Grants talk:PEG/WM CZ/Communities/Report/2015-01

Hi Aktron. Thank you for this detailed reports and all your efforts on the project! We've reviewed the last two interim report in conjunction with this one and have a few comments/questions below. We're looking forward to your responses.

1. The December 2014 report talked about the challenges WMCZ was having in getting more participation in events, especially editathons. You talked about starting with a new model for editing events in January 2015. What was this new model and how has it been implemented? The last report also talked about cooperation more with cooresponding wikiprojects and GLAM's for editing events. Have you explored these ideas?
2. How has WMCZ worked on developing a better promotion strategy for events?
3. The seminary about copyright sounds like a great event. Have any working relationships developed with the NGOs that attended?
4. Thanks for the sharing the great learnings (and results!) from the Translatewiki editathon.
5. Why do you think participation in the CEE Spring editathons was so low? How about the participation in the writing contest more broadly?
6. Development of the education program and GLAM projects were a big focus of the last report. Has there been much development in these two areas?
7. The report states that “many of the ideas that were supposed to make the community stronger did help”. Do you mean specifically the writing contests, efforts to cooperate with NGOs, and basic advocacy work?
8. It would be great to have a better sense of your volunteer community. Are you expanding your community of active Wikimedians who can independently manage offline projects? It sounds like the community in Brno is growing and quite independent, which is great!

Thanks again for this report. Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 23:55, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

Thank you Alex for the review. It is always nice to have some questions as it means that we can have more feedback. The responses are following:

1. The core idea of this new model was to do various events on regular basis, which would sparkle a message to the possible audience (ie. "every thursday there is this Wikipedia thing"). As about editathons, the major plan was to combine this approach with the CEE Spring contest. Several events were arranged, a schedule when which kinds of events should take place, but then again despite a proper promotion of the events (ie. mailing-list, Facebook, Wikipedia) in a reasonable time in advance (14 days), the model simply did not attract enough people. Not to mention also that time issues when it comes to have this events organized by me or eventually someone else was also a problem.

2. Well what is needed is to promote the events better. Frankly, the entire chapter is challenged by this issue (in Mediagrant and Czech Outreach as well). The events were promoted earlier, on multiple channels (Wikipedia, Facebook, mailing-lists, private messages, posters etc). Apparently, in order to attract more people, the events should be backed by better generally known wikipedians (this works really well with the Senior Citizens write Wikipedia) or by various other institutions (which was already suggested to them, but the idea in general failed during the talks - they rather wanted to promoted the contest by a separate category than doing temathic editathons).

3. Yes we do! As we have realized that WM CZ is a rather small organization (but growing mostly outside from Prague), we understand how various relations are important in order to promote our values outside. Having a good network of institutions that have similar goals does amplify our outcome. One of the good examples how things work: In June the Freedom of Panorama campaing started. Thanks to the earlier relations we were able to push this to the Greens and Pirates. Thanks to our current relations we were able to make various other NGOs to send their appeals to the European Parliament for the MEPs and also to the media. The goal is to have a personal network where people can rely to each other to promote one idea in multiple environments.

4. Yes. That platform is good and we should definitely promote it in the future again.

5. The writing contest in the Czech Republic was actually two writing contests: The one that went with all the countries in the region (ie the "international one") and the one focused in Poland in WWII. The reason for this separation was a fact that we managed to get the Polish Institute in Prague to support our event (we also tried to convince the Hungarian institute, but after the initial phase no further contact was made, which was highly strange...) In general in the Czech Republic the contest had overall quite positive results - in the Poland in WWII category 712 kB of text was written and in the international category more than 200 articles were created. It is highly surprising then that simply people did not want to meet in our office and discuss, suggest or write articles about the region, despite several attempts. This result made me personally unhappy, as the idea "let's use our office for content-generation activities" was the cornerstone of the COM grant. I do believe now that perhaps different environment - like let's say the Polish Institute - or various schools - would generate better results. But this is only my speculation.

6. Well, we do cooperate with various GLAM-related institutions (during the Museum night WMCZ had a workshop with general public related to the encyclopedia), and other earlier cooperation continues. The events mentioned in the 2015-01 report resulted from the cooperation we have (the Karel Čapek's villa tour), and some others are trying to reach something new (such as the Liteň meetings).

7. Most likely the mutual cooperation with other NGOs, travelling to their places, doing stuff together and learning from them. This is an interesting issue of this grant, but frankly it makes my hair sometimes standing on end, as these are very hard to measure, unlike written articles, taken pictures or other stuff done.

8. Well, I do not want to promote any political platform here, but after reading Swarmwise I got much better understanding how to expand the community and where. And I am quite happy that this is already happening in various places and I also understand that there are people there within the chapter and Wikipedia community who do stuff the way it should work and it does work!

So ugh, I hope this is all and I also belive I answered most of your questions. If you have some more, please feel free to ask more, so we will be both very clear about everything. --Aktron (talk) 18:19, 9 August 2015 (UTC)