Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Wikimedia Community Malta 3-Year Plan 2025–2027

Feedback from the Northern and Western Europe (NWE) Regional Funds Committee on your proposal FY25

Dear Wikimedia Community Malta,

Thank you very much for your proposal, describing your activities and projects in support of the Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia movement. The Northern and Western European Regional Committee has initially reviewed the proposal, and wishes to offer some initial feedback and questions for your review.

The Committee valued  the consistency with which WMC Malta is performing, with a small community and a set of core projects. Gradual and important progress is noticeable over time in terms of programming, such as the residency at the Times of Malta, the growing editing activities on the Maltese Wikipedia, which was also clarified as a main goal in the strategy, and the progress made in the educational field. The Committee supports the approach of joining existing structures across the movement instead of reinventing the wheel with limited resources.

As you submitted a three year plan, the Committee would like to understand the longer term direction you plan to take :

• How do you plan to involve the community into the planning of activities in the following years and in reflecting on the impact of the programs that are currently running? What opportunities are you planning to provide for the community to reflect on how the programming impacts them (e.g. through satisfaction surveys, focus groups)?
• Is there any way you can identify and reach out to your English editing community in Malta to address their needs in your planning?
• Beyond the output numbers, what evaluation process are you intending to introduce to evaluate the ongoing contests, campaigns and activities to understand their success trends or sustained relevance over time?
• With the extension of personnel to 0.4FTE, what additional horizons are you contemplating to extend towards, in terms of strategic institutional partnerships or selecting topics for impact for the Maltese speakers? Can you explain a bit how the divisions of tasks will be organised between the paid Program Coordinator and the chair of the board / the board members with this increase in FTE? The committee would like to recommend WMC Malta to reach out to other affiliates or look at the Board training sessions to learn about the transition process from a more or less fully volunteer led organisation to an organisation with a staff member that has given the board an employer responsibility.
• Related to having a small team, burnout is a real and present danger. Are you considering having a succession plan to ensure operational continuity in Malta in the longer term?
• Are you planning to further extend the Board by the end of the three years, or establish a pipeline of interested people for positions in the board that can take on other tasks to secure good governance for WMUG Malta?

• Do you have plans to diversify your sources of funding over time to reduce dependence on WMF funding?

In terms of the schedule for our review process, please complete your review and responses to committee feedback by November 20th, 2024. After this time, the Regional Committee will begin a final review of the proposal to make a formal decision.

Thanks again for your work on the proposal and supporting our review with your answers!

On behalf of the NWE Regional Committee  == Astrid Carlsen (talk) 10:17, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

Dear @Astrid Carlsen and the NWE Regional Committee –

Thank you very much for your initial review and feedback on our General Support grant application covering the period 2025–2027.

We have carefully considered the questions you've asked us, seeking to understand the longer term direction we plan to take. Here are our responses to each question:

• How do you plan to involve the community into the planning of activities in the following years and in reflecting on the impact of the programs that are currently running? What opportunities are you planning to provide for the community to reflect on how the programming impacts them (e.g. through satisfaction surveys, focus groups)?

We regularly solicit feedback and suggestions informally, through loosely assembled focus groups during/after events. We bring this to board meetings whenever it happens, and give special attention to comments on things we seem to be doing well, as well as recommendations/suggestions for improvement. While retaining this format, we also intend to start doing this a little more formally (mainly through surveys) as we continue to build the community over the coming months and years. We’re hoping that the additional day we’re asking our employee to work each week will give us the required capacity to try this in 2025, with the aim of establishing it as normal practice from 2026.

• Is there any way you can identify and reach out to your English editing community in Malta to address their needs in your planning?

Yes, we’ve actually just done this by offering a series of Wikipedia editing workshops through our partnership with the Times of Malta, which is an English-language newspaper and media company based in Malta. We are planning to develop these further, depending on the success of our initial work with readers of the Times of Malta. We’re also hoping that in the process, this will attract some of the more established English editing community in Malta, which is not very large, particularly because we’ve mainly focused on the greater need at a national level: i.e. growing the Maltese-language Wikipedia.

• Beyond the output numbers, what evaluation process are you intending to introduce to evaluate the ongoing contests, campaigns and activities to understand their success trends or sustained relevance over time?

Our part-time employee has data analysis skills. She has recommended that we should start looking at trends in the contests, for example: who are the users who participate in more than one contest every year? How many participants in any given contest are return participants from previous years? etc. This quantitative data will then help us determine, what (if any) qualitative analysis we can perform, through focus groups and/or surveys.

• With the extension of personnel to 0.4FTE, what additional horizons are you contemplating to extend towards, in terms of strategic institutional partnerships or selecting topics for impact for the Maltese speakers? Can you explain a bit how the divisions of tasks will be organised between the paid Program Coordinator and the chair of the board / the board members with this increase in FTE? The committee would like to recommend WMC Malta to reach out to other affiliates or look at the Board training sessions to learn about the transition process from a more or less fully volunteer led organisation to an organisation with a staff member that has given the board an employer responsibility.

This line of questions makes us need to bring up a number of related considerations. The first is that our employee has been working with us on 0.2 FTE for three years now. This means one day a week. However, it is widely acknowledged within our community that she has also been engaging with us for more than the one day a week of paid time, a demonstration of her generous spirit. Therefore, the first point we’d like to make is that the request to go for a 0.4 FTE is a recognition that, for quite some time, she has been doing additional (unpaid) hours. We are therefore considering this as an action towards ensuring staff retention. Secondly, our part-time staff member is instrumental in developing/establishing two institutional partnerships and selecting topics of impact for the Maltese speakers. The first of these is the project Każini, which involves working with community band club across Malta. The other is WikiNisa, an initiative to address the gender gap, partly in collaboration with the Gender Studies department at the University of Malta. We’re aiming to see full engagement on both these initiatives in 2025, and beyond. Moreover, she is also involved in developing a Wikipedian in Residence program with the National Book Council of Malta, focused on authors and publishers who have won the National Book Prize. Again, we’re planning to see noticeable engagement on this in 2025 and beyond.

In terms of the question about the division of tasks between the paid Program Coordinator and the (volunteer) board members, this will remain largely as has already been established in the last three years. Our Program Coordinator handles the day-to-day aspects of running all our activities and community engagement, while our volunteer chair and board members oversee all the administrative and financial requirements mandated of any non-profit organisation, which is officially registered to operate within the legal/administrative jurisdiction of Malta, under the oversight of the Office of the Commissioner for Voluntary Organisations. As stated earlier, the additional hours are not to relieve the volunteer board members from their administrative/legal role but rather to ensure employee retention and not take her generous spirit for granted.

The suggestion to reach out to other affiliates is very well made and taken. WCM engages with other affiliates at every opportunity and intends to continue doing so over the coming months and years. The suggested Board training sessions will certainly be taken into consideration by our volunteer chair and board members at the first opportunity. Within our board membership, we ensure that the role of employer is taken seriously by appointing people who have appropriate experience in this area, and we also receive guidance on such matters from the aforementioned legal body that governs registered voluntary organizations in Malta, such as ours.

• Related to having a small team, burnout is a real and present danger. Are you considering having a succession plan to ensure operational continuity in Malta in the longer term?
• Are you planning to further extend the Board by the end of the three years, or establish a pipeline of interested people for positions in the board that can take on other tasks to secure good governance for WMUG Malta

We see these two questions as closely related and will therefore answer them in one go:

We fully acknowledge that a succession plan is essential for the longevity of an organization. This is partly why we have requested an increase of 0.2 FTE paid time for our Program Coordinator. We believe that a 0.4 FTE job is more attractive to recruit to (and retain an employee in) than one which is merely 0.2 FTE. We are also considering the expansion of the number of members on our board to ensure that there are appropriate numbers shadowing the essential officers (chair/president, secretary, treasurer) to ensure continuity in case of any resignation. This is very likely to happen over the next 3 years or so.

• Do you have plans to diversify your sources of funding over time to reduce dependence on WMF funding?

Yes, and we have already started exploring this. For example, we would like our Wikipedian in Residence opportunities to be funded (or at least co-funded) by our partners. We had trialed this between September 2020 - August 2021 with the Valletta Design Cluster, and reported it in our annual affiliates report covering that period. Our next WiR program is being co-funded by our new partner, the National Book Council of Malta. We aim to develop this further over time. We also already receive part-sponsorship for a number of our photo contest prizes, in as much as our ability to pay cost price (approximately) rather than the full retail price on books and other prizes we present to our contest winners. This is an example of how we have already reduced dependence on WMF funding in recent years. The Malta Council for the Voluntary Sector offers small grants for voluntary work, and we’re also looking at this funding scheme as an option to enable further collaboration with other potential partners we seek to engage over the coming months and years.

We trust that these responses fully address each of the questions and points you have raised in your committee feedback. We'll gladly provide any further clarification or details, if necessary.

Thank you very much for all your support! On behalf of Wikimedia Community User Group Malta -- ToniSant (talk) 21:27, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

Round 1 - 2025 decision

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

The Wikimedia Foundation has approved the committee's recommendation to fund your proposal in full for 147,968.00 EUR for the period of 1st January 2025 - 31st December 2027.

Comments regarding this decision:
The Committee was glad to see the employee retention efforts of the group, and welcomed the projected plans for extending partnerships, residencies and support for the Maltese and English communities in Malta. The Committee asks WC Malta to develop a strategic plan and a Theory of Change by July 2025, as these will be needed when working with a wider range of partners on the island, as well as for the organisation for itself, to better define the paths of extension or retraction of activities planning ahead.

We wish WMC Malta good luck with your plans in the next three years!

Thank you for your valuable contributions!

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement.
2. If you have questions, you can contact the Regional Program Officer for the Northern and Western Europe Region.

Posted on behalf of the Northern and Western Europe (NWE) Funding Committee, ABruszik-WMF (talk) 16:52, 3 December 2024 (UTC)