Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Oesterreich/September2013

Vienna Office[edit]

The preparation of the 2014 FDC round 1 proposal mainly occupied board and staff in September. In contrast to last year - when we needed to complete the proposal within only two days, as we didn't know about the proposal form and only learned about it after the deadline has passed - we had enough time to align or strategic work with the budget and programm planning. We were able to prepare it more thoroughly and also to learn from the experiences with our current proposal. While we had a souund budget planning in the years before, there was a lack of systematic, well documented programm planning (using SMART critieria) but we think with this years proposal we made a huge step forward. However, the fact that we had to close our fiscal year around the same time as we had to prepare our proposal still caused a lot of pressure for everybody involved. Hence, we decided to change our fiscal year to match the calendar year and the FDC planning periods.
We also had the pleasure to welcome Kira from the WMDE Chapters Dialogue in Vienna, before she traveled to Graz in order to interview our president Kurt Kulac. We are really looking forward to the results of this exciting project!

Wiki Loves Monuments & Federal Monuments Day[edit]

As in the last two years Austria also contributed in Wiki Loves Monuments in 2013. Again WMAT supported the activities of our volunteers by comming up for their travel costs and by providing photographic equipment. This year we announced right at the beginning of the contest, that we support activities to close the blank areas on our WLM map by offering reimbursement of travel costs and the like. There were 3 photographers conducting 4 photo-trips supported by WMAT which resulted in many good pictures of underrepresented areas. All in all 11,135 images from Austria were uploaded during the contest in September 2013. 190 uploaders took part in the Austrian contest. Of these the second and third most active uploaders were newbies on Wikimedia Commons.

Additionally, the special contest in the context of the Federal Monuments Day (September 30), which we conduct together with our GLAM partner, the Federal Monuments Office, brought us a number of pictures from monuments which were featured during this day.

For more information and lessons learned please also check our FDC Q3 report.

Wiener Forschungsfest / Vienna Science Festival[edit]

The Vienna Science Festival is the informative and entertaining core of numerous initiatives aiming to convey information about research and innovation to the interested general public. As our GLAM partner, the Federal Monuments Office, also conducts scientific activities (e.g. history of art), they had their own station at the fair and invited WMAT to present our cooperation there. It was a good occasion to raise awareness for WLM, Wikipedia, Wikimedia and free knowledge among the general public and some quite interested Austrian politicians.
For this and similar occasions in future, we designed an information brochure on our cooperation with the Federal Monuments Office in German and English. The slogan and branding that we developed for the brochure are also used for other information material (e.g. roll-ups for joint events). The costs for design, translation and printing were split between WMAT and the Federal Monuments Office.

Vienna Science Festival