Esperanto kaj Libera Scio/Reports/2024/en
Annual report 2024 of the Wikimedia User Group Esperanto and Free Knowledge (EliSo, in Esperanto Vikimedio EO, VMEO) approved during the General Assembly Meeting on February 9, 2025.
Mission work
Talks, trainings and edit-a-thons
Talks:
- Live forever of die trying (ZAT - Zamenhof Event of Tuscany, Italy)
- Live forever of die trying (5th Virtual Congress of Esperanto, online)
Presentations during events:
- 5th Virtual Congress of Esperanto: presentation during the Movement Fair (online)
Trainings:
- Italian Congress of Esperanto (Italy)
- Wikipedia Afternoon
- Wikivoyage training
- Let's co-create the free map OpenStreetMap (Arkones - Artistic Confrontations in Esperanto, Poland)
- Improve the (project) management of your organisation (VSKK - Green Scouts Gossip Meeting, Belgium)
- Create your first website in 1 day (ĈAR - Near-Border Autumn Meeting, Poland)
Contests, campaigns
Translation contest 2015
- recalculate winners and provide prizes
- planned, but not done
- postponed due to administrative, organizational and personal challenges
American month 2021
- provide last prize (awaiting confirmation from WMF)
- WMF does not have sufficient capacity to address our final report
- planned, but not done
Wikimedia CEE Spring - English 2022
- was delayed because of organisational challenges
- count winners and provide prizes
- planned, but not done
Event Competition 2022
- was delayed because of organisational challenges
- count winners and provide prizes
- planned, but not done
African competition
- considered contest about Africa, related to the 1st Universal Congress of Esperanto in Africa in 2024
- considered, but neither planned nor done
Campaign / contest for content about skills development
- considered competition / campaign / something alike about writing of content for Wikipedia (and maybe other Wikimedia projects) about skills required for work of Esperanto-organisations
- considered, but neither planned nor done
Contest about other important topics
- we had considered a competition or a campaign about other topics, that especially matter for mankind (e.g. health, climate change)
- considered, but neither planned nor done. However, through Erasmus+ we applied as a partner in a grant application for a health project
Community and activist engagement and development
We have been working on recruitment of volunteers using our volunteer recruitment tool. But its usage in 2024 was limited because of technical problems.
The distribution of organizational roles continued to be insufficient. Onboarding continued to be a problem, mainly for the Board and the Audit Committee. More work on this was planned to be done during the creation of the strategic plan, which itself was again postponed.
A membership recruitment campaign was not carried out. The reason was the need for better preparation - getting to know our members and community members better (this is planned to be done as part of creating the strategic plan), the need for improvements to the workflow of our membership tool and marketing funnel (to be done with the help of an invited expert thanks to Erasmus+) and the over-preoccupation of the person in charge.
No assessment of the Community Capacity Map had been done.
Grant projects
ViPE – Wikis for Europe (Erasmus+ KA2)
- trainings about Wikipedia and Wikisource, creation of online video course, manual and educational portal, translation of MediaWiki
- successfully reported
Str – Strategic development for Wikimedia support (Erasmus+ KA1)
- individual education of ELiSo activists
- there have been several changes in the project, especially regarding participants, but overall successful
- project successfully completed. To be followed by the submission of the final report in early 2025
SANO (Erasmus+ KA2)
- we participated in the grant as a partner
- in the case of approval of the project, our tasks will include, for example, direct paid writing of Wikipedia articles and organization of a competition in Wikimedia projects on the topic of health
Consideration of additional projects for individual education of ELiSo activists and adult learners, with support from Erasmus+ (KA1)
- due to insufficient interest and possibilities of EliSo activists, we decided in 2024 not to apply for a new similar project, and rather to firstly involve more activists
- for the same reason we decided in 2024 not to apply for accreditation for KA1
Considerations for other Erasmus+ collaboration projects (KA2)
- we considered, and discussed with potential partners, other collaboration projects, but the interest of potential partners was not sufficient
- we explored a bit the possibility of doing a project for creating a system for Global Templates (as part of our Strategically Important Work). The level of management and financing of such a project currently exceeds our capacities, so in the near future we will not be able to lead this kind of a project, but could eventually participate in it. After sufficient development of our capacities and in the event of great success in obtaining grants, we could lead such a project in several years.
Participation in Wikimedia events
General assembly of Wikimedia Europe (Czech Republic)
- we participated as an official member
- we led a short workshop about grants from Erasmus+
Wikimania (Katowice, Poland)
- participated also some esperantists and they gathered together
Photo Workshop of Wikimedia Czech republic (Kolín, Czech Republic)
- learning (on organizing trainings) by job shadowing
- supported by Erasmus+
WikiSaturday of Wikimedia Netherlands (Utrecht, the Netherlands)
- learning (about organizing community meetings) by job shadowing
- supported by Erasmus+
Wikipedia afternoon – Write our history (Schiedam, the Netherlands)
- learning (about organizing community meetings) by job shadowing
- supported by Erasmus+
Participation in Esperanto events
Italian Congress of Esperanto (Montecatini Terme, Italy)
- joint lecture and training about contributing to Wikipedia and Wikivoyage
- supported by Erasmus+
Arkones - Artistic Confrontations in Esperanto (Poznan, Poland)
- lecture and training about contributing to OpenStreetMap (OSM)
- supported by Erasmus+
VSKK - Green Scouts Gossip Meeting (Tilff, Belgium)
- training about organisational management
- supported by Erasmus+
ZAT - Zamenhof Event of Tuscany (Pisa, Italy)
- learning (about contributing to Wikipedia) by job shadowing
- supported by Erasmus+
ĈAR - Near-Border Autumn Meeting (Krakow, Poland)
- training in website creation
- supported by Erasmus+
5th Virtual Congress of Esperanto (online)
- presentation of ELiSo during the Virtual Movement Fair, talk
Participation in other events
General assembly of OpenStreetMap Czech Republic (Olomouc, Czech Republic)
- learning (about work of organisation providing support for OpenStreetMap) by job shadowing
- supported by Erasmus+
Other mission work
Work for Slovakia
We focus on working with the Esperanto community. But with our strategic approach of ecosystemic support, we are also working to support Slovakia, the country where we are officially registered.
In 2024 we mainly informed the Slovak-speaking public through the dedicated Facebook page (PreWiki.sk) about important events through links to articles on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Our Facebook page was the most active Wikipedia Facebook page in Slovak.
We also wrote a few articles on the EU portal for adult education - EPALE.
We started planning to hold a community meeting or a topic-focused edit-a-thon, but we haven't done it because of the busy schedule.
Outreach
In 2024 we outreached to the public mainly through our social networks (Facebook, Twitter / X) in our pages / accounts of EliSo, Wikipedia and Wikivoyage.
We planned to try to receive in our possession the long-unused social media accounts from Esperanto-language Wikimedia projects. But due to busy schedules, we didn't start working on it.
Due to a bug in our contact management system CiviCRM, we were unable to send mass messages from our website. So there was no increase in newsletter activity either.
Stretch goals
ZEO database
- idea to create a database of ZEOs (Zamenhof/Esperanto objects) through a new installation of WikiBase (the same as Wikidata)
- due to busyness we have not made any progress on the matter
Events Competition
- in 2022 it was on the verge of success, so a reconsideration was needed first
- due to busyness we did not make progress on the matter
Organisational work
Organizational sustainability
In 2024 we were able to participate in a number of learning events, thanks in particular to the generous support of the European Commission's Erasmus+ programme.
Recognition as a Wikimedia Thematic Organisation
Continuation of our request from 2019. At that time, AffCom did not have sufficient capacity to complete the recognition. Recognition of an organization as a Thematic Organization has 3 steps and is scheduled to take 4-6 months to complete. In our case, AffCom took 7 months and failed to complete even the 1st step, nor proactively inform us of its delay. Shortly after, AffCom put on hold our recognition process, providing various reasons on different occasions.
In 2024, we did not proactively restore the recognition process because of our busy schedule.
Infrastructure development
In 2024 we worked to restore our project management tool OpenProject. It has helped us a lot in the past, but after server problems it remains unavailable. We tried to migrate our data to Projektoj.org (a new online project management tool for Esperanto community run by TEJO (World Esperanto Youth Organisation), also running on OpenProject). We achieved partial, but insufficient, success, and will continue the work in 2025.
Because of our busy schedule, we were unable to handle other planned infrastructure developments.
Human resources
Due to our great busyness we were unable to continue the planned activities to develop our human resources.
Grant projects for development
During 2024 we completed the project Strategic development for Wikimedia support supported by Erasmus+ of European Commission, which aimed to increase the capacity of our activists. Several changes occurred in the projects, in particular some planned people could no longer participate.
Membership recruitment campaign
In 2024, due to our busy schedule, the planned membership recruitment campaign did not take place. The campaign also included improvements to infrastructure, which should have helped us with recruitment.
Strategic attitude
Strategic plan 2025-2026
The goal was to establish a long-term strategic committee that would lead the work on the Strategic Plan 2025-2026 during 2024 with the participation of several members and activists of EliSo and Wikimedia community members. Due to our greatly busy schedule, we were unable to start this work in 2024 and postponed the work on the plan to early 2025.
Incubator for free culture Esperanto organizations
As we reported in the Annual plan, in order to be able to address an Incubator for free cultur Esperanto organizations, we ourselves need to achieve a higher level of organizational sustainability first. Due to our great busyness, we were unable to address this basic condition, so we did not work on the Incubator either.
Group preparation of important documents
Due to our great busyness, important documents were once again prepared only by one core activist, without the participation of members, activists, and community members.
Development of an employment system
In 2024 we neither developed our employment system nor hired an employee.
Restoration of Wikimedia Foundation grants
The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has temporarily suspended grants for Michal Matúšov (current Chair) due to his unwillingness to resolve conflicts. This limits our activities and our ability to advance the Wikimedia mission and thus hurts the Wikimedia movement. In 2024, we aimed to resolve this WMF's conflict, if possible at the structural level of WMF (otherwise it could resurface in other places and times).
Grants from the Wikimedia Foundation in 2024 were not our priority, so we didn't work to restore them.
Ecological sustainability
We continued our organizational habit of using mostly ground vehicles for our travels, and serving vegetarian and vegan meals.
However, we have not formalized these and other habits and practices.
Global calendar
Because of our great busyness, we did not address the possibility of introducing a globally valid calendar.