Grants talk:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Chile/2019

Initial review & questions about reserves

Posting comments from Email here so we have them documented.

OK, the first thing we need from you is a staffing plan. The link from your grant application leads to your annual plan, where the staffing section is blank.

Asked and answered :)

Next, since you are adding funding to your reserves I won't be adding a contingency fee to your grant, as I am doing with some of the grants to organizations that have very small reserves so that they can handle emergency expenses if they come up. This means that if an emergency occurs, you will need to draw on your reserve funding to cover it, since no grant increase will be possible. I strongly support this allocation, but I would like to get perfect clarity on your reserves before approving it. This means I need to understand:

1. The amount you have in your reserves currently.
2. The amount you may allocate to your reserves from the underspend of your 2018 grant.
3. The amount you will allocate from your 2019 grant.
4. The total amount in relation to your staffing expenses and operating expenses.

Next, do you have a written policy in place regarding your operating reserves? If not, we may recommend you develop one as a condition of this approval.

Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 18:33, 5 November 2018 (UTC)

According to our projections, for the 2018 grant we will spend around 13,000,000 CLP (83% of the expected expenses, 75% if the funding reserves are included). That would mean there will be 4,250,000 CLP not spent from 2018 grant, including 1,571,000 CLP for reserves. Considering this, the answers to the questions before:

1. WMCL has 2,026,000 CLP as part of their own funds (not attached to any grant).
2. WMCL included 1,571,000 CLP for funding reserves in the 2018 grant. We would like to include additional 1,278,000 CLP to the reserves (making a total of 2,849,000 CLP from the approx. 4,250,000 CLP underspent in 2018)
3. WMCL considered 2,238,000 CLP for funding reserves in the 2019 grant (5% of the expected expenses of the year).
4. Including the funding reserves requested in the 2018 and 2019 grant and our own funds, WMCL will have 5,835,000 CLP for reserves (approx. US$ 8,473). That will represent 2,46 months of the regular (staffing and operating) expenses expected for mid-2019. Including the additional 1,278,000 CLP requested (US$ 1,856), it will represent 3 months of regular expenses.

Although we don't have yet a written policy, we believe 3 months is a reasonable amount for reserves. We would welcome any recommendation regarding this aspect that we can adopt -i.e, the policy of other similar affiliate-. --Osmar Valdebenito, B1mbo (talk) 03:26, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

Questions about your plan

Hola, colegas! Tenemos unas preguntas sobre su plan.

Wikipuentes

Right now the goal of this program is not clear. Your objectives are focused solely on implementing this year's version of Wikipuentes, but you don't describe why you are doing it or what you are hoping the impact of this will be either for the Wikimedia communities or the participants.

Would you please add some objectives to this program that include answers to the questions:

• Why are you doing this?
• What do you hope to achieve?
• How will you know if you are doing it?

The goal of this project is to train teachers on using Wikimedia projects as pedagogical resources for their work with primary and secondary students. Given it is a continuation of our work last year, we didn’t included the detail but gave more details about the changes we want to implement this year.

Besides the particular results of the MOOC presented in the grant regarding the number of participants and the improvement of the platform, our main goal this year is to work with the institutions mentioned, in particular with CPEIP, which can gave us access to teachers in public schools (which represents around 50% of the total of schools in the country). However, given that this idea is only in its initial stages, we need to understand more the way CPEIP (or any other institutions we might collaborate with) works, so we can set metrics that are relevant for that. For example, we could say now that we can evaluate satisfaction of the teachers or maybe have a follow-up after the project, but we are not sure yet if we can access to that information. --Osmar Valdebenito, B1mbo (talk) 02:33, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

But why is it important that you "train teachers on using Wikimedia projects as pedagogical resources for their work with primary and secondary students"? That's the thing I still don't understand. And what does the number of participants in the MOOC tell you about that?

I get your point that some of the metrics around what teachers are actually gaining from this may need to be defined together with your partners. Do you know about when you will be able to define metrics & targets around these points? (Can be an approximate timeline, we understand there are many moving parts.) Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 19:48, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

Partnerships

• Under your program "Conocimiento libre", you discuss how you will engage new partners and you set objectives that include the number of partnership agreements you will sign and the number of activities you will do as a result of these partnerships. What is your ultimate goal in establishing these partnerships? What impact are you hoping will result, for your projects or communities or society at large? How is this related to the overall program goal for Conocimiento libre, which is, "to guarantee access to free, quality, trusted, diverse and locally relevant knowledge, with the support of other institutions with similar objectives to those of Wikimedia Chile"? Can you add objectives that are relevant to this goal?
• I appreciate that you are working on creating the "Institutional diffusion plan" and I agree this might be a useful tool, but I do not think you need to list it as a separate set of program objectives, Rather it seems integrated with the first set of goals around alliances with other institutions. This may help to simplify this section a little bit.

• In our Strategic Plan for 2019-2022, we mentioned as one of our main goals to work on the establishment and strengthening of alliances with other cultural institutions to promote their participation within the Wikimedia movement, especially as a source to incorporate local content not available publicly. The idea is that, working through these alliances, we can support the other items under the program Free Knowledge, such as the Outreach activities (like editathons) and Wikipedia in the University. One of the reasons we separated this as a different item is because we want to move from the past situation where we had successful spot-on activities, but without adequate continuation of the relationship. We expect to start cultivating and developing the links with different institutions now that we have a more stable structure and reliable capacity.
• Regarding the institutional diffusion plan, we decided to put it on a different item so we can track the advance of the process and report on it, considering it will be realized throughout the year and has a bit different scope than the other projects. However, we can consider this project inside the Alliances item if that makes it clearer. --Osmar Valdebenito, B1mbo (talk) 02:33, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

What you are saying about your strategy behind this program makes sense. But I still don't see how the objectives you've listed are connected to this larger goal? For example, what does the number of agreements tell you about how you are strengthening alliances with cultural institutions in order to make more content available? Do you have a way of understanding how "strong" a partnership is, or is that something you are developing as part of your plan? Is signing an agreement part of how you determine that a partnership is "strong"? If so, what does that tell us? (It may be your objectives here are on the right track, but I just don't understand them clearly enough yet.)

I agree you should track the progress on your institutional diffusion plan, and that it is important. I am glad you are doing it. I don't think this is focused enough on outcomes to be included as an objective in your grant proposal. It's more an answer to the question "How are you achieving this?" (description) than "What are you achieving, and how will you know you are achieving it?" (objectives).

Community program

1. You describe the idea of the Wikicafés like this: We will create a monthly convivial activity between members of Wikimedia Chile, as well as other Wikimedia enthusiasts, in order to encourage a strong local community under the lead of Wikimedia Chile. Considering that we are planning to have our own office space through 2019, we will provide a place to gather people that are currently chapter members, as well as new members of the local community, in order to reinforce the feeling of belonging and shape new projects.' 'Yet, the objectives provided only measure the number of people participating. How will you know if this is actually leading to "a strong local community under the lead of Wikimedia Chile" or "a feeling of belonging" or if the events are "shaping new projects"?
2. We really like the emphasis on reaching more communities outside of Santiago through your community program. It is clear how this aim is reflected in your objectives. Are you able to add some more context here about why this is so important?

1. Regarding the first project, we expect to follow closely the results of this idea, given it is a new project for us, and measure the impact of it in two main lines: first, regarding the particular outputs of the project (articles created or images uploaded, for example) and second, regarding the level of participation of the volunteers (if we are going to bring current members and make them more active in chapters’ activities or maybe bringing new people) and how they evaluate this activity. We didn’t include more detailed metrics regarding those issues because we don’t have a baseline to compare and set a reasonable target (Are two new articles per meeting ok? Or should be more? Or less?)

Thank you! Let's talk more about this during the course of your grant. If this is the year you want to set a baseline, make sure you are measuring the things you need in order to do so. Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 19:59, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

1. In our opinion, there are several layers of inequality on our movement on a geographical basis. While on a larger scale, there is a dominance of Anglo-European contents over those coming from developing countries, even in a local scale there is also a inequality in the contents produced by the Chilean community, younger than average and mostly focused in Santiago. Chile is a very centralized country -40% of the population lives in Santiago and 70% in a 250 km radius- so is natural that most of the contents come from those places. However, if we expect to have access to the sum of all knowledge, we need to bring those spaces that are being left out: regions outside the Central Valley, rural localities, tradition from our indigenous communities, etc. Those are the contents that are being invisibilized compared to those from the most cosmopolitan and well-connected part of Chile. As Wikimedians, we believe our projects offer a unique opportunity to this ‘forgotten’ part of the country to be repositioned and shared with the rest of the world, giving a more diverse view of how Chile is.
   The idea of working through alliances with other institutions located along the country tries to reduce those gaps in content production and diffusion. We expect that in the future those institutions can help us to trigger the creation of local communities with a stronger local and territorial focus. --Osmar Valdebenito, B1mbo (talk) 02:37, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

Perfecto! Muchas gracias :) Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 19:59, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

Wikimedian in Residence

You describe this activity this way in your plan: In order to make the most of the opportunities that have arisen with highly relevant local institutions, we expect to incorporate the figure of Wikimedians in Residence (WiR); this will help us to improve collaboration between editors and institutions, improving access and highlighting Chilean heritage on a local, regional and global level within the movement. Yet, none of your listed objectives related to this aim. They are focused solely on the number of people or institutions involved, and the amount of content being produced. How will you know if the WiR is having the impact you expect, for example improving collaboration, or highlighting content related to Chilean heritage?

We expect that the institutions we are able to contact can provide that kind of content. Our main candidates are the National Library and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, institutions where we had WiR in the past; we reactivated the connections with them in 2018 and they are in line with our goal to increase the access to local and relevant content. However, we have not sealed those partnerships and maybe we can do it with other institutions that can be relevant too and provide contents that are not yet available. Considering the WiR will answer the requests of contents from our volunteers, those contents will be used on our projects and have a tangible impact. --Osmar Valdebenito, B1mbo (talk) 02:48, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

OK! Can you add some objectives that track this (how content is going to be used). I believe they are important to justifying expenses going to a WiR program, and so this is necessary. Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 20:00, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

Staffing plan

Your descriptions of the tasks that staff will engage in are very general. Can you please break down each of the areas you describe into specific tasks? Unless there is a more specific job description located elsewhere, I am looking here.

In the case of the General Coordinator:

• To administrate and to manage regular activities related with the operation of the Chilean chapter: elaboration of financial reports, manage the relationship with the accountant and our bank executive, manage payments from service providers, contact the President and Treasurer for activities related to the bank account, etc.
• To work with the communities in the elaboration and developing of different Wikimedia activities and working plans: support them to create plans, budget the costs and resources needed, propose the projects to the Board for approval, etc.
• To coordinate and to develop those activities, acting as an institutional and logistic representative before other organizations: to participate in the elaboration and organization of activities such a edit-a-thons and others; to coordinate the development of these activities before and during the events; to evaluate their final success, etc.
• Work with the chapter board to elaborate and write action and grant plans, as other strategic documents needed by Wikimedia Foundation or by other external organisations.
• To evaluate, report and inform activities results to the chapter’s board.
• To elaborate and execute a diffusion and communication plan to highlight the chapter’s work within national medias and different communities.

Regarding the Education Manager:

• Coordinate activities with educational institutions, working with them to define location, schedule, resources needed, etc., and work with the General Coordinator to make that possible.
• For those activities, the Education Manager should coordinate with volunteers that can lead them or, in case there are no volunteers available, he/she should lead the activity (whether is a talk, a workshop or an editathon). For those activities, he/she must measure the results and provide an evaluation of them to the Board.
• Design changes to Wikipuentes based on the results of the first and second course (done in 2018), aligning the project with the needs of the Chilean teachers and the potential alliances with other institutions.

---

If possible, it would be great if you could respond by 22 November. If you need more time to make these revisions or write responses to these questions, please let us know. We are also available to arrange a call if you need us to clarify anything we have written here.

Thank you! Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 21:46, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

Noting here that the grantee replied to request an extension until 26 November and this was granted. Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 01:25, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

Thanks @Wolliff (WMF): for the extension, it was very helpful and considerate! The answers have been posted after each question. --Osmar Valdebenito, B1mbo (talk) 02:50, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for arranging this in advance to help us with our planning. I added follow up questions here, and I do need WMCL to respond, but review is not contingent upon your responses, meaning I can move forward with a decision in the mean time. So would 7 December be a reasonable deadline to reply to my follow ups? Let me know if this is a problem and we can negotiate a new deadline. Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 20:03, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

Wikimedia Chile's grant is approved in the amount of 47,000,000 Chilean Pesos for 12 months

Congratulations! This grant is approved in the amount of 47,000,000 Chilean Pesos for 12 months, and includes funding for the increase in staff you have requested.

We appreciate your approach to thoughtfully planning growth in staff and programs, and the way you have proactively worked with your program officers to plan for growth and transition. We appreciate the improvements implemented in your reporting practices, now that you have resolved past reporting gaps.

We are very excited about several parts of your plan, especially:

• We appreciate your emphasis on reaching communities outside of Santiago, in line with your commitment to diversity. We find your approach to achieving this through collaborations with regional GLAM networks particularly interesting. We hope for great results, and hope the movement is able to learn from this.
• We like the ways you are working together with other chapters on regional initiatives, such as the Derechos Humanos project. We also appreciate your work on the Puentes entre Culturas program, in collaboration with organizations in the Latin America and MENA regions.
• We like that you are developing an institutional diffusion plan, which may help guide you in prioritizing future partnership activities in a more strategic way.

Now that you are receiving a large increase in funding and in staff, we would like you to consider how you may address these topics in the future:

• Implement improvements in evaluation, and especially in setting objectives with targets that are relevant. How are the things you are measuring related to your goals? Are you yet measuring progress toward your goals? Are you establishing baselines where these are necessary to set future goals? We would like you to challenge yourselves in this area as you are evaluating your results this year, and to think about how you might improve your evaluation plan for 2020.
• Give more thought to the strategic importance of initiatives where your organization is investing a great deal of time and attention, especially in Wikipuentes and GLAM. We would like to better understand why you are doing this work, and how it relates to the long term changes you wish to see and the threats and opportunities you have evaluated in your context.
• Think about how you can make your programs more cohesive. How are activities included in the same program area interrelated as part of a system? How do they share common objectives and theories of change? How can this be better expressed as part of your program plan?
• Consider what areas of your program plan you may want to prioritize or deprioritize. Right now you are doing a lot, but are there some areas of your program plan where you need to deepen your engagement? Are there other things you need to let go of? We realize there are many exciting opportunities, but we also caution you not to let your scope expand infinitely as you grow.

We hope 2019 will be a year of positive transitions, where you can build on your momentum and increase your staff capacity, and your strategic focus. We are looking forward to the results!

Best, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 01:16, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Deadline for midterm report extended

WMCL has requested and been granted an extension of the deadline for the midterm report, until 22 July. Best, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 16:52, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

Remaining funds from 2019

Hello! Noting here that in December 2019 WMCL estimated 12,529,712 CLP of remaining unused funds from this grant, which was deducted from Annual Plan 2020. The reported final remaining funds at the time of the final report submission (as I understand it) is less than was the estimated amount at 12,456,691 CLP, with a 73,021 CLP variance. Let us know whether this difference will impact your current grant activities by contacting the Simple APG and Grants Admin teams at any time before the grant period ends. Many thanks! Morgan Jue (WMF) (talk) 19:43, 4 February 2020 (UTC)