Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2012-2013 round1/Wikimedia CH/Progress report form/Q1

Link to staff summary

We have published a staff summary of all 2012-2013 Round 1 Q1 reports here: FDC portal/Proposals/2012-2013 round1/Staff summary/Progress report form/Q1. We ask each entity to also review our general comments there. All the best, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 23:57, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Appreciation

We enjoyed reading WMCH’s detailed report.

• Congratulations on hiring two community managers; we hope these two new members of your team are poised be effective and reinforce the voice of WMCH’s community in its program activities. Now that both staff people are in place, we look forward to learning about how they are supporting your communities in future quarters.
• Thank you for your work on the videoconferencing tool. We look forward to hearing more about this tool and its potential to ease communications between our global movement.
• Thanks for linking your progress in professionalizing your chapter directly to the positive impact you hope this will have on participation. We appreciate that WMCH sees its work as very community-focused. Thanks also for sharing many of your lessons learned and for showing you are adjusting your strategies accordingly.

Regards, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 23:57, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Suggestions for future reports

Congratulations on doubling your membership within 6 months. In future reports, we’d also like to learn more about how WMCH’s activities may be increasing participation or contributing content on the projects most relevant to its work. Best, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 23:57, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

We would like to learn more

We are interested in learning more about a few of your activities:

• We noticed that WMCH did not implement the EduWiki conference as planned because of challenges with your partnership with the educational institution involved. Since you did not seem to view this as a major setback, we would like to learn more now about what happened with that partnership.
• We understand the challenges with taking advantage of all of the partnership opportunities for GLAM work. We look forward to the “GLAM partnership protocol tool” you are developing to balance staff and volunteer capacity in order to manage GLAM partnerships efficiently in future reports.
• We’re looking forward to the pilot project you are conducting to bring offline Wikipedia access to prisons, and look forward to learning more in future reports. As far as we know, this is a new experiment.

We will give you more informations about this project in the Q2 report, and offline will be our coolest project presented in Wikimania. Chantal Ebongue (CAO) 11:08, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Thank you: we are looking forward to it. Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 19:22, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your time and attention, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 23:57, 10 June 2013 (UTC) about the Eduwiki conference: Thanks to a very good relation with a Professor from the University of St.Gallen - and her interest in participating at the EduWiki Conference - we seized a chance and started to think about hosting the event directly at the University of St.Gallen. A few weeks later, the Professor discussed her intent with the University foundation council and got a strong advise against hosting the EduWiki Conference from an emeritus Professor. This emeritus Professor was a former ETH professor (Swiss federal institute of Technology Zurich) who's apparently familiar with the Wikimedia Movement but very critical in terms of the EduWiki Conference not being well established in the academic community. Due to this negative answer from the emeritus Professor, our contact person had no choice but to refuse to host the EduWiki conference. The EduWiki conference was an important part of our budget in Education for 2013, and for us it was a non-sense to take the risk to organize it without the full support of a Swiss University.

However, the good news is that we were in contact in the meantime with a very big student association (Oikos) at the University of St.Gallen and we will be part of their conference in November. At the end it will cost us something like 10 fold less, but with the insurance to reach a lot of students. This association is also interested in organizing with us a Wikipedia Day conference in 2014. Bottom line, we may have cancelled a conference in 2013, but we almost won one in 2014 with a real partnership with an important student association. Furthermore we learned that it takes time to cooperate with Swiss Universities due to their rather traditional and conservative way of acting in the area of new social phenomenons. --Charles Andrès (WMCH) 14:09, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for sharing this additional information, Charles. It does help us better understand your decision and your future plans for these activities. We can look forward to the results of your participation in the Oikos conference in your final impact report, since you're now scheduled to take part in Q4 of this year. Best wishes for future success with your new partner! Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 16:11, 19 July 2013 (UTC)