Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Oesterreich/October2013

Vienna office

The submission of our FDC proposal was directly followed by the creation of our Q3 report for this years' FDC grant. Fortunately, October was not only dominated by administrative tasks though: We gave talks at various interesting events of like-minded organizations which also offered perfect networking opportunities: E.g. the Shareconomy conference in Vienna or the Elevate Festival in Graz - this year's motto: "Open everything?".

Strategical board-meeting

The board of WMAT at the strategical board-meeting

On October 6th the board of Wikimedia Österreich met with the staff members at the office in Vienna. This was the second major strategical board-meeting of WMAT in in 2013. The goal of this meeting was to set up new policies regarding internal communications, to vote the Good Governance committee member of board and staff and to discuss details concerning our 2014 strategy and budget. Another important part of the discussion concerned challenges and improvements regarding administration and book keeping: As outlined in our FDC proposal, we plan to outsource the book keeping to a "professional" company. The next step will be to find a suitable service provider, redefine our processes together with them and move our accounting from Civi CRM to a new accounting system. We also need to revise the strucutre of our accounts to somehow fit the demands of all our auditors (FDC, external auditor, Fundraising Certificate) as best as possible and to create synergies and make the whole process more efficient.

netidee kickoff event

netidee kick-off event

WMAT very recently received funds through an initiative called "netidee" by the Internet Foundation Austria. We applied for the funds as part of a project team that consists of WMAT, Open Knowledge Foundation Austria and the Cooperation Open Government Data Austria and which aims at establishing an open data portal in Austria that hosts non-governmental open data. Open Data is an important part of Free Knowledge and often serves as a valuable ressource for Wikimedia projects. Without open data on monuments in Austria, we wouldn't have been able to create such an impact with WLM during the last years. Hence, we decided to take advantage of Austrias role as open government pioneer in the German-speaking countries and widen the focus on non-governmental data in a similar fashion. From the beginning, we thought of the open data portal as a prototype that should be designed in a way that makes it easy to roll it out in neighbouring countries (DACHLI). We already have interested partners in these countries. We also plan to incorporate an interface from the open data portal to Wikidata, in order to make relevant data available to the various Wikimedia projects. Our application was successful and we received 50.000 EUR to launch the project in the first year. As WMAT took the project lead, it will also manage the funds. During the kick-off ceremony on October 24, 2013 our project was presented with a short video and we received an official certificate.

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"Landtagsprojekte" evaluation meeting

As a follow-up to one of our most successful projects in 2013, the so-called "Landtagsprojekt", we conducted an evaluation session in order improve our planning and performance for similar projects to come in 2014. The meeting was held in the WMAT office and half of the project team attended and shared their views on what went good and on areas that need improvement. Although there were no major shortcomings, we found it helpful to create learning patterns in order to ensure that all the details run smoothly. As a result we documented several learning patterns on what went well and should be repeated and what could be improved and might need further attention when planning the next projects. The lessons learned cover the areas of communication, technical equipment, team building and practical advice for photographing.