Grants:APG/Proposals/2019-2020 round 2/Wikimedia Norge/Proposal form

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Overview[edit]

1. In order to support community review, please provide a brief description of your organization's work in the upcoming funding period.

Wikimedia Norge is requesting 1,970,000 NOK for the 2020–2021 funding period. This funding will be used to continue WMNO's work with volunteers, prominent partners in the Norwegian GLAM sector (at the national level) and broader civil society (at the international level), as well as with international Wikimedia affiliate partners, to increase the diversity in content and among contributors on the Wikimedia projects. We will concentrate on projects and events about gender gap, for example our Women in Red project with The National Library and Oslo Metropolitan University as partners. The other main area we will work on is indigenous languages, especially the Sámi languages spoken in Norway by the Sámi people. Building on our work and partnerships from the 2019 International Year of Indigenous Languages Wikimedia Norge will do different collaborations and events throughout the year to increase Sámi-related content on the Wikimedia projects. One example is a new project that will start in June 2020, funded by the Norwegian Arts Council Norway, where we will work with The National Archives on adding image collections of Sámi history and work with the archive on decolonizing the metadata attached to the images. You can read more about the focus of our work on this project portal.

Norway is a country where gender issues and the rights of indigenous people are supported on a government level and by different structures in society such as national institutions, organizations and by a large part of the public press. This provides Wikimedia Norge great opportunities to align our work to the international strategic direction and focus on knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.


2. Name, fiscal year, and funding period.
  • Legal name of organization: Wikimedia Norge
  • Organization's fiscal year: 1.1.2020–31.12.2020
  • 12-month funding period requested: 01/07/20-30/06/21
  • Currency requested: NOK
  • Name of primary contact: Astrid Carlsen, Executive director


3. Amount requested.

Provided exchange rate=0,1101 USD

Table 1

Currency requested US$
Total expenses for the upcoming year 3,039,000 334,594
APG funding requested for the upcoming year 1,970,000 216,897
Amount of funding received from WMF for the current year 1,970,000 216,897


4. How does your organization know what community members and contributors to online projects need or want? Does your organization conduct needs assessments or consult the contributors and volunteers most involved with its work?

Wikimedia Norge consults and takes part in discussions on the village pumps of the Northern Sámi, Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedias and their sister projects. We discuss ideas and concerns from community members via email, social media (mostly Facebook), telephone calls, meetings and wiki meetups. During our general assemblies, our annual plans are always presented and feedback from volunteers will be used by the board and staff members to adjust our work accordingly. This gives us useful feedback and information on how we should best use the resources we have available for projects the community members and contributors to online projects need or want.

We have started discussions on how to reorganize our work because of the COVID-19 crises. Our general assembly on 14 March was held as a video call and our first video wiki meetup was held 25 March with 12 participants. The feedback was that it worked well and some tips on adjustments have been shared with us. Using video calls allows everyone regardless of geography to participate, which can make for a more diverse group of participants.

We also have ongoing conversations and host meetings with GLAM partners and educational partners to make sure we plan activities they have a strong interest in supporting and promoting. This is also important for applications for external funding we write with partners. We have done two user surveys the last couple of years, one community survey and one about Northern Sámi Wikipedia. The community survey we had planned for January 2020 we will move to the summer 2020 beacuse it is work suitable for remote working. We have many contributors and volunteers involved in our work also through different groups, for example the group working on Wikimedia Norge wiki grants and wiki meetups in Oslo with external guests speaking. We are happy that our efforts over several years on more volunteer involvement are showing results.


5. Please provide a link to your organization's strategic plan, and a link to your separate annual plans for the current and upcoming funding periods if you have them.
  • We gathered all relevant documentation for our yearly planning on one page on our wiki. This documentation includes: action plan, budget, guiding documents, the board's annual plan and staff program reports, communication activities, and spendings etc. This page gives both Wikimedia Norge's members and volunteers, board members and staff members, an overview of our work and the link between what we want to achieve, how we are going to achieve it, what resources we spend on achieving it, the division of tasks between board and staff, and how it all went in the Reports section.


Annual plan summary[edit]

Introduction to Wikimedia Norge’s work[edit]

Wikimedia Norge's strategy was revised by the board in 2017–2018 to start our process to align with the international strategic direction of knowledge as a service and knowledge equity. The two biggest changes in the Wikimedia Norge strategy were choosing diversity as a more prominent thematic approach and the second change was that we want to focus more on international collaboration with other affiliates and partner organizations. These changes were done for several reasons. We identified our biggest opportunities for partnerships, external funding and outreach within diversity projects. Our strategy will be revised again in 2022. WMNO will continue our emphasis on gender diversity the next funding year, and this is reflected in both our organization’s culture and our evaluation plans. Our emphasis on gender diversity extends from the board leadership level, through to program design and implementation. This is an ongoing approach in our work.

Wikimedia Norge’s three programs for the 2019–2020 funding period have diversity as an overarching theme and this theme is an integrated part of all three programs; in partnerships with GLAM and educational institutions, at events, in online editing competitions, applications for press accreditations, in our communication work to name some examples.

Our three programs for the next funding period are the same as for last year and with many of the same activities planned; Supporting Communities, Closing Content Gaps, Raising Awareness of Free, Trusted Knowledge. The changes in the programs will be changes due to the COVID-19 crisis. We wanted to share some of our early thoughts about the COVID-19 crisis here and how it may affect us on a national level. We will have to evaluate what activities we can move online, what new activities we should consider doing online and how we can make sure we keep our good partnerships. Some of WMNO’s strengths in this situation are that we have a strong network of partners both among volunteers, for content partnerships and for national funding. We also see now even more than before the importance of our communication work and presence in social media to engage people in our work. Another strength is that the staff members are used to remote working. Some of the challenges we anticipate is how we can continue working with marginalized groups. This is work that for the most part requires physical meetings to develop in a good way. The opportunities in national funding may decrease due to the new and worsened financial situation in Norway. There is also a challenge for the stress and anxiety we all feel now, volunteers, partners, as well as everyone in the organizational part of WMNO.

Something new we intend to do next funding period is organizing conferences. The experiences we have in WMNO from our diversity work was something we wanted to share with the rest of the Wikimedia movement in the conference format. As a chapter we have many experiences from previous years on issues like gender diversity and language diversity, but it has also been clear to us that we lack skills and approaches needed as we continue this work. Now WMNO has reach a point in its development where organizing international conferences feels like a good next step for us.

WMNO applied for a conference grant for a Wikimedia Diversity Conference Europe 2020. Our ambition was to invite participants who are decision-makers in the movement (volunteers, board or staff members of a Wikimedia affiliate) or highly engaged in projects about knowledge equity and diversity and that. The conference would be an opportunity for the participants to discuss and learn about solutions for the implementation of the 2030 movement strategy. Because of the COVID-19 crisis this plan is put on hold. But the planning process for the conference was nevertheless useful for us and we are exploring options for Nordic funding for a Diversity conference in 2021 when we can expect the pandemic crises to be over.

In agreement with Wikimedia UK We are also hoping to host the The Celtic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference 2021 in the city of Tromsø in June 2021 This would be a great opportunity to focus on the different Arctic languages, including the Sámi languages. The Celtic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference aims to bring people together to share their experiences of working on sharing information in minority languages. We hope to help people learn how to encourage the flow of information across language barriers and support associated communities. As in previous years, we will have a strong focus on Wikidata and its potential to support languages.

We are watching the pandemic situation carefully and will evaluate over the 6 months how we proceed with the conference planning and how future travel restrictions might develop.

As of 14 March Wikimedia Norge has a new chair elected and the gender balance in the board is 50 / 50 (6 people). If we include staff members and committee members the gender balance is 40 % women and 60 % men (15 people).

Program overview[edit]

Wikimedia Norge has three programs for the upcoming funding period. All three programs have been part of our work for several years and have a strong focus on a select group of partnerships and a set of activities and events we do on an annual basis. The fact that some activities and events are annual helps us plan our work ahead and do it in an efficient way. It also means that both volunteers and partners know that for example each October we do a Wikinobel event at The Nobel Peace Center and they can reach out to us and plan their own engagement.

Supporting Communities

This program will strengthen and support the work done by and the collaborations between a diversity of communities, partner organizations and Wikimedia Norge

The goals of this program are:

  • WMNO will be an organization that works together with a diverse set of communities and is considered an influential organization in free culture and open knowledge.
  • WMNO will offer different types of support to new and active volunteers that enables contributions to the Wikimedia projects.
  • WMNO will support different community initiatives and share volunteers' stories in social media.

To reach the above-mentioned goals we have a set of community support activities we have organized over several years now. The community support activities are used and appreciated by both Wikimedia Norge members and other volunteers. Examples of different activities Wikimedia Norge offers to support community activities are wiki grants, The Wikipedia Library, online editing and photo contests, wiki meet-ups and Wikidata workshops, applying for press accreditations, sharing stories from volunteers and our work in different communication channels. Homepage, wiki, Blog, newsletters, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter.

We are making some changes compared to last year: the drone project is cancelled due to new restrictions on the use of drones in Norway and required insurance. We are expanding The Wikipedia Library project with resources in Sámi languages, and wiki meet-ups are—for the time being—video calls. We are also planning to reorganize the WMNO wiki to make it easier to navigate and to have a separate volunteer portal on the page with resources, guidelines, and requests or ideas from partner organizations easy accessible. We are also exploring the idea of redesigning the Northern Sámi Wikipedia front page in collaborations with volunteers.

Closing Content Gaps

This program will add high quality content to close content gaps on the Wikimedia projects by partnerships between Wikimedia Norge, volunteers and major Norwegian institutions

The goals of this program are:

  • WMNO will explore existing national and international partnerships to diversify the content available on the Wikimedia projects.
  • WMNO will support initiatives and contest that results in high quality images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons with image use across many Wikipedias.
  • Through partnerships with GLAM and education institutions WMNO will give access to and contribute to free knowledge.

The three main projects in this in this program includes partnerships we have worked on for years already and they all have external funding approved for the upcoming funding period. The 3 main projects are:

In this program we work with partner institutions on Wikidata uploads, Wikimedia Commons uploads, writing of Wikipedia articles by students (as an elective at Oslo Metropolitan University), organizing events and taking part at conferences, and outreach activities such as online competitions, to give some examples. The main partnerships for our program on Closing Content Gaps are: The National Library, The National Archive, The Directorate of Cultural Heritage, The Norwegian Mapping Authority, Nordland County Library/Márkomeannu Festival, The Sámi University of Applied Science, Sámi language centres across the country (main partner in Oslo), The University of Tromsø, Oslo Metropolitan University and other Wikimedia affiliates. Most of these partnerships have been built over several years. In doing the Sámi project, our experience from the existing partnerships are very useful in how we approach new partners within the Sámi community.

There are some changes worth mentioning for this program. Two projects will be ongoing also for the next funding period because of delay due to the COVID-19 crisis; our project on Sámi place names and our education program for Sámi students funded by the Sámi parliament. The Bodil Biørn project has ended. We hope to find new ways to work with our good volunteer friends in Armenia in the future. We’re starting a new project with The National Archives with approved funding from The Arts Council we have called: Decolonization of image collection. The image collection in question is of a very central and debated part of Sámi and Norwegian history regarding the use of natural resources. We are currently working on pilots for Wikipedia editing trainings for students to be prepared if our trainings cannot happen as planned. The first on is planned in May and have to be rescheduled.

Raising Awareness of Free, Trusted Knowledge

This program will raise awareness of whose knowledge is shared on the Wikimedia projects and welcome new voices to contribute

The goals of this program are:

  • Norway has a national online encyclopedia, by some viewed as a competitor to Wikipedia, and WMNO will raise awareness on how Wikipedia works and is part of an international ecosystem of knowledge.
  • WMNO will continue to build strong partnerships with a select group of partners that share our vision of free knowledge.
  • By participating in major national events in Norway, WMNO will advocate for diversity on Wikimedia projects and beyond.

In this program, we work mainly on annual events, communication work and image uploads to Wikimedia Commons. Examples on different events we either are invited to partcipate in or organize ourself are: annual WikiGap event with The Swedish Embassy in Oslo, the Oslo Freedom Forum in May, the indigenous music festival Riddu Riđđu in July, and the Sámi music festival Márkomeanu in July, The Researcher Days organized by The Research Council in September, and Wikinobel at The Nobel Peace Center to mark the announcement of The Nobel Peace laureate in October. Another set of activities in this program are different types of communication work we do to share stories about these events and the importance of free knowledge. The radical negative changes that has happend over the last years in many democracies in Europe have not happened in Norway and we are in a privileged position where we can speak up about threats to free knowledge without fear of repercussions.

The main partnerships for our program on Raising awareness of free, trusted knowledge are: The Nobel Peace Center, The Research Council in Norway, Oslo Freedom Forum/Human Rights Foundation, Riddu Riđđu Festival, NetBlocks, The Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU and The Swedish Embassy in Oslo.

There will for sure be many changes to this program because of cancelled events. Hopefully national events will be up and running again starting August/September 2020. We are experimenting with setting up Wikipedia trainings for new editors with partners and we may also secure funding for this. The last two weeks we have used the Wikimedia Norge home page more extensively to communicate around our work and for March 2020 we have the highest number of page views since we launched the page. We have one new partnership since January 2020 with Wikitongues.

Budget[edit]

Wikimedia Norge's budget for 2020–2021 was approved by our general assembly 9 March 2019, as this record shows. The budget that was presented to the general assembly can be read here. It does not include in-kind donations. But in-kind donations are included in this Annual Plan Grant application.

This budget is the most ambitious one for WMNO so far in terms of external funding. External fundraising and in-kind donations makes up 35 % of our total revenues for the upcoming funding year. However, the approved budget does not consider possible consequences of the COVID-19 crisis for the upcoming funding year. The possibilities of external project funding and in-kind donations opportunities are likely to decrease.

In the staff assessment from 2019 we can read: "funding capped at last year's level has prompted organizations to review and rethink some of their priorities, or to focus on securing external funding opportunities." This goes for WMNO as well. Last year we had great success with securing external funding, 30 % of our revenues were external funding. The resources WMNO has spent on fundraising, and for the last funding year also the 2030 strategy work, have been high. These are operational costs we managed to cover last funding year, but with the APG funding frozen for the last 3 years it means our operational costs are increasing and available funding for operational costs are decreasing. This is a concern we would like to share and discuss with the Wikimedia Foundation along with more insecurity when it comes to external funding.


Below are tables of Wikimedia Norge's total projected revenues and expenses for the upcoming funding year 2020–2021:

Revenues NOK $US
Annual Plan Grant, Wikimedia Foundation 1,970,000 216,897
External funding 781,000 85,988
In-kind donations 300,000 33,030
TOTAL PROJECTED REVENUES 3,051,000 335,915
Expenses NOK $US
Staff expenses
Staff expenses Program 1 Supporting communities 540,000 59,454
Staff expenses Program 2 Closing content gaps 540,000 59,454
Staff expenses Program 3 Raising awareness of free, trusted knowledge 270,000 29,727
Staff expenses Operations 450,000 49,545
Operations expenses
Office costs, audit & accountancy, travel costs staff & board members 739,000 81,364
Program expenses
Program 1 Supporting communities 200,000 23,394
Program 2 Closing content gaps 200,000 22,020
Program 3 Raising awareness of free, trusted knowledge 100,000 11,010
TOTAL PROJECTED EXPENSES 3,039,000 334,594
Surplus 12,000 1,321

We have also included a table to show the split of salary expenses per program and operations in percentages:

% of staff expenses per program and on operations
Program 1 Supporting communities 30 %
Program 2 Closing content gaps 30 %
Program 3 Raising awareness of free, trusted knowledge 15 %
Staff expenses Operations 25 %

Grant metrics and evaluation[edit]

Grant metrics
Participants Newly registered Content pages Diversity Volunteer hours
Program 1 Community Support 350 50 10,000 5,000 450
Program 2 Content 350 200 10,000 10,000 400
Program 3 Free Knowledge 300 20 2,000 100
TOTAL FOR ALL PROGRAMMES 1,000 270 20,000 17,000 950

Explanation of grantee defined metrics:

  • Diversity: Number of new or improved articles on women's biographies on the Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk or Northern Sámi Wikipedias and number of Sámi-related items added to Wikidata
  • Community hours: Hours community members spend on organizing activities or helping staff organize activities (not included are hours spend adding content)


Comments on metrics:
We very much welcomed the grantee-defined metrics when they were introduced for the 2016–2017 funding period. The Grant metrics from our last annual plan can be read here. Due to the current COVID-19 crisis, we have decreased our targets for Participants and Volunteer hours as we expect both travels and physical events may be put on hold for several months of the next funding period. We also expect that interest and willingness to travel and do physical events with our partners may shift dramatically. It's too early to predict how this will affect our work, but we wanted to share our thoughts and concerns here. The other general metrics are at the same level as for our last APG proposal.

Continuing our focus on diversity as an overall approach means our metric for Newly registered must reflect that we work with marginalized groups. But at the same time this focus has given us an increase over the years in the number of participants. The reason for this is that the gender gap on Wikipedia is very much an issue that engages the press and public in Norway and it's one of Wikimedia Norge's best opportunities to attract attention to our work and has also given us important national funding opportunities the past years.

Evaluation of Wikikmedia Norge's work:
Every quarter, before board meeetings, staff from Wikimedia Norge shares reports on wiki on our activities, spendings and communication work. This gives volunteers, members and the Wikikmedia Norge board and committees the opportunity to follow and oversee over work. It's important for us to be transparent on how our resources are spent. The last report from Wikimedia Norge, for the term July 2019–January 2020, on received Annual Plan Grant from the Wikimedia Foundation can be read here.

Verification and signature[edit]

Please enter "yes" or "no" for the verification below.

The term “political or legislative activities” includes any activities relating to political campaigns or candidates (including the contribution of funds and the publication of position statements relating to political campaigns or candidates); voter registration activities; meetings with or submissions and petitions to government executives, ministers, officers or agencies on political or policy issues; and any other activities seeking government intervention or policy implementation (like “lobbying”), whether directed toward the government or the community or public at large. General operating support through the FDC may not be used to cover political and legislative activities, although you may make a separate grant agreement with the WMF for these purposes.
I verify that no funds from the Wikimedia Foundation will be used
for political or legislative activities except as permitted by a grant agreement 		Yes


Please sign below to complete this proposal form.

IMPORTANT. Please do not make any changes to this proposal form after the proposal submission deadline for this round. If a change that is essential to an understanding of your organization's proposal is needed, please request the change on the discussion page of this form so it may be reviewed by FDC staff. Once submitted, complete and valid proposal forms submitted on time by eligible organizations will be considered unless an organization withdraws its application in writing or fails to remain eligible for the duration of the FDC process.
Please sign here once this proposal form is complete, using four tildes. Astrid Carlsen (WMNO) (talk) 17:46, 1 April 2020 (UTC)


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