Grants:PEG/WM IN/Bootstrap Grant/Report

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Report accepted
This report for a Project and Event grant approved in FY 2012-13 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
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Compliance and completion[edit]

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?
Yes
Is your project completed?
Yes
Did you use any of the grant funds?
Yes

Activities and lessons learned[edit]

Activities[edit]

Here is a list of activities as per the grant request and their status:[1][2][3]

Wikimedia /Chapter promotional materials.[edit]

The design and printing of Chapter brochures, Wikimedia India annual report 2011-2012 booklets, leaflets , membership application forms,[4][5] donation form,[6] receipt books, academy certificates[7] and stationery in English has been completed. The design and printing of the 2011-12 annual report in English has been completed.[8] The annual report is serving the dual purpose of promoting WMF and WMIN and for the purposes of donor education. Some of the promotional and instructional documents were also translated into some Indic languages like Malayalam, Odiya, Bengali and Hindi.[9] T- shirts were designed and printed for two events and promotional stickers were produced for another. In short all the planned promotional materials were produced in English, while for native languages we couldn’t complete translation of all materials in all major languages.

Details for Operating Expenses[edit]

We engaged a consultant for bookkeeping and liaison with Government authorities for various approvals and for filing statutory reports. We also engaged an auditor for statutory audit. A legal consultant was also appointed.

The government liaison, bookkeeping consultant and the auditor have not been paid out of the grant funds. The govt liason was paid from local funds as he was was required before the actual receipt of money. Similarly the auditor has been engaged and paid from local funds. The grant money came in after the financial year was over. Since the period covered by the grant was not the one being audited, we did not pay from the grant fund. The payment for the period under grant will be due sometime in May 2013. Legal services were acquired pro-bono.

Apart from these consultants, we also appointed our first staff member - an Executive Manager. A staff was employed as we needed to partly handle the bookkeeping work and all other bank and government relations work at Bangalore. The new EC did not have any members in Bangalore, the city where the chapter is registered, to take care of this. The staff member is required to support the society members in all possible activities where the members require support. As a one man office, the job description has a wide spectrum of activities.

We had a few domain names registered. We have paid for the renewal one of these and other renewal payments have also been incurred, but just outside the grant period, though due date was within the grant period.[10] We did not project telecommunication expenses as a means. This was incurred as we shifted from IIRC to teleconference for better interaction.

Travel[edit]

Travel expenditures were incurred for the following activities.

1)EC and Subcommittee members travel has been incurred particularly for the AGM and for the transition of EC.

2)Participation in the below community meet-ups, outreach and academies .

  • LD College workshop
  • Dravidian university workshop
  • IIT Madras workshop
  • WWW-Mumbai

3)For participation in events where chapter mans an exhibition booth.

  • Hasgeek, a hackers group event
  • FICCI event
  • DBIT seminar on e-Libraries

In addition to these we had also budgeted for travel for a global chapter event and that did not happen.

Grants[edit]

Instead of giving a 100 small grants of 1000 INR each, WMIN funded a few large community projects. Community driven projects funded during the grant period are Malayalam Wiki’s Sangamotsavam, Wiki loves monuments India, Wiki women's workshop at Mumbai, Assamese wiki’s Photo and article writing contest, Kannada wikipedia’s 9th anniversary celebration, Bangalore wiki meetup 50. These grants include prize money and catering expenditure.[1][2][3]

Lessons learned[edit]

What went well?
Chapter was registered properly and we could comply with all the statutory requirements. FCRA approval was done so as to facilitate receiving foreign funds. Chapter was well received by the community as an entity to support the community and their efforts to take up the activities further. First ever Wiki conference was held successfully. Various academies and outreach events were carried out across the country. W10 celebrations happened across the country and that motivated volunteers for outreach and other activities/events.
What did not go well?
Our efforts to get registered with the authorities as a charitable organisation for income tax purpose have not been successful so far. This will have an impact on managing our grants, funds and will also affect the donors as they will not get tax exemption for donations.
Lot of turnaround in the EC has its own impact in the handling of various projects. Continuity in the project work and thought process gets hampered because of this. Lack of volunteers in some geographies hamper taking up/running of the projects. Given that we have limited volunteers, it is difficult to measure the success of any of the outreach/academies kind of activities.
What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?
Now that we have experience, we will plan activities in a better way. We will try to synchronise grants, financial year end (regulatory bindings) with each other so that planning and utilisation of funds can be done in better way. Expenses on staff and office will be properly included.

Project goal and measures of success[edit]

Project goal[edit]

Did you achieve your project goal? How do you know your goal was achieved? Please answer in 1 - 2 paragraphs.

The stated goal was “To attain financial and operational strength to undertake active outreach projects, targeted interventions and to support efforts of members and the community at large.” Being the first year, we believe that we achieved it properly. We still have to perform better on financials. We did better in getting along with the community and generating confidence in them as a supporter of their activities. Considering the diversity of languages and cultures that we have, we did fairly good in reaching out to people from North-east to down south. Some more time will be required to strengthen the city, language SIG structure so that we can really do better in outreach and awareness.

Our annual report for 2011-12 gives more clarity about our achievements.[11]

Measures of success[edit]

List the measures of success exactly as provided in the approved grant submission, and evaluate your project according to each measure listed there.
A. Conducting the Wiki Conference: We conducted our first Wikiconference successfully. Jimmy Wales was the keynote speaker and he acknowledged that it was the biggest Wikipedia Conference he had ever seen. There were Indic tracks and other technology hackathons going on parallely that received a great response. Media coverage was excellent. All the local print media and some TV channels gave coverage to the conference. Lot of like minded people met each other and great brainstorming and idea sharing happened during the conference.
B. Fulfilling basic statutory requirements.:We fulfilled all our statutory requirements completely. Further applications for 12A and 80G (Income Tax related) will be processed in the future.
C. Outreach events: We did a number of outreach events across the country this includes seminar/workshops and wiki academies too.The response to these events was very good.
D. Memberships: We still lag behind in increasing the membership numbers. We do not want to get a huge number of inactive members but we want to have a selective, dedicated members in the chapter.
Provide an overall assessment of how your project went according to these measures.


If you were to plan a similar project, would you measure it differently? If yes, please explain how.

We will have to figure out methods of measuring the success in terms of retaining people, followup with them and convert them from users to editors. As of now, there are no way to measure the success through any follow ups. That should be built knowingly and with additional interaction and resource allocation.

Impact[edit]

From the conference and other various events and activities done by the chapter, we reached to a lot of people and created awareness about Wikipedia. It was also highlighted in various academies and outreach events that Indian language Wikipedias exist and the users were encouraged to become editors. Photothons and photowalks generated interest further and added pictures in Commons pool.[1][2][3][12] Volunteers across the country can now ask us for grant easily and we can support them to fulfill their requirements.

Reporting and documentation of expenditures[edit]

Documentation[edit]

Documentation of expenditures has been received by WMF.

A request for reallocation of remaining funds has been submitted by the grantee and approved by WMFon the discussion page of this grant report.

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grants at wikimedia dot org, according to the guidelines here? Answer "Yes" or "No".

Not yet. We are still left with some money and re-purpose request is already made. We can generate the report once this is complete and then submit to you.

Expenses[edit]

Description Budget Total Group total Actual Actual group total amount
Wikimedia / Chapter promotion material 160,000.00 112,593.50
Design and Printing costs of stationery. 100,000.00 47,384.50
Design and manufacture of promotion material 60,000.00 65,209.00
Operating Expenses 165,000.00 15,340.50
Consultant fees – Govt liasion, auditor, legal consultant 125,000.00 0[13]
Bank expenses for clearing forex receipts 25,000.00 563.00
Web domain and hosting 15,000.00 715.00[14]
Teleconferencing services 14,062.50
Travel 205,000.00 265,577.30
Travel for EC meetups, community meetups, outreach events, events where chapter manned booths and wiki academies. 155,000.00 265,577.30
For any Global chapter events where funding is required from chapter 50,000.00 0[15]
Grants 100,000.00 121,885.50
For innovative projects from community / members 100,000.00 121,885.50
AGM and Wiki conference 45,000.00 -
AGM meeting expenses 45,000.00 0[16]
Total 675,000.00 515,396.80
Balance from above 159603.2
Interest 15232
Tax on interest 278
Less amount in received grant fund transfer 25753
bounced transfers for WLM prize money 4200
Tax deduction at source. 978
Balance in bank 143626.2


Total project budget (from your approved grant submission)
6,75,000 INR
Total amount requested from WMF (from your approved grant submission)
6,75,000 INR (Actual amount received from WMF 649,247 INR[17])
Total amount spent on this project (this total should be the total calculated from the table above)
5,15,396.80 INR
Total amount of WMF grant funds spent on this project (this total will be the same as the total amount spent if the WMF grant is your only funding source)
5,15,396.80 INR
Are there additional sources of revenue that funded any part of this project? List them here.
An amount of Rs 176,575 was spent from the local account for other expenses of the chapter including consultant, auditor, part time staff, other local travel, stationery, courier charges, postage etc. The local fund had received a WCI Surplus of Rs 365,814; Bank interest from Local account was Rs 2,621; Of the local fund Rs 201,015 was set aside as a corpus. The local fund available for spending is currently at Rs 26,343.
Apart from this, in partnership with WMIN, WMF supported some additional printing and travel expenses, totalling 1,10,880 INR.

Remaining funds[edit]

A request for reallocation of remaining funds has been submitted by the grantee. You may view its current status here.

Are there any grant funds remaining?
Yes
Please list the total amount (specify currency) remaining here. (This is the amount you did not use, or the amount you still have after completing your grant.)
INR. 143,626.20
If funds are remaining they must be returned to WMF, reallocated to mission-aligned activities, or applied to another approved grant.
Please state here if you intend to return unused funds to WMF, submit a request for reallocation, or submit a new grant request, and then follow the instructions on your approved grant submission.

Repurpose request is already submitted on the talk page.

Notes and References[edit]

  1. a b c Feb-May activity report
  2. a b c Jul-Sep report
  3. a b c Oct-Dec Report
  4. http://wiki.wikimedia.in/images/9/9c/WikimediaChapterMembershipFormIndividual.pdf
  5. http://wiki.wikimedia.in/images/3/38/WikimediaChapterMembershipFormInstitution.pdf
  6. http://wiki.wikimedia.in/File:Wikimedia_Donation_Form.pdf
  7. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMIN-Wiki-AcademyCertificateTemplate.pdf
  8. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMIN-Annual-Report2011-2012TwoUp.pdf
  9. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_India
  10. wikibooks.in, wikisource.in, wikiquote.in, wikibooks.org.in, wikiqoute.in, wiktionary.org.in, wikinews.in, wikisource.org.in
  11. 2011-12 Annual Report
  12. Chapter events
  13. All Consultants' fees were paid before grant funds were received (in case of legal no fees as services were obtained probono). No money was spent out of grant funds
  14. More Expenses exist, to be paid after repurposing
  15. No travel for any global event happened
  16. No separate AGM expenses
  17. as per fund transfer records with the bank