Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2015-2016 round1/Amical Wikimedia/Proposal form

Comments and need of clarifications

Thanks for your proposal which makes it possible to follow your efforts in Amical. First some general comments:

• your goals is not expressed in terms related to impact results, and also your targets is more focused on enablers then results. Could you please comment on this?

This is exactly our strategy. We don't want to be starring but enablers. As you can read at our Public Libraries project Case study we are more interested on indirect results. They are the key of a self-sustainable network of volunteers where we are not a bottleneck but a facilitator.

• your stated global metrics seems to me to be seriously unrealistic. What is the base you have used to come to these very huge numbers, which is not corresponding to what is usaully experienced.

Community metrics includes our social media efforts, which are key for us for expanding the awareness of the project and to keeping the community together further than on the wikiverse.

• you seem to expect a surplus of 5000 euro this finacial year. Will you put thses in your operating reserve?

We are still not sure about it. Once we have final 2015 finantial results, if we have a surpluss, we will then take the decission, always after an agreement with the WMF and our community.

• Core project, looks good to me, but underdeveloped when it comes to targets and goals.

Thanks for your opinion here. As most of them are mid-term already ongoing projects with existing goals on its program pages. But we understand your point and will try to be more detailed in further proposals.

• Education and Knowledge. The focus looks about good to me, but I do not really understand what is in the "New Mindset on knowledge sector". In general to get 60 classes on Uni level to actively work with writing articles, for me seems totally unrealistic, even 6 I would think would be a ambitious target. Have you real experince working like this and how is the active involvement from the community. In my experince every article produced in a classroom, needs 0,5-2 hours afterwork by some in the general community and I do not understand if you have a explicit commitment from the communty to do this with 1000 articles?

If you look at our existing education projects category you can see that we are already dealing with 30-45 courses per year. As told, we try to organize our projects in a way that we can reach many people with low resources. Is not what WE do but want we can get OTHERs to do. 60 courses is a brave proposal, but we've been told in WMF evaluations that oure 2014-2015 goals were too easy to achieve. This is why we challenge ourselves a little bit here :-)

• Community. I do not object to the stated acitivites but would like to see more concrete support activities like providing technical expertice to experienced contributers in need of that. I believe your goals and targets are serious underdevloped and not on par with what is expected by an APG proposal in such a wellknown activity area. Have you looked into what other chapter do in this area?

Yes, we closely follow other chapters proposals and reports and we adapt and copy best ideas of the rest of the movement. IMHO, I believe here we don't have same point of view of what it means "community care".

Needs of clarifiactions

• The last column in table 2 should be a sum for the whole year, not just the delta from now to end of year.

Anders Wennersten (talk) 13:38, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Hi Anders, thanks a lot for your comments. We will think about it and answer you with further details during the next days. Thanks again.--Kippelboy (talk) 10:53, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Hi Anders, I'm sorry, I corrected Table 2, according to your suggestions. And regarding the possible surplus,yes, probably use to increase our operating reserve. Thanks. --Josepnogue (talk) 17:56, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

This change is approved, Josepnogue. I've altered the proposal to show the change using strikethrough, as we usually do to document the change. Thanks for making it. Cheers, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 17:55, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

questions from FDC staff

Hi friends at Amical, Thank you for all your hard work in submitting this proposal. The FDC staff has reviewed your proposal, and we have a few questions for you. Please let us know if any of these are unclear. Thank you! KLove (WMF) (talk) 21:58, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Program questions

• In Table 3, would you also please provide targets for the Community program, Education & knowledge, and Core Projects that do not include your social media reach, so we can better understand them?
• Thanks for including detailed tables showing different program activities and how you plan to measure the results. We want to know if you have targets to share (as in, specific numbers you will achieve through each program activity), to give us an idea of what you plan to achieve through each activity.

Community program targets are detailed here

Budget and finances

• In Table 2, it looks like you’ve provided your actual spending and revenues until 1 September, but the projected amounts included do not look correct. Your projected spending and revenue should include the total amount you think you will spend or raise by 31 December (including the amounts until 1 September as well as any additional amounts you will spend between 1 September and 31 December). E.g. If you spent 400 euros by 1 September and you plan to spend 200 euros between 1 September and 31 December, your projected spend would be 600 euros. Please update this table using strikethrough.

Many thanks! KLove (WMF) (talk) 21:58, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

This is fixed by Jnogué

Futher comments: As Amical members we miss WMF feedback on the programatic line. We read concerns on the budget and metrics but not concers, nor proposals on what should we do or how can we better do what we are doing or what we want to do. Instead of discussing if we are doing 3 or 5 editathons or we will reach 70 people, we would like to receive more feedback on strategy, on how or plan is aligned or not to WMF mission and goals or on how can we better aligned. This is a shared feeling I've received from the community and wanted to document it here.--Kippelboy (talk) 16:06, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

Hi, Kippelboy! Staff questions at this stage are focused on needs for clarification, which often occur around these details (e.g. budget, metrics) in your proposal since your programs and strategy are quite clear. These are not intended to be feedback, which is why we focus only on getting the information we need. More detailed feedback about specific programs will be shared as part of the staff proposal assessments in November, and we'll keep these comments in mind when we make our assessment. Cheers, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 17:48, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Yes, to add to what Winifred said -- the staff proposal assessment will be published on November 9. We are collecting information here to better understand your context and plan. Thank you! KLove (WMF) (talk) 05:41, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for the clarification. Now it makes much more sense to me :-)--Kippelboy (talk) 08:54, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

Questions from FDC members

Itzik

Hi, first of all - good luck. I know the APG is not an easy process for small chapters, so I really appreciate the time and resources invest.

It's unclear for me, looking on your detailed budget what each program costs include. Education outreach is budgeted for 6,000 € without a clear or several examples what this sum include. Same for community led projects.

Most of the 6K education goes for university professors in person meetings while introducing Wikipedia idea. With the years we have learnt that the wiki introduction period with educational sector is very important, and it works much better with real life meetings. Catalan speaking areas have a dozen of universities spread around our territory and some of the budget will be used in trip spending. We have marked that if you spend a little bit of time in gaining teachers confidence during the 1st semester, then you can follow & scale projects almost exclusively online. As we want to focus better on education this year, we need some budget for it.

As we have good examples and success of microgrants projects, there are also many others not. Have you decided how much from the 4,000€ community projects budget will be allocated for micorogrants? Who will decide for approving them and what (if) the maximum budget for each grant?

This is not yet decided by the community. During our previous meetings, community has claimed for the microgrants, but we don't have decided yet how we will use it. One of the options is adapting the WMUK system, with an open wiki where people introduce proposal and cost and rest of the community give or not the ok. We may include a maximum budget per proposal (e.g.: 300€) but we are not sure how it will work as it is our first ever edition of this proposal.--Kippelboy (talk) 16:18, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

Also, I read about the target for having 40% of the Catalan editors as members. Maybe I missed this information - but how many editors are on Catalan Wikipedia (and BTW, are you referring to "editors" or "Very active editors"?) and how many members do you have right now?

That's an easy one ;) You can read all cawiki stats here and a summary here. Catalan Wikipedia has around 1500 active editors and around 80 very active editors. Amical has >90 members. We care a lot about the core editors, while programming activities for improving engagement of regular active editors.--Kippelboy (talk) 16:18, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

Traveling - from my understanding - WMCON is expecting APG organizations to include their travels costs within their grants requests. Are you planning WMDE\WMF to cover attending or are you allocating budget for that in your budget? Thank you and again, good luck! --Itzike (talk) 12:19, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

No, travels are included in our programs budgets. E.g: Travel to Sweden to march collabs meeting on education is budgeted on our Education program budget. Same for core projects et al. Thanks a lot for taking time in reading and adding questions. It helps us to improve our projects--Kippelboy (talk) 16:18, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

Liam

• In the Community program 'internal wikilove' activity, you indicated "Number of conflicts on Catalan Wikis" as a measurement. I am very supportive of the idea that a Chapter should focusing on the "emotional welfare" of the community, I don't know a) how you intend to measure the number of conflicts, and b) whether it is sensible to imply that the conflicts of the language-wiki are a direct responsibility of the organisation. Can you explain this measurement? Wittylama (talk) 16:12, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

Hi Liam, very good appreciation there. As you may know, Amical (nor chapters) own any wiki project nor community. We are just project enablers. But as you've read community liason, welfare and cohession is key in our organisation. If everyone feels confortable, everyone can help where he/she/? is better at. We have some roles in our movement similar to a call center or panic phone. They are regular users who have experience on dealing in conflicts/edit wars with a peacification profile. Usually they are contacted offline or via mail when something is not goind ok. As we are a midsize community, we also track when one of our "very active" users is not editing. this can mean 2 things: A) real life issues or news that affect editing time (job,family...) or B)someone feels bad about something and starts a wiki break: if you can contact them they feel needed and appreciated and members of a community who cares about them. So we can say we measure the number of conflicts with these techniques. Also reading the village pump :P. This DOES NOT mean that we are responible at all of it. It means that we care about. People have a right idea that Amical is an organisation that helps wiki thinkgs to become bigger, stable, easier or real, but it doesn't own nor the project nor the community.--Kippelboy (talk) 16:42, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

• In table 3 (global metrics) you indicate a target of 10.000 individuals to be involved in the 'community' programs. I also see that in the progress report form you are claiming 7,402 people are involved - because that is the combined number of followers of your twitter accounts. Is the number 10.000 primarily based on an expected growth of the number of followers on twitter? Wittylama (talk) 16:19, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

Yes, also we have plans to improve our Facebook activity, where we are quite quiet right now. We have also done some unstable experiments on other networks (instagram, Vine and others) but we realise we can't handle so many accounts in a volunteer capacity. Social media is handled by a group of volunteers with my help as Amical's FTE.--Kippelboy (talk) 16:42, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

For your information, I asked a related question on the UK chapter proposal, and referenced this question/answer - 2nd bulletpoint here. Wittylama (talk) 15:13, 24 October 2015 (UTC)

• I acknowledge that the amount being requested here is smaller than last year, which addresses the point in the FDC comments last year about "underspending". However, also in last year's FDC review comments it was stated that "The FDC recommends that Amical start thinking about the sustainability of the organization for future years". Since the single employee is dedicated entirely to the second program priority ('education and knowledge'), how is Amical addressing this request from last year's FDC recommendations? Wittylama (talk) 18:00, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

Austerity is one important word in our organization. We want to optimize donor's money. Also we want to keep being a volunteer led organization. We had some learning curve asuming which tasks need to be done by staff/volunteers. We think than the more people in staff, the bigger the risk for the community to relax and let staff do projects. My role as an employee is doing the investigation, introducing and enabling midterm projects but they need to be managed by volunteers otherwise it won't be sustainable. This is explicitely our way of addressing FDC's recommendations: we don't need a FTE on GLAM anymore because we have achieved a level that GLAM can be managed almost completely by volunteers. This is really a success factor for us. If on a 2 years time we can say that a FTE is not needed on education either, it will be a measure of succes, because it means we can focurs our efforts in other things. Regarding underspending and budget: we have asked the amount of money we think we will spend. Some of the budget lines (microgrants,...) may not be fully spended if community doesn't ask for it. This is also a good thing for us. If we give the option to the community but they don't need the whole amount of budget, this is even better for us :-)--Kippelboy (talk) 16:42, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

• Small clarification - in 'Table 7' you say "Program expenses (total from Table 7, excludes staff)". Do you actually mean to say Table 6? Wittylama (talk) 18:03, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

Ups! You're right :P --Kippelboy (talk) 16:42, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

• In the current year, GLAM activities are a major component of your plans, and have proven to be one of Amical's most recognised areas of success. This, year that section has been removed and the related activities (e.g. Bibliowikis) are now under the heading of "Program 3: Core projects" (the same can be said for the Education programs). Your 2014-15 progress report specifically about GLAM activities implies to me that GLAM activities have a worsening effort:outcome ratio. Is that correct? Wittylama (talk) 18:33, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

Not really. Let me explain what we have changed the way we present our budget and APG proposal. Last 2 years GLAM has been one of our main things. It still is and it will keep being one of our major tracks, but we have included in "Core projects" for asuming they are regular important things we want to keep doing during the year, while Education is the next big thing we want to put our efforts on. Probably is just a matter of self visualization more than real difference. Libraries are our key partner, but now they are a regular partner. We don't need/want to invest further efforts on it, we want to stabilize what we have and go deeper on it. Probably the difference is that education is an expanding project and core projects are in a go deeper phase.--Kippelboy (talk) 16:42, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

Aegis Maelstrom

Hello All and thank you for your submission! My first questions :) are:

1. You are aiming at a number of specific goals, some of which I find personally quite ambitious, e.g. 10.000 new/modified articles thanks to the core projects or 3.000 individuals involved there. How did you come up with these numbers? I have taken a look into your impact report form and learned a bit about your achievements - i.e. I am quite impressed by the scalability model, e.g. activities (including events) run by libraries, however I would love to learn some more numbers / details here. (side note: I find your strategic plan pretty ambitious as well :) )

Thanks for your appreciation. 2015 projects are aligned to reach 500.000 articles on Catalan Wikipedia, 2016 will be focused on improving project's quality, so we will promote small maintenance edits (review, typos, references). This is why we think the number of edits related to our projects can boost. Also WMF claimed us to challenge ourselves with more ambitious goals, as from 2012-2014 we have already achieved most of our year goals on our mid year progress reports--Kippelboy (talk) 03:43, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

1. Some secondary items show costs (e.g. sister projects - $2k, Viquipèdia 15 - $2k, other(?) core projects - $6k) but are left under described. What are they and what needs to be financed there?

Viquipèdia 15 will be a weekend event to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Catalan Wikipedia. We will celebrate a real life activity in Barcelona city. As we are a community led organization. The event and the budget have been aproved by our board and community, but not yet the details. I could say it will be some real life contest+ editathon+ cake + other challenges but can't give you more details about it because community needs to plan it, and I'm afraid the Catalan Wikipedia 15 momentum will start in early January, after English Wikipedia's celebration. This statement works equally for the rest of the other secondary costs you mention. Core projects include our Wiki Loves Earth, Wiki Loves Food, GLAM, Public libraries projects, are the big projects that are already happening in 2012-2015 and will need some funding to keep going.--Kippelboy (talk) 03:43, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

1. Main item - salary. It is (EUR 47k) = roughly 42.5% over an average gross annual income in Catalonia (~ EUR 33k) but it is very similar to last year expenses - EUR 46.3k. Did you use any benchmarks here, e.g. other NGO opportunities?

I'm afraid there is a misunderstanding here. 46,3 K is Amical's cost (social security and other taxes), not staff salary (I'm the FTE). Real salary is about EUR 26K. So there is still way to improve until 33K :P--Kippelboy (talk) 03:43, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

1. Amical is not asking for e.g. conference scholarships resources. As we seem to not have any standard here - do you wish to use here general opportunities with WMF? :)

No, conference and travel resources are included into each program budgets. If one volunteer wants to travel to explain/learn something related to sister projects, it will come out from the 2K year budget, and so on. This way of planning give us a better idea of projects and expenses related to a cost centre--Kippelboy (talk) 03:43, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Best Regards, aegis maelstrom δ 20:50, 26 October 2015 (UTC)