Grants:PEG/WM CZ/Czech Outreach/Report

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Report accepted
This report for a Project and Event grant approved in FY Pending has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
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Project status[edit]

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?
YES
Is your project completed?
YES

Activities and lessons learned[edit]

Activities[edit]

Roudnice nad Labem Festival
Roudnice nad Labem Festival
Masaryk University Loves Wikipedia - the tent in the campus. Wikimedians talking to a teacher who incorporates Wikipedia into her course
Book Fair Havlíčkův Brod event
Wikiconference attendance
Wikiconference 2015
WikiConference leaflet
Citoid video screenshot
Statistics of the Students Write Wikipedia program school year 2014/2015 in comparison with year 2013/2014
Elpida centre - Scanning/Uploading workshop organized for seniors
  • Wikimedia in the public space
    • We have become one of the first chapters with all available equipment needed for outdoor editing events, including a tent, portable laptops with long battery life and a mobile internet access point with a power bank - obviating the need for a power supply for almost a whole day. This expands the variety of events that we can participate on. All the equipment was purchased with the best price/effectiveness ratio. For example, the tent was purchased with a 50% discount provided as a sponsorship by Coleman company. An identical tent was purchased by the Alumni Club of Masaryk University in Brno and is available to Wikimedia community in Brno. We also purchased a large banner with a Wikipedia logo, to be used at events in Brno.
    • We participated on United Islands of Prague festival (as already detailed in the interim grant report). To improve the signal reception, we purchased additional antenna and we recommend everyone to do so (maybe not needed in the Western Europe countries where mobile Internet coverage is better).
    • We participated on the Roudnice nad Labem City Festival thanks to our outdoor equipment. This way we spread the knowledge about Wikipedia to smaller towns like Roudnice and even encourage the visitors to try to make their first edit. 12 visitors created an account and made their first edit (as seen from the course page here), although none of them continued editing in the upcoming days (at least from the username they created).
    • The tent was again used in Brno during the "Masaryk University Loves Wikipedia" event on 14th September 2015, this time to attract attention of the university employees and inform them about the small conference which took place indoors in one of the classrooms. The conference itself proved to be a big success, attracting attention of about 20-30 people (estimate), many of them teachers of the university. In the upcoming months, this conference proved to be an important starting point for a formal memorandum of collaboration between Masaryk University and Wikimedia Czech Republic and establishment of a "Wikipedian in Brno" position for 2016. Specifically, at least one teacher from the audience decided to start a course which incorporates Wikipedia into the curriculum
  • Participation on indoor events
    • We participated on several indoor events which were adequately described in the interim report: Prague Museum Night 2015 in the National Technical Library, Silesian Museum Night in Opava, NGO Market in Prague and "Wikipedians in Kadaň" event.
      • Since then, "Wikipedians in Kadaň" resulted in 33 new Wikipedia pages (195,407 bytes) added by 3 local student participants over the course of year 2015.
    • Wiki Loves Monuments Exhibition in Semily took place between 21st October and 15th November 2015. There were 1100 regular visitors to the library during the period, not counting accidental visitors to the library café and cinema. The exhibition featured winning pictures from the WLM exhibition (as created and printed in previous years) and informed visitors about the licences under which the pictures were uploaded and how Wikipedia profits from them. We offer this exhibition and two more at our public page to other institutions.
    • Book Fair Havlíčkův Brod (pictures here, blog post here) has always been WMCZ's traditional event where we have a chance to speak to motivated and clever people who are profoundly interested in Wikipedia. The burden for our volunteer organizers is small because we know who to call and what to bring there now. However, some of our participants of this years's festival suggest that we take a "year off" in 2016 because some of the people coming to our booth seem to repeat over years. We are able to talk not only about editing Wikipedia (with practical showcases using our newly purchased laptops and the mobile internet access point) but also promote our senior program
  • Principal annual events
    • WikiTown Hustopeče event was described in the interim report.
    • Wikiconference 2016 (blog post here, pictures here) was the first Czech Wikiconference to go beyond a single-day program - there was a smaller pre-conference day for people interested in the senior citizen program (Senior Citizens Write Wikipedia) and the university program (Students Write Wikipedia) while the 2nd day was devoted to talks and lectures on various topics. Wikiconference returned to the 2013's venue - Geological lecture theathre of the Faculty of Science, Charles University. The school provided additional funding for the event, reducing the costs significantly. The conference was attended by 116 visitors (2nd place after the record 2014's event [with 128 visitors]). Lectures are available online. The event also attracted significant media attention - was featured in Czech TV and Czech Broadcasting Service. The program of the lecture day included talks on the censorship of the Internet (featuring a short movie with Wikimedia Russia), future of digital education, hacking Wikipedia and structured data analysis, and introduction to WMCZ's successful initiatives.
  • Outreach programs
    • The update on the Students Write Wikipedia program in school year 2014/2015 was published in the interim report. In the following months, we have started a new school year 2015/2016 and preliminary data suggest that students contributed 1,067,422 Bytes (about 50 new articles, many more improved) during the winter term (2nd best result after summer term 2014/2015). Many courses are lead by our long-time collaborators; for example, the History of Architecture classes at Faculty of Architecture, Czech Technical University in Prague, which incorporate Wikipedia into curriculum, are taking place for the 4th time in 2015/2016. An estimated number of 150 articles about medieval churches have been written by the students of this class during the last four years. Our team also spent time improving resources for students - we successfully lobbyed for the deployment of Citoid on Czech Wikipedia and remade the "Training for students" to feature a VisualEditor guide. To train the trainers, we also started a campaign to recruit more public speakers and plan to organize lectures and workshops for them.
    • The Seniors Write Wikipedia program successfully scaled up in 2015. We organized courses in the Municipal Library in Prague and the Elpida senior centre in Prague. There, 85 new users successfully created new account and enrolled into our education extension on Wikipedia, enabling statistical analysis. All our participants of 2015 courses together did 3700 edits in the main namespace, created 180 new articles and added 1,897,955 bytes of encyclopedic content to the main namespace. Interestingly, about 10-15% of bytes were added by those who did not register in 2015 but earlier - in autumn 2014 in our early courses, suggesting that some of our seniors already edit for almost >1 year. The metrics do not include our one-day workshops taking place outside Prague - most notably in Pilsen (9 visitors) and in a small town of Jablonné nad Orlicí, where enthusiastic librarians invited us to give a talk to their readers and we turned it into an editing event, where 10 users registered and learned the basics of Wikipedia. We also organized a scanning workshop in Prague (119 uploaded pictures here) and in Semily (11 uploaded pictures here). However, short events do not lead to long-term recruitment of new editors. Similar talks took place for 45 librarians in the National Library (described in the interim report). We want to turn them into our collaborators, or better, into Wikipedians and teachers of Wikipedia. Indeed, one of them later invited us to a 2016 conference and another independently organized a course for senior citizens in the city of Zlín under the name of our Seniors Write Wikipedia program (10 participants, statistics includes in the overall metrics). Several other participants of these courses have since invited us to their libraries to give talks and we choosing the best offers to maximize impact. The librarians added 100,000 bytes to the main namespace but mostly during the workshops only - however, about 5 continue to edit independently.
  • We also developed our GLAM collaborations.
    • We partnered with the National Heritage Institute, as described in the interim report.
    • We renewed our relations with the National Technical Library, organized an exhibition of Wiki Loves Monuments pictures in their building and prepared a ground for a formal memorandum of collaboration (2016).
    • We formalized our agreement with the Masaryk University where a Wikipedian-in-residence Marek Blahuš started working in 2015 and prepared a formal agreement of collaboration between the Masaryk University and Wikimedia Czech Republic. We provided financial support by purchasing a Wikipedia large-scale poster for usage on outreach events in Brno. Further activites were supported from a different grant. Financial consolidation is on the way in 2016.
    • We gave a talk to 15 employees of the Silesian Museum where we have a long-term colloboration. We introduced them to Wikipedia, discussed free licences and collaboratively wrote an article about Karel Vyčítal.
    • We built up our relationship to the Czech Union of Interpreters and Translators. We organized a lecture and a subsequent workshop for the visitors of the largest translator conference in the Czech Republic; 7 participants registered and added 17,000 bytes until February 2016.

Lessons learned[edit]

What worked well?
Generally, we noticed significant interest in the Wikimedia outreach activities both among our volunteers and among the partner organizations. The student and senior citizen programs are growing at a stable pace and started a professionalization process towards the end of 2015. They also turned out to be the most innovative of our outreach activities.
What didn't work?
Our outreach activities in the public space or GLAM activities are growing at a slower pace as it takes some time in both cases to build up our community and collaborations with partnering organizations. We did not meet the metrics for the usage of the purchased equipment (tent etc.) but we are confident that the target number of usages will be overcome in the long-term as the equipment remains in the ownership of Wikimedia Czech Republic.
What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?
This is a very large and multifaceted project so general statements about strategic changes are impossible. Most of the weaknesses stem from the fact that a majority of our outreach activities are volunteer-driven and we have to work with what we have both in terms of level of professionalism as well as the total amount of outreach events organized.

Learning patterns[edit]

We updated several learning patterns with new observations:

Outcomes and impact[edit]

Outcomes[edit]

Provide the original project goal here.
This grant request covers all presentation initiatives that are planned by Wikimedia Czech Republic for 2015. Besides already established activities with a high outcome (Wikiconference, WikiTown, Students Write Wikipedia), this grant also covers a novel, somewhat experimental approach called "Wikimedia in the public space". As public space initiatives blossom in Prague, we want to be a part of it and get Wikimedia/Wikipedia closer to people.
Did you achieve your project goal? How do you know your goal was achieved? Please answer in 1 - 2 short paragraphs.
Yes. All activities described in the project goal were certainly conducted during 2015. Most of them are not finished as these are usually long-term programs. The impact of the projects is measured using quantitative and qualitative data.

Progress towards targets and goals[edit]

Project metrics

Project metrics Target outcome Achieved outcome Explanation
750 visitors of outdoor events coming to our booth 350
200 visitors to indoor events 400
120 participants of the Czech WikiConference 116
150 participants, registering to Wikipedia and editing articles during our events 118 Wikimetrics only.
500 pictures uploaded during WikiTown, 100 picture usages on all wikis 1079 uploaded, 187 picture usages
250 kilobytes of text in Wikipedia added by WikiTown participants 175 kilobytes
2,000,000 bytes to be added during the course of the 2014/2015 school year by students 2,098,060 bytes.
6-8 courses organized each school term as a part of the Students Write Wikipedia program 18 courses organized during the two school terms
Senior citizen education program: 3 courses in Prague, 2 new courses outside Prague 10 courses in Prague, 5 short-term courses in other cities (Jablonné, Semily, Plzeň, Roudnice, Pardubice)
6 courses for librarians and other employees of cultural organizations which could lead senior citizen courses, 3 of these from outside Prague (totalling at least 40 participants) At least 7 courses with 85 participants 4 in National Library in Prague, 1 at Masaryk University in Brno, 1 in Semily, 1 in Silesian Museum in Opava, probably many more
10 new Wikipedians (long-term community members) from the senior citizen education program 20


Global Metrics[edit]

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees. In addition to the measures of success for your specific program (in above section), please use the table below to let us know how your project contributed to the Global Metrics. We know that not all projects will have results for each type of metric, so feel free to put "0" where necessary.

  1. Next to each required metric, list the actual outcome achieved through this project.
  2. Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome. For example, if you were funded for an edit-a-thon which resulted in 0 new images, your explanation might be "This project focused solely on participation and articles written/improved, the goal was not to collect images."

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. # of active editors involved 30
2. # of new editors 495
3. # of individuals involved 1524
4a. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages 366
4b. # of new images/media uploaded to Wikimedia Commons (Optional) 1447
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects We did not track this. (>1000) With such enormous number of activities we cannot track total number of all articles edited by our participants - we don't want them to make lists of articles created (that's too boring for them) and running a quarry query is technically demanding for us.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects 4,775,000 At least.
Learning question
Did your work increase the motivation of contributors, and how do you know?
Yes, we recruited many new contributors through our outreach activities (especially the education program) and hopefully increased the motivations of those preexisting by events such as WikiTown which were praised by its participants.


Impact[edit]

What impact did this project have on WMF's mission and the strategic priorities?

Option A: How did you increase participation in one or more Wikimedia projects?

We recruited many new editors.

Option B: How did you improve quality on one or more Wikimedia projects?

Participants of our events and courses added significant amounts of data.

Option C: How did you increase the reach (readership) of one or more Wikimedia projects?

We talked about Wikipedia during many public events, raising awareness about Wikipedia.

Reporting and documentation of expenditures[edit]

This section describes the grant's use of funds

Documentation[edit]

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grants at wikimedia dot org, according to the guidelines here? Answer "Yes" or "No".
YES (2016/01/09)

Expenses[edit]

Please list all project expenses in a table here, with descriptions and dates. Review the instructions here.

Conversion rate 27.3546 CZK / EUR

Number Category Item description Unit Number of units Actual cost per unit Actual total Budgeted total Currency Notes
1.1 Wikimedia in the public space Tent 109.67 100 EUR
1.2 Wikimedia in the public space 2 laptops 701.82 670 EUR
1.3 Wikimedia in the public space Accessories and equipment of the tent 262.30 340 EUR
1.4 Wikimedia in the public space Internet fees, Fees for usage of public space 201.02 250 EUR Includes purchase of a mobile access point.
1.5 Wikimedia in the public space Consumables 92.45 350 EUR Includes fees for public transport of volunteers to the events.
2.1 Participation in indoor events Participation costs, travel costs 538.00 850 EUR
2.2 Participation in indoor events Technical equipment for our indoor efforts 504.81 520 EUR
3.1 Principal annual events Czech Wikiconference 866.61 2500 EUR
3.2 Principal annual events WikiTown 2015 808.58 1000 EUR
4.1 Outreach programs Outreach to students and senior citizens 667.20 1200 EUR
4.2 Outreach programs Outreach to cultural institutions: GLAM 371.87 350 EUR
5.1 Additional requisites Promotional items out of scope of programs above 448.09 500 EUR
5.2 Additional requisites Grant administration 0 0 EUR
5.3 Additional requisites Phone receipts for project managers 84.89 100 EUR
Bank transfer costs etc. 7.02 EUR
Total expenses 5664.31 EUR
Total project budget (from your approved grant submission)
8730 EUR
Total amount requested from WMF (from your approved grant submission, this total will be the same as the total project budget if PEG is your only funding source)
8730 EUR
Total amount spent on this project
5664.31 EUR
Total amount of Project and Event grant funds spent on this project
5664.31 EUR
Are there additional sources that funded any part of this project? List them here.
Avast Foundation grant - Senior program (80,000 CZK = about 2924.55 EUR)
Other partners who provided discounts etc are listed among our sponsors; importantly, Coleman provided a discount for the outdoor tent, Jobs.cz provided a discount for web advertising in our search for the 2016's education manager, Faculty of Science Charles University provided free catering during WikiConference and Active24.cz hosted all our web domains for free.

Remaining funds[edit]

Remaining funds from this grant have been returned to WMF in the amount of 3,065.69 EUR.
Are there any grant funds remaining?
Yes
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.)
3065.69 EUR
If funds are remaining they must be returned to WMF, reallocated to mission-aligned activities, or applied to another approved grant.
Please state here if you intend to return unused funds to WMF, submit a request for reallocation, or submit a new grant request, and then follow the instructions on your approved grant submission.
Return, together with other remaining funds from WMCZ PEG grants.