Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2012-2013 round1/Wikimedia Israel/Progress report form/Q2

Please complete this report

Thank you for your work on this progress report so far!

We did notice that a few important fields in the reporting form are missing:

• What were your major accomplishments in the past quarter, and how did you help to achieve movement goals?
  • Done
• What unanticipated challenges did you encounter and how did this affect what you were able to accomplish?
  • Done

This is information is still needed to complete Wikimedia Israel's report. Please add your responses directly to the reporting form.

We also noticed that the following field was missing from your description of Program 4 / Editor meetings: Activities conducted. Please also add this missing information directly to the reporting form.

• Done

We noticed that this report was created by User:OrenBochman and that a number of contributions have also come from an anonymous IP edit. We would like to know that somebody on the board of Wikimedia Israel or a staff member (preferably Itzik or Chen as the primary contacts for this grant) have also approved the creation and submission of this report. We request that somebody from Wikimedia Israel sign this form with four tildes in the indicated field at the bottom of this report in order to indicate that this report is complete and submitted.

We encourage Wikimedia Israel to complete the missing fields, and to sign this form, so that we may proceed with instructions regarding Wikimedia Israel's second installment of funds, and so that we may update Wikimedia Israel's eligibility status. Please contact us with any questions or concerns about this report or the missing information. We are happy to clarify our request or support you however we can.

Best regards from FDC staff, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 17:41, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments.

My edits were done on behalf of Chen, who furnished me with a report draft. However I'm sure that this will be signed by our chair once he reviews that the additions based on your requests for clarification have been handled satisfactorily. OrenBochman (talk) 04:49, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Oren for all the help. Winifred, I approved the report. I added my signature at the end. --Itzike (talk) 12:14, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Report received

Oren and Itzike: Thank you very much for your changes and updates, and for submitting a complete progress report for 2013 Q2. We look forward to reviewing it in detail in the coming weeks. Please continue to monitor this discussion page for our comments and questions, and contact us at any time if you have any questions or concerns. We will be in touch to notify you any changes to your eligibility status that may have resulted from the submission of this report. Best regards from FDC staff, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 07:19, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for this report

Thank you for taking the time to compose this report. We appreciate the continued dedication of your board and volunteers. While we encourage WMIL to grow in its willingness to share its challenges openly, we recognize a significant improvement in this report. One thing we appreciate is that your passion for your chapter’s activities comes through much more clearly in this report than in others. This is one aspect of your chapter’s work we know has always been strong.

We encourage all entities to also read the staff summary of this quarter’s progress reports in addition to these comments.

Best regards, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 03:13, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Appreciation

• We appreciate the hard work your volunteer board is doing to keep your existing programmatic activity moving forward in the absence of an Executive Director. We recognize this is a significant challenge.
• Congratulations on the 10th anniversary of the Hebrew Wikipedia and the success of the first Hebrew Hackathon! We celebrate your success and appreciate your presenting this model as a lean alternative in the movement. We are excited about the momentum you are building. As you move forward, we hope you will find ways to measure and track the outcomes of these events in order to better understand your model of work.
• We appreciate your sharing quantitative measures of success in addition to qualitative measures. Where these are available, they help us to understand your activities. For example, including the number of participants that attend each session helps us understand the growth of activities like external lectures, workshops, tours and working meetings.
• We were excited to learn about the theme of this year’s Wikipedia Academy (_Why are there fewer women editors on Wikipedia?_) and we share your excitement for continuing to integrate discussion about the gender gap into your activities.

Congratulations! Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 03:13, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

We would like to learn more

Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions about this report. Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 03:13, 9 September 2013 (UTC) 1. Are you yet able to share a link to more information about your ‘Helpdesk’ project that offers help for new editors?

Winifred, I'm afraid there must have been some kind of misunderstanding -- the helpdesk we were referring to is not for new editors; for that our community has other means that are not new to Q2. In Q2 we opened, as part of our long lasting GLAM partnership with the National Library of Israel (NLI), a new helpdesk, that allows wikipedians to directly approach the NLI librarians, who then assist them. Wikipedians seem to like it and use it and the NLI librarians, who were trained on how to edit wikipedia, are very much supportive. Here is a link to it.

2. Do you now know how many new photos were added to Wikimedia Commons as a result of Wiki Loves Monuments?

7000 new photos added to Wikimedia Commons http://www.wlm.org.il/

3. We are interested to know more about the way chapters understand and measure quality of content. We noticed one of the objectives of your Elef-Milim project is 5-10 vastly improved articles. Would you please offer your definition of ‘vastly improved’?

Our definition of 'vastly improved' means that in articles which related to the tours pictures and information are added.

4. Are you able to share more about how the insistence on SLR cameras enabled the success of the aerial photography project? While we can certainly imagine why this would be helpful, we ask because we know several other groups have done or are working on similar projects and might learn from your observations.

Unfortunately we do not have the information at the moment. Will start to track numbers in Q4.

5. Regarding the Hackathon, you mention, “due to lack of manpower and policy, there was no tracking and continuing contact with the developers who participated in the meeting.” Since you are planning another event later this year, do you have plans in place to improve on this for the next event? If so, would you share them here?

The next Hackathon is going to take place at December 26th. As part of the process of professionalization of the chapter, we started to formulate an event procedure that will be to used for all the events of the chapter. We will be more than happy to share it with you.

6. We are interested in knowing more about your GLAM strategy. We see you are investing effort into creating relationships with cultural institutions that may have huge potential. We are interested in your approach to cultivating these relationships over time, and in particular, we would like to know how you decide which relationships to invest in.

Winifred, I have to say I'm a bit puzzled as to how these questions relate to the Q2 report, specifically #2 & #6 -- WLM has just ended mid October (Q4, not Q2), and our GLAM strategy question relates to our annual program. Nevertheless, here are the answers -

WLM results - I believe we had an upload of about 7000 pictures to commons this year. We consider it a success, as we had fewer volunteers working on it this year and we got slightly better results than last year. I'm leaving the rest of the WLM report, on all its partnerships and other successes, to the Q4 report.

GLAM strategy - Since the beginning of GLAM in Israel (08/2011, right after Wikimania Haifa), we have been very lucky and blessed to be working with top GLAMs in Israel. We usually have GLAMs asking to partner with us (sometimes too many at once), and look at a few factors deciding who to work with and when. Here are the main ones, in no particular order. We choose to work with GLAMs that -

• share our agenda of making knowledge free and accessible to the pablic and understand the partnership is not only for the sake of publicity or "Good Karma".
• have a knowledge-base, collections or experts that have a potential to make a noticeable impact on our content.
• look for a long-term, sustainable partnership and realize that a WiR program is just the beginning.
• differ in what the partnership has to offer, in relation to existing partnerships.
• have a potential to attract new audience from the general public.

I'd like to elaborate on a few of these points --

As for sustainability (the 3rd point), our Wikipedian-in-Residence programs always aim to "jump-start" a partnership that will last long after the residency. So far, every partnership we forged has continued, after the WiR program ended. Each GLAM is different, so I won't get into the 'how exactly' here, but I will give one example from this week -- we are about to participate in the "Europeana-Fashion Challenge" and have an edit-a-thon dedicated to fashion. My first call was to the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (IMJ), our very first GLAM partner. We've just collaborated with them in WLM and they have agreed to participate in the fashion challenge with us. They are in the process of donating media to commons and help us with mapping articles that need to be created or expanded. They will also be present in the edit-a-thon to guide wikipedians who are interested in editing content relating to their donations, although the edit-a-thon is not in their GLAM.

As for the 4th point, in other words we look for variety. Our experience show that even wikipedians sometimes get board, so we have to mix it up a bit in order to create interest and not "burn out" our volunteers. It is especially important since we are a small community that has a lot going on. Therefore, we try doing something new that wasn't done before in our community in every new partnership. This allows GLAMers to be excited about new things and also help us engage new contributors from within the community. For example, our coming partnership is with the Comics & Cartoons Museum in Holon (a city near Tel-Aviv). We've never dealt with cartoons or comics along side professionals, so we are very excited about the opportunity to do so. This specific partnership will also aim to involve educational institution in that city, and having a partnership in which the EDU part is integrated into our project's goals is also a new challenge. That is _not_ to say that it's a must, but it's something we consider and if we succeed in creating partnerships from cultural aspects we didn't deal with before, it's a bonus.

As for the 5th point, we view both GLAM and collaborations with educational institutions (sometime these outreach branches overlap) as one of our strongest platforms to engage not only with 'experts in their field' but also with the general pubic. Our "behind the scenes" tours and most of our edit-a-thons are always open to people interested from the public. The latter usually begins with a workshop on how to edit wikipedia, after which experienced editors work together with newcomers.

One last point to consider - This year, as part of our efforts to become better in measuring things that can be measurable (not everything can be, but what can be is our goal), we have implemented the Education Extension in He-Wiki, and were the first worldwide to use it in GLAM workshops, as a tool to monitor newcomers and their contributions. All in all, our experience in GLAM events has also helped us get better in the way we lecture, the way we teach newcomers to edit wikipedia and what needs to be done, practically, in order to help us measure and evaluate our work. I would say that what guides our GLAM strategy, as well as other activities in the chapter, is consciously thinking about both professionalism and scalability in our work - two things that occupy us and that we try to consider and implement in every new collaboration. I believe it's safe to say that all in all our outreach experience has had a major impact on our continuous and sustainable growth as a chapter and it's important for us that it will continue to do so. Finally, we view GLAMing a bit like a farmer planting seeds. We plant many seeds in many places, and those seeds sprout and bloom when the time is right. So as a strategy, we look at it as running to long distances. This allows us to continuously perfect our work and grow steadily. I hope this helps. If not, I'm here. Best, Shani (talk) 23:11, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Regarding point 5. The last hackathon took place at the same time as the Amsterdam Hackathon, accordingly our staff was split. - I am looking at evaluation criteria for this Hackathon and I've started a discussion on this subject at the Program Evaluation Portal. OrenBochman (talk) 19:43, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Suggestions for future reports

• Table 3 should be formatted in a way that allows us to easily understand your expenses with respect to the planned expenses listed in your proposal. We appreciate that you provide a more detailed financial report here, but we ask that in future reports you also tag each line item to the budget categories listed in your original proposal.
• We invite WMIL to build on existing progress and continue to share its challenges more openly with the FDC and the community. We encourage WMIL to include yet more reflection on both challenges and successes into future reports.
• We look forward to hearing more about what was learned from the decision not to pursue the contract with the original Executive Director and how the Board is managing the additional work.
• We encourage WMIL to develop more robust plans to follow up with participants after events like the Hackathon or Wikipedia Academy and to share that information with us in these reports.

Thank you for taking these suggestions into account. Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 03:13, 9 September 2013 (UTC)