Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015 round1/Wikimedia Deutschland e.V./Impact report form

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Global Metrics Overview[edit]

Program 1: Volunteer Support[edit]

Global Metrics: Volunteer Support
Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. # of active editors involved 947
2. # of new editors 1,332
3. # of individuals involved 4,514 From all volunteer projects directly supported by WMDE, online & offline, participants & organizers (not including ‘followers’, ‘page viewers’ or ‘survey participants’).

Does not include additional participants of activities at local hubs: 1,900 - 2,500 (estimation based on partially documented participation data and total number of activities at local hubs).

4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages Uploads to Commons total: 117,544

Added to WM pages/articles: 18,653

5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects 30,116 Based on project documentations documenting articles created/ improved and integration of media files in articles.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects n/a

(discontinued metric)

WMDE does not track this (now discontinued) metric because it requires tracking of user names to aggregate ‘bytes added’ (as analysis of article sets is not available in Wikimetrics). We do not practice this with regard to EU privacy laws and privacy preferences of the German-speaking editor community.

Program 2: Software Development[edit]

Global Metrics: Software Development
Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. # of active editors involved n/a Please note: Global Metrics are not applicable to the activities of the WMDE Software Development Program. For assessment of our online work, e.g. with the Wikidata editor community, please refer to the Wikidata Metrics table below. For more data on FOSS outreach and community-centered software development, please refer to the Additional Metrics table below.
2. # of new editors n/a
3. # of individuals involved n/a
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages n/a
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects n/a
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects n/a

Wikidata Metrics[edit]

To assure comparability, Wikidata metrics included here are the same as in the 2015 progress report. (For the APG 2015-2016 Round 1 funding and reporting cycle we will introduce further software development metrics and KPIs, made available via public dashboards, aligned with the targets in WMDE’s APG 2015-2016 Round 1 proposal.)

Wikidata Map June 2015 (map shows a single pixel dot for every Wikidata item with a coordinate location)
Wikidata Map October 2015 Note: Significant increase of Wikidata items with a coordinate location in Mexico after Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City.
Wikidata Map October 2015 Note: Significant increase of Wikidata items with a coordinate location in Mexico after Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City.
Additional Metrics: Wikidata Overview
Editors
Metric 12/2014 12/2015

(31.12.2015)

Change 2014-2015
editors (1+/ 30 days) 13,344 16,530 +24%
active editors (5+/ 30 days) 5,377 6,650 +24%
very active editors (100+/ 30 days) 800 1,080 +35%
new active editors (10th edit threshold, 01-05/2015) (01-12/2014)

9,212

(01-12/2015)

8,629

- 6%
Content
Metric 12/2014 12/2015

(31.12.2015)

Change 2014-2015
pages 16.87M 20.32M +20%
items 16.67M 19.31M +16%
items with referenced statements 8.42M 11.64M +38%
edits (total) 182.57M 287.42M +57%
statements (total) 53.02M 80.91M +53%
statements referenced to Wikipedia 18.69M

(~35% of total)

23.02M (~28% of total) +23%
statements referenced to other sources 8.01M

(~15% of total)

16.86M (~21% of total) +110%

Additional Metrics: Community-centered Software Development / Outreach[edit]

Additional Metrics: Community-centered Software Development / FOSS Outreach and Mentoring
Global Metric

equivalent

Additional Metrics Q1/Q2 2015 Total 2015

(Q1-Q4 2015)

Explanation
Community-centered Software Development
Editors involved Technical wish list 2014-2015 TOP 20

Pageviews

2,234 4,552 This refers to the project page of the first round of the technical wish list in Germany (2014-2015). The participation with the second round of the technical wish list in Q3 2015 is summarized in the metrics below.
Technical wish list 2014-2015 (Coordination page)

Pageviews

1,578 3,064 This refers to the overall coordination page of the technical wish list and was used to organize the ‘Tech on Tour’ workshops and as entry point for the 2015 wish list survey.
Technical wish list 2015

Pageviews

n/a 7,682 This refers to the main page of the 2015 wish list survey (starting September, 19th). For further information please refer also to the prioritization page of the poll and the documentation page of the 2014 and 2015 ‘top wishes’, which gives an overview of the development tasks completed, in progress, or upcoming,  including tasks addressed jointly with the WMF Community Tech Team and aligned with the international wish list.
Editors engaged in voting on/ discussing the 2015 wish list (online) n/a 235 # of votes (total): 1,039 on 132 wishes/ ideas. 153 voters. 43 of the voters engaged in extensive online discussions of the proposed tasks/features. Additional 82 editors engaged in the task discussions (but did not vote). Overall voting and community discussions involved roughly 22% of the very active editors of de:WP.
Event participants in the context of community- centered software development (offline only) 53 73 Participants of the ‘Tech on Tour’ workshop series and at the live kickoff event for the 2015 wish list survey at the German Wikipedia volunteer conference WikiCon 2015.
FOSS Outreach and Mentoring
New Individuals involved Media Activity 18 52 Number of tech articles (blogs, other media) published/ initiated by WMDE software development
Views Software Development page on Wikimedia.de Page views (total) 843 932 Landing page of WMDE software development. Indicating general interest in software development at WMDE
Social Media Response

Number of retweets, followers, Facebook likes

387 603 Indicating the involvement / interactions of FOSS scene with the software development@WMDE
WMDE Tech Events

Number of tech events hosted or organized by WMDE Software Development

24 55 Indicating the involvement / interactions of FOSS scene with the software development@WMDE
Participants (on-site)

Visitors at tech events hosted or organized by WMDE software development department

197 603 Indicating the involvement / exchange of FOSS scene with the software development@WMDE
Podcast Source Code Berlin

# of listeners

7,467 15,031 Number of listeners to FOSS Podcast Sourcecode.Berlin (23 new episodes in 2015 with an average of 590 listeners per episode/ 1,250 listeners per month)

Additionally, WMDE published 15 FOSS Tech Talks (sourcecode.berlin / youtube) with more than 1,800 views in 2015

Mentees / participants at WMDE mentoring activities 5 + a student group (10 students) 6 Currently WMDE is mentoring six individuals (bachelor/master students, high school interns). Additionally WMDE mentored a student group (ten students) from Hasso Plattner-Institute working with staff on data quality in Wikidata.

Program 3: Institutions[edit]

Global Metrics: Institutions
Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. # of active editors involved 137 Active Wikimedians as organizers or participants at workshops and ‘GLAM on Tour’ or ‘KulTour’ events. Not applicable to other events included in this report (Coding da Vinci, conferences, in-house events, etc.) as these are not targeted at Wikimedia editors mainly.
2. # of new editors (15) Representatives of GLAMs who started editing at workshops or ‘GLAM on Tour’ and ‘KulTour’ events as documented on the project pages. But please note: this program is not targeted at generating new editors.
3. # of individuals involved Offline: 995 Please note that the offline count includes very diverse groups: Editors, GLAM representatives, hackers/ developers, participants of panel discussions.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages Uploads to Commons Total: 49,854

Added to WM articles/ pages: 662

5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects 922 Based on project documentations regarding articles created/ improved and on integration of media files in articles.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects n/a

(discontinued metric)

Please note: WMDE does not track this (now discontinued) metric because it requires tracking of user names to aggregate ‘bytes added’ (as analysis of article sets is not available in Wikimetrics). We do not practice this with regard to EU privacy laws and privacy preferences of the German-speaking editing community.

Program 4: Legal and Social Framework[edit]

Global Metrics: Legal and Social Framework
Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. # of active editors involved n/a Please note: Advocacy and policy work - which is the core of WMDE’s Legal and Social Framework program - is aimed at high-level changes in societal and political conditions and by this, supporting the vision, mission and values of the Wikimedia movement - creating conditions in which free knowledge can thrive. Thus, activities in this field are not intended to have a direct impact on the Wikimedia projects in terms of gaining new editors or new content. For an overview of WMDE's political work please refer to the figures below.
2. # of new editors n/a
3. # of individuals involved n/a
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages n/a
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects n/a
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects n/a

Additional Metrics: Advocacy & Policy Work[edit]

Additional Metrics: Advocacy & Policy Work
Metric Q1-Q4 2015 Explanation
# of volunteers involved > 4,500 EU advocacy: 100+ for the Freedom of Panorama (FoP) campaign, 17 on regular basis (at least four actions/year), hundreds wrote letters to their MEPs; 4,235 German Wikipedians submitted an open letter to the European Parliament regarding FoP; 4,464 non-editors were engaged to sign the open letter.
# of Wikimedia orgs involved 23 EU advocacy: WMF, chapters/thematic orgs/user groups from the EU and non-EU based
# of events/ networking meetings staged 26 EU advocacy: two events targeted at policy makers, three at allies/volunteers

OER and beyond: Nine events about free knowledge issues staged at WMDE / five events supported informally / Mapping OER: four thematic workshops and one final conference (> 250 stakeholders involved) / three barcamps on open science

# of allies & partners 25 / >250 EU advocacy: 14 allies & partners (based on at least one cooperation activity/year)

OER and beyond: 11 partners and supporting members at the Open Education Alliance / > 250 stakeholders working with WMDE through ‘Mapping OER’

# of participations at hearings and expert committees 9 / > 200 EU advocacy: > 200 contacts/ meetings (conservative count); three participations in hearings/expert committees (active role in official EP/Commission hearings/expert committee)

OER and beyond: seven consultations and hearings, project lead at ‘Mapping OER’ project

# of published statements/ position papers 7 EU advocacy: Two letters (to Parliament on process and to Commission on content), one FAQ on FoP and one study

OER and beyond: One position paper / one statement/ one OER practice framework

# of policy decisions/ policy changes happened 5 EU advocacy: Three (FoP on Commission agenda for copyright reform; "Safeguarding of public domain" recommended by EP; "Database Directive" review recommended to Commission by EP)

OER and beyond:

German Federal Ministry of Education and Research funds further development of OER in Germany (~2M € per year). Its 2016 call for proposals incorporated findings from WMDE’s ‘Mapping OER’ project.

Federal and state level authorities (Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the KMK - Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany) increasingly act in concert to foster OER.

Program Stories[edit]

Overview[edit]

2015 was a year of consolidation and strengthening for Wikimedia Deutschland. The organization took the opportunity of an executive transition to review and improve key organizational structures, processes and relationships. The Board and the new Executive Director found collaborative and effective ways of communicating and engaging with each other. The annual planning process was re-designed to assure participation of all stakeholders and now reflects a clear distinction between strategic planning on the one hand and operational/programmatic planning on the other. Community participation in the creation of the strategic piece, the Annual Compass 2016, was high, and input from the communities was carefully reviewed, analyzed and incorporated into the final product.

At the program level, Software Engineering saw significant growth and development for Wikidata, as well as in the area of community-centered software development. Volunteer Support saw a growing number of high quality community projects, many of them successful thanks to the growing local volunteer groups and structures and their local partnerships. Mapping OER (Open Educational Resources) was WMDE’s 2015 flagship project, since it was financed through a large federal grant from the Department of Education and Research (620K EUR), recognizing WMDE as an important stakeholder in the field, and enabling us to directly work together with many other OER stakeholders in Germany. The project produced not only significant policy pathways, but also a coalition of open education stakeholders that is gaining strength and influence – assuring that policy is filled with life and activities furthering universal access to knowledge in all educational arenas. The accompanying advocacy activities that WMDE and partners engaged in picked up in terms of frequency and relevance, and begin to show concrete results at a number of policy levels.

Finally, WMDE worked hard in 2015 to share learnings with the movement through numerous learning patterns and other means. Through WMDEs leadership organizing the Wikimedia Conference, we support the movement’s ability to engage in outcome-oriented conversations, to think and learn together and from each other, and to work effectively across chapters and user groups in between conferences.

Program Story 1: Supporting Volunteers[edit]

2015 was a year of consolidation and advancement of our Volunteer Support Department: We refined our strategies for volunteer support, continued to strengthen local groups and local hubs, and increasingly focused on synergies between successful existing programs at large scale (e.g. WLM competition) and new volunteer activities complementing them. Strong emphasis was put on building further trust with program leaders and the volunteer communities, e.g. in the course of the participatory, multi-stakeholder process over the summer of 2015 that led to our 2016 annual plan. Simplified support structures and improved communication enabled more Wikimedians to get access to monetary and non-monetary support for their activities. Local capacities increased through local hubs, boosting independently conducted activities and new ideas.

In October, a new department head took the lead: Julian Fischer comes with much experience gained in several nonprofit positions, among others as Executive Director of the German Foundation for Consumer Protection. His rapid onboarding was facilitated by interim department head Sebastian Sooth. In Q4, under this consolidated leadership, strong emphasis was placed on focusing on the 2016 goal of gaining and retaining new editors, and first steps were taken to gather data, knowledge and community input to inform the upcoming efforts. Meanwhile, the Volunteer Support team continued to support partnerships, ideas, local hubs and projects, relying on proven methods of providing monetary support, and testing new avenues for non-monetary support.

Volunteers and Groups (by Dec, 31th 2015)
Program leaders / organizers of activities 161
Active Wikimedians involved in activities supported by WMDE 947
Participants at volunteer activities directly supported by WMDE* 4,514
Local groups cooperating in their respective region 50
of that, local hubs (locations with formalized Wikimedia meeting space) 5

* does not include additional participants of activities at local hubs (indirectly supported by WMDE, ~ 1,900 - 2,500 per estimation based on documented participation data)

Local Hubs and Groups[edit]

Deutschsprachige Wikipedia Stammtische 2012-2014
Deutschsprachige Wikipedia Stammtische 2012-2014

The German-speaking community is one of the largest and most interactive groups globally engaged in the Wikimedia projects (measured, for example, by participation in administrator elections). Soon after the founding of Wikipedia, volunteers started meeting locally and regionally, and have done so ever since. ‘Stammtisch’ (cracker barrel meeting) culture, established for centuries in Germany, served well as a community building format for Wikipedians in Germany. ‘Stammtisch’ means a regular meeting of friends or like-minded people in a pub. The culture of face to face meetings of Wikipedians has evolved over time in Germany, with the first ever meeting of volunteers taking place in Munich in 2003, the first Wikimania in Frankfurt in 2005, annual summer camp style meetups since 2007 and the annual volunteer conference WikiCon since 2011.

WMDE continues its strong support for local volunteer groups and initiatives. We believe it is important to support groups locally, so volunteers do not have to travel across the country, so they can act as go-to places and people for new volunteers, and so they can connect and leverage with partners, networks and institutions locally. WMDE supports these activities with funds and technical assistance as needed and as appropriate based on funding guidelines and movement goals. Support covers the cost of insurance, equipment rentals and meeting spaces.

Workshop Stuttgart - August 2015
Workshop Stuttgart - August 2015

Local activism is a highly fluctuating process. As with all volunteer-led initiatives, results are mixed: Some hubs have stabilized, some have shrunk, and other groups have newly formed, depending on the availability and interest of local activists. Many local structures strengthened and were inspired by each other. When volunteers get together across regions (for example at WikiCon), or hear about each other’s activities on wiki discussion pages, they often then strive to replicate promising local initiatives they learned about. We have also seen local structures serving as a base for reaching out to other civic groups, or engage in local events, conferences and fairs. Munich, for example, now has exhibition walls and equipment stored at their hub, so they can easily represent the Wikimedia community with a booth at two annual fairs in town.

Local hubs, most importantly, in 2015 have served as meeting space for volunteers, serving a crucial function in not only sustaining social ties between individuals, but as a friendly entry point for new editors. In Stuttgart, for example, each open editing meeting is accompanied by a two-hour newbie workshop beforehand - the curriculum and format was completely designed by the Stuttgart volunteers. The Stuttgart hub works with the public library as a location for the open editing Stuttgart meeting and as a partner that does the advertising for the event. WMDE supports the PR, through local print invitations for active members, and assists with public transport tickets, materials, supplies, equipment and snacks for the events.

WMDE is monitoring and analyzing local developments in order to learn and share what makes local hubs successful and sustainable. To this end, WMDE conducted a study (English summary) in late 2015. The activists of the local hubs/spaces were interviewed to help us better understand volunteer motivation and the types of activities taking place. On the one hand, this study highlighted important aspects that already influenced our strategies regarding local hubs/spaces: they are important for the recruitment of new editors, strengthen the local communities and alleviate conflicts, thus building social capital. On the other hand, interviews with participants from these hubs highlight that local spaces can also serve as a public face of the Wikipedia community for media and help forge new partnerships, for example with local groups. In addition, the study encourages WMDE to provide more guidance and capacity building for its volunteers, through careful non-monetary support.

Highlight Story: Wiki Loves Monuments 2015[edit]

Leuchtturm in Westerheversand – WLM 2015 Winning Picture
Leuchtturm in Westerheversand – WLM 2015 Winning Picture

WLM 2015 benefitted from a number of technical innovations, and of course from the continued engagement of the volunteer organisational team, supported by WMDE staff and resources.

WLM-Uploader Tool
WLM-Uploader Tool

Local partnerships also help to improve projects such as WLM: In several German states and cities, volunteers cooperated with the local/regional offices of historic preservation to receive real-time lists of historic monuments to then update state monument lists in Wikipedia. A new WLM upload tool - supported by WMDE software development, based on requests by WLM activists - was integrated with state monument lists on Wikipedia: Upload icons for each image missing on the lists led to the upload tool. Object IDs and categories were automatically added during the upload. Finally, uploaded images were integrated in the monument lists. This helped to identify gaps in the documentation of monuments and resulted in 2,764 uploads and 890 pictures added to the monument lists during the competition. Overall this allowed for an easier upload - especially for newcomers - without having to switch between Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

In total, German participants uploaded a new record amount of pictures: 38,983. Despite this wealth of submissions, many of which were of high artistic and technical quality (1,047 featured, valued or quality images so far), the team was able to process the pictures through the use of a pre-jury-tool, which enabled community members to evaluate submissions based on their aesthetic, encyclopedic and technical quality. Through this process, 883 submissions were pre-selected for jury-review. The pre-jury tool, provided by WMAT and used for the first time, helped to facilitate discussion and transparency of the selection process.

WLM 2015 in Germany Uploads
WLM 2015 in Germany Uploads

Accompanying the competition, nine WLM-related photo tours and excursions took place, supported by WMDE funds. One of the WMDE-funded photo tours involved high school students in taking pictures of historic logframe buildings in and around Sachsen. This project alone resulted in the upload of 1,189 pictures for WLM taken by the students and the WLM volunteers (3,025 Commons uploads in total).

High schools students at logframe buildings photo competition
High schools students at logframe buildings photo competition

The winning photograph of both the German and the International 2015 WLM competition was submitted by a German photographer who uses drones to shoot aerial pictures. This technique provides completely new perspectives not accessible to the visitor on the ground. On the WMDE blog, the author, User:Phantom3Pix was interviewed and shared helpful technical and legal information on this innovative way to take pictures. WMDE also supported the creation of a learning pattern based on his information. The possibility of affordably creating aerial pictures opens up a myriad of opportunities for cultural heritage photography, which we expect to see explored by our volunteers in subsequent years. German volunteers already have access to a photodrone that can be checked out at the local hub in Cologne.

Learning Pattern: Drone photography for Commons and Wikipedia Using drones for aerial photography for Commons and Wikipedia

Supporting Volunteer Projects[edit]

Volunteers projects supported by WMDE 2015, by main project goal
Volunteers projects supported by WMDE 2015, by main project goal
WikiCON 2015
WikiCON 2015

In 2015, WMDE has directly supported 381 volunteer projects (not including: ~ 240 additional activities at local hubs, 159 stipends for literature, software or database access and provisions of email addresses etc.) – a substantial increase compared to ~300 supported activities in 2014.

These projects include volunteer meetings, excursions, attendance and representation at conferences, symposia and fairs, photo projects, edit-a-thons, Stammtische, competitions, GLAM on Tour, the 3rd Annual Festival Summer, Women edit, WikiCon 2015 (in Dresden) and many more formats and events.

Support continues to come in a diversity of ways, through covering travel cost, meeting space, the cost of accessing literature needed for high quality articles, equipment rentals, and insurance.

Increased community communication with WMDE volunteer support, per month
Increased community communication with WMDE volunteer support, per month
Increased community communication with WMDE volunteer support, per year
Increased community communication with WMDE volunteer support, per year

We also try to find ways to cut costs and assure sustainable partnerships that support the creation of content, for example through the cooperation with publishing houses that provide Wikipedians with free literature. This was initiated by the community, and after starting with one partner in 2014, the community - encouraged by WMDE - gained four new publishers in 2015. This program will be continued, as it is an efficient way to support authors.

An analysis of WMDE volunteer support communication shows that OTRS communication has constantly increased, totalling up to 15,759 emails in 2015 (pls. note: our volunteer support team uses its own OTRS via community@wikimedia.de to manage support requests, similar to the OTRS used by the Wikipedia Volunteer Response Team), while other communication channels have remained stable. We are receiving more funding requests than in previous years - this has most likely to do with the improved flow of information about support services, and a wider array of support types that are well communicated and easily accessed on the website. Volunteers find fewer and fewer barriers to accessing monetary and and non-monetary supports.

Overall, relations between WMDE Volunteer Support staff and the volunteers have been positive, constructive and collaborative in 2015. There is a climate of constructive cooperation and friendly exchanges. User-friendly, transparent processes and clear role distinctions also help - finding the right balance between targeted support provided by WMDE and volunteers running their projects independently, using the skills and resources available to them. Much of this balanced division of labor can be credited to local hubs, groups and spaces, and the opportunities they provide for leveraging targeted, sustained support with local capacity building. Overall, community relations have improved, yet, we still have much to learn over the next years as we work on realizing a growing number of projects together with the community.

Increasing leverage through connecting external funds with communities

Working closely with ZEN, WMDE’s partnerships & development team, the volunteer support team is actively testing new strategies around developing partnerships and financial resources for volunteer projects. The idea is to forge partnerships locally that allow volunteers to use local facilities and resources, and connect with volunteers from other movements and arenas. In addition, we are exploring ways to support volunteer groups as they apply for movement-external grants, sponsorships and donations to fund their activities. This is often a challenging task, as it requires finding an acceptable fit between volunteer projects and external funder priorities. In a few model cases, first successes are visible:

  • Klexikon – An online encyclopedia for kids age 8-12 is a growing volunteer project we have been supporting since 2014. We submitted a grant proposal, which was not immediately funded, but the funding agency encouraged us to re-submit in a second round with a few changes - the suggested changes were around better planning collaboration with other online early childhood education projects.
  • WikiCon – Planning for the 2016 volunteer conference is done by a team of volunteers from Stuttgart and Ulm. They receive technical assistance from ZEN around local fundraising, and from WMDE’s Event Team around organizing the conference.
  • German-Israel Exchange – Working with volunteers, volunteer support, WMIL, supported by ZEN, we developed a proposal for a Wikipedian exchange project to take place in 2016/17. If funded, ten Wikipedians from each country will participate in the exchange, co-create content for both Wikipedias and Commons, and learn about the respective country’s volunteer cultures. Funder is the German-Israeli Future Fund, and the proposal will go in the final review round in May 2016. Through work on this proposal and project development, we are refining our collaborative strategies when it comes to matching volunteer and funder interests.

Volunteer Project Highlights[edit]

Map created at mapping workshop
Map created at mapping workshop
Taken during Festival-Sommer, used in 26 Wikipedias
Taken during Festival-Sommer, used in 26  Wikipedias

Leipzig Book Fair – Was attended by WMF and WMDE staff, as well as by German volunteers. Members of the German community met with Jake Orlowitz and exchanged ideas for a German WP:library – determining that there was no desire to become an official WP:library site due to the preference not to be bound by referencing expectations. Our staff met with Random House and the Deutsche Wissenschaftsverlag to seal additional publisher cooperations, staffed a well-attended booth that quickly ran out out materials, and provided a presentation about Wikipedia. (Foto under Institutions)

Mapping Workshop at Kontor Hamburg – A volunteer workshop at the local space in Hamburg, to create maps for use within Wikipedia  and to improve skills in using vector graphics software like inkscape.

Refugee Phrasebook
Refugee Phrasebook

Festival Summer – Continues to be a successful format in terms of participation (40 volunteers) as well as the pictures produced for Commons (24,333) and Wikipedia. This project, supporting volunteers as they take life performance photos of musicians, not only during the summer, but all year, has led to much better visual coverage of these artists in the German and several other Wikipedias.  First conversations in the community have ensued about transferring this format to other thematic areas such as sports. Projects of this type also lead to training and capacity building activities in the communities, for example workshops on taking high quality pictures (one of which was based on translated information from a learning pattern on Meta).

Shooting WikiLoves Cocktails
Shooting WikiLoves Cocktails

Refugee Phrasebook – In November, WMDE supported an innovative volunteer project that helps refugees as they travel through Europe. The Refugee Phrasebook, also supported by Open Knowledge Germany and coordinated through Wikibooks volunteers, has created an open collection of useful words and phrases for refugees. The Refugee Phrasebook is a multilingual tool that provides basic useful vocabulary related to the most common immediate needs (also recently honored with the German OER Award). This dictionary of phrases can be used in print and online and local initiatives are able to adapt, print and distribute all contents of this page to support refugees in all regions. It currently contains vocabulary in 28 languages. WMDE provided meeting facilities, food and printing cost for the project. The current printable versions (wiki + pdf) can be found on Wikibooks.

Wiki Loves Cocktails – Is a volunteer project that aims to improve the quality of articles around cocktails, spirits and bartending. Wikipedians meet to mix state of the art cocktails, set them up in visually attractive ways and take professional pictures. In addition, they create pictures of or from historical cocktail literature, techniques, tools and glasses.

Erasmus Award – 20 German Wikipedians had a chance to be publicly recognized as members of the international Wikipedia community by attending the Erasmus Award event in Amsterdam. WMDE supported the travel costs of attendees.

WikiLoves Cocktails
WikiLoves Cocktails
Award ceremony Erasmus Prize
Award ceremony Erasmus Prize

Diversity[edit]

WikiWomen on the road
WikiWomen on the road
WikiOwl Award @WikiCon
WikiOwl Award @WikiCon

Diversity continues to be an important issue for our communities, and we support a number of initiatives that aim at increasing editors from underrepresented populations. Impulses here come from the communities, through projects that address specific subgroups.

Women – Women Edit, now in its third year, has grown into three separate women-initiated thematic groups: The original Women Edit, a group called Filmwomen and ‘Wikiwomen on the Road’, which involves site visits in a format similar to GLAM on Tour. A major learning here is that these developments take time, are community driven and cannot be engineered solely by WMDE. Women Edit, a project we initially supported through funding a coordinator, is now a regular event in Berlin, and in addition to the thematic split-offs mentioned above, there are now conversations about replicating the format in other cities/local hubs.

Young people – Jungwikipedianer - the Young Wikipedians, already featured in the progress report, continue to be very active, are increasingly participating in larger projects, meetings and activities, and are attending community events as a group. Their meetings and activities continue to be supported by local spaces. The group was nominated for the German Wikipedia community award, a motivational prize in several categories called WikiEule (WikiOwl, also adapted by Wikimedia Netherlands). Further, some current and former members of the Jungwikipedianer group were also nominated and awarded. They will share their experiences at the upcoming Wikimania.

Looking Ahead[edit]

Editor Survey Results (German)
Editor Survey Results (German)

In Q4 of 2015, the team had already embarked on implementing WMDE’s first priority focus for 2016: recruiting and retaining new volunteers for the Wikimedia projects. Editor decline has been an increasing concern for both English and German Wikipedia. Activities here included: a dialogue with the German community, research interviews conducted with key players in the movement, incl. at the WMF. Staff is now beginning to develop a focused concept, guided by a new cross-department working group on new editors. This will be further developed with the community in the beginning of 2016.

Fact finding also includes in-depth research into the ‘welcome culture’ of the German Wikipedia through a survey (report, in German), inspired by the latest editor survey of WMNL. In January 2016, 653 active de:WP editors contributed their views about new editors in general, potential barriers for newcomers to stay on board and about the effectiveness of existing measures to support newcomers. Overall, 89% of the participants regard a constant influx of new editors as important, 46% plan to actively support new editors in 2016 (with only 25% refusing support). For those who feel uncertain about supporting new editors, a main barrier is the fear to be distracted from other necessary work on Wikipedia (46%).

We are also looking closely at the appreciative culture of the community and the organization, asking the question: What makes people stay? A recruitment campaign is planned to be rolled out in mid-2016. In addition, WMDE Volunteer Support is looking into ways to integrate volunteer recruitment and retention into existing and new activities of the whole organization. We are also looking forward to further collaborating with the WMF on this topic and sharing WMDE’s experiences from current and upcoming activities. Much knowledge on this topic already exists and we are hoping to tap into this going forward. Finally, WMDE is inviting Wikipedians to visit HQ and engage in dialogue with staff, as well as mentoring new staff.

Targets Volunteer Support[edit]

Color Code indicating Progress on Targets
On track/ ongoing/ results meeting expectations
Delayed or falling behind expectations
Not meeting expectations
Target changed/ postponed / no results available yet
Targets: Volunteer Support
Targets Progress (at end of Q2) Total year Q1-Q4 Comments/ Next steps
By the end of 2015, 75% of the volunteers who have initiated community projects report that WMDE support packages (e.g. project management assistance, event support, technical assistance) were helpful for managing their project and for making it a success. This target was revised, aligned with the shift in our approach to volunteer support:

We primarily ensure satisfaction with our support packages by developing the structures with the community. In March, WMDE staff and volunteers met in Hamburg for the 3rd workshop on support structures and needs. This was accompanied by Wikipedia surveys (polls) and resulted in several work packages (e.g. ‘improvements in evaluation and documentation of volunteer activities’) to be addressed by dedicated teams of staff and volunteers.

While we did not formally assess volunteer satisfaction in 2015, the increase in applications, as well as in funded projects and the growing collection of very positive feedback from volunteers supported by WMDE, through online and at offline events, indicates an increasingly positive, trustful working relationship. In light of our goals for gaining new volunteers in 2016, we initiated base research about welcoming culture in the de:WP editor community (686 editors participated in the survey). Results (in German) indicate a general appreciation of more new editors among the existing active editors, but also fears and barriers. Only 25% of the participants do not want to support new editors in 2016.
Fostered by the WMDE volunteer support team, the number of collaboratively created learning patterns that describe promising community project practices rises up to 10 until the end of 2015 (learning patterns will be translated and posted to Meta). End of Q2 still ongoing: several important topics have been commonly identified and are now worked on (e.g. an extensive hands-on guide about the upload of large datasets to Commons).

One jointly written Learning Pattern about recording audio samples for Wiktionary is already available on Meta.

With regard to our work in 2015, we added 11 learning patterns to Meta and to other wikis. Our staff is working with volunteers to collaboratively turn their experiences into formalized learning pattern (pls. see e.g. Using drones for aerial photography).

Especially the hands-on guide about the upload of large datasets to Commons and the tips for successful GLAM partnerships drew much attention.

Additionally we worked on making the pattern library more multilingual and useful for non-english speaking volunteers by using translation mark-ups and a translatable template box. Most of our patterns are available in English and German. Translations into further local languages have started.

Insights from our analysis of local hubs will be shared with the movement in 2016.

WMDE and WMAT are working on a joint learning pattern about “appreciation in community management”.

The number of new media items added to Wikimedia Commons in 2015 which are marked as ‘supported by WMDE’ continues at the high levels of 2014 (99K for calendar year 2014). New media items added to Commons / marked as ‘supported by WMDE’ (Jan-June 2015): 35,714 New media items added to Commons / marked as ‘supported by WMDE’ (Jan-Dec 2015): 64,199 Please note: The unusually high baseline of 99k for 2014 is due to one mass upload in December 2014 (more than 40K official seals from Veikkos archive). Without these items, the baseline for 2014 is 58k → slight increase in 2015.
Global usage of media items (improving articles in global Wikimedia projects) ‘supported by WMDE’ increases by 20% to ~65K (End of 2014: 68K). Global usage of media items (improving articles in global Wikimedia projects) ‘supported by WMDE’: 83,476 Global usage of media items in ‘supported by Wikimedia Deutschland’ category (improving articles in global Wikimedia projects/ all name spaces): 108,690 Increase of roughly 60% (compared to end of 2014: 64K)

Article name space only: 66,218

Metrics and ways to measure them are established for monitoring the number of articles created or edited as a result of WMDE’s small project support. Staff is working on finding appropriate ways of measurement in line with EU/ German privacy laws which allow for more time-efficient analysis, also on a large scale (> 300 - 400) volunteer-led projects per year). Currently we rely on isolated, laborious methods, based on the extraction of new and improved articles from wiki project pages, provided voluntarily by volunteers leading the projects. Another measure is the counting of media items (and their descriptions) added to Wikipedia articles. To date we have been unable to identify effective ways to measure the relation between article metrics and > 600 diverse volunteer-led projects per year. The focus of currently existing tools on tracking user name contributions  remains problematic with regard to EU privacy laws and privacy preferences of the German-speaking editing community.

In the context of the upcoming revision of the current set of global metrics we suggest joint efforts to build tools that focus on article sets (instead of user contributions).

New objective from the revised WMDE 2015 Annual Plan: Strengthen local hubs and local groups to spark sustainable activities, content work, local partnerships and mutual inspiration.
Indicators and criteria of success (from our revised annual plan):

# of cities/ regions with local hubs and activities

# of completed local projects and activities

Number and quality of sustainable local partnerships which support the work for Wikimedia projects

Continued sharing of experiences and success strategies for local Wikimedia involvement

End of Q2, 8 local hubs are established (to different degrees of formalization). In Q1/Q2, a total of 162 activities were conducted by Wikimedians at the local hubs.

Additionally,  42 different local groups are working on a local level to conduct activities, build partnerships and inspire each other.

In total, >54% of all directly supported activities in Q1/Q2 are based on the work of local volunteers cooperating in their respective region (if including indirect support of local hubs: 74%).

First examples show fast adoption of successful formats from one region to another and mutual consultation and knowledge sharing of the groups/ hubs.

End of 2015, local hubs and community offices are active in 5 cities, additionally to the >50 regular Wikipedia meetups active in different regions of Germany. Hubs in 3 additional cities are in the planning stage.

A total of 243 activities were conducted at the local hubs (with ~2000 participants), evidence of  the high dynamic potential of this kind of Wikipedia groups.

Local hubs increasingly act as contact point for other open knowledge groups e.g. the regular meetings of the OK Lab Cologne.

In close coordination with Wikimedians active in local hubs, we conducted a study about success factors of local hubs/ local groups to inform advancements in this field and to guide future initiatives/ new hubs.

Insights from this study are already used to consult Wikimedians on planning new local hubs (e.g. in Berlin and Munich).

The dynamics of hubs and local and thematic groups will be further strengthened and supported by WMDE in their striving for innovative, impactful activities.

Insights from our regionalization strategy will be shared with the movement e.g. at the upcoming Wikimania.

A volunteer handbook on local hubs is planned for 2016.

Program Story 2: Software Development[edit]

Highlight Story: Wikidata in its Third Year[edit]

Overview

Wikidata statements (Total, Wiki, other)
Wikidata statements (Total, Wiki, other)

Wikidata’s third year was characterized by solid growth, productive discussions inside and outside of the Wikimedia projects, celebrations, important technical innovations, and a great community working to make all this happen. 2015 was marked by rapid growth of the data base, as well as by significant improvements in data quality. Adoption in Wikimedia projects increased, Wikidata-caused improvements in Wikipedia became increasingly visible and third-party applications blossomed.

Wikidata Items
Wikidata Items

In 2015 we increased the number of statements from 53 million to 80 million, and at the same time improved the percentage of statements with a useful non-wiki reference from 15% to nearly 21%. 52% of items have three or more statements now - up from 46% one year ago. This means Wikidata now knows significantly more about the world. And the percentage of items with labels in at least five languages increased from 23% to 26%, signifying that Wikidata’s content is understandable by more people. Uses of Wikidata entities in other Wikimedia projects has risen to 162 M usages by the end of 2015.

Technical Developments

Screenshot new edit references
Screenshot new edit references

In 2015 the Wikidata Product Team worked on four closely related areas:

1. Data Quality (discussed in more detail below)

This area was a main focus based on feedback from many stakeholders and as a reaction to the realities we were facing as a result of the Freebase donation. Work here covered the constraint reports (see targets below), as well as features such as Special:Nearby, which creates more complete data sets and helps to identify gaps and mistakes in the data.

2. User Experience

This is an important area, also based on user feedback, which is at the core of our ability to attract and retain volunteer editors for Wikidata. In 2015, we made all the necessary preparations to tackle significant design improvements in 2016. We improved the mobile view of Wikidata: m.wikidata.org, although mobile editing is not available just yet. Users had specifically reported that adding references takes too many steps. As a consequence we enhanced the user experience by making it possible to edit items and references in only one step.

3. Removing Roadblocks (for adoption on Wikipedia and other projects)

One of the major changes here was the extension of the quantities datatype with support for units, such as the length of a river in km. This enabled the addition of significantly more data that was previously not supported by the software. Unit support was one of the major blockers for adoption of Wikidata on Wikipedia. It is now possible to store a significant part of the infobox values from Wikipedia on Wikidata. Another missing piece for increasing adoption of Wikidata on Wikipedia was the ability to access data about a given topic from any article instead of just the article on that topic. For example, we made it possible to use data about Germany in the article about Berlin. The team also added a feature called usage tracking that allows us better insights into how much of Wikidata’s data is used on Wikipedia and the other sister projects.

4. Query service

SPARQL-Query Largest Cities with female Mayors
SPARQL-Query Largest Cities with female Mayors

In 2015 it became clear that Wikidata needs a first-class and well-integrated query service. After much discussion and research involving both our WMF colleagues as well as the community, SPARQL was selected as the query language and Blazegraph as the software. The result is a query service that withstands high volume traffic and runs reliably. The Wikidata SPARQL endpoint finally introduces the possibility to answer multi-part questions such as the well-known "list the largest cities in the world with women as mayors", all in one request.

The development was a collaboration between WMDE’s Wikidata team and WMF’s Discovery team with the latter doing the majority of the engineering work. This worked out very well and we are looking forward to similar close collaborations in the future. The SPARQL endpoint has received a lot of praise for its stability (something very rare for publicly-accessible SPARQL endpoints) and ability to cope with Wikidata’s amount and complexity of data. The SPARQL endpoint also facilitates third-party applications, allows editors to check the data for errors and is the groundwork for automated list generation on Wikipedia.

Through the SPARQL endpoint, much potential is now unleashed with regards to the usage of data sets outside of Wikidata, based on multiple items. An example of this is the nodegoat project, which used the 8,049 instances of battles in Wikidata to create a map, called the geography of violence.

Data Quality

Quality Strategies
Quality Strategies

The Freebase data donation, as previously reported, provided major challenges for the team. While it was welcomed and appreciated as an opportunity to grow, putting people before data, and maintaining trust in data quality took up much of 2015’s energy.  Many activities were initiated to improve quality, led by a philosophy that emphasizes community decision-making and supporting volunteer editors to the greatest extent and with the most efficiency possible.

These main quality strategies emerged in 2015 and will be carried through 2016:

Make quality measurable: The more data we have about data quality, the better we can react with direct measures enabling editors to address quality problems.

Activities:

  • Develop a variety of metrics to meaningfully track the quality of Wikidata’s data
  • Finalize quality dashboards (see 2016 R1 proposal)

More eyes on the data: The more people are exposed to data from Wikidata, the better the quality.

Activities:

  • Integration of Wikidata’s changes in the watchlist
  • Changes on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects (see above)
  • Planned Article Placeholder extension
  • Automated list articles for Wikipedia based on the data in Wikidata
  • Making it easier to reuse the data in Wikidata for third parties
  • Building streamlined processes for allowing data-reusers to report issues easily to create good feedback loops

Automatically find and expose issues: The better the tools supporting editors, the more data they can handle. Automatic tools help detect potential issues and then make editors aware of them, so they can look into them and fix them as appropriate.

Activities:

  • Internal consistency checks (to easily spot issues such as people who are older than 150 years or an identifier for an external database that has the wrong format)
  • Checking Wikidata’s data against other databases and flagging inconsistencies for the editors to investigate
  • Provide visualizations that make it easier to get an overview of a larger part of the data and spot outliers and gaps
  • AI machine-learning tools such as ORES that allows recent changes patrollers to focus their attention on the most problematic edits

We have made great progress in this area in 2015 and will realize more of this potential in 2016. Overall, the fact that Wikidata consists of structured data makes it much easier to automatically find and fix issues than on Wikipedia.

Increase the number of references: The more references for the statements in Wikidata, the easier it is for people to verify data quality and stay true to sources.

Activities:

All this will help raise the number of referenced statements in Wikidata. Due to these measures, in 2015 we have already seen ‘references to non-wiki sources’ increase massively up to 20.9% and ‘items with referenced statements’ increase up to 11.64M (from 50.6% to 60.4% of all items) .

Encourage great content: Valuing high-quality contributions more and highlighting our best content will lead to more great content.

Activities:

  • Continue to present Showcase items
  • Make this process run more smoothly and encourage more participation

Some examples of how content became of richer and higher quality over the last year include

  • http://addshore.com/2015/07/barack-obama-geneawiki-1-year-later/
  • http://addshore.com/2015/06/wikidata-map-19-months-on/
  • http://addshore.com/2015/12/wikidata-references-from-microdata/
  • http://addshore.com/2015/11/impact-of-wikimania-mexico-2015-on-wikidata/
Wikidata Active Editors
Wikidata Active Editors
Wikidata Very Active Editors
Wikidata Very Active Editors

Community

At the end of 2015 roughly 6,500 people made five or more contributions to Wikidata each month (compared to ~5,300 one year ago, an increase of 24%) and approximately 1,000 of them provided upwards of 100 edits. The Wikidata community is still welcoming, friendly and enthusiastic, one of the most inclusive and least sexist, lacking the escalation and dragged-out conflicts that burden Wikipedia. Relations between the development team and the community continue to be very good, indicating that practicing community-centered software development helps to avoid the kind of negative reception some new features have met with the Wikipedia community over the last years. We have learned that it is extremely important for us to have the human resources to respond to community requests in a timely, meaningful and substantial manner. In 2015, we did not always have the resources available to do this as well as we would have liked. In the Annual Plan for 2016, we created a Project Manager position to assure that these functions are covered. Due to the APG reductions to the 2016 Wikidata budget, this position is now on hold until funding for Wikidata has been agreed on with WMF. In the meantime, we continue to use existing communication channels as well as we can, including Wikidata Weekly Newsletter and regular office hours.

Sample infobox for the ARF6 protein
Sample infobox for the ARF6 protein
Number of articles without Wikidata items on it:WP
Number of articles without Wikidata items on it:WP
Structure of the ARF6 protein
Structure of the ARF6 protein

Impact on Wikimedia Projects

The integration between Wikidata and the other Wikimedia projects continues to strengthen. Wikibooks, Meta, MediaWiki and Wikispecies all joined the projects whose sitelinks are managed through Wikidata. The new translation tool on Wikipedia automatically adds a sitelink on Wikidata, and many other features benefit Wikipedia. Wikidata is playing an increasing role in Wikipedia improving its quality – by revealing longstanding content issues on Wikipedia through the data on Wikidata. Issues include a Wikipedia with two articles about the same topic, or two Wikipedias with differing data about a person without any useful reference. Wikidata provides Wikipedia authors new ways to expose and correct these mistakes. Once there is a data point and a good reference for it on Wikidata, it can be scrutinized more thoroughly and then used much more widely than before.

Inside of Wikimedia, we have observed many projects' important discussions about their use of Wikidata’s data and authority templates. Several Wikipedias are now using Wikidata - such as the German-language Wikipedia agreeing to conditional use, and the English-language Wikipedia agreeing to deprecate their persondata template. The badges for good and featured articles are now mostly managed on Wikidata and most of the Wikipedias have deleted their local templates. Many Wikipedias and other sister projects are starting to adapt their articles to make use of Wikidata’s data, e.g. the Hungarian, French or English language Wikipedias. On the other hand, the large influx of data coming from Wikidata has met with mixed degrees of welcome. While many editors embrace the new possibilities offered by Wikidata, others express fears of vandalism from outside their wiki of choice, and some doubt the quality of the data itself. The large Wikipedia projects discuss integration with Wikidata and are beginning to form community opinions. WMDE is standing by to answer questions arising in the process and to provide supporting information to volunteers. The discussion in the French community became heated in October, and we are continuing to observe these interesting developments.

Several Wikipedias are using dozens of Lua infoboxes which are displaying data from Wikidata when the information is not locally present. The addition of arbitrary access to Wikidata has made it possible to increase the data used in the infoboxes and, more importantly, laid the groundwork for a first volunteer-developed prototype of how generation of automated list articles on Wikipedia can work.

Meanwhile, our team and the volunteer editors have put significant time and energy into developing features that enable faster integration. Duplicity, for example, allows users to see lists of the articles in each wiki that have no Wikidata item associated with them, to pick a random article, and then offers some possible matches on Wikidata, so users can add it to an existing item, or create a new one. As a result, for example, the Italian Wikipedia shows a significant decrease of unassociated articles in Q4. Similar effects were achieved by the Catalans and the Dutch, who, starting from thousands of missing items/ links brought them down to 0 after publication of the tool.

Specific subject areas on Wikipedia that are benefiting from Wikidata in 2015 included medical information: GeneWiki is a portal founded in 2008 that has researchers from SU Lab, UCLA, the University of Maryland, Micelio and Wikipedians working together to create a database of all genes, funded in part by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). This team had created and maintained the infoboxes on Wikipedia articles on human genes since 2008. 2015 was a busy year for this group: Participants wrote bots that generated Wikidata items for all human genes, all mouse genes, all diseases represented in the Human Disease Ontology, and all FDA-approved drugs. Participants imported about 132,000 genes (59,530 human, 73,130 mouse) from NCBI into Wikidata and about 44,000 proteins (27,662 human, 16,728 mouse) from Swissprot. In addition to importing human and mouse genes and proteins into Wikidata, members of the GeneWiki/Wikidata team imported bacterial genes and proteins, sourced info for the GeneWiki infoboxes from Wikidata, and proposed new Wikidata properties.

The researchers are currently working to expand Wikidata representations of information about these items and are in the early phases of including this new content in the corresponding Wikipedia article infoboxes. The first fruits of this labor can now be seen in Wikipedia.

A research study looked at how Wikidata can be used to improve medical information on Wikipedia.

Wikidata community members were also very active in building tools and tutorials, and in providing presentations and talks at a number of conferences. Selected presentations/blog posts:

Other examples of exciting WikiProjects building on or enhancing Wikidata are:

Screenshot Histropedia Timeline of GLAM institutions in London
Screenshot Histropedia Timeline of GLAM institutions in London

Impact outside of Wikimedia

Meanwhile, the world outside of Wikimedia continues to take notice as well, as these public channels prove:

The Register UK – http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/25/wikidata_turns_the_world_into_a_database/

CCCBLab – http://blogs.cccb.org/lab/en/article_la-nova-pedra-de-rosetta/

Examples of third-party applications, data donations and use cases involving Wikidata have been increasing in 2015:

Wikidata receiving the Land of Ideas Award
Wikidata receiving the Land of Ideas Award

These examples show how Wikidata has become a source of inspiration and innovation in the open source developer community. WMDE helped along by making it easier for partners to be introduced to Wikidata at dedicated online places – for example to learn about data donations. This work will be further structured and improved in 2016. Please see the 2016 proposal for more detail.

A whitepaper on how GLAMs can work with Wikidata was created by Wikipedians involved in a project in which Flemish museums contributed collection data to Wikidata. The paper is designed to be an inspiration and useful guide for other museums that have data to contribute.

In 2015, Wikidata also engaged with significant events and external partners, such as the World Health Summit. Here, we provided information on Wikidata and the potential of free and open knowledge/data for healthcare and medical research. The accompanying essay which was printed in the WHS yearbook, closed with the words:

‘The conventional thinking about open data is that a government institution or company publishes a data set that can then be consumed by others but is read-only. In order to reach the full potential of open data, we need to go a step further. Truly open data needs to be editable and expandable so more people can take ownership of the data, improve it, spread it and make it do things we have not thought of. This is the beauty of open data. We often fear that if we give people this power they will abuse it. With the right tools in their hands and the opportunity to be a part of the solution to their own problems, they will instead amaze us with ideas and solutions we have never thought of. When we open up data we help spread health-related information far beyond our current reach.’

Finally, the hard work of the communities and the team was recognized: After winning the Open Data Award in 2014, in 2015 Wikidata was honored with the Land of Ideas Award, which this year was highlighting high-impact digital innovation projects in Germany. Out of 100 ideas and projects, Wikidata was publicly voted as one of the Top Ten most innovative projects. The award celebration took place at the Wikidata birthday celebration on October 29.

Looking ahead for WMDE’s Wikidata team

This year saw major milestones completed and goals accomplished. Much remains on the development roadmap. Details can be found in our 2016 proposal. The goals remain to grow reach of Wikidata into and beyond the Wikimedia projects while building sustainable trust in Wikidata through continued improvement of data quality. What we accomplished and learned in 2015 will lead right into this work. Specific activities include, but will not be limited to:

  • Plans for a redesign of the user interface, both for computer and mobile users
  • New data types such as multilingual text, formulas and geo-shapes, and improvements on existing ones
  • Increase the support of the smaller Wikipedias and the other sister projects, through efforts such as building the article placeholder
  • The support of Wiktionary in Wikidata is reviewed, and will be subject of external resource development activities in 2016

Finally, the funding of Wikidata will change to a new model. For 2016, the FDC has graciously agreed to bridge the financial gap created by delayed negotiations between WMDE and WMF on the future of Wikidata. For 2016/17, we are looking forward to continuing the collaboration between the two software teams, enhanced and supported by continuous, solid collaboration at the strategic and funding levels, manifested in an agreement reflecting a commitment of both organizations to sustainably supporting the project.

Community-Centered Software Development[edit]

The work on the German Community Technical Wishlist was described in detail in the APG Progress Report 14-15. This was continued in the second quarter with a on-wiki survey conducted in September/October. The goal of the survey was to arrive at a prioritized list of technical requests to be reviewed and addressed by the WMDE Community Tech Team (TCB). Other teams, chapters and open source developers are then invited to participate in working on the requests.

The phases of establishing the 2015 wishlist were as follows:

  • Phase 1: 132 requests in 34 categories were collected at WikiCon and onwiki until 10/5.
  • Phase 1.5: WMDE reviewed and structured the requests
  • Phase 2: 132 Requests were voted on through October, 26th (results)
  • Phase 3: WMDE reviewed top requests by importance and feasibility, and added them to the Toplist
  • Phase 4: Publication of and comments on the Toplist started in mid November
  • Phase 5: Work on requests begins January 2016

The TCB team made sure to clearly communicate that the results of the first review (Phase 3) are likely subject to change: Feasibility and time needed for completing a request is only revealed as development work progresses. Starting each quarter, the TCB team creates a plan. Criteria for selecting development requests are in each case: Importance of the request for the community, existing knowledge/expertise related to the request, lack of barriers (such as other developments that need to be completed first, or ongoing community discussions), coordination and commitments of stakeholders (WMF, or volunteer developers). Important to notice here is the increasingly close, positive and effective collaboration between staff and volunteer developers on many of the wishlist-based projects. The positive reception is reflected in many of the comments and kudos we receive:

All ongoing development work of the team is tracked on Phabricator.

In August of 2015, WMF created its WMF Community Tech team. It has been tasked with  gathering the technical requests of editors at the international level (project page). WMDE staff provided significant resources towards directly consulting with the WMF team on setting up its community input and participation process. As a result, the WMF processes are now very similar to the ones practiced by WMDE, offering much opportunity for collaboration in 2016 and beyond. The two processes are now integrated, and workflows between the two teams are being synchronized. This is a major accomplishment, allowing to leverage the resources and aligning activities between the two teams and the volunteer developer community.

FOSS Outreach and Mentoring Program[edit]

Podcast Listeners
Podcast Listeners
Screenshot Podcast 'Playful Commons - A License to play'
Screenshot Podcast 'Playful Commons - A License to play'

Activities in the outreach area continued – podcasts (more than 1,250 listeners per month), technical talks on the sourcecode.berlin blog and the first Free Knowledge Game Jam. Results in terms of participation are encouraging. The Game Jam was a great opportunity to reach out to audiences not yet part of our core communities, but which have great potential to join. In 2016 WMDE will continue on a path of reaching out to coders, supporting networking, communication and knowledge transfer. Events in the future will likely be coordinated with events from partner networks, such as the node.js meetups hosted at WMDE HQ in Berlin.

Learning Pattern: Game Jam How to introduce a new target group to free knowledge and open source
Phragile
Phragile
Jakob at the Hackathon in Lyon
Jakob at the Hackathon in Lyon

The mentoring program continued as well and produces first results for the movement. WMDE’s Mentee Jakob Warkotsch focused his Bachelor thesis project on the development of Phragile. This is a tool that generates burn down charts, burn up charts and sprint overviews for the Phabricator boards of agile software projects. It supports scrum masters, product managers, and agile software development teams in their daily work. Jakob was advised by Abraham Taherivand (Head of Software Engineering) and Tobias Gritschacher (Scrum Master). Subsequently, the project was further developed by WMDE software engineers. After the demo of the first working prototype in March 2015 the WMF and WMDE worked together on a shared vision of Phragile and came up with a roadmap of features that would fulfill the additional requirements of the WMF. A lot of valuable feedback was gathered during the MediaWiki Hackathon in Lyon in May which allowed both parties to sit together to discuss and hack on new Phragile features. The collaboration resulted in several great additions such as burn up charts, chart data export, automatic snapshots of chart data and automated deployments on Wikimedia Labs (blogpost).

Our mentees regularly share their knowledge and experiences with the Wikimedia movement e.g. at Wikimedia hackathons, developer conferences and via blogposts. The work of one of our mentees paved the way for the development of an article placeholder extension based on Wikidata in 2016 (see APG 15-16 proposal for more details).




Targets Software Development[edit]

Color Code indicating Progress on Targets
On track/ ongoing/ results meeting expectations
Delayed or falling behind expectations
Not meeting expectations
Target changed/ postponed / no results available yet


Targets: Software Development
Targets Progress (at end of Q2) Total year Q1-Q4 Comments/ Next steps
Wikidata
The improved “Edit References” feature is available for users of Wikidata by the end of 2015 and allows for quick and easy referencing (as indicated by an increase in references to 15 % statements that have non-Wikimedia references by six months after feature roll-out). The feature is available, but not yet further improved.

Statements referenced to other sources by 2015-06-22: 11,333,403 (17.45%)

Improved feature was successfully deployed in Q4.

Statements referenced to other sources by 2015-12-28: 16,855,464 (20.83% of all statements)

Now a reference can be specified directly in one step each time a statement is added. Before, the reference had to be specified separately after a statement was added.
The new feature “Enhanced Changes List” is available for users of ‘sister’ projects no later than by the end of 2015. We gathered community feedback regarding watchlist integration improvements (enhanced recent changes is part of that) and investigated the technical efforts needed. In close coordination with the WMF at the Developer Summit, working on this feature was rated as technically very intricate and was thus jointly deprioritized . In 2016, WMDE software development staff will investigate alternative ways of addressing this issue.
The Wikidata feature “Constraint Reports” is improved/ enhanced and made available for users of Wikidata by the end of 2015. Working on Constraints Reports Stats.

Setting up  a “check against third parties” feature by HPI student team.

A minimal version of Constraints Reports is live (roll-out on 2015-07-08), but needs further improvement (e.g. listing the item for each statement). Still pursued by WMDE, but not top-prioritized.

The “check against third party” feature is not completed yet and will need further development efforts in 2016, after the student team has completed working on it.

Expected to be finalized in 2016.
Wikimedia Commons
A topic category function is made available for editors of Wikimedia Commons by the end of Q2 2015. Changes in prioritization due to a stronger focus on ‘data quality and trust’ and personnel changes at development teams at the WMF.

Regardless, some minor improvements in the backend were deployed. Further steps regarding this objective will be defined in Q3.

Taking into account the priorities and resources at the WMF, working on structured data support for Wikimedia Commons was shifted to 2016.

Nevertheless, essential groundwork for this topic e.g. code refactoring was done.

As work in this area is often related to changes in the Mediawiki core, it will still require close coordination and cooperation between WMDE and WMF developer teams.
Users of Wikimedia Commons are enabled to search media content by searching for topics and other media data by end of 2015.
Data types to specify e.g. institutions, authors or licenses are made available by end of 2015.
By the end of 2015 optimized user functions (e.g. for ‘new entry’ or ‘edit’) are made available to users of Wikimedia Commons.
Berlin-based Software Development Center
The Community Project Team is established, is working according to agile processes of software deployment, and starts to support the technical needs of community-initiated projects by end of 2015. Q1/Q2: Establishing the team, setting-up agile processes and cooperation with technical community communications staff The TCB (Team Community Bedarfe, roughly translated as Community Needs Team) was established in Q3.

The team’s work intensified with the successful implementation of a second round of the ‘technical wish list’ process, including:

  • Survey regarding software needs/ wishes of the German-speaking editing community
  • Consulting of involved editors regarding refinement of their wishes by WMDE development staff
  • Technical evaluation and prioritizing of features (voting by community members)
  • Implementation of wishes/ features from the community wish list (pls. see below) e.g. integration of the CatScan functionality via deepcat gadget
Monthly audio podcasts and videos of technical talks are published, resulting in at least 200+ downloads per episode by the end of Q3. Two hands-on, output-oriented tech events are attended by at least 60 community members. 13 new english audio podcasts (Sourcecode Berlin) were published January - June with 6,533 listeners total, on average 502 per episode.

The FOSS-Event  EnthusiastiCon was conducted in June (16 speakers / 50 participants on-site / 45 viewers via livestream / 175 views on YouTube).

More and more developers from the FOSS scene come us to stage their Tech-events at our premises.

A total of 23 english audio podcasts (Sourcecode Berlin) were published January - December with 15,031 listeners total (on average 590 per episode/ 1,250 listeners per month).

Additionally, 15 FOSS technical talks were published (sourcecode.berlin / youtube) with more than 1800 views in 2015.

A second FOSS-Event was staged in October 2015: The Free Knowledge GameJam, bringing together over 45 developers at a Hackathon focusing on development of open source games and utilizing Wikimedia project APIs and Wikimedia content (pls. find the games here)

With our newly set-up engineering portal at mediawiki.org we will provide a new unified entry point for junior developers to get in contact with our development work and get access to our mentoring program.
By end of 2015, the mentoring program is made publicly accessible and volunteer open source developers receive first support (e.g. scholarships for hackathons or other events, co-working space at WMDE office etc). As pilots, we are already mentoring a high school student intern and four working students (who also work on their bachelor/ master thesis at WMDE) and a project group of 6 students at the HPI.

The mentoring of the HPI student group proved to be highly productive in terms of engaging junior developers in our common work on data quality & trust issues in Wikidata.

In 2015 we had the pleasure to mentor six mentees and one student group.

Our mentees share their great work and their experiences with the movement at conferences, Mediawiki hackathons and via blogposts. Pls. see also detailed above: the initial development of Phragile by one of our mentees.

This will be continued in 2016.
Community Communications
A mechanism has been established that will enable volunteers to submit software/technical suggestions and ideas, and the Volunteer Support/Software Development teams respond efficiently to these suggestions (Objective, please note: this was under Volunteer Support in the original proposal). Based on the 2014 “technical wish list” initiative, in Q1/Q2 we conducted extensive consultations with community members - both, on- and offline (please see success story ‘Improving Software with Communities’ for detailed information):
  • 6 ‘Tech on Tour’ workshops across Germany with 53 community participants
  • Total 2,596 page visits on the ‘Tech on Tour’ page and by this rising visits on the ‘technical wish list’ page (from 1,113 for Q3/Q4 2014 to 2,234 for Q1/Q2 2015)
  • 108 postings by community communications staff on mailings lists, wikipages, online forums
2015 has seen the refinement and streamlining of the technical wish list process: The first round of the technical wish list resulted in an analysis outlining the principles of community-centered software development and extensive feedback by the editing community.

Based on this groundwork, the 2015 round of the technical wish list was started (live at the WikiCon 2015 in September), involving more than 235 editors voting or discussing the technical wishes on-wiki.

This resulted in a list of 132 wishes/ features which were jointly prioritized and turned in a list of top wishes to be addressed by volunteer developers and WMDE’s TCB team. This list includes wishes from the first and from the second round of the technical wish list and is aligned with wishes from the international wish list and the WMF Community Tech team.

Development work on top wishes started in January 2016
Passing through the new iterative mechanism, by end of 2015, at least five suggestions/ideas/tools will be rolled-out. Continued work and testing regarding four suggestions/ideas/tools from the 2014 “Top 20 technical wish list” in close coordination with WMF teams, but not yet finalized.

Other affiliates (e.g. Wikimedia Israel) are interested in an exchange of experiences around community-centered software development.

By the end of 2015, jointly working with volunteer developers, WMDE’s TCB team completed 8 wishes from the community wish list for the benefit of volunteers in the Wikimedia projects.
Continuous monitoring and documentation of community feedback shows predominantly positive assessments of software/technical features and of the process of community participation through the end of 2015. Continuous monitoring and documentation of community feedback is established through our community communications staff and informs the development and deployment process.

In general, we experienced very positive reactions and good participation. A Wikipedia poll (June 2015) concerning usage of Wikidata in deWP article namespace raised high attention and showed rising trust to work with Wikidata.

A workshop at the annual Wikipedia volunteer conference WikiCon (15 participants, facilitated by WMDE community communications and development staff) was utilized to get feedback on the past round of the technical wish list and to kick-start the second round of the technical wish list.

Development tasks concerning the wish list are publicly accessible on Phabricator, a help page for the work in Phabricator was set up in de:WP.

All development tasks, workflow steps and related discussions are documented transparently on-wiki.

Overall, we regard the refinement of the technical wish list process as a clear success in terms of productive, constructive community-centered software development.

The whole process - from exploring community needs to prioritization and sharing the development work - is now set up in close coordination with the editing communities. Transparency throughout helps to prevent conflicts and misunderstandings.

Throughout 2015, there is a lively, respectful exchange on software development activities facilitated through the WMDE Community Liaison position and a decrease in controversies upon implementation of software-related changes. Regular consultation between WMF Community Engagement Team (Engineering Community and Community Liaison Teams) und WMDE Community Communication is established.

Our Technical Community Communications staff takes part in relevant WMF Tech events (e.g. Lyon Hackathon, Wikimania) which already led to over 20 conversations with WMF and affiliates e.g. about our concept of community centered software development.

Mutual exchange between WMDE Community Communications and WMF teams is established on regular basis (bi-weekly appointments, product manager calls, co-working at Hackathons/ Wikimanias).

The head of Communications for the WMDE TCB team was highly involved in consulting WMF's Community Tech team in the course of setting up the first international community wish list.

Wishes from the international and German community wish list are now aligned and commonly addressed.

In this area, we achieved much more than the target projected. While we are enthusiastic about seeing the experiences from the German community wish list fed into WMF Community Tech’s work, the changes here are larger and systemic, promising much improvement in community relations as well as quality of products.

Establishing synchronized processes and workflows between WMDE and WMF with regard to fulfilling technical community needs is an important step towards a stronger community orientation in software development for the Wikimedia projects.

Program Story 3: Institutions[edit]

In 2015, we have seen the boundaries between policy work on the one hand, and work with institutions on the other hand, become less and less distinct. As a result, much of WMDE resources and staff time have been focused on the Mapping OER project, listed under Program Story 4: Legal and Social Framework. We believe that, as concluded by the findings of the one-year project, institutional change happens as a result of many factors, one of them being advocacy on a policy level. (Influencing educational institutions as part of the Mapping OER project is discussed in detail in the next program section.)

In addition, WMDE continued working in the areas of scientific as well as GLAM institutions, pushing for the new Fellow Program Open Science in the academic sphere and continuing our fruitful and inspirational work in the GLAM world with Coding da Vinci and the volunteer-led ‘GLAM on Tour’ and ‘KulTour’ formats. Our engagement at Germany's largest GLAM conference ‘Shaping Access’ evolved into a more hands-on arena that brings bring together GLAMs and Wikimedia projects/ communities. Furthermore, WMDE developed further ways to assist institutions with the access to and use of Wikimedia projects, which led to the testing of a portfolio of Technical Assistance Services.

Fellow Program Open Science[edit]

Principles of Open Science
Principles of Open Science

This program was developed across 2015 as a first entry point for WMDE to the science community. WMDE sees Open Science as a crucial strategy to promote citizen participation in science, grow the innovative potential of science projects and ultimately increase access to free knowledge. Open Science holds much potential for both science (research and education) and society as a whole. Open Access to scientific data and information has a significant impact on quality, content as well as on the applicability of scientific knowledge and innovation. Globally, science information - whether it is in the form of data, code, study results, or open educational materials - is increasingly made available to the public through digital media, using the principles of Open Data, Open Source, Open Access, Open Methodology, and Open Peer Review. These developments are taking place with different levels of scale and intensity, depending on the discipline and the geographic context, each with its own specific incentives, cultures or barriers. Over the last few years, Open Science has become an agenda item for some of the important players in higher education and research in Europe and globally: Some universities have created Open Access ambassador positions, some of the larger German research networks have started Open Science programs, the EU Commission mandated that all outcomes of EU-funded research projects must be published as Open Access materials, and Open Science plays an increasingly important role in research funding. However, to date only a small community of German scientists actually engage in Open Science. Multiple barriers in the science system prevent a widespread adoption of practices and principles.

The target audience of the Open Science Fellow Program comprises early stage researchers, who are currently working on a science project in any field. By piloting the program across disciplines, we hope to generate significant learnings around methods, potential and barriers for the participants and the program.

The program has three components:

  1. Financing the fellowships
  2. Training fellows through group work and mentoring
  3. Generating visibility of Open Science, the Fellow Program and the fellows’ research projects

Through their fellowship, participants are financially supported as they are introduced to the ideas of Open Science. The program will build their knowledge and skills on Wikimedia projects, collaborative work methods, and open digital infrastructures and services. Methods used will include workshops led by open science and Wikimedia experts, as well as group mentoring, supporting the participants throughout their projects in utilizing Open Science principles and practices. Through integrating Wikimedia topics into the training, the project also aims to increase the visibility and recognition of Wikimedia projects (e.g. Wikidata, Wikipedia) with the scientific community. Potential interfaces exist with the communities of Wikidata, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons und WikiBooks.

The desired impacts include:

  • Increase participant knowledge and skills in the following areas:
    • Points in the research process where Open Science can be applied
    • Tools and services available within respective discipline
    • Utilizing open licenses
  • Alter participant behavior in the following ways:
    • Participants apply principles of Open to their research projects
    • Participants integrate Wikimedia projects into their research
    • Participants start to network with co-fellows and mentors
    • Participants act as ambassadors in the science community
Barcamp Citizen Science
Barcamp Citizen Science

In 2015, our team researched and analyzed the state of Open Science in Germany, in order to identify partners, barriers and potential leverage points for a pilot project. We consulted with many stakeholders, potential partners and funders. Staff attended Open Science barcamps, citizen science events, policy meetings and conferences. The Fellow Program emerged as a result of this research and the conversations with stakeholders.

We then moved on to negotiating the pilot phase of the project with partners, and secured a partnership with the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft (German Donors' Association for the Promotion of Humanities and Sciences). This organization acts as a thought leader and provides financial support to individuals and organizations that develop bottom-up solutions to improve higher education, science and research. Stifterverband also acts as a trustee for hundreds of foundations that support science projects. Stifterverband will add €25,000 to the fellow fund, and support the project by administering outreach, communication, recruitment, applications, selection of participants and disbursement of funds. The fellow program will be rolled out as a pilot in 2016, in close cooperation with the partner, while we recruit additional partners and funding sources, as well as create additional connections with the citizen science movement. At the end of the year, learnings will inform the improvement and scaling of the fellow program for 2017 and beyond.

Technical Assistance Packages[edit]

CCchange your mind at the conference We are museums
CCchange your mind at the conference We are museums

In 2015 we began to develop and field-test an integrated portfolio of existing and new services for information, learning, consultation and events. The portfolio ultimately will feature lines of products, combinable in modules, based on the needs of diverse target institutions. This system will allow transfer of methods and tools across disciplines and thematic fields, as well as impact orientation of specific interventions and modular packages.

Some of the module components developed and/or field-tested in 2015:

Wikiversum World Cafe

This very open workshop format is specifically designed to be conducted by Wikimedia volunteers. It is supposed to serve as an introduction to the Wikimedia movement, Wikimedia projects and open licenses. Up to 30 participants each, generally representing a cultural institution, go around and get introduced to the Wikiversum, its principles and the people behind it. This is supposed to increase the institutional knowledge about the Wikimedia movement and its benefits for cultural institutions.

CC-change your mind

Workshop at Deutsche Digitale Bilbliothek
Workshop at Deutsche Digitale Bilbliothek

The three-hour workshop ‘©©-change your mind’ was specifically designed for staff of cultural institutions. Through this training participants learn how to assign the correct licenses to their digitized cultural heritage data and to assure that it is as reusable as possible for as many people as possible. This will foster a cultural change in cultural institutions, through which they evolve from guardians of knowledge to distributors of knowledge. In 2015 the workshop was delivered five times at various conferences and events to sets of 15-35 participants of cultural institutions, as well as once to the staff of a single institution, the Jewish Museum Berlin. Each time the format was tailored to the audience. Ongoing requests by GLAMs for this format reflect a high need for guidance and training in this field.

Technical Workshops: ‘Uploading Coding Da Vinci data into Commons’

In November, at a volunteer workshop at the German National Library, participants worked on the further integration of Coding da Vinci data into Wikimedia Commons and explored the use of different upload tools. This workshop helped us to pre-test the ‘Prepare Your Data’ workshop format, a hands-on consulting format for data upload.

GLAMs particpating at Coding da Vinci 2014-2015
GLAMs participating at Coding da Vinci 2014-2015
Audience at the conference 'Shaping Access'
Audience at the conference 'Shaping Access'

GLAMorous: Coding da Vinci and beyond[edit]

The cultural data hack-a-thon Coding da Vinci took place in the first half of 2015 and was a great success, highlighted in WMDE’s APG progress report. We utilized the remaining half of 2015 to further develop strategies for scaling up the hack-a-thon to a larger program. In a community workshop with different stakeholders at the GLAM Conference ‘Shaping Access’, the planning process for a regional GLAM hack-a-thon was started in late 2015.

Using GLAM Conference ‘Shaping Access’ for Outreach & Workshops

Together with our Coding da Vinci partners (Open Knowledge Foundation, German Digital Library, digiS) and seven other partners, WMDE co-organized Germany’s largest GLAM conference ‘Zugang gestalten’ (‘Shaping Access’), staged in Hamburg on November 5-6, 2015, for the fifth time. More than 300 expert participants from different departments of diverse cultural heritage institutions from all over Germany gathered to work on future strategies for improving the accessibility of cultural heritage.

Overall, in 2015 WMDE observed that exchanges with participating GLAMs are becoming increasingly concrete, and are now focusing on meaningful collaboration with the Wikimedia projects and their volunteers. The conference evolved from mainly having presentations towards more diverse tracks and more engaging workshop formats.

Targets Institutions[edit]

Color Code indicating Progress on Targets
On track/ ongoing/ results meeting expectations
Delayed or falling behind expectations
Not meeting expectations
Target changed/ postponed / no results available yet
Targets: Institutions
Targets Progress (at end of Q2) Total year Q1-Q4 Projected (end of year) / Next steps Comments
Volunteers participating in our training workshops and using WMDE’s cooperation guidelines report this support as helpful for establishing sustainable cooperation with institutions. Not addressed in Q1/Q2. Not addressed in Q1-Q4
Additional high priority institutions participate and ten potential partners engage in follow-up communication and continuous interaction with WMDE. Multiple GLAM cooperations in Q1/Q2:
  • GLAM-Hackathon ‘Coding da Vinci 2015’: 33 GLAM institutions (22 new, 11 2nd timers)
  • 3 new museums participated in the outreach formats ‘GLAM on Tour’ and ‘KulTour’ (e.g. Wuppertal’s Von-der-Heydt museum, 62 volunteer and institutional participants).
  • Volunteers increasingly took over coordination with local museums / 3 further institutions plan to participate in similar events
  • Conference talks by volunteers (e.g. at the ‘museums and the internet’ conference)
  • Multiple GLAM representatives (total: 90) at our ‘CC-Change your mind’ workshops and in the ‘Prepare your data’ consulting format

Overall, 46 cooperations with GLAM institutions:

  • 33 GLAMs (22 new!) engaged over 10 weeks (and partly beyond) at the Coding da Vinci 2015 GLAM-Hackathon
  • 9 additional museums participating at the ‘GLAM on Tour’ and ‘KulTour’ outreach formats
  • Workshop formats conducted at 3 museums/ libraries and at conferences and GLAM meetings, reaching out to more than 180 representatives of various GLAM institutions.
A comprehensive list of WMDE GLAM cooperations is available on Outreach Wiki.

WMDE now coordinates GLAM efforts with partners in the Open GLAM Arbeitsgruppe Deutschland (German Open GLAM working group)

Of our existing GLAM partnerships (baseline: 21 in 2014), at least eight institutions will continue contributing to our content-liberation activities in 2015. We strive to activate at least ten new GLAM institutions to provide access to their data/content. Coding da Vinci 2015: 12 participating GLAM institutions from 2014 continued to contribute with their data/ content this year. 22 brand new GLAM institutions joined the event in 2015 additionally. Overall 620K media files and 65M Metadata became available under free licenses during the 10 week phase of the competition. The main challenge for Coding da Vinci still remains: how to integrate the liberated data into Wikimedia projects (Commons, Wikipedia) and get them used more and more. To date, ~ 48,500 of the files have been uploaded to Commons.

WMDE and volunteers started initiatives to make use of the data (e.g. at a joint workshop at the German National Library).

An overview list of the datasets still to be uploaded (plus additional information about the data and suitable uploading tools) is set up on a project page on Commons.

By the end of 2015, a renowned science institution commits itself to partner with WMDE in a pilot project regarding open knowledge in the scientific community. In Q1/Q2, staff reached out to several potential partners (via direct contacts or participation at open science barcamps) to map the landscape of needs and opportunities in the open science field. This resulted in the plan to foster open science via initiating a fellowship program together with partners. A first concept was drafted and first conversations with potential partners took place in July. In Q4, a partnership for an open science fellowship was secured with the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft (pls. see above for more details). Formal confirmation of the partnership was signed in the end of Q1 2016.

The Fellow Program will be rolled out as a pilot in 2016, in close cooperation with the partner, while we recruit additional partners and funding sources, as well as create additional connections with the citizen science movement.

At the end of the year, learnings will inform the improvement and scaling of the Fellow Program for 2017 and beyond.

Deployed technical assistance package (info & consultation modules) shared with the movement through publishing on Meta and as learning patterns with practice examples. Three modules that will support GLAMs in liberating their content have been defined and are being developed. Learning patterns are under construction (incl. an extensive hands-on guide about the upload of large datasets to Commons) and will be published in Q3. We successfully tested two workshop formats to support GLAMs in liberating their content:
  • 2x ‘Wikiversum Weltcafé’ (world café): an entry format / introduction on free licences and the Wikimedia projects in a world café format for GLAM staff, conducted by Wikimedians
  • 5x ‘©©change your mind’: an in-house training for GLAM staff on how to apply free licenses

Additionally, we utilized a volunteer workshop at the German National Library to pre-test a third format: ‘Prepare Your Data’, a hands-on consulting format for data upload.

Through the end of 2015, constant demands for these workshop formats indicate high acceptance and need by institutions.

2016 will see a further building and systematization of our assistance portfolio for institutions, based on the testing in 2015: update of general information materials, a set of different learning formats (direct consulting) and accompanying tools/ tutorials (e.g. the attribution generator, video-tutorials, event-videos etc.)

As conversations with institutions from the science sector showed that they have very similar needs like the GLAMs, we plan to expand and adapt our consultation modules to this sector, too.

Nevertheless, we were unable to share information about our formats and materials as broadly as we would have liked to (mainly due to limited translation resources).

Please find all materials yet available in the ‘Shared Learnings’ section below.

Program Story 4: Legal and Social Framework[edit]

2015 was a year of much activity in numerous policy arenas. The borders between advocacy and policy work on the one hand, and work with institutions on the other hand, became more blurry, or rather, both programs became more mutually reinforcing.

Based on the multiple streams approach, success is likely when the streams of problems, policy, and politics align to provide windows of opportunity for change. In terms of Open Education, these opportunities for change appear at multiple levels of the educational system, which is fragmented not only by educational arenas, but by the federated system in Germany, which leaves education as the responsibility of the states (Länder).

Open Educational Resources (OER) are an issue that exemplifies such a window of opportunity.  While OER are a means rather than an end in themselves, they present an avenue through which the values and the philosophy of free and open knowledge can be carried into various educational fields and related policy arenas.

By investing in OER advocacy work over several years, WMDE was able to achieve a type of impact that is very rare in Germany: actively influence attention, decision-making and resource allocation decisions in both the federal and state level educational arenas. The recent federal requests for proposals around OER reflect the interim results of Mapping OER, and the assembly of state education ministers (KMK) issued a policy statement reflecting the recommendations of the Open Education Alliance.

Our OER work did much to further position WMDE as a thought leader in education reform. We built trust with partners through incorporating diverse perspectives into the products of Mapping OER.  And, with our partners, we affected policy and fund allocation.

Highlight Story: Mapping OER[edit]

Free Knowledge Events[edit]

Development event series ABC of Free Knowledge
Development event series ABC of Free Knowledge
ABC event
ABC event

In 2015 we continued our successful in-house event formats ‘ABC of Free Knowledge’, and ‘Monsters of Law’. Especially ‘ABC of Free Knowledge’ received increasing attention in the media (media coverage increased nearly tenfold vs. 2014), attracted expert audiences and cooperating partners (three media partners and two partners at joint events) and proved to be a useful forum to establish contact with decision-makers regarding questions of free knowledge. High-level guests from the political arenas e.g. included Elisabeth Kotthaus (European Commission in Germany), Tim Renner (Permanent Secretary for Cultural Affairs, Berlin), and Olaf Zimmermann (Executive Director of the German Cultural Council). In the light of our annual goals for 2016, WMDE plans to focus the “ABC of Free Knowledge” event series even more on political and policy issues. We plan to target speakers from federal ministries and political parties, members of the European parliament as well as activists and organisations advocating for a free web. These efforts aim at strengthening the Wikimedia movement’s influence on crucial political decision making processes.



Learning Pattern: Organizing an event series How to generate publicity and foster collaboration: Organizing an event series
A=Allmende-Postkarte - Das ABC des Freien Wissens
A=Allmende-Postkarte - Das ABC des Freien Wissens

Other Advocacy Activities[edit]

Open Education Alliance (Bündnis Freie Bildung, BFB)

The Open Education Alliance in 2015 built significant capacity in terms of structures and processes, and established a part-time staff position to coordinate the activities. The group evolved from a loose group into a structured alliance, with regular meetings, and with its back-bone functions covered. Membership criteria were agreed upon and eight new organizations (four as partners and four as supporters) joined in 2015. Recently joined partners include OER Transfer Point, ZUM (Center for Educational Media on the Internet) and Serlo. The Alliance now includes all important players from the Open Education field, including OER practitioners such as Serlo and ZUM. The Alliance increasingly serves as the go-to expert address for decision-makers in need of high quality information, materials and political consultation. In 2016, the Alliance plans to establish more sustainable funding mechanisms, discussing possible corporate forms, and furthering the identity of the group.

Staff and members analyzed party positions and points of influence in 2016 state parliamentary elections and fielded requests for information. The group issued several statements and commentaries on public policy developments around Open Educational Resources. A basic policy paper issued in February continues to serve as a basis for the Allliance’s positions, and its recommendations ultimately were reflected in the January 2015 OER calls for proposals and the associated substantial funding commitments for OER.

The alliance evolved into a useful mechanism to issue policy positions jointly with our partners, and directly address political decision-makers. The positions are aligned with the learnings from Mapping OER and the values of the Free Knowledge movement. This advocacy group is another point in case for the effectiveness of integrating the applied work with institutional partners closely with advocacy activities. Speaking to decision-makers with a unified voice, backed up by an evidence base and practitioners’ insights, makes policy statements much more powerful and applicable.

Consultations

Bar Camp Citizen Science
Bar Camp Citizen Science

Staff of the WMDE Education, Science and Culture team spent significant time with and attention to affecting policy and decision-making, and to providing expert input at numerous levels. In 2015, we have seen an increase of invitations for WMDE’s contributions to these high level conversations. This is evidence of how WMDE is looked to as an expert on policy issues related to cultural heritage and education. Topics of our expert input requested often have to do with open licenses, learning about opportunities to work with open knowledge communities, and of course with OER as a path to open education and to equalizing opportunities in education. Selected consultations included:

  • Advisory Council to the Senate of Berlin: Co-creation of the OER-Agenda 2015-2020
  • Advisory Council to Bertelsmann Foundation: Consultation on OER as part of the project ‘Monitoring Digital Education’
  • Advisory Council Goethe Institut: Consultation regarding community processes, open licenses and Wikimedia projects
  • Science 2.0 Conference of the Leibniz Research Association, Hamburg: Expert input regarding open licenses
  • Barcamp "Citizen Science - Creating Open Knowledge together" (04. & 05.12.): Barcamp in cooperation with ‘Citizens create Knowledge’ ("Bürger schaffen Wissen") towards strategy formation for Citizen Science 2020 in Germany (resulting policy paper to be published in 2016)
  • “Bürger, Künste, Wissenschaften” (Citizens, Art and Science) Conference, Erfurt University: Presentation ‘Discovering citizen science in the Wikiverse: How cultural and science institutions can cooperate with Wikipedia’ and participation on panel
  • Cultural Affairs Committee of the Berlin Senate: Position statement on the Wikimedia projects and the importance of open licenses in the context of digitization of cultural heritage
Big Fat Brussels Meeting 2015
Big Fat Brussels Meeting 2015

EU Advocacy[edit]

Freedom of Panorama in Europe - Report
Freedom of Panorama in Europe -  Report

Visiting Weasel

The first Visiting WEASEL hailed from Italy and spent five days in Brussels, while meeting with nine MEPs from all political groups. The visit was successful not only in establishing relationships, but also resulted in active support for our Freedom of Panorama (FoP) campaign by a large number of Italian MEPs. These contacts also helped WMIT establish new relationships back home. While a success, the program will most likely not take place in 2016 due to insufficient funding.

Life after the  #saveFoP campaign

After successfully repealing the undesirable FoP proposal (see details in the progress report), the work on this issue continued without pause. We focused on encouraging the EU Commission to keep working the issue despite the controversy that had arisen. Together with the WMF Legal team, we authored a detailed letter that highlighted concrete problematic cases. In cooperation with New York University and the HEC Paris, we also prepared a report on Freedom of Panorama in Europe. Our Wikimedian in Brussels, Dimitar Dimitrov, conducted additional meetings with the respective department and assured support for a quality proposal and the possibility for a positive vote in the EU Parliament. By the end of the year, the commission officially confirmed that FoP is still part of the copyright reform package.

FoP EP event
FoP EP event

Catalyst for Wikimedia policy work groups: 2015 was marked by policy activities finally seeing widespread distribution across the member states. This was one of the foci of the Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU (FKAGEU), and the FoP campaign along with more concrete reform proposals generated in Brussels also helped to motivate people.

National policy work groups usually gather volunteers, staff members, and occasionally representatives of coalition partners. Their goals are to:

  • Assist the FKAGEU in its EU level efforts, which often requires national activities.
  • Work within Wikimedia’s global public policy goals to set national priorities and follow-up with a very targeted, local approach.

Their current sizes range between four and ten people.

Some examples:

  • EE: Founded a policy work group, conducted high-level consultations with ministry, recruited the chamber of architects to support FoP campaign.
  • CZ: Founded a policy work group. Featured MdEP as Speaker at their national conference forging a national Free/Open Coalition.
  • FR: Created a policy internship position. Pushed FoP through the Assemblée Nationale. The language of the law still provides an exception through a non-commercial restriction, but is still a huge step forward in the French political context.
  • IT: Always had an active group. Conducted an event in Parliament about free knowledge and FoP. Provided policy work during Wikimania.
  • UK: Started a policy work group towards the end of 2015. Work begins in February of 2016.
  • NL: Founded a policy work group. MdEP was speaker at their national conference.

Policy Advisor

The recruitment for the Policy Advisor position at WMDE was put on hold throughout 2015, due to changes at the executive level and budget restrictions. Nevertheless, through the participatory process for the 2016 Compass it was decided to strengthen WMDE’s political and legal work for free knowledge. Wikimedia is a network of key organizations that can pursue the fight for a modern copyright, and that can influence the public debates. With the current copyright reform in the EU, now is the time to become proactive and effective, on a global and regional as well as on a national level. In the second half of 2016, we welcomed and actively contributed to the introduction of the 5 Public Policy Areas for the movement. We highly appreciate that the movement – for the first time – committed itself to becoming a proactive voice and strong player in the fields of copyright, privacy, access, knowledge, and liability, and is enabled to globally contribute to the political agenda. We also consulted with WMF and the community on how to make those policy areas applicable to regional and national frameworks. At the European level, WMDE helped with preparations and attended the Big Fat Brussels Meeting III in November, where European Chapter representatives defined next steps for their policy agenda. At the national level, many of our local activities already have a political dimension, be it the work on OER, GLAM, or the support for volunteers in cases where they seek legal advice.

For 2016, WMDE is aiming at preserving and improving the political and legal frameworks for Free Knowledge. Our goal is to strengthen our position on the political stage, shaping political decision making processes and debates. We will publish statements and opinion pieces with a clear and strong political message. During WMDE’s annual planning process, we defined the structures and processes we have to build and extend to contribute to the political debates around free knowledge in Germany and Europe. We kicked off the search for the Policy Advisor in December and will onboard the person in Q2/2016. We are looking forward to a productive collaboration with the WMF and the FKAGEU and to shape a policy environment that supports our movement’s goals together.

Targets Legal and Social Framework[edit]

Color Code indicating Progress on Targets
On track/ ongoing/ results meeting expectations
Delayed or falling behind expectations
Not meeting expectations
Target changed/ postponed / no results available yet
Targets: Legal and Social Framework
Targets Progress (at end of Q2) Total year Q1-Q4 Comments/ Next steps
Open Educational Resources
By the end of 2015, five new partners (organisations or individuals) have joined the Open Education Alliance. Additionally, the diversity of the alliance in terms of type and scope of our partners is increased. Until June 2015, four new partners (individuals and organisations) have joined the Open Education Alliance.

Published a position paper on OER in February and a statement regarding a report of the German federal states and government on OER.

The mailing list of the alliance serves as a well-used exchange forum about OER.

The coalition receives frequent requests e.g. for review of parliamentary requests and for inputs at OER events and expert rounds.

In 2015, overall 8 organisations joined the coalition as a partner or supporter,  totalling up to 7 formal partners and 4 supporting organisations.

But even more important, the Open Education Alliance evolved from a loose group into a structured alliance with fortified structures and processes (pls. see above for more details).

In terms of diversity and composition, the alliance includes a diverse set of players from the Open Education field, now also including recently joined OER practitioners such as Serlo and ZUM.

WMDE continues to be regularly invited to crucial state level open education consultations and hearings in Germany 2015 and plays an active role (provide own position papers, add new agenda points etc.) in most of them. Participation in 5 hearings/ expert committees (mainly in a consulting role). The major ‘Mapping OER’ project allowed us to work directly with many relevant OER stakeholders (from educational arenas, as well as from policy, administration, publishing companies, interest groups, and science) on the development of OER in Germany.

The published OER Practice Framework makes recommendations and outlines development paths that will influence the implementation of OER in Germany for years to come.

Additionally we took part in 7 state level hearings/ expert committees and barcamps regarding open science.

By the end of 2015, one state level political entity commits itself to partner in an OER pilot project with WMDE. Q1/Q2: initiation and start of the major ‘Mapping OER’ project (together with the Federal Ministry of Education and Research) This was replaced by the much larger-scale Mapping OER (MOER) project, discussed above in the institution program. MOER straddles the line between the institution and legal framework programs.

Funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research, this project involved > 250 of OER’s most relevant stakeholders in Germany.

There is a growing national stakeholder group interested in forming an OER consortium with us.

WMDE will continue OER work given the availability of further federal and other funding sources in close cooperation with the emerging network of OER stakeholders.

EU Advocacy
An EU advocacy contact database is available for Wikimedians, and policy issue brochures in at least three different languages are shared with the Wikimedia movement. Database of relevant contacts already grown to 202 entries.

Brochures yet not published, work-in-progress.

Contact database has grown to 297 entries now.

Brochure on "NC won't serve your needs" now available in four languages.

Published a media work guide at the Wikimedia EU policy portal (Meta)

Due to data protection regulations in Belgium and the EU, very few people have direct access to the contact database. Contact information is provided upon request by the Wikimedian in Brussels.
Ten new working contacts to MEPs are established in 2015, which result in ongoing consultations by volunteer Wikimedians (as qualified by meetings, email conversations, phone calls). End of Q2: 11 volunteer Wikimedians have established contacts with more than 20 MEPs. In 2015, 22 Wikimedians were in touch with at least 37 MEPs. These are only the contacts that received documented replies.

There have been many many more on ad-hoc basis during the successful #saveFoP campaign.

WMDE/FKAGEU participates in all relevant EU copyright dialogues, meetings and consultations in 2015 and plays an active role in all opportunities. FKAGEU and our Wikimedian in Brussels have not missed a single relevant event related to copyright in Brussels so far: 88 discussions/ meetings until end of Q2 (conservative count)

Co-organised a film screening and a FoP Expert Seminar on Wikimedia topics inside the European Parliament, both hosted by MEPs (3 MEPs from 3 different political groups).

Totalling up to more than 200 contacts/meetings.

Due to the #saveFoP campaign and Wikimania Mexico City FKAGEU and our Wikimedian in Brussels did miss several interesting seminars and meetings, but nothing that threatens the overall monitoring/visibility.

The number of all events is difficult to determine, since it is hard to define what counts as “discussions” and “meetings”.
By end of 2015 at least two volunteer Wikimedians have participated in the “Wikimedian in Brussels” work scholarship and our EU advocacy activities. The first ‘Visiting Weasel’ was Federico Leva from WMIT. We regard the first Visiting WEASEL as very successful: Federico worked 5 days in Brussels, met 9 MEPs,  participated at 7 meetings which covered all relevant political groups.

A second official work scholarship unfortunately lacked funding in 2015. Instead Romaine from the Southern Netherlands came several times to support the Wikimedians in Brussels and meet relevant people.

While a success, the program will most likely not take place in 2016 due to insufficient funding.
Additional working partnerships are established and existing ones are deepened in 2015. Our Position Paper on Copyright Reform was co-signed by 18 non-Wikimedia organisations.

We have begun participation in Communia (cooperation platform for advocating for the public domain - OKFN, Creative Commons and Kennisland are the lead partners):

  • Approx. 7 active non-Wikimedia participants as partners in lobbying for Free Knowledge

Cooperated with Right to Research Coalition/SPARC on drafting plans to jointly lobby for real open access (i.e. cc-by or compatible) in the EU’s Horizon 2020 funding programme:

  • 3 non-Wikimedia individuals as partners

Organized event with Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue, invited to advise the organisation of OpenCon in Brussels:

Organised a NGO Networking Lunch together with EDRi and Amnesty International:

  • 18 non-Wikimedia participants

Advised the Mozilla Foundation on its Brussels activities, goals and on opening its Brussels representation.

Mozilla Foundation now shares the Brussels office space with us, which allows for close coordination of our activities.

Organised a well-received EP event on Freedom of Panorama

Co-organised a "School of Rock(ing) EU Copyright" together with Communia and EDRi in Warsaw.

  • Approx. 30 volunteer participants from 12 European countries
The FKAGEU more and more functions as a catalyst for the forming of Wikimedia policy work groups in Europe. 2015 was marked by policy activities finally seeing widespread distribution across the member states (pls. see above for further details).

Working for and with the Global Movement[edit]

Wikimedia Conference[edit]

Wikimedia Conference 2015 Program and Engagement Coordination Infographic
Wikimedia Conference 2015 Program and Engagement Coordination Infographic

WMDE is hosting the most important conference of all Wikimedia organizations, the Wikimedia Foundation and its committees for three years in a row (2015, 2016, 2017). The team put much effort in making this conference not just a simple gathering, but a productive and sustainable conference series that focuses on working, thinking, and learning together. One of the steps to achieve that was the creation of the Program and Engagement Coordinator (PEC) position.

Thanks to the PEC’s efforts, the conference program and its documentation was refined and improved. The concept of identifying “thematic ambassadors” in the aftermath of the conference – volunteers who carry the “thematic torch” of a conference main topic throughout the year – helps to continue conversations on specific issues and to produce post-conference outcomes for the first time in the history of the event. A workshop on the Wikimania pre-conference days in Mexico and the PEC’s presence at the CEE meeting in Estonia were the first pillars of our “programmatic bridges”. Better documentation gives Wikimedians who could not participate the chance to be on the same page and to follow important movement conversations. An improved documentation and follow-up, the programmatic bridges as well as the thematic ambassadors are part of our efforts to integrate the Wikimedia Conference in movement’s conversations and context instead of having  an isolated, one-shot event as was perceived in the past.

The issues the Wikimedia Conference suffered from in the past – unsustainable programmes, inconsistent documentation, no visible outcomes, no follow-up – are general, systemic problems of all conferences, incl. those in the Wikimedia movement. Experiences, learnings and promising practices gathered with the new approach will be shared widely, so that other Wikimedia organizations and Wikimedians can learn from and build upon them (see reports 1 and 2).

Given the current leadership crisis, WMDE is also willing to make space at the 2016 conference to strengthen the movement through respectful dialogue and deliberation, and as ‘a platform for exchange and progress’, as WMDE’s Board president wrote to the global community in February.

Other WMDE staff activities that benefit movement partners

  • Wiki Loves Monuments Fiscal Sponsorship: WMDE International Relations and Finance Teams supported the WLM international team through providing fiscal sponsorship for the prizes.
  • WMDE Partnerships and Resource Development (ZEN) participates in capacity building activities with WMFR and WMSE, building resources and expertise around the topics of partnerships, fundraising and collective impact. We have also provided group peer consultation on these topics to each other.
  • Close consulting of WMF Community Tech team by WMDE TCB team’s head of communications in the course of setting up the first international community wish list.

Shared Learnings[edit]

Learning Patterns

Please find all published Learning Patterns at the WMDE category of the Learning Pattern Library on Meta:

Talks at the Wikimania & Wikimedia Hackathon (non-exhaustive list)

Reports

Policy & Scientific Papers

Guides & Tutorials

Promotional Materials

Financial Information[edit]

Please note: Expenditures shown in in these tables differ from financial figures included in the Annual Report 2016 due to multiyear depreciation of equipment purchases and different allocation of indirect cost reflected in the latter.

WMDE Expenses 2015 by Quarter[edit]

Table 1: WMDE Expenses 2015 by Quarter

Wikimedia Deutschland: Expenses 2015 by Quarter

APG expenses Q1 expenses Q2 expenses Q3 expenses Q4 expenses
Cost unit Line item Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Cumulative Cumulative in USD
Program 2: Software Development
101/102 Program Coordination/Internal Meetings 5,410 € 50,338 € 15,813 € 44,231 € 6,158 € 44,629 € 17,012 € 34,853 € 218,445 € $ 286,818
104/105 Vacation/Sick (Wikidata project employees) - 26,473 € - 14,726 € - 30,342 € - 37,845 € 109,386 € $ 143,624
55100 Wikidata 4,101 € 117,632 € 18,135 € 111,741 € 9,090 € 117,516 € 15,258 € 118,696 € 512,169 € $ 672,478
Total APG expenses (1) 9,511 € 194,443 € 33,948 € 170,698 € 15,248 € 192,487 € 32,270 € 191,394 € 840,000 € $ 1,102,919
Non-APG expenses Q1 expenses Q2 expenses Q3 expenses Q4 expenses
Cost unit Line item Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Cumulative Cumulative in USD
Program 1: Supporting Volunteers
101/102 Program Coordination/Internal Meetings 2,346 € 16,235 € 112 € 14,769 € 516 € 19,474 € 4,779 € 13,979 € 72,210 € $ 94,812
104/105 Vacation/Sick - 8,990 € - 4,724 € - 2,258 € - 13,780 € 29,752 € $ 39,064
211 WikiCon - 742 € 1,120 € 792 € 12,123 € 5,396 € 39,793 € 625 € 60,591 € $ 79,556
213 Volunteer Support 37,393 € 18,205 € 30,876 € 20,789 € 44,827 € 19,279 € 81,917 € 29,234 € 282,520 € $ 370,949
214 Development 90 € 1,684 € 11,946 € 1,990 € 343 € 1,231 € 12,918 € 5,907 € 36,109 € $ 47,411
215 Community events - - 73 € 90 € 30,137 € - - - 30,300 € $ 39,784
216 Large community projects 8,091 € 70 € 2,320 € 69 € 7,394 € - 601 € 6 € 18,551 € $ 24,357
217 Local community spaces active 8,813 € 225 € 8,141 € - 7,972 € - 8,750 € 350 € 34,251 € $ 44,972
218 Local community spaces development 730 € - 1,831 € 283 € 229 € - - 339 € 3,412 € $ 4,480
Subtotal 57,463 € 46,151 € 56,419 € 43,506 € 103,541 € 47,638 € 148,758 € 64,220 € 567,696 € $ 745,385
Program 2: Software Development
101/102 Program coordination/internal meetings 132 € 999 € 448 € 4,522 € 1,928 € 1,431 € 5,543 € 184 € 15,187 € $ 19,940
104/105 Vacation/sick - 7,315 € - 1,736 € - 10,900 € - 26,693 € 46,644 € $ 61,244
219-221 Enthusiasticon/ Game Jam - 5,767 € 507 € 8,362 € 5,716 € 11,158 € 6,159 € 2,690 € 40,359 € $ 52,992
222 Communication networks - 1,641 € 2,314 € 3,437 € 1,480 € 4,525 € - 1,768 € 15,165 € $ 19,912
223 Communication communities 258 € 4,152 € 1,501 € 5,648 € 3,291 € 3,841 € 541 € 1,271 € 20,503 € $ 26,920
224 Technical requests - 14,717 € - 24,922 € - 37,765 € - 14,267 € 91,671 € $ 120,364
225/113 Internal and other projects (3) - 7,928 € - 22,093 € - 44,128 € - 63,956 € 138,105 € $ 181,332
Subtotal 390 € 42,520 € 4,770 € 70,720 € 12,415 € 113,748 € 12,243 € 110,829 € 367,634 € $ 482,703
Program 3: Institutions
101/102 Program coordination/internal meetings 460 € 23,946 € 3,309 € 26,152 € 1,178 € 19,371 € 9,040 € 20,317 € 103,773 € $ 136,254
104/105 Vacation/Sick - 10,970 € - 15,570 € - 22,354 € - 19,181 € 68,075 € $ 89,382
201 ABC of Free Knowledge 2,012 € 3,381 € 3,693 € 4,320 € 2,932 € 2,810 € 2,438 € 2,236 € 23,822 € $ 31,278
202 Technical Assistance Packages 838 € 3,305 € 1,106 € 5,596 € 712 € 6,364 € 3,881 € 6,004 € 27,806 € $ 36,509
204 Coding da Vinci 20,000 € 6,164 € 1,790 € 5,050 € 254 € 2,266 € 78 € 297 € 35,899 € $ 47,135
205 Tools for volunteers - 222 € - - - - - 222 € 444 € $ 583
206 GLAM on Tour 4,237 € 2,707 € 811 € 1,631 € 2,348 € 3,330 € 2,269 € 1,545 € 18,878 € $ 24,787
207 Development of materials 19 € 3,548 € 8,333 € 1,997 € 10,289 € 3,092 € 2,060 € 3,577 € 32,915 € $ 43,217
208 Open Science project 300 € 8,469 € 630 € 6,929 € 471 € 6,489 € 10,198 € 8,617 € 42,103 € $ 55,281
209 Monsters of Law 91 € 707 € 125 € 1,650 € - - 148 € 1,193 € 3,914 € $ 5,139
Subtotal 27,957 € 63,419 € 19,797 € 68,895 € 18,184 € 66,076 € 30,112 € 63,189 € 357,629 € $ 469,567
Program 4: Legal and Social Framework
101/102 Program coordination/internal meetings (5) - - - - - - - - - -
104/105 Vacation/Sick (5) - - - - - - - - - -
203 Free Education Alliance 763 € 5,094 € 170 € - - 885 € 228 € 645 € 7,785 € $ 10,222
210 OER project 221 € 15,073 € 455 € 561 € 3,496 € 538 € 6,236 € 468 € 27,048 € $ 35,514
226 Free Knowledge Advocacy Group 7,312 € - - - - - - - 7,312 € $ 9,601
227 Mapping OER - - 8,858 € 40,610 € 44,146 € 45,219 € 147,746 € 44,412 € 330,991 € $ 434,591
Subtotal 8,296 € 20,167 € 9,483 € 41,171 € 47,642 € 46,642 € 154,210 € 45,525 € 373,136 € $ 489,928
Total non-APG expenses 103,227 € 324,180 € 119,647 € 324,270 € 184,615 € 352,843 € 365,350 € 364,328 € 1,666,095 € $ 2,187,583
Program support cost Q1 expenses Q2 expenses Q3 expenses Q4 expenses
Cost unit Line item Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Cumulative Cumulative in USD
International Relations 1,317 € 24,464 € 77,173 € 31,454 € 5,966 € 20,685 € 6,463 € 24,535 € 192,057 € $ 252,171
Communication 24,107 € 43,529 € 38,182 € 39,512 € 32,246 € 47,474 € 53,708 € 48,511 € 327,269 € $ 429,704
Event Management 1,141 € 16,612 € 5,410 € 15,220 € 3,439 € 23,625 € 10,517 € 19,406 € 95,370 € $ 125,221
Partnerships und Development 2,900 € 42,051 € 2,298 € 56,664 € 1,096 € 48,669 € 4,207 € 54,459 € 212,344 € $ 278,808
Total program support cost (2) 29,465 € 126,656 € 123,063 € 142,850 € 42,747 € 140,453 € 74,895 € 146,911 € 827,040 € $ 1,085,904
Administrative cost (including indirect program cost) (4) Q1 expenses Q2 expenses Q3 expenses Q4 expenses
Cost unit Line item Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Cumulative Cumulative in USD
Office of the CEO, Board of Directors 43,374 € 68,059 € 32,641 € 84,268 € 34,979 € 44,310 € 48,074 € 65,134 € 420,839 € $ 552,562
Finance 4,212 € 19,392 € 15,743 € 19,788 € 3,666 € 20,015 € 10,612 € 20,016 € 113,444 € $ 148,952
IT 4,393 € 13,838 € 5,565 € 14,655 € 13,946 € 8,790 € 23,323 € 13,465 € 97,975 € $ 128,641
Operations (incl. Works Council, HR) 129,393 € 41,132 € 148,210 € 48,089 € 107,468 € 39,311 € 322,476 € 43,561 € 879,640 € $ 1,154,967
Total administrative cost (2) 181,372 € 142,421 € 202,159 € 166,800 € 160,059 € 112,426 € 404,485 € 142,176 € 1,511,898 € $ 1,985,122
Total expenses Q1 expenses Q2 expenses Q3 expenses Q4 expenses
Total program and associated expenses 323,576 € 787,700 € 478,817 € 804,618 € 402,670 € 798,209 € 877,001 € 844,809 € 4,845,033 € $ 6,361,528
Operating reserves - - - - - - 478,611 € - 478,611 € $ 628,416
Total expenditures including operating reserves 323,576 € 787,700 € 478,817 € 804,618 € 402,670 € 798,209 € 1,355,612 € 844,809 € 5,323,644 € $ 6,989,944

Notes:

(1) Total APG expenses: This sum does not reflect the entire expenses for Wikidata. Additional costs for administrative and program support as well as for other activities of Software Development are not included here and were covered by WMDE.

(2) Total program support and administrative cost: This includes around 17 % of Wikidata's share in program support and administrative cost. Since this was not covered by the APG, it was covered by WMDE.

(3) This covers work done by software department for other WMDE departments and the annual fundraising campaign.

(4) Administration costs listed here also include indirect program cost such as IT infrastructure for software development that is not accounted for in the program expenses above (for a financial statement that allocated some of these indirect administrative costs to the individual programs, please review the WMDE Annual Report 2015, due in April 2016).

(5) Program coordination as well as vacation/sick time of program staff is included under Program 3: Institutions since both programs are run out of the same department.


WMDE Expenses 2015, Budgeted vs. Actual[edit]

Table 2: WMDE Expenses 2015, Budgeted vs. Actual

Wikimedia Deutschland: Expenses 2015, Budgeted vs. Actual

Expenses (1) Total in EUR Total in USD
Budgeted Actual Budgeted Actual
Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Total Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Total Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Total Nonpersonnel cost Personnel cost Total Percentage of budget spent Explanation of variances from plan
APG expenses (without program support and administrative costs)
Program 2: Software Development (1) 80,640 € 759,360 € 840,000 € 90,978 € 749,022 € 840,000 € $ 105,880 $ 997,040 $ 1,102,920 $ 119,454 $ 983,465 $ 1,102,919 100% APG expenses are those covered by the €840k ultimately awarded by the FDC. Due to reduction (compared to funds request in the proposal) cuts were made across the organizational budget.
Subtotal 80,640 € 759,360 € 840,000 € 90,978 € 749,022 € 840,000 € $ 105,880 $ 997,040 $ 1,102,920 $ 119,454 $ 983,465 $ 1,102,919 100%
Non-APG expenses
Program 1: Supporting Volunteers 500,000 € 240,000 € 740,000 € 366,181 € 201,515 € 567,696 € $ 656,500 $ 315,120 $ 971,620 $ 480,796 $ 264,589 $ 745,385 77%
Program 2: Software Development 39,360 € 370,640 € 410,000 € 29,817 € 337,817 € 367,634 € $ 51,680 $ 486,650 $ 538,330 $443,553 $39,150 $ 482,703 90%
Program 3: Institutions 225,000 € 345,000 € 570,000 € 96,050 € 261,579 € 357,629 € $ 295,425 $ 452,985 $ 748,410 $ 126,114 $ 343,453 $ 469,567 63% Several projects planned for 2015 were postponed to 2016.
Program 4: Legal and Social Framework 200,749 € 207,548 € 408,297 € 219,631 € 153,505 € 373,136 € $ 263,583 $ 272,511 $ 536,094 $ 288,376 $ 201,552 $ 489,928 91%
Subtotal 965,109 € 1,163,188 € 2,128,297 € 711,679 € 954,416 € 1,666,095 € $ 1,267,188 $ 1,527,266 $ 2,794,454 $ 934,435 $ 1,253,148 $ 2,187,583 78%
Program support cost
Communications 170,000 € 210,000 € 380,000 € 148,243 € 179,026 € 327,269 € $ 223,210 $ 275,730 $ 498,940 $ 194,643 $ 235,061 $ 429,704 86%
International Relations - - - 90,919 € 101,138 € 192,057 € - - - $ 119,377 $ 132,794 $ 252,171 N/A This line item was orginally listed under Office of the CEO/Event Management. Now this also includes Wikimedia Conference & Policy Advisor.
Event Management 105,000 € 80,000 € 185,000 € 20,507 € 74,863 € 95,370 € $ 137,865 $ 105,040 $ 242,905 $ 26,926 $ 98,295 $ 125,221 52% Budget orginally included Wikimedia Conference which is now listed under International Relations.
Partnerships and Development 20,000 € 200,000 € 220,000 € 10,501 € 201,843 € 212,344 € $ 26,260 $ 262,600 $ 288,860 $ 13,788 $ 265,020 $ 278,808 97%
Subtotal 295,000 € 490,000 € 785,000 € 270,170 € 556,870 € 827,040 € $ 387,335 $ 643,370 $ 1,030,705 $ 354,733 $ 731,170 $ 1,085,904 105%
Administration cost (incl. indirect program cost)
Office of the CEO, Board of Directors 190,000 € 390,000 € 580,000 € 159,068 € 261,771 € 420,839 € $ 249,470 $ 512,070 $ 761,540 $ 208,856 $ 343,705 $ 552,562 73% International Relations, originally included in the budget, is now seperately listed under program support cost.
Finance 30,000 € 90,000 € 120,000 € 34,233 € 79,211 € 113,444 € $ 39,390 $ 118,170 $ 157,560 $ 44,948 $ 104,004 $ 148,952 95%
IT 30,000 € 60,000 € 90,000 € 47,227 € 50,748 € 97,975 € $ 39,390 $ 78,780 $ 118,170 $ 62,009 $ 66,632 $ 128,641 109% Expansion of IT infrastructure
Operations (Office, HR, Works Council) 565,000 € 150,000 € 715,000 € 707,547 € 172,093 € 879,640 € $ 741,845 $ 196,950 $ 938,795 $ 929,009 $ 225,958 $ 1,154,967 123%
Subtotal 815,000 € 690,000 € 1,505,000 € 948,075 € 563,823 € 1,511,898 € $ 1,070,095 $ 905,970 $ 1,976,065 $ 1,244,822 $ 740,300 $ 1,985,122 100%
Total program and associated expenses 2,155,749 € 3,102,548 € 5,258,297 € 2,020,902 € 2,824,130 € 4,845,033 € $ 3,441,187 $ 4,073,646 $ 6,904,144 $ 2,614,295 $ 3,264,530 $ 6,361,528 92%
Operating reserves 120,000 € - 120,000 € 478,611 € - 478,611 € $ 157,560 - $ 157,560 $ 628,416 - $ 628,416 399% We were able to additionally increase operating reserves with the help of a one-time donation in Dember 2015 that included cash as well as stocks and bonds.
Total expenses including operating reserves 2,275,749 € 3,102,548 € 5,378,297 € 2,499,513 € 2,824,130 € 5,323,644 € $ 3,598,747 $ 4,073,646 $ 7,061,704 $ 3,242,711 $ 3,264,530 $ 6,989,944 90%

Note:

(1) This sum does not reflect the entire expenses for Wikidata. Additional costs for administrative and program support as well as for other activities of Software Development are not included here and were covered by WMDE.


WMDE Revenues 2015[edit]

Table 3: WMDE Revenues 2015

Wikimedia Deutschland: Revenues 2015

Revenues Q1 Revenue Q2 Revenue Q3 Revenue Q4 Revenue
Anticipated Cumulative Anticipated in USD Cumulative in USD Percentage received Explanation of variances from plan
Donations 2,150,000 € 2,002,590 € 124,499 € - - 2,127,089 € $ 2,822,950 $ 2,792,868 99%
APG grant 840,000 € 840,000 € - - - 840,000 € $ 1,102,920 $ 1,102,920 100% Original FDC funding request was 1.2 M.
Membership fees 1,100,000 € 598,551 € 294,122 € 147,282 € 156,681 € 1,196,636 € $ 1,444,300 $ 1,571,183 109% This includes membership fees that have been pledged, but have not been received yet.
Contracts 500,000 € - 106,472 € 76,503 € 225,322 € 408,297 € $ 656,500 $ 536,094 82%
Carry-over 30,000 € 30,000 € - - - 30,000 € $ 39,390 $ 39,390 100%
Other revenues 100,000 € 36,814 € 4,946 € 14,272 € 490,054 € 546,086 € $ 131,300 $ 717,011 546% Donation of 478k € in December 2015, including cash, stocks and bonds
Fundraising management overhead 150,000 € 75,000 € - 75,000 € - 150,000 € $ 196,950 $ 196,950 100%
Wikimedia Conference 100,000 € - 108,882 € - - 108,882 € $ 131,300 $ 142,962 109%
Total 4,970,000 € 3,582,955 € 638,921 € 313,057 € 872,057 € 5,406,990 € $ 6,525,610 7,099,378 € 109%

Note:

(Table 2 +3) The surplus between total revenue and total expenses is a result of revenue we received from the Mapping OER contract in 2015, part of which was spent in 2016 in accordance with the funding period ending in Q1 2016.


WMFG Expenses and Revenues 2015[edit]

Table 4: WMFG Expenses and Revenues 2015

Wikimedia Fördergesellschaft: Expenses and Revenues 2015

Revenues Q1 Revenue Q2 Revenue Q3 Revenue Q4 Revenue
Anticipated Cumulative Anticipated in USD Cumulative in USD Percentage received Explanation of variances from plan
Donations within the Fundraising Agreement (carry-over 2014) 6,602,173 € 6,602,173 € - - - 6,602,173 € $ 8,668,653 $ 8,668,653 100%
Donations within the Fundraising Agreement (first term 2015) 1,340,832 € 726,829 € 336,608 € - - 1,063,437 € $ 1,760,512 $ 1,396,293 79% Fluctuations due to across-FY payments to WMF
Donations within the Fundraising Agreement (second term 2015) 7,629,463 € - - 179,769 € 7,198,371 € 7,378,141 € $ 10,017,485 $ 9,687,499 97% Fluctuations due to across-FY payments to WMF
Subtotal 15,572,468 € 7,329,002 € 336,608 € 179,769 € 7,198,371 € 15,043,751 € $ 20,446,650 $ 19,752,445 97%
Donations for WMDE (carry-over 2014) 1,718,145 € 1,718,145 € - - - 1,718,145 € $ 2,255,924 $ 2,255,924 100%
Donations for WMDE (first term 2015) 434,852 € 284,445 € 124,499 € - - 408,944 € $ 570,961 $ 536,943 94% Fluctuations due to across-FY payments to WMF
Donations for WMDE (second term 2015) 1,907,366 € - - 66,890 € 1,902,593 € 1,969,483 € $ 2,504,372 $ 2,585,931 103%
Subtotal 4,060,363 € 2,002,590 € 124,499 € 66,890 € 1,902,593 € 4,096,572 € $ 5,331,257 $ 5,378,799 101%
Interest 20,000 € 6,684 € 1,164 € 616 € 379 € 8,843 € $ 26,260 $ 11,611 44% Lower revenue due to interest rate reduction
Total 19,652,831 € 9,338,276 € 462,271 € 247,275 € 9,101,344 € 19,149,166 € $ 25,804,167 $ 25,142,855 97%

Expenses Q1 Expenses Q2 Expenses Q3 Expenses Q4 Expenses
Budgeted Cumulative Budgeted in USD Cumulative in USD Percentage spent Explanation of variances from plan
Transfer of donations to WMF on January 1st 4,862,173 € 4,862,173 € - - - 4,862,173 € $ 6,384,033 $ 6,384,033 100%
Transfer of donations to WMF on September 1st 1,340,832 € 726,829 € - 336,608 € - 1,063,437 € $ 1,760,512 $ 1,396,293 79% Fluctuations due to across-FY payments to WMF
Transfer of donations to WMF for 2016 7,629,463 € - - 179,769 € 7,198,371 € (1) 7,378,141 € $ 10,017,485 $ 9,687,499 97%
Subtotal 13,832,468 € 5,589,002 € - 516,377 € 7,198,371 € 13,303,751 € $ 18,162,030 $ 17,467,825 96%
Transfer of donations to WMDE on January 1st 1,718,145 € 1,718,145 € - - - 1,718,145 € $ 2,255,924 $ 2,255,924 100%
Transfer of donations to WMDE on September 1st 434,852 € 284,445 € 124,499 € - - 408,944 € $ 570,961 $ 536,943 94%
Transfer of donations to WMDE for 2016 (including interest) 1,927,366 € - - 66,890 € 1,902,593 € 1,969,483 € $ 2,530,632 $ 2,585,931 102% Pledges made in Q3 and Q4 to be submitted to WMDE in 2016
Transfer of FDC funds to WMDE 840,000 € 840,000 € - - - 840,000 € $ 1,102,920 $ 1,102,920 100%
Fundraising management overhead WMDE 150,000 € 75,000 € - 75,000 € - 150,000 € $ 196,950 $ 196,950 100%
Subtotal 5,070,363 € 2,917,590 € 124,499 € 141,890 € 1,902,593 € 5,086,572 € $ 6,657,387 $ 6,678,669 100%
Personnel cost 306,000 € 46,779 € 61,931 € 45,990 € 48,105 € 202,805 € $ 401,778 $ 266,283 66% Lower than budgeted due to shifting cost to nonpersonnel category
Nonpersonnel cost 444,000 € 59,248 € 167,353 € 20,503 € 394,766 € 641,870 € $ 582,972 $ 842,775 145% Higher than budgeted due to higher contract and advertising cost
Total 19,652,831 € 8,612,619 € 353,783 € 724,760 € 9,543,836 € 19,234,998 € $ 25,804,167 $ 25,255,552 98%

Notes:

(Table 4) The difference between total revenue and total expenses results from WMFG fundraising expenses that occurred in 2015, but will only be reimbursed by the WMF through the fundraising overhead in 2016 (WMF's fiscal year runs from July 01 to June 30, while WMDE's fiscal year is the calendar year).

(1) The actual transfer of funds to the WMF for Q4 2015 (in Feb 2016) amounted to around 5.45 M € since fundraising costs (551,133 €) and the APG 15-16 (1.2 M €) were deducted from that transfer.

Compliance[edit]

Is your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement?

As required in the grant agreement, please report any deviations from your grant proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.

Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

Yes

Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Grant funds as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

Yes

Signature[edit]

Christian Rickerts (WMDE) (talk) 15:15, 24 March 2016 (UTC)