Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2013-2014 round1/Amical Wikimedia/Impact report form

Report received

Thank you, colleagues, for submitting this report on time! The FDC staff looks forward to reviewing it and learning more about Amical's work last year. KLove (WMF) (talk) 17:12, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Feedback from FDC staff

The FDC staff (Katy and Winifred) spoke with Alex about their feedback on Amical's recent work, as featured in this impact report and the more recent progress report. What follows is a summary of the conversation. KLove (WMF) (talk) 23:43, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

Appreciation

• We see Amical has delivered impactful work in the past year, particularly in its GLAM and education work, where you are getting new editors and significant content.
  • Amical continues to impress us with its library network: congratulations on reaching 149 libraries. We’re pleased to see, too, you sharing your model with the movement. We loved the case study you developed. We also very much appreciate that you are prioritizing depth over breadth in terms of the number of libraries you are working with.
  • It is exciting to see you begin to test this model with archives; we’re eager to know what kind of successes you might have.
  • In terms of education: we enjoyed pursuing your education portal and will also be interested to see how it plays out. We’re glad to hear that you are thinking hard about how to sustain and not overwhelm your community as the education program grows.
• The quality of the recent progress report was good. We could really understand your work, and were helped to understand it by global metrics in the progress report. We were especially impressed with your progress on articles improved.
• Congratulations on the National Culture Award last year! We know that these awards can go a long way with recognizing community efforts and motivating volunteers.
• We were interested to see Wikidata popping up in your work and will be curious to see how this goes.
• Amical is pursuing some important strategies we hope to see continue:
  • Developing programs that can be sustained independently of the organization. You are a leader here.
  • High levels of volunteer involvement (many volunteers involved with many projects) rather than relying on only a few volunteers. Again, Amical is a leader here.
  • Starting to look at becoming more strategic and selective about pursuing opportunities, and yet carefully balancing that with the needs and interests of volunteers. This will be continually more important as Amical moves forward (and especially if Amical ever considers expanding). We like this year’s more focused program plan a lot. We can see the strategic focus is improving.

Concerns

• Your impact report did not include consistent data, so we were left struggling to understand the work you had achieved. As discussed, your more recent progress report is an improvement.
• To this point: despite impressive achievements described in the impact report, it will be very difficult for the FDC and staff to truly grasp what Amical achieved, due to lack of consistently reported metrics across programs. For example, it seems clear that a lot of content is being produced through e.g. edit-a-thons, but we don’t know how much.
• We appreciate the concerns you have in reporting how you help your community (“online help” or “community care”). We know this support is an important strength of Amical, and we would be interested in working with you to see what can be measured together. If we are not able to measure it at all, it’s hard for us to understand what is happening.