Grants:Conference/Europeana/Scholarships for 2017 European GLAM coordinators meeting

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The post-event final grant report is here

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This Wikimedia Foundation grant has a fiscal sponsor. Wikimedia Nederland administered the grant on behalf of User:Wittylama.

statusFunded
This two-day meeting is to share skills and best practices, coordinate projects, and consolidate connections between parts of our movement already investing in Cultural-Sector partnerships & outreach (GLAMwiki).
targetEuropean language/national/regional communities already active in Cultural-Sector partnerships. Most notably those who produce reports in the "This month in GLAM" newsletter.[1]
strategic priorityIncreasing participation (experts, cultural institutions)
amount-local7,000€ ($7,270 USD) €7,700
amountplease add the amount you are requesting (USD)
typeIndividual [Fiscal Sponsor is WM-Nederland]
creator• Wittylama
contact• liamwyatt(_AT_)gmail.com, j.cummings(_AT_)unesco.org
endorse


Goals and outcomes[edit]

Goals[edit]

Please list three to four priorities that the community has identified that they want to focus on at this conference. These should be specific and actionable.

This Grant:

  • To fund the travel, accommodation and incidental costs of up to 10 representatives from non-APG/SimpleAPG Wikimedia affiliates in the European region

The Meeting:

  • To increase the efficiency and effectiveness of inter/multi-affiliate activity-planning in Europe relating to Cultural-Sector activities.
    • To increase the number of "joint activities" in the GLAM sector that European Wikimedia affiliates undertake
  • To increase the ability of the various European affiliates to know who is their immediate counterpart in neighbouring countries, to ensure they have strong lines of communication and collaboration.
  • To facilitate the sharing of best practices and the most up-to-date documentation on the most common or most innovative GLAMwiki projects.
  • To encourage Wikimedia Affiliates in Europe to be aware of activities and developments (in-Wikimedia and external, positive and negative) and be able to respond to them accordingly.

Context[edit]

It is helpful to get an understanding of why this event is important to your community, and what experiences you have had in the past. Please answer the applicable questions below.

1. What inspired your community to begin planning this event?
This event is based on the followup from the equivalent 2015 meeting. The attendees of that event were keen to repeat the activity and found it to be both inspiring and productive. The fact that the Chapters are willing to self-fund their attendance demonstrates this. However, as this is now a 'repeat' activity, more solid outcomes will be required to confirm the event's success.
2. How does this event tie into other activities that your group has done?
There is no official 'group' of European GLAMwiki coordinators, and each affiliate treats this role slightly differently. Some have a paid staff position with this name, some have 'project managers' who do not necessarily specialise in GLAM, some have a board-level liaison for this; and some have a designated volunteer or volunteer committee. This kind of diversity is healthy, though it does make it difficult to specify the exact activities that 'this group has done'. The archives of the This Month in GLAM newsletter[2] is the best place to summarise the activities of European Wikimedia affiliate GLAM activities.
3. If your community has hosted a similar conference in the past, what outcomes and benefits have you seen from past conferences?
The previous event was hosted in 2015, also in Paris. The specifics "next steps" from this event were, however, not very well attained, or, for those which did occur it is unclear whether the event was a key cause (however, for an event with €0 budget that's not bad either!). Nevertheless, there has been an increase in European GLAM activities - both in their success, density, inter-affiliate coordination and diversity of countries participating.
The hope with this event is to extend that trend, and be able to demonstrate a causative relationship to it.
4. Please list the focus priorities identified in the report from the last conference organized by this community. What progress have you made in those areas?
As per the items listed in The Pitch session from 2015, several of those activities were created and concluded in the intervening years - notably Wiki Loves Earth, Europeana Challenge, Wikimaps, and tools such as mass upload. These were not run entirely/uniquely as a result of the success of the 2015 meeting (it would be unfair to attempt to claim credit for all the people's work in those projects) nevertheless it is hoped that the 2015 meeting helped!
5. If your community has hosted a similar conference in the past, what key lessons were learned, and what would you like to improve on?
One of the 'lessons learned' from the last event is that if too high a proportion of attendees are representing affiliates which do not yet have GLAM programs, or do not feel as if they have the authority to speak/agree to ideas 'on behalf of' their affiliate - that this greatly decreases the effectiveness of group-planning sessions. If the primary goal of the meeting is to increase the number of inter-affiliate GLAM related activities, this requires a critical mass of people with decision-making power in their organisation. The attempt with the scholarship criteria here, as well as the invitation-letters to the APG-funded Chapters, is to reinforce that fact - this is not a 'how to begin' or 'outreach' event, but an effort to increase 'coordination' between organisations which are already active in the sector.

Measures of success[edit]

Please provide a list of both quantitative and qualitative criteria that will be used to determine how successful the project is. You are welcome to modify, delete or add to the metrics listed below so they reflect the goals of your event.

  • Total # of participants > than 2015 edition (which was 15)
    • #/% of female participants > than 2015 edition (which was 5)
  • # of new projects initiated as a result of connections made, skills learned, or ideas shared at the conference within the following year
    • Most specifically, that these projects are joint or multi-affiliate activities, rather than single-Chapter/independent

Plan[edit]

Venue and Logistics[edit]

Friendly space policy

Event Program[edit]

Please give a brief outline of the conference schedule or program and any events or activities you are planning for participants. The timing, topics and format of each session should be finalized and published on Meta six weeks before the event.

The meeting will take place over two days in two meeting-rooms in the UNESCO headquarters, Paris. A third, optional, morning of workshops can be hosted at WM-France's office.
To a certain degree the schedule will be open for adjustment and modification even during the event - as it is a meeting, not a conference.

The meeting's public homepage on Meta is 2017 European GLAMwiki Coordinators meeting and will be updated to include all documentation as it is created. For comparison, see the level of detail provided on the 2015 edition page.

Sessions include:

  • Practical preparation/planning for 2017 joint activities (WikiLovesMonuments; WikiLovesEarth; Europeana 1914-18; #1lib1ref; Memory of the World)
  • Best-practice briefings on existing projects (could include: Target international organizations current direction; GLAM-specific legal threats; WikiCite and Structured Data in Commons projects; Ethnographic documentation; Connected Open Heritage project; Hackathons & framing as Coding da Vinci project)
  • Training workshops (could include: Pattypan uploader; ComeOn uploader; WikidataQueryService / SPARQL; Redesigned Global Metrics process; Opening branches of The Wikipedia Library; GLAM Wiki Toolset)
  • Meeting with: UNESCO manager(s); ICOM managers
  • 'Documentation [collation] sprint': identification, categorisation, translation of core documents/documentation required for key and common activities
  • Open discussions of: GLAM metrics; state of the art in metatada uploads; Open Access world network, European Year of Cultural Heritage (2018)

Community Input[edit]

Grant reviewers will be interested to read how the planning discussion developed and who was engaged. Please link below to all of the places where discussion about this conference are happening, i.e. talk pages, Facebook groups, meetup pages, notes from meetings. The most central, up to date, and relevant page should be highlighted in BOLD letters.

  • GLAMwiki Global facebook group[3]
  • GLAM-l and Cultural-partners-l mailing lists[4]
  • Moreover, this even has been discussed with many of the prospective-attendee Chapters during their Annual Planning period, and therefore funding for attendance has been included in their budgets (e.g., but not limited to, WM-CH's plan (see: Program area "GLAM", project 3: "Participate to an international GLAM network")

The non-public attendance 'sign up' sheet with contact details, and preparatory planning documents for discussing the schedule etc. can be shared on request.

Participation[edit]

It is crucial that most participants have a minimum level of Wikimedia experience so that they can engage actively in workshops and discussions. Please answer all applicable questions below.

1. Please describe the target audience for this conference or event.
Invited attendees are each the representative of a European Wikimedia affiliate organisation who have responsibility for coordinating GLAM activities.
Attendees will primarily be Chapter-staff, but also can include designated volunteers or board members - also of Thematic Orgs or User Groups. Generally this will be 1 per affiliate, but in some affiliates the role might be shared.
GLAMwiki Coordinators from non-European Wikimedia affiliates are also welcome to attend and participate if they wish.
2. If you are requesting funds for travel scholarships, what criteria will be used to select scholarship recipients?
This grant request is entirely for funding travel/accommodation scholarships.
Successful applicants will need to demonstrate:
a) That they are the approved representative of their affiliate organisation, responsible for speaking on behalf of/coordinating Cultural-Sector partnerships in their affiliate.
b) That their affiliate organisation has a history of existing - not merely proposed/future - activities in GLAMwiki partnerships/outreach.
c) That their affiliate organisation does not have Annual Plan Grant or Simple APG funding, and that they are located in the European region.
3. If your conference has an outreach component, how will you ensure engagement with these participants after the conference, and what impact do you see them having on the projects?
This is not an outreach event. However, we will attempt to use the event to meet with relevant officials from UNESCO (or similar international cultural peak-body organisations located in physical proximity to UNESCO, e.g. ICOM). The outcomes of that meeting could be various and difficult to quantify - but could produce multinational partnerships/projects in the mid-term.
4. Are you thinking about inviting WMF staff to attend or participate in the event? If yes, please list individuals or teams who you may want to invite, or describe how you would like WMF staff to be involved in the event.
Alex Stinson - Wikimedia Foundation GLAMwiki strategist - will be in attendance.
Other WMF staff could potentially attend physically or by video-link to demonstrate specific and relevant information (e.g. new metrics system, grant-writing/annual planning, WMF strategic plan...).

Follow-up[edit]

Please describe how you plan to follow up with event participants after the conference.

Following the 2015 meeting we created a low traffic group-chat which has been used sometimes to share news and ideas, we have also continued to use the 'This Month in GLAM' and 'cultural-partners' mailing lists for general communications. Moreover, the 1-to-1 contacts fostered in 2015 have been useful for each to contact the other.
For the 2017 edition, we realise that 'being able to contact each other more easily' is a necessary but not sufficient outcome. Nevertheless, the ability to know who is ones counterpart in a neighbouring country and having a working relationship with them is a key goal for this event. As a group communications can continue within the informal chat and established mailing list formats.

Resources and risks[edit]

Resources[edit]

Organizing team
  • Europeana through Liam Wyatt - Europeana GLAMwiki Coordinator - is providing event coordination/management/facilitation staff time.
  • UNESCO through User:John Cummings - UNESCO Wikipedian in Residence - is providing the venue for this meeting as in-kind support. This specifically includes office-hours access to two executive meeting rooms with a capacity of 40.
  • Wikimedia France through Rémy Gerbet - Wikimedia France GLAM coordinator - is providing access to its offices on the optional third day for any requested practical training sessions.
  • Advisor-- Alex Stinson - Wikimedia Foundation GLAMwiki strategist

Risks[edit]

Examples of risks, along with how you would minimize or overcome them, are:

  • Skill gaps in project leadership team (e.g. no financial management experience)
  • Components of the measurement process that are hard to quantify

Examples of how to minimize these risks include:

  • Recruiting volunteers with desired skills to project leadership team.
  • Working with the WMF Learning & Evaluation Team to develop an appropriate measurement and evaluation plan.
Risk: Scholarship recipient attendees do not attend, do not keep receipts of their relevant expenses, or over-spend
Response: The proposal is that scholarship recipients will receive a reimbursement for their hotel and airfare costs upon sharing their receipt at the meeting itself. This means that the money from the grant will only be spent after the scholarship recipient has arrived. For the purposes of food and incidental costs, this will be distributed on the first day as a fixed-amount per-diem. There is no desire to collect and calculate the value of individual attendees meals - they will receive, and sign for, a fixed amount in cash at the beginning to cover food and incidentals. This minimises bureaucracy and maintains fairness.

Budget[edit]

Please provide a detailed breakdown of project expenses according to the instructions here. See Budget Guidelines.

Total cost of event

The whole event is being run on a zero-budget basis except for this grant.
Resources, apart from this grant for scholarships, are being provided in-kind (e.g. venue hire) AND attendees (or, more correctly, their affiliate), apart from this grant's recipients, will be paying for their own travel, food, and accommodation.
Fiscal sponsorship for processing this grant is being provided at no fee by Wikimedia Netherlands as in-kind support.

Scholarship budget

There will be a maximum of 11 scholarships offered (see criteria in the #Participation section)

Each scholarship will pay for:

  • Return airfare within the European region (max 250€ per person)
    • Scholarship recipients may chose their own travel options, including arriving earlier/leaving later but are expected to select the cheapest 'reasonable' travel option from their hometown to. Reimbursement will be to the amount on the receipt, or €250, whichever is lower.
  • Up to three night's accommodation (max 100€ per night = €300 total)
    • Recommended options nearby to venue include Hôtel Ibis Paris Tour Eiffel and Hôtel Eiffel Villa Garibaldi
    • Scholarship recipients may chose their own accommodation preference (including single or shared) but will be reimbursed to the amount on the receipt, or €300, whichever is lower and only inclusive of the period 15th-18th February.
  • Fixed per-diem for food/expenses (50€ per day x 3 days = €250 per person.
    • Meeting lunches will be purchased in the UNESCO canteen. The Wikimedia France recommended Paris per-diem is 25€ per lunch or dinner.
    • This amount will be provided by reimbursement as a flat rate, no receipts. It assumes a half day for arrival, half day for departure and two full days of meeting.

Therefore, total per scholarship maximum is = € 250 + 300 + 150 = €700

Therefore, total per scholarship x 11 Scholarships = €7,700

All scholarships will be provided to recipients as reimbursements upon delivery of receipt for both airfare and hotel. Un-used funds will be returned to WMF.

Total amount requested from the Conference and Event Grants program
€7,000 ($7,270 USD)
€ 7,700 ($8,230 USD)
Additional sources of revenue that may fund part of this event, and amounts funded
None
Please confirm that you are aware that changes to the approved budget beyond 10% in any category must be approved in advance.

Yes

Recipients[edit]

Note: This section has been added after the grant was approved, to document how the scholarships were awarded.

Scholarships have been offered to representatives of four Wikimedia affiliates and, following confirmation from the relevant WMF program officer, to one invited guest with relevant expertise:

*scholarships not in accordance with the rules listed on the original grant request but approved directly by the relevant WMF grants officer.

Discussion[edit]

Endorsements[edit]

Do you think this project should be selected for a Conference Grant? Please add your name and rationale for endorsing this project in the list below. Other feedback, questions or concerns from community members are also highly valued, but please post them on the talk page of this proposal.

  • Violetova (talk) 18:28, 21 December 2016 (UTC) - I am GLAM Coordinator and Chair of GLAM Macedonia User Group, which cooperates with several GLAM institutions in the Republic of Macedonia. (My past activities in GLAM: WiR at the State Archives, till the end of December 2016, and GLAM Coordinator of Shared Knowledge, till August 2015) I value this conference very high, and I am very interested to participate on this meeting of coordinators. Looking forward to share skills, best practices and successful stories with other GLAM Coordinators.
  • I support this nonbureaucratic way of making it possible for representatives of user groups, which have active GLAM partnerships, to share their experience, learn from the experience of others and have the possibility to brainstorm new ideas for future joint projects. Working over social media, Meta, video conferencing tools, etc. is possible and it is being done, but meeting in person is the best way to start new initiatives. The other communication means can and will be used for follow-up work. Furthermore, reimbursing only those, who are the approved representative of their affiliate organisation, responsible for speaking on behalf of/coordinating cultural-partnerships in their affiliate guarantees that the participants are not travelling to Paris as tourists. --Nikola (talk) 20:28, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Active minds in GLAM need to get together from time to time so that they share specific ideas of their country/region and inspire others to try something they would never come with by themselves. --Gikü (talk) 23:41, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
  • As the Deputy Chair for the User Group Wikimedia Community Ireland, this could be an invaluable event for an emerging group like ours. Having attended GLAM-Wiki in The Hague, I have felt the absence of a GLAM-centric event in Europe. As a smaller group we would not be able to fund an attendee any other way. These sorts of face-to-face meetings are critical for smaller groups to learn from more established ones, and even vice versa! Smirkybec (talk) 15:42, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
  • It is good to have a common understand and collaboration in Europe. We are stronger as movement when we work together on pan-European projects. Romaine (talk) 10:01, 11 January 2017 (UTC)S
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