Wikimedia Conference/Program and Engagement Coordination/Wikimania 2016 report/Impact

Wikimedia movement's impact

Observations:

• Wikimedians are enthusiastic about why and how they achieve impact
  • Don’t make it too theoretical!
  • Conversations were so intense!
• Impact exists in many different ways, on many different levels

=> paths of impact emerge

• Two levels of need and interest: strategic and methodical
  • Larger organizations think more about the strategic aspects of impact
  • Smaller organizations is much more practical: good tools and methods are important to analyze their own activities
  • Where is there overlap, where are the differences?
    • Things that are not easily measured are difficult to make visible
• Large organizations (lots of experience, older) vs. lots of user groups (young, inexperienced) – resources are needed to develop capacities over time in order to build up experience, you have to start small to increase your impact over time
  • All online resources do not build capacities
  • How can we build capacity in the movement by creating synergies among affiliates, not putting everything on the organizations?
  • How to build capacity in countries with political repression by the government?
  • Challenges: government repression
  • How can we evaluate our impact?

Ideas about how to continue working on impact: * Continue to build a map of impact

• • Useful tools
    • What do we have: pictures of logic models on Commons, program reports - lots of pieces, but not on a map
    • Map could be a useful tool for strategic planning for individual affiliates
      • Comparing the success of different programs within one organizations
      • Tool-Example: Jaime
      • Looks very different for big vs. small organization
      • Different goas for different actors with different resources
      • Necessary for this: Shared metrics & Outcome mapping
  • Quality?
  • What do we not know?
    • For some programs, we can see an impact but don’t know what’s causing
    • Others, we can’t see an impact
  • Building an evidence base!
    • Conference provide opportunities to share experiences
    • It’s difficult to convince board members of importance of impact
    • It’s hard to map outputs and impact in a single organization over time by staff and boards – lots of enthusiasm, but very little analysis
      • Solution: outside impact evaluation?!
      • Methodological training
    • Identify drivers of change
      • Unique models: what have other people done successfully?
        • What can people contribute to that?
        • Starting point: I want to have impact in this particular area
      • Utilize existing reports, studies and analysis
      • Utilize experts within the movement to propose new models
      • Highlight and collect things that work in an accessible way
        • Existing: reports on Meta, Learning Patterns
        • It should be searchable like a database (what can we do in the field of GLAM for this budget?)
        • More concise than Learning Patterns: How many resources do we need? What area of interest do we want to engage?
        • Accessible from both sides: best practices published to people in the movement
        • Developing a shared framework to measure impact, so that we can have a shared conversation about it

How can we distribute this work? What could be the benefit for groups in the movement by investing in this resource?

• Lots of information in the grant reports, but not shared enough
• Not enough metrics available to track outcomes internationally over time
  • Data collection is growing in the movement
  • WMF is building the system to be able to streamline and monitor your programs
• Data is collected by WMF for reports, but then after publication, nothing happens
• Data collection should be easy for people to do
• It must be useful and used by people in the movement
• We can’t all be experts
  • Solution: mentorship programs – finding the needs, connect people to peer leaders, peer leaders to be supported by the foundation, share the knowledge
  • Difficulty: Identifying peer leaders, Not all editors want to collaborate and share their knowledge, but just want to edit online on their own (Only becomes a concern when these editors are having a negative impact on our projects)

Now what?

• WMF question: How can we better enable our chapters to support impact-based programs?

Needs

• Peer consultation
  • How is WMDE dealing with measuring impact?
  • Has WMDE considered undergoing an outside evaluation?
  • How do you advise people on impact?
    • Talk to them, provide tools
    • Advise on an individual basis
    • Peer-group conversations can be helpful