Grants:Conference/Wikimedia Israel/GLAM-WIKI 2018/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Conference Grant approved in FY 2017-18 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Conference/Wikimedia Israel/GLAM-WIKI 2018.
You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
You are welcome to Email conferencegrants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

GLAM-Wiki Conference 2018

Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums
More than 180 attendees from 43 countries gathered between November 3rd-5th for the GLAM-Wiki 2018 conference in Tel Aviv, Israel.
During the GLAM-Wiki conference, GLAM community professionals and Wikimedians convened to discuss and share experiences, present their favorite tools, and discover new ways to create, enrich and reuse free cultural knowledge.

Goals[edit]

Did you meet your goals?

To increase awareness among GLAM professionals of the importance of accessible cultural heritage

One of the basic motivations towards hosting the GLAM conference was to raise and spread awareness on GLAM collaboration possibilities locally and globally. The program included sessions and panels which discussed experiences and ongoing GLAM-Wiki partnerships and initiatives which aim to preserve heritage and culture, digitization of GLAM content and allowing access to the public in the multilingual global sphere.

To inspire and motivate participants to start up their own GLAM projects

Bringing together professionals from various GLAM institutions and Wikimedians from around the globe has allowed visibility of GLAM-Wiki initiatives within the global Wikimedia Movement, and to GLAM institutions which were not aware of such possibilities. The conference also allowed conversations on future strategies to promote GLAM-Wiki partnerships.

To facilitate the sharing of best practices and the most up-to-date documentation on the most common or most innovative GLAM-Wiki projects.

GLAM Wikimedians from different active GLAM projects brought their experience in their home communities. The projects that were introduced at the conference varied in their durability and scale and circumstances. For example, presented topics referred to questions on the effectiveness of collective GLAM-Wiki projects in times of crisis and finding solutions to protecting knowledge, the issue of copyright from a GLAM perspective, and more.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
A total of 18 different GLAM organizations representatives at the VIP meeting	12 organizations had a representative at the VIP meeting.	It was a challenge to invite some of the directors of the GLAM institutions because some of them were not familiar with WMIL. It was a great opportunity to expose them to the Wikimedia Movement.
A total of 150 participants, 90 from Israel and 60 from abroad.	Total of 180 participants, 60 from Israel and 120 from abroad.
45% female participants	31% female participants	These are statistics based on the application forms of all participants. We wanted to have a large presence of participants from emerging communities, but this resulted in less female participants, as the representatives from these countries were almost exclusively men.
45 scholarship grantee	39 scholarship grantee attended the conference	Six of the scholarship grantees canceled their arrival close to the conference date. Unfortunately, it was too late to give the scholarship to another candidate .Another scholarship grantee was refused by the airline to aboard the plane due to lack of Transit Visa.
At least 10 representatives from emerging communities	22 representatives from emerging communities	The scholarships committee dedicated a large part of the scholarships to representatives from emerging communities according to the Community Engagement/Defining Emerging Communities. We also received additional funding form WMIL this purpose.
Post-event survey, with an 80 % approval rating	93% of the participants rank their overall rating of the conference between 4-5 from a scale 1-5. Only 53 participants answer the survey.
One new Israeli organization sponsor supports the conference.	Tel Aviv Municipality supported the conference with In Kind donations: the conference venue and tours worth of 53,900 NIS (15,055$).
Media outlets: 2 reports about the event, and 2 keynotes speakers interviews	5 reports at the Israeli press about the conference. 3 keynote speakers personal interview	The conference attracted the attention of the local media: People And Computers, Yedatech, Calcalist, Israel Hayom, Globes. Examples of GLAM initiative in different countries, and the keynote speakers got a lot of media coverage.

Next steps[edit]

Please share a brief update about the status projects, important discussions and/or capacity building that took place at the event.

	Activities during the conference	2 months after the conference	6 months after the conference
Strategic Discussions: Were any significant issues your community discussed at the conference?	Raising awareness about GLAM projects: One significant issue discussed at the conference was GLAM at Emerging Communities. Africa and India were two of the main topics. Mainly discuss the challenges and solution GLAM community have in their communities, and working together with governments to get more awareness to GLAM projects. The GLAM community also had the chance to discuss the case of the National Museum of Brazil, which was destroyed by fire, and the work of GLAM volunteers after this unfortunate event, as an example of the importance of GLAM projects for the whole world. Partnership and capacity building: The Strategy Team was able to meet together and discuss their issues face to face, it was an important meeting, because they usually meet on an online meeting. Wikidata and GLAM: Wikidata was also a significant part of the program, as Wikidata is a powerful tool GLAM projects, so learning about Wikidata, and its advantages can help to create better projects in GLAM.	High-level notes about the status of the discussion and the next steps that are planned. Names of people will be responsible for following up. If conference participants drafted a proposal or some other document for review, please link to the page. If conference participants drafted a proposal or some other document for review, please link to the page. We were updated by Sailish Patnaik about the collaboration he presented to us during the session “Working with government for GLAM projects”, about drafting an open content policy for the state of Odisha.
Capacity Development: Please list capacity building sessions or workshops.	Learnings from GLAM projects: what do we know so far about running a successful GLAM project? partnership-building, communication and negotiation	How many people participated in the session? Are people using the skills they learned at the conference? How do you know? Do participants want additional training or support to continue to improve those skills? In both of those sessions there were about 15-20 participants. Participants mentioned that they need more support with learning and training technology tools in GLAM, like Sparkle.	Survey participants 6 months after event -- how many people have used the skills they learned?
Projects or Working Groups: What are the most important projects that were started or improved during the conference?	Before The conference participants opened a GLAM-Wiki Con 2018 Telegram group in order to communicate throughout the conference. One project that was planned at the conference was the attempt to found an inter-Chapter GLAM user group. Believing that working together can make different. Also thinking that most Chapters deal with the same issues. One of the conferences most important program was the GLAM VIP Israeli personal meeting. That was the first time a meeting like this took place in Israel. This meeting was the establishing point for explaining GLAM initiative, and begging the process of GLAM in Israeli institutions.	Brief description of new projects that were planned at the conference or summary of improvements/changes that were made to existing projects after the meeting. Who will be responsible to follow up or complete projects? Without making any special efforts, the GLAM telegram group became the main channel for the global GLAM community, to communicate,ask questions and get updates about existing GLAM projects. The GLAM user group was not established after all... The Chapters who were involved with this idea decided to keep working as individual Chapters. After the conference, we had a follow-up with few of the Israeli GLAM instantiations who participated in the VIP meeting: The Negev Museum, Yad Vashem, Om El Pahem Gallery. Itch one of the Museums has made future plans to collaborate in a way that is suitable to its institution. The Shapell foundation made interest to invest in GLAM collaboration projects with a chosen list of institutions.	Provide an update on projects that were started, or changes that were made as a result of work done at the conference.

Learning[edit]

Conferences and events do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

What worked well at the event?

Co-organized with the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Israel hosted the GLAM-Wiki Conference as part of the GLAM–Wiki initiative (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums). The initiative enables cultural institutions to share their resources with the world through collaborative projects with experienced Wikimedian editors.. One of the challenges of this conference was that its audience was very heterogenous – a unique mixture of people from all over the world, with different backgrounds, experiences and expertise, including Wikimedia volunteers, GLAM volunteers, GLAM professionals, ranging from newbies to experts, and with different goals and motivation to come to the conference. We managed to successfully meet this challenge and to create a special atmosphere, which made this event quite different from other Wikimedia conferences. Our participants had mentioned this to us throughout the conference and in the survey afterward.

The GLAM-Wiki Con 2018 came at perfect timing. The last time that all GLAMers met was at the last conference in 2015, and since then a lot had changed in the GLAM world and community. At the Conference, participants had the opportunity to examine new paths toward GLAM-Wiki collaborations and to discuss mutual interests shared between Wikimedia and various cultural institutions. The conference main highlight is the developments around GLAM and Wikidata, the GLAM-Wiki Toolset, new technical tools being developed (including structured data on Commons, which touches many GLAM collaborations), and the advantages of free content. Coordination between the program committee and Wikimedia Israel was successful throughout the year prior to the conference until the last of the conference. Together we made a variety of sessions, to GLAM beginners and pros. This collaboration helped us also when we had a few last minutes cancelation from a few of our speakers, we were able to create new sessions that were successful.

477 people had applied to a scholarship for the conference, which was much more than we expected. the scholarship committee did a great job combining with the program committee, we gave 45 scholarships to people that we found them important to the conference. It was important to us to have participants from immerge communities, as a scholarship grantee’s, 22 of the 39 scholarship grantee’s that attended the conference came from emerging communities. All of the Visa applications were approved by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs – who also sponsored the event. Communication with the ministry began very early in the conference preparation process, which was an important factor for receiving approval to 100% of the visa’s applications. Looking at the statistics of the conference survey conference, it is clear that most of the participants gain a lot from the conference. Most of the feedbacks were positive, 93% of the participants rank their overall rating of the conference between 4-5 from a scale 1-5.

What did not work so well?

Organizing the travels for the participants was a time consuming and stressful endeavor when none in the team had worked with supporting visa applications previously. When planning for the conference we wanted to ensure diverse participation from across the world, but we missed support from WMF team, regarding the protocol of visa application and refunds. In particular, arranging travel for scholarship recipients from emerging communities proved troublesome and time-consuming, as communication was sometimes difficult due to either technical issues or cultural differences.
A discrepancy in expectations regarding what a full scholarship includes: some participants were surprised to learn that not all of the meals are included in the scholarship, and resented the WMIL team for that.
Six scholarship grantees canceled their arrival very close to the conference date so that their flight and accommodation could not be changed or canceled causing quite a loss of money (and invested time and energy). Moreover, these participants did not even let us know they are not coming to the conference, and we only found out after reaching out to them. It is quite likely that some of these scholars knew that they would not be attending ahead of the conference.
The representatives of Tel Aviv Municipality withdrew their offer to sponsor the Tel Aviv Cinemateque two weeks before the conference. Because of that, we had to put on hold a lot of the conference preparation until they agreed to fulfill their commitment.

What would you do differently next time?

The GLAM community had grown significantly in the past years, and there are many GLAM projects today in the world. Next time we would probably put more focus on previous experience and level of acquaintance with GLAM, such that there would be parallel sessions for GLAM beginners and for advanced GLAMers. Also, there are big differences between GLAM institutions size and budgets, so we shouldn’t refer to them as the same. We believe that the program should have included a diverse program to all kind of institutions.
Regarding travel arrangements, we strongly believe that more support from WMF would offer significant cost savings for the movement as a whole.
The scholarship grantee should have some investment in their travel fee to avoid last minutes’ cancelation.

Financial documentation[edit]

This section describes the grant's use of funds

There are two important steps for documenting your budget and spending.

Budget table Please copy the budget table from your approved application and add a column titled 'Actual expenses'. In this column, list the actual amounts spent on each line item. Use the 'Notes' column to explain any variances in budget that seem relevant.
Please email documentation (receipts and invoices) and a detailed budget spreadsheet to gransadminwikimedia · org.

Budget[edit]

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

Event budget table

Category	Description	Unit	Number of units	Cost per unit (ILS)	Total cost	WMF contribution	Comments	Actual Expenses
Event logistics
Conference location	Venue	Day	3				In kind	In kind
Conference location	Audiovisual equipment, wi-fi facilities and furniture	Day	3	10,000	30,000 ILS $8,571			₪18,335 $5,121.51
Tours	2 to 3 tours in libraries and museums	Tour	2-3				In kind	In kind
Hall	Half day workshop for directors of GLAM institutions in Israel	1	1				originally was In kind, but we couldn't find one.	₪1,950.00 $544.69
Facilitator	Half day workshop for directors of GLAM institutions in Israel	1	1	5,000	5,000 ILS	$1,429		₪3,510 $980.45
Food	Coffee and buffet	Day	3	6,000	18,000 ILS $5,143	7,000 ILS $2,000	For 180 participants	₪ 22,260 $6,217.88
Food	Friday evening pizza meal	Participants	70	30	2,100 ILS $600	2,100 ILS $600	40 sandwiches to scholars (not Pizza)	₪ 2000 $558.66
Food	Saturday dinner	Participants	45	80	3,600 ILS $1,029	3,600 ILS $1,029	110 sandwiches to All conference participants (originally International scholars only)	₪ 2,000 $558.66
Food	Sunday dinner party	Participants	150	150	22,500 ILS $6,429		Opening evening after the keynote lecture	₪ 27,480 $7,675.98
Food	Lunch 1st day (Saturday)	Participants	80	130	10,400 ILS $2,971	10,400 ILS $2,971	130 Participants (originally 80)	₪ 9,360 $2,614.53
Food	Lunch 2nd day (Sunday)	Participants	150	130	19,500 ILS $5,571	19,500 ILS $5,571	178 people (originally 150)	₪ 21,360 $5,966.48
Food	Lunch 3rd day (Monday)	Participants	130	130	16,900 ILS $4,829	16,900 ILS $4,829	Also includes the tour Falafel meal	₪ 12,525 $3,498.60
Food	VIP dinner	Participants	25	250	6,250 ILS $1,786			₪ 7,401.20 $2,067.37
Speakers	Travel costs for speakers	Speaker	5	6,000	30,000 ILS $8,571		4 Speakers (one didn’t make it)	₪ 31,095.06 $8,685.77
Speakers	Accommodation for speakers	Speaker	5	4,500	22,500 ILS $6,429		Accommodation for 4 nights, 3 speakers (originally 3 nights, 5 speakers)	₪15,036 $4,200
Merchandise	T-Shirts, Badges and Registration, Notebooks and Pens	Participants	150	90	13,500 ILS $3,857			₪ 12,897.73 $3,601.32
Personnel	Conference organizer	Months	6	13,000	78,000 ILS $22,286		Project coordinator	₪ 62,798 $17,541.34
Personnel	Administration	Months	6	5,000	30,000 ILS $8,571	7,000 ILS $2,000	Production company + administration	₪ 25,757 $7,194.69
PR company	Promoting the conference and media visibility	Months	2	15,000	30,000 ILS $8,571			₪ 38,610 $10,784.92
Marketing	Website, design, posters, promotions	1	1	50,000	50,000 ILS $14,286			₪ 45,988.51 $12,845.95
Documentation	Video, photographer, written materials	1	1	25,000	25,000 ILS $7,143			₪ 9,600 $2,681.56
Subtotal event logistics					413,250 ILS $118,071	66,500 ILS $19,000		369958.5 NIS $103,340.36
Scholarships
	Flights	flights	45	2,500	112,500 ILS $32,143	112,500 ILS $32,143	43 scholars, includes the visa reimbursement (originally 45) international scholar flights	₪ 119,873.89 $33,484.33
	4 nights hostel accommodation (internationals)	Participants	45	880	39,600 ILS $11,314	39,600 ILS $11,314	43 international scholars (originally 45)	₪ 44,162 $12,335.75
	3 nights hostel accommodation (Israeli)	Participants	25	660	16,500 ILS $4,714	16,500 ILS $4,714	2 local scholars, 1 night (originally 25)	₪1,632 $455.87
	Travel from the airport and to the airport	45	90	170	15,300 ILS $4,371	15,300 ILS $4,371	All the conference travel expense (originally for 45 roundtrip airport transfers)	₪ 14,181.65 $3,961.35
Subtotal scholarships					183,900 ILS $52,543	183,900 ILS $52,543		₪ 179,849.54 $50,237.30
TOTAL (without incidentals)					597,150 ILS $170,614	250,400 ILS $71,543		₪ 549,808.04 $153,577.66

Currency exchange: 1 USD = 3.5 NIS, The Actual Expenses column 1 USD = 3.58 NIS

Total cost of event: 597,150 ILS ($170,614)

Total amount requested from the Conference and Event Grants program: 250,400 ILS ($71,543)

Additional sources of revenue that may fund part of this event, and amounts funded

Source	Amount (ILS)
Israeli foundation	310,000
Participants	5,000
Other resources	85,000

Please confirm that you are aware that changes to the approved budget beyond 10% in any category must be approved in advance.

Yes

Budget table

Please list all project expenses in a table here, with descriptions. Review the instructions here. These expenses should be listed in the same format as the budget table in your approved submission so that anyone reading this report may be able to easily compare budgeted vs. actual expenses.

Summary of funding

Total project budget (from your approved grant submission): ₪597,150 ($170,614)

Total amount requested from WMF (from your approved grant submission):

₪286,860 ($80,128.49).

The first amount that was approved by the Conference and Event Grants program was: ₪250,400 ($71,543). On August 20th 2018 a request for additional budget request was submitted and approved. ₪36,460 ($10,000). Pls. see: Talk page of the grant request

Total amount spent on this project (this total should be the total calculated from the table above):

₪ 549,808.04 ($153,577.66)

Total amount of WMF grant funds spent on this project:

₪286,860 ($80,128.49)

Are there additional sources of revenue that funded any part of this project? List them here.

Participants ₪32,080 ($8,960.89). The first calculation of the participant fee was inaccurate. It was calculated without taking into account the Israeli participants.

Yad Hanadiv Foundation ₪310,000 ($86,592.18)

Ministry of Foreign Affairs ₪40,000 ($11,173.18). The funding approval from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was received two weeks before the conference and it has not yet received due to March 2019.

Remaining funds

Are there any grant funds remaining?

NO

Please list the total amount (specify currency) remaining here. (This is the amount you did not use, or the amount you still have after completing your grant.)

₪80,131.96 ($22,383.23). This amount doesn't include the income from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that was not received yet and excess from other resources.

Anything else[edit]

Is there anything else you want to share about the conference or event?