Grants talk:PEG/WM FI/WMFI 2015 H2

The WMFI board is currently considering revisions to this grant request. The status has been changed to Draft. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 18:49, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

GAC members who support this request

1. --DerekvG (talk) 00:56, 1 June 2015 (UTC)
2. I think that the plan can be realized and can produce results. --Ilario (talk) 09:58, 5 June 2015 (UTC)
3. Support. Alleycat80 (talk) 07:35, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

GAC comments

I find this a hefty budget, and I have difficulty seeing measurable results. However there might be a lot of imponderable results. Allow me to go deeper into the fact that you ask for over 5.000 € for your education program. you say "Committee work with education has not produced results in Wikimedia Finland so far." that is quite a statement when you ash for 5000 € budget, including a paid staff member.

Am I right in my assessment, that you are looking for leads through a steering committee, that you need a paid project manager for that and the translation of 3 brochures (are you getting paid translators?). What is your target group, what are the defining characteristics? How large is your target group? How many lecturers/ schools have you convinced to step into the education project? Are you preparing any pilots and experience building for your education team, if so when are they planned? Have you determined what your education community needs/requirements are? What Wikimedia education needs exist in Finland outside your education system? What you need in terms of volunteers to address those needs and and how many volunteers you can rely on to cover the education need. The metrics of the education program do not reflect education objectives they measure number of articles number of illlustrations which is in term of measure of success of an education program irrelevant. --DerekvG (talk) 17:03, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

You target your GLAM activities at Wikimania , in April our Dutsh friends organsied Glam wiki. This is the place to be for experieicen exchange about GLAMś --DerekvG (talk) 17:16, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments! We are seeking funding to initiate the education program. The task of the coordinator is to answer the kind of questions you describe to successfully design the right kind of program for Finland. The budget consists of 80 hours of work for that, 12 hours for layout work for 3 brochures each, printing costs + 125 € to host an open education advocates' meeting. See the spreadsheet.

We were and will be presenting in GLAM-Wiki 2015 and Wikimania 2015. The Maptime! Wikimedia and maps, for beginners workshop in GLAM-Wiki 2015 was hosted by Susanna Ånäs from Wikimedia Finland. In Wikimania, Sanna Hirvonen, Board member in 2014 and a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and the coordinator for the Bring Culture to Wikipedia series will present A Gateway Theory – How Edit-a-thons Can Lure Innocent GLAMs into the World of Wiki. --Susannaanas (talk) 17:24, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

More volunteers

Hi, thanks for the submission. I saw in the submitted report, and in this grant proposal, that you lack volunteers. If so, why not focus your efforts on the programs that aim to bring in more volunteers (such as the GLAM/WikiHacks/LocalWikipedia programs) and discontinue / postpone things that are not going to bring new volunteers, such as the WikiMaps and WikiData projects? I'm encourgaing you to think strategically - what is the main outcome you wish for WMFI next year? --> and then plan your program around it.

One last thing; My experience in WMIL, is that "one-off" events often don't yield long-term volunteers. I have the battle scars to show for it, too! Your report says so as well - you state 0 new editors surviving for the longer term in your GLAM project. I suggest you plan multiple-meeting courses, where people have to be selected by you, and REALLY have to make an effort to be selected to. We are seeing better results with this approach. If you like, I can connect you to our ED, Michal, for details.

Alleycat80 (talk) 01:46, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

We are focusing GLAM/Wikihacks and it has been our most visible activity in last years and maybe most succesful too. Wikimaps has been most expensive because Susanna and contractors have been paid for that though. However the Wikidata is important because it is machine readable and it can be used to merge different datasets together. In example in last february I used Wikidata and Finnish National Gallery API Overview to generate pre-filled artist article templates in Open knowledge foundations hackaton. Wikidata is also used in fiwiki things like data validation. (eg even the Wikidata data quality varies it can be used in example for checks that if birth and death dates are correct in articles).

About success, yes i can confirm that the multiple meetings are better in editor recruiting point of view. We had Wikiproject Ateneum 2012-2014 by Pitke and which was organised as monthly meetings where was also one wikipedist as tutor. That was success in both terms in editors and contributions. However generally editors from GLAM events will make ten or hundred edits in their wikipedia careers so it is not so big reason to do those events.

There are however there are other reasons to do those vents too. Rupriikki mediamuseum which have dual acted as Tampere wikipedist meetup and i think that it is more important as yearly Tampere meetup than edithaton itself. Other example is that in 2014 there was Data opener -network cource, Open cultural data -masterclass by Open Knowledge Finland which was followed by "Tuo kulttuuri Wikipediaan" -course with six events and one in 2015 (Take culture to Wikipedia) by Wikimedia Suomi. Both were targeted to people working in GLAMs, but they were also open to public. As expected Tuo kulttuuri Wikipediaan weren't too big success from new editors point of view but it was big success in open data advocacy point of view. As result 2014 multiple Finnish GLAM organisations started to publish their pictures in Flickr under Creative Commons by-licence. After that there was goverment Public Administration Recommendation (http://www.jhs-suositukset.fi/web/guest/jhs/recommendations/189 JHS 189]) deviced by OKF Fi for that the public organisations should licence their works with Creative Commons 4.0 when possible. In april 2015 National Land Survey of Finland changed their map licence to CC4.0 from their own licence. Eg. i think that our last year target and success wasn't the editors but solving the licensing gap which would not have happened without actors like OKFFi or Wikimedia Suomi and this is tangible result --Zache (talk) 09:50, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

User base of Finnish wikipedia is dropping from 2008 until 2013 when it starts to balance out.

@Alleycat80:. Just to be sure i would like to point out that we have been able more or less balance the our editor loss in Finnish Wikipedia. It is rather hard to which are the elements which have effected to editor loss but my guess is that Wikimedia Finlands outreach (GLAM and other stuff), Flagged revisions and Visual Editor is main ones. Also one of the main reasons why WMFI is mostly outreach project is that when I started in WMFI member the community was losing roughly 10% of its editors per year and if we would have been recruiting active members from inside community we would have been cannibalizing those same people too what community was needing. So we our choose was mainly recruit people outside and push them towards Wikipedia and also do cool stuff to show for Wikipedia internal community and for potential new editors that editing Wikipedia can be fun and cool, and you can show your own name and face if you want. So that is our strategic choice. It has worked out least for cool stuff and for that the community is nowadays more healthy (less trolling, better articles, new editors) than it was before. -Zache (talk) 15:28, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

A general statement as a reply to several comments

Hi Alleycat80. Thanks a lot for your comments! I reply below to many comments about the same key issues that keep popping up.

Sure, I hope I'm helpful. I thank you for your detailed replies below, I am content with most of them, except our little disagreement of measures regarding community. But I said my opinion (with some more detail, below), and it's only an opinion. I wish you good luck and support this :-) Alleycat80 (talk) 07:35, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

The choices we have made are based on strategic thinking but they should be clarified by documents that we could refer to when discussing our choices. In addition to the overall strategy of the association, we should document what I will present in this statement. We may need more time than the process of evaluating this application to do that properly with the community. We are willing to discuss methods of reaching our goals effectively enough.

Key challenges

The key perceived threats or challenges from the comments are:

• Too little participation, too little volunteers
• Too little contributions

In relation to spent money and in relation to benefit to WMF sites

Our principles

We are working to make contributing to Wikimedia relevant and rewarding. I see the following key principles in this work:

1. Tap into the research needs of individuals, make Wikipedia useful and fun for them in their own work or hobby. We are interested to study how for example local knowledge can be brought to Wikipedia. That will mean that when people are engaging with their hobby they include Wikipedia in the process.
2. Bring the data/content of knowledge organizations into Wikimedia. It means primarily two things: Make data available through Wikidata and open content from memory organizations though GLAM programming. This must be extended to other domains. We want to address institutions and make contributing to Wikimedia a standard practice in their knowledge production work. We want to offer training to the volunteer community as well as the knowledge organizations to handle these data imports and media uploads.
3. Investigate how knowledge in Wikimedia projects as well as outside Wikimedia can be brought together and enriched. Innovating with open data takes place in hackathons and other exploratory events. Yesterday in #Hack4NO us wikimedians (Norway, Sweden and Finland) were able to tie the use of Wikimedia into many of the projects.
4. It is an open question how the association should engage directly with editors. Convincing editors one-by-one in events will consume the energy of the association and require a lot of volunteers. GLAM events in the future will require the GLAM to take responsibility of engaging it's own communities, attract volunteers to participate and hire a lecturer directly, while the association can help in structuring this. The future EDU program will also deal with editor engagement. We should investigate if he methods in GLAM and EDU can be interchangeable.

In addition to the above we hope to see that the tools and processes for contributions are enjoyable and that the technology is not an obstacle.

Volunteers/editors

We disagree on the role of volunteers and are confused about the pressure. We think volunteers are first class citizens who should be allowed to participate to the extent they are comfortable with. We don't think they should be free labour to do what we do: organize events, connect with organizations and communities of interest, develop technology, launch projects. It is our job to oversee that their work is meaningful. While saying this, I agree that we must ensure that there is space for volunteer participation in all our activities, but I am reluctant to set goals for that. I consider volunteering a gift. We are proposing to take into account the variety of ways we encourage people and organizations to contribute, and perhaps devise metrics for that.

I see your point; I just think that you *have* to make sure your community is healthy, and growing. Setting numbers for that is not something that should be considered a bad thing; after all - if you are making sure your volunteers are happy, their work is appreciated, and they do meaningful things (which I'm sure you are!! btw), their number should increase, even slowly, as time passes. Why not measure that and get validation you're going in the right direction? Alleycat80 (talk) 07:29, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

Definitely! The key thing is how to set the expectations, and whether we can celebrate each editor who turns into an active offline community member or be dissatisfied with their number. Thank you for your support! Susannaanas (talk) 21:04, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata

Wikidata is priority 1. We want editors to concentrate on writing articles rather than updating numbers, since the community is small and gets exhausted. This is an essential part of making contributions meaningful. For those who like numbers we offer the possibility of learning Wikidata with us. I hope it is not expected that some communities would be without the data skills? We wish to enforce the skills of handling media in the same manner in the Finnish community.

Events

The amount and scope of events is a continuous learning and tuning process. We are exploring recurring events and have new options for the autumn. We have discussed about hosting a regular meetup at a research library. A monthly/weekly theme could be experimented with, with a combination online and onsite activities. Organizing more online activities is an area to investigate. We are already fluent with remote work.

Exploratory events, hacks etc. are our core competency. We want to continue that.

Awesome stuff. Glad to hear. Alleycat80 (talk) 07:30, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! I asked the participants in our spring assembly about whether they think we should turn into a more online community. I have rarely seen such disappointed faces, and that confirmed that the people (of which some were completely new) do support the path of doing things together that we have chosen. Susannaanas (talk) 21:10, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

Work locally

We find introducing Wikipedia work in different cities in Finland useful. Even though participant numbers are not very high, the reach often is in terms of communities of interest. We also have an interest to develop the practices of gathering local knowledge and develop the role of Wikipedia in that.

Wikimaps

is a project in its own right. It has been convenient for WMFI and the Wikimaps project to share the same resource (me) between them. It is an option that Wikimaps no longer will be under the WMFI umbrella if the benefit to WMFI is questioned. So far there has been no discussion about that. In that case Wikimaps would have to create its own infrastructure outside WMFI, but it would not cease to exist.

Swedish

The WMFI community is mainly Finnish-speaking and serving that community. However we see that we are a country-based organization that supports all languages spoken in the area. For the visit of WMSE in Helsinki last week, we arranged a meeting between them and our key Swedish-speaking partners for discussing collaboration.

Susannaanas (talk) 15:11, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

Community comments

Tony1

Heavens, GAC seems to have died, aside from DerekvG. Could someone wake them up?

Don't be a troll, Tony1. It's beneath you. We are all volunteers, with work to do, families to support, errands to run... Alleycat80 (talk) 01:47, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

So you're calling me a troll? Seriously? Tony (talk) 11:58, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

And Susannaasas, I wonder whether you could respond to Derek's queries more fully ... also, your links to google spreadsheets above lead to an access-refused notice. Surely these things are onwiki somewhere?

The google spreadsheet is a spreadsheet version of the budget in the application, with calculations. Unfortunately it was left unopened, thank you for the notice.

Sure. Tony (talk) 13:58, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

I agree with him that it's a hefty budget. I've gone through the application page once, fairly quickly. It's sprawling and in one place incomplete (education table?), so not an easy read. Much of it is vague, whereas for this amount of donors' money we need more precise information. I'll return soon to go through it again with more helpful comments in that respect. Some statements are hard to understand ("There is no evident recurring schedule"; "We must create more events, or ensure that there is at least one monthly event in Helsinki."—why?).

Why should there be a clearly recurring event in Helsinki? The events take up a lot or resources if they are not "automated": organized in the same recurring time and location with minor changes in the agenda. If they are sparse or irregular, each event will require much more organizing per event.

OK, series of events can be useful, especially if carefully programmed and focused editathons with strategically selected participants (according to the WMF's Asaf Bartov). However, my intuition tells me recurrent should be every few days, or every day, for a short period (not once a month). So, I'm wondering about the distribution over time, and the themes, of these events—being naturally cautious about whether they actually garner new medium- to long-term basiseditors. Tony (talk) 13:58, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

People photographing "Kotkia" by Bertel Nilsson for the DroneArt Helsinki! event

In particular I'd like more precise information about the hackathons and wikidays (format, timings, presenters, process, likely achievements; I'm concerned about "confusing mix of topics"). My tech friends tell me that physical meetups are helpful, but there seem to be quite a lot of them in this plan.

The typology of the one projected Wikihack day has not been settled exactly. We have a lot of experience in this already with the Wiki Loves Maps hackathon or yesterday's DroneArt Helsinki! event (collaborative notes). The events would follow a similar pattern. I will add that information in the application rather that use here as an argument, but I will not be able to do it this week.

I note the "risks" of "not very active participation". This is a concern, especially since Finland is a geographically large country with low population density. I'm wondering at this stage whether Finnish connectivity is generally good enough to do more online than in person, while directing the funding to programmatic activities of more direct benefit to WMF sites.

That is also something that the chapter is not necessarily needed for. We are very good in disseminating information about Wikimedia projects in Finland among different actors and finding ways of demonstrating the benefits in person. I hope we can work towards taking advantage of our strengths than trying to force results in areas that are not likely to perform.

You write: "That is also something that the chapter is not necessarily needed for."—I'm unsure what you mean; is online contact not something the chapter wants to organise? I'd recommend a wider debate about it, if that's the case. Tony (talk) 13:58, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

"Measures of success"—this is a lot of money to pay for these low numbers; e.g. 5 "new images/media added to Wikimedia article pages" ... really? "[5] active editors involved". This is more suitable for google huggle video conferencing sessions, and I'd much rather pay for an isolated participant to go to the library for good connectivity than bring a host of people to one central location.

In your most recent report, it would be helpful to have links to diffs of "19 articles created" and "1 improved"—it's hard to judge what we got for €12000+ of staff and equivalent volunteer labour, plus other costs, unless we see the extent and quality of work. Skills improved/acquired are not mentioned. I don't know what "The course was useful for our organization. DISAGREE - - - 2 4 AGREE" means.

• I have not realized diffs for articles would be required in reports. Are they? [Examples would be good, yes, in future reports, for both verification and to enable everyone to learn lessons from your experiences. Tony (talk) 14:13, 4 June 2015 (UTC)]
• Skills improved/required seems like a useful metrics and likely to be positive.
• I was hoping that the scale "DISAGREE - - - 2 4 AGREE" would be comprehensible, I did not figure out a nicer way of expressing it. On a 5-step scale from DISAGEE to AGREE the answers were distributed in the following manner: 1: 0 mentions, 2: 0 mentions, 3: 0 mentions, 4: 2 mentions, 5: 4 mentions.

I'd suggest giving the scale (which should be "Strongly disagree ... Strongly agree"), and reporting just "0 0 0 2 4". These are very small samples. Tony (talk) 14:13, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Can you link us to somewhere that gives a better sense of what has been and will be achieved in the maps project?

The Maps project has been reported to some extent in the most recent report. You may also read the blog posts. The Nordic Culture Fund part is ongoing and will be reported later. There are many activities that will be reported later and/or have no WMF funding, such as the Wiki Loves Maps seminar and hackathon, the workshop at GLAM-Wiki 2015, the DroneArt Helsinki! event, the #Hack4NO (ideas notes) coming up this weekend. I will also update the blog to reflect latest events, it has been dormant.

A clearer sense of what has been achieved, and what you propose to do on top of this in the proposed extension, is necessary within the actual application. These links, piped, would have been helpful in the application.

Generally, I'm most concerned about low numbers of participants and low ambitions in the measures of success. Also, please confirm that you deal only with Finnish-language sites/projects, not Swedish. Does the Swedish chapter liaise with you about Swedish-language contributions from Finland (20% of the population, is it?) Tony (talk) 13:58, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Thank you. Tony (talk) 12:37, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

Thank you Tony1 for your committed comments! I will have replied above. --Susannaanas (talk) 07:40, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

WMF comments

Thank you Susannaanas, the GAC, and community members for participating in this discussion. We especially appreciate WMFI's efforts to respond to repeated questions around volunteer engagement, measures of success, and your strategy for working with the broader open knowledge movement.

After considerable review of the 2015 H1 proposal, we approved the project plan with expectations for focusing activities and developing a strategy for community engagement. Unfortunately, this proposal and the draft H1 report does not give a clear sense of progress on either of these issues. In terms of those expectations, we have the following questions:

1. Strategy for increased engagement of active Wikimedians: Has WMFI worked on a strategy for engaging not just new editors, but existing editors? What has been done to better understand their interests and needs from the chapter?

   We are expecting to conduct a readership & community survey in the coming H2 term. Based on the survey results we can see which actions would benefit the community most. Support projects and ideas that originate from the community. We will enhance communication about projects and activities in the chapter wiki, start building projects together with the community. (Susannaanas (talk) 08:30, 30 June 2015 (UTC))

   We have a new Facebook group called Wikipedia's friends [1] as Facebook groups are quite popular in Finland. So far it has been a great arena for spreading the news about Wikipedia and Wikimedia but we are still in the beginning. My personal view is that not that many people follow coffee room discussions regularly so spreading the word outside Wikipedia is needed to reach the people who edit only few times a year. And now that we have the group we can start interviewing the people when needed. --Jjanhone (talk) 15:17, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

   My personal view is, that the majority of the active (and even the less active) editors of Finnish language wikipedia (and even many who do not edit much or at all) follow the discussions in the coffee room (as an active editor, I have repeatedly heard from people, who do not edit wikipedia or do not edit it very much, but are interested in it, comments about coffee room discussions, which is something that has surprised me positively, because I myself as an active editor for several years have quite often found the discussions quite dull). And besides, there may be active editors who even do not have a facebook account (even I myself created a facebook account only quite recently, when an account was needed for several different projects both inside and outside the wikimedia movement). Therefore, I find that the only way to reach the whole editor community is the coffee room. If something is not announced there, it is no announced at all. However, also the facebook group is very important and useful, and there are active editors of Finnish language wikipedia also there. - But not all of them are there, only some, I guess. And also, in the facebook group there seem to be many people from the finnish open data movement, GLAM organisations etc. who are interested in finnish language wikipedia and want to learn more about it. How many of the members of the facebook group are active editors of Finnish language Wikipedia, and how many are just unterested, is not easy to to tell, because all users of fi-wikipedia do not share their identity in public. Therefore, the facebook group is a good media for outreach, but not so good media for inreach. --Jyrki Lehtinen (talk) 14:37, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

2. Increase in volunteers who can independently run projects: What progress has been made in developing community members into project leaders? We realize that we (WMF and the GAC) and WMFI have different views on the role of volunteers, but we still believe that the role of staff is to support volunteer projects and initiatives -- not for all activities and organizing to be lead from staff/board. This is the culture of our movement and what we have the ability to support.

   As noted several times before, we are seeing gradual increase in participation through our events and we consider all small steps positive. On the projects edge, the Wikipedia Library project is a project that aims to be run for and by the community itself. Local Wikidays will aim to gather wikimedians in events outside Helsinki. The Ministry of Culture funded Wikidata project will bring together volunteers and organizations to learn together. (Susannaanas (talk) 08:30, 30 June 2015 (UTC))

   Classrooms are in many ways a perfect setting to recruit more editors and teachers make great program leaders. In fact, quite a few teachers in Finland already use Wikipedia and other open knowledge projects as part of their work. The problem is that they've worked on Wikipedia-related activities on their own and there hasn't been much of a network yet. We've started spreading the word and made some introductions this year. Wiki-friendly teachers have joined us and are among our greatest assets.--Tommikovala (talk) 17:29, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

   Just recently a project iniative for the 100th anniversary of the independence of Finland was made from inside the editing community: [2]. The initiator for sure would be capable to lead any project. Many editors, however, have limited spare time, and for the most of them, there are competing activities. Therefore, in my opinion, the long time strategy and solution would be to get more such people involved with wikipedia and at the same time with the wikimedia movement, who have an intrest to produce high quality content to wikipedia and at the same time ability to become project leaders some day. For some, the interest may be personal and a spare time activity as such. For some, it may be to use wikimedia projects as instruments in other projects (the aims of which do not conflict with the aims of the wikimedia movement, of course), i.e. for example local heritage associations or amateur naturalists, or any other spare time activity, in which wikipedia is a suited media to create and maintain contents in a community based or crowdsourced manner. And so, the only win-win situation would be, if someone would have another project, for which some wikimedia project(s) would be a suitable instrument, then this person would gladly become a project leader also in wikipedia/wikimedia. And the role of the chapter (or anyone, who would like to see the wikimedia projects florish), then, would be to seek and promote such opportunities. And what have we done: what Susanna listed above is all part of this, i.e. strenghtening the community by getting people involved. And I think, we are just about to learn (by doing!) how to do it well and in an effective manner. An at the same time, there is (to my opinion as a quite experienced wikimedian but not so very experienced WMFI actor) a growing intrest among them, who could use wikimedia pojects as instruments in their own projects the aims of which do not conflict with the aims of wikimedia projects. --Jyrki Lehtinen (talk) 23:33, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

3. Programmatic focus: The budget for H1 was decreased from the original proposal. This was in part to encourage programmatic focus on the activities that both engage volunteers and deliver impact on the Wikimedia projects. How has this focus improved WMFI's ability to deliver on increasing the quantity and quality of content for Wikimedia projects? How does this new request reflect that focus and any lessons learned?

   We must accommodate to circumstances. We are doing the best we can to engage the community, but we work with many narratives in parallel. Some move forward faster than others. We engage also with the surrounding society in keeping focus on our shared mission of open knowledge. (Susannaanas (talk) 08:30, 30 June 2015 (UTC))

   Finland is in the fortunate position of having a vibrant open knowledge community. We have connections with other volunteer organizations and public institutions that are willing to cooperate with us. Coordinating all this does take a fair amount of effort but this will allow us to keep program costs minimal. For example, our shared office space is a very good deal for good facilities in a handy location.--Tommikovala (talk) 17:29, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

We have a number of other detailed questions related to the specific activities and budget proposed, but hope we can have more clarity around the larger more strategic issues listed above. Looking forward to your responses. Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 23:27, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for the questions. I am asking the board to reply to get a more varied scope of voices on these issues. I add my comments above. --Susannaanas (talk) 08:30, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

I'd also like to thank you for the questions. They mean that you read our proposal carefully and put a lot of thought to it. I really appreciate the chance to clarify our goals and methods. Unfortunately, my computer's logic board got fried on Monday and I've had a hard time setting up a replacement machine, so I couldn't comment on this earlier.--Tommikovala (talk) 17:29, 2 July 2015 (UTC)