Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2017-2018 round 1/Wikimedia Serbia/Staff proposal assessment

Hello everyone. Thank you for this assessment, it is very important to us to hear your opinion and have a look on this matter from different perspective. Although, while reading it, we were under the impression that certain things were left unclear and we would like to explain them more thoroughly.

Primarily, it is important to amplify the fact that Wikimedia Serbia carefully listens to all the advices and suggestions received by WMF and FDC. We think that we have evolved significantly compared to the previous year, and we believe that we will continue growing in the future.

We realized that some parts of the plan were not clear enough, so we will try to explain them in greater detail.

• We tried to take the initiative to establish leadership in the region by our proposal to organize CEE meeting in 2018. Employees of WMRS have thoroughly examined the possibilities of organizing the conference and created a bid. The representatives of WMRS who attended the CEE meeting in Warsaw paid attention to the organizational and program matters, highlighted in the report compiled after the conference. These matters were recorded in order to keep them in mind during the potential organizing of CEE meeting 2018 in Serbia. However, Wikimedia Ukraine was selected as the organizer of the conference.
• The need to include diversity in programs was stressed many times. However, bearing in mind that WMRS had to create a clearer focus, it has been decided through the brainstorming and strategy-building processes what the priority for the next period will be - Edu, GLAM and Community. It should be clear that the activities related to diversity are being implemented through the existing activities. So this year, for the first time in Serbia, we had Wiki Loves Pride, which consisted of an edit-a-thon and the first organised Pride photo tour. This took place in September, so the results may not have been visible. However, they can be found on the project page on English Wikipedia. Wikimedia LGBT’s Twitter page even shared one of the photos taken on that occasion. There is a plan with Pride organisers to release photos from all previous Pride events in Serbia. We will continue to support such activities in the coming years. In addition to this, our projects involve female editors of Wikipedia. At the moment, we are having an article-writing contest on Serbian Wikipedia on the topic of notable women through history, which has reached as many as 130 articles for the first 9 days. It might be an indication that this contest will be one of the more successful ones. Project Wiki Librarian largely includes female editors, because the field of librarianship in Serbia is mostly consisted of women. Through the educational activities, an edit-a-thon was organised in coordination with UNITAS Foundation and the Red Cross, on the topic of human trafficking, where we covered the sensitive subject by raising awareness about vulnerable groups of people among us.
• Communication Manager is a full time employee, but it is important to emphasize that her job is split into two parts: 50% GLAM program and 50% the media. This was noted in previous annual plans and reports, so we have not emphasized this particularly, because we thought it was well known. So, in addition to the media, she is actively working on the establishment of GLAM cooperation and the development of this program.
• Regarding the sharing of our experience, we have really tried to make our projects and results more visible through the writing of newsletters on Outreach (Edu example, GLAM example). GLAM cooperations were also recorded within this category. This can certainly be improved and we will work on it.
• Underspending - this has been substantially corrected and with the intensification of the GLAM program in the last quarter, the rest will definitely be lower than 5,000 euros. Please note that the WMRS has a significant number of in-kind donations, which leaves much of the funds unspent. We can not rely on them when writing an annual plan, because we do not know with certainty whether we will have, for example, provided space for a conference and/or catering by a partner, and we do not want our program activities to depend on such things, so we have to plan them in our budget. We also have some specific circumstances such as government’s funds or other funds (external financiers). In general, fund applications are announced later, and the results are known at the end of the year, when the WMRS annual plan has already been prepared and published on Meta.

All of the above states the fact that WMRS is an organization that is learning, adopting new knowledge from the Wikimedia Movement and implementing them. Thus, we believe that we should grow and stay in the FDC, because it will greatly motivate members of the community and employees and will be a confirmation of their efforts and hard work. --IvanaMadzarevic (talk) 15:30, 9 November 2017 (UTC)