Grants talk:PEG/WM UA/Wiki Loves Monuments 2014

Evaluation by the GAC

GAC members who support this request

1. Yet, another WML application, and the contest is about to be finished in 3 days till today.. So it is easy to say that you will partially achieve your measures of success and partially not. For sure you won't achieve 400 participants (there is 234 at the moment) and maybe you achieve 25,000 images but it is not very probable (at the moment there is 11427). But.. well there are not so important details, and for sure you have well written budget and one of the best WLM edition although problems in your country. Polimerek (talk) 19:27, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

   Not exactly, we have started it on 15 September and it will last until 15 October. Problems in our country together with summer holidays and slow international organisation were the reasons why we started two weeks later. This contest is thus to be finished in 18 days and is much more likely to achieve 25,000 images — NickK (talk) 01:21, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

2. Support, except on the particular matter of the photo albums, on which I'd like more information in response to mine and Alex Wang's questions. Craig Franklin (talk) 10:35, 2 October 2014 (UTC).

GAC comments

This is more of a general comment to WMF team - maybe we (GAC & Grants team) need to create more strict guidelines for WLM submissions? e.g. establish (and enforce!) some guidelines for prizes, schedule, souvenirs and such, and create a standard method of approving this to save your headaches and our time? I mean, there must be a way to deduce the "right" amount of prize money that motivated volunteers to produce a "significant" amount of photographs, and there "must" be a way to make more impact (e.g. allow for bigger grants if the competitions involve events such as edit-a-thons, and not only commons uploads). No? Alleycat80 (talk) 20:50, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

While I don't think that it would be possible to standardise the entire process (as pointed out below, the logistics of running the event in countries like Russia, India, or Monaco are going to be completely different from each other), there are areas where we could come up with generic templates that we're happy with. Some of the measures of success, for instance, are likely to be comparable even amongst very different countries and cultures. Perhaps for next year we can look at this. Craig Franklin (talk) 14:10, 1 October 2014 (UTC).

I agree with Craig that we can't really standardize the grant review process for all WLM grants, but we can provide guidelines for a WLM grant request. We have put together a photo event program resource page with suggested measures of success and other resources. The next step would be to build a sample proposal and the guidelines. I can start this and will ask GAC members for their input. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 23:10, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Now, for the actual comment: In line with some of the other WLM grants, I do think that you should lower the prize money, or at least the spending on calendars. Although "successful" as you put it, it is more of an after-the-fact kind of spending (as it promotes winning photographs *after* the competition), and you should consider excluding this or producing a digital calendar and not a physical one which costs thousands of dollars. I would actually use some of the prize money to support creation of more editing events... Alleycat80 (talk) 20:58, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't think that a "unified" WLM grant is a good way to do. Many countries have a specific context: for example, Pakistani organisers have said that contest will not be successful if one does not offer cash prizes, while in Ukraine we explicitly do not want to distribute cash prizes (it is more complicated from both legal point of view and is very differently viewed by people), in some countries most of prizes are provided by sponsors, while in Ukraine it is highly unlikely we will get more than one big or several smaller prizes. It also heavily depends on the level of participation and coverage: while it is reasonable for us to provide prizes for top-10 photographers having pictured most monuments (as these users cover at least several hundred monuments each), it may be much less reasonable in, say, Luxembourg or Andorra where coverage is close to 90%. Thus needs and resources are different, so are grant requests.

Concerning your comment, we do not order any calendars. However, we do order photo albums, and that was probably your main concern. From our experience, photo albums are the best items we can offer to partners and use for promotion of WLM during our events. These albums show the best images from WLM (and we do have a choise, as we had over 30,000 images in previous years) as well as information about us and our projects, both in Ukrainian and English since last year. Thus it is definitely not true that albums only promote winning photographs, it is much more important for us to promote WLM (and Wikimedia projects in general) between the contests so that we can attract people, and albums do help people understand why they may be interested in supporting or participating in such contest. In addition, our 2013 album also had a particular stress on freedom of panorama, and it helped us raise public awareness about this problem. Digital album will not be of any use for this purpose: people may write down link somewhere, but we cannot control if they will ever open it (well, we have Instagram for this). Without this album we will either have to arrange a presentation of this digital album (not always practical as laptop and screen are needed) or come to meetings without any WLM materials, and I do not even mention the fact that there are still people in Ukraine who don't use Internet (in particular some historians who often have valuable information about monuments and may be willing to share). Thus these albums do support creation by raising awareness of people and organisations about WLM, and in our view this is one of the best investments in supporting creation we can make — NickK (talk) 22:58, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

Photo album

Can you please provide more detail on the "photo album" portion of this project? It represents just over a quarter of the overall budget, but there is not a lot of detail on what the two thousand dollars will be spent on. I'm also not 100% sold on holding an awards ceremony and other big events for the winners; while we should of course celebrate those who are most successful this seems to me a rather expensive way to do actually have impact. On the other hand, if the "Presentation events" are like the gallery exhibitions that have been done in previous years, the reports I've read would indicate that they're a relatively efficient way of connecting with the public. Craig Franklin (talk) 14:10, 1 October 2014 (UTC).

Hi Craig and thanks for your question!

Concerning the budget of the photo album, our expenses can be split into two parts:

• costs for the preparation the album. Photos, captions and texts about organisation will be done by volunteers, while design and page layout will be done by a professional designer (preparing 64-page album requires more time and skills than our volunteers have) and proofreading will be done by a member of the National Union of Local Lore Researches of Ukraine (who will contact historians in respective regions if further details are needed). These costs are fixed in UAH and can be estimated as 8500 UAH, ca. 650$ (subject to changes in USD/UAH rate)
• printing costs, consist in printing of 500 copies of the album. These costs depend on prices on paper and ink plus fees of the publishing house (most notably for registering the book and getting an ISBN, but these fees are almost negligible), they are fixed in EUR (as paper and ink are purchased in the EU) and can be estimated as 1300€, ca. 1600$ (subject to changes in both EUR/UAH and USD/UAH rates)

We are going to use these 500 copies of the album to distribute to libraries (10 copies), winners, volunteers who helped us and jury members (ca. 100 copies), partners of the 2014 edition and potential partners of the 2015 edition, including both sponsors and historians (ca. 150—200 copies), local governments who have to provide us up-to-date monument lists as there is no nationwide monument register (ca. 50—100 copies), and the rest will go for presentation of WLM during our events.

If you want to know what it will look like, you can look at our 2013 edition here, or you could probably see it at Wikimania if you were there :)

The award ceremony is necessary to get a good media coverage, last year we have invited journalists to the ceremony, and we got a very good media coverage. It is also necessary for collaboration with our partners, as they prefer to give the prizes themselves instead of sending them by post. Thus ceremony does have an impact by increasing awareness of people and organisations about our contest. In addition, if we send prizes by post instead of organising the ceremony, we will not save much as sending anything bigger than A4 envelope is rather expensive.

We do expect to organise a gallery exhibition like last year, probably even in more than one city, but we cannot guarantee it at the monument. Unfortunately it is quite difficult to plan cultural events more than several weeks in advance in Ukraine at the moment, so we may have to replace it with a press conference or a similar event if we will find it more appropriate given the situation at that time.

Please tell me if you need any additional details — NickK (talk) 19:36, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Hi User:NickK, thankyou for the prompt reply. I must confess that my gut feeling is that the photo album, as lovely as it is (and as much as I'd like one in my personal library), does not represent good value for money in terms of movement impact. Is there any information on what sort of impact it had last year? I'd be very happy to change my position on this particular issue if there is more information (beyond what was in last year's report.

Apart from this one issue the rest of the request seems quite reasonable to me, especially in light of WMUA's success with WLM in previous years. Craig Franklin (talk) 10:33, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Hi Craig, I have added some details below in the section #Album. Hope this helps — NickK (talk) 21:40, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

WMF comments

Thanks, NickK and the WLM Ukraine team, for your engagement in the discussion of this grant request. WMUA has a strong track record of organizing photo contests (WLM and WLE) and we appreciate the work you put into ensuring their success! It's great to see that you've added an article writing contest to the actitivies this year - something we are encouraging other folks to do as well!

We have the following comments/questions:

1. Were you able to get monument lists from local governments? Did you do targeted outreach to less-covered regions?
2. How was the jury selected and how many jury members will there be?
3. Does "5000 image uses across Wikimedia projects" mean total images uses or distinct images used? 5,000 distinct images used would be a great goal (20% of the targeted 25,000 photos)!
4. Last year's prize hall was covered by the Ministry of Culture. Is this possible this year?
5. It seems like a good opportunity to combine the award ceremony with the presentation/press events. What do you think?
6. What is the budget breakdown for the article competition? How will the prizes be awarded? Will there be prizes for number of articles, quality of articles, number of images integrated on wiki projects? It does not seem necessary to have a press conference for an online writing competition.
7. Photo album: We understand that the previous albums were a "big success" and "very helpful" for promoting WLM and the broader mission of WMUA. Can you provide more details on what the impact was? Who did you send the albums to previously? Did they result in new partnerships? We understand the general outreach benefits of a product like the album, but the expense needs more justification. If you believe there is real impact with the albums, we suggest printing a much smaller quantity for targeted outreach -- potential GLAM partners and sponsors.

Looking forward to your responses, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 23:01, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Hi Alex and thank you for your questions.

1. We still do not have 100% coverage. We have 670 districts and cities, approx. in 80—85% of them we have usable lists (i.e. most of users will be able to find a monument they can picture), and in approx. 30% of them we already have full and updated lists (with all available monuments). However, in 15—20% of them we have little to no monuments, and we obtained either no response or a formal response without lists from local goverments. Please note that these figures are after 3 years of contacting local governments, not just from this year. We have made targeted outreach via local media, contacting local cultural institutions and organising photo expeditions, with some photo expeditions probably following over the next two weekends.
2. We have selected jury members so that we have approx. 1/3 of historians specialised in monuments, 1/3 of photographers, 1/3 of Wikipedians (including three winners of previous editions of WLM and WLE who should know quite well what is a winning photo). Historians and photographers are partly representatives of our partners, partly people found by our volunteers. We expect to have 15 members of the jury (with 11 already confirmed).
3. We would be very glad to have 5,000 distinct images used, but we are not sure it will be possible, so we used total image uses as a measure. Each measures has both positive and negative points: in the first case people will be more likely to use different images (probably lower-quality) to illustrate the same monument, in the second one people will be more likely to use the best image to illustrate the same monument in different articles. However, as we have already reached our target of 5,000 monuments pictured in just two weeks, we will most likely meet both targets of 5,000 distinct images used and 5,000 total image uses
4. We do not have the same collaboration with the Ministry of Culture due to their reorganisation. The team in the ministry and their internal structure has almost completely changed over the last few months, so we have to negotiate with them from the very beginning. We are currently negotiating with them, but we have no guarantee they will provide us the hall free of charge. We do expect however to get a hall for a price lower than a market price, i.e. just to cover their expenses such as entrance tickets (if it is a museum) or cleaning fees and similar charges.
5. We do want to invite press to the award ceremony of the photo contest part, but it will not be a format of a real press conference. Our promotion events will either have a different format (e.g. gallery exhibition in a different hall) or will be held in a different city (e.g. in 2013 we had a press conference in the city where the winning photo came from, and we had a higher participation from that region).
6. We expect that 750$ will be the prize budget and 100$ will go for the press conference combined with the award ceremony (in this case it will be effectively the type of event you have suggested in the previous question). We expect that press conference / award ceremony fees will be covered by our partners. We will have nominations for both quality and quantity, i.e. prizes for most active participants and prizes for best articles.
7. As this issue has been raised more than once by several users, I have created a separate section for it below.

I will be glad to provide you more details if you need. Thanks — NickK (talk) 21:39, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the very clear responses, NickK. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 23:20, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Album

As several users has asked questions about our photo album, I will try to answer the main issues they have raised.

• Why so expensive? We do want to show that projects driven by volunteers can generate high-quality output. We do want to produce a high-quality album instead of a cheaper brochure, as this shows to people not familiar with Wikimedia movement that Wikimedia volunteers can produce something of professional quality. Some organisations decided to become our partners because they were impressed by the quality of our album, among them were the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, National Geographic and the Embassy of Greece. (This does not mean we looked for something particularly expensive, 2250$ is a normal price for printing 500 copies of 64-page photo album in Ukraine).
• Distribution and impact We expect to use the 500 copies we have planned in the following way (figures are approximate and similar to those of our 2013 album):
  • 100 copies will go to the winners, jury members and volunteers who worked on the contest. Expected impact: higher motivation to participate or volunteer for WLM next year. This is very important for participants (who know that it is not that difficult to have your photo published in a high-quality album), jury members (who work hard, as they have to evaluate dozens of thousands of photos but do not get any other reward for their work than this album and their name in it) and volunteers (who help us find partners, get monument lists, work with media and social networks etc.). From our past experience, many WLM participants from previous years who received the album returned in the following year, while this is not always the case of other users.
  • 100 copies will go to partners of 2014 edition (whose logos will be published on the dedicated page) and potential partners of 2015 edition. Expected impact: more partners decide to sponsor or support the contest. 2012 and 2013 albums helped us arrange partnerships with the Ministry of Culture for WLM and the Ministry of Ecology for WLE, and Ukrainian officials often judge on the quality of the presentation materials. In addition, our 2012 and 2013 editions of the album helped us organise 5 special nominations in each of 2013 and 2014 editions, with all prizes of these nominations provided by partners, and find a number of partners who supported us in a different way (media, jury members, professional expertise etc.). None of these partnership existed in 2012 when we had no album to offer. Another notable example is this post on the website of the National Society of Photo Artists of Ukraine (the leading association of professional photographers of Ukraine) who promoted our album (as well as WLM) to their members. And we do need 100 copies for this: for example, both WLE and WLM 2013 had 20—30 partners each.
  • 100 copies will go to other partners and potential partners of Wikimedia Ukraine. In this album we have information not only about Wiki Loves Monuments, but also about Wiki Loves Earth, Wikiexpeditions and our organisation in general. Expected impact: more partners decide to support one or more projects of Wikimedia Ukraine, more organisations become aware of the diversity of our projects. Our 2012 and 2013 albums helped our WLM partners discover other activities: for example, Ukrainian Association of Active and Ecological tourism decided to support Wikiexpeditions and QRpedia projects, and Centre of Hellenic Studies after organising a Greek special nomination last year decided to organise a Ukrainian-Greek international collaboration week on Wikipedia, with workshops for people interested to write about Greece in Ukrainian. In addition, having this album in English helped us reach international partners, for example, it helped us establish partnership with the UN Development Programme for Wiki Loves Earth.
  • 50—100 copies will go for presentation purposes during other wiki events. Expected impact: participants of editing workshops, wikiexpeditions, Wikiconference, article contests etc. decide to participate in Wiki Loves Monuments. For example, several wikipedians who have discovered our album during non-WLM events became very active participants of the contest, and one Wikipedian decided even to picture all monument of her home city (there are about two hundred of them, and most had no images). This means more wikimedians who have already heard of the contest (e.g. have seen the banner) will learn more about it and probably participate. This does not mean we distribute this album to everyone: we will distribute flyers/leaflets to those who are neither wikipedians nor partners nor people interested in joining the contest.
  • 100—150 copies distributed for partners who will help us work on other issues we want to raise. Expected impact: higher public awareness and help in resolving these issues.
    • In our 2013 album, we have raised two issues in our album: Freedom of Panorama and Destroyed Monuments. Concerning Freedom of Panorama, we have distributed several copies to people working on issues related to copyright. A recent result is this article explaining Freedom of Panorama in one of the leading legal media of Ukraine. We already have several people interested in promoting Freedom of Panorama in Ukraine and we will continue distributing the 2013 album in the following months, and we really expect this will have impact on the deputies who will amend the Copyright Law of Ukraine. Concerning Destroyed Monuments, we wanted to raise attention to the fact that several dozens of monuments on our lists were destroyed despite being protected. This helped us attract attention of organisations working on protection of wooden churches (probably most fragile monuments) and organise a special nomination on wooden monuments, as well as attract photographers who provided under free license us images of monuments that do not exist anymore (something quite difficult to obtain!)
    • In our 2014 album, we want to raise the issue of poor availability of lists. Expected impact: successful cooperation and getting lists from problematic regions. We still have over a hundred of districts and cities (out of 670) where we did not get any adequate lists, and little or no monuments on our lists. This problem makes people less likely to participate due to difficulties in finding monuments (an extreme example is a district where the only monument is a kurgan without an exact adress). We want to explain the idea of the contest to local governments, libraries or museums by providing them an album instead of a simple email, as we believe in this case they will be more likely to collaborate with us (we have already send emails to them, and that did not work). This will also help us establish partnerships with these institutions to work on other projects as well.
  • 10 (or more) copies go to biggest libraries in order to make our album, together with information about our projects, publicly available, as well as appear in national book databases.
• Value for money. The total price of the project is 2250$, which gives just 4.5$ per album. This is not more expensive than a T-shirt, a mug or any other similar souvenir, and its cost per copy is close to the one of our annual report. However, WLM albums combine advantages of both. On one hand, they provide information about our organisation and our projects (similar to annual reports but unlike T-shirts or mugs). On the other hand, albums are something people will like to have even without knowing the Wikimedia movements (similar to T-shirts or mugs but unlike annual reports that were designed only for partners but not for the general public). It is also important to have a kind of attractively-looking souvenir to distribute it to governmental authorities, big companies and other "respectable" organisations who will like to see "respectable" materials from us. While we can offer an album to an employee of the Ministry of Culture or to a lawyer working on copyright issues, there is no other gift with the same value for money we can give them.
• Ways to reduce costs. We do not see a reasonable way to reduce costs and have the same impact. We do need to have souvenirs for partners, jury members and volunteers, as we need to have something to motivate them. An object worth 4.5$ does not seem expensive as a reward for a jury member who has evaluated thousands of photos or a volunteer who helped us find a partner or a jury member. We do need to have a small gift for winners with their winning photos: some countries give poster-sized winning pictures, but they will probably cost even more than 4.5$ per person. We do also need to have materials for presentation purposes of a higher class than a leaflet for important partners (government institutions, commercial organisations etc.), and the only way to reduce costs here is not to work with such partners (as in Ukraine such organisations will not work with you if you do not have good materials about your projects or you don't have friends working there). Finally, we need materials to promote WLM to wikimedians (often newbies) who want to know more about the project. We may get the same impact with giving, say a flyer and a WLM mug, but it will not cost any cheaper (and we do not order any WLM mugs, T-shirts or similar items this year). In addition, printing 300 copies will not cost 60% of the price of 500 copies because of fixed design costs and because printing is always cheaper if you order 500 copies or more (source: prices of all publishing houses we contacted)
• Reporting. For the 2012 album, we only have a partial report (it can be found at wmua:Фотоальбом «Вікі любить пам'ятки» — 2012), and we have distributed 499 copies out of 500 (the remaining one will be stored in our office). For the 2013 album, it is too early to provide any statistics, as we have still couple of hundreds of copies to distribute and we expect to finish distributing them not earlier than in January 2015. In particular, we are still in negotiations with partners for the photo contest, we still have to find partners for the article contest and we continue working on the Freedom of Panorama issue. It is true that we do not have these figures in our last year's report, but the problem is thatv the album was actually printed days before submission of the actual report (we had severe delays with printing due to problems with paper and ink delivery, as UAH prices of them have almost doubled in a few months) and we have only sent some copies to winners at the moment of submission of that grant report. We will prepare a report for the distribution of the 2013 and 2014 albums, but again, they are unlikely to be provided before February 2015 and February 2016 respectively, well beyond usual grant reporting period. We may try to make a test and distribute album selectively (i.e. randomly choose partners who receive the album and partners who do not receive it) and compare the results, but we are not sure such kind of research will be good for our movement.

I hope this justifies why this album will have the necessary impact on the movement and represents a good value for money — NickK (talk) 21:39, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Response re: Photo Albums

Hi NickK. Thank you for this thorough rationale for why you believe the impact of the photo albums justifies the number of albums and the cost. We agree there are some benefits, mainly as gifts for volunteers/jury members/partners, and as promotional material for potential strategic partners. While the cost per album is reasonable, we do not believe the number of albums requested is necessary. Prizes and gifts should be used very strategically, to reward volunteers who put in a lot of their time and energy, supportive partners, and targeted potential partners. You have a strong track record in developing partnerships, but the numbers seem very high. Here is our proposal for an appropriate number of albums:

1. Albums for winners (36) + jury members (15) + volunteer organizers (20?) = 70
2. Albums for 2014 partners (25 - there were 21 last year) + 2015 potential new partners (5?) = 30 (WLE partners should be given the gifts produced from WLE 2014 --calendars and cards.)
3. Albums for other partners = 50 (it would be helpful to have a more detailed list of prospective partners you're hoping to target in the next year to see if this number is accurate)
4. Albums for presentations = 0 (You do not need to give out albums to people just interested in WLM. They should be used as rewards. Having an album on display should be enough to interest people.)
5. Albums for libraries = 10

Total = 160

Please let us know what the pricing would be for 160-200 albums. As you noted there were issues with printing last year's album and you needed to offset the rising printing/paper costs with free press conferences. How will you mitigate the risk this year? We agree that testing the effectiveness of the albums by sending them to select potential partners and not others, does not make much sense. We would encourage you to really think which partnerships are the most strategic and have the highest probability of success and focus on those. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 00:08, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Hi Alex. I need to correct some figures in the following way:

1. Albums for winners, jury members and volunteer organisers. While your figure of 70 is close to reality (and we do have around 20 volunteers, see list on the main page), you have also forgot jury members of special nominations (5 nominations, 3 jurors each) and winners of special nominations (5 nominations, 3 winners each), which malkes the number to 100.
2. Albums for WLM 2014 partners and new 2015 partners. We are not sure we will have only 5 new partners, in some cases we have one-year partnerships that were not made to be continued (e.g. special nominations, where we get less effect if we target the same group of people two years in a row), in other cases people responsible for the project have changed (like this was the case with Ministry of Culture) and we have to arrange with the new people. I agree we would have about 25 partners this year, with 10 of them we may have to renegotiate or contact new people, and we may have 10 or 15 completely new partners. Sometimes we have to give several copies to representatives of the same partner, e.g. if two equally-ranked people from different departments come to the meeting with us. The real minimum here is 50—60 (so that every partner organisation gets an album), and we will be more restricted towards our partners in this case (i.e. we may still happen to come without anything to a meeting with partner if another person from the same company already received the album before).
3. Other partners. We may try to reduce this number to 50 by a more thorough selection. However, our list of prosperous partners may be well beyound 100: we have 27 regions in Ukraine, and in every region we have several organisations that can be really helpful in promoting WLM. For example, last year we had several successful partnerships in Lviv Oblast and Chernihiv Oblast, this year we have very good partnerships with several organisations in Ternopil Oblast (currently in top-3 most active regions) including local government, museum, a cultural organisation and media, thus we can easily find more than 50 prosperous partners here. Reducing to 50 would probably mean we will have to reduce our regional dimension, as even two prosperous partners per region give us already 54 partners, and we also have a number of prosperous nationwide partners.
4. Presentations. Unfortunately we have not forseen anything in between a flyer and an album. We do usually have an album on display (even here we need at least 10 copies to make this album available in different cities). The problem is not with people who do not know what WLM is (they get flyers), but with people who have heard of WLM but want to become more active in it (where flyer is not a sufficient motivation). For WLE we have post cards, calendars or coasters for this, but we have nothing similar with WLM logo (we did not expect to order any similar WLM souvenirs this years). We will probably have to order around 100 WLM post cards or similar if we have no possibility to give albums to users who are interested in becoming more active in WLM. Alternatively, we would be happy if WMF could provide us with WLM souvenirs if you have any available.
5. Local governments for lists. We have around 100—150 districts and cities where after emailing and/or calling them for three consecutive years we failed to get any lists of reasonable quality. We wanted to send (or hand in during the meeting if we have local volunteers) to their local governments and potentially libraries and museums an album and explain them how both WLM and their region could benefit if we have good monument lists. We do need to send them some item with information about WLM however to make them interested, and it must be something better then a simple printed page (they will not pay any attention to something that is not looking respectable). We cannot send them our annual reports simply because we do not have enough copies (we have 100 for all partners together, and we have more than 100 districts and cities concerned). Please suggest what we can send or give to representatives of local governments and potentially libraries, museums or cultural organisations (we will target them only if local governments will not be cooperative) in order to provide them information about WLM on a paper support. If we do not send anything to them, we are unlikely to get a succesful reponse from them next year as well. Please note that although this work is oriented towards WLM 2015, it has to be held from January to August, with first contacts probably made in January or February (this year we started in March and we still did not have enough time, but this was probably because governments had other problems).
6. Libraries = 10. Agreed.

My count gives that the minimal need is about 220—230 albums, we will try to get a quote for this. However, in this case we have to order 100 small gifts (probably post cards) for those who want to become active in WLM (as we have no similar WLM gifts at the moment) and 100—150 items with information about WLM for local governments and other institutions that can provide us lists (please suggest the best format for it!). Thanks — NickK (talk) 07:53, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Update: we have received new quotes from the publishing house, again those may change if exchange rates change:

• 250 copies - 8500 UAH fixed + 17500 UAH printing = 26000 UAH = ca. 1980 USD at current rate (just below 8$ per copy)
• 500 copies - 8500 UAH fixed + 22500 UAH printing = 31000 UAH = ca. 2360 USD at current rate (about 4.7$ per copy).

Both prices are within 10-15% of the original quote, and they may change if exchange rates change (we do have a currency risk, unfortunately) — NickK (talk) 09:58, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Budget suggestions

Following Alex's suggestions above, I have prepared three different gift budgets:

		1) Current proposal (albums as main gifts)	2) Alternative proposal (albums only for most involved people and organisations)	3) Low-cost proposal (very limited distribution of gifts)
Distribution per group of partners
Winners, jury members and active volunteers (100)	Gifts distributed	Albums	Albums	Albums
	Expected impact	Higher motivation to participate or volunteer for WLM next year	Higher motivation to participate or volunteer for WLM next year	Higher motivation to participate or volunteer for WLM next year
WLM 2014 partners and most important WLM 2015 partners (50—60)	Gifts distributed	Albums	Albums	Albums
	Expected impact	Support of the contest	Support of the contest	Support of the contest
Most important partners of other WMUA projects (50)	Gifts distributed	Albums	Albums	Albums
	Expected impact	Partners aware of the diversity of our projects and support one or more of them	Partners aware of the diversity of our projects and support one or more of them	Partners aware of the diversity of our projects and support one or more of them
Non-priority and regional partners of WLM and other WMUA projects (100)	Gifts distributed	Albums	—	—
	Expected impact	Partners support WLM or other our projects, higher coordination in regions	None	None
Presentations of WLM during other WMUA events (50—100)	Gifts distributed	Albums	WLM postcards, with albums on display	Albums on display only
	Expected impact	Participants of other WMUA events contribute to WLM	Participants of other WMUA events contribute to WLM	Participants of other WMUA events become aware of WLM
Local administrations (and potentially museums and libraries) of regions where we have no lists (100—150)	Gifts distributed	Albums	Leaflets (8 pages) explaining why participation of their region in WLM is important	—
	Expected impact	Getting lists from most of problematic cities as districts	Getting lists from most of problematic cities as districts	Little or no responses (as in previous 3 years when we sent nothing)
Libraries (10)	Gifts distributed	Albums	Albums	Albums
	Expected impact	Album publicly available and indexed by national book databases	Album publicly available and indexed by national book databases	Album publicly available and indexed by national book databases
Budget breakdown
Albums		500 copies = 31000 UAH = 2360 USD	250 copies = 26000 UAH = 1980 USD	250 copies = 26000 UAH = 1980 USD
Sets of WLM postcards (or sets of coasters)		—	100 copies = 180 USD	—
Leaflets (8 pages) for regional administrations		—	150 copies = 200 USD	—
Total budget		2360 USD	2360 USD	1980 USD

Differences in price and impact:

• Proposal 1: price and impact as described above
• Proposal 2: little impact on non-priority and regional partners (unfortunately our success rates with partners is not 100%, and it does happen that our prosperous partners never respond to us, so we will have to eliminate almost all regional partners altogether), similar impact on all other groups. Cheaper souvenirs for people interested in WLM (marginal cost of 1.8$ instead of 4.5$) and cheaper leaflets for regional administrations, museums of libraries (marginal cost of 1.3$ instead of 4.5$), however, due to smaller number of copies marginal cost of album raises from 4.5$ to over 7.9$ per copy (it's always cheaper when you print more copies), thus total budget remains the same
• Proposal 3: little impact on non-priority and regional partners (as above), little participation expected from participants of our events interested in WLM (we have no gifts for them, and they will most likely lose flyers if we distribute them months before the contest), low response rates from local governments who did not respond in the past 3 years. Total budget will drop by 380 USD by reducing impact on some groups.

Those are three most realistic options we could come up with in the current situation

P.S. Changes in the price of 500 copies are purely due to exchange rate variations. On 22 September when we have submitted the request USD/UAH rate was at 14.2 (same quote of 31000 UAH corresponded to ca. 2180 USD, but as the rate was lower than average we included a bit higher quote), today it is around 13.1 (with 31000 UAH becoming ca. 2360 USD). Those are things that happen often in Ukraine these days, but both of these quotes are within 10% of modifications. Please note that all above mentioned prices may change within weeks and be different at the moment of order — NickK (talk) 20:16, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Hi NickK. Thank you for this detailed proposal. I appreciate that you're carefully considering the different options and open to working within a smaller budget. While we are more comfortable with proposal #2 in terms of the number of albums, the fact that the price is the same as 500 albums makes us supportive of proposal #1. Measuring the impact of the albums is not precise, but it would be great if WMUA could keep track of who you give the albums to and what the result was -- how many new partnerships were created, what type of partnership, new participants in WLM, etc. Tracking will enable us to have a better sense next year what the most appropriate number is. We do appreciate that effort you've taken to make the albums as useful as possible, by including English captions, highlighting partners, and raising relevant free culture issues like FoP and destruction of heritage sites. Thanks for all your work on this. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 22:37, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Hi Alex and thank you for your feedback. As I have mentioned above, we will make a report on how these albums were distributed, although this report will not be available in time for this grant report (we expect to be able to provide it by February or March 2016, as albums are distributed over a year). In the meantime, we will start working on the intermediate report on the distribution of WLM 2013 albums, as we are also interested in having a transparent structure of where our albums go. We are not sure we will be able to provide it by the end of this discussion as people distributing these albums are also heavily involved in WLM organisation — NickK (talk) 22:47, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

hello Alex. it seems that WMUA is (finally!) going to have its own office in a week, so I will be very happy to provide you with the detailed report for the WLM 2013 album distribution so far (as soon as our moving process is complete) --アンタナナ 22:58, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Requesting an Extension

Hi,

We would like to request an extension of this grant for two months (31 March 2015). We could not organise the article contest so far: we did not want to hold it in November-December in order not to overlap with an extremely successful Military article contest, and we could not hold it in December-January as most of schools and universities are currently on holidays, and outreach to this group is extremely important for the success of this project. Thus we want to hold this content between 15 February and 15 March and we plan to determine the winners by 31 March 2015.

Thanks in advance!

Best regards,

Mykola Kozlenko

WMUA Treasurer — NickK (talk) 12:50, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Hi NickK. Thank you for the update. The extension is approved. Good luck with the contest! Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 18:19, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Requesting an Extension - 2

Hi,

We would like to request an extension of this grant for two more months (until 31 May 2015). We are planning to hold our activities in the following way:

• For the article contest, we are expecting to define the winners and hold the award ceremony by 30 April 2015 (the contest period will last until 5 April 2015)
• For the album, we are planning to add an information about the article contest as well, thus we are planning to have it ready by 31 May 2015.

Thanks in advance!

Best regards,

Mykola Kozlenko

WMUA Treasurer — NickK (talk) 22:23, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi NickK. This extension is approved. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 18:00, 6 April 2015 (UTC)