Grants talk:PEG/WM PH/Cultural Heritage Mapping project 2014/Report

Hi Seav, Namayan, and everyone that worked on this project. Thank you for this very detailed and informative report! We really appreciate all the time and effort put into documenting the project and reflecting on lessons learned. We are impressed with the level of organization, of both the offline activities and all of the online work. The geographic coverage is impressive, the photos have high encyclopedic value, and the article quality is generally good (special thanks to Carlo Moskito!). We were all inspired originally by this project and the immediate need to document cultural heritage in the Philippines, given the natural disasters of the last several years. The organizing team and volunteers have made a really commendable start in helping to preserve your history.

We are happy to hear that the training and certification period was beneficial and could be improved upon in the future. It also sounds like you've developed some useful partnerships with SMART, the National Historic Commission, and local heritage organizations. It's interesting, and not too surprising, that the wikiexpeditions and editathons were much more successful in getting the volunteers engaged and productive. It was probably ambitious to think recently trained volunteers would or could take the initiative to go out on their own and that is a good lesson for all of us. These types of events, however, would be harder to organize farther afield from Manila, as you noted.

We understand that a project of this size and complexity also has a lot of challenges. Defining roles and responsibilities from the beginning, identifying the best person for the project lead role, dealing with interpersonal conflict, and setting up efficient systems for expense reimbursement are the main areas for improvement.

We have mentioned this before, but we encourage you to look at the tool Wikimedia Czech Republic has created for easily processing high volumes of small expense reimbursements from volunteers. You can read about it on the Wikimedia blog.

The Philippine Heritage Map is a different version than what we've seen in the past. Previously, monuments on the map linked directly to the Wikipedia article and it was nicely integrated. Looking at the current map, it seems like there is very little information and no links to Wikipedia. Do you know what the plans are for the map? Is the previous version of the map still available?

Thank you for the detailed budget information. Can you let us know the different between the "project management costs" and "project manager fee"? Also, we are not clear on the "contingent project management fee." The remaining funds of 466,817.12 PHP should be returned to WMF until all affiliate issues have been resolved.

In terms of continuing this project, we see that you have a grant request for the Encyclopedia of Philippine Heritage in draft. We will be interested in understanding what the plans are after the affiliate issues are resolved.

Thank you again for all your work on this project and for wrapping up the reporting despite all the challenges. Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 04:12, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Hi, Alex. Thank you for appreciating the report that we provided! It was certainly challenging to create this report (one of the reasons for its delay) but I think it provides a lot of useful information that can be applied to other similar projects so it hopefully is worth the wait. I will respond to 4 points:

• Thank you for again pointing us to WMCZ's Tracker tool. We don't have the time yet to evaluate this tool but we will definitely consider it for future projects involving lots of small expenses and reimbursements. Our chapter has recently qualified for the free use of NetSuite's accounting software (one of our action items for improving financial systems in the chapter). We are in the process of setting up the software and trialling it for use over the next few months. So we first need to see if NetSuite already fulfills what we need, and if not, what sort of integration is needed to hook up NetSuite with Tracker or another tool.
• The original Philippine Heritage Map website is no longer available. The current website is now powered by Arches while the original site was powered by WordPress. In terms of content, there is no major loss as the original website was intended to mirror content from Wikipedia (including map coordinates) and Wikimedia Commons—and only presenting the content in a navigable website. The future plans for the website is that it will be managed as an independent project while WMPH will continue developing content for Wikipedia, Commons, and Wikidata. For example, WMPH currently has a trial map website for displaying data stored in Wikidata. We believe this separation of Wikimedia project from the Philippine Heritage Map is the best way forward given some of the conflicts encountered.
• Please refer to the detailed expenses ODS file that we have submitted via e-mail for the project management costs. The project management costs are basically expenses incurred for meetings and project coordination (transportation, food, mobile phone load, etc.), such as meetings held with partner institutions (like traveling over 100km to meet with the Sariaya Heritage Council for planning the WikiExpedition Sariaya). The project manager fee is the honorarium for the project coordinator (Zach Pagkalinawan) which was submitted and approved as a reallocation. The contingent fee is the unpaid honorarium that we are reserving when Zach comes back from his masteral studies abroad and completes the remaining documentation needed.
• As for the new grant request: We will be updating this when the other issues have been resolved as the proposed timelines in the grant request no longer apply.

We will provide responses to the remaining points soon (hopefully by next week). Cheers! —seav (talk) 05:44, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for the responses. What documentation till remains to be completed when Zach is back? Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 19:21, 27 April 2016 (UTC)