Grants:APG/Proposals/2016-2017 round 1/Wikimedia Sverige/Impact report form

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki


Global metrics overview - all programs[edit]

Shared metrics

  1. Participants: The number of people who attend your events, programs or activities, either in person or virtually. This definition does not include people organizing activities, social media followers, donors, or others not participating directly.
  2. Newly registered: The number of participants that create new accounts on a Wikimedia project. These include users who register up to two weeks before the start of the event.
  3. Content pages: A content page is an article on Wikipedia, an item on Wikidata, a content page on Wikisource, an entry on Wiktionary, and a media file on Commons, etc. This metric captures the total number of content pages created or improved across all Wikimedia projects.

Grantee-defined metrics

  1. Blog posts: The number of blog posts and newsletters written by Wikimedia Sverige or blog posts written by guests on the Wikimedia Sverige blog. Used as a proxy for visibility.
  2. Diversity: The number of participants and/or organizers of activities conducted or supported by Wikimedia Sverige who belong to underrepresented genders in the Wikimedia movement in Sweden (non-unique as we are not tracking them with names). These groups are defined as women and people identifying themselves as something other than male or female.
Program Participants Newly registered Content pages Blog posts Diversity
1 Access 4,139 427 548,011 34 1,722
2 Use 362 0 0 1 14
3 Community 751 178 9,294 17 298
4 Enabling 133 0 0 4 34
TOTAL for all programs 5,385 605 557,305 56 2,068
Goals for 2017 6,050 650 553,300 75 2,310
Comments Breakdown by gender:
Women: 2,060
Men: 1,582
Non-binary: 8

This metric was converted from data collected for the old individuals involved metric. The number may therefore include a few organizers and volunteers but should on the whole match the new metric well.

Breakdown by gender:
Women: 279
Men: 201
Non-binary: 0
Breakdown by type:
Articles: 359,352
Media: 197,953

In the future this will be broken down by project. For now it is split into articles (Wikipedia or Wikidata) and media (Wikimedia Commons).

While we only reached 2/3 of the intended goal we also experimented with other kinds of communication which, while not captured by this metric, aims to fill the same visibility goals.
Note that this metric will be replaced in the future.

Introduction[edit]

The year was one of the most intense we have had, with a flourish of activities and some major setbacks. We continued with our 4 programmatic areas, Access, Use, Community and Enabling, which were developed in 2016.

Some of the most important activities to date are the following: We have created more than 350,000 information rich items on Wikidata about cultural heritage and uploaded around 200,000 images. We launched an alpha version of our new Wikispeech extension on Wikimedia Cloud Services. We organized a photo exhibition together with UNESCO and Wikimedia Italia and joined as formal partner in the #Unite4Heritage initiative. We organized the first Wikipedia Day with great success. Wiki Loves Earth was organized in Sweden for the first time. We organized our first international conference, the Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2017. We are honoured that our work was recognized with three awards during the year “Årets pedagogiska pris”, “Ann-Marie Lunds encyklopedipris” and the Open Knowledge Awards for Best Civil Society.

We’ve seen some changes to our organizational structure. In May, Anna Troberg left as the Executive Director and was replaced by John Andersson, previously Chief Operating Officer. We hired a new communication expert, Gitta Wilén, and signed contracts for two new consultants, Paweł Marynowski and John Cummings. We also launched a project focused solely on WiR, with three WiR positions completed and a fourth, fifth and sixth being planned for 2018. We spent a significant amount of time preparing for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), preparations that need to be finalized in May 2018. Furthermore we established new routines with our new administrative and financial service provider OP Administration AB. We have also changed our accountant to Maria Jalkenäs at Grant Thornton with a fixed price for the coming four years and signed an agreement with a travel agency specialized in travels for NGOs (with reduced prices from the airlines); all of which will help reduce costs and administration.

Two new board members, Sofie Jansson and Erik Åström, have joined our board, with Karin Åström Iko leaving. Sofie and Erik are bringing further community, GLAM expertise and networks to the board.

In July we lost the Freedom of Panorama court case which we have been fighting since 2014 (all the way up to the Supreme Court). We had to cover the legal fees as well as pay damages to the Visual Copyright Society in Sweden for the images we had showcased on our website, offentligkonst.se, since it was launched in 2013. We had put aside money over the years in preparation for this but the sum was higher than we expected and as a result most of our savings were depleted. This meant we did not have the necessary safety margins for what came next.

Around the same time as we lost the court case, we received information that some of the major external grant giving organizations would postpone their calls to 2018. This lack of available funding opportunities was unexpected for us. We had a larger staff which, because of the delay in project grants, would not have projects to work on in late 2017 and early 2018. We also had higher overhead costs during the year. We realized in the beginning of October that we would need to reduce staff, cut costs and request an earlier payment of our FDC grant from WMF. WMF agreed on the earlier payment and after negotiations with the union we have reduced our staff size from 8.5 FTE to 5.25 FTE, until further funds can be obtained. This was a hard blow to the organization as these were excellent staff members. As a result of the staff reduction some of the planned activities for late 2017 also had to be canceled or postponed.

In November we got news that the cost for our office space would double in the coming year. We started looking for a new office space and were offered sponsored office space at the Internet Foundation in Sweden’s coworking space Goto10. This is the foundation which runs the Internet Museum where we had a Wikipedian in Residence earlier in the year. This change will cut our office costs to around 80 % in the first year (with the possibility of an extension for a second year if we do not secure any major grants).

Access[edit]

  Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (at end of Q2) End of year (projected or actual) Comments
Access A.1.1 Enrich the Wikimedia projects with 25 resources,[1]through the creation and distribution of materials and by providing support and performing batch uploads. 32 11 44 resources out of 25
We surpassed our goal which is mainly due to much of the work done in 2016 being finalized in 2017. Thirty of these are heritage datasets made available on Wikidata through the Connected Open Heritage project and a number of resources are from GLAMs. We also had a few sets of geodata that we could include.
A.1.2 150 identified[2] subject experts contribute to the Wikimedia projects with at least 1 productive edit each, through the dissemination of information, maintaining relationships or arranging thematic edit-a-thons. 209 74 181 experts out of 150
We surpassed our goal as we had a number of events with a large amount of expert participants from partner organizations that had prioritized working with us highly on their agenda. As previous years the experts were fairly evenly divided between GLAM and university staff. Worth noting is that one event organized by a grant giving body, where 37 invited experts participated, did not materialize as the internet connection failed.
A.1.3 Involve 15 courses in the Wikipedia Education Program,[3] through educating motivated teachers and providing expertise on the Wikipedia tools for education. 16 12 12 courses out of 15
We did not reach the goal we had set for number of courses, which to a large extent is due to the workload associated with the Wikimedia Diversity Conference in late 2017. However, the education program supported more new users and more schools/universities, and more articles were edited than the previous year. A course is included once they have finalized the work, which means that some of the courses that started in 2017 will end in 2018 and is not included here for that reason.
A.2.1 To increase the use of free licenses ensure that 15 organizations[4] clearly license[5] their material under free licenses, through workshops and support with information aimed at staff within the organizations. 6 2 7 new organizations out of 15
We did not reach our ambitious target in quantitative numbers, but we are very happy about the quality of the new material that has been released. We had six GLAMs (including UNESCO) that changed the license of their material but moreover the Swedish National Land Survey (Lantmäteriet) relased their geodata as CC0, something we have been working towards for years. We continued our efforts to convince Statistic Sweden to change their license to CC0, which would be of major importance for Wikidata. We also had discussions with GLAM organizations in a number of other countries and IGOs about future work with them to release information in the future, but these did not reach fruition during 2017.
A.2.2 Work actively to nurture and develop the relevant networks and contacts with people who can influence license choice of material in order to safeguard the topicality of the issue. This is achieved, in addition to regular activities, through active participation in at least 10 new events and at least 10 new direct contacts with content owners, organizations and politicians. N/A 17 new events out of 10

45 new direct contacts

28 new events out of 10

75 new direct contacts out of 10

Our definition of someone belonging to our network is when they have met a representative of the chapter and staff has some way of contacting them, they have received information about what we do as an organization and how they can reach us. We have reached a large number of decision makers during the year, much more than we believed would be possible. A large part of this was due to the two externally funded projects which allowed us to do more in this area: the Connected Open Heritage project where we could organize and participate at a number of events. As part of the Public Art – Open Data project we held a number of meetings with politicians. We also had a set of meetings as part of the project Advocacy 2016 due to the Freedom of Panorama (FoP) court case.

Our Access program focuses on improving the free content on, or available to, the Wikimedia projects both short and long term. This was our largest program, both in number of ongoing projects and initiatives, and in budget.

Our earlier work with getting GLAM and other organizations working with us have shown that both individual staff members and the organization as a whole have to go through a number of steps, and that the environment (context) which they work in has to be suitable. As stated in our application we see contributions from new organizations happening mainly in two ways:

  • People contribute to the Wikimedia projects within their institutional frameworks. This could e.g. be GLAM staff, researchers or students.
  • Resources created elsewhere are put under a free license and can later be included in our projects.

Through the projects in the Access program we worked to influence staff, decision makers and the environment (context) they work within.

Access gained short term[edit]

I.e. production, adoption of tools and methods.

Different organizations have reached different levels of maturity when it comes to how they view free knowledge and their perception of how they can contribute. Their maturity affects what we can achieve together in a particular timespan, and a large part of our work is focused on moving them forward to a more thought-through strategy. We focus on partners who have expertise and/or collections that we have identified as relevant for Wikimedia in general or for a particular project.

In 2017 we focused on three Wikimedia platforms: Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia. For nearly ten years we have invested time and effort in workshops where we train experts to contribute to these platforms and train and teach them about free licenses and other things related to the Wikimedia platforms and free knowledge. The output from these activities is improved articles and content, but a far more important outcome is the deeper knowledge and expertise which later will help when we organize projects to release material owned by the institutions. From our experience, the decision for an institution to release material often takes place years after we have given them a first introduction, however every now and then we experience a faster turnover.

Through a number of partnerships, we have managed to deliver unique material to the Wikimedia movement, spanning from images of monuments destroyed in Palmyra to structured data about lakes in Sweden. Through dedicated efforts we have carried out the preparations needed for institutions to start new partnerships, either working directly with us or with other Wikimedia affiliates, in the future. We strive to be considered a professional and generous partner.

We also work with the education sector to support educators who assign students to contribute to free knowledge as part of their course work. Here the outcome we are looking for is topic experts identifying low quality and missing content and engaging students to contribute. Students have support from research libraries and tutors which put them in favourable position to produce high quality content on often complex topics.

We see educator retention as a key in sustaining and growing in education, as the quality of the program benefit from the experience and skills they gain over time. We have started with more targeted efforts towards specific programs where we believe the students are more likely to work in organizations that we would like to partner with in the future, such as GLAM or university education.

Traditionally, content from GLAMs is processed and uploaded to the platforms. This year, we have made an extra effort to engage volunteers in making use of the content that has been added through the work in the Access program. To that end we have organized online contests as a way of encouraging volunteers to take a closer look at the material and find ways to use it in Wikipedia articles.

We have actively worked on finding new ways to work with the different Wikimedia platforms, such as Wikidata and MediaWiki, in order to be able to form new content partnerships in the future.

Story: Batch upload of data[edit]

Over the last 8 years we have worked with batch uploads of media files. This year, however, we have put in considerable efforts around batch data uploads. The foundation we have built will ensure that WMSE can help to deliver high quality and updated information for a large amount of Wikipedia articles and Wikidata items. It also helps prepare us for Structured data on Commons when batch uploading of images will be intertwined with batch uploading data.

We have mainly focused on different types of geographical data, as this has been identified as valuable by the Wikipedia editors. More specifically on built cultural heritage data, through Connected Open Heritage, on lakes in Sweden, through WFD data to Wikidata, and protected natural sites, as preparation for the Wiki Loves Earth photo contest. John Cummings, whose work at UNESCO we are financing, has meanwhile been working to release the troves of data held by UNESCO.

We have worked on documenting the different steps needed for a batch data upload and developed instructional materials. We have continued to train our new developers, written new code and identified ways for the community to support the work. To make use of the data and stimulate more organizations to release their data we have also developed ways to include the data in templates on Swedish Wikipedia as a proof of concept and supported the development of Monumental, a tool to visualize the data on Wikidata.

Through the Connected Open Heritage project we updated or created more than 330,000 items from 27 countries. This forced us to look at how the upload process could be streamlined for multiple datasets following a similar schema but where the actual data differs significantly. While there are more Wiki Loves Monuments datasets which can be migrated the framework we built makes this easy to do for anyone with the technical know-how.

One thing that take a lot of time and effort is the careful selection of what data in a dataset to include in the batch upload. We have continuously worked to engage volunteers to contribute with their expertise to clean and prepare the data. This helps ensure accuracy and avoid irritation and frustration from the communities.

We are planning new project proposals around batch upload of data for 2018.

Story: Online contests to engage volunteers in a prioritized area[edit]

To ensure that the images we have worked on uploading are put to use and gain visibility, we organized two online challenges in 2017: The UNESCO Challenge and the Connected Open Heritage Challenge. Furthermore we assisted the CIS-A2K in India to organize the Bhubaneswar Heritage Edit-a-thon in October.

We have organized a number of online challenges during the last five years and continue to improve on the concept and make the organization of them more efficient. The two challenges organized in 2017 have been very successful, with the UNESCO Challenge having the highest number of registered participants of all writing challenges organized (that we know of, possibly beaten by the CEE Spring). The UNESCO challenge had 96 participants writing a total of 6,917,069 bytes of text, equal to 1,729 A4 pages of text.

The UNESCO Challenge was followed by the Connected Open Heritage Challenge. This challenge focused on using the images uploaded as part of the Connected Open Heritage project. The 14 participants worked very hard to add 547 images to Wikipedia. These images are projected to reach around 173 million views per year. This incredibly high number of views is largely due to the many quality images depicting World Heritage Sites, often making them good candidates illustrating articles about countries. We used these numbers to highlight to our partners the enormous value of releasing content under a free license.

To learn more about what drove interest in the contest and to understand what was done well and what could be done better we organized a survey for the participants. The feedback was overall very positive but we also took away some useful lessons regarding the point system for future challenges.

We intend to keep online challenges as part of our toolbox in the future.

FACTBOX - PLATFORMS SUPPORTED

For the direct inclusion of material to the platforms we have worked in a number of ways:

Wikidata

We have developed capacity in 2016 that now is being utilized. We have worked on enriching Wikidata with data about:

  • cultural heritage, as part of the Connected Open Heritage and our GLAM projects;
  • lakes and water quality, as part of the WFD project;
  • natural sites, in preparation and as part of the Wiki Loves Earth initiative.
Wikimedia Commons

Through our technology pool and accreditation work we have enabled the community to contribute with their own media. As with data, the work done during 2016 has allowed us to heavily scale up our batch upload activities in 2017. We have uploaded image collections from:

and updated the file descriptions for some of our older uploads where new research data has come to light as well as improving tools for GLAMs to perform uploads by themselves.

Wikipedia

For Wikipedia we have worked with a number of actors to include more high quality information in the articles.

  • UNESCO, to freely license their information;
  • Academic programs;
  • Faculty, PhDs and GLAM experts.

Access gained long term[edit]

I.e. changing minds, policies and attitudes, improving our capacity.

Wikimedia Sverige is in this for the long run. We aim to change the way organizations and the society think about knowledge dissemination and production. Creating that kind of change in attitudes will allow for the full impact of free knowledge. To reach this goal partnerships are key. We need to work to change the attitude of organizations in society to engage them in free knowledge production.

The practical work outlined above is therefore only half of the story. It is the end result of an often long period of finding common ground with an organization. We are continuously working to convince more organizations to partner with us and through this themselves become champions for free knowledge in the end.

Top down[edit]

By convincing decision makers to adopt different forms of policies around openness we are laying the foundations for accessing new material in the future.

In the Swedish context, most organizations are rather non-hierarchical but individual staff members can nonetheless be restricted in their ability to act by limited funds or lack of supportive policy. Removing such barriers is therefore important to allow them to improve the amount of access to free knowledge. While decision makers are of course hard to reach, the strong Wikimedia brand gives us a real advantage compared to other organizations active in the free knowledge movement. It does however take a lot of preparations to develop argumentation, networks and supporting material.

A larger focus on free knowledge and access to information by politicians is core to our work. In 2017 we have focused a lot of energy on putting our cause on the political agenda. This can help change the context prospect organizations are working in. It is especially true with government agencies. Through some of our external grants we have worked to step up our national efforts this year. We continue to build on the material created over the years.

Sweden does not exist in a vacuum and especially new legislation on the EU level affect our work directly. Our ongoing involvement in the FKAGEU is therefore important to us and we continue to support the initiative.

An integrated part of this is to achieve visibility, and we continue to find synergies with the work done as part of the Use program.

Story: Spreading the gospel of open data[edit]

Wikidata is a unique possibility for us as a Wikimedia affiliate to influence data owners, as we are not only receivers of data, but can also present arguments as data owners ourselves. Thus, we can also present concrete examples of how Creative Commons Zero (CC0) has helped ensure usage of our data available through Wikidata.

In 2017, we worked hard through a number of different initiatives and meetings to convince decision makers that they should carefully choose their license and open up more of their public information. On a national tour we visited and discussed open data with decision makers in 20 municipalities and with Members of Parliament. We worked with the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions, and the Open Data network Sambruk. At the end we handed over a roadmap and policy proposals to the Swedish minister for public administration.

We have also discussed open data with Statistics Sweden (SCB), centered on a much needed update of their license. Currently they are using a homemade license and we have convinced them to update to a standardized license. We are making a case for using CC0. To that end we have created materials targeting Swedish authorities, which has also been internationalized and is being used as part of the Connected Open Heritage project.

Through the Connected Open Heritage project we worked on a global level to showcase what could be achieved when data is made available under an open license. We discussed with local Wikimedia affiliates and volunteers how to do it, we prepared instruction material on Wikidata to make it easier to understand, we created the required properties for including more data on Wikidata, we presented Wikidata and open data at many conferences and events and published an article in a peer-reviewed journal covering the value of open data and Wikidata.

The work to communicate the value of open data will continue and we will focus on creating examples and visualizations to ensure that the decision makers easily see and understand the value of opening up their data. This include both external tools such as Monumental but also good examples on how the data is being used on Wikipedia. We will also work on communicating the decisions taken by governmental agencies and make targeted efforts to some of the most important data owners in Sweden.

Story: Fighting for Freedom of Panorama[edit]

”Help us protect Freedom of Panorama” part of our Social media campaign.

Freedom of Panorama (FoP) is an important exception from copyright that allows us to showcase, illustrate and discuss the public space around us. Over the last years FoP has become a core focus for the chapter due to a number of circumstances.

In December 2013 the chapter received a financial demand from the Visual Copyright Society in Sweden (BUS) for our project Offentligkonst.se, a database project where we showed images from Wikimedia Commons of Sweden’s public works of art. WMSE investigated the claim with the help of an academic researcher in Swedish copyright and based on the conclusions decided to refuse the payment to BUS. BUS sued WMSE and 3 years followed of court proceedings (including a stint to the Supreme Court of Sweden). In July 2017 the court ruled against WMSE and ordered us to cover BUS’ court costs of around 81,000 USD (Wikimedia Foundation covered the costs of our lawyers).

This cost was a hard blow to our association’s financial stability. We decided to start a crowdfunding and information campaign asking for a change in the legislation. Through these efforts we received around 8,000 USD in donations that will be used for our lobbying efforts. However, we had not expected the ruling to come during the summer, and most of our staff and board was on leave which hampered our outreach. We still need to analyze this more in depth, but we have identified a number of things that we can improve on. One important conclusion is that much more preparatory work for the crowdfunding needed to have been carried out well in advance to counteract the unfortunate timing of the ruling. We believe this would have been worth it, even though such an approach would have needed us to design outreach material for different scenarios as we did not know what the ruling would be.

On the other hand we are very happy with what we achieved in terms of media coverage and political interest. We had 42 press or blog mentions about the outcome (including all major Swedish media outlets), with the media nearly unanimously condemning the ruling and pointing to a need for a change of legislation. Several local politicians and MPs of different political parties reach out to ask how they could help in changing the law. Two legal amendments have been proposed by parliamentarians from three parties in the Riksdag, the national parliament. We hope for a legal amendment in 2018.

FoP is also being discussed on the European level and the chapter has contributed, and will continue to contribute, to the efforts done by the FKAGEU group. The case puts the issues around limiting FoP in the spotlight and we hope to support our sister organizations in their efforts.

Bottom up[edit]

I.e. finding partners, forming partnerships, working in joint projects and delivering content.

For the chapter to work efficiently with other organizations we often find that early interaction with staff members of the organization is crucial to form internal support for the needed changes (choice of license, how they can share data etc.) that make a partnership possible later on. We approach potential partners at different events (either organized by us, or when participating at e.g. conferences), when planning externally funded projects and through social media and offline networks.

When meeting with staff members we need to be clear on what we have to offer, what we need and how we can work with them. The clearer our message is, the faster we can form a new partnership. We most often start with a small pilot project or a few workshops to lower the threshold and investment made by both parties.

After we start working together we strive to be accommodating and generous with our time and our resources to ensure a positive experience. In 2017 we have also started working on ensuring that we will be able to offer our partners informative reports to help them justify the partnership internally. We continue to refine the way we offered this additional reporting to our partners during the year.

Story: Capacity building[edit]

Wikimedia Sverige has focused significant time and effort on adding new resources to the Wikimedia platforms ever since the chapter was formed 10 years ago. Yet, in order to reach more partners and organize better and more efficient projects we have many things to be developed still. The need for increased capacity has become clearer as the interest in working with us has increased over the years.

In 2017 we worked to establish a number of new projects and initiatives and to consolidate what we had learnt during 2016. We saw a real need for improving the documentation when new staff and board members and volunteers joined our work with Access. We also continued our work on creating a number of resources that will help us convince different organizations to partner with us. This included a report to the library sector outlining how libraries and the Wikimedia movement can work strategically together (this was a comment on the National Library Strategy which is being developed) as well as a number of examples for IGOs, see #Story: Finding the ways to work with an intergovernmental organization below. We also initiated a resource for organizations to learn about how they can benefit from having a Wikipedian in Residence, we established the process for how to collect data and support educators by using the Programs & Events Dashboard and we initiated the documentation for it. Developing new and improved resources is something we hope will benefit the global Wikimedia movement as we continue to make these accessible through different channels.

We have also identified a need to have materials to continue the development of the partnerships. This include more specialized materials for long term partners (i.e. how they can work with Wikidata or organize their own edit-a-thons). We developed a standardized report format for GLAM partnerships to give them the information needed to be in-house champions of free knowledge.

However, for some types of partnerships we know too little to efficiently create materials and design projects and events to support the organizations in a good way. One idea that we tested during the year was to utilize Wikipedian in Residence (WiR) at different institutions. Now we are laying the foundation together with our first pilot WiRs. We intend to scale up the number of WiRs in the future – as we believe that they have the potential to change attitudes in organizations long term. Working closely with selected and centrally placed organizations within a certain domain will help establish the basic routines, materials, and general argumentation needed for having a WiR and why the organization should engage with the Wikimedia movement. Most importantly, it will establish the in-house knowledge needed to promote working with the Wikimedia movement within their domain. Our hope is that the WiR can function as a key to unlock entirely new types of collaborations within a few years. Based on the experiences from the WiRs in 2017 we started the creation of a resource for future WiRs.

Having a number of skilled people in Sweden who are interested in working with different organizations is a great resource to tap into if we have an increase in project grants and quickly need to increase our capacity.

Story: Finding the ways to work with an intergovernmental organization[edit]

Intergovernmental Organizations offer expertise, connections, specialist knowledge, social media reach and content that the Wikimedia movement can benefit from significantly. They occupy advisory and best practice roles which give them the ability to influence other organizations within their fields of expertise to promote and adopt open licensing and engage with the Wikimedia movement.

UNESCO is the lead agency for education within the United Nations and has a mandate to adopt and promote open licenses. Working with UNESCO has provided access to senior people in other UN agencies and at other Intergovernmental Organizations. We have presented to heads of UN publication departments, to senior staff at WIPO and took part in a panel on Open Licensing at the World Summit on the Information Society. UNESCO’s remit has also allowed us to promote Wiki Loves competitions through UNESCO social media and run Wiki Loves Earth Biosphere Reserves.

As one of our team members have been hosted at UNESCO HQ it has provided us with access to regular conferences at UNESCO HQ (e.g Mobile Learning Week) and allowed the organization of the 2017 European GLAMwiki Coordinators Meeting (report).

UNESCO hosts a great amount of knowledge, content and data which we are working to make available through Wikimedia. We have worked with the Education and Science sectors to create and improve 100s of Wikipedia articles using existing UNESCO publication text that receives nearly four million page views per month. We have worked together with UNESCO staff to have several section of the UNESCO website available under an open license World Heritage descriptions and are working towards making the entire UNESCO website available under CC BY-SA.

UNESCO has shared over 2,000 images on Wikimedia Commons that receive 10-14 million page views per month. Data added from UNESCO to Wikidata receives over 2 million page views per month through World Heritage articles. We have begun to do similar projects with other IGOs including working with the European Space Agency sharing their content on Wikipedia, setting up metrics to understand the reach of their content and creating the Industrial Property article using two open licensed WIPO publications.

The work done at UNESCO around both documentation and metrics will allow other UN agencies, and other organizations in general, to contribute to Wikimedia projects more easily. We have created a process for organising and documenting data imports into Wikidata and are continuing to create a process and guidance for adding open license text to Wikipedia including working with WMF to create a metrics tool for text. We have developed Wikiproject United Nations to allow any UN agency to share open license content on Wikimedia projects and produce a section in UNESCO’s monthly visibility report to provide information to IGOs on the benefits of sharing content with Wikimedia. This groundwork will allow us to expand our work with IGOs in the future.

Story: Building bridges to a new group of experts[edit]

2017 was when we started working with a relatively new group of experts, working in the intersection of GLAM and Education. The GLAM educators work at different GLAM institutions to engage teachers and students to learn from the resources offered and curated by the GLAM.

We had realized that GLAM educators were largely left out of the Wikimedia work carried out by GLAMs in Sweden in the last 10 years. The reason could be due to our partners having the idea that they wanted to “start out small” or because of organizational silos, or other decisions in the organization.

Initiated by the interest of a few selected champions of free knowledge from this group of experts, we started developing methods for how Wikipedia fits with the pedagogy offered by GLAMs. The externally funded project This is my area, starting in 2016, allowed us to experiment with a number of classes and develop missing open learning resources. We started supporting the first established education program at one of the major GLAMs in Sweden; the Wikipedia education program at the Nordic museum, which saw its first program conclude in March 2017 and the second one starting in October 2017. We compiled a case study of the first program to communicate the idea and method to other GLAM-educators.

The work with GLAM educators has gained a lot of attention and recognition for its pedagogical value and innovation. The pilot project “This is my area” recieved the Pedagogy award of the year, presented at the Spring meeting of museums in Sweden.

In partnership with the GLAM educators’ association in Sweden, we gave a two session training course customized specifically to their context. We intend to continue working with these educators and to scale these efforts in the future, hopefully with direct backing from the GLAMs themselves.

Story: Taking national experiences to the international setting[edit]

After 10 years of GLAM collaborations in Sweden we have learnt a lot. Projects such as Connected Open Heritage is an attempt at taking the lessons we have learnt to GLAMs across the world. The focus of the project is on collecting material about built cultural heritage sites under threat.

There are large costs associated with organizing an international project. However, with a budget of circa 250,000 USD the ambitious project is covering a range of different activities. This made it possible to inform experts in digital cultural heritage at important conferences and to organize activities and meetings in a number of countries to initiate the discussions about digitization, Freedom of Panorama and open data. We could also create missing material and visualization tools that works in an international setting.

We worked with UNESCO and funded part of the Wikipedian in Residence position there. We are happy to report that we became an official partner of the #Unite4Heritage campaign, with the visibility and recognition that this entails. We also worked closely with Wikimedia Italia around batch image uploads and the preparation of a photo exhibition. This cooperation has been a positive experience and we are applying for more funding to work together in the future.

Our intention was also to include more Wikimedia affiliates in a direct way, but we have only had limited success in this. Although many affiliates have been involved in data preparations, they have been less so in the GLAM outreach and we struggled to find a way of giving efficient support to smaller affiliates’ work with GLAMs. This has mainly been due to lack of funding for their work. Involving more affiliates was not an explicit goal of the project, but something we still hoped to be able to achieve.

But the Connected Open Heritage project was not the only activities which the chapter carried out to share our experiences. We also took part in Wikimedia events and activities around education, partnerships and diversity and our board chairman shared lessons at Wikimedia Conference about how to organize a board in an efficient and professional way (for our involvement in the work with the Movement strategy, see #Story: Strategic planning for the chapter and the movement).

Fail fest: Slow moving institutional partners[edit]

Here we describe problems we struggled with and what we learnt from them.

One of the things we experimented with during the Connected Open Heritage project was forming partnerships with local GLAM organizations in the countries we visited. We hoped to work with them to upload selected parts of their collections. This however turned out to be much harder than anticipated.

We experienced long deliberation times in Sweden in the early days of our GLAM work as well. But in reaching out to GLAMs in other countries we were still (overly) optimistic that we would be able to progress further during these meetings, since we brought with us the Swedish experience, the strong network and the large scale of the project.

We did see a strong interest in participating but the timeline was overly optimistic. Many of these GLAMs are much more hierarchical and slow moving than their Swedish equivalents and are at a much earlier stage in their work with digitization.

Outside of the Connected Open Heritage project we have experienced the same slow moving pace when contacting institutions (in Sweden and abroad) about freely licensing their data. Since having to think about copyright in relation to data is a fairly recent occurrence this mirrors some of the challenges we saw with GLAM partners years ago. From our experience it became clear that GLAMs, having some similar experiences before, found it easier to look at licensing their data than institutions in other sectors that had not interacted with movements such as ours before. Complicating the matter further was the question about how an institution could license something it didn’t consider copyrightable to start with and our request that they use the CC0 license, dropping the attribution requirement.

This experience from working with slow moving institutional partners confirms the need to work long term and the continued investment in new partnerships. We therefore see a great value in being able to continue working in the areas where we have now invested resources.

Fail fest: Technical limitations for monitoring and reporting[edit]

Here we describe problems we struggled with and what we learnt from them.

We have high ambitions with the work we carry out in our Access program in terms of making free content and data accessible through projects and partnerships. An issue we have dealt with is the technical limitations when it comes to monitoring the work and accurately present data and metrics, which we especially need to show the impact our partners have and that the results are indeed aligned with the value proposition we bring.

2017 marked the start of onboarding educators and other partners to use the Programs & Events dashboard to track and monitor activities across programs; Education, GLAM and Wikipedian in Residence. The tracking function offered by the dashboard finally provides educators, partners and organizers with vital data needed to visualize the impact of efforts in an accessible and comprehensible overview.

We acknowledge that there is great potential in this tool, although currently it comes with many limitations which prevent it from fully realising that potential. Educators are initially excited to see the functions of the dashboard and the improvement it is to the MediaWiki Education extension, however we have seen some educators return to that extension, or being forced to ask for more support – rendering themselves less independent than before. Similarly, GLAMs are eager to use the dashboard for their own campaigns, only to realize that the documentation is lacking and we become the bottleneck for the self-sustaining work that many GLAMs are capable of. Over the course of 2017, we saw the functionality of the Dashboard gradually improve. With the training modules and timeline function specifically catering to the academic context. The improvements have become assets when planning for future partnership and has ignited interest from data analysts and pedagogical research.

A common request from, and promise to, GLAMs and other organizations realising data and images for use on our platforms is that they can import any improvements back into their own systems. Examples include newly identified subjects on images, correction of faulty data and consolidating of duplicate entries. While theoretically possible actually extracting (or sometimes even detecting) this information has proved impossible for any but the most technically adept of the organizations. As a result the value of "open" is eroded in the eyes of these partners as they are often forced to rely on manual reporting of important changes from us, when we encounter it. With more technical development invested in tooling to examine changes to a set of pages it would be possible for the organizations to become more self-reliant and allow them to continuously reap this benefit of having shared the content on our platforms.

We have struggled to introduce technical tools supposed to support and scaffold important work, without discouraging participants from engaging in our projects. With more technical development invested in something like the dashboard, beyond supporting Education programs, we could showcase its features and track program activities whilst our partners and participants remain largely self-supported and kept up-to-date on the progress they are making and the impact they have.

Detailed project overview[edit]

Below all the projects belonging to the program will be briefly explained and the current status presented. Synergies between the projects will be described. A few selected stories has been presented more in depth as case studies above.

For all the projects, we will state whether they are small, medium or large. In this context, a small project is defined as one where the total budget is less than 100,000 SEK (about 12,500 USD); a medium sized project is defined as one where the total budget is between 100,000 SEK and 300,000 SEK (12,500 to about 37,500 USD); finally, a large project is defined as one where the total budget exceeds 300,000 SEK (about 37,500 USD).

Making LSH available 2016[edit]

What is the project: A batch upload project with a Swedish GLAM, LSH, which we have worked closely with over many years.

What has been done: This batch upload project together with the Swedish GLAM LSH started in 2016 and the focus in 2017 was to upload new higher resolution versions of some older images and to enrich another set of images with new metadata. This was successfully concluded in March 2017.

What's next: LSH is undergoing a merger with another museum which is occupying their available resources. There is still an interest in future projects but these are unlikely to start before the end of 2018. If so it would be an integrated part of our project GLAM 2018.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Project impact: Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata

Partners: LSH

Link to the project: LSH-tillgängliggörande 2016

Connected Open Heritage 2016[edit]

What is the project: This is a major global externally funded project aiming to add information about built cultural heritage from around the world to Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

What has been done: The project started in 2016 and was finalized during 2017. We organized a photo exhibition with Wikimedia Italia and UNESCO which was exhibited in 12 locations in 6 different countries. We performed 4 batch uploads of approximately 184,000 images from UNESCO, the Swedish National Heritage Board and the National Museums of World Culture (Sweden). We migrated 26 datasets from the Monuments database to Wikidata and imported another 4 brand new datasets totaling 337,000 updated items and 3.4GB of new data.

Progress was also made on the needed technical development for allowing WLM to run directly of this data and support was given to the development of Monumental which can be used to interact and enrich the data. We organized two online international competitions (UNESCO Challenge and Connected Open Heritage Challenge) (for detailed information about them, see #Story: Online contests to engage volunteers in a prioritized area). Presentations of the project were made at 7 events and resulted in one academic publication.

Further contacts were made with decision makers during travels in Kenya and Uganda to initiate discussions about digitization and dissemination of information through the Wikimedia platforms. We also created documentation about our best practices around using Phabricator, a major document covering how to organize batch uploads, and we produced a report about keeping Wikidata in sync with official data.

What's next: The photo exhibition lives on and will be on show at a few more places in 2018. We are leveraging the network we’ve built and the contacts we’ve made for another application to the Swedish Postcode foundation and are invited as project partners in e.g. the Fragile Heritage Hub, which hopefully will be funded with up to £20 million by GCRF. We also intend to provide limited support to further data migration efforts, if requested by volunteers.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Large

Project impact: Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia

Partners: UNESCO, Wikimedia Italia, Cultural Heritage without Borders

Link to the project: Kopplat Öppet Kulturarv 2016

Wikipedia in Education 2017[edit]

What is the project: This project supports educators to implement Wikipedia based assignments where students improve Wikipedia as part of their curricular activities.

What has been done: The Nordic museum concluded its first education program with five schools and started its second one with two schools. Furthermore, we supported eleven university courses, of which three are part of the PhD program which continue to grow.

We have built on our capacity to support partnerships in education by developing topic specific handouts, such as FAQs, manuals of style and assignment designs, and are systematically implementing the Programs & Events Dashboard as a tool and as a host of resources (see #Fail fest: Technical limitations for monitoring and reporting). We co-authored an op-ed about faculty engagement on Wikipedia for one of the major Swedish newspapers.

Investing in our network with education in Sweden continues to pay off in terms of requests for presentations,training and support, which we have given numerously. We have formalized two new strategic partnerships; one with Gothenburg University as one of the official partners on the first master’s program in Digital humanities in Sweden, and a second one with Stockholm university comprising training the the Center for the Advancement of University Teaching.

What's next: With Stockholm university we will give teacher training and form a pilot project combining data from student contributions with learning analytics to examine Open education practices and learning outcomes. We will standardize the programmatic support (including the P & E dashboard) so that it becomes accessible for more institutions to enroll and get customized support in a timely manner. We also plan to investigate options for running an online course in 2018 and inviting the wider open education movement in Sweden to a one day conference. We hope to continue working with the National Agency for Education to update teaching materials about the Wikimedia projects which they distribute to Swedish educators.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Medium

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: Nordic museum, Gothenburg University, Stockholm University

Link to the project:' Wikipedia i utbildning 2017

GLAM 2017[edit]

What is the project: This project maintains continuous interaction with GLAM partners and seeks out new collaborations. It also serves as an umbrella project for smaller projects funded by individual GLAMs.

What has been done: During the first half of 2017 much of the work that has previously been part of the GLAM project instead happened under the umbrella of the COH project. During the fall of 2018 we continued offering support and inspiration to several GLAM institutions, along with a couple of workshops with The Working Life Museums Cooperation Council and a two day workshop with the Swedish Performing Arts Agency. The GLAM 2017 project was also the umbrella under which five externally funded bach uploads were planned, coordinated and executed.

The Twitter bot @WMSEimages has tweeted out almost 2,000 sample images from the batch uploads to showcase the wide scope of content our GLAM partners contribute to Wikimedia Commons.

What's next: During 2018 the GLAM project will continue as an umbrella project offering support and coordination to both keep previous partners up to speed and to find, develop and execute new partnerships.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Medium

Project impact: Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata

Partners: The Working Life Museums Cooperation Council, Swedish Performing Arts Agency, Nordic Museum, Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology, National Museum of Fine Arts and Swedish National Maritime Museums

Link to the project: GLAM 2017

Public Art – Open Data 2016[edit]

What is the project: This project supported municipal decision makers across Sweden to work with open data.

What has been done: From January to April 2017, we met politicians and policy makers from 20 municipalities to try to get them to increase and speed up their work with open data. From the experiences and challenges the municipalities have met, we compiled material that could help them with their work in the municipalities. We cooperated with SKL, the Swedish federation of municipalities and county councils, and the Open Data network Sambruk. We also established contacts with Members of Parliament and other high rank politicians, in order to propose relevant changes on the national level. As last part of the project, we handed over a roadmap and policy proposals to the Swedish minister for public administration. As the fall developed our efforts to continue this work was put on hold. Our work with the Public Art database offentligkonst.se and freedom of panorama has moved on to the policy making part of our projects.

What's next: We are currently focusing our Public Art – Open Data work on the policy making part. We are still keeping in touch with partners and open data networks, but no active work is going on. We are actively looking for external funding opportunities for this type of work.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Medium

Project impact: Wikidata

Partners: SKL, Sambruk, several municipalities

Link to the project: Offentligkonst.se 2016

This is My Area 2016[edit]

What is the project: This is a local cultural history project with six schools in Stockholm contributing to Wikipedia and Wikimini with support from local GLAMs.

What has been done: The project started in 2016 and during the final year of running the focus was on finalising the portal on Swedish Wikiversity and to communicate the project. A main video was released to showcase the concept, and a series of filmed interviews with key actors explaining the pedagogical value was released, such as a professor in history, a media literacy specialist and the head of documentation at Stockholm city museum. In order to reach educators, we presented at three international education conferences and several national conferences, one with an audience of 300. The project was recognized with the pedagogy award of the year. Find more in #Story: Building bridges to a new group of experts.

What's next: This externally funded project was finalized in 2017. The resources will live on as part of the education program of one of our partners and we will use outreach materials and experiences with educators and GLAM-educators.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Medium

Project impact: Wikiversity, Wikipedia

Partners: Stockholmskällan (Stockholm Digital archives for schools) and the Swedish National Heritage Board

Link to the project: Välkommen till min plats 2016

WFD data to Wikidata 2016[edit]

What is the project: A project focusing on finding ways in which structured data about lakes and rivers in the EU can be included on Wikidata, including uploading a first batch of data.

What has been done: Started in 2016 this project was concluded in June 2017. The practical work included mapping the Water Framework Directive (WFD) data structure to Wikidata, proposing six new identified properties which were missing. We also imported water data for 6,800 Swedish lakes as well as data on Finnish and Swedish river basin districts. The project also included explaining the role that Wikidata and Wikimedia can have in making EU data in general and environmental data in particular more accessible to the public. In 2016 we had several international meetings with WFD data stakeholders and as a result of this we in 2017 worked on making CC0 the default license for publicly reported data. The project was summarized in a final report.

What's next: While the project has concluded the discussions on CC0 are still ongoing. We are also looking into ways to make the imported data more readily accessible to readers on Swedish Wikipedia.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Project impact: Wikidata

Partners: Länsstyrelsen i Kalmar län, European Environmental Agency

Link to the project: WFD-data till Wikidata 2016

GLAM Educators 2017[edit]

What is the project: This outreach project caters to educators in GLAM institutions.

What has been done: We gave Wikipedia training to GLAM-educators in partnership with the Association of pedagogy at Swedish museums. We were also part of panel discussions and gave presentations at the main Swedish GLAM-event to communicate the benefits of working with Wikipedia in education at GLAM institutions. We also developed a case study of the Wikipedia education program at the Nordic museum to communicate to various stakeholders, which we shared at training events and outreach events with this group of experts.

What's next: We will continue our partnership in 2018 and we are looking into possible funding opportunities to scale the initiative to other GLAM institutions across the country.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: Association of pedagogy at Swedish museums

Link to the project: GLAM-pedagoger2017

Advocacy 2017[edit]

What is the project: Our political activities are compiled in this project to keep them separate from FDC funded projects. Funded by donations and membership fees.

What has been done: Our three main focus areas for advocacy during 2017 have been Freedom of Panorama, copyright and open data. Through FKAGEU we have been a vocal and constructive part of the copyright legislation reform in the European Union. In April, we participated in a meeting for coordination of EU Policies in Brussels along with participants from a dozen of other member countries.

The other focus has been on an open data project, see its own project overview. We produced a roadmap and a policy paper which was handed over to the Minister of public administration. This was also a core part of preparations for the political week of Almedalen.

During the later part of the year we switched our focus to Freedom of Panorama as the court case was finalized. See #Story: Fighting for Freedom of Panorama.

What's next: As we reached an agreement for the last payments to BUS in late 2017 we will be able to increase our advocacy work around freedom of panorama. This is initially mainly focused on influencing politicians and preparing materials. If the current legislative proposals are not supported we will work to find partners with whom we can work towards a change in legislation. We also intend to support the FKAGEU work, as soon as we have secured funding for the year.

We will investigate funding opportunities for a new project around open data advocacy.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Medium

Project impact: Wikimedia Commons

Partners: FKAGEU

Link to the project: Påverkansarbete 2017

Historical Maps 2017[edit]

What is the project: A planned project to find ways to add structured information about historical place names on Wikidata.

What has been done: A grant application was sent in to a potential funder, but the project did not get financed.

What's next: We will look into other versions of the project for next financing round.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Project impact: Wikidata

Partners: Wikimedia Finland

Link to the project: Historiska kartor 2017

Sounds of Changes 2017[edit]

What is the project: Sounds of Changes is a cooperation between several European GLAMs aiming to record and collect soundscapes of various kind. This project was previously called Work With Sounds.

What has been done: Our part in the project is to help the project use Wikimedia Commons as a platform for sound files and to help the GLAMs with workshops and public activities to make sure sound files are used to illustrate articles.

What's next: Further planning of activities including workshops on sound recordings of words being pronounced (which might contribute to the Wikispeech project) and an online contest.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Project impact: Wikimedia Commons

Partners: Flygvapenmuseum, ArbetSam

Link to the project: Work With Sounds 2017

Wikipedian in Residence 2017[edit]

What is the project: The project is focused on laying the foundation for WiR projects in Swedish contexts.

What has been done: We started a portal to gather resources and describe the WiR concept and process, drawing from the experiences of other chapters. We have also developed a report to highlight the key elements to making WiRs successful with Swedish organizations.

In this first year we organized four types of WiRs: (1) Intergovernmental organizations (IGO), represented by UNESCO; (2) medical organizations, represented by SBU; (3) GLAMs focusing on preparatory work before release of new archival material, represented by Musikverket; and (4) GLAM with focus on community engagement, with Internetmuseum.

What's next: We hope to organize at least 3 WiRs in 2018. As we gain experience we can finetune the program, such as how to identify suitable candidates to work as WiRs; prepare standardized material and establish processes and methods to be able to scale.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Medium

Project impact: Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons

Partners: UNESCO, SBU, Musikverket, Internetmuseum

Link to the project: Wikipedian in Residence 2017

Use[edit]

  Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (at end of Q2) End of year (projected or actual) Comments
Use U.1.1 To inform the public about Wikimedia projects and free knowledge, good media relations are central. This is achieved through active work with press releases, op-eds, commentaries, newsletter and presence on social media. During the year, a set of well defined metrics for media activities will be developed and the measured media presence will increase by 10 %. N/A - Not possible to measure due to lack of defined metrics, but expected to have been increased 10 % across the communication platforms we use
The goal with our communication is to raise awareness and to get more people involved in our projects and to use the Wikimedia platforms. Due to the need for crisis communication after the court case around FoP we did not manage to finalize the metrics. However, as we hired a communication coordinator during Q3 and Q4 we were much more active with communication on all our communication platforms and we expect that we reached the goal, even though we currently cannot compare it (when we have decided on the metrics we can back-track the data).
U.1.2 To increase awareness of the usage and trust, clearer measurement methods for how the Wikimedia projects are used, in general and by specific user groups, will be developed during the year. N/A No work was done. No measurement was finalized.
We were unable to work on this due to the FoP case and the restructuring of the organization at the end of the year.
U.2.1 To decrease the number of bugs in the software and increase clarity all identified and verified bugs shall be reported on Phabricator within one week of being encountered and critical system messages will be translated.[6] The result is monitored annually. 100% (14 new bugs and 3 translation messages) 100% (16 new bugs and 0 translation messages) 100% (20 new bugs and 0 translation messages)
We have reported all the bugs that we have encountered in the MediaWiki software. We have not included bugs that we have reported in external Wikimedia related tools.
U.2.2 To make content available for more people the Wikispeech extension shall be activated as a beta function on three language versions of Wikipedia[7] before the end of the year and carry out an investigation into the future development through a pilot study. Prototype ready[8] A basic prototype was ready. New functions were added to the prototype.
A prototype has been finalized for all three languages, but it has not yet been activated as a beta function as we are waiting for code and security review by the Wikimedia Foundation.

The focus of the program is to make the platforms and activities known, appreciated and trusted. It also includes our work to make the platforms easy to use and both our platforms and our activities accessible to everyone.

Making the platforms and activities known and appreciated[edit]

Sassa Persson at the Sundsvall Public Library has positive views on the collaborative contribution to qualitative knowledge from her work with Wikipedia.

Our focus is on spreading information about the Wikimedia platforms and the role they fill (in a neutral way) and explaining why we are focusing on free knowledge and the different types of values which this creates. We believe that this communication work will, amongst other things, increase participation at our events, help us find more partners, increase funding opportunities and prevent misunderstandings about our work and the community driven Wikimedia platforms. To increase our capabilities we focus on both short term communication efforts and long term planning, strategizing and infrastructure creation needed to effectively communicate.

Short term we have worked to increase our communication through our different communication tools, such as social media, press releases, op-eds, blog posts etc. At the end of Q2 we hired a new communication coordinator, Gitta Wilén, who worked for three months on developing our network of journalists, our crisis communication and our social media presence (with a focus on highlighting the work done by our volunteers).

Story: Developing an international photo exhibition[edit]

To make the general public aware of the work done by the Wikimedia movement and the resources available on the platforms we organized an international photo exhibition. This allowed us to reach a new audience and was a new way to approach partners and sponsors. Being involved in more “traditional” cultural projects, such as a physical exhibition, also gave us credibility in some groups unused to working with online based initiatives.

The photo exhibition "Journeys through our Fragile Heritage" has mainly been developed in early 2017. The exhibition showcases cultural heritage in danger using images from Wikimedia Commons together with information about the heritage sites and the value of digital preservation and how Wikimedia is involved in this.

The exhibition was organized by Wikimedia Sverige, UNESCO and Wikimedia Italia. It started as a rather limited part of the Connected Open Heritage project, but significant efforts were made as it grew in importance at UNESCO – with a number of different departments getting involved and making their opinions heard. As a direct result of this work Wikimedia Sverige joined the #Unite4Heritage campaign as an official partner and the exhibition was featured at the UNESCO headquarter in Paris, at the United Nations Office in Geneva, at four locations in Sweden, in the renowned Etruscan museum in Rome, at Wikimania in Montreal and at 4 more locations.

We look forward to building on this experience, analysing the outcome of the initiative, and possibly develop new photo exhibitions in the future.

Making usage easy and accessible to everyone[edit]

Through our efforts we hope to make the platforms easier to use for our readers. We focus both on our in-house development and on informing other developer teams about issues that we encounter during workshops and other events that we organize.

Story: Developing new technical capabilities to include new audiences[edit]

For 16 years the Wikimedia movement has gathered an impressive amount of knowledge that is of great value to hundreds of millions of people. However, access to this material is greatly limited if you are not a strong reader. This fits poorly with the vision of delivering free knowledge to everybody. In 2015 Wikimedia Sverige started investigating what we could do to remedy this issue and bring all this information to people that for various reasons cannot, or have limited abilities to, share in free knowledge the way we offer it on our projects.

We decided that the best thing we could do to change this was to develop a text-to-speech solution. We had good financial opportunities and Sweden is at the forefront of the relevant technical development, with a pool of experts to hire from. Hence, we initiated the work on Wikispeech.

The project aims to create an open source text-to-speech solution. It is a server based solution, which means it can be used without having to install any software locally (something that is not possible on many devices used to access the Internet). All components are open source and all data and documentation available under a free license so that it can also be included on other platforms. The Wikispeech extension is built in a way that makes it possible to add new components and more languages over time. It will become increasingly better through crowdsourcing as anyone interested can help to make the text-to-speech work better by e.g. improving the lexicon with new words.

During 2017 we have launched a prototype player with most of the basic functionality in place. Next we are working to have the code go through code and security review.

We are also discussing with the funders, the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS) about a continuation of the project where we focus on collecting free speech data. This is in line with the idea presented in the Movement strategy as Wikimedia being a service for free knowledge.

Story: Understanding Wikimedia’s role online in the age of the orange man[edit]

Over the last few years a lot of attention has been towards the changing nature of internet and social media: how some social media platforms are used by extremist groupings in order to change the view of truth and knowledge and how falsified information is spread online. Wikipedia specifically, and the Wikimedia projects generally, have shown that this does not have to be the case throughout the internet, and that Wikimedia can play a crucial role in fighting fact resistance online.

We thought it important not only to manifest this position passively and reactively, but also (pro)actively. In May, we organized one event and co-organized another focused explicitly on source criticism, and Wikipedia’s and the Wikimedia movement’s role in maintaining and enforcing reliability and objective knowledge online. Wikipedia-dagen 2017, ‘The Wikipedia Day 2017’, focused on fact-checking, reliability and fake news. Several prominent figures in the domain participated with specific insights on how to enforce reliability on digital platforms. For the first time, Wikimedian of the year was awarded by the WMSE board to one active user whose contribution has had significant impact. We also co-organized Källkritikens dag, “The day of source criticism”, along with the fact-checking section of the Swedish newspaper Metro, as another way of manifesting our commitment to source criticism, fact checking, knowledge and truth.

These two events played a part in raising awareness of Wikimedia projects and showing that they are trustworthy platforms serving the public. The events were an opportunity to educate the public on critical thinking, reliable sources and the use of citations. Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects are used more and more by students, teachers, faculty, journalists, etc., which lends us a responsibility to educate, but also to take part in the wider discussion on reliability and source criticism on the internet. In fact, informing how to evaluate the quality and reliability of a Wikipedia article is an important component that we have included in presentations and trainings for years.

In the late part of 2017 we started developing an application for a pilot project focusing on identifying what will be important for Wikipedia to have in place when major sites such as Facebook (and in 2018 Youtube) start linking to Wikipedia from controversial topics discussed on their sites.

Fail fest: Finding ways to work with WMF[edit]

Here we describe problems we struggled with and what we learnt from them.

Wikimedia affiliates have traditionally not actively invested resources in MediaWiki development. Instead, this work has been done by either volunteers or the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland being the major exception.

When we decided that we wanted to start development on Wikispeech we realized that this would entail a steep learning curve for our developers and took steps to prepare for this. However, we were not prepared for the governance issues concerning final inclusion of the extension on MediaWiki.

When we initiated the project we were in contact with a number of staff members at the Foundation who were supportive of the idea and stated a willingness to help. As a result we deemed it possible to take the extension to Beta status. However, after the major restructuring and loss of staff members at the Foundation things became uncertain. As we had not ensured to have this clearly specified in writing and formally agreed upon, we found it very difficult to find staff members willing to set aside time to work with us on code and security review.

Furthermore, we found it hard to ensure that Wikispeech was included in any of the team's yearly planning as we lacked knowledge of WMF's internal decision making structures and had a limited set of contacts to use. For us this was a major issue as not delivering on the project goal has hampered our chances of finding further external funding to continue the development. We have had a few meetings scheduled during Wikimania and the Wikimedia Conferences with WMF developers who have stated a willingness to help us. We have discussed the issue with WMDE’s developers as well. In the end we received a brief initial feedback in December 2017, giving us only a couple of weeks to respond to the feedback. We intend to use some FDC funding in 2018 to cover the cost of solving the issues identified in December.

This lead to a number of suggestions:

  • We urge Wikimedia Foundation to develop a formalized procedure for requesting, and resources for conducting, code and security review of new MediaWiki extensions in the future. Initially for Wikimedia affiliates, but also in the long run for other organizations that might have an interest in contributing. We believe this is an important step to fulfil the strategy of the Wikimedia movement becoming a service for free knowledge (partners within and outside of the movement should be able to effectively plan and support the service). We offer our support in developing such material.
  • For our coming development projects we will ensure that we have a formal written agreement in place before starting the project. If this is not possible, this must be clearly communicated to the funders and the project plan adjusted accordingly.
  • Participation in developer events where we can present and discuss our work is very important.

Detailed project overview[edit]

For all the projects, we will state whether they are small, medium or large. In this context, a small project is defined as one where the total budget is less than 100,000 SEK (about 12,500 USD); a medium sized project is defined as one where the total budget is between 100,000 SEK and 300,000 SEK (12,500 to about 37,500 USD); finally, a large project is defined as one where the total budget exceeds 300,000 SEK (about 37,500 USD).

Trust Making 2017[edit]

What is the project: The focus of this project is to develop methods on how to survey the trust of Wikimedia.

What has been done: This project was postponed due to the effects and work surrounding the lost court case around Freedom of Panorama for works of art.

What's next: We will define the focus and methods of our surveys, identify earlier surveys relevant for our purpose, find partners at universities and compile surveys.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Project impact: Wikimedia movement

Partners: -

Link to the project: Förtroende 2017

Visibility Making 2017[edit]

What is the project: In this project we develop long term communication activities in a number of channels to increase visibility for our organization and Wikimedia in general.

What has been done: We organized a prototype for a style guide, based on the Wikimedia brand and other chapters’ guides.

In April, adjacent to the annual meeting, we organized the first “Wikipedia Day”. The event was open to the public and offered panels and talks on the topic of fake news and reliability. Several prominent Swedish personalities participated and the founder of the Dutch crowdfunded fact checking platform De Correspondent. We also launched the first “Wikimedia-priset” (Wikimedian of the year). The report from organizing “Wikipedia Day” has given us a base for how to develop the event in coming years.

The Swedish fact-checking platform Viralgranskaren invited us to participate in the national event “Källkritikens dag” (The day of source criticism) during which we demonstrated to a wide audience how sources are cited and reviewed on Wikipedia. The event got national media coverage.

Later in 2017, we were honored to be recognized with two awards, the Best Civil Society Award from Open Knowledge Sweden and the Ann-Marie Lund’s Encyclopedia Award, which boosted our visibility.

We have increased the number of followers on Facebook to 2,102 (an increase of 24 %) and to 2,269 on Twitter (a 22 % increase). We published 17 press releases using Mynewsdesk. We started a long term social media campaign with quotes and texts showcasing the important and diverse work carried out by our volunteer community. The graphics we designed have been appreciated and we were happy to see them picked up by the Wikimedia Conference team.

What's next: Next we will develop our communication strategy and plan, finalize the style guide and develop a new website (as we did not have time to initiate the work in 2017). All this is part of a larger goal to get more visibility and influence the way in which we are visible. We will take steps to develop our methods for measuring our visibility, which is crucial since we want to capture progress and understand how to best adjust our activities to improve the reach of our message.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Medium

Project impact: Wikimedia Sverige

Partners: -

Link to the project: Synlighet 2017

Wikispeech[edit]

What is the project: This project aims to develop a prototype of a speech synthesis solution for the Wikimedia projects. The main features is that it should be server based (so as not to demand to much of the readers device), modular (so that new languages can be added using existing open source solutions) and it should allow readers to improve the pronunciation.

What has been done: During the spring, this work has continued. Our developers took part of the Wikimedia Developer Summit in San Francisco to discuss annotations to the synthesis. The functions have been further developed in order to be tested by users and to get feedback. A beta example has been developed, and contacts with organizations for disabled people have been taken, to gather their initial feedback.

What's next: The development of the player will be finalized and sent for code and security review for later release as Beta for Swedish, English and possibly Arabic. The editor interface for Wikispeech will be developed. We will participate at Wikimania, Interspeech and organize more workshops with organizations for disabled people.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Large

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: WMF, STTS, KTH

Link to the project: Wikispeech 2016

Bug Reporting and Translation 2017[edit]

What is the project: The main purpose of this project is to decrease the number of errors in the software used on the Wikimedia projects by reporting bugs and correcting erroneous translations in the software.

What has been done: To ensure high quality bug reports an internal workshop, with all of our staff, was held to investigate how bugs or other pain points discovered during events can be efficiently reported. A total of 20 bugs were reported by six of the employees, and two of these bugs have been patched by our own staff. Due to time constraints the planned public events (below) were postponed until 2018.

What's next: The reporting of bugs will continue. In 2018, we will organize a “translation sprint”. We are also investigating the possibility of organizing a bug-a-thon where the participants all try out a new functionality with the intention of discovering and describing bugs.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Project impact: Mediawiki

Partners: Wikimedia community

Link to the project: Buggrapportering och översättning 2017

Wikispeech 2017[edit]

What is the project: A planned sequel to the Wikispeech project.

What has been done: Work around the application for a continuation of the Wikispeech project has been initiated. The project start has been postponed to 2018 as our Wikispeech 2016 project was prolonged.

What's next: We will finalize the new project application to the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS) in 2018 which, if supported, will last until 2020.

Size of project (small/medium/large): N/A

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: WMF, STTS, KTH

Link to the project: Wikispeech 2018

Community[edit]

  Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (at end of Q2) End of year (projected or actual) Comments
Community C.1.1 To make work easier, support will be given 365 times to at least 100 Wikimedians (or others who advocate for free knowledge) with expertise, financial or other resources.[9] 265 times to 101 Wikimedians 69 times

35 Wikimedians

114 times out of 365

47 Wikimedians out of 100

We did not reach the goals of the year. However, we have instead been able to offer support to the volunteer community as part of our other projects, such as the Wikimedia Diversity Conference, which is not included in this metric. Also, unlike 2016 we did not have community members using our office as frequently. We have also intentionally set the bar high for this metric as we always want to strive to do more for our communities.
C.1.2 To strengthen the community the chapter will support at least 50 recurring meet-ups[10] for Wikimedians 134 63 113 meet-ups out of 50
We have supported a large number of meet-ups. Especially the group in Gothenburg has been very active.
C.1.3 To facilitate the use of new technical solutions on Wikipedia, a project shall be carried out around implementation, based on the Community's needs and desires. N/A No technical solution was implemented No technical solution was implemented
The survey was carried out and work started on implementing one of the wished for features. However, it was not finished during the year as we had to focus on batch upload projects to increase the funds available for the association.
C.2.1 To increase participation from Wikimedia's underrepresented groups[11], targeted initiatives organized by the association shall result in one productive edit from 365 unique users belonging to one or more of those groups. 403 197 382 unique users out of 365
We surpassed our target. The number presented here is the lower limit of users reached as difficulties in determining the eligibility of a user means the actual value likely is higher.
C.2.2 To lower the threshold for new users, 50 users shall be supported on the Teahouse (Fikarummet) at the Swedish Wikipedia. We will provide support for one additional language version of Wikipedia to activate the Teahouse. N/A 18

0 additional languages

21 supported users out of 50

0 additional languages out of 1

Fikarummet was closed for a large part of the year due to community discussions about the structure and functionalities. We did not have time to finalize the integration of our new code in the Teahouse code base, and hence we decided not to promote Fikarummet to other language versions. For more information, see #Fail fest: Fikarummet.

Supporting existing community[edit]

We work to support our wider community in a number of ways, which is possible thanks to our staff members who possess a wide variation of skill sets and the infrastructure which we have built up in the last few years.

This year we have focused on creating meeting spaces, cover costs associated with with the volunteer projects, and helped facilitate discussions. For the first time we have also been working to provide technical support to create tools for the most active volunteers.

Expanding the community[edit]

To grow the community on Wikimedia platforms we are organizing a number of activities aimed at inciting the interest of groups of people who have yet to engage on our platforms, or around free knowledge in general.

We work to raise awareness of Wikimedia projects in order for new participants to engage. When new participants start to contribute we make sure to lower barriers and create an inclusive environment by providing support in different forms.

Our collaborations with different organizations have been a cornerstone in achieving success in community growth. By involving the communities of the partners in our projects, some of their community members have joined the Wikimedia community in some capacity.

Story: Collaborating with the international community to increase diversity[edit]

A number of initiatives in Sweden and abroad have increased the focus on diversity in Wikimedia projects and communities, either in content or participation, or in both.

Healthy inclusive communities was the highest ranking theme in cycle 2 of the Movement strategy process, which has highlighted the importance of working for diversity in Wikimedia, and that challenges are similar across countries and communities.

To be able to learn from each other and find ways forward together, we organized the Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2017 (WikiDivCon) in Stockholm in November with 80 participants from 43 countries. We worked closely with WMDE’s conference team, the movement strategy team, Wikimedia Norway and WMF to prepare for the conference. Two main committees (Program and Scholarship) and a group of conference volunteers made the conference possible.

Strategic discussions focused specifically on the equity component of the strategic direction and was summarized for diversity conversation to be shared beyond the conference. For capacity building, we were able to share about inclusive technologies such as Wikispeech.

The long term effect of organizing this conference, we feel, is the supportive international network of diversity advocates that grow stronger. The network of dedicated Wikimedians becomes a platform for continued outreach and collaborations across affiliates and groups. We have seen this in action during the preparations with the gender gap campaign with Swedish embassies around the world at the start of 2018.

Our successful cooperation with Wikimedia Norway in preparing WikiDivCon increased our interest to do more events together around diversity. Hence, we initiated a joint application with Wikimedia Norway and Wikimedia Finland around a wiki camp to train volunteers to become diversity leaders within their communities.

Our work with successfully organizing the Wikimedia Diversity Conference encouraged us to submit our application to host Wikimania in 2019.

Story: Enabling self sustaining local events[edit]

We try different ways of making our limited resources have maximum impact. Exploring how to scale programs and grow sustainable projects is therefore a major focus in developing our methods, reach and impact. In 2017, we have seen opportunities for enabling self sustaining local events, with capacity to engage new groups of contributors without relying on on-site facilitation from WMSE staff.

Maria Johansson took part in the 1lib1ref campaign and explains why she and her library contributed in the 1lib1ref campaign.

The opportunities come from tapping into the allure of global movement campaigns such as 1lib1ref and Arts+Feminism, and leveraging international connections for the local contexts. 13 libraries organized local events as part of 1lib1ref and most of them and other organizations hosted Arts+Feminism, several of them outside of the main cities, for the first time. With the right resources already at hand, our role was to lead by guiding participants to prepare in the best way possible.

We co-organized a multilingual gender gap edit-a-thon hosted by the Swedish Embassy in New Delhi in March. The Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs saw the benefits and encouraged more of their embassies to repeat the event with local Wikimedia affiliates. The Swedish embassies in Pretoria and Washington DC followed with events in partnership with Wikimedia South Africa and Wikimedia DC. In December, we met with the Department of Foreign Affairs and laid the foundations for a global gender gap campaign in 2018, supported by all Swedish embassies.This is another example of where we support by providing infrastructure so that local events can sustain themselves.

We are discovering how international partnerships and collaborations within our movement have effect on local activities and we can see that we are improving on how to best invest our resources to support local leaders to step forward and new groups are engaged in Wikimedia projects.

Fail fest: Fikarummet[edit]

Here we describe problems we struggled with and what we learnt from them.

When we were exploring successful international initiatives to improve diversity in Wikimedia we came across the Teahouse on English Wikipedia. The initial reports were encouraging and we thought it was worth trying on the Swedish language version of Wikipedia.

In 2013, the first discussions were initiated and the basic structure for the Teahouse was created on Swedish Wikipedia, named Fikarummet. The idea was that the structure would be discussed by community members and quirks would be solved as needed. However, not many active editors commented on the plan and we interpreted this as a quiet support (a common decision making process on Swedish Wikipedia).

Due to technical obstacles the pages lay dormant for a couple of years but in late 2016 we resolved these and decided to create the missing bot infrastructure so as to be able to activate the project. We informed the community about the plan and started developing the bot. The technical development took much longer than expected as many parts of the bot developed for the Teahouse on enwp needed to be rebuilt to work on other language versions. Rather than just doing a quick adaption for Swedish Wikipedia we recognized the value, for the wider movement, in generalizing the bot to run on any language version. However, when launching the bot and reopening the Fikarummet, it took only a few weeks before some influential editors started protesting heavily. The initial concerns were about the settings of the bot, but as things evolved more criticism focused on the structure of the pages and most importantly on the feeling of not having been sufficiently consulted. A place such as the Teahouse had been requested at a number of occasions by potential new users. We are aware that this group of users are all unheard voices on Wikipedia and as such are not part of the decision making processes.

From this we draw a number of conclusions for future initiatives:

  • If an initiative lasts over a long timespan, new consensus (with proper discussions taking place) must be found before taking the initiative further, as the old (or unclear) consensus might no longer be valid as the community has evolved.
  • We need to find more ways and methods of involving the community in the discussions and have clear stages of community consultations, to make clear when to react and interact. In person meetings, where quick feedback can be given and initial reactions are easier to read, can be an option. Another option would be to find a volunteer in the community willing to act as an ambassador for the project.
  • When the bot was finally launched, the project was at its very end, which meant that we had very limited possibilities to follow up on comments. We need to launch earlier in the project so that there are still enough resources to do follow-ups. In the long term we need to either include maintenance of the tools in our future budgets or find a volunteer willing to adopt it.

Detailed project overview[edit]

For all the projects, we will state whether they are small, medium or large. In this context, a small project is defined as one where the total budget is less than 100,000 SEK (about 12,500 USD); a medium sized project is defined as one where the total budget is between 100,000 SEK and 300,000 SEK (12,500 to about 37,500 USD); finally, a large project is defined as one where the total budget exceeds 300,000 SEK (about 37,500 USD).

Community Support 2017[edit]

What is the project: The project is directed directly towards support for the Swedish Wikimedia community.

What has been done: We have supported the community with loaning technical equipment from our technology pool, with grants to cover costs of projects, with money for purchase of reference literature, etc. We have also rebuilt the template for showing that something is a result of the technology pool, to include more of the support given. We have given support to edit-a-thons and regular activities in Gothenburg, Stockholm, Falun, Uppsala and Visby.

What's next: The community support will continue as is during 2018, with increased focus on bringing in new community members through more communication about the possibility of using equipment from the technology pool, help with accreditation and travel grants.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Medium

Project impact: Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons

Partners: Wikimedia community

Link to the project: Stöd till gemenskapen 2017

Equality on Wikipedia 2015[edit]

What is the project: This was an externally funded project for a gender equal Wikipedia.

What has been done: This project was actively running to the end of February 2017, and initiated in 2015. In the two months we continued to work for an inclusive community welcoming of new groups of contributors. We took part in 1lib1ref for the first time and we did preparations for Art+Feminism, and other gender gap focused edit-a-thons. We also worked on the technical development of the host bot for the Swedish version of the Teahouse.

Our experience from working with diversity in the past four years culminated in the decision to apply for a conference grant to organize Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2017. We initiated that process as the final steps of this project.

What's next: The project has been finalized and we organized Wikimedia Diversity Conference with a Conference Grant and the edit-a-thons keep getting community support.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Medium

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: Stockholm public library

Link to the project: Jämställdhet på Wikipedia 2015

Development Support 2017[edit]

What is the project: The project aimed to investigate how technical support could be given to the Swedish volunteer community, to increase the number of people who can make use of technical solutions such as advanced templates, bots and Wikidata.

What has been done: In order to investigate how technical support can be given to the Swedish volunteer community we set up a community wishlist on Swedish Wikipedia aimed at wishes which were not well suited for the WMF wishlist (e.g. by only affecting the Swedish community). We collected suggestion and decided on which projects to work on. Budgetary constraints meant that, other than support for ORES activation on Swedish Wikipedia, work on the wishes was postponed until 2018.

What's next: In 2018 we will work on the first wishes on the wishlist as well as continue the support for ORES activation for detecting vandalism. The aim is to host a second round of wish collection, this time open to the Swedish communities on the other Wikimedia projects. The BOT Academy might be added as a part of the Northern Europe Meeting.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Medium

Project impact: Wikipedia, Mediawiki

Partners: Wikimedia community

Link to the project: Utvecklingsstöd_2017

Wiki Loves 2017[edit]

What is the project: The project aimed to plan and organize Wiki Loves Earth 2017 and Wiki Loves Food 2017. The project also continued the work with Wiki Loves Monuments, which had been initialized previously.

What has been done: Wiki Loves Earth (WLE) was planned and organized in Sweden for the first time. It took place in June, and in total 155 individuals engaged and produced 1,188 media files, added 80 of them to Wikipedia articles and added or improved 67 articles. Out of the participants 93 were completely new users to our projects. The winning images can be found here. As a preparation for WLE two datasets with protected areas were added to Wikidata to build lists from. During September Wiki Loves Monuments was organized, adding 1,407 images by 46 individuals. The winning images can be seen here. Wiki Loves Food was not organized as a result of changes in the number of staff and plans during the fall.

What's next: In 2018 Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments will be organized in May and September.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Medium

Project impact: Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata

Partners: National environmental agency, National heritage board

Link to the project: Wiki Loves 2017

A Community for Everybody[edit]

The Swedish ambassador to India, Mr. Harald Sandberg, thought that the Wikipedia edit-a-thon was great fun.

What is the project: This project focuses on inviting diverse participation in Wikimedia.

What has been done: We started the project in March 2017 with submitting the application for a grant to organize Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2017, and in November 80 diversity leaders in Wikimedia came to Stockholm. The conference presented us with an incredible opportunity to collaborate with volunteers, affiliates and groups to increase diversity in our movement.

For the first time we worked on ways to identify and reach sponsors for an event. This was a good opportunity to establish some basic methods around event sponsorships, although we were not as successful as we had hoped. We now have a better understanding of what it will take and how to structure the work.

Editing campaigns that we engaged with were the Art+Feminism campaign and WikiPride with several partners. Furthermore, we supported three Swedish Embassies to host gender gap edit-a-thons with local wikimedia groups. We have also supported the regular edit-a-thons in Stockholm. See #Story:Enabling self sustaining local events.

What's next: We will submit the full conference report and we will continue with international collaborations as part of a new partnership with the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs called WikiGap. We will investigate opportunities with senior citizens and minority culture associations.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Large

Project impact: Wikipedia, Wikimedia movement

Partners: Wikimedia Norge, Wikimedia Foundation, Stockholm public library

Link to the project: En gemenskap för alla 2017

Enabling[edit]

  Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (at end of Q2) End of year (projected or actual) Comments
Enabling E.1 For the association to work competently the office staff shall be given the opportunity to develop their skills in relevant fields and the members of the board shall strive to develop their competences. 2 0 staff members

0 board members

7 staff members out of 8

4 board members out of 8

Staff members received training in HLR and we also had in-house skill sharing sessions. New board members were trained at Wikimedia Conference and by staff members in how to edit Wikipedia. A structure for how to offer and evaluate external trainings have been put in place which should have an effect in 2018.
E.2 To strengthen the transparency of the organization the members of the board or office staff shall participate in at least 4 international Wikimedia events and on a monthly basis update international newsletters,[12] key wikiportals, etc. N/A 7 9 int. events out of 4
We have been actively participating at more Wikimedia events as we have seen a direct value added to some of our major projects.
E.3.1 To ensure organizational stability the chapter shall work towards broad and sustainable funding where no donor exceeds 50 %, a 20 % increase in membership from the 31 December previous year, enhance volunteer involvement with 20 % compared to the total amount previous calendar year, and develop a plan around corporate sponsorship. Largest donor was FDC with 41%. Membership increased with 14%. Amount of volunteers increased from 31 to 66. Based on current estimates 39.2% of funding will come from FDC in 2017.

Unclear as we are changing our membership database system.
32 volunteers
We have developed a first version of our plan around corporate sponsorship.

51.5% of funding came from WMF in 2017

149 members out of 1,038 (increase from 865 in 2016)

60 volunteers out of 79 (increase from 66 in 2016)

2 plans developed around corporate sponsorship.

While the FDC funding still makes up less than 50% (43.5%) the Wikimedia Diversity Conference meant that the total funding from WMF constituted more than 50% of our total funding. We therefore largely consider this goal accomplished.

We didn’t get the new membership system up and running during 2017, and as a result the membership numbers dropped drastically. We expect membership numbers to come back up as we send out reminders in early 2018.
We had a large amount of volunteers involved this year as well, and many of them were empowered to do more activities, however we were unable to increase the headcount and reached 75 % of our goal.
We developed a plan specifically for corporate sponsorship around conferences and a strategy around corporate sponsorship in general.

E.3.2 To ensure organizational stability the chapter shall actively work to increase the amount of overlapping competencies in business-critical areas. N/A - -
Efforts include establishing Developer guidelines, hosting in-house skill sharing workshops and expanding our use of Phabricator.

The chapter aims to be a relevant actor for years to come and is actively working towards building the organizational capacity needed for long term activities. We need to be a good employer, a strong partner, and a well functioning democratic and transparent membership organization with a close cooperation with a strong volunteer community. The chapter is also intending to not be an isolated player but be actively involved in the international movement.

These intentions demand projects that are more long term oriented and strategic. The projects in this program therefore contribute only marginally to content production in a given year, but over time will ensure the success and sustainability of all our activities.

Increasing competence[edit]

The Swedish National Heritage Board found their own metadata improved through their collaboration with us.

To be able to develop skills in relevant fields board and staff members shall be given the opportunity to develop their skills. Due to limited funding for external training we started adding a few in-house training sessions to ensure that best-practices are shared within the team. We also organized a team-wide training in HLR as part of the security preparations for the Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2017.

We see a great need to ensure that we ongoingly identify and take notice of suitable board members, potential new staff members, and volunteers who have capacity to take leadership roles in different initiatives.

Fail fest: Lack of volunteer training and infrastructure[edit]

Here we describe problems we struggled with and what we learnt from them.

The volunteers of Wikimedia Sverige is an extremely important resource that can help ensure success of our projects. The board consists entirely of volunteers and there is much room for active involvement in all the projects that are organized by the chapter.

However, as the chapter has grown in size, with more staff members and many more projects and events, we have seen that the volunteer community has not grown at the same rate. To avoid volunteer burnout and cannibalizing on volunteers who already actively contribute to Wikimedia projects, we see a great need to build a strong group of volunteers engaged in supporting the projects run by the chapters. This is especially important since we want to ensure activities all over the country, and not only in the main cities.

We want individuals from outside the core Wikimedia community to be able to see what we have to offer with our activities and the vision of granting everyone free access to knowledge. So far however, we acknowledge that our track record is poor when it comes to ensuring participation and empowerment of these new volunteers.

To improve the situation we see a need to:

  • Clearly outline what volunteer opportunities are available, present them with material or trainings to feel empowered, outline how a volunteer can develop within the organization and continue to grow.
  • Ensure that the volunteers themselves can develop ideas and find a space within the association in a way that is consistent with the goals and strategies of the association.
  • Actively contact our members and previous volunteers to ensure that they know we appreciate their involvement, and to ensure that they are aware of our current work. After all, we are competing with a number of other organizations for their time.
  • Ensure that our membership and volunteer list is up to date and can be used for ongoing contacts. This also ensures that the volunteers become part of our institutional memory.

We intend to continue developing our capacity in this area during 2018-2019.

Story: Strategic planning for the chapter and the movement[edit]

As the Foundation is leading the efforts to form a global strategy for the Wikimedia movement, Wikimedia Sverige has stepped up to contribute.

Over the year we were involved in four activities directly related to the development of the Movement strategy.

At the Wikimedia Conference two staff members and three board members took part in the movement strategy track or the partnership track. We got the opportunity to meet with fellow Wikimedians and get their insights and also learn more about the strategy process, which influenced our following work that year. We were happy with the strategic direction as we believed it to be well aligned with how our chapter has worked over the years. As a chapter we have not only focused on the Wikimedia projects but also taken free knowledge in general into account. We have also had a lot of focus on diversity and worked hard to get our work to be considered an important service to our partners, something which adds value to their strategic goals.

In June, one staff member participated in the Education Collab meeting in Armenia where a document with input to the Movement strategy cycle 2 was developed, with perspectives from Education program leaders from 12 countries.

In November, Wikimedia Deutschland hosted a meeting in Berlin where 11 countries participated to talk about partnerships. A few years ago Wikimedia Sverige was one of the three affiliates initiating the Partnerships group, which has since increased significantly in size. In Berlin the group jointly drafted a statement with insights regarding partnerships and the importance they will, and should have, on the Movement strategy.

Equity is a core part of the Strategic direction and in November Wikimedia Sverige hosted the Wikimedia Diversity Conference, with active support from Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Norway. One of the sessions was specifically prepared together with the movement strategy team generating a document outlining the importance of diversity in the strategy.

We look forward to be working with the movement to develop the strategy further and turn the visionary document into tangible activities, projects and events building on and supporting it.

Fail fest: Time consuming to onboard new staff[edit]

Here we describe problems we struggled with and what we learnt from them.

In 2016 our team grew in size. We especially strengthened our technical capabilities with three new developers. Onboarding the new technical staff members took much more time than expected which created unnecessary stress for the team.

The main issue was that we previously hadn't had multiple people working in tandem with similar development and this new situation required things to be written down, discussed and restructured. Most chapters do not have an in-house team of developers, but we had great help from the WMDE teams.

Furthermore, our organization and the wider Wikimedia movement use a large number of different systems, often not-so-user-friendly open source solutions which many a time lack proper documentation. We recognize that these can be challenging circumstances for new staff.

We found that much of the actual development work we had hoped to achieve during 2016 was pushed forward to 2017, leading to a large drop in our expected output for the year. The work to develop routines became a priority for 2017 and the discussions that took place in late 2016 led to conclusions about what to use out of a number of technical options. It is a living document in English that we intend to keep updated so that other chapters easily can use it if they decide to invest in in-house developers.

When hiring staff members that bring needed expertise they sometimes do not have any, or very limited, experience with the Wikimedia community and our platforms. Not cannibalising from the community, and bringing in other experiences and skill sets is something we see as valuable, but this also increases the risk of mistakes and misunderstandings which put a lot of extra stress on the new staff members. We have tried to mitigate this with involvement in different in-person events such as Wikimedia conferences and hackathons and different events that we organize. Also, now that we have a larger team this means that further hirings will have more support from the team as a whole. However, we are aware that there is a need to further improve on our onboarding process.

During the year we continued to further develop the guides and we also started to consolidate the system we use to lower the threshold in the future (this got increased priority when GDPR started). Volunteers who were Wikipedian in Residence collaborated with us to summarize frequently asked questions, create good information materials, etc., which will also be useful for new staff and for new volunteers working with partners.

As we had to reduce our staff force at the end of the year, these instructions might be used again in 2018 if we fail to rehire the previous staff members.

Being transparent[edit]

Ensuring that our work is transparent is core to how we plan our projects and day-to-day work. Transparency is inherently valuable as more people can give feedback, point out problems, suggest solutions and in other ways contribute.

However, working in such a transparent manner is something that takes a bit of getting used to for new team members, new volunteers, consultants and external partners. It also comes with an increased cost to ensure that all documentation is understandable, summarized and presented in the different places where our members might expect to find it. Simply making materials available without ensuring that it is understandable is arguably a false transparency. For example, our new financial system does not allow anyone to instantly see live updated financial information, but instead we will provide regular monthly updates with the information structured more clearly and in a standardized way to ensure that an interested member can understand what is going on and ask relevant questions.

While acknowledging the issues, our conclusion is that the value of transparency is much higher and we are working to increase our transparency even further.

Story: Increasing transparency to our day-to-day work[edit]

Ever since the chapter was founded the chapter wiki (se.wikimedia.org) has been the central hub for developing and sharing information. The wiki continue to be so. However, a wiki is not the ideal platform to coordinate and manage tasks between people within a project. As the team has grown, partners have gotten involved and the complexity of the projects has increased we have investigated other options.

In 2017 the decision was made to manage all project tasks through Phabricator, with links between Phabricator and the chapter wiki. It made it possible for interested volunteers to see what the staff members are working on any given week and for the team to coordinate the work, both internally and with partners and volunteers.

We established clear routines for our work there and all staff members received training on how to use the tool. Phabricator is being used by the Foundation and is also well known by the technical community. However, to the best of our knowledge we are the first chapter to move all our projects onto the platform. We hope that our structure will be possible to duplicate by other chapters. We have seen interest from other affiliates and we have introduced staff members at Wikimedia Norway to Phabricator.

We are still experimenting and our methods need refinements, but our first staff evaluation was overall very positive. We continue to work on ways to better include the information on Phabricator in our reporting and how it can be used by new staff members to gain an understanding about the steps involved in a project of a specific type.

Improve organizational quality[edit]

For the chapter to continue to improve its quality and efficiency we worked to keep our broad and sustainable funding, with the aim of no donor exceeding 50 %, and to find new financial options, including a long term increase in paid memberships, and also to increase volunteer involvement which can help ensure high quality projects for a limited cost.

Mainly through external grants we had a broad and sustainable funding for the first ⅔ of the year with promising opportunities for 2018 and forward as well. However, at the last part of the year many of the different grants we had identified as good opportunities earlier in the year (mainly from grant giving organizations which we had received grants from before) had either been cancelled, had a significant change in focus or had been moved forward too early 2018.

We started experimenting with online ads for memberships, corporate sponsorships and crowdfunding. However, these did not turn out successful to the extent we had hoped. We then identified a number of bottlenecks we need to solve before continuing our experimentation, such as developing our website to highlight sponsors in a suitable way and creating a well functioning membership system as well as regular information and activities to encourage members to stay involved and supportive of our work.

What seems to have turned out well so far is the restructuring of what our financial remuneration looks like for focused efforts or trainings from e.g. GLAM or educational partners that happen outside of our usual projects. Up until 2017, we had charged only for direct salaries, but a tax lawyer we hired strongly recommended that we, for tax reasons, start charging the market rate (i.e. more than double what we charged). 2017 was the first year we did so which led to a significant addition to our budget. Our partners showed a strong willingness to engage us in target efforts, despite the increased cost to them for the work we do.

Our volunteer community has been supportive and active in 2017. In addition to our volunteer run board of trustees we have had 60 volunteers helping us with our projects in different ways. We have seen volunteers join our organization in roles other than the typical helper at edit-a-thons or with initiating partnerships with other organizations.

At the very end of the year we prepared an application for a so called 90-account to the Swedish Fundraising Control. The 90-account is a confirmation for the donor that the fundraising operation is being managed in an ethical and responsible way and that the money is used for the intended purpose (at least 75% of the total income) without excessive cost (maximum 25% of the total income).

Story: Outsourcing of non-core work[edit]

To be able to streamline our operations and allow staff to focus on activities that are part of their core competencies we have invested resources into changing our financial system and outsourcing our financial administration, which has worked very well so far. We investigated the tax situation in Sweden regarding different forms of partnerships with the help of tax lawyer.

We spent a significant amount of time with preparing for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), preparations that need to be finalized in May 2018. The chair of our board is working professionally with GDPR preparations and have been able to take the lead. As part of the work we have begun a major overhaul of the systems we use (with a general move towards open source alternatives that we can host on our own servers). We are now changing our server infrastructure with the help of a consultant.

In 2018 we expect to start reducing our overall administrative costs and improve our output in our day-to-day operations as we can work with more focus on the tasks at hand.

Detailed project overview[edit]

For all the projects, we will state whether they are small, medium or large. In this context, a small project is defined as one where the total budget is less than 100,000 SEK (about 12,500 USD); a medium sized project is defined as one where the total budget is between 100,000 SEK and 300,000 SEK (12,500 to about 37,500 USD); finally, a large project is defined as one where the total budget exceeds 300,000 SEK (about 37,500 USD).

Organizational Development 2017[edit]

What is the project: This project aims to improve the functioning of the organization and the efficiency of its work through targeted activities against identified bottlenecks.

What has been done: For improved flexibility, common understanding and management, we started to use the collaboration tool Phabricator. Instruction materials on how to use it was developed, and a workshop was held for smooth transition. We also worked actively to improve the documentation of different aspects of our work, routines and tools to make it easier to add new members to the team.

As another means of improving the collaboration at the office, a series of skill sharing workshops have been initiated to share skills between the staff members. The idea is both for colleagues to get an idea of what the others are doing, and to share competences for overlapping purposes.

A training for the board was also held, for increased understanding of the board members on how Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects work. We established individual plans with all staff members regarding what trainings they should focus on during 2018.

What’s next: The documentation of our work routines will continue. We will also encourage staff and board members to participate in trainings and courses to continue to develop their skills. Learning patterns and/or articles for scientific publications will be written in relevant fields.

The work around preparing for GDPR and consolidating and updating our IT systems is expected to take a lot of work during the first half of 2018.

We are also intending to simplify bureaucracy and to create a better structure for our yearly planning to ensure that a staff member do not have to much work in any given month.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Project impact: Phabricator, Meta

Partners: -

Link to the project: Organisationsutveckling 2017

Exchange of Experiences 2017[edit]

What is the project: The project is to ensure that we share our experiences and learn from other affiliates through available events and platforms.

What has been done: We have taken part, with staff and/or board members, at the WLM Offsite; the DevSummit; the Wikimedia Conference; the Wikimedia Hackathon; the Big Fat Brussels Meeting; the Education Collab meeting, the Wikimania conference, the GLAM coordinators meeting and we organized and took part in the Wikimedia Diversity Conference. Furthermore we have had meetings with representatives from WMFI and WMNO.

Staff members have also continuously worked on sharing lessons learnt on Meta based on the work initiated at these events and through direct contacts with staff at other chapters. Amongst other things we have helped develop the Partnerships & Resource Development portal and the GLAM portal.

What's next: We will look into developing the EU portal further and add more learning patterns based on our experiences. We also expect that we in 2018 will be participating in many of the same events we participated in this year.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Project impact: Meta

Partners: Wikimedia affiliates

Link to the project: Erfarenhetsutbyte 2017

Association Involvement 2017[edit]

What is the project: The project aims to increase the number of members and volunteers, find tasks and the necessary support to get and stay engaged and a new membership management system.

What has been done: A migration of management systems has taken a lot of time and effort. Discussions regarding the membership system took place with different actors. A new EU directive, the GDPR, will affect how we will be able to register members, and this together with the migration of systems have required analysis.

Furthermore, tasks for volunteers have been identified and we have started the creation of a volunteer portal on our chapter wiki. We have engaged volunteers in different ways and have had some of the highest numbers of individuals involved ever (only beaten by 2016). We have also started handing out certificates for larger voluntary efforts and highlighted volunteer efforts in social media (see #Visibility Making 2017).

What's next: Before our general assembly we will be finalizing the migration of all data about our members and send out reminders for them to renew their memberships. Thereafter, we will work to attract more members through active campaigns, including an email campaign we started working on in 2017 together with WMF staff.

We will also organize trainings for the volunteers in different ways. We are looking into the possibility for a Nordic WikiCamp with Wikimedia Norway and Wikimedia Finland.

We will continue to highlight the work done by our volunteers and continue developing our volunteer portal.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Project impact: -

Partners: Wikimedia Foundation

Link to the project: Föreningsengagemang 2017

FOSS for the Association 2017[edit]

What is the project: Investigate where FOSS alternatives can replace proprietary software used by the organization or where fairly minor issues are preventing that FOSS from fulfilling our needs.

What has been done: We have updated the list of which FOSS and which proprietary services we use and put up a matrix to make this easier to compare across chapters. We organized a workshop to identify problems with the FOSS services we currently use, and if they could be improved, in order to be able to contract with consultants to do the necessary changes. With the upcoming GDPR requirements we further investigated which of the services we use can be hosted locally. Due to budgetary constraints the project was put on hold during the last quarter of 2017.

What's next: For 2018 the plan is to decide which FOSS to improve and, if the financial situation allows it, hire a consultant to solve the identified issues. As part of our planned work of migrating some of our cloud services to locally hosted FOSS alternatives we will aim to document our experiences so that they may be of use to other chapters.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Project impact: -

Partners: -

Link to the project: FOSS för föreningen 2017

Notes[edit]

  1. The Wikimedia projects mean those platforms within the Wikimedia Family that are usually called sister projects of Wikipedia:
    • Wikipedia The free encyclopedia
    • Wikimedia Commons The free media database
    • Wiktionary The free dictionary
    • Wikisource The free library
    • Wikibooks Free textbook collections
    • Wikiquote The free quote compendium
    • Wikivoyage The free travel guide
    • Wikispecies The free species directory
    • Wikiversity Free learning resources
    • Wikidata The free database
    • Meta-Wiki About the projects
    • We also include translatewiki.net.
  2. Identification can be via user names systematically connected with the institution, special user templates showing the connection to an institution, registration in a Wikiproject, or possibly through personal knowledge etc.
  3. This include the Wikimedia projects, translatewiki.net and Wikimini, according to the principle that we train an instructor who is using the creation of content as a part of the pedagogical process.
  4. An organizational unit with self-governing power is included here; however, units that have been included previous years are not.
  5. By clearly licensed, we mean that an upload of these resources to the Wikimedia projects would be undisputed.
  6. Software which is considered is MediaWiki extensions in use on the Wikimedia project or on translatewiki.net. This is in accordance with the priority order: bugs, erroneous translations, untranslated.
  7. Swedish, English and Arabic language Wikipedia.
  8. In 2016, the goal was to "create a functional text-to-speech prototype before the end of the year."
  9. We are counting occasions and Wikimedians as follows:
    • Only activities outside of other project related goals count. I.e. a Bot Academy focusing on cultural heritage and as part of COH does not count, but an event focused on running bots but not related to a specific project count.
    • Wikimedians and advocates for free knowledge who got support count, regardless of if they used the information or not. The important part is that they asked for help/resources. I.e. people contributing to FOSS-projects count.
    • We count occasions as when someone got help from a WMSE staff member. I.e. a volunteer working for two weeks without contact does not count, but if they send an e-mail with questions after a week that counts as one occasion. Questions related to memberships, donations or administrative matters does not count towards the goals.
  10. With recurring meetups we are referring to some type of face-to-face meetings that are repeated over time.
  11. Underrepresented groups are here defined as:
    • women
    • contributors whose native language are different than the 10 largest Wikipedias (per 5+ editsp/month (3m avg) according to https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm) or Swedish
    • contributors 60 years or older
  12. GLAM Newsletter and Education Newsletter.

Revenues received during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report)[edit]

Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

Table 2 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

  • Please also include any in-kind contributions or resources that you have received in this revenues table. This might include donated office space, services, prizes, food, etc. If you are to provide a monetary equivalent (e.g. $500 for food from Organization X for service Y), please include it in this table. Otherwise, please highlight the contribution, as well as the name of the partner, in the notes section.
Revenue source Currency Anticipated Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Anticipated ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Explanation of variances from plan
Membership fees SEK 110,000 - 12,900 - 6,500 19,400 12,870 2,270 Technical problems with our membership system meant we have not been able to efficiently send out reminders to expiring users. The new membership system only got up and running in Q1 of 2018.
Donations SEK 200,000 - 1,000 - 193,358 194,358 23,400 22,740 The 100,000 donation mentioned in the APG proposal arrived in 2016 instead. In our final impact report for 2016 it was registered as an Interests, misc revenue, and added to our reserves. The "normal" donations were largely as expected, however as a result of our crowdfunding campaign after loosing the FoP court case we had a doubling of our donations. This sum also includes an award totalling 10,000 SEK.
FDC SEK 2,950,000 - 1,720,833 - 1,229,167 2,950,000 345,150 345,150 Note that the early payment of our 2018 grant counts as a revenue for 2018 (i.e. this year we have a negative result).
Interest, misc SEK 15,000 - -80 - 9,747 9,667 1,755 1,131
Other Grants SEK 159,600 - 93,252 - 357,067 450,319 18,673 52,687 Due to the funding situation at the end of the year we actively sought out GLAM partnerships where they funded our work. As a result this revenue was higher than originally planned.
Vinnova SEK 220,530 - 156,097 - 59,875 215,972 25,802 25,269
Royal Armoury SEK 15,000 - 15,000 - 0 15,000 1,755 1,755
The Culture Foundation of the Swedish Postcode Lottery SEK 1,875,000 - 750,000 - 363,373 1,113,373 219,375 130,265 An additional (since APG proposal) 213,373 of funds was not used up in 2016 and therefore brought over into 2017. Meanwhile the anticipated funding included continuation project (975,000) which will now hopefully happen in 2018 instead. As a result the anticipated revenue is 761,627 less than originally expected.
European Union Grant SEK 200,000 - 0 - 0 0 23,400 0 This project will happen 2018-2019 instead.
Pelagios Commons Resource Grants SEK 50,000 - 0 - 0 0 5,850 0 Our application was not successful and the funding (mention in the APG proposal) was not awarded.
Länsstyrelsen Kalmar SEK 60,000 - 60,000 - 0 60,000 7,020 7,020 Some of these funds were not used up and will be returned during 2018.
Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency SEK 57,391 - 0 - 75,000 75,000 6,715 8,775 The discrepancy is due to an increased amount of funding being transferred over from 2016 to 2017.
Event Grant Diversity Conference 2017 SEK 500,000 - 0 - 546,345 546,345 58,500 63,922 Due to increased travel costs we received a larger event grant from WMF, additionally some chapters covered part of the costs.
Swedish Post and Telecom Authority SEK 1,115,000 - 334,740 - 796,438 1,131,178 130,455 132,348

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Notes:

Exchange rate: 1 SEK = 0.117 USD (per 1 USD = 8.547008547 SEK in APG proposal).
All numbers rounded to whole SEK/USD.
We also received in-kind donation of about 2000 SEK (234 USD) by FSData for server hosting. Museum of Medieval Stockholm and the Royal Armoury donated venue spaces for our General Assembly and the Diversity Conference reception respectively.

Spending during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report)[edit]

Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

Table 3 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

(The "budgeted" amount is the total planned for the year as submitted in your proposal form or your revised plan, and the "cumulative" column refers to the total spent to date this year. The "percentage spent to date" is the ratio of the cumulative amount spent over the budgeted amount.)
Expense Currency Budgeted Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Budgeted ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Percentage spent to date Explanation of variances from plan
Access SEK 3,020,078 - 1,673,502 - 1,196,968 2,870,471 353,349 335,845 95.1% Due to the shifted focus to externally funded GLAM projects (consultancy work) and the reduced staff the worktime spent on Access was intentionally reduced as we needed to make funds available for operational costs.
Use SEK 1,505,652 - 671,309 - 1,148,957 1,820,266 176,161 212,971 120.9% To be able to finalise Wikispeech we decided to spend more staff time on the Use program.
Community SEK 1,189,885 - 382,769 - 1,059,976 1,442,745 139,217 168,801 121.3% The Diversity Conference meant we ended up spending slightly more than originally budgeted.
Enabling SEK 260,000 - 88,562 - 32,760 121,322 30,420 14,195 46.7% Most of the expenses for Enabling were planned for Q3-Q4. As a result of the financial situation we cut back on all non-staff spending and focused staff time on other programs.
Operational costs SEK 1,374,260 - 806,728 - 1,572,433 2,379,161 160,788 278,362 173.1% This budget post includes our 750,000 SEK payment resulting from the loss in the FoP court case. We also had significantly higher costs for our external accounting agency (change of accounting system and underlying schema) as well as our requested investigation by tax lawyers to clarify whether some of our projects should pay VAT. It also includes the retroactive VAT that we realised was due for some of the work already done. There were also worktime costs associated with the change of CEO and the staff reduction.
To reserves SEK 85,000 - 0 - 0 0 9,945 0 0% Note that due to a typo the previous progress report erroneously gave the budgeted amount as 185,000 SEK. With the loss of the FoP case no money was put into the reserves, instead most of our reserves were depleted.
TOTAL SEK 7,434,875 - 3,622,872 - 5,011,094 8,633,965 881,580 1,010,174 114.6% N/A

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Compliance[edit]

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

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]

Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.