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

Shorter overview

@Jan Ainali (WMSE):, can you please add a short overview, one or two sentences, for the purposes of community review. The overview provided in the proposal is too detailed to use. You can just add it here on the talk page and I'll move it over to the template that goes on top of your proposal form. Thanks, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 20:06, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

@Wolliff (WMF): alright, quite hard to compress it so much, but here is a try: "With a new focused strategy, Wikimedia Sverige reduces the numbers of programs and goals which makes it possible to create a holistic annual plan with fewer but more ambitious targets. Within the new programs Access, Use and Community, which harbours both stable, proven projects and some new innovations, there is also a great opportunity for external funding for large scale projects that are well aligned to them." I hope that helps. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 15:02, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for this, Jan. I know it's a challenge to summarize all your work in a few sentences ;) Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 18:20, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

Change of Executive Director

I see from wikimedia-l that Jan is, sadly, leaving as ED of WMSE in the next few months. How will this affect WMSE's plans for the forthcoming year? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 00:05, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

I don't think next years plans are affected too much. First of all, Jan isn't disappearing immediately, he will work fulltime until January until new programs are prepared and started. We have a very flat hierarchy, and there is not much relying on Jan. In fact, our key staff (Sara, André, Axel, John) has been with the chapter for many years now, and it is them developing and driving the programs. The thing we are going to miss though, besides the general administrative responsibilities, is Jans more general forward-looking/visionary view. This however, is not an immediate issue during the transition. --Prolineserver (talk) 09:09, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for sharing this information, Prolineserver. Does WMSE plan to replace Jan with a new Executive Director? What is the timeline for that? Many thanks, KLove (WMF) (talk) 15:54, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Well, there is no replacement for Jan ;) But yes, we have to find a new ED, but there is no timeline yet. We have a hiring committee consisting of Mattias, Bengt and me, and are currently discussing a position profile with the board, employees and others. In contrast to the process three years ago we have much more experienced board members regarding this kind of hirings, and can now also rely on quite some help from our networks. We try to speed up the process as much as we can, however, an ED is certainly the most important board decision for the next years, and we rather focus on a good process rather than rush through it. --Prolineserver (talk) 18:38, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for the update, Prolineserver. I agree Jan is impossible to replace! :) Once you have a plan for the interim and a timeline for hiring, please do share a bit more with us. Many thanks. KLove (WMF) (talk) 19:55, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

I agree with Prolineserver regarding the key staff and their ability to run the projects. I´m also confident in the board, which consists of people with various experiences, knowledge and network. On Tuesday 13 October, the board will have a special meeting just to discuss the profile of the new MD and how the process will be handled. We keep you informed about the work.--Historiker (talk) 15:49, 11 October 2015 (UTC)

Some news about the recriutment of a new ED: The board of Wikimedia Sverige had a meeting last Tuesday, where we thorougly discussed the profile of the new ED and wrote the job announcement, which was published the same evening on our wiki and later on externally. You find an English version on Executive Director for Wikimedia Sverige. The applications shall be sent in on 31 October 2015 at the latest. The board decided to temporarily extend the HR committee with one person for this recruitment.--Historiker (talk) 20:04, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

Information about the current process status of recruiting a new ED: The final date for the applications has passed and we got in total 28 applications. The HR comittee had a meeting last Tuesday, where we decided to interview three people. The interviews will be conducted on Saturday 7 November. More news will come after that.--Historiker (talk) 18:13, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

Thank you, Historiker, for the update. I hope you have some great candidates to fill Jan's big shoes! Best of luck with the search. KLove (WMF) (talk) 18:34, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

We have today interviewed three candidates, and found all of them of interest for further evaluation, where we will get help from an external recruiting company in order to get a professional statement on the candidates' strengths and weaknesses, and what we have to consider when we decide on employing them. Further information will come.--Historiker (talk) 17:52, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

Re: text-to-speech functionality for MediaWiki

Do you know about WikiTalk? --Nemo 21:00, 11 October 2015 (UTC)

It is on our radar. We have read the paper, and even if their application is totally different than ours, we will contact Niklas to see what components they used for the text-to-speech. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 06:49, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, nice. I'll try to make related wikipapers page more complete later. Nemo 06:57, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

questions from FDC staff

Thank you for submitting this annual plan grant proposal, Jan and colleagues at WMSE. The FDC staff has some questions in reviewing it. If any of them are unclear, ping me and I'll be happy to explain. Again, thank you for your work on this proposal. Cheers, KLove (WMF) (talk) 22:26, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Program and organization questions

• How did you calculate the target of 577,575 articles to be improved and 104,035 images to be uploaded through your Use program?
  • It is the Access program that are responsible for that. Very specific details are available in the Detailed budget document (columns L to AA on the program tabs) but briefly most of the articles are improvement on Wikidata (in the main namespace) through the migration of the Wiki Loves Monuments database. Most of the images uploaded are through batch uploads in the Preserving the Cultural Heritage project, we have estimates from partners that makes up for 100,000 images. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 08:35, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
• Please share more about your goals for your education work. Beyond involving 10 classrooms, do you have targets in terms of articles improved, or editors retained?
  • Yes (details in the document linked above). Our target for new users is to have a 303 accounts created, and for retention we have used Rolling Surviving Active New Editors as the metric and we expect 192 of new users from Education become Rolling Surviving Active New Editors. We have considered average class sizes and how Wikipedia assignments previously have been designed to estimate that at least 150 articles will be improved from these activities. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 08:35, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
• Once you develop the speech to text prototype, will you have a way to track how it’s used? How will the community be engaged in this work?
  • Yes, since we plan to integrate it through an API it should be possible to setup logs for usage on each language version/project/third party application. I guess that the Analytics team could give us some good advice on that.
  • Already from the start the community are invited to help us sort through existing resources and components for different languages so that we get an overview what need to be done for their language. The community will also be key for choosing the implementation style, both in how the actual text-to-speech will work in the MediaWiki context, but even more importantly, be involved in how the improvement process should function. We want the synthesis and text processing to have a collaborative approach where the community (and readers/listeners) can give feedback to improve the quality of the service and can also be helpful in adding text-to-speech for new languages. Since the development will be completely transparent, and we will use the standard tools (like Phabricator and Gerrit), we will be open for bug reports and feature requests for the community as well as looking forward to patches from volunteer developers. We will of course use Translatewiki.net as translation platform and the community will be doing the localization.
• Please provide some more details for baselines around readership, so we can better understand your goal of a 10% increase.
  • We take our baselines from the official stats here. Or rather, from the archives (example from May 2015). It will be the sum of the columns to the left (the 1:1000 samples) that we will compare Year-to-Year. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 08:35, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
• Do you have a general estimate for the number of bugs you think you will track?
  • Based on numbers from 2014 and 2015 we expect it to be be somewhere in the order of 40 - 80. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 08:35, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
• We note you are planning 3 new FTEs if external funding is secured. Does the planned departure of the current ED affect those plans, and if so, how?
  • No it should not. Since we will get notice on the funding this year, we can initiate the hiring process for these positions before I leave. The new employees could also be onboarded by the existing staff and we will prepare in advance. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk)

Questions from FDC members

Questions from Risker

• Text to voice - I note that WMCH is also planning to work in the area of supporting visually impaired users (more specifically on Wikisource), and there are several voice to text software packages that are currently used by visually impaired Wikimedians. Do you have reason to believe that there is a particular gap for Swedish readers? Is there a way that these two projects could develop some synergy to extend applicability? I note that the intention is to fund this work with an external grant, not directly from the FDC envelope. It would be useful to know if the grant applied for would be encumbered in any way that would adversely affect the ability to make this a more universal application.
  • No, we have no reason to believe there is a particular gap for Swedish readers, and yes, there can be huge synergies. The project does not aim to actually develop the basics of text-to-speech from scratch, there are already plenty of such resources around, but rather combining these existing puzzle pieces and make them work together, and make sure that it is accessible within the Mediawiki framework. The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority are mostly interested in getting it working in Swedish, but we have made it very clear from the beginning that in order to get it up and running in the Wikimedia environment it has to be capable of supporting multiple languages. And to make sure it is so right from the start, we have successfully convinced them that the first iteration should also handle English and one Right-To-Left-language (probably Arabic) besides Swedish. The tool we build will support MediaWiki in general rather than just Wikipedia, because that has the effect that not only all our projects can use it, but also other users (and there are quite a few installations of MediaWiki on Swedish universities for example) which The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority reacted positively on. We believe that by not limiting ourselves to Wikipedia there is a great opportunity to get also other organizations to modularize their language resources so that they can be included and also actively help with improving the text-to-speech tool. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 14:43, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
• Contributors 60 years and older - I recall that other chapters had experimented in specifically trying to seek out new editors from this age group, although these programs may have been before there was a more systematic method of sharing experiences amongst affiliates. (I believe WMDE was one of the chapters.) As I recall, their experiences showed a lower than average editor retention rate. Is there something different about the Swedish-speaking population that leads you to believe there might be a different result from your efforts?
  • Yes, not only because we are in Sweden (where internet penetration is extremely high) but also because of time passing. We made some outreach in this area in 2008 to 2010 with quite sparse results. That was mainly because of low computer skills in general. Nowadays we notice that new retirees have been around long enough in the workforce to have gained those basic skills needed. This means they are able to dive into a discussion about Wikipedia culture and guidelines rather than how to surf to a web page. We also learned that those we reached through “computer clubs” was the target group with the lowest skills. Instead we will now aim to reach subject matter experts, who are more likely to have sufficient computer skills today compared with 5-7 years ago. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 14:43, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks very much for your submission. Risker (talk) 02:44, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for reviewing our application and for your relevant questions. I added answers above as indented list. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 14:43, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

Questions from Aegis

Hello @Jan, god kväll! Thank you very much for your submission and the detailed, opened budget document - I highly appreciate your work here, as well as the accesibility. Sorry for the late questions, but I am rereading the proposal documents and I have some points where I would like to clarify.

Firstly, as far as I can see, the largest items are two points sponsored by external grants: Preserving the Cultural Heritage by The Culture Foundation of the Swedish Postcode Lottery with 3,374,900 SEK and text-to-speech by Swedish Post and Telecom Authority with 1,000,000 SEK. Are these grants restricted/earmarked, that is are the donations meant for these projects only? What I noticed is that in case of the first project the budget document mentions only 3 071 700 SEK of expenditures while the grant request stands for 3 374 900 SEK.

Well spotted. They are different, and in fact the difference that you find between the grant request and the project cost for The Culture Foundation of the Swedish Postcode Lottery is money that we will use for overhead costs, i.e. that part is not earmarked. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 17:30, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Secondly, the proposal of Wikimedia Sweden has (in comparison to other chapters of similar size) a pretty high FTE count: 9.5. and I would like to understand if it is due to grants. Planned staff cost for 2016 is 4.7 M SEK, and without the two major external fundings (heritage 2.05 M SEK, text-to-speech 0.7 M SEK) it is ca. 2 M SEK. For 2015 total staff cost was ca. 2.909 M SEK, 41% externally funded which meant 1.716 M SEK. What staff is constitutes this difference: advocacy person in Brussels, something else? It is not clear, especially that actual 2015 FTEs were lower than proposed in your submission last year.

Yes, our large increase of staffing for 2016 is based on the expected increase in external funding. Regarding the variation in sums for staff, it is because we also have other external sources in 2016. If you look at the tab Costs you can see the summary. Some of the external funding goes to work on overhead (see above). Staff is not tied to the source of income, which makes it a bit tricky to tie a specific staff function to it and compare it year over year. Regarding advocacy, Karl Sigfrid, our advocacy person in Brussels is doing it as a volunteer. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 17:30, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Thirdly, one of bigger items is advocacy. As WMSE pledged yes that I verify that this proposal requests no funds from the Wikimedia Foundation for political or legislative activities, could you give me an example of WMSE advocacy tasks funded with APG?

Yes, advocacy is a wide subject and one example would be advocating to GLAMs and producers of teaching material and research to use free licenses. For our goal regarding politicians, we have no intention to do lobbying this year, but is in a preparatory phase and need to start by extending our network and getting knowledge of who is who. That is the only thing the FDC grant will be used for. Any form of lobbying will be using external funding that is yet to be acquired. We will make sure to comply with the terms. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 17:30, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Hi [[Hello @Jan, I remember your efforts etc. in Europeana years ago but I wanted to confirm and check out what is new here.

Then, community' items. Am I right that the Equality on Wikipedia 15/16 item means edit-a-thons, surveys etc. aimed at groups believed by WMSE to be underrepresented? Do you have a page summing up these activities? And am I right that these items have some fractional FTEs?

Yes, the Equality on Wikipedia includes such activities. Our project page is here and it is based on this application And yes, Equality on Wikipedia will sum up to a little more than 0.4 FTEs. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 17:30, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Understood, 0.4 was my initial estimate. :)

Finally, to clarify staff expenses: the proposal asks for 4,737,950 SEK; 3 programmes allocate 2,524,700 + 945,000 + 417,500 = 3,887,200 SEK. Non-programme "grey" items "Staff costs" in categories like "Administration", "Employees", "CEO" etc. take 710 250 SEK. The difference (140500 SEK) - are these some other items?

Hm, I do not recognize all of your numbers. Perhaps a bug due to loading in Google sheets? I see this in the document: the proposal asks for 4,737,950 SEK; 3 programmes allocate 2,524,700 + 1,003,000 + 417,500 = 3,945,200 SEK. Non-programme "grey" items "Staff costs" in categories like "Administration", "Employees", "CEO" etc. take 792,750 SEK. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 17:30, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Alright: there are differeces between Costs and particular sheets.

E.g. in Use sheet I see Total staff as: 945000 = Increase Trust and usage 205000 (2x102500) + Increase usability 740000 (700k + 40k) = 245000 (FDC) + 700000 Own.

In the same time, in Costs you have 1003000 SEK as the item Increase Trust and usage is 263000. As it is a FDC funded: what is the difference? :)

The same: both items in Community programme are bigger.

If you manage to see it on time, it'd be nice to know the reason. :D

Best Regards, I hope these are pretty obvious answers for you. aegis maelstrom δ 08:33, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for reviewing our proposal at such detail. I supplied answers indented above. I hope that makes things more clear. If not, please ask again and I will make my best to explain it more clearly. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 17:30, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Yeay, sorry for being such a pesky reviewer! Obviously I cannot be that careful with every APG number as I would need to be highered with FTE>1 ;) but I am trying to understand you and your methods of managerial accounting (as we do not have a single standard cross-wide Wikimedia). Regardless of some differences between sheets and a difficulty to link programme costs-FTEs-people (some of them very understandable :) ) I really like your approach (and I like learning from it). And it could be helpful in preparing a one single format for everyone.

And finally, very often the better you understand something, the more confident you are with that. :) Best Regards och tack så mycket, aegis maelstrom δ 15:17, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

New grant approved

We just received notice that another grant we were not so sure to get was approved. The total amount is 486 000 SEK and it will go to education related activities. The application are available here (in Swedish). We are now looking into the effects of this good news! Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 15:23, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

Congratulations, WMSE! Bravo. KLove (WMF) (talk) 21:15, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

Extension granted for next progress report

Here for archival purposes. WMSE has asked for an extension on their progress report originally due on 30 July 2016. Extension has been granted until 31 August 2016. Delphine (WMF) (talk) 10:02, 14 July 2016 (UTC)