Grants talk:PEG/WM UA/Programs in Ukraine 2012/Report

FYI

We are pleased to invite you to read and comment on our grant report --アンタナナ 14:45, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for letting us know! Expect comments, questions, or a decision here on the discussion page this week. Cheers, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 19:43, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! --アンタナナ 19:48, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Thank you

Thank you for this fine report. It is accepted.

1. We would like to congratulate you on the quality of this report and will point other grantees to this report as a good example for grants of this type (supporting a chapter's projects over the course of an extended period of time). We appreciate that your report is detailed and clear.
2. We very much appreciate that your report is reflective, and that you did an excellent job of honestly sharing your lessons learned and your insights with WMF and the community.
3. We were impressed by your chapter's clear focus on content acquisition: it is evident that your projects are increasing the amount of quality content available on the Wikimedia projects.
4. Thank you for sharing your learnings around avoiding conflicts of interest transparently. We recognize that this is a challenge for many groups, and also a key challenge for your chapter. We strongly encourage you to ensure that any financial compensation of participants in your projects is disclosed fully and in advance. If you are interested, we would like to support your chapter as it moves forward with some training in this area (understanding and addressing potential conflicts of interest).
5. Finally, we noticed that you spent a bit more than expected on chapter merchandise. Please offer a brief explanation for the variance here, and explain how the additional spending benefited your projects.

Thank you once again for submitting your report before the deadline and we look forward to your future work.

Best regards, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 16:21, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

• Hi and thank you for the evaluation of our report, we appreciate your feedback and evaluation of our achievements, we are very pleased to know that you liked our activities and our report. We will continue working on our projects and we hope that we will continue successful collaboration.
• Concerning expences on merchandise, this year we (re)launched a Wikizghushchivka project - a project on sending a zghushchivka (a can of condensed milk, our local replacement of barnstars) as well as some souvenirs (e.g. a badge and a mug or a T-shirt) to the most active participants of Wikimedia projects. Each month we send such souvenirs to the most active user and the most active newbie of each Ukrainian project (Wikipedia, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage etc.), and we believe that this project greatly motivates both new and established users. Given the success of this project, we included it as a separate line in 2013 grant. We also actively distributed merchandise at our events (prize ceremonies of contests, WEP events, presentations etc.) and it helped us to attract more new users. We still have some stock remaining (we ordered higher qualities to have more favourable prices), so we will continue distributing them in the following months — NickK (talk) 15:38, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, Winifred! I read it right now in our mailing list - The Ukrainian Wikimedia Chapter List. ;-) --Nickispeaki (talk) 20:17, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

thank you! may i find out more about the training in CoI area? it is a key challenge for us and we are interested to understand and address this issue --アンタナナ 23:59, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Volunteer accounting and other details

Hello, I have a couple curiosities so I dump them here in case it's interesting for you to satisfy them. :)

1. "We have been paying an accounting firm for 9 months of 2012, then the volunteer was assigned to this task": I assume this decision was just because you run out of money for this task/component? This makes me worry for the victim ;-); personally I think that in such cases it's worth mentioning and evaluating the non-financial costs too, for instance what else the volunteer could not do due to this additional workload.
2. What t-shirts do you give to the keen photobiker? :) I see you have two 19.59 $ t-shirt lines in addition to the general t-shirt spending so they seem to be two different pools.
3. It's interesting that you built a university partnership model which is very lightweight, almost at no financial cost (though stats indicate you mostly engaged 1-2 universities of the pool of 10, probably the closest). Again however, this makes me wonder about your "externalities": how worn out the volunteers in the project are; whether the burden of assisting/educating/correcting the students was put mainly on the projects' communities' standard workflow and if yes whether they were happy or not. In short, if it is/was sustainable or rather some sort of liability for the period.

On the monthly reports: feel your pain of assembling a yearly report with activities from dozens people! In our (WMIT's) experience, it's of great help even if you just maintain a chronological list (calendar) of events in a single page, adding them as soon as they are decided/they happen. Encourage every board member to be proud of every event they organise/attend and to boast write a couple lines about each, either on your mailing list or on wiki, in your language. Translating to English is tedious, but even worse is trying to remember what happened on each day one year later, so better ask something they have some internal incentives to provide. All this may be true or not for you, of course. --Nemo 08:14, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi and thank you for your questions!

1. We have been paying to an accounting firm in April-December 2012 until AGM 2012. After a new board was elected in December 2012, we introduced a position of the treasurer in the board, and a new treasurer (Antanana) had a background in Financial Management and was competent enough to prepare these reports herself. Moreover, she found out that reports by this accounting firm were not detailed enough, and thus we decided to stop partnership with this firm. Reporting and working with grants are major responsibilities of our treasurer, at least for now it works well, we will see if the new board will keep this model for next year.
2. 19.59$ corresponds to the expences of those bikers, but they decided not to claim their expenses, thus we have put "-" to the "WMF funds" column. The T-shirts were the standard ones (line 5.4), 31.20 UAH (3.81$) each, not special ones.
3. Out of our university partners, we do engage 2 universities more than others, but that's just because those two universities (namely, National Technical University of Ukraine KPI and Kyiv National University) are the largest in Ukraine: almost 40,000 and over 20,000 respectively, and we work with the wide range of specialities, from Geography to Media. At the moment the programme does require some investment from university coordinators who mostly manage interaction with professors and students, but this does not require heavy investment (several hours a month). Assisting and educating students is mostly done in the form of workshops (organised by volunteers in the universities), correcting students is done either by WEP volunteers or project communities, no problem were found so far as users mostly focus on quality instead of quantity. At the moment this does not require heavy investment, but this may change in future, depending on the motivation of volunteers and universities.

We tried to add activities from dozens of people to our 2012 yearly report, hope we have not missed anything important :) At the moment we ask all organisers of events to post a small post about their event to our blog or (at least) on our mailing list, unfortunately, Ukrainian only so far. We are asking users to make a brief summary in English, but we do not systematically get English summaries yet — NickK (talk) 14:58, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Great, thank you. --Nemo 11:39, 16 November 2013 (UTC)