Grants:PEG/WM CZ/Presentation & Outreach/Report2013-2

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Interim report accepted
This interim report for a Project and Event Grant has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
  • To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:PEG/WM CZ.
  • You may still comment on this report on its discussion page.
  • Please visit Grants:PEG/WM CZ/Presentation & Outreach to comment on or read the final report.
  • You are welcome to Email grants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.


This report covers development of Wikimedia CZ's "Presentation & Outreach" grant after the submission of the 2013-1 report, e.g. from May to November 2013

In this period, P&O grant spent 53,652.3 CZK, and while continuing with already working projects such as Student Write Wikipedia, GLAM, representing Wikipedia on relevant exhibitions, also partially financed 2013's Wikipedia conference + WLM. Major news was Czech Republic's second Wiki Loves Monument participation, which was quite high with more than 6k contributed images.

Projects[edit]

Students Write Wikipedia (Czech Ambassador Program)[edit]

In December 2013, Czech education program Studenti píší Wikipedii (Students Write Wikipedia) is continuing with 7 participation institutions and eleven projects, which range from Pedagogy to Immunology to Management. Eight volunteers take part as ambassadors/consultants.

In report period, there were no expenses for the programme by itself, but we spent 2,904 CZK on Instructor Basics brochure, intended for participating teachers. Programme was mentioned also in several university magazines.

GLAM[edit]

There are ongoing talks with Masaryk University in Brno about possible cooperation, including "Students write Wikipedia" activities, release of images and partial support of next year's wikiconference. Apart from that, we have been given photos from Moravian Gallery in Brno, and got promised pictures from Central Archives of Surveying and Land Register in Prague.

In the report period, GLAM expenses included only travel, and totalled 1,268 CZK.

Prints[edit]

Wikimedium - We have printed one issue at the end of October, which cost 3,256 CZK.

Leaflets - We have printed a set of Commons-promoting leaflets, as well as Instructor Basics brochure for teachers, and "thank you" cards for our sponsors and supporters. Total printing expenses were 8,044 CZK.

Banner Milady Horákové street - under the project 12 for 12 (12 months to 12 nonprofit), we created a placed a plastic banner for one month (2x3 meters) in Milady Horakove street in Prague. The part of the project was the publication of an article on the project's website. The average traffic intensity on the street is 27,700 vehicles and 1,179 trams per day.

Books - We have decided to buy 100 remaining prints of Wikipedia instruction book (written in 2010 by local wikipedians) from the publisher for price of printing, in order to give them out to libraries and partners. The total cost was 5,000 CZK, so far about 80 the books have been given out to libraries, participants of our courses, competition winners, and so on.

Events and conferences[edit]

Silesian Museum Night[edit]

QRpedia codes in Silesian Museum Opava

Three Wikimedians travelled to Opava to take part in local Museum Night event, setting up a booth with mini-presentations about contributing to Wikipedia, its coverage of Silesia, as well as SWW and GLAM projects. A meeting with director of the museum also took place, one outcome of this was participation of the museum on WLM competition later in the year.

QRpedia codes were put to several museum exhibits. They attracted attention, but only 27 actual visits throughout the night. The museum has promised better support for them in the future (including free WiFi in the building). Visitors were also encouraged to bring historic photos or objects, which our volunteers offered to digitize, identify (with help of the museum), and possibly include in museum collection. This activity did not have much success, as only one older couple brought anything -- a set of photographs from beginning of 20th century.

The event was considered a success -- even though the total number of event attendees was lower than last year, we estimate number of people at our booth to be roughly the same. Nevertheless, in future we should promote our participation in the venue a bit more -- all we got from the museum was one A3 poster at the ticket office and one sentence in leflets, which is not much by itself.

Autumn Book Fair Havlíčkův Brod[edit]

Autumn Book Fair Havlíčkův Brod

In October 2013, three volunteers from WMCZ and 1 from Czech Wikipedia Community set up a booth at Autumn Book Fair in Havlíčkův Brod. The booth was visited by the more or less same number of visitors as in previous years. They where mostly interested in Memory game of Nature protected Areas and . Staff of the boot answered many questions about Wikipedia, Czech Wikimeda Chapter and about other Wikimedia projects. Our fifth participation on this Book Fair was a success, we handed out 35 magazines, 41 memory games, ca. 100 leaflets and 7 books. We hope books will have the biggest impact as these were intended mostly for libraries.

Wiki Loves Monuments[edit]

Photo of Zbraslav chateau, fourth place in Czech WLM, 8th place globally

Czech part of Wiki Loves Monuments, a major media-gathering and promotion effort, attracted 398 volunteer contributors, who brought in 6,424 new pictures. Measure of success can be almost 46 per cent coverage of ca. 40,000 listed monuments after 2 years.

The competition received less than half of contributions we got last year, partly due to significantly lower media coverage, and reduced availability of our three volunteer organizers. The Prizes, provided by 3 sponsors, were handed out at the award ceremony that was part of 2013 Wikiconference.

Wikiconference[edit]

The morning session of the conference
Participants in the workshop of Juandev upload photos to Wikipedia

2013 Wikiconference took place on 30th November in Charles University in Prague Faculty of Nature campus. Conference includes two main parts – presentation and workshops session. Most of the presentations were about partnerships between Wikimedia Czech Republic and other organizations including Czech Television, Czech Radio or Khan Academy. In practical workshops people were practising knowledge which their received in theoretical presentations. Conference included Wiki Loves Monuments award ceremony and ceremony of Prizes of financial literacy (competition in writing articles about financial topics). The venue was unpaid and sponsored by thy Faculty of Nature.

The conference was generally agreed to be successful, gauging by reaction of WMCZ members. More than 100 listeners came to the conference to listen to 15 talks. Most of them were recorded and can been found on slideslive page. Most of our printed materials were used on site including promotial banner from Milady Horákové.

  • Grant expenses were 8,124.16 CZK. Most of the actual conference expenses were paid by Charles university, faculty of natural sciences - i.e. almost 25 thousand CZK for cathering.

Links:

Others[edit]

There were several other small things paid from grant in last period like cursor highlighter for workshops and videos, domains and others as you can see in our tracker.

We have continuous tradition of monthly wikimeetings in Prague coffees mostly organized by our members, which are made at no cost usually, where we discuss possible projects and other ideas worth spreading. In the report period, there were 6 meetings in Prague a 1 in Brno.

Towards public: At the moment (14 Dec 2013) we have 730 fans on FB page, we started to distribute email newsletter to attract more people to our blog and revived twitter account.

Finance[edit]

Payment totals for P&O, as of 2013-12-15
topic tts unpaid paid overpaid paid
change since
last report
Czech Ambassador Program 9 - 2,259.00 CZK - 92.00 CZK
GLAM 7 - 6,690.00 CZK - 888.00 CZK
Conferences. Talks. Presentations 13 144.80 CZK 42552.57 CZK - 10,608.07 CZK
Presentation Equipment 7 - 42,299.80 CZK - 0
Printed materials 17 70 CZK 106,874.00 CZK 450.00 CZK 9,971.00 CZK
Exhibitions 2010-2011 8 - 62,215 CZK - 0
Exhibitions 2012 4 - 30,659.00 CZK - 0
P&O misc
This includes books mentioned above, as well as exhibitions for this year
25 - 77,507.31 CZK 1,446.00 CZK 32,052.23 CZK

An up-to-date version of this table is available in WMCZ grant tracker.

Account balance[edit]

The following figures include both P&O and Mediagrant, as they use same set of bank accounts.

In 2010 we received 34260 EUR (868148.40 CZK) from WMF as funding for our consolidated grant programs (P&O and Mediagrant), which, together with 60,404.50 CZK, transferred from previous grants, form the financing of both grants. During preparation of this report, we're sorting out what parts of balance belong to which grant, taking interest and various conversion rates into account (there were four different EUR->CZK conversions), as well as finishing a few outstanding payments for WLM and the conference. Final numbers will be included in the final report.

As of 2013-12-15, WMCZ grant account balances are:

account balance ~ in CZK change
since last report
common account CZK 354,222.06 CZK 354,222.06 CZK 353,530.40 CZK
savings account CZK 124.05 CZK 124.05 CZK -460,277.56 CZK
common account EUR 10 EUR 275.18 CZK 16.43 CZK
saving account EUR 14.11 EUR 388.27 CZK 23.18 CZK
total 355,009.56 CZK -106,707.55 CZK

Conclusions[edit]

Lessons learned[edit]

  • Organizing WLM in three people is exhausting.
  • While having four accounts for two grants might be optimal economically (two currencies allow using the best exchange rate, two accounts for each currency get best interest), they make accounting quite complex. We're here to spread knowledge, not to make money on exchange rates. Either stick with one account for all your grant funds, or divide them per grant.
  • If you have a booth on a bigger event, bring posters to attract people to it.

Impact[edit]

Reach
We've spread knowledge of Wikipedia and related projects to Students Write Wikipedia course participants, conference attendees, as well as book fair exhibition attendees. We belive the number of people familiar with our message will be even higher over time, as more people will watch video recordings from our conference. Additionally, many more people could have seen our banner in Prague. From time to time, new people show up on our regular community meetings.
Our plan for the next year is to attract more seniors -- this is a theme that was mentioned on the conference, as well as in interview of our Chaiman in newspaper, and as a result we have been contacted by several Universities of the Third Age, and intend to talk about possible cooperation.
Quality
P&O grant is not primarily about increasing quality of projects. However, activities such as Students Write Wikipedia, supported through P&O, bring new quality content, written under direct supervision of experts on the topic.
Credibility
Many of P&O activities increases Wikipedia credibility. This includes conference with participation of known experts, and related talks with Faculty of Natural Sciences, which helps establish Wikipedia as a project that has good relations with academia. Many professors taking part in Students Write Wikipedia publicly speak about value of Wikipedia in education.
Participation
Again, Students Write Wikipedia and WLM directly encourage participation, but we belive that this message echoes in everything we do in course of P&O: the main message of our banner was "don't keep your knowledge to yourself".