Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2014-2015 round1/Wikimedia Sverige/Proposal form

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Community review has ended. You are still welcome to comment on these proposals, but the FDC and the applicants may not be able to respond to your feedback or consider it during the deliberations.

Please do not edit this proposal form directly. If changes are needed, applicants can request them on the proposal form's discussion page. Thank you!

Proposal by Wikimedia Sverige to support its annual plan with ~$366,000.

Program focus: Community support, Content liberation, Free knowledge in education, Reach and readers, Free knowledge awareness

The chapter will utilize 2015 as a year for fine-tuning projects and increasing the use of metrics to evaluate and further develop the work. Our long term collaboration with GLAMs will continue, as partnerships where seeds planted several years ago now flourish. While we expect to see several more of these collaborations form during the upcoming year, we also acknowledge the fact that it takes time for licensing questions to settle within these large institutions and that our expertise is needed throughout that process. Furthermore, we're seeing a similar time scale for the Educational sector. While we do manage to get individual teachers involved, it is a long term project to get institutions to contribute as part of the curriculum, making true scaling possible. During 2015, we will build case studies to demonstrate the value of free knowledge sharing in education in order to promote larger changes on institutional levels. We will continue to support the community in a good number of ways and we will try to be more flexible in adapting to their needs. Since the infrastructure for the technology pool, administrating grants and helping out with accreditations are already in place, we can offer efficient support to the community. For Public policy, we will focus our efforts more on the EU level, where we have the opportunity to make a difference.


Exchange rates[edit]

Hello, WMSE Colleagues:

On first glance, we've noticed that you have not used the proposed standard exchange rates we've requested. We need to make sure the rates are consistent, and so we will need to make some edits to your proposal in the areas that include estimates in US dollars, if that's alright with you. This means we will be editing your proposal extensively in the near future. For now, we have changed the amounts in Table 1, since it is important to make sure those are consistent right now.

The rates we are using are listed here. The rate we will be using to convert Swedish Krona to US dollars is 1 SEK = 00.15400 USD. This makes the overall amount requested ~US$393,778.

Please let us know immediately if you have any questions or concerns about these changes or rates.

Best regards from FDC staff, Winifred Olliff (FDC Support Team) talk 23:45, 3 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Jan! You are correct, that the rates to and fron SEK and USD we posted do not match: therefore, I've reverted these changes to use your original exchange rate and will update the exchange rates page to make them consistent. We appreciate the prompt response and apologize for our mistake there! Cheers, Winifred Olliff (FDC Support Team) talk 17:47, 6 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Information on "Other grants" and fundraising[edit]

Hi, from your impact report, which I understand to be referred to 2013, I can read that you expected to acquire SEK 1,835,000 (USD 266,715) from grants, but received eventually SEK 801,725 (USD 116,530), from the proposal I read that you are revising your expected revenues from SEK 4,901,500 (USD 701,216) to SEK 3,853,000 (USD 551,216) with year-to-date actuals being SEK 1,945,898.22 (USD 278,383), a quite significant difference. Also, in table 4 you mention that you :hired fewer staff than planned due to external funding that did not come through". In table 5 you mention that you expect to get from other grants SEK 2,069,855 (USD 296,117) and of these sum around SEK 545,000 (USD 77,969) are already approved, but for the rest of the funds (SEK 1,524,855 [USD 218,148]) you have applied and you are awaiting answers. Can you please give more details around this revenue source? Do you know around which period the information about acceptance of grant will be available? Whilst the fact that you are learning about the challenges in fundrasing is good, how did you make the prevision about the external funding in this proposal? Can you break it down in more detail? Thanks, -- CristianCantoro (talk) 23:39, 8 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the question CristianCantoro. In the linked detailed budget, every little bit is trackable if you want to dig in, look in the blue columns marked "Own" (E:G), there are also notes to indicate where the money is applied from. For an overview, we have applied roughly 1,000,000 SEK from Kulturbryggan for Wikipedia towns. We already received a seeding grant from them with the pilot for Umepedia, which is why we are quite optimistic about that. The notice are expected on 6 November. Then we applied roughly 260,000 SEK from EU for the Aha! project where we will get the decision this year. The rest are a number of smaller grants with different dates, but all quite early. We have also already identified several grants that we could apply for in January and February so that if we do fail on the ones that are out for decision now we have backups that will be useful for almost the entire year. --Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 11:19, 10 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thank you for your response, Jan. Could you give a bit more detail on what your contingency plan would be if these grants do not come through? What programs would receive less emphasis? Risker (talk) 03:40, 21 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, of course. It do depend a bit on what grants does not come through. For most of them we do have similar grants that we can apply for more or the less the same things. And it s also possible to apply in the area of education, which would make it possible to redistribute funds from FDC to areas which do not get external funds. These are now not in the plan, but active contingencies (there are others as well). This makes it possible for us to react on what happens but still not make any major changes to the plans. Obviously there might be minor changes or single projects to be changed or dropped, and this will be reported in the quarterly reports, but it is not possible to give a definitive answer right now. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 09:39, 22 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's unfortunate that we don't yet know the actuals, but I find it very encouraging that a substantial portion of your budget is funded by non-Wikimedia grants. Congratulations. (Disclaimer: one of those grants is or was [also] about translatewiki.net, so as TWN staff we enjoyed a couple or handful more users.) Would such grants applications made easier if you could already ensure a certain share of co-financing in the moment you apply? --Nemo 09:16, 26 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    • It varies a little from grant to grant, but in general yes. For some grants it could be really helpful. Some of the active grants we have recieved have been made possible by saying that we use FDC money worth X amount to cover basic costs like internet, office space and things like that. So the APG is really an enabler to this in several ways. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 08:10, 27 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Questions from FDC staff[edit]

Thank you for submitting this proposal for an Annual Plan Grant to the FDC! As the FDC staff, we have enjoyed reviewing it and learning more about the work you’ve done to date, and the plans you have for 2015. At this time, we’d like to know a bit more. Some questions have come up as part of our review, and we have a few requests for clarifications. Please let us know if any of this is unclear.

Thank you for your hard work! Winifred Olliff (FDC Support Team) talk 00:26, 11 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Confirming your financial information[edit]

Based on your budgeted spend for 2014 your proposed growth rate is 36.33% and based on your projected spend for 2014 your growth rate is 4.36% because you expect to spend 76.55% of the total budgeted. WMSE is requesting a 2.28% increase in FDC funding. This analysis is based on the following numbers:

  • Budgeted spend 2014: kr4,901,500
  • Projected spend 2014: kr3,752,000
  • FDC funds granted 2014: kr2,500,000kr2,507,000
  • Proposed budget 2015: kr5,115,000
  • FDC funds requested 2015: kr2,557,000
That seems to be correct, except for that we were actually granted 2,507,000 SEK from FDC and that the requested increase from FDC funding therefore is 1,99%. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 06:07, 14 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, of course, thank you! We have updated our records to show the increase in FDC funding as 1.99%.

There is a minor discrepancy in your detailed budget. The sum of the costs listed in “External” do not equal the subtotal listed. You might take another look to resolve that minor inconsistency.

Thanks for spotting the error. If we fix that, should we also update relevant tables that are affected? Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 06:07, 14 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, please do if they are affected. Please do so using strikethrough as usual. We approve that change in advance. Cheers, Winifred Olliff (FDC Support Team) talk 20:52, 16 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Fixed Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 07:15, 17 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, Jan! Winifred Olliff (FDC Support Team) talk 17:53, 17 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Table 6[edit]

We think there may have some confusion in filling out the reserves table in the form (Table 6), and we apologize if this table was confusing. It was confusing to many applicants, so we will be sure to revise it next year.

  • Total anticipated amount in operating reserves (by the end of the current fiscal year) should be the amount that you plan to have in your reserves by the end of December 2014.
  • Total existing reserves from the current year to be carried over as reserves in the upcoming year should be the amount of those reserves you listed in the first row that you intend to keep in your reserves until the end of December 2015. (This will need to be equal to or less than the amount listed in the first row.)
  • Total to be added to reserves in the upcoming year (excluding FDC funding) should be any additional amount you plan to add augment your reserves by end of December 2015 taken from any source other than FDC funding.
  • Total to be added to reserves in the upcoming year (excluding FDC funding) should be any additional amount you plan to add augment your reserves by end of December 2015 that you intend to draw from FDC funding.
  • Total planned reserves in the upcoming year (should equal the sum of the rows except the first) should be the total amount you plan to have in your reserves by end of December 2015. This will be equal to the sum of the second, third, and fourth rows in the table.

Example (building reserves):

  • Total anticipated amount in operating reserves (by the end of the current fiscal year): 20
  • Total existing reserves from the current year to be carried over as reserves in the upcoming year: 20
  • Total to be added to reserves in the upcoming year (excluding FDC funding): 2
  • Total to be added to reserves in the upcoming year (excluding FDC funding): 1
  • Total planned reserves in the upcoming year (should equal the sum of the rows except the first): 23

Example (drawing on reserves):

  • Total anticipated amount in operating reserves (by the end of the current fiscal year): 20
  • Total existing reserves from the current year to be carried over as reserves in the upcoming year: 15
  • Total to be added to reserves in the upcoming year (excluding FDC funding): 0
  • Total to be added to reserves in the upcoming year (excluding FDC funding): 0
  • Total planned reserves in the upcoming year (should equal the sum of the rows except the first): 15
I, see. Should we update the table to be aligned with this explanation? Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 06:08, 14 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, please, if you don't mind! Any changes needed to that table are approved. Thank you, Winifred Olliff (FDC Support Team) talk 21:00, 16 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Fixed Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 07:15, 17 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, Jan! It looks consistent now, and we will update our records to reflect these corrections. Winifred Olliff (FDC Support Team) talk 17:53, 17 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Questions[edit]

  1. Your plan this year is ambitious and includes a continuation of many existing programs while also piloting new ones. How will you ensure your community has the interest, energy and time to support all of the projects that are included?
    So far we have only seen increased interest from volunteers as we increase our activity. Last year we counted to have 31 volunteers involved helping us with projects. So far this year we have already had 39 volunteers helping us in our projects. With more tasks to choose from and increased activity in different geographical areas, volunteers that had not been active before find a way to get involved that feel compelling to them. We have also increased our member base quite substantially. Last year we ended with 194 members. On 13 October we counted to over 530 members. That will substantially enhance our chances to reach out to volunteers in different areas and with new skill sets.
  2. What are some of your long-term goals for the free knowledge awareness program? What change do you hope to see as a result of this work?
    That is a very good question, thanks for asking. In our vision we state this:
    • The term free and open information is commonly known and are never needed to be explained.
    • Any barriers between us and other promoters of knowledge and education are eliminated and we work together towards a common goal.
    This means that we want to get free knowledge to be universally accepted, and that it should be the default and that any limitations in this area are exceptions to the rule which need to be justified. To give a little more specific example, we would like all publicly funded produced material to be in the public domain, much like content produced by federal authorities in the US are.
  3. How will making communication easier by hosting more offline meetings contribute to results online?
    There are plenty of studies showing that communicating online reduces empathy, whilst meeting in real life does the opposite. There are even studies showing that users with human avatars are treated more nicely than those without. The more we can humanize the users, the better the communication climate will be online. If a user has met another user before, it will be easier for that user to truly assume good faith. In the long run, this is very much an attempt to improve the community health, to have less infected discussions and by letting these go, get more productive users.
  4. For your content liberation program, do you have targets for how much content will be contributed? Do you plan to set targets for usage of the content? (For example, is media uploaded included in articles on Wikipedia.)
    No, we have explicitly refrained from setting these targets since we believe it might make us focus on the wrong things. What we have learned is that too much focus on large numbers might not be the best way to build a healthy relationship with a GLAM institution. And we do not just want to grab files and then never hear from them again. So we focus on getting the institutions to do something. Perhaps this year they only upload 20 hand picked files. But they will still need to go through the complete internal review in clearing these files by the legal department (and some times the board). And since the number is so small, nobody will get stuck on the question "Are we releasing too much?" but rather solve the actual questions at hand. This build up experience on practical copyright issues within the organization. Come the next round, these questions will be easier handled, and the evangelists within the institution can focus on getting interesting material released. Interesting material have high chances of being used widely and they will be able to show the impact that the first tiny step had. (This is also why we want to inform the community on all released content.) When they later see how their files are being used, they will be champions within the GLAM community, making our work much easier. It is also more likely that the release will go well if not trying to release too many files the first time. We believe that having a smooth ride increases the chances of the institutions coming back (we have examples on when the first release took a long time due to the size, and that that particular institution have been slow on releasing new files). That is why we focus on the number institutions releasing files rather than the number of files released. But obviously we will track and report the numbers.
  5. Do you have any content-focused targets related specifically to use of the technology pool?
    No. But for a different reason than above. This is a service to community members and for them to be, and feel, empowered. That is why we rather have the technology to enable them to "get that one shot" than to implicitly (or explicitly) tell them to upload many files. On the other hand some volunteers are not professional level photographers, but really tenacious and with a drive to systematically document an object or event and will produce a high number of files that as a collection are really important, but perhaps not include a single featured picture. But for this one too, we will track and report them, and thanks to WMFR and WMDE for tools like [1] and [2] it will be pretty easy.
  6. You write, “By reaching out to academics we aim to get more high quality contributions to the projects”. Do you have any targets related specifically to measuring the quality of contributions, that will indicate if this is successful or not?
    No, but we had a lot of discussions on this one. We finally decided that the number of useful ways academics can be involved are too diverse to easily be captured by a single metric. Or rather, there is no standardized ways to measure the quality of a contribution, and instead of inventing a new one that only we will use, we are hoping that the analytics team will come up with some metric that we all can use. If we for example would focus on only getting featured articles, we reasoned that we would limit our ways in engaging academics since there are a number of good ways an academic can contribute, eg. removing errors, adding sources or discussing which sources that are reputable in one topic. There is also the aspect that since we are working with the academics within their courses they will stick to the topic they are learning and be motivated to perform well. i.e. we are assuming the topical quality to be high by default and therefore only measure the number of productive edits will be enough. Our main focus will be to get them informed about how Wikipedia works and to get them involved so they can contribute to free knowledge in the most number of ways and also be a part of the community rather than being a “guest”. We do, of course, realize that it would be very valuable being able to measure the quality of contributions and would love to see more ideas in that area that we could use to measure our impact.
Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 07:05, 16 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Engaging topic experts[edit]

Hi Jan Ainali (WMSE), thank you for the work that you all are doing for the wikimedia movement. I like the focus that you all have on working with topic experts. I think that bringing more of them in is the answer to many longstanding problems on Wikipedias. And I understand that there are reasons that cause you all are hesitant to make a list of ways that topic experts could contribute and then create measures and targets for them, but there also compelling reasons to do it. One being that we can be smarter about the way that we engage topic experts if we better understand the way that they work. We gain this understanding by making educated guesses now, create measures and target, and then tracking them for results. As an example, because topic experts have greater knowledge about a topic, they might be less likely to refer to a source and create more content without references. Or a topic expert might add their own previously published material that does not have copyright compatible with WMF, and have it reverted or deleted. Or a topic expert might have great access to sources on a particular topic, and add a large number up to date high quality reference. So an effort to measure # references added or the number of reverts, or the number of deletions could give us valuable information about the success that the experts are having editing high quality material. This is just one example and maybe not the most relevant for the work that you all are doing. But I think it makes my point. I realize that doing this type of work is breaking new ground. But best results will happen if these measures and targets are created by people in the community who are closest to the articles being supported by chapters (or thematic organizations) and WMF. Wikimedia Sverige is in a good position to do this type of work. I hope that you all with jump in and take it on. :-) FloNight (talk) 17:07, 17 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, and thank you for your thoughtful comment. I do agree that there might be metrics that can be useful, and that it is worth exploring. And we will do that, try to figure out what is worth focusing on and see what measurements can be tracked (and try to report them all). But I do think it is too early to set targets for them, since it might distract us from charting this territory (because reporting targets usually affect the way you do your activities). Rather we would try to include in our evaluation of the project some sort of recommendations on things that would be worth to measure as something we can learn for next year. --Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 07:12, 22 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

MEPs[edit]

In-person interaction with all Swedish MEPs, interesting. How many of them are active in digital agenda, copyright and similar stuff? --Nemo 09:16, 26 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We don't know for sure, and this will be a way to find out, on a more informal way. Since our volunteer-to-be in Brussels is a former MP and know several of the MEPs this will also be a good way to find out in what ways our respective agendas might overlap and an excellent way to get Wikimedia known. Obviously, before approaching for a meeting, deeper research will be made on each individual MEP to be able do a unique pitch. This research will start in November when our volunteer moves to Brussels. --Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 08:21, 27 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Ok. --Nemo 07:16, 29 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Questions from Risker about participant metrics[edit]

I realise that the chapters and affiliates have not really been asked to produce consistent participant metrics to date, so it is understandable if you have to give estimates for some of these metrics. When responding, please identify if the data you are providing is verified (e.g., a maintained membership database) or estimated.

  1. How many members do you have? If you have different categories of membership, please give subtotals for each category.
  2. How many individuals volunteered for/participated in an activity sponsored by your organization so far this year, excluding special events like WMF-related conferences/Wikimania? (Please let me know what kinds of activities you're including.) Approximately what percentage of these volunteers are also chapter/affiliate members?
  3. What percentage of the individuals who have volunteered for or participated in your organization's activities in the past year are also active Wikimedians, or became active Wikimedians after participation? (Activity could include content contributions or administrative contributions on any project, developer contributions, committee membership, etc.)

Thanks for any information you are able to provide. Risker (talk) 04:42, 30 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  1. From our Q3-report: 509 members, of which 9 are organizations and 500 are individuals.
  2. As of 13 October we had 40 volunteers active in our projects, of which I estimate around 70% to be chapter members.
  3. This estimate is less precise, but I would guess it is around 75% or more.
--Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 17:09, 30 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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