Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Wikimedia Community Malta Simple Annual Plan 2024/Final Report
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Part 1: Understanding your work
[edit]Per the recent update on the Wikimedia Foundation Affiliates Strategy process, Wikimedia Affiliates that are General Support Fund grantees will fulfill their affiliate reporting requirements through their final or yearly grantee report.
If you are a Wikimedia Affiliate, you will use this form for your affiliate reporting and to address the affiliate health criteria. You do not need to submit a separate report to AffCom. Follow the guidance in the green boxes to report on how you met the corresponding affiliate health criteria.
If you are not a Wikimedia Affiliate, aligning your responses with the affiliate criteria is optional and not required.
1. Please share to what extent your programs, approaches, and strategies contributed to addressing the challenges you shared in your proposal. If they did not contribute as you believed they would, please share what obstacles you faced and what, if anything, you learned from them? (required)
For affiliates, use this space (Question 1.) to address Affiliate Health Criterion 1.1 (Goal delivery). Describe how you actively delivered on mission goals, e.g. content creation.
Our main strategic goal throughout this year was to continue our presence within the Malta community by consistently being active and producing activities to encourage greater participation and engagement, both at a local and international level. We believe that this has broadly been achieved, as we were able to hold several activities throughout the year. Our implementation strategy broadly continued to build upon what we had done in previous years, namely identifying and developing activities that may encourage further engagement and working with key partners to maximize their reach and impact.
This grant enabled us to continue developing our program far more systematically than we could do before we started operating with an annual grant, as it allowed us to dedicate further time and resources to the planning and implementation stages of our activities. A key element enabled by the grant was the employment of a program coordinator, which ensures we do not continue to solely rely on the kindness of volunteers to organize and deliver our planned activities. This has allowed us to build stronger links with partner organizations and prospective partners, which augurs well for our ongoing work to promote Wikimedia activities in Malta.
2. Is there a plan to build on the key successes you had? If yes, please describe the plan and if no, please share the limitations to do so. For instance, did the activities lead to any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future? (required)
We have also come to see that we can go for multi-year planning now, especially aiming to retain our employee for more than the equivalent of one day per week, with some assurance of further engagement at the end of the year.
The presence of a dedicated project coordinator continues to be crucial in achieving our goals, as it enables us to manage our time in a more efficient and effective manner, working towards both short and medium-term goals simultaneously. Our experience over the past year has continued to show us the benefit of dedicating specific resources to the different aspects of the organization’s running, including the organization’s day-to-day administration, the implementation of activities, and the longer-term strategic development.
Having the same project coordinator on board this year, as we had in the previous years, also helped us to strengthen our relationships with key partners as well as explore the possibilities of developing new partnerships over the coming years. One example of this is a loose partnership with the University of Malta, which started in 2023 and we plan to develop further from 2025. Another example is our ability to maintain a Wikimedian in Residence program at the Times of Malta, which is Malta's newspaper of record, and develop a similar new arrangement with the National Book Council, focused on our Language Project.
3. Please provide a link to reports that detail the activities that took place in the last year. This can include an annual report, Meta pages, and websites. If there are no links available, briefly describe the implemented activities and programs below or upload any files. (required)
For affiliates, use this space (Question 3.) to address Affiliate Health Criteria 2.1 (Affiliate health & resilience), 4.1 (Internal engagement), 4.2 (Community connection), and 4.3 (Partnerships and collaboration):
- Describe your activities engaging new users, new members for your decision-making body(ies), and developing leaders and organizers (2.1).
- Describe your activities creating or hosting spaces to encourage greater collaboration and engagement among your members (4.1).
- Describe how you engage with the contributing community that you serve and/or support (4.2).
- Describe your partnerships with other affiliates or with non-Wikimedia entities (4.3).
We submitted our annual affiliates report last August, unaware that this would no longer be required, or rather that it would be replaced by the filing of this report. There are two things missing from that report, and these are our main activities in the months between when that report was submitted and the end of 2024. You can find the report covering August 2023 to July 2024 at [1]
To supplement this and sync up with the new reporting period, we have also written this additional page on meta covering the period 1 August to 31 December 2024: [2]
4. Are you interested in sharing what you achieved or learned this year with the wider community through different peer learning programs (e.g. Let's Connect program, Diff)? (optional)
Yes, we are. We had a very positive experience doing this for the first half of 2024, along with our fellow communities from Morocco and Canada through the Let's Connect program. You can see the video recording of that session here: [3]
5. Did you collect feedback from your community or target groups on how the activities implemented impacted them? If yes, please attach/provide information on the results (e.g. community surveys, stories, impact booklets/reports, interviews with partner institutions, etc). Did you collect other impact-specific data? (required)
For affiliates, the response to Question 5. also partially addresses Affiliate Health Criteria 4.1 (Internal Engagement), 4.2 (Community Connection), or 4.3 (Partnerships & collaboration), where applicable.
We regularly solicit feedback and suggestions informally, through loosely assembled focus groups during/after events. We bring this to board meetings whenever it happens, and give special attention to comments on things we seem to be doing well, as well as recommendations/suggestions for improvement. While retaining this format, we also intend to start doing this a little more formally (mainly through surveys) as we continue to build the community over the coming months and years. We’re planning to try this in 2025, with the aim of establishing it as normal practice from 2026.
6. During the fund period, did your efforts do any of the following? (required):
For affiliates, the response to Question 6. also partially addresses Affiliate Health Criterion 2.2 (Diversity balance).
- 6.1 Bring in participants from the following groups: women, neurodiverse people, indigenous groups , people with disabilities
- 6.2 Develop content about the following underrepresented topics or groups of people: women, indigenous groups
- 6.3 Support the retention of: Editors, Organizers, Partnerships, Wikimedians in Residence positions
7. What, if any, effective tactics or approaches can you share that worked well when dealing with the programs under points 6.1-6.3 that you selected? (optional)
The secret of our success, if we can call it that, has been, and continues to be, consistency. We have established a working baseline and maintain our activities well above this minimum line. People in Malta know where and how to find us, and what to expect from us. And we have also made our mark on the global Wikimedia community in as much as we're known to many other Wikimedia affiliates as a very active user group, even if relatively small in size.
8. If you developed partnerships, which of the following factors most helped you to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors (optional):
Board members’ outreach, Staff hired through the fund
Part 2: Metrics
[edit]| Metrics name | Target | Result | Comments and tools used |
|---|---|---|---|
| Number of all participants | 100 | ||
| Number of all editors | 12 | 25 | |
| Number of new editors | 8 | 20 | |
| Number of retained editors | 4 | 4 | |
| Number of all organizers | 4 | 4 | https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org and https://stats.wikimedia.org |
| Number of new organizers | 1 | 1 |
| Wikimedia project | Target - Number of created pages | Target - Number of improved pages | Result - Number of created pages | Result - Number of improved pages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | 500 | 1000 | 1695 | 7692 |
| Wikimedia Commons | 1000 | 500 | 1400 | 500 |
| Wikidata | 1000 | 1000 | 1000 | 1000 |
| Wiktionary | ||||
| Wikisource | ||||
| Wikimedia Incubator | ||||
| Translatewiki | 100 | 100 | ||
| MediaWiki | ||||
| Wikiquote | ||||
| Wikivoyage | ||||
| Wikibooks | ||||
| Wikiversity | ||||
| Wikinews | ||||
| Wikispecies | ||||
| Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia | 100 | 100 |
11. Did you set other quantitative and qualitative targets for your project (other metrics)? (required): No
11.1. Other Metrics.
In your application, you outlined some other open metrics that you would like to measure. Please fill out the achieved results for each of the open metrics you defined.
| Other Metrics name | Metrics Description | Target | Result | Tools and comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Continuity | This is a major metric for our user group. We give great importance to whether we're able to resume a photo or article editing contest from year to year and whether we're able to maintain a baseline level of activity, more so that number of uploads or edits. | |||
| Retention | This is another major metric for our user group. We find that it's better to engage with existing editors and uploaders to ensure that they're happy to continue to engage with Wikimedia projects than it is to seek new editors and uploaders, even if we still do the latter, to some degree or other. | |||
Part 3: Skill Development / Capacity Building
[edit]12. Reflecting on your programmatic (external) and organizational (internal) work, did your grant support you to undergo any skill development that made a difference to your success? If yes, what skill was developed, and how did it lead to success? (e.g. received coaching on public speaking, attended training on nonviolent communication, hosted professional development conversations on leadership, learned and used a new tool for project management, etc.)? Can you share any materials? (required)
For affiliates, use this space (Question 12.) to address Affiliate Health Criteria 2.2 (Diversity balance) and 3.1 (Diverse, Skilled, and Accountable Leadership):
- Describe actions taken to prioritize gender balance in affiliate leadership, as well as any areas of diversity relevant to your affiliate's context (2.2).
- Describe the management, financial, or other leadership skills of your affiliate leaders. If you have a succession plan, please include it here (3.1).
- Describe any training or skill development (as outlined in the question above) (3.1).
- Incorporate into the annual report a disclosure of conflict of interests (if any) from the leadership (3.1).
During the current year we have managed to maintain the levels of success we planned for and developed in previous years. Our gender balance is appropriate, even if this is harder to maintain in small groups such as ours. Our management team is small and resilient; we manage to get things done by keeping things to an appropriate scale and don't attempt to do more than we believe we have the capacity to do.
13. What is one capacity/skill area that you would like to focus on for the next year? And how do you plan to achieve this capacity? (required)
We would like to develop our capacity for collecting feedback from our community systematically. Rather than relying solely on loosely assembled focus groups during/after events, we plan to also start running simple evaluation surveys as we continue to build the community in 2025.
We have also been invited to consider board member and staff training in 2025 relating to strategic planning and theory of change, as a requirement for our multi-year grant for 2025-2027.
14. If you have additional information or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here. Use the space below to upload any additional documents that would be useful to understand your report.
For affiliates, also use this section (Question 14) to fulfill the Affiliate Health Criteria requirements.
- Describe and link to any public-facing documentation for affiliate governance, including affiliate leadership and membership with a breakdown of the demographics; how elections are conducted; how conflicts of interest are declared; and how decisions are made and communicated (2.2, 2.3, 3.1).
- Describe and link to any public-facing documentation for activities incorporating, promoting awareness about, or enforcing the Universal Code of Conduct in your affiliate's activities (3.3).
- Describe and link to any public-facing documentation for internal membership engagement, such as notes from your regular meetings and how you communicate to or involve your membership (4.1).
While we certainly appreciate the need to focus on skills development and capacity building, we don't particularly find this line of reporting particularly useful, especially compared to the previous method of having us report on our sense of belonging and cooperation. We feel that capacity building, or at least reporting about it, was more effective of us in the context of a sense of belonging than in the requirement of skills building, particularly when we are careful to work with board members and staff who bring skills to their roles, which are hard to come by in the nonprofit and voluntary sector in Malta.
Part 4: Financial reporting
[edit]For affiliates, also use this section (Part 4: Financial reporting) to address Affiliate Health Criterion 3.2 (Financial & Legal Compliance).
| Description | Planned / received budget for this category (EUR) | Amount spent (EUR) |
|---|---|---|
| Personnel costs | 9680 | 10480 |
| Operational costs | 17172 | 17237 |
| Programmatic costs | 15680 | 14779 |
| Total General Support Fund | 42532 | 42485.49 |
| Other revenue | ||
| Remaining funds from General Support Fund | 37 |
15. Please state the total amount spent from this fund in your local currency. (required)
42485.49 EUR
16. Please provide an overview of the amount spent from this fund in the following budget categories in your local currency. (required)
- Operational costs: 17237 EUR
- Programmatic costs: 10480 EUR
- Staff and contractor costs: 14779 EUR
17. Did you have any other revenue sources (e.g. other funding, membership contributions, donations)? (required): No
- 17.1. Provide the total amount received from other revenue sources in your local currency. (required): EUR
- 17.2. Provide the total amount spent from other revenue sources in your local currency. (required): EUR
18. Provide a financial report document which will provide the details of funds received and spent in the currency of your fund. (required)
- Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.
- Report funds received and spent, if template not used.
18.2. If you have not already done so in your financial spending report, provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal. (optional)
N/A
19. Do you have any unspent funds from this funding?: Yes
- 19.1. Please list the amount of unspent funds in your local currency. (required)
- 37
- 19.2. Explain why you did not use the amount. (required)
- Left over from from contingency allocation / other operating costs.
- 19.3. What are you planning to do with the underspent funds?
- A. Propose to use the underspent funds within this Fund period with PO approval
- 19.4. Please provide details of hope to spend these funds.
- This amount is very small, and we are therefore proposing that this remains with us as petty cash in the office.
20. Final confirmations (required)
- 20.1. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement? You must be in compliance with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement. In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the Wikimedia Foundation mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
- Yes
- 20.2. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?
- Yes
- 20.3. 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 Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
- Yes
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