Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2012-2013 round1/Wikimedia Deutschland e.V./Progress report form/Q3

Report received

Thank you for submitting a complete report for Q3 on time. We look forward to reading more about your activities. Due to the timing of the FDC funding cycle, it will take staff a little longer than usual to offer feedback about this report and post clarifying questions. We appreciate your patience with this process, and welcome any urgent questions or concerns that you may want to address before our comments are ready. Thank you for your attention to the reporting process during this busy time and best regards, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 02:07, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Comments on this progress report from FDC Staff

Thank you for this report, and thank you in advance for making the effort to read and respond to our comments and questions. Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 00:37, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Financial summary

• We are reading the actual cumulative expenses in EUR as 2,746,942 EUR, or 65% of WMDE’s revised budget of 4,220,642 EUR. Spending across quarters has been consistently between 19% and 22% in each quarter thus far (i.e. Q1, Q2 and Q3). The highest spending rates against budget are in personnel, supervisory board, international affairs, fundraising and representing interests at an EU level, while the lowest spending rates against budget are in event management and evaluation. In terms of the greatest amounts of money spent, spending was concentrated on improved motivation in the communities, after administration and personnel costs.

Appreciation

• Thanks to WMDE for introducing us to its new change models. We are interested to see this develop and are appreciative of the insight it offers into how WMDE is thinking about its programs.
• Thanks to WMDE for continuing to provide background in each of reports about its reporting process. We hope this information is valuable to others working on similar processes and continues to show how WMDE is working transparently.
• Congratulations to WMDE on integrating Wikivoyage and Wikimedia Commons into the WikiData project this quarter.
• Congratulations to WMDE on its diversity project and its paper on diversity. We look forward to learning about the outcomes or results of these activities. Congratulations also on WMDE’s successes with the Women Edit and Silberwissen programs. We look forward to learning about the results through the evaluations.
• Thanks to WMDE for using this report to reflect on lessons learned at a high level. We realize it is difficult to balance the right level of detail with high-level reflections in a report from an organization of this size and scope, and we appreciate improvements in this area. While this report was informative, it was also easy to read and engaging.

We would like to learn more

1. Please explain more why the program “Changing the working climate” was not successful. What did WMDE learn from this experience?

When Wikimedia Deutschland designed this program idea in 2012, it seemed to be urgent to do something on this topic. When first steps on this program were on it’s way, we found that an initiative from the community had risen up, which was similar to central ideas of ourselves. It was pretty clear, that we should not interfere against a community initiative and thus moved it throughout the year. The community initiative didn’t really take off and as the department additionally went through some unexpected major changes in the middle of 2013, it finally it was to late to start the program. We learned from this, that we need to avoid situations of “WMDE program vs. community program”. The 2014 design of working with “social processes” adresses this, as it is directed to support, amplify and stabilize change processes in a coordinated way the community already is active within. Denis Barthel (WMDE) (talk) 10:24, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

2. Thanks to WMDE for stepping in to make sure a German-speaking WikiCon was organized. Please share more about how that will impact the German-speaking wikicommunities or the movement as a whole? What were some of the positive outcomes or results of this event?

Three major clusters of outcomes are important for the wikicommunities and/or the movement concerning the WikiCon: motivation, generating content and outreach. Motivation: As every year approximately 200 persons, mostly from the core community, took part at the WikiCon. Based on a decade of observing the German communitys steadily growing social life, we perceive personal encounters among core community-members per se as beneficial and motivating. Karlsruhe was outstanding on this: Never before the German community networked as intense among each other, the all-time-high November-peaks on https://tools.wmflabs.org/pb/ (a community interaction confirmation tool) point this out.

Generating content: direct content generation is in a conference set-up always a side-effect only, due to the time-consuming slots-and-tracks-matrix. But the WikiCon offers the indirect approach of a conference, which is learning and enabling. Many workshops transferred knowledge on topics like programming and developing, photographing and video-recording and even editing articles. Experience exchanges on GLAM stimulated the submovement, as did the award ceremony of Wiki loves Monuments, projects have been founded or boosted. Finally productive forwarding discussion on major issues like botgenerated articles, categorizing pages or technical innovations from the Wikimedia Foundation (e.g. "Echo") took place and helped to clarify positions.

Outreach: supported by Wikimedia Deutschlands communication department, the Wikicon organisational committee generated extensive reports in many of the most renowned regional and national media, centered on the positive aspects of the Wikiverse like voluntary participation and collaborational work. We understand this as especially beneficial because media coverage that is centered on such a positive information is rare these days. Denis Barthel (WMDE) (talk) 10:24, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

3. We are interested in the Women Edit project, which seeks to increase the activity of female contributors. Does WMDE have specific targets with respect to numbers of new female editors WMDE expect to attract or numbers of existing female editors that will be engaged? How does WMDE plan to track their editing activities over time?

All Wikimedia Deutschland’s activities relating to the topic of “diversity” are based on a multi-dimensional concept developed as part of a collaborative project with universities and experts in 2013. The English translation of the diversity concept will be available in February. Preparatory work on the project has already been translated into English and was discussed with the international community at our Wikimedia Diversity Conference in November 2013. This concept incorporates the five action points that we will be focusing on in coming years in order to promote diversity in Wikimedia projects: (1) increasing awareness of diversity issues, (2) creating a more open and welcoming culture within Wikipedia, (3) improving interaction and communication within the community, (4) improving the quality of knowledge production, and (5) improving opportunities for participation.

Under the heading of “Diversity,” we consider interaction within the Wikipedia community a top priority, alongside opportunities for developing the diversity competence of Wikipedians in order to promote respectful conduct in, for example, conflict situations. It is not, therefore, a matter of calling for more women to edit, but rather of creating an inclusive realm where everyone can make his or her knowledge and expertise available. This has so far not been the case. All research findings show that the only way to sustainably develop the author community is to create an open atmosphere on Wikipedia and to motivate existing authors to take part in this process. Exclusion mechanisms need to be avoided in order to open up opportunities for participation.

The Women Edit pilot project had the aim of encouraging women to take an active part in Wikimedia projects. The aim of the project was not to carry out editing events; instead the plan for 2013 was to develop a network of active female Wikimedians who would act as contacts and network hubs (“Wikiwomen”) in their local areas and organize networking events and similar occasions for other female Wikimedians and women with an interest in Wikimedia projects. The project’s aim of attracting at least three active female Wikipedians to volunteer as “Wikiwomen” was achieved. In total, 15 women agreed to support the project. However, the plan of organizing events in collaboration with these women before the end of the project period could not yet be implemented, since the volunteers wished to have more time to work on achieving a mutual understanding of these events. The events will begin in early 2014. The first Wikiwomen networking event will take place in Berlin on January 18 and 19, when decisions will be taken on what events should follow over the course of the year. The events will reflect our five above mentioned action points. Every Wikiwoman will independently choose the topic to address in her region and the approach that she will use. This could mean that some editing events do take place. These are not, however, the focus. There are therefore no plans to pursue the issue of editing behavior. --Nils Weichert (WMDE) (talk) 13:54, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

4. Please offer some examples of how WMDE’s involvement with projects like the Chapters Dialogue and the Chapters Village has enriched its day-to-day project work.

Although we only kicked-off the communication and interviews for the Chapters Dialogue project in August, we experienced an increase in visibility and inter-chapter exchange in Q3 already. We were able to grow our network of contacts throughout the world, not only in regards to the chapters but were also in constant touch with stakeholders like the Wikimedia Foundation, the Funds Dissemination and the Affiliations Committee. This helped us not only to enhance the work and visibility of the international affairs unit and the project itself, but we were also able to make and strengthen connections between those entities and Wikimedia Deutschland. Reporting back from the experience we made in the course of the first months of the project also helped our board and colleagues to get better insights in the structures and organisations of the movement, which in general boosts the feeling of being part of an international network of Wikimedia organisations. On top of that, we hope that it also helps us to deal with challenges on a more informed and structured basis in the future. It is hard to name specific examples here, but in day-to-day work the project team is often approached by colleagues as well as international movement members and asked to make connections or to give advice regarding special issues and contact persons.

Being present at the Chapters Village during Wikimania helped us not only to connect with potential participants, partners and contributors for projects like the Free Knowledge Advisory Group EU, our Diversity Conference, Wikidata, RENDER, and GLAM activities, but also offered a nice contact point for the German community members. They participated in activities like shooting movies with the flip cams, being Human APIs tagged with the large stickers we provided and several of them were able to (re-)connect with international community members. Having met face to face and exchanged ideas and opinions helps them and us to enhance the global collaborative work within the Wikimedia universe. On top of that, we see the Chapters Village as an experiment and potential role model for future events (local as well as international), and gathered a lot of constructive feedback and ideas. --Nicole Ebber (WMDE) (talk) 15:52, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

Suggestions for future reports

• We encourage WMDE to include more images, sounds and videos in its reports to bring its many activities to life in the report.
• We encourage WMDE to move toward including specific and measurable targets related to the outcomes or results for its activities and sharing them in its reports. We would like greater insight into what WMDE is achieving.