Grants:Simple/Applications/Amical Wikimedia/2019/Midpoint 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 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 of the Movement for over a decade. However, last year our Board stepped down and at 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 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
Despite being in a low moment when it comes to participation, three Amical members hosted a total of nine sessions in Wikimania. Despite 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, still prove muscle, skills, and capacity building. Overall, among our c. 119 members, 52 have participated to some extent in Amical activities so far this year.
We also keep our high-touch approach and since the new board was elected since we have had personal meetings or in-depth phone calls with every member willing to do so. Esther, our coordinator, has also held in-person meetings since she onboarded last July. We already have surpassed by far the amount of 30 members that we wanted to meet and we expect to go further in this regard. Besides, we have been able to create a fully volunteer-led commission to manage workshop planning and delivery, and a group of volunteers is devoted to welcome new members to the organisation.
After some time in which most members of the community had decreased their involvement with the association, the new board was about to increase its 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. We still have some work to do to get back their confidence and engagement.
We were able to hold a Strategy Saloon 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 are learning how much can we demand to our members without consuming their interaction both with Amical and the Wikimedia projects they participate. We can't afford any more burnouts. We are also still struggling to appeal to more women and young people (<20 years) to join us, and this is something we are quite concerned about, even if it is a shared circumstance with the whole Wikimedia movement. We expect that the successes described above might slightly contribute to improvements.
- Highlighted activities
-
An almost renewed Board with little previous experience has taken the responsibility for a new stage in Amical's history, with new perspectives and projects in mind. -
Up to 6 members of Amical attended Wikimania with a high level of participation, keeping our main discoursive lines and volunteer spirit. -
Esther Solé, our new Project Coordinator, will help us to reach further in our ambitions and give support to the community in the implementation of our Strategic Plan.
- Community program against its targeted metrics
| Objective | Description | Midpoint 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 11 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 50 members and/or Catalan editors. | 100% |
> 100% |
Education
- Progress of our objectives
Despite the organizational hiccup of our affiliate at the beginning of this year, 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 recent 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.
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 if we happen, as we expect, to sign similar agreements in the upcoming future.
Notably, as we have been doing for 4 years so far, we co-organized the annual Catalonia College Music edit-a-thon and helped teachers and tutors with the definition of the wiki assignments they would request to their students. We had initial conversations on how we can take advantage of other existing Wikimedia projects (e.g., Commons or Wikidata) with a special emphasis on the particularities of musical content.
After a long time, we also recovered our contact with Andorra and we engaged in some training activities in a secondary school.
We are currently involved with a couple of universities in order to define institutional agreements similar to the one already signed with UAB. Apart from supporting already ongoing courses and activities in these institutions, these agreements are aimed at exploring (re)licensing of educational content and fostering open practices within university communities.
We foresee to design a better mapping of all the projects where we are involved, which will help us keep a closer eye of those cases that might require further support and highlight any existing unattended space that might be worth approaching.
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. As a consequence, our numbers for #eduwiki this year haven't been as good, but the year is not finished yet and the new academic course 2019-2020 will bring us new projects and a chance to get back some of the past ones. No 'Train the trainers' courses were offered either so far, but we aim to tackle it on a special session in our annual Viquitrobada.
- Highlighted activities
-
Our yearly edit-a-thon as part of our collaboration with ESMUC (Catalonia College of Music) brings their students closer to the wiki environment. -
We developed a new wikiproject in the biggest secondary school of Andorra: Viquiprojecte Liceu Comte de Foix. -
Our Viquiprojecte:Educació UB is increasing with the mentoring and lecturing for different University of Barcelona Education degree classes. -
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 | Midpoint 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. We are currently negotiating with two other universities to settle similar agreements as well. If there is a shared mutual understanding, they might happen to be signed either during the next term or by the beginning of next year. | 33% |
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, 11 education-related wikiprojects, apart from participation in other occasional workshops or lectures in education centers. From these, at least 3 have been new ones: Liceu Comte de Foix (Andorra), Obres fonamentals (UIC), INS Domus d'Olivet (Canovelles. | 60% |
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 taken place away from 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 have 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, being the #1lib1ref campaign 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 in 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. Besides, we have been 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 to 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 training when needed. Moreover, we keep on exploring the possibilities of a 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, we are 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 an encyclopaedia widely used in the Catalan context 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 that we didn't see since a few years ago.
We are working towards the reactivation of our GLAM relationships with Andorra, which will probably take place in early autumn. Also, we have been working on some projects that will take place during the second half of the year, such as offline events to commemorate Joan Brossa and Ramon Margalef's centenaries or a datathon in collaboration with the Catalan government. These are being planned on top of other ordinary editing events, like a simultaneous edit-a-thon in several local libraries in Vallès Oriental or several thematic edit-a-thons. Furthermore, we have started contacts with several GLAM institutions (Museu Olímpic i de l'Esport, Museu de Ciències Naturals) which may become collaborations in the near future, and we have been reconsidering the format of some key activities which showed clear signs of decay, such as Wiki Loves Monuments in the Catalan-speaking area.
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.
- Highlighted activities
-
We signed an agreement with the Valencian Association of Librarians and Documentalists (COBDCV). -
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. -
The annual challenge, Viquirepte, was this year focused on connecting 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!
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- GLAM & Culture program against its targeted metrics
| Objective | Description | Midpoint 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. | 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. While we are developing contacts in Andorra, we still need to strengthen and intensify our relations with Sardinia. | 50% |
100% |
| 8 training sessions of libraries/archives involved in the #bibliowikis project. | We have held 3 sessions in the Land of Valencia (with the libraries and/or local institutions of Benifaió, Alboraia, and Valencia) and 2 in Catalonia (Vilanova i la Geltrú and Barcelona). At least two more sessions have been scheduled in several libraries from Vallès Oriental area and in Sant Vicenç de Castellet. | 60% |
100% |
Sister projects & Others
- Progress of our objectives
We have successfully launched ideas about sister project, 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 Catalan Government is also very engaged with Wikiquote, as we have reinvented the project to also host traditional proverbs and oral transmission of the language.
We seek that the seed of these projects can start having an impact on our partners and Wikimedians, even though the difficulties to promote outdated platforms and interfaces that do not depend on us.
Although the renewal of the Wikipedia main page and other minor improves in the contest participation lead by our tech members, we still haven't fully targeted how to deal with the accessibility objective. During the upcoming months, we will be exploring more intuitive and user-friendly ways to sign up for edit-a-thons or online challenges, as well as demanding for effectiveness from the WMF in this regard. The ideal signing-up method would be integrated into the wiki itself without actually requiring any wiki knowledge. This tool should also help us to more easily collect metrics about the events. We will hold a debate about the implementation of a kid-friendly tab on Wikipedia during our annual Viquitrobada meetup, which will take place in late November.
While drafting our plan of activity 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 assistants and the annual Wikiquote challenge had underwhelming participation of only five users, three of which are 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 integration so far, the rest of the sister projects are in a critical situation. The diminishing Catalan editors remaining in the projects have shown frustration due to the lack of interface improvements, constant restrictions from Meta and lack of care from the WMF. Our perspectives are quite pessimistic about how to solve this dynamic if the major problems come from above and there is little interest to promote them from an economical point of view and a rebranding recentralisation.
- Highlighted activities
-
Catalan Sign Language on Catalan Wiktionary: this minority language is part of Catalan culture, so we are improving the representation of local cultural diversity on our projects. Our partner for this project, the Pompeu Fabra University, has been very happy with the results so far.
-
Viquiestirada ("wiki-stretch"): thanks to this brand-new annual project, several users help to reduce the number of stubs every month. -
We organised an online event to celebrate the 18th birthday of Catalan Wikipedia. Everyone (both editors and readers) were encouraged to write an article from the "Wanted Pages" to Wikipedia for its birthday. -
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.
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- Sister projects & Others program against its targeted metrics
| Objective | Description | Midpoint status | Final expected status |
|---|---|---|---|
| At least one datathon event and import of at least 5 relevant existing open datasets not present in Wikidata. | We are planning a datathon in the next months, so this goal should be completed by the end of the year. | 0% |
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. | 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. | 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, bringing back the old tradition of sending press releases for every big 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 on different Amical volunteers.
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 most probably will not be ready until early next year. We are preparing a new website, and the usage of instructional and promotional videos, even premature, has been tackled a few times in beta.
After the outcome of EU Copyright directive voting, we started becoming more engaged into EU Policy team activities and we began collaborating with other affiliates in order to support upcoming legislative changes that may be more beneficial to our movement interests.
Because of the little involvement of our community in lobbying and legislative matters in the past, we could not organize as well as possible effective actions against EU Copyright directive. That is somehow a missed opportunity considering the general awareness and promptness of Catalan community when a decision such as the EU Copyright blackout was taken.
Small management mistakes regarding the usage of our Twitter account were solved with the effort and engagement of several members of Amical and the Catalan community.
- Highlighted activities
-
After 5 years, we pushed for the development of a new high-quality Main Page in Catalan Wikipedia. -
We attended the Wikimedia+Education Conference to bring our volunteer-driven Eduwiki projects to a further audience. -
The annual conference of terminology organised by the Catalan Institute of Studies was fully focused in Wikipedia, with the presence of our member Pau Cabot, the top editor of the project with more than 700K edits. -
Our sister projects are a reference for minorized languages and we participated in the Celtic Knot Conference with an excellent speech level of one our youngest assets. -
Our social media outreach is increasing fast with new, reactivated accounts; thus we involve new partnerships and approach newcomers.
- Communication & Outreach program against its targeted metrics
| Objective | Description | Midpoint 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 divulgate tool for our projects and community reports. This year we have had about a weekly post. Furthermore, one of our members is developing an entire renewed website with brand new functionalities. | 100% |
> 100% |
| Activation of a Mastodon account for Amical Wikimedia and for Catalan Wikipedia. | We created the accounts on summer and tested them during a couple of months. They are already public but not announced officially yet. However, they are starting to have a great impact among free-knowledge and tech enthusiast. The ecosystem of this app is very interesting for us and we have created a bot that provides automatically the content of the article after a query. | 60% |
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 Wikimania meetings at all levels: Wiki+Education Conference, Wikimania, and the CelticKnot. 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. | 90% |
> 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 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.
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.