Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2012-2013 round2/Wikimedia Norge/Progress report form/Q2

Report received, and thank you

Dear Erlend:

We thank you for submitting this complete progress report for Quarter 2 on time, and we look forward to reviewing it soon and learning more about your activities this past quarter. Please be sure to monitor this page for questions and feedback from FDC staff while your report is being reviewed. Contact us with questions or concerns about this report at any time.

Best regards, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 22:37, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Comments from FDC Staff on this report

Thank you for submitting this complete and high-quality report on time. We are very excited to see WMNO’s activity levels increasing this quarter. Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 20:26, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Financial summary

• WMNO’s spending patterns over Q1 and Q2 reflect that many funded activities, such as the hiring of staff to do their programs, were delayed. Spending is expected to increase in future quarters now that staff are in place and programs are underway.
• Several programs are being executed as planned but WMNO has had program expenses covered by other sources and so expenses were lower than may be expected: GLAM, W-i-R. WMNO’s spending has exceeded 50% of anticipated spending in two categories: Wikipedia Academy & other events and Prizes, gifts.

Inconsistencies

There seem to be some inconsistencies in WMNO’s table of expenses. Please check these numbers and confirm the correct totals, making corrections to the financial report as needed, or please let us know if we are misunderstanding any aspect of the financial report so that we may make corrections to the financial summary.

1. In the “Total” line for Q2 expenses, “139,205 NOK” is listed, while the total of the expenses listed in the table adds up to “128,257 NOK.”
2. The total amounts budgeted in NOK and in US dollars do not add up either. For example, the total of the items listed here seems to be “1,090,000 NOK” rather than “1,100,000 NOK” as listed.
3. The cumulative Total in US dollars is also listed as “24,730 USD,” while the actual cumulative expenses seem to add up to “22,905 USD.”
4. WMNO was sent 479,359 NOK in Q2 for the first installment of its Annual Plan Grant 2012-2014, but reports revenues of only 145,656 NOK from this source. Would WMNO please explain why these numbers do not match?

Appreciation

• Congratulations on hiring three program staff, and a warm welcome to Astrid, Jorid, and Tor. We look forward to working with them and to learning about the results of their work in future quarters!
• Thank you for sharing details with us about WMNO’s annual planning process and for providing a link to WMNO’s detailed plan, and for sharing information about WMNO’s current areas of strategic focus. We will be interested to see this process develop, and to see how WMNO continues its work in these areas of focus.
• We enjoyed learning about WMNO’s plans to collaborate with other chapters in the region, including sharing experiences around W-i-R programs with WMSE and other chapters.
• This is a reflective report that shares useful insights. For example, we appreciate WMNO’s observations around recruiting and training GLAM experts in editing and how that may be affecting content on the projects in the context of an overall decline in editing.
• We are excited about WMNO’s current momentum in its GLAM work. We appreciate that WMNO recognizes many aspects of its success in the GLAM sector, beyond editor retention and the amount of content contributed, including aspects like volunteer motivation and the way Wikimedia work is being sustained in the GLAM sector over time.
• We liked the overview table that shows the results of WMNO’s W-i-R programs and we look forward to understanding this data from quarter to quarter as the program builds momentum. We especially appreciated when specific numbers were available (for example, 1,505 images uploaded through partnership with the Museum of Cultural History), or when WMNO can link directly to work products or examples. We encourage WMNO to provide more specific numbers for each partnership when they are available, to help quantify the impact of the program, and to link to blog posts or other documentation about how the program is developing the capacities of the partner institutions as well.
• We appreciate that WMNO is participating in discussions with its communities around editor decline on some of its projects of focus (Bokmaal Wikipedia, Nynorsk Wikipedia), and is moving conversations around how to work with the community to create a more welcoming environment for new contributors forward.

We would like to learn more

1. Does WMNO have an idea of how many images, videos, articles, and other content, were/was created or improved as a result of WMNO’s activities this quarter? If not, does WMNO have any plans to track this moving forward? This could be a useful indicator of what the organization is achieving.
2. WMNO reports that membership has declined and that WMNO plans to change this in coming quarters. What strategies is WMNO considering, or has WMNO implemented, to address this problem in the future?
3. WMNO reports that “Wikimedia Norge should assist W-I-R's more closely in involving the total staff of their institutions more thoroughly.” Has WMNO yet been measuring progress against this objective?
4. Would WMNO please provide more details about the editing scholarships program that WMNO reports was very successful? We are very interested in learning more about how WMNO is supporting its editors through this program.
5. WMNO reports a very successful recruitment process. Congratulations! Does WMNO have any additional insights or lessons to share with the movement about this success? Recruiting can be a challenge for organizations so we would like to know more about what went well.

Suggestions for future reports

We appreciate the level of detail in this report and also appreciate that WMNO is clearly reporting against its stated program objectives. In general, future reports may be improved by also including more specific data to show progress against WMNO’s objectives for each program. For example, if WMNO has data about retention rates from its activities and the amount of content produced through its activities, we strongly encourage WMNO to share it here in these reports.

Please do work to ensure that numbers in these financial reports are consistent when submitting future reports by checking the calculations in these tables. This helps us all stay on the same page as far as the numbers are concerned, which is important!

With respect to sharing insights and learning through these reports, please keep up the good work in this area! We are excited to learn about the increased levels of program activity this quarter and look forward to the results WMNO’s new staff will achieve. We also recognize that WMNO is reacting to trends in editing activity with its communities and working toward addressing editor decline in its online areas of focus and hope to learn more about this in future reports.

Thanks again for this great report! Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 20:26, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Summary answers

Dear Winifred and team,

Thanks for thorough and good questions. We will try to answer this chronologically, with some extra comments aswell.

1. Regarding total expenses, the higher number is the correct one, as two items were let out in the details but not in the sum-up. The missed item were:

• Two advertisements in the newspapers, of NOK 10,944, that we paid in October and November. That were advertisements on the job openings that we recruited to.
• A refund to the Sametinget (NOK 4.oo), after we discovered that after cumulative roundings of sums we hade returned NOK 4 too little back to the Sametinget from unutilized, older funds (from 2009-12).

1. The deviation of budgeted sums, is yet one error in transferring numbers from budget to report. If you look at the new budget, you will see that the budgeted total cost is NOK 1,090,000. I observe that it is the sum of the single items that is correct here, and arriving at NOK 10,000 more in the summary is probably because we have made the mistake of including the budgeted result or EBITDA (of exactly NOK 10,000) in the sum.
2. The deviation in USD then obviously has the same reason, it corresponds more or less to the budgeted result or EBITDA.
3. The reason why we account only NOK 145,656 in revenue from the WMF, while the WMF has installed NOK 479,359, is that we account after the accrual principle and not the cash principle. So, we only account FDC funds as a revenue when they are spent - we "activate" it into the running accounts. The rest of the amount does not belong to us - because we have not legitimately spent it and therefore we actually owes it to the WMF. Therefore, the residual or un-spent sum is continuously kept in the balance sheet as "Non-utilized funds WMF", so you would see it there if you asked us for reporting the balance-sheet aswell.
4. Number of photos - we have described in the application for 2014-15 that we will report on more metrics. In the two quarters (July-december 2013) there resulted approximately 10,000 images , of which almost 5,000 were uploaded by the WiR at the Directorate of Cultural Heritage and the rest from other institutions and some 2,500 as a result of WLM. However, the big result from 2 years of effort is the decision to release some 300,000 imaged from 2 institutions - roughly 100,000 from the Oslo Museum and Wilse collection, and up to 200,000 from the Folkemuseet. These images will need uploading at that will be a considerable task, but the WiR at the Directorate of Cultural Heritage produced an uploading bot that might be of some use.
5. In the newest newsletters we have stressed more to remind of paying the membership fee, and we have regained some members. We are now up to 70-75, which is a modest increase from 2012-13. We will work much harder on this, especially by making more widely promoted the digital solution we have for membership payment.
6. We have become more active in staging events at the institutions were there are WiR's as a way to involve the reminder of the staff and as a means of "promoting" the WiR internally. There were a large number of events with the Directorate of Cultural Heritage (2 WiRs) and we are following this up this year with the National Library (1 WiR since February). At the Directorate of Cultural Heritage , they have, as a result, started up writing circles where employees for the first time write articles about cultural heritage sites and topics. This is a result of the joint efforts and focus we had during the fall. In just the same manner, we contacted the Folkemuseet again in January, and arranged one major wiki workshop there together with a curator, and involved more employees than just the WiR.
7. We are lacking on reporting yet because the quite new staff (from December) have focused heavily on hgetting operational projects flying. There will be reporting but less frequent that we would wish, with only 1.6 employees...
8. The editing scholarships were not granted by WMNO, but by the Directorate of Cultural Heritage . hey gave away approximately 20 scholarships, some 80 per cent of these to university students. They did not demand a particular production, they just gave everyone NOK 10,000 (USD 1,800), against submitting a report in the end about what you had done. Some had done almost nothing, some had done a lot, and actually a good number seemed to starting writing some time after the scholarship period. I took home a scholarship myself, actually, and produced some 100 articles on heritage sites in Spitsbergen. The scholarship thing was one out of many efforts that the Directorate did, with a residual part of the budget towards the end of a budgeting period. When we get the full report from them (the period ending new year), we will be able to tell more about what worked, and what did not.
9. Regarding recruitment, we described the success a bit in our latest submission to this year's Round 2. First of all, we let the most experienced board members do the recruitment, so only board members with extensive experience as leaders and/or labour unionists were members of the recruitment committee. The rest of the board were part of the decision of course, but they let the recruitment committee do the actual pick. We did not involve any externals (we tried, but the relevant candidate travelled to France for some time), so we just went on with board sources. The recruitment committee put most emphasis on subjective impression and gut-feeling. Of course the chosen ones had their CV's in place, but several candidates had. The decisive point was to dare to follow instincts and experience. We deviated little among us, actually.
10. Regarding reporting, we will start using more wikimetrics available, but we could use a little crash-course in that. We also notice that the gender-statistic program at toolserver is down, that is a pity! We focus more and more on recruiting women now, and reckon that we hit some 60-70% women with our activities. We are following editing statistics and newbies statistics, and that developed well in January and February. The same two months, article production rose sharply. We will try to collect some viable basket of metrics to report on. Please suggest.

Kind regards,Bjoertvedt (talk) 00:47, 4 April 2014 (UTC)