has tied bonds during Viquitrobada and a meeting will be a natural next step, but some more time is required. | 70% |
100% |
| At least 1 internal formative seminars to empower the discourse and the workshop skills of our members. | Done during Viquitrobada. It was quite praised by the participants. | 100% |
100% |
Education
- Progress of our objectives
Despite the organisational hiccup of our affiliate at the beginning of 2019, we can congratulate ourselves on the resilience of our model. Many of the educational projects that already existed during previous years have been able to iterate this year as well thanks to the commitment of their responsible institution tutors and our volunteer members in quite an autonomous fashion. We actually shared this model and exchanged opinions with fellow wikimedians during the Wikimedia+Education Conference 2019. This shows that our model allows a strong, long-term resilience, as our volunteers provide skills to the professors to lead themselves the projects with minor further support. An example is the ongoing project at the Catalan Superior Music School (ESMUC) since year 2015-2016, in which our active support is only needed when their annual edit-a-thon is organised and when professors define the wiki assignments that will be requested to their students. Regarding this institution, we have had initial conversations on how we can take advantage of other existing Wikimedia projects (e.g., Wikimedia Commons or Wikidata) with a special emphasis on the particularities of musical content, which will be continued on 2020 due to schedule mismatchments.
We performed our annual follow-up review of the signed agreement with UAB and both parties jointly detected several opportunities and potential new projects to explore. The experience with this university could be an example we could transfer to other similar institutions in the near future, since this autumn we signed an agreement with Universitat de Vic (UVic) and we are looking forward to starting joint endeavours.
Furthermore, we would like to spotlight some other successes achieved during the last 4 months of the year: a new eduwiki project in UAB has been launched and leaded by a volunteer who happens to be a university professor, so that only our oversight was needed in this case. Also, other highly successful projects in the same university (food microbiology and food biotech) are on their way to consolidation and there has even been a spin-off initiative related to both projects: some microbiology students have set up their own project to improve contents about prokaryote organisms.
Besides, in this period we were invited to commemorate Catalan ecologist Ramon Margalef's centenary by addressing a seminar to researchers in Barcelona Institut de Ciències del Mar. This was an outstanding opportunity to bring top researchers from our country closer to Open Knowledge, Wikipedia, and its sister projects. However, despite we managed to spark their interest we haven't had the opportunity to move this relationship forward. On the bright side, contacts have been made and freshening them up will not be as complex as reaching them for the first time.
We are aware of 22 eduwiki projects that have taken place in educational institutions this year. However, the number is slightly higher, as there are some completely autonomous projects that run without any oversight from Amical Wikimedia. As far as we know, there are at least two university professors (chemistry and systems engineering) that include Wikipedia editing in their assignments and provide us with the results once the academic terms are finished. We would also like to highlight a run test of a project deployed with Communication students from Blanquerna University, where some Wikipedia articles were read aloud, recorded, and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. This initiative, known as "Be the key", will iterate next year by asking leaders from different cultures and communities that currently live in the Catalan speaking areas to read aloud Wikipedia articles in their mother tongues and Catalan during a campaign aimed to promote knowledge as a key resource against hate speech and disinformation.
We are about to reach a new institutional agreement with Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). We are especially interested in this agreement since some of our members and editors are associated with this institution, which provides distance university learning. This agreement is especially aimed at exploring the (re)licensing of educational content and fostering open practices within university communities.
We are elaborating a historical record of all the eduwiki projects where we are involved, which has already helped us to keep a closer eye of those cases that might require further support and highlight any existing unattended space that might be worth approaching. Also, this mapping has also been quite helpful when rebuilding some contacts with the teaching staff that had fallen into the cracks and weren't properly followed up from year to year.
Regarding secondary education, some preliminary contacts have been made with several teaching staff and a couple workshops have been delivered to high school students. However, our contact with secondary schools in Andorra hasn't moved forward as swiftly as expected and more efforts will be needed in order to set up a stable collaboration there. We have been thinking about future collaborations within secondary education and consider that our approach will probably need a slight adjustment in order to make our purpose more appealing to teenagers and young students. Among others, we would like to introduce other Wikimedia projects apart from Wikipedia into secondary education classrooms and suggest teaching staff to undertake smaller, assumable tasks that do not daunt students because of their complexity -as it happens when high school students are asked to contribute to Wikipedia-, such as uploading content to Wikimedia Commons and reusing it on their own, real-life assignments, adding words to Wiktionary or quotes to Wikiquote, etc. Furthermore, we are also exploring the possibility to offer introductory trainings about those Wikimedia projects that can be used in primary and secondary education environments in collaboration with educational support offices that are spread among the territory.
Partly because of the hurdles associated with Amical board's transition earlier this year, the departure of our long-time former staff, and the time invested in the recruiting process of our new one, too many opportunities may have been missed for setting new educational wikiprojects or maturing ongoing ones. Despite having mapped all the educational wikiprojects that have taken place in the Catalan speaking areas in the last academic years, we have been unable to offer a proper follow-up to all of them and at least one of them -devised and launched without any direct support from Amical Wikimedia- caused noticeable friction and discomfort among the community due to a lack of preliminary communication. Furthermore, several projects have been discontinued, and most of them have the shared feature that large groups of students were involved, which leads us to consider that our follow-up and accompanying efforts need to be increased when large groups of students participate in the same educational wikiproject in order to provide both teachers and students a pleasant experience that leads them to being further engaged with these initiatives.
Finally, our plans to promote visits to Wikipedia and its sister projects in Catalan within the educational institutions from the Catalan speaking areas have been slowed down since we consider that despite the individual guerrilla-like approach might provide some results, some institutional contacts need to be done since collaboration between several actors is needed to make this proposal a successful and long-lasting one.
- Highlighted activities
-
Communication students from Blanquerna university recorded themselves reading aloud Wikipedia articles in a test run of a project against hate speech. -
We signed a new institutional agreement with Universitat de Vic. -
Our institutional agreement with UAB has received continuous support with the organization of workshops, follow-ups and several educational courses in the framework of their 50-year anniversary.
- Education program against its targeted metrics
| Objective | Description | Final status | Final expected status |
|---|---|---|---|
| At least one additional University agreement. | We had our first annual follow-up meeting with UAB, the main university with which we have an institutional agreement. This fall we signed an agreement with Universitat de Vic (UVic) and we are working on another one with Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) | 100% |
100% |
| Collaboration in at least 20 existing educational wikiprojects and 5 new ones (both secondary and university levels). | So far there have been different actions related to, at least, 22 education-related wikiprojects, apart from participation in other occasional workshops or lectures in education centers. From these, at least 5 have been new ones: Liceu Comte de Foix (Andorra), Obres fonamentals (UIC), Arts de les Cultures del Món (UAB), SmartCities, Llengua i literatures modernes UB, and the test run of the "Be the key" project. | 100% |
100% |
GLAM & Culture
- Progress of our objectives
Despite we are in a recovery phase we are delighted with the organisation's productivity regarding GLAM & allies projects, especially because some of the most relevant have not taken place in central areas (such as Barcelona and neighbouring locations). A significant amount of events (5 editing activities) have taken place in the Land of Valencia in collaboration with several libraries, and we have also signed an agreement with the professional association of librarians and documentalists from the Land of Valencia (COBDCV). On the other hand, we organised and held the first event in Minorca (Balearic Islands) in collaboration with Institut Menorquí d'Estudis, a local research society.
Many libraries from the Catalan-speaking area are still active in the #bibliowikis initiative, the #1lib1ref campaign being one of the most followed by this sector. Actually, this year's #1lib1ref campaign was a huge success within the Catalan community, since it set a new record both in participation and results terms (47 participants added more than 400 references to more than 300 Catalan Wikipedia articles). On top of that, we have noticed that several libraries are becoming more confident and many offline events are self-organised and we are only asked to provide minimal onsite support and help with the public communication of the events. A fine example is the annual edit-a-thon that takes place every September in l'Eliana, in the Land of Valencia, organised and led by a librarian who happens to be a member of Amical Wikimedia too. Another edit-a-thon took place in the Vallès Oriental area, being its main singularity the fact that it was a simultaneous event that took place in 5 different libraries at the same time, a challenge that could be faced by our volunteers' willingness to give a hand. Furthermore, several trainings to library personnel have been delivered in many areas away from Barcelona, such as the central area of Catalonia (Bages, Berguedà, and Moianès), the coastal area north of Barcelona (Maresme) and some trainings in the Land of Valencia have been scheduled for early 2020 thanks to the institutional agreement signed with the professional association of librarians and documentalists from the Land of Valencia.
Besides, we were invited to participate and deliver a workshop about open knowledge and Wikimedia projects in the annual FESABID meeting, the official gathering of the Spanish Federation of Archival Science, Library Science, Documentation science and Museology professional associations. Not strictly related with libraries, we also took part in this year's SCATERM (Catalan Society of Terminology) annual meeting, where several talks about Wikipedia and its sister projects were delivered.
Our activities and relationships with museums have been diminished but we believe they have experienced a qualitative improvement, since we have started to collaborate with the Catalan network of Art Museums in their quest to map the biases in their collections and subsequently design proper actions to reduce them, providing support, consultancy, and trainings when needed. Moreover, we keep on exploring the possibilities of content donation from galleries and museums, an endeavour that this year has already had a positive outcome with a private collection from the Balearic Islands.
A noticeable amount of our activity in this sector has been led by volunteers, which have organised new editions of long-standing projects, such as the projects devoted to cinema, comics or gender, or of projects aimed at bridging content gaps in Catalan Wikipedia, such as the projects focused in Africa (25th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, Africa Day). In addition, during the first half of the funding period we were impressed by two volunteer-led projects which have provided quite remarkable results. The first one consisted of an initiative aimed to transfer to Wikimedia Commons a collection of more than 21.000 public domain photographs preserved in an institutional repository, address some misidentifications and place the pictures in Catalan Wikipedia articles. The second one sought to connect 100.000 IDs from a traditional Catalan encyclopaedia to their respective Wikidata items in less than a month, a goal that was achieved in 25 days and with the outstanding participation of 69 volunteers -an absolute record not seen for years.
During the last quarter of the year, an edit-a-thon to celebrate the 150 anniversary of the periodic table took place in collaboration with the Catalan Chemistry Society. We also celebrated the 10th anniversary of 48H Open House Barcelona, an architecture festival, by organising an edit-a-thon aimed at improving the information about Catalan women architects on Wikipedia. The event was hosted by Barcelona's professional association of architects, and they are looking forward to collaborating again with us. Also, during that period, the second edition of an edit-a-thon organised by Barcelona's professional association of architectural engineers took place, and the head librarian of the institution is planning an improved version of the event for 2020. In November, another edition of Nit de la llengua al món digital -one of our most successful edit-a-thons- took place in Tarragona, with a remarkable participation of about 50 people. Among these there were about 30 Catalan language students that translated Wikipedia articles about Catalan language into their mother tongues, such as Ukrainian, Arabic, Turkish, English, French or Urdu, among others. Our volunteers also led this year's edition of Wikipedia Asian Month, which happened to be the second most successful edition of this contest in Catalan Wikipedia, with 19 participants that wrote 325 new articles about Asia. We'd like to highlight another volunteer-driven project that has reached to its 12th edition, Quinzena de la Qualitat (Quality Fortnight), an initiative that encourages Wikipedia editors to focus on maintenance tasks during the last fortnight of the year.
We are working towards the reactivation of our GLAM relationships with Andorra, which have been rescheduled to 2020 due to aforementioned schedule mismatchings. Contacts with GLAM institutions that had been started during the first half of the funding period haven't had a positive outcome during 2019, though communications channels are open and both parts are interested in moving forward possible projects. Among these we'd like to mention, on the one hand, an unexpected meeting with Institut Amatller d'Art Hispànic -an institution that preserves a picture archive of over 350.000 photographs of Catalan and Hispanic heritage widely used by art historians-, that contacted us and showed their interest to share at least part of their archives. Further movements regarding this proposal will be done in 2020. On the other hand, we have also hold a meeting with a Catalan music Internet portal that will celebrate their 10th anniversary on 2020 and explicitly wants Wikipedia and its sister projects to be part of the celebratory events that are still at the planning stage.
On the other hand, between September and December we shifted our focus point to professional associations (architects, architectural engineers, journalists, lawyers) and several contacts were made so as to explore paths for collaboration. Some of these contacts (architects, architectural engineers) have had positive and promising outcomes, with some proposals for 2020 already on the table; while others (journalists) have lead into traditional training sessions. Furthermore, we have also started conversations with Institut d'Estudis Catalans (IEC), an academic research institution focused on Catalan culture as a whole which concentrates several societies (history, chemistry, technology...) seeking to set grounds for collaboration in 2020.
Finally, we'd like to mention that the ongoing collaboration with L'Hospitalet de Llobregat municipality has led to the establishment of a wikimedian in residence at Torre Barrina, a cultural centre which offers trainings and cultural activities to the neighbours. During the last quarter of the year, the volunteer performing as the wikimedian in residence has hosted regular Wikipedia workshops (both at Torre Barrina and at Amical's headquarters in Barcelona) and has been getting acquainted with potential allies from l'Hospitalet de Llobregat, such as libraries and cultural institutions. In early 2020, a plan that will cover this wikimedian's activities in Torre Barrina will be presented to these potential allies and subsequently deployed.
Our presence and activities in l'Alguer (Sardinia) are still at a premature stage, since we are aiming for a multilateral collaboration which effectively becomes a seed for a long standing partnership and presence of Catalan language initiatives in the island. Contacts regarding the deployment of Kiwix in Catalan prisons are still pending since we are looking for a suitable partner to design a pilot test.
Some projects planned for the last quarter of the year weren't sucessful at all. We're refering to the project that vas proposed as a revamp of Wiki Loves Monuments, which on its turn showed clear signs of decay in the Catalan speaking area. The proposal wasn't neither welcomed nor rejected by the community, so we consider it wasn't appealing at all and that some reconsideration will be needed in order to reengage our editors in a heritage related initiative next year. Also, we regret to have cancelled the last edit-a-thon of the year, which was supposed to commemorate Joan Brossa's centenary. Our main mistakes that led to this project being cancelled were related to the event timing and duration (a whole Saturday close to Christmas holidays and examination periods), so we have commited ourselves to find a more suitable design for this proposal, which will take place next year.
- Highlighted activities
-
We signed an agreement with the Valencian Association of Librarians and Documentalists (COBDCV). -
The annual challenge, Viquirepte, was this year focused on connect 100.000 identificatory IDs from Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana (an encyclopedia widely used as a reference in the Catalan context) to Wikidata items. We made it in just 25 days! -
In late November we organised the 6th edition of Nit de la llengua al món digital, the edit-a-thon that gathers most attendees every year.
- GLAM & Culture program against its targeted metrics
| Objective | Description | Final status | Final expected status |
|---|---|---|---|
| The release of at least 3.000 multimedia files to Wikimedia Commons. | Thanks to Viquiprojecte:MDC, more than 21.000 public domain photographs were added to Wikimedia Commons. Some misidentifications were addressed, and a significant number of these pictures are now used to illustrate Catalan Wikipedia articles. Also, an agreement with Fundació Carloandrés (Eivissa, Balearic Islands) resulted in the donation of 7 reproductions of the artist's work. During the last quarter, conversations to move further in this direction have been started. | 100% |
> 100% |
| 3 workshops, edit-a-thons or other events in collaboration with GLAM partners of Andorra, l'Alguer (Sardinia, Italy) and the Balearic Islands. | The Viquiprojecte:IME included the first edit-a-thon ever held in Minorca, in collaboration with Institut Menorquí d'Estudis, a local research society. Unfortunately, more efforts will be needed in order to organise similar events in Andorra and Sardinia. | 50% |
100% |
| 8 training sessions of libraries/archives involved in the #bibliowikis project. | 3 sessions have been held in the Land of Valencia in collaboration with the libraries and/or local institutions of Benifaió, Alboraia, and Valencia. In Catalonia, 4 sessions have taken place: among these, two were delivered to individual institutions from Vilanova i la Geltrú and Barcelona, while the other two were trainings delivered to library staff gathered for the occasion in Sant Vicenç de Castellet (~10 libraries) and library staff participating in a simultaneous edit-a-thon in the Vallès Oriental area. | 90% |
100% |
Sister projects & Others
- Progress of our objectives
We have successfully launched ideas about sister projects, such as the Catalan Sign Language on Wiktionary. This project consists of uploading to Commons video recordings of signs in this language and then importing them into Wiktionary to improve the coverage of this language. Before starting the project we sought counsel from the Centre of Catalan Sign Language Studies, a group of researchers from the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona). The Department of Culture of the Government of Catalonia is also very engaged with Wikiquote, as we have reinvented the project to also host traditional proverbs and oral transmission of the language. In this sense, last July we held the second edition of an edit-a-thon devoted to traditional Catalan proverbs, which was quite successful both regarding its participation and results.
Also, in November we celebrated the first "Dimecres de datafília" (Dataphile Wednesday), a datathon organised with the Transparency and Open Data Department of the Government of Catalonia. The event, which was aimed at data scientists, developers, and journalists, got fully booked days before its celebration, and some of the prototypes presented at the end of the event looked quite promising. We are looking forward to repeating the experience and we consider refining it a little bit in order to favour its consolidation.
Sister projects were a matter of discussion during this year's Viquitrobada, since some of them (Catalan Wikinews, for example) are in critical condition and further steps needed to be agreed. Many participants of these discussions weren't completely familiar with some sister projects, so it was an opportunity to get them acquainted and foster new engagements. In this sense, some contributions were done to this year's technical wishlist survey in order to improve the user interface and experience of the sister projects and thus enhance participation.
Even though it is not a proper sister project, we were interested in discussing about the opportunity to deploy a children-friendly tab in Catalan Wikipedia, following the example of the Basque Txikipedia. A representative from the Basque community was invited to share their experience with us and foster debate around this proposal, which still needs further reflection.
We would also like to highlight the online contest held to celebrate Catalan Wikisource's 16th anniversary. The initiative, which gathered 5 participants, was devoted to improve the amount of reviewed and validated pages of works written by Emili Vilanova, and resulted in more than 500 improved pages, far from the record established during the contest held for Catalan Wikisource's 10th anniversary but actually the second best result of these sort of initiatives in this project. Finally, we need to mention that Viquiestirada -the annual contest that has been going on since March- came to an end. Its main goal was to outstretch those Wikipedia articles that were just stubs or too short articles, one topic per month. Despite maintaining participation in this contest proved to be quite challenging, we are happy with the outcome, since there were some very loyal participants, and thanks to the contest some content gaps that we had been dragging along for several years were finally addressed.
Although the renewal of the Wikipedia main page and other minor improvements in the contest participation lead by our tech members, we still haven't fully targeted how to deal with the accessibility objective. We have been developing new features in our own tools used to monitor contests and projects, but still haven't found the perfect path to a completely intuitive and user-friendly way to sign up for edit-a-thons or online challenges, since the interface sometimes becomes a hurdle for newcomers and/or mobile users.
While drafting our activities plan for this year, we planned more activities and developments in the sister projects than the ones we will probably be able to tackle. We had to cancel a Wikibooks workshop due to the lack of attendees and the annual Wikiquote challenge had a participation of only five users, three of which were indeed Amical Board members or Staff (i.e. organisers). Making small sister projects engaging is still a challenge —"edit and contribute to free knowledge" doesn't seem to be enough.
While Wikidata integration in our activities has an amazing response from our volunteers, the rest of the sister projects are in a critical situation due to the lack of active editors. This was discussed during Viquitrobada, and among the suggestions drafted to improve the situation, the demand for more visual and user-friendly tutorials and interfaces was especially remarkable.
- Highlighted activities
-
Dimecres de datafília was a dataton organised with the Catalan Government. The event was fully booked days before its celebration, mostly by developers and other tech profiles that were not familiar with Wikidata. -
With our Viquiprojecte:MDC, more than 21.600 public domain pictures preserved in Memòria Digital de Catalunya, a Catalan institutional repository, were transferred to Wikimedia Commons. -
Up to 17 people introduced with success 250 proverbs in Catalan Wikiquote during our second Viquimarató de refranys, held in the headquarters of the Catalan Department of Culture and focused just in this sister project. We are on our way to make the Catalan proverbs edit-a-thon a consolidated event for Catalan wikiquote -
We finished Viquiestirada, our annual contest, which was devoted to outstretch stubs and very short articles.
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- Sister projects & Others program against its targeted metrics
| Objective | Description | Final status | Final expected status |
|---|---|---|---|
| At least one datathon event and import of at least 5 relevant existing open datasets not present in Wikidata. | In November we coorganised "Dimecres de datafília", a datathon where datasets from Wikidata and the Open Data repository from the Government of Catalonia were wrangled. | 100% |
100% |
| 3 edit-a-thons & other events to edit across multiple Wikimedia projects. | The Wikiquote birthday challenge had a participation of five users. The MDC and GEC projects (explained in the GLAM section) also involved Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata respectively. Moreover, we celebrated Catalan Wikisource 16th anniversary with an edit-a-thon; during the edit-a-thon held in l'Eliana library, participants were encouraged to upload to Wikimedia Commons their pictures of local heritage and festivities, and during Viquitrobada, an edit-a-thon focused on improving content about Cervera was held jointly with a Wiki Takes event that resulted in 131 pictures uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. | 100% |
100% |
| 6 online contests to engage participation and reduction of content biases. | Several edit-a-thons were organised during the first half of the year to reduce some content biases: several were focused on the gender gap, but we also organised an LGBTI edit-a-thon and an African history one, among others. However, the most outstanding contest held this year has been Viquiestirada, devoted to outstretch stubs and very short articles of one different topic each month since March. Regarding the reduction of content biases, this year's edition of Wikipedia Asian Month was also quite successful, as it was the challenge we set to our volunteers to reach 25000 articles about women on Catalan Wikipedia, a milestone that was achieved way before expected thanks to several especially engaged volunteers. | 100% |
100% |
Communication & Outreach
- Progress of our objectives
This program has been one of the most successful so far, especially from June onwards. We have engaged up to 10 members for social media management and press release duties. Through these months, we have built a multidisciplinary volunteer commission that is efficient, reliable, and can still improve in matureness. We have attended different events and been present in several media coverages, sending press releases for every relevant enough project that we complete. Some internal discourse has also been distributed as a result, allowing an outreach activity that is not dependent in a single visible face, it relies in different Amical volunteers. Regarding social media, we are active in the most mainstream social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon) and the vast majority of communications through these channels are curated by volunteers.
During the last quarter of the year a noticeable amount of our efforts was focused in becoming more engaged into EU Policy team activities, especially after the outcome of EU Copyright directive voting. We have been collaborating with other affiliates (mainly Wikimedia España) and allies in order to support upcoming legislative changes that may be more beneficial to our movement interests.
Besides, some of our volunteers have participated in several international events, such as WikidataCon in Berlin, the 6th Big Fat Meeting in Brussels, and Wikimedia Hackathon in Prague. One of the volunteers that attended the Hackathon was awarded a Google Summer of Code grant and spent the summer improving a tool to translate pictures in SVG format.
We are still in the very early phase of the Communication Plan 2019-2024, as the daily duties and this transition year made us focus the efforts in the Strategic Plan and the Activities plan. We aimed to have the final document written by the end of 2019, but the discussion didn't spark until late November, during Viquitrobada, when a group of volunteers familiar with communication and journalism tasks sat down to define the major axis of the plan. However, more reflection and effort are needed on this side in order to obtain a fully functioning plan during the first months of 2020. We are also working on our new website, defining a feature wishlist and trying to integrate all our needs in as few interfaces as possible. We keep considering the best approach to create and promote the usage of instructional and promotional videos, which has been tackled a few times in beta.
Even though it occupies a featured space in our webpage, we struggle to publish blogposts regularly and to encourage volunteers and members from our community to do so. More planning is needed on this side, keeping in mind that a blogpost doesn't need to look like a dissertation.
- Highlighted activities
-
We attended a bootcamp in Warsaw to get ready for the transposition of the EU directive about copyright to the Spanish legislation. We teamed up with Wikimedia España to present our position in the first round of statement collection by the Spanish government in this matter. -
We also attended the 6th Big Fat Meeting in Brussels. -
Our most active volunteers in the tech segment attended Wikimedia Hackathon. One of these volunteers earned a Google Summer of Code grant and spent the summer improving a tool to translate pictures in SVG format. -
Our social media outreach is reaching the plateau of productivity, with a tight team of engaged volunteers who constantly care and curate comms through these channels.
- Communication & Outreach program against its targeted metrics
| Objective | Description | Final status | Final expected status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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. | We have internally assumed our blog as the main informative tool for our projects and community reports. Despite we have published 33 blogposts this year we feel that some more planning would make us more efficient on this side | 100% |
> 100% |
| Activation of a Mastodon account for Amical Wikimedia and for Catalan Wikipedia. | We created the accounts on summer, tested them during a couple of months, and they are currently up and running with great impact among free-knowledge and tech enthusiast. The ecosystem of this social media channel is very interesting for us and we have created a bot that provides automatically the content of the article after a query. | 100% |
100% |
| Stabilisation of all our existing social media accounts (2 on Facebook, 6 on Twitter and 1 on Instagram). | We have distributed our networks among different members without previous management with outstanding results: we took back the activity levels of some accounts in the past, and most of them now are even more active than before. @Viquipedia, @Viquidites and @Viccionari have increased significantly their impact and are engaging the interest of new readers and editors. | 100% |
> 100% |
| Attendance and presentation of our projects in 4 national/international events of Wikimedia, tech or free knowledge during the whole year. | We have attended several Wikimedia-related meetings at all levels: Wiki+Education Conference, Wikimania, CelticKnot Conference, Wikimedia Hackathon, WikidataCon, Wikimedia Summit, and VI Big Fat Brussels Meeting, among others. Besides, we have participated several times (8-10 times) in public TV/radio/written media interviews of Andorra, Catalonia, Balearic Islands, and the Land of Valencia. | 100% |
> 100% |
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 remained for the first semester of 2019 as a full volunteer-driven association. We hired Esther Solé i Martí (user ESM) from the second semester of 2019 onwards with a brief initial period of adaptation.
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.
Esther Solé i Martí (ESM) is our new Project Coordinator after 1-month selection process with 5 candidates. The screening process consisted in two phases, in which she provided excellent insights. Her previous experience as a volunteer Wikipedian in GLAM projects, educational wikiprojects, first Wikipedian in Residence in Southern Europe, and several workshops make her the best candidate for this position. Her duties and objectives are to deploy the Strategic Plan 2019-2024 and are detailed 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.