Grants:PEG/WM CZ/Full-time employee

Not funded
This grant submission from an group, organization, or individual in 2013-14 was not funded by the Wikimedia Foundation.
  • Prior to 2011, reasons for not funding this submission were communicated in private and may not be available on the discussion page. For more information about a particular request, please contact the grantee directly or send your questions to grants at wikimedia dot org.
  • Beginning in 2011, reasons for not funding this submission are communicated publicly on the discussion page of this submission.
  • Since this grant request was not funded, no report is required and no further action is required from the grantee.
Legal name of chapter
Wikimedia Česká republika / Wikimedia Czech Republic
Grant contact name
Milda
Grant contact user-name or e-mail
wikipedista.milda@gmail.com
Grant contact title (position)
WM CZ grant coordinator
Project lead name
Petr Novák
Project lead user-name or e-mail
User:che
Project lead title (position), if any
chairman
Full project name
Full-time employee
Amount requested (in USD)
24000
Provisional target start date
2010-07-01
Provisional completion date
2011-06-30

Budget breakdown edit

2000 USD (wage) × 12 (months) = 24000 USD.

Average brutto month income in region is 1500 USD. According to the law conditions (employer's participation on social and health insurance (both mandatory), taxes) the superbrutto wage (= the final expense for the employer) is then 2000 USD. The final netto for employee after all his participation on insurances and taxes is about 1000-1100 USD.

Project scope edit

The full time employee, whose job description will mainly contain (but will not be limited to):

  • fundraising, search for sponsors, donors, long-time partnerships and supporters
  • finding and managing of partnerships with data providers, organizations, experts etc.
  • organizational work
  • administration and bureaucracy

Project goal edit

Situation in a nutshell:
The volume of our current, planned, intended and desired activities is already so high that it is not possible to handle it on pure volunteer basis. Staying a volunteer-only organization would mean abandoning significant part of things we want to do.

In detail:

  • We have more than a few planned projects which require a lot of time to prepare and organize - much more than the amount of time spent on such action directly. Exhibitions, fairs, conferences, lectures, writing contests...
  • We have number of projects intended or desired which we unfortunately can not realize because of lack of volunteer humanhours.
  • There are people turning to us with ideas for projects, but we unfortunately have to either reject them or - in better case - we just simply can not help them with such activity.
  • We want to lookup, establish (or continue in) relationships / partnerships with a number of educational and cultural institutions, experts, archive owners etc. with the aim of providing data as well as cooperate in other areas such as wiki education or promotion etc.
  • Fundraising and sponsor lookup requires lots of paperwork and way so much time for various dealings, meetings, negotiations...
  • Also lot of other activities require non-trivial amount of bureaucracy and administrative work which takes up resources which could be used directly for such project. (Purely illustrative example: I have 10 hours of spare time to volunteer, but instead of playing with kids on playground for all of those 10 hours I have to spend 4 hours by getting the trucks with sand to sandboxes, filling paperwork about hygienic and technical conditions etc.)
  • We want to start up our subscription (required by law if we want to receive money on rather often than rare basis) so we could start our own legal fundraising campaign and/or to join the foundation's fundraiser (yes, even the simple join compels us to start the local subscription, not mentioning additional paperwork necessary to forward some of the collected money to Foundation). The law is pretty long and requires many actions.
  • We often deal with content stealing from Wikimedia projects (typically Wikipedia and Commons), with inappropriate or incorrect stating of source of copied / reused information, or with illegal usage of trademarks (typically "Wikipedie") as a part of the name of foreign project (e.g. Foo Bar Wikipedia instead of Foo Bar wiki). Communication of rectification of these misdemeanours is usually very time consuming, since it involves multiple emails / phone calls / visits exchange together with patient education without which the opposite number doesn't understand what is requested and why (in better case) or even doesn't want to work on rectification at all.
  • We currently have some possession for lending (e.g. camera), we plan another activities in this area (camera upgrades, video camera, GPS navigation, digital projector with equipment, library...) - it is necessary to take care of it.
  • We have, will have and plan to have some possession, which could be usefully utilized during opening hours or full day at designated place (e.g. photo scanner etc.) - it is necessary to take care of it, to be there when somebody wants / needs to use it for working on / for Wikimedia projects or so.
  • With our growing activities, the volume of mails (both e- and snail) we have to react on grows as well. Unfortunately currently the reaction time not rarely reaches indecent values. Also number of random media activities grows.

Non-financial requirements edit

Some way of support for permanent office would be helpful.

Fit to strategy edit

Aim:
Stable background that will help the majority of active members worry about actual substance of their projects, and not about secondary administrative tasks, which are unfortunately necessary for operating as a decent non-profit organization. We want to spend more of our time on activities directly supporting our mission (as illustrated in example).

Long-time impact:
Increasing of our flexibility and operability as well as the amount of activities for the mission.

Other benefits edit

Less stress and burnouts and more enthusiasm and energy between active members which will allow them to clearly focus only on main aims and leave worries on the designated person.

As a side-effect, we'll be able to save some money on administration of our other grant projects.

Measures of success edit

We believe that having an employee will help us participate in more activities such as exhibitions, conferences, and content creation, thus basically ensuring smooth progress of all our (grant) projects and perhaps it would allow us to start something entirely new. However, as our mission-focused projects are mostly going to be done by volunteers, we'll base our assessment of employee's helpfulness on their views. At the end of this project, we'll ask the project leaders and other active members of the chapter on their opinions regarding a paid employee -- e.g. how his/her work helped their projects and whether it had any effect on administrative tasks they had to cope with.

We'll consider this project successful if the employee -- in views of our active volunteers -- reduces amount of their non-mission-related work and helps them with organization of their projects. We will also consider number of newly established partnerships with sponsors and other organizations.

Personal note: It is my firm belief that the desired effect -- letting volunteers do more of things that they joined Wikimedia movement for -- will also make them significantly happier and more likely to continue their work on our mission. --che