Grants:APG/Proposals/2013-2014 round1/Wikimedia Österreich/Proposal form

Wikimedia Österreich received a funds allocation in the amount of €204,000 (equal to about US$279,000) in 2013-2014 Round 1. This funds allocation was recommended by the Funds Dissemination Committee on 15 November 2013 and approved by the WMF Board of Trustees on 31 December 2013.

Basic information

Overview of grant request

In order to support community review, in no more than one paragraph, please provide a brief description of your entity's forthcoming annual plan, with focus areas and key objectives. Please also include the total amount requested in US$.

• WMAT's annual plan comprises the following four strategic areas: community support, free content generation, reach / free knowledge awareness and organizational development. Our programms are designed to make the most our of our organizational strength and to reduce possible negative effects of the challenges we are facing as an entity. Our number one strategic priority is to support the existing community as a realiable service provider and to reach and gain new volunteers where possible. We believe that success in this regard will automatically result in further success concering free content generation. We also believe that our progress as a chapter needs sound organisational development (including not only board and staff, but the wider community of active volunteers) to accompany our other activities and therefore established a programme that is designed to further develop our governance, our role in the Wikimedia movement, adequate means to mesure our impact and share what we do with the wider Wikimedia community. To achieve this we request 310,500 USD from FDC funds.

Contact information

Table 1

Organization information	Legal name of organization	Wikimedia Österreich
	organization's fiscal year (mm/dd–mm/dd)	09/01–08/31
	12 month timeframe* of funds currently requested (mm/dd/yy–mm/dd/yy)	01/01/14–12/31/14
Contact information (primary)	Primary contact name	Claudia Garad
	Primary contact position in organization	Executive Director
	Primary contact username	Claudia.Garad
	Primary contact email	claudia.garad@wikimedia.at
Contact information (secondary)	Secondary contact name	Kurt Kulac
	Secondary contact position in organization	President
	Secondary contact username	Kulac
	Secondary contact email	kulac@wikimedia.at

*Timeframe should ideally be for a 12 month period that begins after the FDC decision.

Amount requested

Table 2

Currency requested: EUR

Currency requested is defined as the currency in which you wish to receive funds (e.g., EUR, GBP, INR). Note that the FDC makes grants in local currency when possible.

Exchange rate used (currency requested to $US): 1 € : 1.35 $US

Please use Oanda.com on March 1 2014 to determine the exchange rate. Please use five decimal points.

	Currency requested	US$
Total annual expenses of organization	302,560	408,456
Amount proposed to the FDC for the coming year's annual plan	230,000	310,500
Amount to be raised from non-FDC sources	87,500	118,125
If applicable, amount of FDC funds allocated to organization last year	164,942.27	220,000

Based on the funding amount you are requesting, what is your entity's proposed rate of growth in budget since last year? Please explain your entity's rationale if your proposed budget will increase this year:

• WMAT asked for more funding than the FDC year-over-year growth rate usually provides for several reasons:
  • We think we could prove, that the concerns the FDC had when not completely fulfilling our funding request, didn't come true: We were quite successful to handle our growth rate despite new staff, a partly new board and the multiple challenges of establishing an office, professionalizing and getting used to the FDC procedures without neglecting our projects and day-to-day operations. We put a lot of effort into finding the right balance between project and community work, governance and strategy that is necessary to ensure sustainable growth without alienating the community by only orbiting around chapter bureaucracy.
  • For two years in a row, WMAT had to draw on it's reserves in a larger scale. In 2012 we organized the WikiCon, which was not yet planned when the budget was set up. In addition to the WikiCon grant, WMAT sponsored the very successful event with 10 000 EUR that were not originally planned, 5000 EUR were drawn from our reserves and additionally approx. 700 EUR (customs for USB sticks from WMCH) for unforseen expenses that were issued long after the project and grant were closed. For 2013 we expect to bridge the gap between our requested FDC funding and the actual amount that was granted from our reserves as well (we expect that we have to cover for up to 16,347 EUR/22,068 USD by the end of the year => see table for year-to-date spending). We need this money, as the ressources for administration (especially FDC) exceeded our expectations and a second full-time employee became necessary (see also the section "Reflection on past activities and innovations"). As we don't want to do this at the cost of the project funding of our community and there were not enough time and resources to exploit other/alternative sources of funding, the reserves will shrink even more. We therefore planned a surplus of approx. 15,000 EUR/20,250 USD in the 2014 annual budget in order to refill our reserves.
  • Our current staffing is not sufficient to cope with the upcoming huge projects (open data portal) in addition to the current level of administration and project work. In addition we identified several areas that we want to achieve progress: e.g. diversifying our funds, more efficient book keeping to adress all the manifold requirements by FDC, fundraising certicifate, other donors, Austrian law of associations etc. The last month showed, that such progress is also not possible to achieve with our current resources. As we strive for sustainable growth, we are looking for ways to increase available manpower without excessive growth regarding long-term staff. Therefore we only plan one 50% long-term contractor for the open data project (restricted to the first year of the project for the time being) and hope to cover for the other overheads with service providers or short-term contractors (for book keeping and project support, e.g. programming and graphic design), which will be purchased case by case. This approach will give us flexibility for our further organisational development but nevertheless requires more financial resources.

Note the FDC Framework funding guidelines on the rate of growth of year-over-year FDC allocations. These guidelines relate not to an entity's overall budget, but rather to movement resources (that is, what the entity received through FDC allocations or grants or what the entity retained via payment processing in the prior funding cycle).

Background, history, and mission

This section provides the FDC an overview of your entity's background and history. Please respond to each question below with 1-2 sentences to a maximum of a paragraph.

When was your entity established?

• Legally established on May 2, 2008, approved as a Chapter by the WMF on February 26, 2008.

What is the mission of your entity, and how does it support the strategic priorities of the Wikimedia movement (infrastructure, participation, quality, reach, and innovation)? We note that Wikimedia movement priorities will be interpreted and addressed differently in each context.

• Our mission as outlined in our bylaws: "The purpose of the association is the advancement, creation, collection and redistribution of Open Content in voluntary service, for the encouragement of free knowledge and education. Open Content refers to all work that has been placed by its author under a license, which allows everybody to modify and distribute these works. In addition, the awareness of the related social and philosophical issues will be enhanced. The Association shares the objectives of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a not-for-profit organization founded in Florida, USA. The Wikimedia Foundation coordinates activities along the lines of the Association's purpose within the international sector, and manages the name Wikimedia as well as the names of the various international Wikimedia projects."
  A more detailed description of how our activities relate to the WMF strategic priorities can be found below as part of the description of our programms.

What is your current leadership structure (e.g., executive staff structure, board / governance structure)? Please explain how budgets are managed and programs are executed between board and staff.

• During the last year, WMAT went through the process from a volunteer-based organization to a "professional" organization with full-time staff and an office. The process was accompanied by a strategic process, the results and detailed information (in German) about our current governance structure can be found here. Some details are still under discussion, an English translation is planned for the end of the year.
  Our board consists of 8 people who are elected by the general assembly every two years. In addition, there is an Executive Director (ED), a second staff member responsible for community management and administration and two long-term contractors. The ED manages the office and staff, reports directly to the board (once a week) and excutes the board's decisions in the day-to-day operations. The annual budgets and programs are drafted by board and staff and are then discussed with the community. Decisions on how the budgets are allocated are made by the board, smaller expenses (up to 500 Euros) for the day-to-day oparations are decided by the ED. This is not due to a lack of trust, but we believe that certain decisions should be made by involving more than one person. Our intention is, to have a more democratic approach to allocating funds. When bigger spendings are discussed between the board and the ED, more different views are considered in the decision making process and will more likely create results in accordance with the wishes of the community.
  The financial auditing is done by an external company and an internal elected revisor. In addition, WMAT goes through an annual auditing process for the Austrian fundraising certificate.

If applicable, how many members does your entity have, and how do you define membership (e.g., attendance at events, paying dues)?

• We offer a formal membership which is usually 20 EUR per year (the reduced rate is 15 EUR for students etc.). At the moment WMAT has 119 formal members. However, the formal membership is neither a requirement to engange in our on- and offline activities nor for our support (e.g. equipment, money). Hence, we have quite a few very active volunteers, who are no formal members of WMAT. They can also contribute to program and budget planning. The only privilege that formal members enjoy compared to other volunteers, is that they can vote for the board and bylaw alterations (usually in the context of general assemblies).

What is the role of volunteers in your entity (e.g., help develop entity plans, participate in programs, edit Wikipedia)? Approximately how many volunteers does your entity serve?

• There is a wide range of roles - however, most of our volunteers are editors and/or photographers. Approx. 30% of the Austrian community regularly engages in our offline activities, not counting volunteers from neighbouring countries like Germany (at least another 20 people). Apart from that, we have some volunteers, who are neither editors nor photographers: Our technical infrastructure is mainly maintained by a volunteer, our treasurer is a Non-Wikimedian who only foscuses on his work in the board, others regularly contribute to our translations. This year we also had some (Non-Wikimedian) volunteers who helped us with handcraft in order to set up and furnish our office.

How do you know what the members of the community / communities you serve (including chapter members and broader online volunteers) need and want? How does this influence your strategic planning and decision-making?

• Being a service provider for the Austrian community (and also neighbouring communities, e.g. in Germany) is centrepiece for WMAT's self-conception and strategy. One of our main goals is to stay close to our community and to avoid alienation. To achieve this, we regularly invite our community to share their point of view on our activites or to contribute their ideas for projects and activities. The channels that we use comprise our public mailing list, our members wiki and social networks like facebook. We also engage in discussions of the broader German-speaking community via Wikipedia discussion sites or the "Kurier" (German Signpost). However, the personal contact and face-to-face discussion are most valuable, especially when it comes to talking to people who usually don't contribute a lot to online discussions. Therefore, board members and staff regularly visit meet-ups and other events of Wikipedians around Austria in order to inform them about our activities and to listen to them. Since we have an office in Vienna now, we also invite them to stop by for a tea / coffee and a little chat, so we get community visitors almost every week. By the same means, we try to explain why and how we do things and why some of their suggestions can be implemented and others cannot. In order to get an even better understanding of the needs and concerns of the community and to evaluate whether we adress them effectively, we plan a survey among our members within the next couple of month. At the moment, we are benchmarking with surveys from other chapters, in order to learn from them and also because we think that a similar design of the questionnaire might also result in interesting insights for the wider movement. Especially interesting for our strategy process is a recent survey of a WMDE board member, as our communities are overlapping and therefore the results and insights are valuable for us as well.

Reflection on past activities and innovations

This section provides the FDC with information about your entity's past programs, activities and strategies. Please answer the questions below with your reflections on the past fiscal year. Responses to each question should be one or two paragraphs.

How does your entity define and measure "success"?

• This depends on the specific context. Usually we set up goals prior to a larger project and evaluate afterwards whether the we met them or not. Meeting the goals is obviously a success. However, the reality is often more complicated. The goals itself can be quantitative and qualitative and especially the latter are not always easy to measure (for example goals like "building trust") and some impacts will only become apparent after a long time (month or years), long after a project or program has finished. In addition, the effort to measure the success has to be in a reasonable proportion to the size of the project. Generally, activities that generate enthusiasm and momentum within the community and motivate volunteers to become or remain involved are successful to us. Moreover, from our perspective, even a formally less successful project or activity can be valuable, as long as we draw our lessons and learn from it. But this requires a culture where the importance of evaluation in combination with honesty and transparency is cherished. Such an attitude is not necesssarly human nature, therefore we are currently working on evaluating our projects in a more systematic fashion and also raise awareness on these issues among our volunteers. We are also thinking about more institutionalized ways to facilitate this process, e.g. having in-person-meetings or at least online discussions on lessons learned after projects or having assigned volunteers who help project managers with their quality management during major projects. This is a long-term process that requires time and resources and we are still at the beginning. The pace of our progress will be highly dependent on the acceptance of these issues by our community.

Please give at least three examples of successful programs or activities that your entity has completed, and explain why they were successful. If available, provide links to information.

• We keep this section short, as most information on the projects and why they were successful are provided in the links below. The three projects were selected, as they are successful examples of different kinds of projects from our portfolio: Taking in part in an international pioneer project (WLPA), adpoting projects from other chapters and refine them according to the needs our Austrian community (Landtagsprojekt) and our own project / cooperation innovations (QR codes in the botanical garden).
  • Wiki Loves Public Art (WLPA)
    • WMAT had the most participants of all the countries who contributed to WLPA (48% of all the participants worldwide), many of them newbies (60%) who haven't had an account before.
    • WLPA brought us to a progress of 84.35 % (1040 of 1233 objects in our lists got at least one picture now). Overall there have been 2410 pictures uploaded in the WLPA-contest by 108 uploaders. 26.04 % of all uploaded files in the contest came from Austria and we were able to win the most uploaders of all participating countries for WLPA. For detailed statistics please visit stats.wlpa.at
    • Open Data (edited for Wikipedia) on public art in Vienna and Graz and increased awareness (press coverage) for the value of open data and freedom of panorama.
    • For further information see monthly report May and June and the Q2 report.
  • Landtagsprojekt Niederösterreich
    • The Landtagsprojekt in Lower Austria resulted in 731 photos, of which 574 were portrait pictures of the politicians. As there were elections taking place in May, it was a goal to complete all new articles about first-time elected politicians until the photography-session took place. This goal could be reached by our volunteers.
    • Most volunteers who participated in the project have been to our preparatory workshop (special workshop in March on portrait photography) before and found it very helpful. The atmosphere was great, the support of the State Parliament administration unconditional and the politicians were very interested and constructive.
    • We established a very good relationship to the State Parliament administration, which is also a door opener for further projects: WMAT was invited to give a presentation at a meeting of all parliament directors in Austria in April. This provides an excellent chance to arrange future cooperations with the other Federal Parliaments.
    • For our internal organisation the Landtagsprojekt was also quite important: As it was a new project that we started from scratch, it was also a test run how volunteers, staff and external partners (State Parliament administration) could work together effectively. Especially the divison of tasks between volunteers and staff worked really well. In order to keep it a volunteer project, staff resources mainly went into financial administration, reporting and public relations. The project manager was further assisted in networking and some organizational tasks.
    • For further information see monthly reports March and May and the Q2 report.
  • QR Codes Botanical Garden
    • In cooperation with the botanical garden of the university of Graz Wikimedia Österreich set up a new and world-wide unique project. As a part of this project there have small plates been placed next to some plants. On this plates there is a QR-code which links directly to the Wikipedia-Article regarding to the specific plant.
    • In preparation of the project, a list of approx. 300 articles were compiled in a list and created or revised by the biology editorial team
    • There was a large amount of press-coverage on this cooperation with the botanical garden of the university of Graz.
    • The project opened the door for further cooperation, e.g. access to the image database of the botanical garden.
    • For further information please have a look at our July monthly report.

What are the plans/strategies that did not work for your entity in the past? What did your entity learn from those experiences? What changes were made after learning from these experiences?

• We introduced Civi CRM not only as an adress management system, but also to handle our accouting. The advantages in our perspective were, that it is open source, it enables us to make our accounting more transparent for our members and that an integrated system reduces interface problems. While Civi CRM is definitely a mighty tool, quite a few weaknesses became apparant in the last to years, so that we seriously have to reconsider this decision. In order to enjoy the full range of possiblities and to ensure security in the long run, several updates are necessary. However, at the moment, it is almost impossible to upgrade the system (to the standard WMSE has), as there is not sufficient documentation and the responsible developers are lacking the time to handle all the questions and requests. In addition, we learned that the WMF finance department has some severe concerns regarding CiviCRM as an accounting system. We are assessing all options at the moment and haven't come up with a final answer how to handle these challenges in the mid-term.

What else has your entity learned or innovated upon that could benefit the broader Wikimedia movement?

• We decided to spend more money on staff than budgeted by turning our intern position into a full-time position. Administrating the FDC funds and maintaining an office increased the workload for the chapter disproportionately. Together with the fact that the ED was also hired to take work of the board we realizied that this is to much for one employee to handle, especially because it didn't leave enough time for innovation, strategy and proactive planing. In addition, the experience of for example WMCH showed that other chapters face similar challenges with their first employees, which in worst case can lead to their resignment. We took advantage of the fact that our intern, who was already successfully integrated into the team was available for a full-time position. As he is an experienced Wikipedian, he is also a perfect complement to our ED, who hasn't been part of the movement but contributes a valuable external perspective and skills in leadership, management and communications. This "overall package" often can't be found in one person, we believe that the current "tandem"-solution of WMAT is the perfect mix and might be recommendable for other organizations which think about hiring staff.

Please link to the following to provide supplemental information to the FDC:

How does your entity share its work with your community and with the wider Wikimedia movement? For instance, publishing case studies on Meta, blog posts, newsletters, speeches at conferences, etc.

• News-section at our members-wiki.
• Our Website.
• Through our facebook-site.
• Additionally we send all important information over the vereinat-l mailinglist (vereinat-l@lists.wikimedia.org).
• Handouts with WMAT news for participants of local Wikipedia meet-ups
• Monthly reports in English on Meta
• Several presentations at last year's WikiCon and will have some this year as well, in case the conference takes place in 2013.
• Three sessions at this year's Wikimania, and seven Austrian scholarship holders to exchange experiences and ideas with the international community as participants. (They also report back about their experiences in Hong Kong to the Austrian community)

Link to most recently completed fiscal year annual plan

• Annual Plan 2012/2013

Link to most recently completed fiscal year annual report and financial report

• Annual Report 2012
• Financial Performance Overview
• Accounting Audit Report

Link to most recently completed fiscal year grant report (if your entity has received funds from the FDC)

• FDC 2012-13 round 1 Q2 report

Link to your entity's strategic plan if you have one

• Strategic Plan (An update / evaluation workshop with board and staff is planned for October 2013)

Link to your organogram or organizational chart if one exists

• We don't have one

Link to your entity's current fiscal year plan and budget

• Budget 2013

Key programs / initiatives and objectives of the upcoming year's annual plan

These tables are intended to provide an overview of your entity's upcoming year annual plan and its alignment with the movement's strategic priorities; please provide short phrases or 1-3 bullet points for each program below. You can also link to any other documents that you think might be helpful as context.

Please ensure that your proposed programs are SMART; that is, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.

If you feel you have a program that fulfills a strategic goal that is not immediately identified with a movement strategic priority ('readership' rather than 'editorship', for instance), please add that in the table and offer us your rationale.

Finally, please also note which programs are the entity's priorities.

Program 1

Community Support

This is a priority area.

What are the objectives of this program? Please use SMART criteria to explain these goals.

• Support existing community with ressources and know-how
  • Goal: Support or organize at least 5 community events
  • Goal: At least 5 Minigrants for new projects initiated by the community
  • Goal: Conclude 100 % of community requests (concerning support, expertise, ressources) and give transparent and timely rationale in case their requests can not be fulfilled to the extent they requested
  • Goal: Engage 10 Wikimedians in our activities who have formerly not or very rarely been active WMAT volunteers
  • Goal: Retain our existing communtiy of active volunteers
  • Goal: Improve the spirit of collaboration and building trust (no baseline to measure against yet)

• Attract new volunteers
  • Goal: 50 new contributors to Wikimedia projects
  • Goal: Collaboration with like-minded organizations and communities in 5 projects
  • Goal: Pioneer project to establish an expert network for 1 subject area, consisting of at least 3 people

• Foster (international) exchange and integration of the Austrian Community into the broader movement
  • Goal: Participation in 2 international Wikimedia projects (e.g. WLM), with at least 5 active volunteers involved each time
  • Goal: 5 presentations on our activites at international events
  • Goal: 10 community members as scholarship holders for international events (20 % of which are new scholarshipholders)

Which Wikimedia movement strategic priority (or priorities) does this program address and how?

• Increase Participation: Our activities aim at increasing the number of volunteers but also put a high priority into supporting existing volunteers to unfold their full potential and to maintain or even increase their motivation to contribute.
• Improve Quality: We strive to build a network of experts (e.g. scientists) in order to improve the quality of our content and to support Wikipedia editors in their work. We further improve the quality by offering expertise and workshops to refine the skills of our volunteers.
• Encourage Innovation: We offer financial and organisational support as well as expertise for new ideas.

What key activities and/or milestones are associated with this program?

• 10 travel grants for international Wiki meet-ups (Wikimania, Hackathon)
• Travel grants for meetings within the German-speaking community (DACH)
• 2 international editor meet-ups (financial and organisational support)
• Financial and organizational support of local meet-ups in Austria
• 2 workshops to develop relevant skills (editing, photographing)
• Support (e.g. accreditations) and Minigrants for small photography projects
• Minigrants, expertise and technical/organisational support for new / innovative projects
• Pool of high-quality equipment (photography equipment, scanners)
• Establish contacts to expert networks to support Wikipedia editors in certain topics (World War I, Biology)
• Book grants / access to literature ressources

How will your entity document, track, and measure successes and challenges of this program?

• For bigger travel grants (e.g. Wikimania) we expect reports which are published via mailing list and members Wiki
• Minigrants are subject to evaluation, reporting and / or documentation on a wiki page
• We are currently looking into Wikimetrics and when to use it
• We are currently working on a community survey which will be conducted regularly in order to evaluate their needs and whether our activities adress them suffciently

Any additional details:

• Note:

Program 2

Free content generation

This a priority area, that is closely related to the area above.

What are the objectives of this program? Please use SMART criteria to explain these goals.

• Generating free content of good quality
  • Goal: Generating 10.000 photographs in the context of our projects and increase the number of decorated (valuable, quality, featured) images by 500
  • Goal: 5 new book grants (by 5 different people) that result in at least 100 articles (new or revised)
  • Goal: 5 good or featured articles (resulting directly from WMAT activities)
  • Goal: Editing events with at least 10 participants altogether resulting in at least 50 articles (resulting directly from WMAT activities)

• Liberating content
  • Goal: At least 2 projects for content liberation with GLAM partners
  • Goal: Access to at least 15 open data sets
  • Goal: Organizing of or taking part in 2 events to adress new GLAM partners (e.g. fairs, giving presentations ...)

Which Wikimedia movement strategic priority (or priorities) does this program address and how?

• Increase participation and: Photography projects on the other hand are often the perfect low-threshold join-in activity for newbies to get involved in Wikimedia projects.

• Increase reach: Especially GLAM activities often reach out to target groups that otherwise don't have many points of contact with online projects and communities. Successful GLAM projects can be a door opener to even more organizations and individuals that would otherwise be hard to reach.

What key activities and/or milestones are associated with this program?

• 2 major photo contests per year
• Supporting / organizing 1 mayor Wiki-TV project
• Providing ressources (technical equipment, travel and mini grants) for small photography projects and other community initiatives to generate free content
• Increase the availabilty of public open data by establishing an Austrian open data portal
• Establishing and maintaing relationships to GLAM institutions
• Exchange of experiences with other GLAM projects on an international level
• Looking into ways to partner with other organizations (e.g. OKFN) in Austria, which are also active in this field
• Creating and distributing information on free licenses through information material, talks etc.

How will your entity document, track, and measure successes and challenges of this program?

• Minigrants are subject to evaluation, reporting and / or documentation on a wiki page
• Number and qualitative Evaluation of existing GLAM partnerships
• Number of accreditations
• Number of pictures / files uploaded on Commons in specific categories
• Number of open data sets

Any additional details:

Program 3

Reach / Free knowledge awareness

What are the objectives of this program? Please use SMART criteria to explain these goals.

• Raising awareness for the importance and benefits of free knowledge for the Austrian society
  • Launching at least 5 major press campaigns on projects or general WMAT topics
  • Maintaining our current level of media attention
• Promoting the profile and brand awareness of Wikimedia Österreich in Austria (no baseline to measure against, market research would be to elaborate and costly)
• Establishing and cultivating contacts to opinion leaders, multipliers and decision makers and other stakeholders (e.g. donors)
  • Interviews with all our major partners

Which Wikimedia movement strategic priority (or priorities) does this program address and how?

• Increase reach: Andressing and involving stakeholders from outside the "Wikiverse".
• Increase participation: Raising awareness to certain issues like free content is the first step towards changing how people act in this regard. Realizing how beneficial free content can be to Austrian society or economy most likely leads to policy changes which promote free content.

What key activities and/or milestones are associated with this program?

• Cooperation with schools and universities
• Communication activities (PR, campaigning) aimed at a broader public
• Co-organizing of or actively participating (e.g. giving presentations) in events and conferences around free knowledge and a culture of sharing
• Exploiting new target groups
• Travel costs for volunteers who actively participate (e.g. giving presentations) in events and conferences around free knowledge and a culture of sharing
• Creating and distributing information on free knowledge through information material, talks etc
• Extend (quantitatively and qualitatively) our CRM database

How will your entity document, track, and measure successes and challenges of this program?

• Interviews with our partners
• Number and quality of contacts to opinion leaders, multipliers and decision makers
• Number of leads after conferences / events /fairs
• Amount of media coverage
• Number and nature of requests from outside the community / the general public

Any additional details:

Program 4

Organisational development

What are the objectives of this program? Please use SMART criteria to explain these goals.

• Sustainable governance structures to enable efficient cooperation beween volunteers, board and staff
  • No major problems due to conflicts of interests or responsibilites
• Empowering volunteers to manage projects effectively
  • Involving at least 5 of our regular project managers in skill transfer activities
• Involving the wider community of active volunteers into the organizational development
  • At least two community events that comprise topics of organizational development
• Develop adequate means to mesure our impact
  • Sufficient level of documentation and evaluation of all major projects

Which Wikimedia movement strategic priority (or priorities) does this program address and how?

• Improve quality: By enabling all stakeholders involved to carefully plan and evaluate our activities, we enhance the quality of the results in the long run. It also contributes to making sure that donation money is spent effectively, which is also an indicator for the quality of our projects.

What key activities and/or milestones are associated with this program?

• Applying and refining our good governance kodex
• Support the design and organization of an international board training
• Support and take part in international capacity building programmes for staff, boards, volunteers
• Governance and project management sessions with staff and volunteers
• Raising awareness for sound project planning, documentation and evaluation among volunteers
• Recruiting Project management / quality management volunteers to consult larger projects
• Regular staff appraisal interviews and performance reviews
• International good-practice benchmarks on governance and project management

How will your entity document, track, and measure successes and challenges of this program?

• Interviews with our volunteer project managers
• Good Governance report
• Scope and quality of project documentation

Any additional details:

Additional context for the upcoming year's annual plan / SWOT

Please provide 1-2 paragraphs for each response below. SWOT stands for your organizational strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

What organizational strengths enable your entity's plan (e.g., leadership, education program expertise, experience with outreach, governance structure, community participation, fundraising)?

• Committed volunteers, board, staff: Although or perhaps even because we are a small chapter, WMAT is flexible and strong enough to cope with unplanned situations and conditions. In our board and also among the volunteers, we have many involved people with a very good portfolio of core skills that can be triggered if required. The spirit of collaboration between staff and board / volunteers is very good and additionally adds to this strength. Since our last genereal assembly, our board also shows a good mixture of "old hands" and new representatives who bring in fresh ideas and perspectives. In addtion, WMAT has a good rapport with the community that is chersihed beyond Austria in the wider German-speaking community and we constantly put a lot of thought and effort into retaining this relationsship.
• Governance: We only hired our first staff member a year ago and measured against this early stage of professionalization we believe that we have a quite solid governance structure in place. In June we drafted our Good Governance Kodex in order to provide a sound basis for our further development. This involved discussing the status quo of collaboration between the different stakeholders of the chapter and setting up standards for the future. Another aim was to suggest proceedings in cases of conflicts of interests.
• Experience: WMAT has been around for five years now and by now we are able look back on several successful programms, projects and inititatives and draw on these experiences when it comes to planning new activities. Success stories are also the best way to win new partners and / or supporters.

What external opportunities enable your entity's plan (e.g., socio-political context, community participation, fundraising)?

• Strong partnerships: WMAT has established some very fruitful, long-term partnerships with GLAM institutions (e.g. Federal Monuments Office), like-minded organizations (e.g. Open Knowledge Foundation Austria) and public administration (e.g. City of Vienna, Federal Chancellor's Office) which enable sustainable, long-term project planning and innovative initiatives (open data portal) and often serve as a door opener for new projects and initiatives. In addition to the impact of the specific projects, they also contribute to a positive image of Wikipedia and Wikimedia and an increased general free knowledge awareness in Austria.
• Ressources: We think that there's is generally good fundraising potential in Austria, for project-specific funding as well as for general fundraising. There's also a small, but very loyal group of long-term donors, that could and shoud be expanded.
• Broader movement: WMAT considers the good relationships to other entities and individuals within the international movement as very valuable and beneficial. Within in the German-speaking community we have strong partners in WMDE and WMCH and can use synergies to achieve common goals. Due to it's geographical location and history, WMAT has close bonds to Western and Central / Eastern European communities and can act as a link between these cultures. We also appreciate what we can learn from older and more developed chapters like for example WMUK and last but not least the expertise offered by the WMF.

What are key risks or threats that would prevent you from achieving your plan (e.g., leadership turnover, governance challenges, lawsuits, fundraising, community participation, socio-political context)?

• Reporting requirements: Not all of our highly active volunteers are project management professionals and generally there's is a lack of awareness and sometimes willingness to thoroughly plan, document and evaluate a project. On the other hand, the expectations regarding our reporting increase more and more and not all of it can be absorbed by staff and board (especially when it comes to projects that we are not closely involved with (organisationally or otherwise)) - as much as we endeavor to take the "not so much fun stuff" off our volunteers. These requirements can also constitute a major additional hurdle for volunteer engagement.
• Process management: Although the collaboration between staff and volunteers is generally good and constructive, there is still potential for improvement concerning efficiency. This comprises mainly issues of communication, coordination and getting used to the "new" structures (especially in projects that have been in place before staff members came in as new players).
• Staffing level: By and large WMAT is well positioned, in the long run however a slight increase in volunteers as well as professional staff would be sensible in order to spread existing tasks on more shoulders (especially further reliefing some of the board members) and to enable sustainable growth for the future.

How will you minimize these risks and threats?

• Empowerment: As mentioned above, we are currently working on evaluating our projects in a more systematic fashion and and means to empower our volunteers with reagard to project management and evaluation (e.g. workshops). We are also thinking about more institutionalized ways to facilitate this process, e.g. having in-person-meetings or at least online discussions on lessons learned after projects or having assigned volunteers who help project managers with their quality management during major projects.
• Planning and assessing: When planing new projects we make sure that roles and responsibilities are clear and processes designed in an efficient fashion. Older / already established coordination and communication structures are assessed in the framework of lessons-learned sessions, performance reviews and the like.
• Diversifying: We intend to increase our staffing level by providing more funds for flexible case-by-case support by service providers and short-term contractors. This shall be achieved by increasing our FDC funding but also by looking into ways to diversify our funding. In addition, we also take action in order to attract more volunteers where possible.

Financials: year-to-date progress

This section provides the FDC information about how your entity is progressing against the current fiscal year's planned budget (revenues and costs).

Please provide the relevant information below. "Year-to-date" refers to the period between the start of your entity's current fiscal year and the date of submission of the proposal. Actual year-to-date financials should be provided as close to the proposal submission date as possible.

Identify the year-to-date for which you are reporting, month/year to month/year:

• January - August 2013

Table 3

	Current fiscal year planned budget		Year-to-date actuals		Projected final amount
	In currency requested	In $US	In currency requested	In $US	In currency requested	In $US
Revenues (from all sources)	197,643	266,818.05	108,057.59	145,877.75	89,585.41	120,940.30
Spending	213,990	288,886.50	111,254.75	150,193.91	102,735.25	138,692.58

Table 3 details, if necessary:

Based on the variance percentages above, please describe how your entity is progressing against revenue and spending targets. If your projected final amount shows your entity to be significantly under or over target on either revenue or spending, please provide a detailed explanation.

• Our year-to-date revenues in this table do not yet inlcude the second FDC installment. Also, most of the membership fees will be due in fall and a huge part of the annual fundraising is also done towards the end of the year and is hence not inlcluded yet. Until the second intallment of the FDC arrived, we had to bridge the gap between revenues and spending with money from our reserves. This shows that with the inflexibility of the current FDC process, sufficient reserves are cruicial in order to secure that a chapter can operate smoothly.
• We expect a slightly disproportional increase in spending in the second half of the year due to major projects like WLM and increased staff costs (the second employee only started in May).

Financials: upcoming year's annual plan

Please note that the FDC staff is currently exploring alternatives to wikitables for financial information. This issue will be addressed by the time the proposal creation tool is launched on September 1, 2013. Provide your financial overview for the upcoming year in the format below.

Please link to your detailed budget in a publicly available spreadsheet file (translation into English highly recommended) in addition to completing the tables below. Detailed budget link:

• Budget 2014

Financial sustainability

What other donors support your work through grants beyond those in the Wikimedia movement? If your entity does receive funding from other donors, please list a contact person. Note that the donor's contact details can be sent directly to FDCsupport@wikimedia.org if you prefer not to publish it here.

Note that the FDC staff may contact these donors.

• WMAT very recently received funds through an initiative called "netidee" by the Internet Foundation Austria. We applied for the funds as part of a project team that consists of WMAT, Open Knowledge Foundation Austria and the Cooperation Open Government Data Austria and which aims at establishing an open data portal in Austria that hosts non-governmental open data. Open Data is an important part of Free Knowledge and often serves as a valuable ressource for Wikimedia projects. Our application was successful and we received 50.000 EUR to launch the project in the first year. As WMAT took the project lead, it will also manage the funds. However, the money is designated specifically to this project and will not only cover WMAT expenses but also those of our partners. Our contact person there is Mr. DI Ernst Langmantel, we will send his contact details by mail.

What are your entity's plans for achieving long-term financial sustainability?

• As the example above shows, we are looking into ways to diversify our funding, for example by looking into project-specific financial support. Usually this is only possible for larger projects. We also plan to establish strategies for a more general fundraising. Due to a lack of time and manpower, this is still only in the margins of our activities. Nevertheless, we already started to collect and analyse data of our long-term donors and try to integrate them more into our communication strategies. We hope our capacities will allow further progress during the next term.

Revenues

Please list anticipated revenues, by source (e.g., FDC, Wikimedia grants programs, grants from institutional donors, public funding, membership fees, local donations, event fees)

Table 4

Revenue source	Anticipated (in currency requested)	Anticipated (In $US)
FDC-Grant	230,000	310,500
Grant open data portal (netidee)	50,000	67,500
Fundraising	35,000	47,250
Membership fees	2,500	3,375

Table 4 notes, if necessary:

Current entity staff and long-term contractors

Role/functions might include program administration, finance, fundraising. Please include both part-time and full-time staff and long-term contractors.

Table 5

Role / Function	Number of staff	Percentage of staff time*
Executive Director	1	100%
Community Management / Administrative support	1	100%

*Please include estimates of the percentage allocation of staff members. For example, for full-time staff, you would put 100% in this column. For half time staff, you would put 50% in this column.

Table 5 notes, if necessary:

Proposed new staff and and long-term contractors for upcoming year's annual plan

Role / functions might include program administration, finance, fundraising. Please include both part-time and full-time staff and long-term contractors.

Table 6

Department (e.g. Programs, Communications)	Number of current staff	Percentage of current staff time*	Number of upcoming staff	Percentage of upcoming staff time*	Rationale for hiring new staff
					Open data project

*Please include estimates of the percentage allocation of staff members and long-term contractors. For example, for full-time staff, you would put 100% in this column. For half-time staff, you would put 50% in this column.

Table 6 notes, if necessary:

Summary of staff and long-term contractor expenses

Table 7

	In currency requested	In $US	Percent increase
Current staff expenses	6,950/p.m.	9,382.50/p.m.
Proposed increase for current staff expenses	7,491.67/p.m.	10,113.75/p.m.	7.79%
Proposed increase for new staff expenses	2,916.66/p.m.	3,937.50/p.m.	26%
Total staff expenses	10,408.33/p.m.	14,051.27/p.m.	33.79%

Please estimate the percentage of overall staff time spent on programmatic work, as opposed to administration:

• Approximately 65 % of the time of the permanently employed staff is spent on projects.

Table 7 notes, if necessary:

• Current staff is entitled to an approx. 3% raise per year by the collective agreement with the union. We also plan a bonus for our ED to compensate a bit for the low wage which is currently below market.
• The total planned staff expenses for 2014 is 126,900 EUR / 171,315 USD including 2000 EUR / 2,700 USD for perks and benefits (e.g. trainings, annual public transport pass).
• The 50% long-term contractor will be hired for the open data project (restricted to the first year of the project for the time being) funded by the netidee grant. We hope to cover for the other overheads with service providers (e.g. for book keeping) or short-term contractors (e.g. for project support, such as programming and graphic design), which will be purchased case by case.

Expenses by program / initiative

Expenses are costs associated with any programs, initiatives, or projects your entity manages (e.g., event costs, materials, transportation). Please exclude any staff costs that are included above. “Programs / initiatives” might include education programs, outreach programs, microgranting initiatives, etc. Please include any administration costs (e.g., office space rental, utilities) affiliated with each program along with any overall administration costs that are not affiliated with any particular program (e.g., Administration should be considered a "Program" under the first column.)

Table 8a

Program / initiative	In currency requested	In $US
Community support	60,000	81,000
Free content generation	52,000	70,200
Reach / Free knowledge awareness	29,300	39,555
Organisational development	11,100	14,985
Administration	23,260	31,401
Total program expenses (should equal the sum of the rows)	175,660	237,141

Table 8 notes, if necessary:

Summary of total revenues and expenses

Table 9

	In currency requested	In $US
Total cash balance as of proposal submission	35,508.24	47,936.12
Total revenues	317,500	428,625
Total spending	302,560	408,456
Net (revenues less expenses)	14,940	20,169
Operating reserves,* if applicable

Table 9 notes, if necessary:

• Total cash balance as of August 31, 2013.
• The surplus of 14,940 EUR / 20,169 USD is inteded to refill our reserves that have been severely melted during the last years (see also the rationale provided in section "Amount requested" above).

Verification that this proposal requests no funds from the Wikimedia Foundation for political or legislative activities

Enter "yes" or "no" for the verification below.

The term “political or legislative activities” includes any activities relating to political campaigns or candidates (including the contribution of funds and the publication of position statements relating to political campaigns or candidates); voter registration activities; meetings with or submissions and petitions to government executives, ministers, officers or agencies on political or policy issues; and any other activities seeking government intervention or policy implementation (like “lobbying”), whether directed toward the government or the community or public at large. Grants for such activities (when permitted under U.S. law and IRS regulations) should be sought from the Wikimedia Grants Program.

I verify that this proposal requests no funds from the Wikimedia Foundation for political or legislative activities

Yes

Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes. No changes can be made to the documents after the deadlines for completion passes, and documents will automatically be considered 'submitted' after the deadline closes.

• --CDG (talk) 11:16, 1 October 2013 (UTC)