Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia Portugal Annual Plan 2023

Feedback from the Northern and Western Europe (NWE) Regional Funds Committee on your proposal

Hello Alchimista, GoEThe, Miguelmcorreia, Waldyrious, Girassolei, MariaCurista

Thank you for taking the time to submit your General Support Fund proposal in the Northern and Western Europe region. We are pleased to have reviewed your application and have the following comments and questions:

• First of all we want to congratulate you for the extremely concrete and straight forward proposal, especially considering a short time with salaried employees
• We consider the collaborative approach to building community a strong one, and the focus on joyous events (like celebrating lusophone culture) really awesome
• We also appreciate your strong international partnership collaboration and your work with several strategic longtime national partners; the encouragement to organisations to "donate data" is really commendable. Can you give more details about the current partnerships?
• (p.2) There are some big events planned for the next period and Wikicon Portugal just ended. Is there any detail on how many attendees participated, which panellists and any lessons you learned from that?
• (p.3) You talked about continuing the wikipedian in residence work, do you have some data about the impact this work had the last year and is there any reflection that your organisation can share? As the WiR program is changing completely from last year and the National Library is itself in the middle of an enormous project to digitise millions of records, did you consider other options or changes in what is considered a new role of the current Wikimedian in residence?
• (p.4) The skills development is a key part of your proposal, your team has made a good assessment of your needs and you are keen to build them as you have in your plans to do training by the end of July of 2024. Can you tell more about the training done last year, which staff were trained in which institutions and what training was given to the community members?
• (p.16) We would like to understand more about the risk assessment, can you develop it? Risk analysis needs to be significantly expanded, in particular risks with staffing and reputation.
• Previous grant annual report closed as of December 2022, for the activities affected did you notice if having grants make differences? What were they?
• We observed that the responses to your learning question are focused on the need for broader strategy planning and review of internal processes. Yet this is not reflected in the metrics. Would you be open to considering and including process related indicators in your application (for example: complete stakeholder analysis of partnerships, designing partnership pathways for new and existing partners, publishing opportunities and examples of partnerships for external audiences; correspondingly fill up core/ additional metrics related to partnerships etc)?
• On a related note, we observed that a sizable portion of your proposed budget is focused on community health, it could be useful to explore ways to garner feedback on community engagement and health. Would you be willing to consider adding metrics in this area?
• As you grow from a largely volunteer run organisation to having full time staff to support Wikimedia Portugal’s operations, what are some initial challenges that you had to work through? What other areas of priorities do you foresee you’ll look into in the coming year, and what type of resources or peer learning experiences would you be interested to learn about?
• We would also be happy to hear about your experience and your plans to increase diversity and equity.

Thank you and we look forward to hearing from you.

On behalf of the NWE Regional Committee, Camelia (talk) 05:55, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi! Sorry it has taken us some time to reply to your questions. Please find our answers in the same order as the questions above:

At an international level, we highlight the partnership with Wiki Movimento Brasil, with which we share the same linguistic project; Wikimedia Spain for geographical proximity and Wikimedia Italy for cultural issues. In addition, we are also a founding member of Wikimedia Europe.

The Porto Meeting (meeting of minority languages ​​of the Iberian Peninsula that will take place in June this year, in the city of Porto), is one of the first steps towards future projects that will not only bring together members of Wikipedias from the Iberian Peninsula but also from other communities outside this space, namely Italy, which will participate as an observer. Exchanging experiences, discovering ways to share resources, are two of the objectives behind this meeting.

In addition to this, regular meetings are planned between the different chapters to, similarly to the Porto Meeting, exchange experiences, share resources and support each other's projects. For example, planning and organizing events together, promoting meetings between Wikimedians in Residence from each country, seeing which projects are being developed and which ones could be replicated.

At the national level, we will continue to collaborate with the National Library of Portugal. We are exploring ways to maintain the partnership in other forms than initially though, as staff there are currently overburdened with their digitisation efforts. We still have a large term goal of enabling mass upload of their public domain documents to Wikimedia projects.

For the meantime, the partnership has evolved, and we are currently planning to organise several events in partnership with them, namely the Wikidata Days Conference, which will have the EODOPEN – Opening Publications for European Netizens as a partner entity and that will take place this year in september. We are also going to promote, in partnership with them, a meeting between the WiRs of the Iberian Peninsula, which will feature activities designed for librarians and archivists, namely workshops on wikidata and wikisource; presentation of projects aimed at libraries, for example, #EveryBookItsReader and #1lib1ref.

We will continue to collaborate with FCSH at University of Lisbon, providing support to various research projects, namely the new phases of projects such as Rossio Plataform and the Marine Lexicon in which there was integration of data in Wikidata and new projects by its teams in order to guarantee the presence of Wikimedia tools since their inception. This will be done, for example, through training actions designed specifically for them, such as the one currently being run by the NDDI - Centre for Digital Research Development,  team (former Rossio project team).

In the specific case of Rossio Plataform, the work carried out, which included the creation of a Wikidata property, will allow it to reach teams from various Portuguese cultural institutions, from museums, archives, theatres, among others, since its network of contacts is extensive .

From a cycle of webinars organized by WIR, a new partnership has emerged with the Faculty of Letters of the Porto University, where the creation of a digital humanities center is planned and with which we are negotiating a partnership. So far, several sessions have been held to present and demonstrate Wikimedia tools and projects with researchers, with the aim of showing that these can be a means of publishing their results and sharing data in a [https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/ FAIR] way. In addition, they are also one of the partners of the Porto Meeting and we are discussing the possibility of creating future projects with their partner institutions scattered across Portuguese-speaking African Countries (PALOPs).

In addition to these partnerships, we are also building a partnership with the Lisbon Libraries Network with the aim not only of training the teams of the various libraries but also to increase the number of editors, through workshops and the creation of editing clubs that become autonomous.

Through the Wiki Loves Música Portuguesa project, activities are underway supported by Antena1 (one of the public radio stations in Portugal, part of RTP), Fonoteca de Lisboa and other entities related to music in Portugal. In the case of Antena1, training actions are planned for journalists and for the RTP archive team (which holds a vast amount of archival footage since the beginning of transmission of radio and television in Portugal).

We also have several partners that collaborate with us in our recurring activities, among them, ANSOL, the National Free Software Association, with which, in addition to celebrating various events related to the internet, free access, we are co-organizing the Free Software Festival that will take place in Aveiro In September.

With D3, Digital Rights Group, we are always in contact and coordinated with regard to public issues related to digital rights, copyright, the right to information, participating in lectures and other activities.

With Creative Commons Portugal, we also maintain a close relationship, inviting them whenever we organise an event to provide training or participate in debates around licences.

Arquivo.pt, a national internet archive which is part of FCCN - Computação Científica Nacional, is another of the partners with whom we continue to work, participating in their activities and organizing training cycles and other activities.

• (p.2)

Around 40 people passed through Wikicon, while not all of them were present in the three days.

The panel of speakers was balanced in terms of gender representation (12 women and 10 men), both on the day dedicated to the academy and on the rest.

The fact that it was face-to-face facilitated the creation of bonds between the participants, since most did not know each other personally. New opportunities for partnerships and ideas for new projects and activities emerged. After WikiCon, WMPT is in preliminary conversations regarding two possible opportunities for WiRs in Portugal, and the establishment of a paid training program.

This WikiCon also worked to reactivate the community after the pandemic, opening the door to an increase in the number of volunteers involved in the planned activities; it also made it possible to better understand the needs and expectations of the community in relation to the movement.

• (p.3)

You can see the impact of the work that the wikimedian through this numbers that you can find here: WIR 12 months report

Project support:

• +400 hours of research and improvements related to Wikibase and on eViterbo (Wikibase)
• +80 hours of dedicated technical upgrades on eViterbo (Wikibase)
• +14 hours of support to other projects using Wikibase
• 1 participation in a research project submission

Internal events (NOVA FCSH-focused):

• +80 hours of dedicated training on Wikimedia tools and platforms, and related topics  (not including Wikicon)
• reaching more +200 participants (not including Wikicon)

Content on Wikimedia platforms:

• 1 new external identifier (Rossio) for authority control on Wikidata
• 1 new major thematic campaign for Wikimedia Portugal - Wiki Loves Música Portuguesa
• that already led to: the creation of 30 new Wikipedia pages, the improvement of 380 Wikipedia pages, and the creation of more than 500 new claims on Wikidata
• and secured 4 new partnerships (an ever-growing number) with major stakeholders
• 1 new “power-contributor” to Wikipedia

Outputs and outreach:

• 60-page detailed report on the usage of Wikibase for research in social sciences
• 5 sessions for external audiences, reaching nearly 80 people
• 1 newsletter focusing on Wikimedia and the Open Movement

As for reflections: although hiring our first staff member (and later a second one) was challenging and was even complicated by personal problems affecting one of our board members, the impact the WiR program had on the visibility of the chapter among academics, the creation of a new flagship project around music, and the number of collaborations created, sustained and proposed in direct response to this project has been outstanding. The above mentioned personal issues of the board member and a lack of a clear governance structure made it so that several people felt legitimized to intervene and direct the WiR's work, which led to some confusion and conflicting messages, and some tension. We tried to resolve it by clarifying with the staff that the board is directly responsible for their work and will support them as it can, while the board answers to the General Assembly.

• As the WiR program is changing completely from last year and the National Library is itself in the middle of an enormous project to digitise millions of records, did you consider other options or changes in what is considered a new role of the current Wikimedian in residence?

Yes, the National Library partnership was not going at the speed we anticipated in our previous grant request. We quickly refocused the WiR project to focus on FCSH, as explained in our interim report from our 2022 grant. As things developed with the contacts in the academic sphere and outside of it, it became clear that the WiR would have a much larger effect than we expected. Additionally, the initial work of the WiR was much more focused on one specific project running at FCSH, and as the functions and reach of the WiR became larger including collaborations outside the FCSH and even outside academia, we wanted to reflect that on both the description of the job description and the title. We first thought of calling this a “Wikimedian at large” as others have in the past (e.g. Grants:Project/Giantflightlessbirds/New Zealand Wikipedian at Large) but this title is not very intuitive for Portuguese audiences and maybe difficult to explain. We believe that “program manager” better reflects the current and anticipated future role, as WiR actions effectively opened a new program for Wikimedia Portugal. This is in fact a natural continuation of her previous activities and so we do not consider it as an entirely “new role”.

• (p.4)

Training was given to researchers from several Portuguese faculties, in particular at FCSH, where several training actions were carried out not only for researchers but also for the technical teams promoted by WIR.

As for the community, several free participation workshops open to newcomers were promoted with the aim of increasing the number of editors. These also served as a meeting point for experienced editors who took advantage of these moments to share knowledge with newcomers and at the same time increase their level of knowledge.

With this in mind, a cycle of webinars was organized with Arquivo.pt, where there was, for example, a session dedicated to APIs; workshops under the Wiki Loves Música Portuguesa, Women in Music editions co-organized with WikieditorasLx and another with Casa da Cerca on women in the arts. We also organized activities for the Open Access Week at UNL-FCSH co-organized with the Open Science Working Group of the faculty and celebrated the Wikidata anniversary with some workshops about Openrefine, Wikidata, GLAM projects and Creative Commons (everybody could participate and we recorded the sessions that are available at youtube).

These events also served to provide training to the association's staff, who also participated in other training activities, namely: Wikidata Reuse Days 2022 (WIR), Wikimedia Hackathon (WIR), Wikimania, Wikimedia Summitt, and others. All the knowledge that is acquired in these moments, is shared afterwards  with the other team members (volunteers and staff) and community.

• (p.16)

The biggest risk that the association runs at this moment is of losing our staff if this grant is not awarded. The two people hired in the last year have not only ensured basic operational tasks, but have also transformed Wikimedia Portugal's relationship with the outside world, making it possible to reach entities that were unaware of the association and the potential of the various Wikimedia tools and projects.

If the worst case scenario happens, the relationship with universities and research centers will be severely affected, since the members of the association can not usually carry out activities during business hours, or respond in a timely manner to requests for collaboration and partnership that have arrived and are still arriving due to the work carried out over the last year, since they are all volunteers.

Other risks include reputational risks with our partners and the Wikimedia Movement, if planned activities fail to meet expected quality standards, including the availability of content on Wikimedia projects, proper licensing of content created during the partnerships and other explicit or implicit criteria of success that may or may not be known to us.

Finally, we include legal risks that this increased visibility could bring to the association, its members, staff and board by indirect association with content present at Wikipedia or any of the other Wikimedia projects. We already faced one lawsuit in [https://blog.wikimedia.pt/2021/04/16/wikimedia-portugal-foi-ilibada-em-tribunal/ 2021] and there are two others we know of at the moment.

• Previous grant annual report closed as of December 2022, for the activities affected did you notice if having grants make differences? What were they?

The fact that the association was able to receive grants made all the difference, without them the work carried out by the association would not have been possible. The main impact came from the annual grant that allowed the hiring of two people, which completely revolutionized the work that the association has been doing, opening the door to new partnerships and new projects; the internal management of the association also benefited.

Our previous grants (Rapid and Conference grants) allowed us to organize specific activities such as Wiki Loves competitions (and a cancelled conference to occur in 2020). The annual grant by contrast allowed us to make longer term plans, engage with partners in a more sustained way and made us structure our procedures in a more consistent way.

• We observed that the responses to your learning question are focused on the need for broader strategy planning and review of internal processes. Yet this is not reflected in the metrics. Would you be open to considering and including process related indicators in your application (for example: complete stakeholder analysis of partnerships, designing partnership pathways for new and existing partners, publishing opportunities and examples of partnerships for external audiences; correspondingly fill up core/ additional metrics related to partnerships etc)?

Most of our partnerships are still in an embryonic phase, even those we have had for the longest time, such as BNP, are undergoing a transformation process. Due, on the one hand, to the pandemic that caused many ideas and projects to be organized together with the institutions to be suspended, and are only now being resumed, rethought and in some cases replaced by others that currently make more sense. On the other hand, the work that was done with the academic world and other entities is opening doors to a whole new set of opportunities.

When it comes to metrics, although we are unable to define numbers to achieve, we have thought:

• Number of activities co-organized with other entities that carry over to the following year
• Number of activities independently organized with the support of Wikimedia Portugal, by partner entities in which tools are used or wikimedia projects or campaigns are promoted
• Number of participants in activities and events
• Number of participants who continue to edit after these events
• Number of protocols with entities that formalize Wikimedia Portugal's relationship with partner entities, currently 6 are in the process of being formalized (BNP, FSCH, Antena1, FLUP, RedeBLX, Rede Porto Meeting)
• Number of papers published and presented at conferences on the use of wikimedia tools in research projects and the impact of the existence of wikimedian communities on the promotion of minority languages.

• On a related note, we observed that a sizable portion of your proposed budget is focused on community health, it could be useful to explore ways to garner feedback on community engagement and health. Would you be willing to consider adding metrics in this area?

To measure the degree of satisfaction and participation of the community, tools such as the dashboard, surveys and consultation through existing communication channels will be used, namely the Wikimedia Portugal Telegram group that brings together not only the Portuguese community of editors but also those of other wikimedias and comunities (Brazilian, Galician, Spanish, etc).

• As you grow from a largely volunteer run organisation to having full time staff to support Wikimedia Portugal’s operations, what are some initial challenges that you had to work through? What other areas of priorities do you foresee you’ll look into in the coming year, and what type of resources or peer learning experiences would you be interested to learn about?

With regard to training, one of our priorities is to focus on training not only the staff but also those who contribute as volunteers to the association. This involves looking for training entities that have courses and workshops designed for the associative environment in Portugal. At Iberoconf, we got in touch with a training center with these characteristics in Porto, which we will contact as soon as priorities are defined in terms of internal training needs.

In the specific case of WiR, two of the needs felt by her, is to have elements within the team with advanced training in Creative Commons for GLAM and in digital practices for the preservation of cultural heritage, which would allow improving the technical and theoretical skills of the team in the development of activities it has secured so far.

Internally we also need to receive training in projects, conflits, communication, community management, Community Resilience and Sustainability. So that were able solve any problems that may arise in the best way and also ensure that the team (staff and volunteers) are not overloaded, there is better internal and external communication, avoiding tensions with and between the community. Some of this  training can be done through the Let’s Connect program.

We are also talking with ANSOL so that it can provide us with training in free software tools to improve the functioning of the association, namely project management, organization of events and internal management of the association.

One of our goals is to have moments of sharing ways of working and experiences with other chapters and groups of Wikimedians. Something that we have been doing in recent months but that we want to do in a more systematic and regular way, mainly with Wikimedia Spain and Wikimedia Italy due to geographic and cultural proximity. Besides this it would be good to learn with others, for example, throught the Let’s connet Peer Learning Program, that organize learning activities such the learning clinic about the practices to support Wiki Loves Earth campaign organizers, that was very interesting because of the ideas and problem solutions that were found by the different groups that participated.

A need that has become more and more evident is to know more about wikimedia tools used by different communities in the projects they develop, from things as basic as the dashboard and streaming platforms, to project management programs.

In addition, we are going to invest in events such as Wikidata Days and Festa do Software Livre to increase the level of technical knowledge and not only of the national Wikimedia community, based on the feedback we had from this year's WikiCon. We are also going to use these events to carry out an assessment of the  community's training needs so that we can design a program that responds to them.

• We would also be happy to hear about your experience and your plans to increase diversity and equity.

In this field, the strategy involves supporting groups that already work on these issues, namely Wiki Editoras Lx that work with the issue of the gender gap, among others. In addition to this, we are planning to organize workshops and thematic training actions, aimed at specific audiences, for example, students from the Palops, Roma community (in this case through an upcoming partnership with Pluriversidade Comunitária, a community university created by a group of ISCTE researchers).

Through the partnerships that are emerging, namely with FLUP and also the Lusófona University, we hope to soon come to define training programs aimed at PALOP researchers and students.

We are also going to take advantage of the results of the survey carried out by WIR in Cape Verde to define a training and promotion strategy for wikimedia projects that could involve organizing activities with Cape Verdean associations in Portugal. An activity that we are already organizing in partnership with Bantumen is an edition dedicated to Portuguese rappers of African descent, as part of the Wiki Loves Música Portuguesa project.

Based on our experience, one of the best ways to increase equity and diversity is to streamline activities so that more people can participate, for example in photo contests such as the Wiki Loves Earth Portugal, part of the publicity for the competition is aimed at senior universities, inviting students to submit the photographs they take on trips/study trips to the competition.

Through events such as the Porto Meeting, in addition to promoting the meeting of different communities of Wikimedians, we also want to contribute to leveraging the organization of activities and events in their places of origin, that is, one of the objectives of the meeting is to join efforts so that during n the next year, there will be at least two meetings outside major urban centers, for example, in Miranda do Douro (Portugal) and in the Basque Country (Euskadi) with activities designed for the local population, as a way of not only promoting the wikimedia movement but also, the local language and culture.

GoEThe (talk) 18:46, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

Congratulations! The Northern and Western Europe Regional Funds Committee has recommended your proposal for funding!

The Wikimedia Foundation has approved the committee's recommendation to fund your proposal in full for 117,311.44 EUR.

Comments regarding this decision:

• We acknowledge that one of the key focus areas for Wikimedia Portugal will be to extend and work on organizational capacity. We believe that those are essential to the sustainability and development of the chapter moving forward.  Following this year, we will be looking to see growth in areas such as communication development; reporting; engagement of new volunteers and contributors retention;
• We warmly recommend a clear onboarding and ongoing plan and activity on supporting the new staff members;
• Please keep us informed on the proposed work with the other affiliates in your area (eq. the Basque community and Wiki Editoras Lx).

Suggestions from interim PO and resources that you may find useful to address the Committee’s comments. Please feel free to adapt and adjust based on your local context:

• For onboarding and ongoing plan and activity to support new staff members, it would be useful to share job descriptions of both full-time staff, reporting structure, employee handbook and/or the responsibility assignment matrix you currently are developing to facilitate better workflow and communications within the team. Here’s an example: job description and reporting structure
• On engagement of new volunteers and contributors’ retention, it would be useful to provide a supplementary brief with an overview of the current membership base for Wikimedia Portugal and how you envision this will grow with the suite of activities you have proposed for 2023-2024. It may also be useful to set a target for membership growth which you currently also track as part of your reporting. https://pt.wikimedia.org/wiki/Relat%C3%B3rios/Anual/2021
• On proposed work with the other affiliates in your area (eq. the Basque community and Wiki Editoras Lx), it would be useful to provide a supplementary document on high value projects or partnerships you plan to work on. This could be an example: WANZ General Support Fund Application - Context for High Value Activities.pdf
• It could be helpful to complete the documentation above, before the start of your grant in July 2023. Once ready, these documents can be shared with the NWE committee.
• At the end of your grant period for 2023/2024, when you are drafting your final learning report, you will then be able to reference these materials and reflect on the learnings, growth or changes that you have observed. This will also help to address the above points about communications development and reporting.  
• Hope you find the above helpful in providing concrete next steps to follow-up on.

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement.
2. If you have questions, you can contact the Regional Program Officer for the Northern and Western Europe Region.

Thank you.

Regards, Jacqueline on behalf of the NWE Committee JChen (WMF) (talk) 13:32, 26 May 2023 (UTC)