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

Report received

Thank you, colleagues at Wikimedia Sverige, for submitting this impact report! We're looking forward to reviewing it in depth and learning more about the impact of your work this past year. KLove (WMF) (talk) 17:17, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

feedback from FDC staff

The FDC staff (Katy and Winifred) met with Jan to discuss both this report and the progress report. We shared our thoughts (both appreciation and concerns) on these reports in the conversation with WMSE. Thank you, colleagues, for these reports, and thank you, Jan, for the conversation! KLove (WMF) (talk) 03:58, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Appreciation

• WMSE is a stable organization with strong leadership and strong connections to the community of contributors in Sweden. Staff skills and expertise enable effective program work.
• WMSE implements a number of programs that are unique in the Wikimedia movement, with a particular emphasis on technical support for its community that includes supporting bugs and working on translation, an education program that includes work with younger students, GLAM partners who crave close technical collaboration, and outreach work targeting Wikidata. More traditional programs, like WMSE’s equipment-lending program and its program for getting press accreditations for contributors, have also had good results.
• WMSE has leveraged external funding to support staff and budget growth, so as not to rely on an increase in APG funding to support its growth. WMSE is becoming more successful in this area, and even raised funding for WMSE’s staff to participate in Wikimania and to continue its important work focused on diversity.
• WMSE has significant opportunities for effective partnerships with GLAM institutions in Sweden, who are eager to embrace digitization and technical work. As these partnerships move forward, it will be important for WMSE to measure and articulate the amount and quality of content generated through these partnerships.
• We like the growing momentum around advocacy work, with WMSE playing a more prominent and consultative role to government bodies, and we hope this is better articulate din future reports.
• We appreciate what we learned from WMSE about the Swedish community’s ability to retain a small but active core of contributors over many years. We hope to see WMSE deepen its work in editor retention, and expand this to include thinking about strategies for retaining newer editors as well.

Concerns

• Our major concern is a lack of program focus. The many programs emphasized in WMSE’s reports and proposals obfuscate WMSE’s strong achievements and the number of programs presents concerns about organizational capacity. An organization with WMSE’s expertise at this level of funding should take a more strategic approach to annual planning: an approach that better emphasizes its most impactful programs so that the overall plan more accurately reflects the organization’s priorities, focus, and potential for achievement.
• We also want to see WMSE investing in programs that are achieving good results.
  • We are concerned about the level of investment in the education program, given the low outcomes we have seen so far.
  • We also have serious concerns about WMSE’s work in Uganda, which seems like it may not be well-matched to WMSE’s expertise and which uses an approach that we don’t think is likely to succeed.
  • We also aren’t yet seeing strong results from Reach and Readers, and some of this program’s activities could be grouped with operational expenses (e.g. communications).
  • While advocacy work may have good potential, WMSE’s role is not yet clearly articulated.
• Many targets for the current year are too low, and WMSE can improve at forming more realistic targets that reflect the potential of its programs and the amount of funding requested (e.g. “help 5 community members” is a very low target).
• Along these lines, we also encourage WMSE to take a close look at what it is measuring to ensure that its achievements come through in its metrics. We recognize there are some big challenges here, especially with respect to measuring the longer term results of its GLAM partnerships. Particularly, we feel that gaining large amounts of high quality content is an important outcome achieved by WMSE, and we don’t see this emphasized in the metrics for the content liberation or education programs.

Other discussions

• We discussed the education program and how you are working to make it scalable through existing tools, like course extension.
• We also discussed your experience with global metrics and how you manage the challenge of one particular event skewing your baseline and future targets.