Grants:APG/Proposals/2018-2019 round 1/Wikimedia Sverige/Impact report form

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Metrics and results overview - all programs[edit]

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees' programs. Please use the table below to let us know how your programs contributed to the Grant Metrics. We understand not all Grant or grantee-defined Metrics will be relevant for all programs, so feel free to put "0" where necessary. For each program include the following table and

  1. Next to each required metric, list the outcome/results achieved for all of your programs included in your proposal.
  2. Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome.
  3. In addition to the Global Metrics as measures of success for your programs, there is another table format in which you may report on any OTHER relevant measures of your programs success

For more information and a sample, see Grant Metrics.

Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. number of total participants 3,474 (out of 5,000) Breakdown by gender:
Women: 1,315
Men: 949
Non-binary: 6
Un-known: 1,204

WikiGap had a smaller reach this year than expected as we only had a month to organize the entire campaign. This was due to a late decision to engage from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs (as Sweden did not have a new government formed after the election until February). Also Wikimania, an event we consider very successful overall, had to be scaled down in size due to budget restraints. As we lacked staff to run our education program from June the expected number decreased significantly as fewer classes were engaged and less activities at education conferences were done.

2. number of newly registered users 857 (out of 700) Breakdown by gender:
Women: 122
Men: 59
Non-binary: 0
Un-known: 676
The global WikiGap campaign, the Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest are the main drivers for reaching this goal. The planned campaign for FindingGLAMs was postponed to 2020 and reshaped and grace did not contribute as expected.
3. number of content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects 108,250 (out of 101,525) Breakdown by project:
Wikipedia: 10,160
Commons: 9,615
Wikidata: 88,473
Other: 2

We managed to identify and process a few datasets that were larger than expected and surpassed the goal.

4. Blog posts[1] (deprecated grantee defined metric) N/A This metric is deprecated, but included here as it is mentioned in the proposal.
5. Diversity[2] 1,387 (non-unique) (compared to 1,263 in our Impact report from 2018) We have approximated ~70% to be women during the WikiGap events internationally.
6. Reach[3] (new grantee defined metric) 4,865 (non-unique) (compared to 6,058 in our Impact report from 2018) The main reduction was in the initiative WikiGap.


Introduction[edit]

In 2019 Wikimedia Sverige has been in a state of rebuilding and expansion. We have executed successfully on a number of large and small projects according to our plan.

We have worked hard to secure long term funding and to build our capacity to scale even further. As we are very optimistic that significant funding will be secured in 2020, allowing our organization to multiply in size over the year, we have invested a large amount of resources, time and effort to prepare. We are in the process of developing an organizational structure that we are confident can handle the changes, which also includes improved documentation, adoption of tools and systems that allow for a quick increase in scale. We have worked to develop consensus in the organization amongst boards, leadership, staff and volunteers. Furthermore we have formed the necessary partnerships and interpersonal relationships needed.

We have planned for expansion in the following areas:

  • Technical development to improve the possibilities for partners to share content to our platforms.
  • An increase in our organization’s international work, both with coordinating and leading the work around content partnerships.
  • A significant increase in the scale of volunteerism in our organization.
  • Events being organized across all of Sweden rather than being concentrated in the major cities.
  • Technical development to increase the accessibility of Wikimedia’s platforms through text-to-speech and speech-to-text solutions.

The organization has increased to 9 staff members, and published job postings for two new positions in the last quarter of the year. Postings for further jobs have been prepared. In December a contract was signed for a new Project Manager for Education and Learning and interviews for a developer for Wikispeech will start in early 2020. A job posting is being developed for a Project Manager for Development and infrastructure (a position roughly equivalent to a Program Manager at WMF) and an Organizational strategist.

The four programmatic areas developed in 2016—Access, Use, Community and Enabling—have continued to form the base of the project structure. Some of the most important activities and changes to date are the following:

  • Organization of Wikimania 2019 in Sweden has been a massive undertaking. With 255 sessions in the program, 21 local partners involved in the activities, more than 70 carefully picked volunteers (from over 120 applicants), nearly all being new to the movement, and 800 scholarship applicants, we are very happy with the outcome.
  • As part of the work with the conference we have organized a number of activities, including our first Culture crawls. For us, this is a new way of approaching our partners and we have seen a lot of interest. We have also organized guided tours and supported the organization of a meeting for national libraries, as well as a Wikidata event for small GLAMs. More than a 1,000 Swedish organizations and VIPs have received an invitation to the conference, as we hope firstly for their participation and secondly to make them aware of our work in this area.
  • We organized WikiGap together with the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs for the second time. We have had around 40 events across the world together with Swedish embassies, local Wikimedia communities and local partners. The Ministry was involved during Wikimania in a number of ways, not least by organizing a reception for the WikiGap organizers from 2018 and 2019. The reception was located in the Blue Drawing Room at the so called “Palace of the Hereditary Prince”, where the Ministry for Foreign Affairs is located. Our partnership was highlighted in the OECD report OECD Development Co-operation Peer Reviews: Sweden 2019 as one important part of the foreign policy’s creation of an “effective platform to address gender equality globally”, stating that “[Sweden's] drive to change norms also has led to creative partnerships. In 2018, in partnership with Wikimedia, Sweden introduced the #WikiGap campaign to enhance the information about women on Wikipedia around the world. In the first three months of the campaign alone, participants wrote almost 4 000 new articles that were read over 5 million times across 50 countries.”.
  • We were approved for a so-called 90 account ("90-konto"), a proof of our organization being well run. To receive a 90 account is a crucial step to achieve our goal to gain 5,000 members over the coming 3 years and our intention to become a recipient of funds from the Swedish Postcode Lottery, with the significant funding that comes with it. The organization started discussing getting a 90 account sometime around 2011/2012, so this is a long time dream being achieved. As part of this we launched our new website and our newsletter to improve our communication with our members. We have also prepared for a communication campaign that was initiated in December 2019, and we have received 300,000 SEK (30,000 USD) in a grant to cover the cost of engaging a communication agency.
  • We have prepared for and created a project plan to investigate how Wikimedia Sverige can support the global movement around content partnerships. The hope and intention is the creation of a large team in Sweden leading the global efforts in this area. The team will develop crucial software for a global set of partners and work to support the Wikimedia and wider free knowledge movement to engage effectively with content partners.
  • We continue to experiment with how bibliographic data can be included on Wikidata and used on the Wikimedia platforms. The many exciting opportunities and the available support in this area has made us more invested in WikiCite.
  • Improving structures to ensure an increase in volunteer engagement has been a priority because of Wikimania and the many new volunteers involved in preparing for the conference. We have started developing a volunteer strategy, supporting material such as a yearly breakdown of activities etc. Much of this will also be useful, in a slightly modified version, when engaging new experts such as librarians (which we are aiming to ramp up in 2020).
  • Outside of the FDC application, we sent in 8 project grant applications. We received 3,040,805 SEK (around 317,000 USD) in funding for 2019–2020. Six out of the eight applications were successful (with two minor applications failing). The success rate was slightly higher than in 2018 with 86.08% of the funds we applied for being granted to us (this is only including the funds directed towards Wikimedia Sverige, if one also include the funds for partners then 90.57% of the funds we applied for were successful). We also participated in two major project applications that was developed by other organizations (and as such could affect the overall adoption of free licenses etc.) of which one received funding and the other was just under the threshold and did not receive funding.
  • One new board member was elected during the general assembly, Göran Konstenius who is working as a manager at the National Library of Sweden.
  • We have had three new staff members joining us during the year, Mia Jacobsson (until June 2019) and Tore Danielsson and Gitta Wilén (who also worked with us in 2017).

Access[edit]

  Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (end of the year) Comments
Access A.1.1 Enrich the Wikimedia projects with 25 resources,[4] through the creation and distribution of materials and by providing support and performing batch uploads. 10 17 resources out of 25
As we prioritized the major externally funded projects and Wikimania we did fewer than the expected uploads from GLAM partners and instead engaged them in the conference. As we had no one working on supporting the research community for half of the year the uploads we hoped to achieve feel short. The FindingGLAMs project over-delivered in 2019, as it had under-delivered in 2018.
A.1.2 150 identified[5] 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. 172 146 experts out of 150
This year the experts are nearly all cultural heritage professionals. Due to staff changes we did not have much activity within the Wikipedia in Education project which led to slight drop from previous year.
A.1.3 Involve 10 courses in the Wikipedia Education Program,[6] through educating motivated teachers and providing expertise on the Wikipedia tools for education. 11 5 courses out of 10
Due to staff changes we did not have a dedicated staff member for our education projects for most of the year.
A.2.1 To increase the use of free licenses, ensure that 50 organizations[7] partake of information about free licenses. 81 58 organizations out of 50
We utilized Wikimania to reach out and initiate discussions and partnerships with new organizations. Furthermore, not included here, around 1,000 Swedish NGOs received an invitation for the even, as a way to initiate a contact.
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, or organization of, at least 10 new events and at least 10 new direct contacts with content owners, organizations and politicians. 16 events, 37 contacts 17 new events out of 10

26 new direct contacts out of 10

Our definition of someone belonging to our network is when they have met a representative of the association 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. The numbers were surpassed due to the work done through Wikimania and FindingGLAMs.

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 in 2019, both in number of ongoing projects and initiatives, and in budget. Preparations to further scale this program in 2020 and onwards are taking place.

Our earlier efforts with getting GLAM and other organizations to work 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) in 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, students or their volunteer networks.
  • 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]

There are a number of activities that increase access to new material directly or in a short period of time. Examples include the active production of new material (e.g. by supporting experts to contribute) or supporting an organization with the adoption of tools and methods for them to provide access to the material they have.

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. We strive to be considered a professional and generous partner. By providing them the needed support we can ensure that new valuable content is added to our projects every year.

The activities aimed at in the near future are to get access to more free information and include it on three of the Wikimedia platforms: Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia. For eleven years we have invested time and effort in workshops where we train experts about free licenses, to contribute to the platforms, and other things related to the Wikimedia platforms and free knowledge. The short-term output from these activities are improved articles and content, but we believe a far more important outcome is the deeper knowledge and expertise which later will help when we organize projects together to release material owned by the institutions. From our experience, the decision for an institution to release larger amounts of material often takes place years after we have given them a first introduction, however every now and then we experience a faster turnover rate.

Through GLAM partnerships during the year we have managed to deliver unique material to the Wikimedia movement, e.g. very old recordings of traditional Sámi music and a number of datasets from GLAM institutions or bibliographical data.

We have also invested significantly in experimentation and testing, which we are carefully documenting with the aim to create a number of case studies in early 2020. The focus is on how different collections at GLAMs can be accessed and included on the Wikimedia platforms. This will be valuable both for other Wikimedia affiliates that want to upload collections and for GLAM institutions that are new but interested in working with the Wikimedia movement. They also help us identify areas where larger investments in tools are needed.

Story: Finding the world’s GLAM datasets and uploading them to Wikidata[edit]

In this Story we are describing how we initiated a global index of datasets of cultural heritage institution data with the goal of processing and ingesting them into Wikidata. By surveying what lists and datasets exist around the world, and how useful they are to the Wikimedia projects, we shone a light not only on the data that is available for Wikimedians to work with, but also on the gaps that need to be filled, and on the problems that need to be solved before the datasets can be ingested into Wikidata.

The project FindingGLAMs had an ambitious goal: collecting data about all the world's GLAM institutions. Having editors input all this information on Wikidata manually would be extremely slow and unnecessary to boot, as databases, registers and lists of cultural heritage institutions often do exist. They have different scopes, formats and are maintained by different bodies, for example ministries of culture of some countries, umbrella organizations for museums, etc. Redoing existing work would be a wasteful use of volunteer resources; that is why early in our project we focused on collating an index of datasets of cultural heritage institutions.

This endeavor has benefited both our project and the Wikimedia community in several ways. First of all, it made it clear how many such lists or datasets exist. Each of them presents an opportunity for Wikimedians, as it can be used as a source in their work to improve the coverage of GLAMs on Wikipedia and Wikidata. Even when we have concluded that no datasets exist this information has a value: we know that in parts of the world like Africa and South America we have much more work left to do and fewer available reference materials than in Europe and North America. Hence crowdsourcing efforts can be directed better.

Initially, we hoped to be able to import large amounts of data from these datasets to Wikidata. We were able to process several datasets that way; we contributed to Wikidata with data on 4,900 libraries in Japan, 2,400 libraries in Sweden, 660 libraries in several African countries and 21,000 libraries and library systems in the USA – among others. What those datasets had in common was that they were explicitly provided with a Wikidata-compatible license, such as Public Domain or CC0.

It quickly became apparent, however, that this was not the case for the majority of the datasets. In some cases, no license information is provided; in others, the data is copyrighted, or released under a partially free license, like Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), which is not permissive enough for Wikidata. Collecting the information about the datasets in one place has not only made the extent of the problem visible; it also provided a starting point to contact the data owners and discuss the licensing.

For example, we initiated contact with Archives Portal Europe about their directory of archival institutions in Europe, which was under copyright. After a fruitful discussion about the role of Wikidata and open licenses in the modern knowledge ecosystem, APE successfully convinced their partners in several countries to release the institutions' data under the CC0 license. This made it possible for us to import data about 6,869 institutions – most of them new items. The collaboration filled a real gap in the coverage of archives on Wikidata.

The index of datasets is a legacy of the project. We actively encouraged Wikimedians around the world to edit and improve it, and a number of editors have contributed to it using their language skills and local knowledge. We hope that the index continues to provide value to both Wikimedians who edit articles about GLAMs and to Wikimedia affiliates who can use it to find data owners in their local communities for possible dialog and collaboration.

With the knowledge gained through this new data affiliates from across the world can identify GLAM organizations to contact about possible partnerships. Without the information collected and easily searchable such efforts would be severely hampered.

Story: A focus on sources for our projects[edit]

In this Story we are focusing on our work to improve access to bibliographical data and to work with libraries to enhance sourcing and strategic digitization efforts. We believe that this will allow us to make sourcing easier and hence help combat fake news. Furthermore, we are working to reach a larger part of Sweden and to support the movement around WikiCite and to find the most suitable tools and methods to connect large collections of source materials on our projects.

As Wikidata becomes more relevant for libraries internationally, our work with the National Library of Sweden continues. We have continued to improve our efforts to add more bibliographical data to our projects, while also finding ways to engage librarians through campaigns and a set of different training sessions.

Our collaboration with the National Library of Sweden (Strategic inclusion of library data in Wikidata), which was initiated in May 2018 and continues throughout 2019, was well received by the library. We were awarded funding to carry out part 2 of the project. During the year we worked to enrich Swedish bibliographical data on Wikidata, but also to investigate, develop and implement solutions that brought that data closer to the Swedish Wikipedia community and made it more discoverable and easier to use. For instance, we are planning to develop a tool for Wikipedians to automatically create new Wikidata items based on entries in the library catalog.

We also looked into how bibliographical data could be connected with digitized material to increase the usage of the digitized material. This work was done both as part of the Strategic inclusion of library data in Wikidata and the FindingGLAMs project (as one of the case studies developed for the project’s white paper).

We believe that this appreciation of our work is a sign that the Wikimedia projects, including but not limited to Wikidata, are not only more accepted in GLAM institutions, but also seen as worthwhile to actively work with. Our collaboration with the National Library is happening in an exciting time, as the library is transitioning their union catalog to a new software platform which is built upon linked data. This is an opportunity for the staff to learn more about the open data landscape, and we have been invited to share our insights and perspectives. For example, we provided advice about how the Wikimedia projects can be involved in prioritizing digitization work at the library, as well as shared our experiences with working with the data model for books on Wikidata – as the library developers wanted to understand how their data is re-used and how it can be made better and more convenient for re-using.

Wikimedia organizations have in-depth, current knowledge of issues such as open data, and can provide valuable assistance to cultural heritage organizations that want to open up their data and modernize their infrastructure. After all, we all work towards the same goal.

The work with the libraries is not limited to the database area, but we are also working actively this year to start engaging with library staff across Sweden. We received a grant and have formed a partnership with the National Library around this. The intention is to develop training material for Sweden’s librarians that will empower them to organize local Wikipedia hubs that can engage and train the general population about how to critically use Wikipedia and how to contribute to the Wikimedia platforms.

We are investigating the possibility for us to support the WikiCite initiative, as this would allow us to collect important feedback from the community on what tools are needed and prioritized regarding more content partnerships with libraries.

See also our earlier Stories in previous reports:

Story: Developing user-friendly tools to crowdsource GLAM data[edit]

In this Story we are focusing on the possibilities with dedicated tools for campaigns and the importance of engaging the GLAM institutions of the world with compiling data about their institution. This is part of a wider strategic initiative to provide the Wikimedia movement with a resource that can be used to design and initiate new GLAM partnerships, especially around projects where a multitude of international partners are needed.

A large part of FindingGLAMs is crowdsourcing data about GLAM organizations from volunteers and from GLAM staff (who have the most up-to-date information). In order to make this process both effective and smooth for non-Wikimedians, we decided to build a tool that would enable them to start contributing quickly, without having to learn about Wikidata. The tool, Monumental-glam, is a continuation of Monumental (created for the purpose of displaying data about cultural heritage monuments), and is being developed by Paweł Marynowski. The major difference from the original Monumental is that it not only displays the data, but also allows the user to edit it directly – without having to go to Wikidata. That way, the entry threshold for new contributors is lowered considerably.

The first functional version of Monumental-glam was ready in time for the Swedish crowdsourcing campaign in May 2019, and focused on collecting data about libraries. This coincided in time with the Wikimedia Hackathon in Prague, giving us an opportunity to share the tool with a wider Wikimedia audience and gather feedback. Seeing people test the tool and talk about their experience was inspiring and motivating.

In a broader perspective, Monumental-glam inspired discussions about the existing landscape of Wikidata tools and about how to encourage non-Wikimedians to start editing. Many agree that there is a need for tools that bypass the Wikidata interface and let the user focus on what they are most interested in: the content. We believe that just like different users have different backgrounds, needs and expectations, there should be more than one way of editing Wikidata. The tool provides an opportunity to examine different ways of helping new editors contribute and we hope that the solutions developed within the frames of this project can be learned from and re-used in the future.

For a number of reasons the tool was not finalized in time and the campaign was postponed. In the end the development of the tool has been cancelled and the campaign has changed focus to engaging the existing Wikimedia community. Our hope is to encourage Wikimedians who are interested in GLAMs but may not be familiar or comfortable with Wikidata to start editing, especially in areas with poor representation of cultural heritage institutions on Wikidata, such as the Global South.

Our hope is that the data collected through batch uploads and now the campaign will support our goal of ensuring that potential GLAM partners can more easily be identified by Wikimedia affiliates to allow for new fruitful projects. The collection of data about the world’s GLAM institutions, which this tool and campaign is contributing to, is a piece of missing digital infrastructure.

Story: Equipping partners with tools and skills to contribute to Wikidata[edit]

In this Story we are describing our joint efforts with a developer at a partner organization to deliver a large amount of valuable data to the Wikimedia platforms as part of a content partnership, and the value these lessons will have for us when prioritizing future work.

The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) requested our help in uploading data about coastal water bodies to Wikidata. They had previously collaborated with us over lake water body data, but this time the scope of the project was larger: they would also spread their material on Wikipedia in Swedish by writing articles about water management and implementing a Wikidata-powered infobox, designed by us, to showcase the data.

What truly made this collaboration special, however, was the distribution of technical work between us and SMHI. Rather than delivering the raw data to us, so that we could process it and upload it to Wikidata, the organization's in-house developer took the initiative to learn about and work directly with Wikidata. Our role was to provide guidance and advice about all the steps of the process, from how Wikidata items are modelled to how to use QuickStatements to upload the data.

The advantages of this approach are twofold. First of all, the organization acquired new, highly transferable tools and skills. These will enable them to continue their work with Wikidata without our involvement, while at the same time sending a message to other organizations that the Wikimedia platforms are important and worthwhile to learn about.

Secondly, we saved time and resources by not having our developer team work directly with the highly specialized data. The decisions about how to convert the data to a Wikidata model were taken by the people who are most familiar with it, reducing the risk for errors. This collaboration model felt very natural, as it made more sense for an environmental data expert to learn about Wikidata (transferable knowledge) than for our developers to learn about coastal water body management (specific knowledge).

Wikidata might not be the easiest platform for newcomers – especially newcomers who have a very specific idea about what they would like to do. Expert Wikidata users have gained their knowledge through observation, reading discussion pages, interacting with others and editing within various areas of interests, rather than through reading documentation. Our collaboration model – providing the organization's developer with guidance and just-in-time information – significantly lowered the threshold for them to start editing and achieve their goals. We will develop plans and ideas on how to provide this type of training for professional development in a more organized fashion and perhaps include some certification system.

Importantly, this experience has given us insights into where the bottlenecks are and where targeted efforts can help content partners to achieve more with limited costs.

Fail fest: Upload of different media content from partners[edit]

In this Fail fest we describe our struggles and learnings connected to uploading and working with media content, such as audio files, on the Wikimedia platforms. This has proven challenging and we have identified a number of areas needing work to reduce barriers in the future.

Together with the Swedish Performing Arts Agency, we investigated how to best work with different types of materials on Wikimedia Commons. Most of the files on Wikimedia Commons are pictures – photographs, paintings and the like – and this is also the media types that most GLAMs make available. This time, however, we worked with digitized music recordings. Sound is a valuable archival material, and we wanted to examine how well Wikimedia Commons was suited to present it to a wide audience. Apart from the music files, we also received a set of visual documents, such as musical writings and leaflets, that were in some way connected to the recordings. We thus wanted to model those connections on Wikimedia Commons in order to make it easier for the users to contextualize them.

To a degree, we were inspired by the ongoing development of Structured Data on Commons (SDC). It has the potential to revolutionize how both uploaders and users use Wikimedia Commons. It quickly turned out that SDC did not, at that point, have features or solutions for working with sounds and music.

This disappointment was not limited to SDC. In general, we found the infrastructure to work with audio files quite lacking. It was obvious that it was not mature in comparison to the existing infrastructure for images. Naturally, the reason for this is that the number of people interested in uploading and working with sounds is much smaller. This became especially obvious when we attempted to highlight the value of the scanned musical sheets that were among the documents shared by the Swedish Performing Arts Agency. This sort of document contains sounds written down in a special alphabet, so that they can be played out by a musician. We found that there exist technical solutions for turning these documents into a format that the computer can understand (akin to OCR for scanned texts), an example of such format being Lilypond, and there have been attempts to include this sort of structured musical data on Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. But despite the long community discussions, we did not find an easy-to-use infrastructure or a best practice.

Wikimedia Commons has an enormous potential for GLAM institutions, but sharing materials that are not images is not easy. This stems from the fact that fewer community members are engaged in this sort of work. Because of that, we could not utilize the full potential of the audio media that the GLAM shared. With this knowledge, we are looking forward to examining the area further, especially as SDC is being developed. We will continue to investigate the needs and if this is a focus area where our developers could make a valuable contribution.

Fail fest: Crowdsourcing campaigns struggles to attract contributors[edit]

In this Fail fest we describe our struggles and learnings connected to organizing two different crowdsourcing campaigns where we have targeted GLAM professionals. We ran the two campaigns in parallel as one focused on Wikidata to highlight their own institution and one on Wikipedia and more generalized contributions of sources.

FindingGLAMs campaign[edit]

A big part of the FindingGLAMs project is crowdsourcing GLAM data in order to fill in the gaps in existing datasets. We are especially targeting new contributors, in particular GLAM professionals, because they possess relevant and current knowledge. We are developing Monumental-glam, a user-friendly tool for remote Wikidata editing, and we are planning to run our global crowdsourcing campaign in October 2019 (see #Story: Developing user-friendly tools to crowdsource GLAM data for more information). In order to test Monumental and learn more about how beginners experience Wikidata, we ran a small campaign locally in Sweden. It focused specifically on libraries and targeted staff at libraries in Sweden.

We only had four new accounts contributing which was disappointing, but such a poor outcome was not extremely surprising. We are aware that Wikidata is harder to sell to non-Wikimedians, as the advantages of collating a database of GLAM institutions are more abstract than those of writing a well-sourced Wikipedia article. After all, Wikipedia is a general-use resource with a wide and diverse audience, while Wikidata by its nature attracts a more specialized audience. On the other hand, we did prepare well for the campaign by announcing it in our social media channels, such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as posting a more detailed write-up on our blog. We even attracted the attention of the Swedish Library Association and published a guest article on their website.

This debacle provided us with a valuable insight: attracting non-Wikimedians to Wikidata is hard! We have been hearing voices from GLAM professionals around the world who have discovered Wikidata and its potential, but this is a comparatively small group. Our target audience of librarians, archivists and museum staff need well-produced, accessible material to understand what Wikidata is and why it's valuable for cultural heritage institutions.

#1lib1ref campaign[edit]

The second campaign we ran was #1lib1ref, where we invite librarians from all over the world to participate by adding sources to articles on Wikipedia. The problem is that all over the world does not include Sweden.

For years we have tried to get the attention from librarians during the weeks in January, and this year also May, to on-board them and have them work with us, but so far with almost no tangible result. We have translated the pages on Meta, we have had breakfast with them, we have had hangout meetings, written instructions manuals, we have advertised in newsletters and magazines and even started multi-year projects where we are going to educate librarians in digital everything and Wikipedia, but still no result.

While other communities are reporting record numbers and significant improvement, and also retention by the new users, we have only a small number of participants each year, and most of them are long time Wikipedians who remember to use the hashtag during those weeks for their normal edits.

During the fall we are building tools for a new learning platform for librarians, and during the winter we are going on a tour to promote the tools and will use that opportunity to give #1lib1ref one more chance. We have not given up yet, but #1lib1ref still has a lot to prove.

Access gained long term[edit]

To get new material added in the long term, we need to create an enabling environment and engage the actors who control resources and materials worth including on the Wikimedia platforms. For this we need to be changing minds, policies and attitudes and improving our capacity. This takes time and effort and a long term strategic vision.

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. This is something we continue to invest resources in.

Sweden is a parliamentary democracy with a very transparent and open governing system. The municipalities have a lot of power and are very relevant to approach regarding e.g. education, cultural heritage and open data. The regions are responsible for e.g. protected cultural heritage and also produce much public sector information. The national level is responsible for setting legislation through the Swedish parliament (the Riksdag) and are responsible for the government agencies. Furthermore, EU legislation has a very large effect on our projects. In 2019 we mainly focused our advocacy work on the national level and supported the important work done through FKAGEU.

Story: Advocating for a modernized copyright[edit]

In this Story we are describing our national and European efforts to advocate for a modernized copyright, and while doing so, establish new networks on both levels with the long-term goal of modernizing the Swedish Freedom of Panorama legislation.

With the final vote of the European Parliament on the Copyright Directive in the spring of 2019, the first phase of several years of hard work on Swedish and European level for a modernized copyright ended. While modernization has been crucially needed, much potential was lost in the political process, and in the end, only one article was very good for the Wikimedia platforms, whereas two articles were negative for the Wikimedia platforms and for the open internet in itself. With that outcome, and an invitation to the implementation process by the Ministry of Justice, Wikimedia Sverige decided to opt for an active involvement in the national implementation, pragmatically focusing on strengthening the good parts of the positive article – an article safeguarding the public domain – and minimizing the harm of the negative articles – on press publishers’ rights and upload filters.

In order to maximise our influence, we worked to establish new networks and coordinate with other civil society actors and institutions working for digitized cultural heritage, free knowledge and an open internet. This work started during the political Almedalen week, where many leading opinion makers, politicians and NGOs meet to discuss upcoming matters, and continued throughout the fall. Knowing that the Collective Management Organizations are well-coordinated, the short-term goal was to build partnerships to minimize harm in the Swedish implementation, whereas the long-term goal has been to build partnerships to defend and promote open internet through advocacy on a national level. This will be done continuously for the foreseeable future. This kind of network or partnership has been lacking in Sweden, to the detriment of an open internet.

As part of this work, we have responded with several thorough opinions to the Ministry of Justice. Realizing that we cannot change the legal text of the EU directive, the opinions have been pragmatic and focusing on solving problems, while still pushing for solutions safeguarding as much of the openness of internet as possible. Wishing to strengthen other organizations in Sweden and internationally, we have shared drafts of these opinions, published them openly on our wiki, and also prepared a FAQ under free license for others to build on. On a national level, the result has been that some of the organizations in the cultural heritage sector specifically state that they agree with and adhere to the proposals and positions of Wikimedia Sverige, showing that the gap we have tried to fill actually existed.

We have also tried to build capacity in smaller European chapters. We have shared the templates and drafts in English with several chapters, and we have let other chapters shadow our work, even physically, so that their representative can learn and get ideas for their implementation. Hopefully, that means that the process in other European countries works better as well. In the end, European coordination is important in the second phase too. Even though we regret the outcome of the vote, it is important that the national implementations are as harmonized as possible, otherwise the directive has been both counterproductive in the legal text, not solving the issues it sought to, and with no added value, as harmonization did not occur.

The implementation process has led to a stronger network among cultural heritage and open internet advocates. This network lays a stronger foundation for future advocacy work, especially towards our long-term goal of modernizing the Swedish freedom of panorama legislation. We will intensify our efforts for this modernization. With several motions from a range of different parties tabled in the Swedish parliament and a stronger network in the civil society, we hope to be able to find support of a majority in the Parliament to update the Swedish legislation in the upcoming years.

Story: Supporting content partnerships and cultural heritage globally[edit]

In this Story we are describing our work to support other Wikimedia affiliates across the globe to do more (both quantitative and qualitative) content partnerships and support cultural heritage.

Over the last years Wikimedia Sverige has had a number of projects and initiatives with the intention to improve work around content partnerships and supporting cultural heritage globally, and not only within Sweden. Over the last two years we have doubled down on these initiatives.

We have worked to collect information about built cultural heritage around the world; we have supported knowledge exchange between GLAMwiki coordinators; we have financed half of the Wikimedia work that has taken place at UNESCO; and most recently we have aimed to collect information about the world’s GLAM institutions. We have also experimented with, and written case studies about, different aspects of content partnerships. These include how to upload and connect material around audio files, how to handle racist and other types of problematic content in GLAM collections and how to upload and connect archival/library material to Wikisource, Wikidata and Wikipedia.

In much of this work we have worked together with other Wikimedia affiliates and the Wikimedia Foundation. We are now starting the process of developing a joint initiative together with the Wikimedia Foundation to investigate how we could support the movement with tools for partnerships and how Wikimedia Sverige could become an international support structure for the movement in the area of content partnerships and cultural heritage. We believe that Wikimedia Sverige’s history of working in this area, together with the planned research, places us in a good position to identify what tools and methods to develop in the coming years. This work will be happening in close collaboration with Wikimedia Foundation and affiliates and volunteers across the world.

Story: Influencing the future of EU funding[edit]

In this Story we are describing the opportunity that were presented to us to influence the future calls for billions of euros in EU funding through the Horizon Europe and Digital Europe programs.

At the end of 2019 a representative from Wikimedia Sverige's office received a personal invitation to participate at first one, and then a second, workshop in Brussels where experts in digital heritage met to outline a number of criterias regarding the planed European wide funding programs, the Horizon Europe and Digital Europe programs. Horizon Europe will have a budget of 100 Billion euro and Digital Europe a budget of 9.2 Billion Euro. As the only representative of civil society participation was considered a top priority.

During the meeting the main points we push for was: open access as a formal demand for all research produced with public funding, the importance that software developed with EU funds should always be FOSS, the importance to allow and promote for civil society to take part in the calls and the need to support efforts to increase both multilinguality and accessibility in Europe's digitization efforts. Discussions also covered the future of Europeana and how to coordinate digitization across Europe, to that end FindingGLAMs, Wikidata and the intensive work done by volunteers could be highlighted. These points were very well received and after the first meeting the team at the Commission invited us for a second meeting. At the second meeting they requested to have a meeting in 2020 with only us, i.e. no other organizations present, to identify paths forward together and to better understand our positions.

Bottom up[edit]

Our work to make more high quality information available through the Wikimedia platforms is dependent on engaging with content partners as well as cooperating with organizations and networks where experts can be drawn from. We invest heavily in ensuring that we regularly attract new partners and continuously engage and support the partners we already have through joint projects and initiatives that deliver content.

For the association 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 the 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. This often takes a bit of preparation to be able to tailor the message to them (using their lingo, connecting our message/suggestions to their own strategies and visions). After we start working together we strive to be accommodating and generous with our time and our resources to ensure a positive experience. During the year we continued refining the way we offer additional reporting to our partners.

In 2019 we have initiated contacts with hundreds of new organizations as part of our work with Wikimania and had a few hundred more organizations listening at events where we have presented. We have also had more in depth conversations with 58 new organizations and participated in 19 new events to learn more about different fields where we might initiate work in the future.

Story: Utilizing a unique event to gain and renew partnerships[edit]

In this Story we are describing our efforts to utilize the unique situation with Wikimania to engage with new and old partners.

GLAM has since the start been one of the core areas for Wikimedia Sverige, and since we started building up the chapter with staff in 2012 some of our largest projects have GLAM-related. Through the work, including training, uploads, editathons and other activities, several partners have moved on to stand on their own feet; this is, however, not yet the case with all of them, and some potential partners have temporarily been lost on the way.

With that in mind, Wikimania worked as a strong lever, giving a reason to reach out to and an argument for renewed conversation with several GLAMs who we have not worked actively with lately. The first ever Culture Crawl in Sweden involved several new and old partners, as did tours, group visits and other parts of the program. The experience of this work has proven very positive, both for visitors and the GLAM partners. It led to several editathons and meetings later on in the year, and laid the foundation for a stronger relationship with them as we go forward.

Wikimania did, however, not only enable partnership conversations with the GLAM sector, but various parts of society. The theme, “Stronger Together: Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals”, tied well to a prominent conversation in Sweden about the Sustainable Development Goals, and for several potential partners, this made, for the first time, the relationship between free knowledge and sustainable development tangible. Conversations with business archives, a high-level seminar with some 30 national libraries, meetings and events with civil society organizations and an invitation to a large-scale folk high school conference are four concrete examples of new potential partnerships or collaborations that Wikimania led to.

Given the theme, we also took Wikimania as an outreach opportunity, and contacted more than 1,000 leading opinion makers, civil society leaders, researchers, politicians and government agencies, to name a few. We chose especially to focus on NGOs working in the international aid sector, aiming to create an interest in organizations that previously had not had us on their radar. Several of them were not aware of Wikimedia Sverige or the existing movement behind Wikipedia and the theme and conference helped create awareness and interest to start a conversation with us. After Wikimania, as described in #Story: Working together for a better world, we organized some follow-up events with the organizations to get to know each other and continue the conversations we have initiated.

We also decided to use the Friday of the conference program as a way to highlight the work of the broader free knowledge sector. As such we invited a number of organizations we believed to do interesting things in the sector to present. At the event we met in private meetings with them and discussed different future opportunities together. The fact that these free knowledge organizations were present on the main stage hopefully got the Wikimedia community to think about potential joint opportunities. We are very hopeful that we will see new activities come out of the event led by other Wikimedia affiliates in the years to come.

Story: Working together for a better world[edit]

In this Story, we describe how we used Wikimania and the conference theme to reach out to a new sector of society, and what that might open up for futurewise.

With the theme of Wikimania, we wanted to visualize and make tangible a connection between the Wikimedia movement and free knowledge on the one hand, and sustainable development, including social and economic development, on the other hand. This was a way to get the conversation started within the Wikimedia movement, but it was also a way to spread awareness to other and new sectors about our work. The hope was that this would lead to a wider outreach and potential partnerships and as a lever to reach out to a new sector of society, inform about the conclusions and insights drawn at Wikimania, and create new partnerships with organizations involved in sustainable development.

As a way to achieve that, we reached out to all organizations registered as being involved within international aid before Wikimania, to initiate a conversation. After Wikimania, we followed up and sent personal invitations to several of them to participate at a high-level introduction to Wikimedia, free knowledge and sustainable development. The event included NGOs and institutions with various perspectives on sustainable development, including peace and peace-making, health, environmental sustainability, LGBTQ and diversity, refugees and human rights, to name a few. The goal of the event in particular was twofold: to create awareness and interest in the Wikimedia platforms as a tool for spreading facts and knowledge relating to sustainable development, and to create a network and conversation between people involved in sustainable development who are interested in and increasingly understand free knowledge and its important for knowledge equity and a sustainable world.

This event in turn led to several requests of individual meetings for future partnerships and collaborations. We got contacted and scheduled a meeting with the CEO of the Swedish chapter of ILGA, and the Nordic general secretary of UNHCR. Several of the organizations, during the event, also started conversations about overlapping projects, seeing that the work does not need to be done in isolation but cooperation. This opens up many interesting opportunities onwards, if Wikimedia Sverige can work as a platform and some kind of intermediary between organizations with different perspectives but the same goal – a sustainable world where free knowledge plays an integrated part.

WikiGap, as one concrete example, proved especially effective in opening up discussions about potential partnerships and networks: to identify gaps in information and use Wikipedia as a tool to fill in those knowledge gaps was a concept that several of the NGOs could easily understand.

For us, finding a way into international aid and sustainable development is important in itself, as we believe that Wikimedia platforms and the free knowledge movement have great, and often unused, potential in the work for a better world. This concrete example is also a way for us to experiment with reaching out to new sectors of society, something that we wish to focus more on in the future. We believe that working with more parts of civil society can have positive effects both for Wikimedia and society at large. Though it is a relatively new approach for Wikimedia Sverige, with the experiences and insights from working with the aid sector, we believe that we can scale up this work in the upcoming years.

Story: Why and how can problematic data be shared on Wikimedia’s platforms[edit]

In this story we are focusing on how we can work together and use the Wikimedia platforms for collaborative solutions for materials that are considered problematic. How should galleries, archives, museums, libraries and other cultural heritage institutions relate to data in their collections that can be perceived as offensive, provocative or racist?

The documentation of the collections and the data describing the content are like time capsules from the past and can sometimes be seen as problematic. When digital material becomes available, it can be a good opportunity to review historical descriptions and update the material so that it better relates to our time. Through free licenses and the possibility of crowdsourcing, data can be added and corrected over a long time. The improved metadata, for example through translations into several languages, can then be returned to the institutions.

The project investigated how collections from archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions, that are problematic in different ways, best can be included with crowdsourcing on our platforms.

Wikimedia can take an active role here with our platforms as a neutral place for further development. There are several issues that arise when institutions and organizations begin to work on the parts that are problematic in their collections. Our strength is that we are transparent through free licenses and already cooperate with several of these institutions and organizations and can in this way be the one who gathers experience in this area.

As a result of the project we have published a case study in collaboration with Swedish National Heritage Board about how the GLAM sector can work with problematic data in open platforms.

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 have 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).

We are also outlining where the project will have an impact in the Wikimedia universe and who we are partnering with to deliver the best possible result.

New for this year is that we also have information about the importance of each project., e.g. if the project is core, essential, one-off or experimental. In this context, a project is considered to be core if it is part of our identity as an organization. The project will be organized even if impact is less in the short term and will only be cancelled after a consensus has been reached amongst our community. A project is essential if it actively contributes to one or many of the goals that have been outlined for the year or the long term strategy. Most projects should belong here. A project that is considered one-off is organized because it is delivering a specific benefit to the organization but it is unlikely that we will repeat it in its current form. This type of project might continue over the years, but the content will intentionally change significantly over time. The experimental projects are testing a new idea, method or technology and are often externally financed. They might be a one-off or, if proved successful, become an essential project.

FindingGLAMs 2018[edit]

What is the project: This is a major global externally funded project aiming to add information about GLAM institutions from around the world, and the collections they hold, to Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. The database will be the first one of its type and will provide a service for both the GLAM sector, for organizations working with crisis situations and for Wikimedia affiliates to find potential partners. Case studies regarding batch uploads and other activities with different types of GLAMs will be developed to summarize the learnings and analyse the effect and future possibilities. We hope to outline what needs to be built in the future to ensure more and deeper partnerships with content partners and around cultural heritage. As part of the project we will do a lot of preparatory work for Wikimania, as the conference will create a lot of value for the project.

What’s been done: The project was extended into 2020. Some highlights from 2019 include:

  • We have uploaded nine different resources to the Wikimedia platforms ranging from audio files and note sheets to datasets of cultural heritage institutions from across the world and are preparing to upload another two resources in the start of 2020.
  • We have had 30 events where we have introduced our work around the project in different ways. 4 more are currently being planned for 2020.
  • During Wikimania there were a handful of FindingGLAMs related presentations and workshops took place while part of the hackathon focused on the issues around content partnerships identified as part of the project. The Culture Crawl was also connected to the project.
  • Together with the Wikimedia Foundation, as a spin-off project, we looked into how we can support the entire Wikimedia movement by developing tools for partnerships and become a thematic hub around content partnerships and cultural heritage.

What's next:

  • The the global Wikidata campaign to collect GLAM information will take place in February 2020.
  • A meeting with the permanent delegations at UNESCO HQ will take place in February 2020.
  • We have started to investigate partnerships around putting GLAM institutions on the map together with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). This work will continue also after this project has finished.
  • We will upload at least 2 more resources.
  • We will document our experiences in our case studies and compile a white paper.
  • We will finalize and report the FindingGLAMs project in February.

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

Importance: Essential

Project impact: Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia

Partners: UNESCO, Wikimedia Foundation, GLAM institutions in Sweden and abroad (more to come)

Link to the project: FindingGLAMs 2018

Wikipedia in Education 2019[edit]

What is the project: This project supports educators to implement Wikipedia based assignments where students improve Wikipedia as part of their curricular activities. It also supports the work around Open Educational Resources (OER) in Sweden.

What’s been done: We have worked together with 5 university courses and thereby continued to further develop our partnerships with institutions for higher education as part of the education program. We finalized the hiring process for a new staff member at the very end of the year.

What's next: The project will continue to build on previous success, but less staff focus will be directed to support educators to organize events, but instead focus will be directed to support peer-to-peer learning and to empower volunteers, students and WiRs to work with educators. A strategy and e-learning material to increase volunteer engagement will be developed. We will also increase the work around Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Access in Sweden. We will start planning for a national OER meeting to further engage the Swedish OER network and highlight the value of Open Access and work to bring more scientific material and sources to the Wikimedia platforms. Through the hub the relevant tools can be developed.

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

Importance: Core

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners:

Link to the project: Wikipedia i utbildning 2019

Samsyn 2018[edit]

What is the project: We work with six institutions for higher education within a three year externally funded project called Samsyn. The goal is a shared nomenclature for the university sector's collaboration. The central tool for collaborating is a wiki that we have helped them create. We are also providing training for the staff at the institutions on how a wiki works. At the end of the project suitable parts will be included on the Wikimedia platforms.

What’s been done: We have continued to work with the educational institutions to develop the material. By the end of 2019 the wiki opened up for account creation and editing by others than invited by members of the project. Some new users have arrived and made some productive edits.

What's next: We will give more trainings and further improve the information material on the wiki. A discussion will be initiated with the Wikipedia community about in what way the material from the Samsynwiki can be used as either a source or reference for improving article content. The learnings from the project on how to support an external organization with a wiki will be valuable for the future when developing projects with different civil society organizations.

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

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: Chalmers University of Technology, Gävle University, Kristianstad University, Linköpings University, Malmö University, Stockholm University

Link to the project: Samsyn 2018

GLAM 2019[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’s been done: The focus has been on acting as a meta level project focusing on providing training for partners where we want to deepen our cooperation in the future, making more GLAM institutions aware of our work, and on preparing for externally funded activities both with our long term GLAM partners (where they pay us for the hours needed for a batch upload or training etc.) and with involvement in initial meetings for possible major projects in the future.

The GLAM 2019 project was also the umbrella under which two externally funded GLAM projects were performed and concluded in the first half of the year, trainings as part of the Sounds of Change project and a data upload with SMHI. At the end of the year we started supporting the Thiel gallery as they were digitizing images and planned for making them available on Wikimedia Commons during 2020.

What's next: The project will continue in 2020 with support to old and new partners, presentations and activities at conferences and meetings to find new projects to get involved in. We intend to further investigate how we can share good examples of how to work with free licenses and structured data to achieve the results the GLAM institutions desire. We will also investigate how we can present solutions that combine databases and intermediation and if there is interest in testing new tools and installations of MediaWiki and Wikibase. This area has significant potential where we see an opportunity to take a leading role. We can be the node that connects different stakeholders in common goals around open linked data.

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

Project impact: Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata

Importance: Core

Partners: Nordic museum, Swedish National Heritage Board, Sounds of Change project, Swedish Performing Arts Agency, SMHI

Link to the project: GLAM 2019

Strategic inclusion of bibliographical data on Wikidata 2018[edit]

What is the project: A project in cooperation with the National Library of Sweden to improve the connections between the library’s open data and the Wikimedia projects, thereby facilitating the access to both the data and discoverability of the sources which they describe. Practically this involves importing some of the datasets held by the Library to Wikidata, in particular data about authorities (authors), libraries (in Sweden) and literary works (editions). Priority is given to data related to sources used on Swedish Wikipedia. Additionally we will host one Hackathon for library developers aimed at building prototypes for tools for interacting with the data or making it easier for the community to access the sources used on Wikipedia. In 2018 we focused on some initial imports and on clarifying the existing data structures and matching these to Wikidata structures.

What’s been done: Early in 2019, we organized a hackathon for National Library staff which combined basic training about Wikidata with ideas and prototypes of how the library's catalog and other resources could be knit closer to the Wikimedia projects. Later during the year, we worked with Project Runeberg, a digital repository of public domain Nordic literature (akin to Project Gutenberg), importing the metadata of the several thousand works hosted there to Wikidata.

In the last phase of the project, we focused on reporting and outreach. We held presentations about our work at Digikult 2019, a conference about digital cultural heritage in the Nordic countries, as well as (after the project formally ended) Wikimania 2019 and the UNESCO Global MIL Week 2019 Feature Conference. We also got an opportunity to share our experiences with the Libris Development Council, a group of representatives of the different branches of the Swedish library sector involved in developing the National Library's catalog. A summary of our work in English has been produced and shared with the WikiCite community.

What's next: The project ended in July 2019. The project Strategic inclusion of bibliographical data on Wikidata 2019 is a continuation of our collaboration with the National Library. The project was granted funding and started on August 1, 2019.

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

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: National Library of Sweden

Link to the project: Strategisk inkludering av biblioteksdata på Wikidata 2018

Strategic inclusion of bibliographical data on Wikidata 2019[edit]

What is the project: A continuation of the 2018 project aiming to further improve the interconnectedness between open library data and Wikimedia data. In addition to further developing ideas and tools that were prototyped in the previous project, it will also strive to import several datasets owned by the National Library of Sweden and ensure that data uploaded are used on Wikipedia, through communication and various events. At least one hackathon will be organized and support will be given to the National Library so that they can improve their internal tools by taking advantage of the increased interconnection with Wikidata. Automatic updating and maintenance of data is a natural continuation of the previous project and is something that we will focus on.

What’s been done: The project started in September 2019. Due to staff changes at the National Library, we did not get an opportunity to discuss and plan our work until December, which is why the majority of the work will be carried out in 2020. Nevertheless, late in the year we made progress on our goal of enriching Wikidata with more Swedish bibliographic data by uploading selected subsets of the Swedish National Bibliography that we deemed particularly interesting: magazines and journals published in Sweden (33,000 entries) and National Public Inquiries (6,000 entries).

What's next: The majority of the work in the project will be carried out in the first half of 2020. This includes a hackathon for National Library staff and development of tools and workflows for updating and maintenance of the data, as well as investigating how the data is used on Wikipedia and how this can be improved.

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

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: National Library of Sweden

Link to the project: Strategisk inkludering av biblioteksdata på Wikidata 2019

Wikipedia in Libraries 2019[edit]

What is the project: This project will prepare digital training material for Sweden’s public librarians as part of a larger national initiative to improve their digital skills. The training material will be included in a learning platform created by the National Library. Furthermore, continuous training, different events and trainings at libraries across Sweden will be organized as well as two campaigns targeted towards engaging library staff to contribute to the Wikimedia platforms.

What’s been done: The digital learning material has been created and published on Digiteket. We also planned the tour for the beginning of the year and invited librarians to participate.

What's next: During January and February 2020 we will visit five regions to conduct training for librarians with the aim of getting them to be able to run events at their libraries later on.

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

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: National library

Link to the project: Projekt:Wikipedia i biblioteken 2019

Advocacy 2019[edit]

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

What’s been done: Our main focus area for advocacy during 2019 has been the Copyright Directive. Through an invitation from the Ministry of Justice, we have taken part in the process of national implementation of the Copyright Directive; we have submitted several opinions on different articles of the directive, coordinated with other cultural heritage and free knowledge organizations, and partnered around how to maximise influence on the implementation process in favor of an open internet. To this end we have also written op-eds in one of the largest national newspapers, taken part in seminars in the Swedish parliament and in different ways expressed our position.

What's next: We finalized our positions on the crucial articles for Wikimedia Sverige – articles 14, 15 and 17 – by December 2019. In late spring of 2020, the Ministry of Justice will finalize a ministry memorandum, and after that, the consultative and political process, in which we aim to be active, will take its start.

In this work, we also aim to raise the issue of freedom of panorama, together with partners.

We also hope to continue improving our strategy around opinion building and get board approval of the strategy.

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

Importance: Core

Project impact: Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia

Partners: FKAGEU

Link to the project: Påverkansarbete 2019

Use[edit]

  Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (end of the year) 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. Based on the key figures identified as metrics by the office the measured media activities for November 2019 will increase by 10 % compared to November 2018. 0 out of 1 1 out of 1 set of metrics defined
We worked on defining how to measure the reach of our newsletter and adjust the policies and activate statistical tools needed for it. A set of metrics were defined.
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. No work was done No work was done
Wikipedia was included in an external report about Internet usage in Sweden. Due to staff changes and other large commitments no further work took place to achieve this metric this 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.[8] The result is monitored annually. 100% (18 new bugs and 0 translation messages) 100% (18 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 In order to make content available for more people the Wikispeech extension shall be activated as a beta function on three language versions of Wikipedia[9] before the end of the year, and supporting functionality/tools will be developed to add more languages. A prototype was finalized for all three languages but was not activated as a beta function. 0 of 3 languages activated
The new Wikispeech project started in September 2019 and will initially work to activate the first 3 languages in 2020.

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 activities accessible to everyone.

Making the platforms and activities known and appreciated[edit]

We work to spread information about the value and importance of free knowledge and about the Wikimedia platforms as tools to achieve more free knowledge of better quality.

We believe that more communication will, amongst other things, improve our possibilities for increasing participation at our events, help us to find more partners, increase funding opportunities and avoid misunderstandings about our work and the Wikimedia platforms.

We have launched a redesigned website to create an easy entry point to our work to all interested new partner organizations, journalists, volunteers, donors and prospective members. We hope that this will help us reach our goal of reaching 5,000 members in 3 years, a number which in Sweden is considered the breaking point for it to be a popular movement in the country.

As part of the Wikimania preparations we have worked closely with the Wikimedia Foundation’s communication team and the Swedish communication agency Wenderfalck to develop a set of communication resources to increase awareness of Wikimedia amongst Swedes. We have also engaged a dozen volunteers with social media communication and hired a communication staff member who until December will create a set of stories around our work, our volunteers and about how it all connects to the Sustainable Development Goals.

Story: Visibility through the Sustainable Development Goals[edit]

In this story we are describing how we used the Sustainable Development Goals as a framework for describing the work we are doing, thereby making the impact tangible both for ourselves and for others.

The theme for Wikimania 2019 in Stockholm related the work, projects and potentials of Wikimedia and the wider free knowledge movement to the overarching framework of the Sustainable Development Goals. The discussions taking place during Wikimania led to many new insights and ideas, which in most cases were documented and formulated. A grant from SIDA, the Swedish International Development Agency, enabled us to use these formulated insights to develop a campaign, to be run in social media during the early months of 2020.

The primary resource for this campaign was a series of speeches given by professionals, VIPs and external speakers, all relating the free knowledge movement to the SDGs. Examples included Tyler Radford, Executive Director of Humanitarian Open Street Maps Team (HOT), Liv-Inger Somby, a prominent Sami journalist, Michael Peter Edson, co-founder of the UN Live museum, and Karin Holmgren, vice-chancellor of SLU, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

These speeches, given on the largest stage during Wikimania, were documented and later on aired by Utbildningsradion (UR), one of the Swedish public broadcasters. Preliminary data from the public broadcaster suggest that about 10,000 persons took part of the content when it was aired by UR during the fall, through the TV channel Kunskapskanalen. The speeches were also made available on their platforms, and, what was especially new, on the Wikimedia platforms, through a collaboration between us and UR, under a CC BY license. This paved new ground both for UR and for us, with great potential for the future.

The grant also enabled us to let a professional communication agency use this material and turn it into a series of small video clips and social media posts, to be promoted in social media in early 2020. The aim is that this campaign will help positioning us as an important player not only in the free knowledge movement, but also in society in general, visualizing and making tangible the work we are doing under a framework often used in the Swedish public debate.

Next to the Wikimania speeches recorded by UR, a series of volunteer stories documented during Wikimania were core to this campaign. Read more about it here.

Story: Volunteers are actively supporting our communication[edit]

In this Story we are describing how we support the creation of information material by and from volunteers and what we aim to do to highlight their work. Wikimedia Sverige has put a lot of focus on engaging volunteers in our communication this year. By doing so we hope to reach more people and improve engagement.

Some years ago, a couple of volunteers started a podcast, where they talked about Wikimedia and Wikipedia related topics. In about a year they had produced 20 episodes, with several of them having chapter staff as guests and bringing up projects run by Wikimedia Sverige. Due to the two hosts moving and other things happening in their life, the podcast took a break, but always intending to resurface again. The years passed by until this spring when one of the regular chapter volunteers restarted the work with the podcast with weekly episodes. This was done as a build up to Wikimania.

Wikimedia Sverige has supported the podcast by loaning microphones from our pool of technology and registering a domain, wikipediapodden.se, where the podcast can be promoted and shared. While it is hard to aggregate the number of subscribers and the number of automated pings from bots and pod players, the number of daily visitors to wikipediapodden.se has grown to over 1,000. During Wikimania and the Wiki Techstorm several interviews in English were recorded and distributed to a more international audience.

For the promotion of Wikimania we have organized a team of around 10 volunteers that run the social media channels. They are working semi-independently and have allowed us to very actively engage people over social media over the span of 8 months. We have hired a communication staff member that will develop stories about the volunteers and speakers during the conference to show the connection between free knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals. We are also very happy that we have received a USD 30,000 grant from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency allowing us to engage a communication agency to promote stories from the conference from September 2019 to April 2020.

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: Collecting speech data for all[edit]

In this Story we are describing how we are laying the foundation to collect speech data. An effort that intends to improve accessibility on Wikipedia and reduce the problems for minorities with AI.

Speech technology, such as text-to-speech and speech recognition, can be a great tool when written text is not suitable. This can be in situations when you have your eyes or hands occupied. It can also be useful, sometimes even required, if you have difficulties reading for any reason, decreased eyesight, lacking education or dyslexia to mention a few.

When we worked on the initial Wikispeech project, we realized that freely available speech data, i.e. recorded speech, were limited. This prevents the development of text-to-speech and speech recognition solutions that are working for new languages, for people with different types of voices or accents. To solve it more data is needed. A lot more.

This is especially true for languages where there is little commercial interest, even though speakers of these languages may be the ones that would benefit the most from the derived functions. During the year we developed a continuation of the Wikispeech project to focus on tools to collect speech data through crowdsourcing. This way the Wikimedia community will be able to help fill these gaps. The data and tools, we hope, will be a key part of the accessibility infrastructure.

The EU Web Accessibility Directive, which requires the websites and apps of all public sector bodies to be made accessible, are now in effect. To provide accessibility functionalities for the tools we build for the public sector in the EU is now a requirement for adoption of them. Hence, this also ties into our efforts to develop tools for partner organizations that want to share their content onto our platforms. The tools we build must be accessible, and through this initiative we are hoping to make it possible.

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 have 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).

We are also outlining where the project will have an impact in the Wikimedia universe and who we are partnering with to deliver the best possible result.

New for this year is that we also have information about the importance of each project., e.g. if the project is core, essential, one-off or experimental. In this context, a project is considered to be core if it is part of our identity as an organization. The project will be organized even if impact is less in the short term and will only be cancelled after a consensus has been reached amongst our community. A project is essential if it actively contributes to one or many of the goals that have been outlined for the year or the long term strategy. Most projects should belong here. A project that is considered one-off is organized because it is delivering a specific benefit to the organization but it is unlikely that we will repeat it in its current form. The type of project might continue over the years, but the content will intentionally change significantly over time. The experimental projects are testing a new idea, method or technology and are often externally financed. They might be a one-off or if successful become an essential project.

Trust Making 2019[edit]

What is the project: The focus of this project is to develop methods on how to survey the trust of Wikimedia. We will support students and faculty to investigate the attitudes and trust amongst different groups in society (a specific focus will be on our own membership base). We will work with the university sector and offer both expertise (e.g. a reference group) and limited financial support.

What’s been done: No work took place during the year as the project was down-prioritized when we were short on staff.

What's next: We will investigate the possibility of working with academia in 2020.

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

Project impact: -

Importance: Experimental

Partners: -

Link to the project: Förtroende 2019

Visibility Making 2019[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.

We will work to keep our blog and social media accounts active with general communication to ensure awareness about our work. The website will be updated regularly through the work in this project. We expect a major increase in visibility for our work simply due to Wikimania and will conduct part of the communication efforts through this project.

What’s been done: We have launched our new website, a new newsletter and are about to start designing a communication campaign with Wenderfalck, a Swedish communication agency (this will happen as a separate project).

We have increased the number of followers on our social media accounts significantly and defined a set of metrics.

What's next: The metrics for 2019 will be compiled to allow for comparison across years and analysis of our efforts. Work will continue with social media, our newsletter and to update our website.

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

Project impact: -

Importance: Experimental

Partners: -

Link to the project: Synlighet 2019

Wikispeech 2019[edit]

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

New for the work in 2019 is that we will continue to solve the issues that have been identified during the code review, prepare for a clearer role division (i.e. skills we need to add to the team) and prepare for other larger externally funded projects supporting Wikispeech development. Furthermore, we will prepare for hiring more staff members working with Wikispeech development should further funding be approved.

What’s been done: We have developed some of the missing functionalities and done some clean-up from the last project in order to quickly be able to start working on the development of the Speech Data Collector.

What's next: This project has ended but the work continues through the project Wikispeech – Speech Data Collector 2019.

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

Importance: Essential

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: WMF, STTS, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Link to the project: Wikispeech 2019

Wikispeech – Speech Data Collector 2019[edit]

What is the project: The main aim of Wikispeech – Speech Data Collector 2019 is to further develop the MediaWiki extension Wikispeech so that it is possible to collect speech data through crowdsourcing. This can be used in order to improve the quality of the text-to-speech software and to extend this to more languages in the future. Furthermore it will be a resource and a service to the entire FOSS community. The project continues into 2021.

In 2019 we will continue developing the Text-to-Speech component with the aim to have a stable version ready for code and security review, for later release as Beta for Swedish, English and Arabic. Initial architecture of the Speech Data Collector tool will be done with the assistance of Wikimedia Deutschland who will also be involved with code review and technical feedback throughout the project. In 2019 we expect initial development of the Speech Data Collector to start along with continuous improvements to the Text-to-Speech component developed in the original Wikispeech project so that it can be activated on Wikipedia.

What’s been done: The project started at a slower pace due to parallel commitments with the developing the hub. The focus of 2019 was on getting the organisational aspects of the project up and running, identifying the issues which had prevented Text-to-Speech from making it to the beta cluster and doing high level design of the different aspects of the Speech Data Collector.

What's next: In January a site visit will take place at Wikimedia Deutschland to allow for a more intense in depth analysis of the issues preventing the Text-to-Speech component from being launched as a Beta feature. In February another developer will be hired to work on the project and as a result we are expecting the (software) development to be ramped up for both the Speech Data Collector and the Text-to-Speech components already in the first quarter of 2020.

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

Importance: Essential

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: WMF, STTS, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Link to the project: Projekt:Wikispeech – Talresursinsamlaren 2019

Bug Reporting and Translation 2019[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.

In 2019 the main focus remained continuous bug reporting, ensuring all staff are comfortable in raising encountered bugs and assisting the community in bug reporting. The plan was also to hold at least one event/drive focused on improving the coverage and quality of Swedish translations of the software (through a translate-a-thon). For that we intended to leverage Wikimania in Stockholm to engage new volunteers in the translation efforts."

What has been done: A total of 18 bugs were reported by three of the employees. No event was organized, mainly due to scheduling limitations.

What's next: The continuous reporting of bugs will continue and we will look into how non-technical staff can be supported in bug reporting. We again aim to hold a translate-a-thon or bug-a-thon event as well as investigating how such events can become a standard feature of the hub.

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

Importance: Essential

Project impact: MediaWiki

Partners: Wikimedia community

Link to the project: Buggrapportering och översättning 2019

Knowledge in Crisis Situations 2019[edit]

Through previous collaborations, the value of free knowledge in crisis situations has been identified as an interesting area for the association to operate within. Both to take part of the enormous amount of material that various aid organizations and the like develop, but also to provide people who, for various reasons, are in a crisis situation with freely licensed material. At present, the knowledge of those working in the sector is very low. In this project, the foundation for changing this is added.

What has been done: As described in the story Utilizing a unique event to gain and renew partnerships, we used Wikimania both as a means of formulating and making tangible the connection between free knowledge and sustainable development and as a leverage to start a conversation with organizations involved in international aid. In order to work with knowledge in crisis situations, however, we realized a strong need to strengthen our network with these kinds of organizations. Using Wikimania as a leverage, we reached out to around a thousand NGOs and invited them to the conference. A few also participated at a seminar we organized with chosen NGOs, institutions and agencies to deepen the conversation and relationship. The seminar led to several individual meetings, and an insight in several of them of the importance of free knowledge in crisis situations.

What's next: We will compile stories into a convincing material, and continue the conversation with the new potential partners. We also wish to use the network established as a platform to reach more international aid organizations, and establish ourselves as a player in the field.

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

Importance: Essential

Project impact: MediaWiki

Partners:

Link to the project: Kunskap i krissituationer 2019

Community[edit]

  Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (end of the year) Comments
Community C.1.1 To make work easier, support will be given 365 times to at least 100 different Wikimedians (or others who advocate for free knowledge) through access to expertise, financing or other resources.[10] 220 occasions to 60 Wikimedians 340 out of 365 occasions

36 out of 100 Wikimedians

Some users have borrowed and used equipment, such as laptops and microphones, for longer periods of time leading to the discrepancy between number of support occasions and number of unique individuals supported.
C.1.2 To strengthen the community the chapter will support at least 75 recurring meet-ups[11] for Wikimedians 114 128 of 75
We have supported a large number of meet-ups. The group in Gothenburg has been especially 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. 2 1 technical wish implemented
While only one of the two technical wishes we had worked on was implemented in 2019 we expect the second to be ready in the second quarter of 2020.
C.2 To increase participation from Wikimedia's underrepresented groups[12], targeted initiatives organized by the association shall result in one productive edit from 365 unique users belonging to one or more of those groups. 1,091 725 out of 365
The GLAM and educational activities are still an efficient way to engage people from underrepresented groups.

The international WikiGap events are however responsible for the majority (the numbers can be found on the Outreach and Events Dashboard). In total the events had around 800 participants. An estimate is that 2/3 were women, but not all have been editing. We have also supported 2 Wikipedia camps for people identifying themselves as women.

Supporting existing community[edit]

We work to support our wider community in a number of ways, which is possible thanks to staff members with a wide variety of skills and because of the infrastructure we have built up in the last few years.

We see the Wikimedia movement needing two different sets of volunteers, that to some degree overlap: 1. The online contributors that for example edits Wikipedia, that photograph for Wikimedia Commons or add data to Wikidata. 2. The volunteers that are interested to support free knowledge offline in different ways, such as organizing events, giving lectures, soliciting new members or forming new partnerships. We have historically focused on the first group but now we are aiming to create resources needed to grow the second group. In 2019 we started to investigate how we can further support the international volunteer community more actively, both through expertise and through grants (see e.g. #Story: Providing small grants globally).

This year we have therefore focused on building a stronger foundation by developing communication tools, developing a strategy and by developing training material.

We still continue to create meeting spaces, cover costs associated with the volunteer work and we have provided technical support to create tools (requested solutions for long standing technical problems) for the most active volunteers. We aim to continue with more supporting tools also later this year.

Story: Reducing the cost to host the Wikimania conference in the future[edit]

In this Story we are describing how the experience gained from a number of international Wikimedia events will be shared with volunteers and other affiliates to reduce their cost to host similar events. We believe that an investment to share our knowledge, through a number of different channels, will save significant resources over time for the movement as a whole, even if Wikimedia Sverige might not need the material for ourselves.

For the last few years Wikimedia Sverige has organized a number of international conferences for our movement. Our team now has gained a lot of valuable experience in this field and a good working relationship with a number of volunteers and other affiliates active in organizing Wikimedia conferences.

Even with previous experience the work with organizing a large international conference such as Wikimania is a major undertaking for a small or midsize organization such as ours. We have had a good working relationship with the Wikimedia Foundation's conference team which has reduced a lot of the logistical hurdles. However, the near complete lack of existing documentation and supporting material available for the local team has left us surprised and it has led to a massive cost increase as we often had to reinvent the wheel.

To ensure that future volunteer led teams will not have to experience a similar situation we invested staff time in 2019 and will continue in 2020 to document our work and create guidelines for future teams. We also intend to offer next year’s team the opportunity to meet with our staff on a regular schedule to function as a resource. The questions and feedback we will get at those meetings will help inform us what supporting documentation or other material we should prioritize creating.

In 2019 we prepared a thorough debrief of our work to help next year’s organizers to avoid falling in similar traps or reinventing unnecessary wheels. We also finalized a volunteer case study, which along with the Wikimania volunteer strategy might provide important insight when it comes to volunteer management for such a large event.

Story: Highlighting the global volunteer community in our communication[edit]

In this Story we are focusing on the work to broadcast the impressive work done by individual volunteers in our global community. We highlighted them through a dedicated communication campaign in the months after Wikimania.

During the Wikimania conference we engaged a communication staff member to work on developing a set of blog posts highlighting the work done by a diverse group of amazing volunteers from across the world. We conducted interviews, took photos, wrote up the stories and published them over the coming months on our blog. We focused our stories on the work they did that connected free knowledge to the Sustainable Development Goals (see story on SDGs). These stories were then used for a communication campaign on social media.

For the campaign we received a dedicated grant from Sida, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. This work has allowed us to create awareness about the great work done by volunteers and we hope they can function as role models for newcomers. We also hope that by highlighting them with a feature story the volunteers feel seen and encouraged to continue their work.

The campaign also gave us the possibility to increase the understanding amongst the population in Sweden about the importance of free knowledge to create a better world and to build awareness of our brand. This is one of the steps taken to reshape our organization to be more visible in order to engage many more people in different ways (as supporters, donors or volunteers).

Story: Wikipedia in libraries – cooperation and regional activities[edit]

In this Story we are focusing on how libraries can be the nave and meeting place for people who want to join the free knowledge movement and contribute on Wikimedia’s platforms.

Sweden is divided into 290 municipalities and according to the law there must be at least one library in each municipality. All citizens must have proximity and access to the knowledge and information that the libraries offer. By having the libraries as a partner there are many opportunities to reach new places and people that are interested in contributing to free knowledge.

There are a number of benefits with physical meetings, especially at a place filled with knowledge to use for sources which provide a variety of perspectives and experts to navigate to find them. The nation wide system of libraries provides unique and valuable resources for this. Independent arenas are needed where we can discuss the future of the Internet and what we want with the Internet. Libraries are good places to go from passive participation to actively developing digital issues. Together we can create program activities that address issues of participation, knowledge and integrity.

In the project Wikipedia in libraries 2019, we have worked together with the National Library of Sweden in a venture called Digitalt först med användaren i fokus (“Digital first with the user in focus”). The project is divided into two parts, where we have contributed a training course on the digital learning platform Digiteket and then a continuation in 2020 where we are going to visit five places around Sweden. On this tour we hold workshops with the aim to see if free knowledge can be introduced into the library's regular program activities. We hope to use our network of interested libraries to reach across the country, in a way we have been unable to before. We will couple these efforts with a clear path for engagement of the local Wikimedia communities.

Story: Careful preparations make it possible to effectively engage a global WikiGap community[edit]

In this Story we are covering how the WikiGap campaign has been successful in supporting the efforts done by our existing community. Through careful documentation and efforts to streamline the event organization we could organize the entire campaign in just one intensive month. The careful documentation made it possible for a new staff member to successfully lead the efforts.

Organizing WikiGap in 2019 was different than in 2018. Due to the fact that the Swedish government was not appointed until January 22, the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs could not decide if they could be involved in the campaign until early February. This meant that work that in 2018 took more than three months now was instead done in just one month. Fortunately, WikiGap was well documented from 2018 and a lot of material could be updated and reused in 2019, which enabled both the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Wikimedia Sverige to quickly act and inform the Swedish embassies as well as volunteers from the Wikimedia movement about WikiGap very quickly. Another factor that enabled the campaign, despite the very short preparation time, was that many organizers were familiar with the structure and organization of the campaign since 2018. Our good cooperation with the staff at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs allowed us to quickly move forward.

At Wikimania in August 2019 Wikimedia Sverige and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs organized a workshop about the future of WikiGap. By using the experience of previous organizers participating in the workshop, we could identify ways to develop the campaign further and try to develop an even greater commitment. Furthermore, the Ministry hosted an event for the WikiGap organizers in 2018 and 2019 in Arvsfurstens palats as part of Wikimania. The fantastic volunteers got the chance to meet each other, share experiences and mingle and discuss the campaign. Gustaf Lind, the ambassador for Human Rights, held a speech during the event, as did Wikimedia Sverige’s Executive Director John Andersson. The event was fully booked and mentioned by several as one of the highlights of Wikimania.

We look forward to achieving even greater impact in 2020, through a longer preparation time, more experience from our and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ side as from the side of the local organizers, and finally because of improved visibility around the campaign in social media. During Wikimania, the state secretary Annika Söder also specifically mentioned that there will be a third campaign in 2020, something that built excitement in the movement. In 2020, we also want to streamline our work even more, by being clearer about what expectations our co-organizers can have on us and what kind of information we need from them. We also hope to be able to extend and deepen the participant’s commitment through the WikiGap Challenge, which was first held in 2019 and where increased communication efforts, partnership with external organizations and this year too great prizes might lead to increased interest.

Our initial investment, which was significant, now pays off. With a very limited cost we can now continue organizing the campaign and even scale it to become significantly bigger and ensure a significant outcome. To keep interest up amongst our partners, the media and the volunteer community we will look for ways to further expand the WikiGap initiative to also include other topics where gaps currently exist.

Story: Providing small grants globally[edit]

In this story we are describing an international small grants program for GLAM-focused education and outreach activities primarily in the Global South. Based on our long-standing grant program for Wikimedians in Sweden, this project enables Wikimedia affiliates to leverage their networks to engage the local communities and recruit new editors in areas where they are most needed.

For several years, we have been running a small grants program to provide financial support for Wikimedians in Sweden to carry out interesting projects. Every year we have been able to support several initiatives, such as workshops and edit-a-thons, photo excursions and press accreditation for photographers to concerts and other events.

The project FindingGLAMs provided an opportunity for us to expand this successful initiative to Wikimedia communities outside Sweden. Since one of the outcomes of the project was shining a light on the imbalance in data coverage between different parts of the world, we decided to support GLAM focused educational events outside of the Global North.

We announced the grant program mainly by directly contacting the Wikimedia chapters and user groups who we thought might be interested. The response of the Wikimedia community was better than we expected, and we allocated our budget within a couple weeks. Six organizers in Botswana, Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, South Africa and Iran were provided grants to carry out nine events in early 2020. All the organizers represent Wikimedia chapters or user groups and thus have contact networks in their local Wiki and GLAM communities, as well as experience with Wikimedia outreach. The events focus mostly on introducing librarians and archivists to Wikidata and open data.

The choice of grantees was different than in our Swedish grant program, where the recipients are independent Wikipedia editors who ask for funds to carry out individual projects (e.g. taking photos at a concert) or self-organize in small groups (e.g. photo excursions, edit-a-thons). In this international program, we decided to target Wikimedia organizations, as they can, due to their organizational capabilities and contact networks, carry out activities on a larger scale, including reaching out to non-Wikimedians, like GLAM professionals.

An issue that became clear when communicating with the grantees was that some of them would have preferred to receive the money upfront, rather than waiting for a reimbursement of the actual costs associated with the event. Reimbursing the actual costs is the normal procedure in our established community grants program, which has worked well with the Swedish grantees. Due to unclarity regarding the audit demands we had to play it safe and follow the same process with our international grantees. Being able to transfer funds in advance to cover budgeted costs would have made the organization of the event easier for the local teams, but would have created a significant risk for the association as knowledge about the regulation was missing.

Albeit limited in scope, the program demonstrated that there is a keen interest in organizing outreach and training activities among Wikimedia affiliates in the Global South, but lack of resources is a real problem. Although such one-off support is far from an ideal solution, it can enable some fruitful initiatives. We were impressed with the scope of the events and the close connection between the Wikimedia affiliates and the cultural heritage and educational institutions in collaboration with which the events were organized.

For Wikimedia Sverige this was an important experiment. Through it we learnt a lot and also identified areas where further investigation is needed to be able to more efficiently provide this type of direct financial support in the future.

Expanding the community[edit]

To grow the community on Wikimedia platforms we are organizing a number of activities aimed at creating interest amongst 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 and to provide direct support of different forms.

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

Story: The power of working together to change status quo[edit]

In this Story we are covering how powerful joint initiatives such as the WikiGap campaign can be when the goal is clearly stated and shared by many people across the world.

WikiGap focuses on engaging new and old Wikimedia community members to increase the coverage of women on Wikipedia. The local teams decide how they organize their own event, and many have decided to partner with local women's rights groups and similar to find new engaged editors who want to work over time to change the status quo.

Despite us having only a month to prepare the campaign this year (see Story above) we manage to engage a large number of people. So far, figures from the outreach dashboard show that over 11,400 articles have been edited by 800 people during 35 events. However, when we have put together the number of events that we know so far, it seems until today there are about 40. The numbers are lower than 2018, but considering the very limited time given to the local teams to organize the event we are in awe at what they managed to achieve.

This year we wanted to extend the engagement in WikiGap and we therefore created the WikiGap Challenge writing competition. It was also a way to engage the existing Wikipedia community in WikiGap. The competition went on for a month and attracted 90 people who edited over 1,400 articles.

The first prize in the WikiGap Challenge was that Wikimedia Sverige subsidized the winner's travel and accommodation as well as the conference fee for Wikimania. We hope that the prize itself has increased attention around Wikimania amongst the most active Wikipedia editors.

Story: Reaching further – newsletter, membership drives and website[edit]

In this Story we are expanding on the work done in 2019 to develope our communication with our members and others who are interested in Wikimedia Sverige’s work and in the movement for free knowledge. Our renewed newsletter and updated website have been important pieces in this work. We have also gotten started on trying out ways to recruit new members to Wikimedia Sverige.

Newsletter[edit]

We want the members of Wikimedia Sverige to have insight into the movement they are a part of. We also want them to feel that they have opportunities to take a more active part in the movement by participating in the activities we organize. To achieve this, we have renewed our newsletter, which had been on hold since 2015.

We have designed our newsletter to be easily digestible with short texts and links to further reading for those who are interested. We sent out the first letter in July and two subsequent letters in September and December. Since September we have been gathering statistics such as the open rate and click rates for links in the newsletter. So far, we have a high open rate of about 50 percent and a click rate of about 10 percent.

On December 31, 2019 the newsletter had 578 subscribers. The majority of the subscribers are previous and current members of Wikimedia Sverige, but the newsletter is open to subscription for anyone who is interested. The number of subscribers to the newsletter will increase as our membership base does, but we also want to increase the amount of subscribers who are not (yet) members of Wikimedia Sverige.

Another development for the newsletter which we will look into during 2020 is whether we should translate it into English, as we have volunteers, members and other interested parties who prefer English over Swedish.

Membership drives[edit]

We want the Wikimedia movement to become a social movement in Sweden. One way to contribute towards this goal is to increase our membership base. At the start of 2019 we had 453 members, at the end of 2019 we had 505, an increase of more than 10 percent. We want to accelerate this increase during 2020.

We have started to look into ways to more actively recruit new members to Wikimedia Sverige. One way are campaigns in social media, such as the communication campaign we have designed with the help of the communication agency Wenderfalck.

Another way to recruit members is by actively approaching potential members at events. During Wikimania we were visible on both the Stockholm University campus and at Arlanda Airport. To make use of this visibility we prepared a document aimed at staff and volunteers. The document contained basic information about Wikimedia Sverige, answers to frequently asked questions, information about how to sign up as a member and some tips about recruiting. This document is a starting point for a more active recruiting work at events.

Website[edit]

We want potential members and partners to understand what goals Wikimedia Sverige are working towards, what we do and how our work helps us reach our goals. Our website is an important place for information about this. During 2019 we launched an updated website. The goal was to get a website that serves as a first introduction to the association, for those who do not know us at all or only know very little about us.

Website visitors who are interested in reading more are linked from our website to our wiki. In 2020, we will continue our efforts to clarify the information we have by working with the content on the wiki, especially those pages that are of interest to members and others who are interested in our work.

Story: Northern Europe continue collaborating through WikiNEM[edit]

In this Story we are describing how physical meetings can support regional partnerships and joint initiatives. The Wikimedia Northern Europe Meeting that we initiated is still going strong.

Following the first Northern Europe Meeting in Stockholm 2018 the Estonian chapter picked up where we left off and took on themselves to organize WikiNEM 2019. During Wikimania in Stockholm we had a meetup where available representatives from the Northern Europe chapters and affiliates talked about what worked well and could be reused and what could be improved. The open space type meeting used in Stockholm worked fine and for the days in Tallinn and Tartu the meeting was facilitated using a combination of open space and a more strict program.

After announcing the possibility to go to the meeting to the community and Wikimania volunteer group three volunteers and one staff member attended the meeting. During the meeting we participated both in the track dedicated to new community members and the one for veteran users. The discussions during the meeting included ways to improve and move on with common projects, ways to collaborate and how to move on with future conferences.

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 have 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).

We are also outlining where the project will have an impact in the Wikimedia universe and who we are partnering with to deliver the best possible result.

New for this year is that we also have information about the importance of each project., e.g. if the project is core, essential, one-off or experimental. In this context, a project is considered to be core if it is part of our identity as an organization. The project will be organized even if impact is less in the short term and will only be cancelled after a consensus has been reached amongst our community. A project is essential if it actively contributes to one or many of the goals that have been outlined for the year or the long term strategy. Most projects should belong here. A project that is considered one-off is organized because it is delivering a specific benefit to the organization but it is unlikely that we will repeat it in its current form. The type of project might continue over the years, but the content will intentionally change significantly over time. The experimental projects are testing a new idea, method or technology and are often externally financed. They might be a one-off or if successful become an essential project.

Community Support 2019[edit]

What is the project: This project is directed directly towards the Swedish Wikimedia community, and consists of a technology pool, the possibility to apply for grants, money for purchasing books, sponsorship for photography accreditation to events etc. In 2019 we continued to support our diversity leaders to run local events in the beginning of the summer. Continued support was also given to low maintenance events (wikifika/pub). We had a decreased focus on Stockholm events, and instead utilized other projects we ran in 2019. There was continued support with technology as well as accreditation to photographers.

What’s been done: During the year support has been given on 340 occasions to 36 Wikimedians. We have supported 128 physical meetings (wiki café, wiki pubs etc.). Two Wikipedia camps have been organized and led by volunteers, with the costs covered by Wikimedia Sverige, and the group of volunteers who have organized camps during the years had a meetup to reflect on the leadership process and to produce guides for future camps. Staff have received training on how to handle the photographic equipment to be able to advise and train new photographers.

What's next: Continuing with giving support, and systematically informing about possibilities in the form of events with photo accreditation etc.

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

Importance: Core

Project impact: Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource

Partners: Wikimedia community

Link to the project: Stöd till gemenskapen 2019

Development Support 2019[edit]

What is the project: The project focuses on giving technical (development) support to the Swedish volunteer community by solving technical problems that they have specifically requested to be worked on. In 2019 we initially focused on developing the ideas raised on the 2018 (Swedish) wish list, namely supporting ORES implementation and facilitating the use of maps in infoboxes, and shepherding the 2017 Citoid project to completion.

What’s been done: A gadget was created for showing quality assessment after making an edit. The assessment is automatically calculated using ORES and an icon is displayed to indicate how the quality has changed after the edit. This first version of the gadget has been enabled on SVWP and some feedback was received from the community. Some of the feedback concerned how ORES calculates quality which is outside the scope for WMSE.

What's next: We will finalize the development of the interactive maps. We will investigate reasonable standards for how long we maintain the tools we’ve developed, what is included in said maintenance and how we deal with tools once they have left our maintenance cycle. This work will be done with Development Support as the starting point but spans all of our past and present technical projects and will be a key consideration for the hub. We may also consider a technical wishlist for 2020.

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

Project impact: Wikipedia, MediaWiki

Importance: Essential

Partners: Wikimedia community

Link to the project: Utvecklingsstöd_2019

Wiki Loves 2019[edit]

What is the project: The project aims to coordinate Wiki Loves Earth 2019 and Wiki Loves Monuments 2019.

What’s been done: Wiki Loves Earth was organized in Sweden for the third time. It took place in May, and in total 132 individuals engaged and produced 721 media files, an increase in both participants and media files from last year. An impressive 75% of all the contributors were new editors. Wiki Loves Monuments was organised for the 9th time in September. While the participation level was roughly the same as in 2018 (65 editors) the number of contributed images (2,573) went up for the first time in four years, almost twice the contributions of 2018. Roughly 500 of the images from the two competitions are in use on Wikipedia and Wikidata.

What's next: We plan to organize Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments again in 2020, and as part of that, start experimenting a bit with how we can use them and potentially, in the future, other Wiki Loves-competitions, as leverages for new partnerships and contents. We will also investigate if the competitions can be leveraged to open up more data.

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

Importance: Essential

Project impact: Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata

Partners: Council of Working Life Museums, National Heritage Board, Swedish National Maritime Museums

Link to the project: Wiki Loves 2019

A Community for Everybody 2019[edit]

What is the project: This project focuses on inviting diverse participation in Wikimedia. In 2019 we coordinated the international campaign WikiGap for the second time. There is a network of active international Wikimedians with experience and interest in WikiGap and we have resources to build on.

What’s been done: WikiGap, a global initiative to increase the coverage of women on Wikipedia and to attract a more diverse crowd of editors, was organized for the second time in cooperation with the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. WMSE had a coordinating role in linking Wikimedia groups with Swedish embassies and a total of about 40 events have been held. A few events are being organized after the current initiative was finalized.

During Wikimania, the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs hosted a reception for the local organizers. The project was presented, and we experimented with a new concept we call Equal Edit, where experts provide inputs on what is missing in historical articles so that volunteers more easily can improve them in accordance with Wikipedia’s rules. This concept might be included in WikiGap 2020.

See also #Story: Careful preparations make it possible to engage a global community through WikiGap fast and easy and #Story: Story: The power of working together to change status quo.

What's next:. Planning for WikiGap 2020 will also start during Wikimania, and intensify during the fall, in order to give enough time for scaling. We will try to formulate new ideas and find takes on the campaign that leads to both sustained and renewed interest, from old and new partners. We will experiment with how WikiGap can lead to interest in international partners such as in the aid sector or the United Nations.

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

Importance: Core

Project impact: Wikipedia, Wikimedia movement

Partners: KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Swedish embassies across the world – in partnership with local volunteers or Wikimedia affiliates

Link to the project: En gemenskap för alla 2019

Enabling[edit]

  Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (end of the year) 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. 0/8 board members and 3/6 staff members 2 out of 9 board members

4 out of 9 staff members

As there were no new board members this year, and most of the current ones have multi-year experience from the work on the board, the need for training was limited. A dedicated training for the entire board is planned for 2020.
E.2 To strengthen the transparency of the organization and to offer insights to the international Wikimedia movement the members of the board or office staff shall participate in at least 5 international Wikimedia events and on a monthly basis update international newsletters[13] and key wiki portals etc. 5 int. events and 12 newsletters 11 int. events out of 5

12 newsletters out of 12

We have regularly been publishing in This Month in GLAM according to plan. Multiple staff members are now sharing information there.
E.3.1 To ensure organizational stability the chapter shall work towards broad and sustainable funding where no donor exceeds 50 %, a 100 % increase in membership from the 31 December previous year, increase volunteer involvement by 30 % compared to the total amount for the previous calendar year. Largest donor was FDC with 60.35%. Membership increased with 325%. Amount of volunteers increased with 26%. The WMF is our largest source of revenue at 50%, the Culture Foundation of the Swedish Postcode Lottery is the second largest contributor at 26%

504 out of 904 members.

96 out of 60 volunteers

For the full year the Wikimedia Foundation is the largest source of revenue at 50,3%. This is a shift from the progress report when the Culture Foundation of the Swedish Postcode Lottery was the largest contributor. The shift is entirely due to a shift in how our revenues are calculated (bringing it in line with the accounting), see more details in the section on Revenue below. The distribution of funding does not take in-kind donations into account.

The expected increase in the membership (since the progress report) was smaller due to a delay of the planned recruitment campaign. We did however expect a bump in memberships as a result of Wikimania.

Most of the volunteer involvement occurred through our WikiGap activities and Wikimania. However, the international WikiGap events organized by volunteers are not included here as we are lacking data. As expected Wikimania resulted in a significant number of volunteers, enough to have met our target by itself.

E.3.2 To ensure organizational stability the chapter shall actively work to increase the amount of overlapping competencies in business-critical areas. Fulfilled the goal. Fulfilled the goal.
Efforts include improved documentation around finances, documentation around the usage of our wiki and information about our new tools. We also successfully applied for a 90 account and for a membership at Giva Sverige, both improving our possibilities to fundraise. Preparations have also been made to increase staff size the coming years (adjusting for more complex HR legislation that starts when you pass 10 employees). We have also increased international work and connected our work to the Sustainable Development Goals. We have focused more on organizing small working groups at the office instead of delegating the responsibilities to one person and on documenting the work on 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 and commitments. 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]

To be able to develop skills in relevant fields board and staff members shall be given the opportunity to develop their skills. More than half of the staff members have participated in different types of trainings this year, a few at multiple ones. The work with developing educational material for new volunteers and members to easier use our tools and join our projects has continued.

As Wikimedia Sverige intends to grow in the coming years 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. We have started the work to initialize a more formalized training program for interns in 2020.

Story: Increased volunteer engagement through dedicated efforts[edit]

In this Story we are covering how dedicated efforts during the year have increased the number of volunteers and their engagement. By developing a number of resources we hope to increase the volunteer engagement even further.

One of Wikimedia Sverige's goals, both in 2019 and in the longer term, is to increase the number of supporting members and to increase the number of members who contribute to the association's activities through volunteering. We believe that the conditions for influencing society in the direction that the association strives for are created through a large and active membership base.

As part of this process, two of the employees at Wikimedia Sweden's office have undergone training how to effectively engage people in a movement and how to maintain commitment over time. Some of the success factors are clarity in terms of tasks and expectations, of being seen and belonging to a community and of being a member or volunteer that there is an opportunity to influence one's role and grow in one's mission. The two staff members organized a condensed inhouse training for the rest of the staff.

In order to create a consensus around the work on member recruitment and retention of our volunteers, the association has begun work on developing a volunteer strategy. A certain part of the work is of such a nature that it will not be very visible for the average member or volunteer. Concepts need to be defined, structures need to be questioned and reworked, and visions need to be formulated and implemented.

During the training sessions we will also present recurring tasks for our activities and campaigns and how they are divided over the calendar year. Next step is to develop a clear description of various volunteer tasks and a structure for how to train and engage volunteers in different types of tasks with us. These opportunities should also support relationship-building, between new and old volunteers and between employees and it should lead to our volunteer workers getting assignments that they feel satisfied and stimulated by.

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 short term 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 they are understandable is arguably a false transparency. A strong argument can be made that even though the short term costs are higher the overall costs are significantly reduced as dependencies on individuals are reduced and when staff changes occur the projects can be successfully taken over in a short time. So far this has been proven correct. 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. The aim for transparency affects many of the choices regarding what tools we use and it is also something that has to be done while respecting privacy.

Story: Live streaming and video documentation of events[edit]

In this Story we are outlining our efforts to share our events with a larger audience across space. By streaming we open up our work to more people and allow a more diverse user base. It also helps to increase our transparency.

After we received a wish from one of our members we decided to live stream this year's AGM. The hope was that this would allow members who can not attend the meeting physically to still participate. There were initially plans to also include voting remotely, but this proved to be significantly more work due to the potential risks involved, so we decided to only stream video for now.

While we have a well stocked technology pool with two camcorders, it turned out that no-one in the staff had any experience in using them for streaming. After spending some time researching and testing using either of them would require additional hardware. Instead we opted to use a conference camera with USB.

For software we ended up using Youtube’s streaming function, though there were some features that we would have liked and that the streaming function of YouTube lacked, such as pausing the stream. We decided that the stream should be available for members both during and after the AGM. We did this by making the stream accessible through link only and included it in the invitation email. This was an easy way to limit the access without requiring an account, although it needs to be made clear in the invitation that you should not spread the link to non-members. Between 5 and 7 members watched the stream remotely at all times. It may seem to be a small amount given the resources it took to prepare, but at the same time, the experiences can be reused at future events, and with less preparation, it is still a substantial amount seen in relation to the total amount of AGM attendees.

We did a fairly extensive test beforehand when we visited the venue to make sure that everything would work. While there was a sound system with microphones available, no-one at the venue knew how to connect it to a computer. As such, we ended up using our own microphone for the stream. This meant that speakers were required to use two microphones, but that was not really an issue. We wrote a step-by-step instruction based on the setup we ended up using to help both for this occasion and if we decide to stream again in the future. From this we learned that there are tools that make it easy to stream if all you need is a single camera video. If you want to use more advanced tools, be they hardware or software, it will likely require some extra expertise.

The knowledge gained and methods developed were reused at events later in the year, such as during Wikimania 2019 and in the members meeting in November. At the members meeting, a similar amount of viewers watched remotely, although at this time the stream was open. During Wikimania, a set of volunteers prepared and carried through live streaming and video documentation of the events, leading to some 150 hours of film uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Even though there are experiences learnt from this as well, that we will write down and transfer to future organizers, the video documentation of Wikimania 2019 must be seen as a success.

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 donations, and also to increase volunteer involvement which can help ensure high quality projects for a limited cost.

Our work to secure funding from external grants has continued in 2019 and we have secured a large grant with multi-year funding from the Wikimedia Foundation and a grant to communicate about our work with the SDGs to the general public (which will help us gain more donations). We currently have funding secured for our current size into 2021 and are planning to scale up our organization in the coming months. We have worked to secure a large EU grant (around 245,000 over 3 years) for Wikispeech, but we received just under the point needed (13.5/15 points, where 14 points was the limit). The exact same call is published for next year and we will work with our partners to secure that last 0.5 points to secure funding.

Our volunteer community has been supportive and active in 2019. In addition to our volunteer run board of trustees we have had 96 volunteers helping us with our projects in different ways (not including the volunteers involved in the WikiGap events outside of Sweden). 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. We saw a significant increase this year thanks to the engagement around Wikimania 2019. We are working actively to keep the many volunteers from Wikimania active also after the conference, but we expect that our volunteer engagement for 2020 will be lower.

We have successfully applied 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). We have developed our internal financial structures so that we can easily provide the 90-account with the financial data that they need each year, without it costing us a lot of extra work. If the application is successful we will apply for different grants that demands that the receiving organization has a 90-account. We also applied to become a member of Giva Sverige (“Giving Sweden”) at the end of the year and are hoping for a positive confirmation in early 2020.

Story: Improved conditions for increasing membership[edit]

In this Story we are covering our efforts to create an easy path for people interested in our work to get more engaged and knowledgeable and become a member.

Work on improving member administration has been ongoing for several years and has led to, among other things, that:

  • It is easy for new members to sign up.
  • It is easy for members to pay the membership fee, both when you become a member and when the membership is to be renewed.
  • It is easy for the association to send mail to the members.
  • It is easy for the association to handle the members' tasks.

The work continues constantly, among other things by improving and documenting routines and implementing solutions such as direct debit, allowing the members to schedule automatic payments for the future. The work done so far in improving the membership administration means that the association now has the conditions to handle an increased number of members and that we look forward to being able to multiply the number of members. An increased number of members gives the association a stronger voice to influence social issues with, it means more active members who can attend and hold events and it means that the awareness of the association and our work also increases outside the group of members.

In connection with the preparations for Wikimania, work began on finding ways to more actively recruit members. We produced updated information material, documented answers to frequently asked questions and planned how we can motivate people who are interested in us to become members.

Together with the work described in #Story: Reaching further – newsletter, membership drives and website this forms a good foundation for a significant increase of members in 2020.

Story: Automatic creation of structure for the new year[edit]

In this Story we are describing how automation can save chapters who are using a wiki a lot of time each year.

As mentioned in our previous impact report, we decided to automate some of the tasks that need to be done at the start of the year. Specifically we wanted to use a bot to create the new pages on our wiki and the new projects on Phabricator. In both these cases this previously required significant repetitive, manual work, even when reusing material through templates etc.

At the start of 2019, we ran the bot for the first time. It created the wiki pages for the yearly projects, which was the initial focus, as well as pages on Phabricator. During this first run a number of additional pages on the wiki relevant for the year were added, e.g. applications, business trips and reports. This was trickier to achieve in some cases, depending on the in and out data.

While we managed to get the bot to do what we wanted, it was apparent that adding something like this to an already established structure takes extra work. If we would have had this in mind from the beginning we could have built the structure to be suited for automation. This can be something to keep in mind for other chapters who may be at an earlier stage, if they would like to reuse our tools. If other affiliates are interested in implementing such a solution we are happy to assist.

Fail fest: Self-hosting tools[edit]

In this Fail fest we describe our struggles and learnings around our IT infrastructure and the costs associated with trying to handle specialized tasks when your organization is as small as Wikimedia Sverige is.

As any organization working with IT, at Wikimedia Sverige we have a number of digital tools for various tasks. These range from our website and wiki to tools for collaborative work with documents to HR tools. Depending on the size, type and focus of the organization, you may want to host some of these tools yourself. There are several possible advantages in doing this: you get more control over the data, you can choose and customize the system that you want to use, you can use FLOSS solutions. It does however also add extra requirements and work; you need to have personnel that can take care of the systems. This includes initial installation, regular maintenance and timely fixing if something goes wrong.

At Wikimedia Sverige we have had several systems hosted on servers that we rent, but over the last couple of years we have moved some of these to external actors. The reason for this is that we have not been able to sufficiently take care of them with our current staff. Some of them were set up by previous volunteers and consultants who, when they left the organization, took with them the know-how to keep everything up to date. Without sufficient documentation and/or routines for knowledge transfer , the remaining technical personnel had to start from square one when something went wrong. This makes trouble shooting a lengthy process, especially when customization has been made to the original software. This led to a few incidents recently, when the state of our self hosted systems became painfully clear, including our website being hacked.

When GDPR took effect there were some steps we needed to take, such as switching solutions for cloud storage. For this we set up a Nextcloud installation, with the intent to also use it for other tasks since there are quite a few add ons that you can use to customize it. One of the big ones is collaboratively writing and sharing documents, something we had used Google’s Drive for in the past. There was an attempt to use Collabora for this, but after this had caused significant issues, mainly with HTTPS certificates, we had to abandon it. Since we ended up using Google’s G Suite for Nonprofits for our email,[14] we could keep using the same cloud tools as before, which was less of a shift for the staff. We are thus somewhat adjusting the direction we have reported about before.

In conclusion, if you want to host tools yourself, it’s important to understand what that will require of your organization in terms of competence and resources. Having old systems that still technically work may cause considerable work the day they finally do not.

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 have 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).

We are also outlining where the project will have an impact in the Wikimedia universe and who we are partnering with to deliver the best possible result.

New for this year is that we also have information about the importance of each project., e.g. if the project is core, essential, one-off or experimental. In this context, a project is considered to be core if it is part of our identity as an organization. The project will be organized even if impact is less in the short term and will only be cancelled after a consensus has been reached amongst our community. A project is essential if it actively contributes to one or many of the goals that have been outlined for the year or the long term strategy. Most projects should belong here. A project that is considered one-off is organized because it is delivering a specific benefit to the organization but it is unlikely that we will repeat it in its current form. The type of project might continue over the years, but the content will intentionally change significantly over time. The experimental projects are testing a new idea, method or technology and are often externally financed. They might be a one-off or if successful become an essential project.

Organizational Development 2019[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.

In 2019 we will develop our work around a stronger project reporting, an improved efficiency in our programmatic work, develop our work with volunteers in our project, strengthen our membership and donor base and the communication to them around our work, improve employee capacity, secure our technical systems that our projects are dependent on and ensure that our policies are in line with our needs in the projects (other policy work takes place outside the project).

What’s been done: Efforts include improved documentation around finances, documentation around the usage of our wiki and information about our new tools. See details outlined in #Story: Live streaming and video documentation of events, #Story: Reusing components from other wikis, #Story: Automatic creation of structure for the new year and #Fail fest: Self-hosting tools. We have contributed to the Strategy process by working on the recommendations from the Resource Allocation working group.

We also successfully applied for a 90 account and for a membership at Giva Sverige, both improving our possibilities to fundraise. Preparations have also been made to increase staff size the coming years (adjusting for more complex HR legislation that starts when you pass 10 employees). We have also increased international work and connected our work to the Sustainable Development Goals. We have focused more on organizing small working groups at the office instead of delegating the responsibilities to one person and on documenting the work on Phabricator.

What's next: We will focus most of our efforts to continue developing our fundraising capacity and to find good organizational structures and methods to run a larger and more complex team.

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

Importance: Core

Project impact: Phabricator, Meta

Partners: -

Link to the project: Organisationsutveckling 2019

Exchange of Experiences 2019[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. In 2019 we took part in many international Wikimedia events to build capacity and stay committed to the emerging Northern Europe Wikimedia collaboration.

We hosted and co-organized Wikimania 2019 in Stockholm and worked to develop the conference significantly. We worked hard to improve the legacy of the event by developing a centralized wiki for all Wikimanias and key information material. We participated in the Strategy process in the working group for Resource allocation.

What’s been done: We have taken part, with staff and/or board members, at the Wikimedia Conference; the Big Fat Brussels Meeting; and one ED meeting. We also participated in 7 other Wikimedia events through other projects.

We hosted and organized Wikimania in August 2019 together with WMF and with support from WMNO, WMFI and WMDE (see #Wikimania 2019).

What's next: We will continue to support the development of the Recommendations for the Movement strategy. We expect to participate in the Wikimedia events that are being organized in the autumn (as most have been cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic). We will also look into developing an international exchange program.

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

Importance: Core

Project impact: Meta

Partners: Wikimedia affiliates

Link to the project: Erfarenhetsutbyte 2019

Association Involvement 2019[edit]

What is the project: The project aims to increase the number of members and volunteers in the work done by the association, and to find tasks and the necessary support to get them to stay engaged.

What’s been done: In 2019 we organized the Wikipedia Day, a General Assembly and a Membership Meeting. We improved communications capacities such as a newsletter and a new website targeted to the broader audience, to engage members. Furthermore, we worked hard to leverage Wikimania in Stockholm to increase membership numbers and volunteer engagement. See details outlined in #Story: Increased volunteer engagement through dedicated efforts and #Story: Improved conditions for increasing membership.

What's next: In 2020, except having a General Assembly in April, one large project is to propose a new volunteer, engagement and education strategy, to scale our work with volunteers and make it easier to engage in Wikimedia Sverige as a member or volunteer.

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

Importance: Core

Project impact: -

Partners: Wikimedia Foundation

Link to the project: Föreningsengagemang 2019

FOSS for the Association 2019[edit]

What is the project: Here we investigate what FOSS alternatives can replace the proprietary software used by the organization or where fairly minor issues are preventing that FOSS from fulfilling our needs. Through the project we investigated were consultants could be engaged to solve the specific issues so that FOSS alternatives could be utilized without reducing our efficiency, nor create problems in the work environment. In 2019 we launched a new website using WordPress and supported the development of a freely licensed theme for WordPress.

What’s been done: A child theme for Reykjavik WordPress theme was commissioned. The Swish payment plugin for Wordpress, mentioned in the Progress report, was put on hold awaiting a larger investigation of our needs from a donation platform.

What's next: We will keep focusing on WordPress for 2020. Depending on the platform used for donations this might also become a focus of the project.

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

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: -

Partners: -

Link to the project: FOSS för föreningen 2019

Notes[edit]

  1. Definition: 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. Definition: 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.
  3. Definition: The total number of people who have heard us talk about Wikimedia related topics through participation at events or activities, either in person or virtually (non-unique as we are not tracking them with names). Does not include reach through Social media.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. This includes the Wikimedia projects, translatewiki.net and Wikimini, according to the principle that we train a pedagogue who uses the creation of content as a part of the pedagogical process.
  7. An organizational unit with self-governing power is included here; however, units that have been included in previous years are not.
  8. 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.
  9. Swedish, English and Arabic language Wikipedia.
  10. 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 Connected Open Heritage 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. if Volunteer 1 works for two weeks they have not gotten support, but if they send an email with some follow up questions after a week then that requires a contribution which corresponds to one occasion.
    Questions related to memberships, donations or administrative matters do not count towards the goals.
  11. With recurring meetups we are referring to some type of face-to-face meetings that are repeated over time.
  12. 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
  13. GLAM Newsletter.
  14. Initially the plan was to host an email server on our own machines, but that fell through due to an external consult not delivering on time.

Revenues received during this six-month period[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 115,000 - 45,800 - 13,111 58,911 13,455 6,893 While we saw membership rise it didn't reach our ambitious goals.
Donations SEK 150,000 - 64,231 - 36,731 100,962 17,550 11,813 While we saw donations rise it didn't reach our ambitious goals.
FDC SEK 2,950,000 - 1,731,988 - 1,218,012 2,950,000 345,150 345,150
Interest, misc SEK 15,000 - 0 - 0 0 1,755 0
Other grants SEK 600,000 - - - 563,568 563,568 70,200 65,937
The Culture Foundation of the Swedish Postcode Lottery SEK 2,635,000 - - - 1,594,931 1,594,931 308,295 186,607 The full amount has been paid out, the difference is due to a change in how the funds were distributed between 2018 and 2019. Due to an underspend there will be additional revenue in 2020.
European Union Grant SEK 30,000 - - - 0 0 3,510 0 This project grant, which one of our partners applied for, was not approved.
Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency SEK 51,652 - - - 0 0 6,043 0 This project was cancelled, as reported in March.
Stockholm University SEK 86,184 - - - 87,740 87,740 10,084 10,266 The funding was increased to cover additional costs, at the same time we have underspent in the project.
National Library of Sweden SEK 1,186,700 - - - 499,670 499,670 138,844 58,461 The anticipated funding has been reduced by about 40% as a larger portion is expected to happen in 2020 instead.
Wikimedia Foundation (special grant for Wikimania - volunteer coordinator) SEK 80,000 - 0 - 77,202 77,202 9,360 9,033 The difference is due to exchange rate fluctuations.
Swedish Post and Telecom Authority SEK 450,000 - - - 192,954 192,954 52,650 22,576 The start of this project was significantly delayed, and as a result the project has significantly underspent. Current projections is that the project should have caught up by mid 2020.

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Notes:

Exchange rate: 1 SEK = 0.109 USD (per 1 USD = 9.174311927 SEK in APG proposal).
All numbers rounded to whole SEK/USD.
We also received in-kind donation of about 2,088 SEK (227 USD) by FSData for server hosting, 217,716 SEK (23,731 USD) by The Internet Foundation In Sweden for office space, 21,807 SEK (2,377 USD) by Google for G Suite for Nonprofits, 450 SEK (49 USD) by "The Generation" for web hosting and 260 SEK (28 USD) by "Scandinavia Photo" for camera rentals to our volunteers. The National Archives donated venue spaces for our Annual General Assembly. Around Wikimania there were many venues made available to us for side-events, it is however unclear whether these should count towards in-kind donations for Wikimania or Wikimedia Sverige. The way in which revenue is calculated has changed since the Progress report. Historically what has been presented has been the actual cash influx during the described time period. From this report onwards this has been updated to be brought more in-line with our accounting procedures, i.e. a revenue occurs when the associated costs are incurred or when a final profit is actualised. In practice this means that if a payment received during the time period is also meant to cover costs after that period then that portion of the funds are not counted as revenue in that time period. Conversely if costs are incurred during the time period but the payment will be received after the period, then that part of the payment is counted as a revenue in that time period.

Spending during this six-month period[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 4,817,884 - 1,556,541 - 1,167,333 2,723,874 563,692 318,693 56.5% Two of the externally funded projects will now mainly take place in 2020 instead reducing the expected spending in this program. Delayed hiring of a Project manager Education and learning lead to a reduced spending for Q3+Q4. FindingGLAMs was extended into 2020 further reducing the spending in 2019.
Use SEK 651,652 - 14,644 - 731,873 746,517 76,243 87,342 114.6% Wikispeech, which accounts for the majority of the program, will start in Q3. About half of this budget goes directly to our consultants and partners.
Community SEK 655,885 - 292,299 - 332,837 625,136 76,739 73,141 95.3% While the final spending in this program is close to that budgeted the distribution was drastically changed. While one of the externally financed projects (20% of the original budget) was postponed to 2020 the cost of organising Wikimania ended up being significantly higher than expected (roughly equivalent to that of the postponed project). Similarly the organisation of WikiGap ended up being roughly three times as expensive with other projects in the program being cut back to accommodate this.
Enabling SEK 305,000 - 147,904 - 245,873 393,777 35,685 46,072 129.1% The grant received from the WMF for our joint initiative around developing the Movement's capacity around content partnerships, secured in July 2019, will mostly be used in the fiscal year 2020. One of our projects in the Access program will bear the majority of the 2019 staff costs. The final spending on the Enabling program was still increased by about 30% as a result of this new project.
Operational costs SEK 1,649,115 - 491,417 - 613,499 1,104,916 192,946 129,275 67.0% Members: The majority of the budgeted costs were associated with a membership drive planned for Q3. Due to a delay resulting from the organisation of Wikimania and later by our external partner this drive had to be postponed until 2020.

External: We managed to secure funding within existing projects. This together with major grants secured at the end of last year drastically reduced the costs associated with grant applications. Administration and Infrastructure: Is in line with what we were expecting. Staff and ED: We have been able to do more work within the projects reducing the operational staff costs.

To reserves SEK 550,000 - 0 - 531,718 531,718 64,350 62,211 96.7% As was mentioned in the 2017 Impact Report the BUS lawsuit depleted WMSE's reserves, and in fact these ended up becoming negative (approx -620,000 SEK), effectively borrowing from our own future earnings. When funds were added to the reserve in the end of 2018 these funds brought the reserves up to approx -95,000 SEK. With the reserves added in 2019 the reserves are finally brought to positive again (approx +435,000 SEK). It should be noted that this means the number supplied in the 2020 APG application is incorrect in that it neglected to take into account the negative reserves to which the 2018 result was added.
TOTAL SEK 8,629,536 - 2,502,805 - 3,623,133 6,125,938 1,009,656 716,735 71.0% 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.

  • Yes

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.