Wikimedia CH/Information Technology Strategy/Staff Experience
This is a work in progress. It is NOT an official document. This is an early stub. This can contain big mistakes. |
Wikimedia CH Staff Experience edit
The following statements are drawn with the help of the staff of Wikimedia CH. These are not verbatim transcripts. These statements are intended to be a summary, to learn more about professional individuals working in Wikimedia CH to sustain the Wikimedia Movement.
The questions are not reported since the intention was to build a monologue about: one's role in the global movement, internal strengths and weaknesses of the organization, and external external opportunities and threats.
Important: Recall that this is still a draft.
Thank you for any fix, especially if you are an interviewed WMCH staff member! Thank you!
The interviews were conducted in December 2022.
To see the current staff of Wikimedia CH:
Tip: experiences are listed in this manner: male names last, then alphabetically.
GLAM programme edit
WIkimedia CH has the current GLAM programme lead since August 2022.[1]
The GLAM lead thinks internal processes deserve clearer definitions. This is true for newcomers but also to speedup routine tasks. For example, the yearly budget page, or the grant process deserve improvements in their process definition. Also, having a shared calendar of activities, showing some tasks of each team member, can be useful, not to control people but to get an overview of how we work.
Tech solutions can probably be explored to better share our work and cooperate. Some organizations use Slack together with Asana. Wikimedia Foundation uses Phabricator. It's a matter of looking around, with the goal to improve our work.
About internal administration, every organization knows that is a risk if bills are not paid on time. I am not saying that this is a problem of Wikimedia CH but we can mitigate this potential problem working on our processes and tools.
The GLAM lead reminds that, at the beginning of her work, routine processes were rather complicated. This is a risk since it's easier that something unexpected can happen and create more problems.
People has expectations from WMCH but often we cannot answer all demands. We work in an NGO. Some of us need to follow lot of projects. Anyway, the number of our team members do not necessarily scale as the projects number increases. With these conditions it may happens that our work is not professional enough. At peak times some coworkers may feel overwhelmed and the risk is a vicious cycle of little happiness and few results. Sharing these issues is important.
The Wikimedia movement should be a cooperation of NGO organizations, working on humanity, freedom of knowledge, and working to be relevant and useful to the community.
To explore more about GLAM program:
Business Intelligence & Finance management edit
The Business Intelligence & Finance Manager for Wikimedia CH shares her experience as professional, external to Wikimedia volunteers.
The primary document, in which volunteers access and have benefit from the production of the finance management, is the Wikimedia CH Expense Report, also part of the Wikimedia CH Annual Report.
Income diversification has been a challenge. An eye is kept on Germany that is a quite unique system, with an extraordinary number of donors and members. It is not clear whether their situation is reproducible in Switzerland. Anyway Wikimedia CH in 2021 achieved a sufficient number of donations to be independent from Wikimedia Foundation.[2]
From her professional point of view, she described that separation between volunteer association and paid works should be set with clear boundaries.
One of the weaknesses of Wikimedia CH is the preparation of a campaign donation. The potential donor does not receive a confirmation of the donation via e-mail. Such blockages slow down the effectiveness of the team working on Fundraising. Platforms like the donation platform, and the bank system, also have poorly interoperable interfaces, and it is difficult to calculate how much time the staff waste in the integration.
Another weakness is probably the internal communication that could be more efficient. As an aspect of that, Wikimedia CH adopted Office 365 but it's not that easy to know who has access to a specific document, how to allow/deny access restrictions, etc. and ambiguity about this can be a danger.
The Wikimedia ecosystem also give great room for improvement. For example, Meta-wiki is a tool that is not very designed to publish complex documents as a Financial Report. Every year the platform has not much improvements and we have to deal with the same problems.
She hopes more training for the staff, to master at least 60% of each tool. Other tools, instead, just need software improvement so as not to slow down operations.
To learn more explore the public WMCH Annual Reports:
Education programme edit
The Education Manager for Switzerland, started since 1 August 2022.[1]
The education manager describes her commitment in involving projects like OpenEdu and Wikidata, with communities like Wikimini.org and DicoAdo.org. There is a growing need for training on Wikidata because it is a tool that people like, it is promising, and it still has great room to contribute. This does not only concern data scientists, computer scientists; but surely they too are often unfamiliar with Wikidata, and that's a shame, because they are the perfect target audience.
The technological goal is to improve Wikimedia platforms to reach new people, but also doing outreach in person into schools, and reach talented students. One challenge was to bring Wikimini to the Swiss-German community, even if it was designed mostly to cover the French-community. She notes that the Klexikon community is instead in German and founded by Wikimedia DE and this project would also deserve more attention to our German-speaking communities.
She highlights internal communication problems that could be addressed to improve reactivity, avoid delays. Some problems are related to the software suite, for instance, Microsoft Teams, which is problematic for many invited to the calls, on different aspects.
She shares some concerns on SharePoint were coworkers take a long time to find things they didn't create. One wonders if with another platform things would improve the situation. A tool should encourage documenting materials not necessarily one's own. Objects should be more easily found. Better connectable with each other.
One of the main challenge, also technical, is the alignment of the outputs of our different programs, such as GLAM, Education, Innovation and Community. In the Annual Plan, every project is supposed to have the same format, but they are not unified.
Wikimedia CH has the opportunity for growth, but there are risks without enough processes, such as on-boarding and off-boarding processes. Lavinia particularly focuses on her on-boarding, which was full of willing people but a very slow and unclear process. We should avoid to have different persons joining with different information.
The contact list of Wikimedia CH should be technically improved, in order to allow more internal members to have access to them, or at least know their existence. At the moment most of them are hided in SalesForce. Every program should not create their own contact list, sometime from scratch. The communication between the programs is essential since a partner can join as GLAM but then can slide in the Education field. Shared communication should be internally supported, also technically.
There is a general fear of communicating things too early, for fear that the project may receive negative feedback and be discontinued. This can be both a solution but a problem, since we are in a community where early involvement is crucial. Wikimedia CH has a newsletter that works, but the bridge between that and the real community is not obvious and somehow narrow. We need a more open and more direct communication with the community, in a safe creative space for project proposers.
To explore the field of Lavinia Malo, visit the Education project:
French community management edit
The Community Liaison for the French-speaking part of Switzerland on behalf of Wikimedia CH since 2017.
She loves to contribute to art-related projects, and explore the potentials of Wikidata. Some of the collaborations of her involves the National History Museum, Wikimedia Commons. The challenge is to convince GLAM to upload useful materials to Wikimedia Commons, and useful data to Wikidata, learning the rules while receiving as little friction as possible.
GLAM see strengths from the Wikimedia world in terms of: Data Visualization projects, meeting volunteers, meeting content contributors. Some GLAM desire to receive support on logistical aspects and she is committed to help them.
She has worked for the following projets: Journée suisse des archives, WikiNeocomensia (with Amandine Cabrio and Gilliane Kern), dicoado (with Vivian Epiney), Ludopaedia, WikiDroitsHumains, WikiEtatVaud, #1Bib1Ref, NoircirWP, Memoriav and WikiRomandie. And also organised several editathons (including in swiss universities).
Since 2021, she is Creative Commons certificated and has trained several people on this subject. She has also trained people on Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikibase.
One of the challenges is helping GLAM in finding the more relevant educational project. This is useful to both bring GLAM closer to the Wikimedia world, and help educational tools to be more palatable for different contexts and produce better results. Another challenges is the clarification of the differences between GLAM but without creating a separation.
Thinking about weaknesses, she describes the need to work on formal procedures. Describe how things work and how to handle specific GLAM requests can bring great benefits to Wikimedia CH.
There are some stereotypes that are certainly threats. For example, new Wikipedians are difficult to be involved. At the same time, some of these new Wikimedians find some long-term Wikipedians as unpleasant. For instance, when doing workshops, you create a page, and your contribution can be cancelled almost in minutes. This can be frustrating. This friction may be caused by the lack of mutual understanding, and here we have the opportunity to do more, by better explaining the projects and reduce this friction.
A technical problem is the lack of communication between language communities. It's not so easy to both discover new initiatives and communicate them, for example when one initiative could be relevant to another specific thematic community in German speaking languages. Wikimedia CH deserves to work on that too.
To discover her work, explore the Community programme:
Outreach & Communication Management edit
The biggest available communication tools are the Wikimedia CH newsletter, and the official website.
About the website, it's powered by the Open Source tool WordPress. About web statistics, the world adopted Google Analytics but instead we migrated to Matomo - that is open too. That's to say: if you have content suggestions, or privacy tips to improve our communication tools, you can talk to her to find an open door.
The complete management of these tools are delegated to an external agency and she handles the day-by-day implementation requests.
She is particularly joyful when describing the progresses of the Newsletter. The Newsletter is a powerful tool. The challenge is, not being just a summary about the activities and the achieved goals, but also giving value to the work of others.
When people discovers Wikipedia on their own, they can somehow damage it, also in good faith, starting with borderline contributions about their company. To avoid early mistakes, Wikimedia CH has educational paths covering hot-topics, like the declaration of your conflict of interests and "paid editing".
Wikipedia is not like the Swiss National Library with well-defined projects. Wikipedia is like a never ending story. That's why we need everyone help to communicate, educate, overcome personal small mistakes, collaborate, reach a neutral point of view and join the beautiful Wikimedia movement in long-terms.
About Wikimedia CH. One example. If your laptop explodes, you get it new in the same day by postal package. This is extraordinary. Our goal should be to create internal procedures as beautiful as our Swiss Post Office.
For example, we can improve our on-boarding process, improve our documentation, and better clarify our roles to the public.
If you want to explore this topic, you can join to the newsletter:
Accounting management edit
The accountant for Wikimedia CH shares her experience as professional, external to Wikimedia volunteers.
She has experience both as a external freelance and, since 2021, as a member of the staff of Wikimedia CH.
She describes her commitment to keep Wikimedia CH operational. Improving the donation system is important, since it's the main entry point for donors who believe in the values of the movement. The donation platform deserves improvements, to be able to enable income diversification.
Her responsibilities on Fundraising remained constant before and after her contract transition. The challenge is to involve different people who have different expectations and use Wikimedia projects in different ways. We know that there is no advertising and the movement just work thanks to donations. Donors expect a lot and the relationship with them is important.
Some years ago Wikimedia CH adopted CiviCRM. Then WMCH migrated from CiviCRM, because of our lack of a technical support figure. Now we use a mixed combination of technologies, like SalesForce and RaiseNow. Thinking about the weaknesses of the current configuration, she highlights the little inter-compatibility between the database and these donor platforms.
To explore this topic, try the Donation page.
Community programme lead edit
The Community Lead specifies that he did not start as a volunteer so his view can better help to get an external perspective.
Part of the background of Maurus comes from a seminar in Austria.
One of the strengths of Wikimedia CH is having internal staff who are very willing to solve IT problems that are not necessarily their responsibility, like individual computer installations, etc. Unfortunately this is also a weakness, since it's not so clear who should be contacted to fix something, for example if there is a major problem. Some of these problems need to be reported in internal ticket systems that are not intuitive. There is room for improvement on training, as well as in everyday IT assistance.
He shares some notes about the community department, that could have a central solution to collect IT problems. This could be useful to describe problems related to file storage, file stats, individual files, individual platforms - like SharePoint and have more knowledge about our tools.
One of the main challenges described by him is the support to Wikipedians. How to keep them happy with the projects, how to keep them active for as much as possible. Switzerland must help in this vision, detecting talented people and have clear tools to support them in the best way.
It's true that Wikimedia CH depends by people who are in 7+ years in the organization. Anyway there is still room for improvement about processes, best practices, or having a tech team.
To support him in his commitment to the Community, you can share this page:
German community management edit
The German community manager shares his experience as an active volunteer on Wikimedia projects since 2004. Now Community Manager for German-speaking Switzerland, for Wikimedia CH.
When Wikipedia started, he reminds how it was difficult to explain Wikipedia to other people. Explain the ideals, explain how it works, explain how to contribute. However, today it is still difficult to explain some internal mechanisms such as Meta-wiki. Meta-wiki is a project where you need to find information but the categorization system is not intuitive. People still need to deal with categories and ask for help.
He describes the ability of being independent and have the freedom to collect and make decisions as an important current strength in Wikimedia CH.
Internally, there is room for improvement about having a Wikimedia CH internal knowledge base, to find solutions, fix problems quickly, without the need to troubleshoot a problem twice, or reinventing the wheel.
One of the risks is the deal with different events, different user groups, different kind of volunteers and members. There is the need to set a clear definition of what is being done as a volunteer, and what it's not. It's a risk if less then 1% of incomes comes from membership fees. This can be increased, working on attracting new members. This is also useful to reach new prolific relationships. SalesForce is an example of a problematic platform, when you quickly need to understand who is a member and who is not. Our tools should be able to have a contact information, to implement follow-up, that now are difficult.
He mentions the German Wikipedia community, who is particularly careful to paid editing on Wikipedia. Newcomers should be attracted from Wikimedia CH in order to help them in understanding how the projects work, how to follow the rules, how to declare conflicts of interest, with their companies for example. This is crucial to break a vicious cycle in which Wikipedia simply seems to be a social network where it is difficult to make your own page; instead of being an encyclopedia in which to improve the culture around you.
You can support him in his commitment to the German-speaking Community, sharing this page:
Notes edit
- ↑ a b "Wikimedia CH welcomes two new staff members". 2022-08-11. Retrieved 2023-02-17.
- ↑ File:WMCH Annual Report 2021 Full Report.pdf