Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Building a firmer base for knowledge sharing on Wikimedia projects.

Feedback from the Northern and Western Europe (NWE) Regional Funds Committee on your proposal

Hello Elisabeth Carrera and Jon Harald Søby

Thank you for taking the time to submit your General Support Fund proposal in the Northern and Western Europe region. We are pleased to have reviewed your application and have the following comments and questions:

We are happy to see your well thought-through strategic plan and yearly plan. We like the ambition towards the communities and that you include both the two Norwegians ones as well as the Sami community. We are also happy to see the decrease in cost for rent. We are missing in the year plan the area you have in the strategic plan under the heading “partnerships and advocacy”,

We would appreciate hearing more detail about your implementation plan on several of the areas you mention in your plan: What are the actual steps you plan to do to reach the big increase in members and also how to reach a 50% increase in women members and for increasing women participation.

We would like to understand better your aims and plans for strategic partnering in the Glam sector. Why is there a big decrease in funding from these?. How are you planning to recruit more and maintain the ones you have been working with, and what actual activities are being done (and have been done) in these partnering? You have also some other sources of income in your budget, could any of these be a recurring source of income?

You have in your plans to recruit a new ED before July 1st. What is the progress of this just now?

In your budget, you have included a substantial increase in project costs at the same time as you budget for less external financing. Does it exist concrete activities to use this money and what type of external cost will it be used for that is new for this budget year?

Thank you and we look forward to hearing from you.

On behalf of the NWE Regional Committee, Anders Wennersten (talk) 05:04, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Dear Anders Wennersten and other committee members,

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to clarify and to provide more background to our proposal. With our new strategic direction and our annual plan for 2023-2024 we are taking a couple of bold steps compared to previous years' work.

Partnerships and advocacy

With our annual plan we aim to professionalise our communications work and start to build a public profile for Wikimedia Norge. That will help us establish top-level strategic partnerships within GLAM and the education sector and position us to start working on advocacy. We are moving away from small content upload projects with uncertain effect. Instead we want to inspire partners to commit to more resource-demanding projects that will contribute more towards our long-term strategic goals. The coming year we will be focusing on our education sector partners in particular, to help us implement our plans to recruit, train and maintain more Wikimedia projects contributors as well as Wikimedia Norge members. Our future "Wiki into education" project will require long-term advocacy efforts to help us introduce wiki training into school and university curriculums.

Budget

Since autumn 2022, when I was hired as interim ED, we have made some changes to our accounting that affect how our revenues and costs appear in the grant proposal. There is no decrease in budgeted funding from GLAM partners compared to previous years. Starting with our budget for 2023-2024 we are listing our revenues in greater detail, in order to make our accountancy and reporting more transparent. Recurring sources of income, such as the annual VAT compensation that most Norwegian non-profits receive, have previously been summed up and listed under «Other funding». Please refer to this breakdown of our revenues the last three years. Some revenues, such as donations and membership fees, I am unfortunately unable to list accurately without manually going through individual entries into our accounts.

In our budget, there is no mismatch between expected project funding and project costs, even though it might seem that way compared to previous years. Previously, expected project costs were dispersed between expense items, e.g. payroll, travelling expenses, course fees et cetera. Now most project costs are summed up in the «Project development» expense item. If and when we are granted project funding, the project costs are moved from «Project development» and onto the correct expense items. Spending will not start until corresponding funding has been secured, and this way of budgeting will make it easier for us to keep track of that. Our most costly project this coming year will be Wiki into education. We hope to secure external funding to cover a project hire, in which case a full-time teacher will join our staff in the first quarter of 2024. We are also looking at hiring a linguist/computer scientist to work on wiki language technoloy for under-represented languages, particularly Northern Sámi. This is something we will have to explore further in the coming months, and the large cost involved is not included in our 2023-2024 budget. This will be aligned with our efforts in the Language Diversity Hub.

Staff situation

Astrid Carlsen is currently employed as ED until her notice period expires end of June. I was interim ED August 2022 through March 2023, and as of 1 May I am employed as permanent ED. This transitional period means an unexpected doubling of ED payroll costs for two months, but our board are happy to have completed the hiring process in a timely manner.

Up until now we have had 2,8 permanent staff positions. One of our project managers has handed in her notice, and we have started the process to recruit a replacement. This time we will advertise a full-time position. That will give us a larger pool of qualified candidates, and we also need to up our staff-time somewhat now that we’re about to start implementing a highly ambitious annual plan.

The staff changes described above will of course affect our payroll expenses, but by leaving the project manager position unstaffed during the summer months, we will be able to stay on budget for 2023-2024. The long-term rise in our payroll expenses will be worked into our annual budget from 2024-2025 and onwards.

Growth estimates

Our plan to grow our membership base by 40 % each year for the next five years is ambitious. But because our numbers are so low to start with, this growth rate is within our reach. We currently have 53 members, and our target for the end of this year is 70. We will grow by working more professionally to recruit, train and maintain members and contributors, with the outreach activities described in our annual plan. The increased focus on communications work and interaction with the general public is also key to succeed. We now work more systematically to reach specific target audiences, and as we speak, the WMNO administration is in Trondheim hosting an Art+Feminism edit-a-thon. We are also planning a wiki meetup for librarians. Both activities can help towards our gender gap. The same goes for our efforts to recruit and train more Wikipedia mentors. By re-vitalising the Norwegian and Sámi wiki communities and making them friendlier and more inclusive, we will attract more female long-term volunteers.

I hope to have answered your initial questions to your satisfaction, but please don't hesitate to get back to us for further details.

Thank you, and best regards, from Elisabeth Carrera (WMNO) (talk) 06:56, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

General Support Fund proposal approved in the amount of 2,300,000 NOK

Congratulations! The Northern and Western Europe Regional Funds Committee has recommended your proposal for funding!

The Wikimedia Foundation has approved full funding in the amount of 2,300,000 NOK for a grant term of one year only to Wikimedia Norge. The committee did not approve the multi-year option and would like to see a new application from Wikimedia Norge in spring 2024.

The committee appreciates the significant experience Wikimedia Norge has, particularly on the chapter board where expertise and professional backgrounds map well onto WMNO’s current and upcoming programmes. We also value the strategic analysis done for this proposal, notably on securing new and investigating additional sources of funding, as well as efforts to reduce long-term operational costs, such as moving to a lower-cost office shared office space that is closer to partners. Finally, we also recognise the decision to better focus staff time on internal operations and local needs.

The main reasons for not supporting multi-year funding are the following:

• Need for stabilised governance due to leadership changes and relatively low membership. The committee wants to be sure that WMNO’s new direction is in place and members’ involvement grows.
• With transition of focus from the Language Diversity Hub (which was a ‘showcase’ project for the chapter in the previous applications), we want to see first how Wikimedia Norge delivers on new priorities (for instance, on gender diversity and GLAM which seem to be among key strategic priorities)
• Finally, the committee expects to see more clarity on external funding and where it will be in one year.

Next steps:

• You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement.
• If you have questions about the funding decision, please contact Chen Almog (calmogwikimedia.org) and Chris Schilling (cschillingwikimedia.org).
• If you have questions or need support during the funding period, you can contact the Regional Program Officer for the Northern and Western Europe Region.

On behalf of the Regional Committee, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 19:33, 25 May 2023 (UTC)