Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2014-2015 round2/Wikimedia Norge/Proposal form

Thank you for this proposal form

Hello, Hogne, Astrid, Erlend! Thank you for submitting this complete proposal form on time. We thank you for using the requested number format in your proposal. That makes things easier for us (and others who may be looking closely at your financials. We did make a minor change to one of your tables to achieve the standard. We hope you don't mind the change, but please let us know if you have any concerns.

1. We are asking you to update your proposal form to use consistent exchange rates. In Table 3 (Financials: year-to-date progress), we ask that you stick to the exchange rate provided (1 NOK = 0.13017 USD). We understand that these rates have changed over time, but we would like a consistent exchange rate used throughout the form. If you would update the table, we approve that change in advance. Please also update other sections of the proposal form to use the same rate throughout, such as the section on staff expenses. We approve those changes in advance as well.
2. Would you also please clarify for us why you have included two numbers in your budgeted revenues and expenses for the current year (e.g. 2,500,000 (1,500,000))? We want to be sure we are fully understanding those numbers.

If we have any other urgent needs for clarification, we'll contact you right away. Otherwise, you can expect questions from FDC staff in the next week or so. Finally, we ask that you do not make any changes to the proposal form now that the deadline has passed (other than those approved here), without first contacting FDC staff. If a change is needed, you can put in a request here on this discussion page.

Best, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 01:50, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Hi, and thanks for your convenient questions. We posted the currency rate USD = 8.00 NOK in absence of a stated rate. We will apply your rate of USD = 7.68 NOK. However, please bear in mind that the actual currency rate is today USD = 8.03669 (http://www.oanda.com/currency/converter/), i.e. it is clearly closer to our level. This will imply that the WMF will eventually be able to support a larger amount of NOK with a lower amount of USD.

The two budgeted revenue and expense levels, budget parallel as both NOK 1.5 mio, and NOK 2.5 mio, are straightforward. Wikimedia Norge has used the budget to indicate a potential level of public (state-level) funding, which is virtually impossible. I.e., the 1.5 mio budget would imply that we got zero public funding, whereas the 2.5 mio budget would imply that we got 1 mio NOK in public funding. Since this hypothetic budgeting of NOk 1 mio is matched by a similar, 1:1 expense budgeting of NOK 1 mio, and since the programs anticipated if funding would be realized is only budget in lump-sum expense categories, the budget span does not play any real role as regards activity planning. If public funding had been realized, we would have spent public funds in a separate programs. Since public funds were not realized, there was no spending of them.

However, Wikimedia Norge realized a NOK 250,000 funding from non-public or semi-public sources. The spending of these funds are bound by the applications and installment letters of the grantees, so the spending is not visualized in great detail here.

Kind regards, Bjoertvedt (talk) 21:05, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Questions from FDC staff

Thank you colleagues, for submitting this proposal. We appreciate the effort you have put into creating it. Please let us know if any of these questions need clarification. We look forward to hearing your responses. Many thanks, KLove (WMF) (talk) 23:37, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Financial questions

• In Table 8, the expenses listed in each category do not add up to your total expenses. Please correct this table so that it is consistent.
• Table 3 uses three different exchange rates. We understand that your local currency has fluctuated significantly over the periods described. Even so, we ask that you use a consistent rate across this proposal form. It is important to note that the FDC uses numbers in local currency to compare budgets year over year and to understand how funds are allocated within budgets. Grants are also given in local currency, and not in US dollars. While we do ask that you use consistent exchange rates in Table 3, as elsewhere, we welcome the inclusion of a detailed note or information in parenthesis explaining your financial information.

Questions about your programs, approaches and staffing

• We would like a better understanding of the role of volunteers in Wikimedia Norge’s programs. In general, what roles do volunteers play in each program and what roles do staff play? What strategies do you use to keep a sufficient number of volunteers engaged in your program work? How many volunteers do you expect you will be engaging through each program, and overall?
• Please tell us more about how WMNO approaches learning. We want to know more about your process for revisiting and adapting the goals of your programs, and how you apply the lessons you learn from both successes and failures. We would like to better understand how you use what you learn to adapt your programs over time to make them increasingly effective.
• Please provide some more details about the roles of the Technical Manager (0.5 FTE) and the Academic Wikipedia program manager? What will their responsibilities be, and why do you feel staff are most needed in these areas?

Gender gap

• Would you please tell us more about how you define your target of 40% participation of women in WMNO’s activities? In which activities are you measuring female participation?
• Beyond number of participants, do you have any targets for your female editing workshops in terms of number of newly registered users, number of active editors involved, number of editors retained after a certain time period, content contributed during or after the workshops?
• Can you tell us why you have chosen to pursue a Train the Trainers approach, and how the content for these training sessions is being developed.? What are your plans to track the results of these workshops, and how will you work with the participants, if at all, after the trainings?
• Please tell us more about what specific strategies you plan to use to create self-sustaining female editors through your gender-focused work.
• Please tell us more about how you decided to focus on universities as sites for trainings and the establishment of self-sustaining communities of female editors. For example, do you expect editors would continue to participate in these groups even after they leave the university?

GLAM

• Please tell us how you define “quality” with respect to media added through your GLAM program, and particularly through your mass uploads program. Are you referring to images rated as quality by the community, or do you have another way of defining quality? Do you plan to measure use of the media?
• Please tell us more about what support you offer Wikimedians in residence and host institutions. If you fund the salaries or stipends of any Wikimedians in residence directly, please explain why this is necessary in your context.
• What specific content will be targeted through contests as part of the GLAM program, and how this will contribute to the topical and geographical diversity of articles on your targeted projects?
• We would like more information about the resources you are devoting to your work with The Wikipedia Library. How do you see the role of WMNO and the roles of volunteers in this work?
• When you say you will attract 8 established editors for each editing competition, do you mean 8 "active editors" (5+ edits per month)? Do you expect to engage a total of 32 editors through four contests?
• Beyond number of participants and scholarships, what do you hope to achieve through the Wiki Academy? Beyond number of participants, what do you hope to achieve through the GLAM-Wiki Meetups or the Cultural Data Conference? We want to better understand the link between these activities and online impact.

Academic Wikipedia

• We note that you are bringing on a fulltime staff person to work on Academic Wikipedia, but we did not find clear links between this program and online impact. Please explain.
• Beyond the number of partnerships, what are your targets on content added or improved, or increased participation through the activities in this program?

Answers from Wikimedia Norway

Financial questions

Thank you for you questions.

We request to update Table 3:

Table 3

	Current funding period planned / budgeted		Year-to-date funding period actuals		Projected end of current funding period
	In currency requested	In $US	In currency requested	In $US	In currency requested	In $US
Revenues (from all sources)	2,500,000 (1,500,000)	325,425	1,009,281	131,378	1,425,931	185,613
Expenses	2,467,000 (1,467,000)	321,129	925,675	120,495	1,403,814	182,734

Table 3 notes:

• The difference between projected (budgeted) revenues and expenses, versus the actually accrued and projected for the current period, derives from the fact that public funding estimated to NOK 1,000,000, has not been realized.
• However, revenues have accrued at the amounts of NOK 100,000 from the foundation Fritt Ord (" Free Speech Foundation "), and NOK 150,000 have been granted by the Finansmarkedsfondet (" Finance Market Fund ").
• In the upcoming 2015-2016 period, Wikimedia Norge aims at having at least NOK 500,000 in external funding outside the WMF.

• The stated currency rate from the WMF for next period is USD = 7.6823 NOK (NOK = 0.13017 USD). However, when looking back, the currency rate was very far from that level, it moved from USD = 6.5 NOK in start of the period in question, to a present USD = 8.0 NOK at the end of the current period. This entails a 23 % change in the currency rate, this should be taken into account when applying today's currency rates at historic data from a period when the rate was substantially different.

We request to update table 8:

Table 8

Expense type	In currency requested	In $US
Program expenses (total from Table 7, excludes staff)	466,000	60,659
Operations (excludes staff and programs)	444,000	57,795
Upcoming staff total expenses (from Table 4)	1,575,000	205,017
Amount to be added to operating reserves (if applicable)	76,500	9,958
Total expenses (should equal the sum of the rows)	2,561,500	333,429

Table 8 notes:

• 16th of April - total expenses is updated to the sum of all rows in the table.

BR Hogne (talk) 09:41, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Hello, Hogne! If you update Table 8 as proposed, your total expenses in Table 8 (2,561,500 NOK) will be different from those listed in Table 1 (2,485,000 NOK), but these amounts should be the same. Do you need to update Table 1 as well? Cheers, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 21:51, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Hey, you're right, and this coincides with the budget approved at the annual meeting of the Wikimedia Norway, when also the amount to be added for operations reserves is included. [1]

We then request to update table 1:

Table 1

	Currency requested	US$
Total expenses for the upcoming year	2,561,500	333,429
APG funding requested for the upcoming year	2,100,000	273,356
Amount of funding received from WMF for the current year	1,294,800	199,200

Hogne (talk) 18:19, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Hogne, thank you for taking a close look and for suggesting these corrections. I think it is most important to get a picture of your year-over-year expenses, and so you can leave the amount in Table 1 as 2,485,000 NOK, and then add a note to Table 1 explaining that 2,561,500 NOK is the total including the amount you plan to add to reserves. The reason the amount including reserves is important is because it is needed for understanding the context for your APG request, which also includes some funding for reserves. The FDC will be taking a nuanced look at these numbers (total budget excluding amount to be added to reserves, total amount to be added to reserves, total APG funding going toward expenses, total APG funding going toward reserves), but I think this approach (including the official budget amount approved at the AGM along with a note explaining the difference from Table 8) may be the least confusing for others trying to understand your proposal. Thanks for your patience with this. As you know, we're still working out the best way to represent information about reserves in the proposal, as it is a complicated issue.

The other corrections to your financial data are also approved. Please use strikethrough to show that the data has been changed. Thank you! Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 16:56, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer), thank you for your approval. I've updated the prosal according to my understanding. Thank you! Hogne (talk) 08:01, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Questions about our programs, approaches and staffing

Gender gap

In addition to our all-female activities, we have a goal of always having a 40 percent participation of women in all parts of our activity. This includes speakers at workshops and seminar, as well as the spokespersons in the media and in communications with authorities. For Wikimedia Norge to be believable in addressing the gender gap, we also want to have women speaking about and on behalf of the project, as well as having a 40 percent female board. We also would like to add that in working closely with the GLAM sector, we reach a lot of women.

Our goal is of course that all the attendees become active editors, but a more realistic goal is one third. After each workshop Wikimedia Norway investigates how many articles have been created, and we invite the attendees to follow-up-workhops and Train the trainer-seminars and to join a facebook-group for female editors. We can to some extent see the impact of our work. The statistic is however not yet ready to be presented.

n inviting to a Train the trainers workshop, we will invite former attendees from the female editing workshops. Our aim is to get two attendees from each workshop to join. At the workshops we have had so far, we have informed all attendees about this plan, and also asked if they were interested in continued training. We will also do this at the workshops planned for the fall of 2015.

After having arranged different kinds of workshops during the last one and a half years, as well as hearing / reading about the experiences from other Wikimedia chapters, we have realized that only one workshop rarely is enough to make someone an active editor. We believe that local trainers who arrange their own workshops can lead to continuous activity as well as settings where Wikipedia editing is a positive social experience. With limited staff recourses this is also a good way to increase the activity, and to build Wikipedia-communities in other cities than where we are situated.

The new trainers will have the possibility to contact formers attendees from editing workshops in their own city, and we will also suggest that the trainers invite fellow students and friends to their own workshops.

We have set the 7th of November as the date for our first Train the trainers-workshop. To this date we have not decided the details of the workshop, but our plan is to spend an entire day (weekend), partially spent on Wikipedia-editing and partially on giving the attendees knowledge on sharing culture, online encyclopedias and the gender gap.

Wikimedia Norge thinks that Norwegian universities are the perfect partners for these courses because of four reasons: They are well suited for reaching many people at once, and at the same time they can concentrate on specific target groups. Universities have the necessary facilities for hosting workshops. It is within the purpose of these institutions to share knowledge. And, in making female students use Wikipedia, we also contribute to the general goal of strengthening women’s place in academia.

When female students at an early point in their academic career learn how they can contribute with their knowledge to the public through Wikipedia, it is more likely that they will consider editing Wikipedia as a part of their work later.

Glam

“Quality” was used to emphasis that the uploads are done by our GLAM partners, and that the media which they upload are central in the cultural heritage of Norway. As an example, the Nordlandsmuseet with help from the National Library recently uploaded 2 267 pictures to Commons, the Kanstad-collection.

We measure the use with the GLAMorous tool. As an example: the use of the upload images from The National Library can be seen here. We encourage our Glam partners to pay attention to this link to see how the community gets involved in adding categories etc.

So far Wikimedia Norge has not funded the salaries or stipends of any Wikimedians in residence. However we have tried to support the Wikimedians in Residence by including them in Wikimedia Norges activities, which of course is easiest to do in the Oslo area. We try to think of projects that will benefit the work of host institution, but also would be of interest for WiR as well as Wikimedia Norge. This has worked very well with the former WiR at the National Library. We get to use the facilities at the National Library once a month for free for our social wiki meetups. The Wikipedia Library would be another example. And since the former WiR now works with the images collections at the National Library, he is allowed to use some of his work hours to do the technical upload to Commons for institutions. Wikimedia Norge tries to connect as many institutions with this person as possible. We invite WiR to come and speak at different events and we try letting them now what kind of work other WiR have done. However there are big variations in how much Wikimedia Norge is involved in the WiR´s work. It depends on the WiR and on what kind of work the institutions wants the WiR to do. Over all we do have more contact with WiR that do technical work than WiR that concentrate on editor training.

The specific content targeted through contests depends on which Glam partners we organize the writing contest together with. Wikimedia Norge often organize a writing contest at the same time as we hold an event. For example there will be a wiki workshop next week about the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius in collaboration with the Finnish-Norwegian Institute and the National Library and the week after we organize a writing contest about Finland on-wiki. The aim of the writing contests we organize is to create a link between Glam institutions and the community, to build and engage the Community and to increase volunteer motivation and commitment among active editors. The topical and geographical diversity of articles will because of this depend on which institutions we work with.

The last 6 months we have had a very good response working with different libraries are very interesting institutions to work together with. The staff are enthusiastic about sharing knowledge, libraries have experience from hosting events, they have the needed facilities and according to the their mandate they are now obliged to use the library as a meeting place for library users. This spring we have worked closely with the National Library, with different University libraries and the Wikipedia Academy this week has a focus on Wikipedia and libraries. We had one library student as an intern this winter and in May another library student will have his internship at Wikimedia Norge doing a study on how librarians use Wikipedia. Several of the very active editors on the Norwegian Wikipedia’s are librarians themselves and on the village pump several community members have asked for the possibility to get access to paid online resources. In our opinion this is an excellent project where staff can support the community by organizing free access to different resources. The former WiR at the National Library will be involved in the project and we will contact all community members who were part of the discussion on online resources on the village pump and ask for suggestions on how we can work together on this. Astrid Carlsen from Wikimedia Norge and the librarian student doing his internship will be involved as well. We have scheduled a call with Jakob Orlowitz in May to get things started.

When we say we will attract 8 established editors for each editing competition, we do mean 8 "active editors" (5+ edits per month). Sorry about that! Most likely many of the active editors will participate in more than 1 editing competition, so the total number of editors engaging will be lower than 32.

At the Wiki Academy, the GLAM-Wiki Meetups and the Cultural Data Conference we want people to meet, talk and find out how they can work together. Who is doing what in regards wiki projects? It is an arena where we can show what other institutions have done and how. With Wikimedia Norges current staff situation we can not ourselves be in charge of that many projects. Since January 2015 we have tried to not be alone in organizing one single event. Because of this we have used quite a lot of time on concentrating in organizing events where we know our Glam partners will participate and it will be useful for them to network. Our aim is that staff from Glam institutions will see the benefits from mass uploads to Commons and how they during their work hours can edit Wikipedia. It is a challenge to establish collaborations between institutions and the community, but we hope to have more ideas on how to this as the staff at Wikimedia Norge gets to know more and more community members.

Please let me know if you have further questions! Cheers, --WMNOastrid (talk) 15:18, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Academic Wikipedia

In Norway the universities have all made an agreement with the competing encyclopedia SNL.NO. (Store Norske Leksikon) through the organization “Foreningen Store Norske” [2]. There are a lower percentage of academic Wikipedia editors in Norway than in many other countries although the Norwegian public and the pupils prefer to use Wikipedia. (SNL.NO is ranked 143 by Alexa, while Wikipedia is 8.). Several research reports have concluded that the teachers of Norway are skeptical to Wikipedia while most of the pupils find Wikipedia useful. [3] Wikimedia Norway finds that this results in two negative issues:

• English Wikipedia is the more read in Norway than the Norwegian Language Wikipedias. This threaten the Norwegian scientific and professional language.
• A lot of the vandalism is committed by pupils at school. This causes some of the patrollers to grow tired of making an effort on improving Wikipedia.

Wikimedia Norway wants the academia of Norway to be more adaptive, positive and supportive to Wikipedia. Cooperation with universities will lead to more academic resources and editors from the academia, and the quality in Wikipedia will improve. If the academia grow more positive to Wikipedia, then most likely the teachers will be more positive. Teachers that care about Wikipedia will tend to correct vandalism from their pupils.
So how can Wikimedia Norway make the Academia more positive to Wikipedia? First, there are many professors and other academicians who are precious editors in Wikipedia. Second, students tends to be more positive than the university administration. Wikimedia Norway wants to hire a resource to work with students and cooperative academicians. This work will be replicated from the work we do today with Glam partners, but will be a collaboration with scientific, medical and humanities disciplines. It is of most importance to make the teachers and students studying to be a teacher to know how Wikipedia is collectively written, so they can learn to read the Wikipedia with care, practice source criticism, and can correct articles on Wikipedia when this is needed.
This work has succeeded when Norwegian Wikipedias are preferred among native Norwegian speakers, and Wikipedia vandalism is negligible. This work may last for several years, but is of most importance.

BR Hogne (talk) 20:49, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Technical Manager

Wikimedia Norway has these requirements on technical resource:

• Supervise and carry out bulk uploads of images for partner institutions
• Providing consultant and ideas for technical solutions and opportunities in partnerships and to new projects
• Maintenance and developing on the sites Wikimedia Norway holds (wikipedia.no, wikimedia.no, and any new pages or competitions)
• Responsible for IT at Wikimedia Norway office
• Guide the other employees in the jungle of wiki statistics, wiki-tools and other wiki projects

Wikimedia Norway wants to emphasize these qualifications:

• Knowledge on and familiar with wikipedia and wikimedia world
• Enjoys to provide courses and to present adequate Wikipedia Technology to institution people (and other resources).
• Able to work independently and to be self-propelled.

The technical resource will also help Wikimedia Norway to measure the effect of our projects.

BR. Hogne (talk) 07:29, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

Thank you from FDC staff!

Thank you, Hogne and WMNOastrid, for taking the time to provide detailed responses to our questions about your programs and approaches. We appreciate your timely efforts, and we will let you know if we or the FDC need any additional information. Best regards, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 16:58, 22 April 2015 (UTC)