This form is for organizations receiving Annual Plan Grants to report on their results to date. For progress reports, the time period for this report will the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). For impact reports, the time period for this report will be the full 12 months of this grant, including the period already reported on in the progress report (e.g. 1 January - 31 December of the current year). This form includes four sections, addressing global metrics, program stories, financial information, and compliance. Please contact APG/FDC staff if you have questions about this form, or concerns submitting it by the deadline. After submitting the form, organizations will also meet with APG staff to discuss their progress.
The biggest events in terms of physical participation were certainly the lectures before high school student assemblies (held by volunteer members Dario Crespi and Marco Chemello), followed by the Linux Day events (combined) self-organised by volunteer members.
The biggest educational/training programs by number of newly registered users were all volunteer-based: one was independently conducted by professor Massimo Carnevali (unife) with support by one of our volunteer members and one by two young members dan1gia2 and Pottercomuneo in their own school (liceo Quadri) with the help of Marcok (60 and 100 registered students respectively). Various other programs got about 50 participants each (IFOA, Basilicata, Asti); several others were focused on professional training of smaller groups of persons (15-30 each) by paid instructors (librarians in Marche, Unipr, Unipv and Bologna; Uniurb and Polimi students). The level of involvement of the new users, however, varies significantly.
The WIR projects had very different outputs, which were mainly of three kinds: 1a) hundreds of low-traffic images, 1b) hundreds or thousands of images with high traffic combined, 2a) hundreds of small articles, 2b) few dozens of bigger articles. BEIC and Museoscienza have 1b+2a+2b; MUSE 1b+2b (though at a lower level); Mansutti and Galileo 1a+2a.
All managed to involve most of the relevant staff of the entity into editing, although only some had the staff produce significant contributions.
BEIC kept growing thanks to increasing involvement by staff and a big content release (17k contemporary photos); Museoscienza may still grow as the released images get used more, and was very happy with the traffic received by their website.
The level of engagement in our online communication is stable across the year, with a slight increase in Twitter and a peak (possibly temporary) of website clicks from AdWords in June-July 2016.
Please tell the story of each of your programs included in your proposal. This is your chance to tell your story by using any additional metrics (beyond global metrics) that are relevant to your context, beyond the global metrics above. You should be reporting against the targets you set at the beginning of the year throughout the year. We have provided a template here below for you to report against your targets, but you are welcome to include this information in another way. Also, if you decided not to do a program that was included in your proposal or added a program not in the proposal, please explain this change. More resources for storytelling are at the end of this form. Here are some ways to tell your story.
We encourage you to share your successes and failures and what you are learning. Please also share why are these successes, failures, or learnings are important in your context. Reference learning patterns or other documentation.
Make clear connections between your offline activities and online results, as applicable. For example, explain how your education program activities is leading to quality content on Wikipedia.
We encourage you to tell your story in different ways by using videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, e.g.), compelling quotes, and by linking directly to work you produce. You may highlight outcomes, learning, or metrics this way.
We encourage you to continue using dashboards, progress bars, and scorecards that you have used to illustrate your progress in the past, and to report consistently over time.
You are welcome to use the table below to report on any metrics or measures relevant to your program. These may or may not include the global metrics you put in the overview section above. You can also share your progress in another way if you do not find a table like this useful.
External communication
The primary objective of the 2015-2016 external communication plan is the growth of WMIT's brand awareness among general public, educational and cultural institutions and national bodies, press and media professionals, donors and potential new members to ease fundraising and thus increase our autonomy, etc.. We aimed at strenghtening the link between Wikimedia Italia and Wikimedia projects and activities (often better known than the association itself) with a more integrated communication strategy. We have built a new website of the association with a blog and a web page for every project (integrating the contents of the previous projects websites of Wiki Loves Monuments and OpenStreetMap, for example); we have strenghened our social network communication by publishing more often news about all WMIT projects; in 2016 we worked together with a professional graphic designer and with a communication agency. This agency offered to create our 2016 5x1000 campaign as an in-kind donation. We have also organized several outreach and more targeted events.
Happy Birthday Wikipedia 2016 - Flavio Colusso - WM-IT] Happy Birthday to You (Public Domain - see), performed by Kapellmeister Flavio Colusso in Milan, Italy, palazzina Liberty
As mentioned in our progress report, in December, 2015, we organized a concert for our Decennial which had about 100 total participants , of which around 15 were WMIT's members. We had less members than expected: possible reasons are that this event may have required a longer promotion and that some members would have preferred a different kind of concert/different kind of event (but these are only suppositions: we plan to ask for more specific feedbacks on that to plan our future community events). Despite this, the concert for the decennial was the biggest investment in this area. The most significant return is considered to be in terms of outreach and (unmeasurable) relations with the municipality of Milan, which hosted the event and provided us with gratis valuable office space since March 2016. At the concert a member of italian House Veronica Tentori intervened with a speech: it was the occasion to suggested her an amendment to the Italian law regarding the reproduction of cultural goods. Some days later she started a petition for introducing freedom of panorama in Italy.
During the year we have also had events aimed at building and engaging community such as Festambiente in Vicenza (led by volunteers) which was above average for sales and new members for this kind of event and many other events (some of them included in the other programs) aimed at increasing awareness of Wikimedia Italia and Wikimedia projects. From our experience we have also learned that in events whose specific audience doesn't yet know Wikimedia projects (for example commons/environmentalist events), it's sometimes hard to reach new people and engage the existing Wikimedia community. On the contrary, we got about 20 new members at Stelline conference, an event for librarians (see Library program).
Another objective of our plan was to communicate in order to promote an increase in the 5 x 1000 revenue for 2018 which is our main source of revenue. We organized some specific actions for that: distributions of old post cards in 2015; in 2016 the graphic layout of new postcards in Milan (20 thousands) have been made pro bono by a communication agency; the purchase of mailing lists of fiscal adivisors (who draft the tax return of citizens) to improve the results of the campaign and we have started other actions never done before such as a video. We can evaluate the results of the campaign only two years later but the past results show a significant increasing trend of 5x1000 every year.
To have an updated overview to all the objectives related to the Communication program and the progress against the objectives please look at this table. The table provides a detailed idea of the general context of each goal: it covers the same two year period of our strategic planning (2015-2016), showing, in black, what is to be included in the funding period and, in blue, everything is out of it.
KPI Comunicazione_final report
Please also note that our External communication plan had these general results: 45k participants, of which 17k interactions on social media and, particularly, an audience of 27k for our TV "lesson" held by Andrea Zanni interview, thus strengthening our brand awareness, which has also been enlarged thanks to the above said events with a more specific target (libraries, WLM, museums, etc.) - see other programs.
Our Facebook and Twitter channels, mostly fed/administered by volunteer members, are expanding their activity (while hopefully maintaining or improving their quality).
Our press and offline communication has volunteer members at the forefront (especially the president, the spokesperson and event organizers) and the ED and are now mostly managed in the background by the office as a whole. The office communicates about office-led activities and tries to support and treasure the hundreds of volunteer-led activities throughout the year.
We had 631 press clippings in 2015 and 360 press clippings in 2016. Most of the yearly recorded press attention for Wikimedia Italia was attracted by WLM in September, but we don't know how the numbers compare to the previous year as we have no baselines as regards the press. The constant stream of clicks from gratis AdWords (from Google Grants) is a significant though not predominant source of attention for our online communication (20–40 % of visits on our website) and allowed us to kickstart the new Wordpress website, while our wiki website continues to be well visited.
Wiki Loves Monuments
Wikigita in Castelvetro di Modena
The success of WLM is a cornerstone for WMIT to try to establish itself as national reference player of open culture. We aimed to use the echo around WLM for increasing the awareness of the institutions on the need for a change of the Italian law which currently limits the spread of photographs of Italian monuments. Another important target was the improvement in the quality of Commons/wikipedia articles. Besides, we integrated the communication of WLM in WMIT's one (a unique website, combined use of logos, etc.) to convey even more the idea that WLM is a project run by WMIT.
See the plan for details.
All WLM activities were handled by the full-time project manager with the help of the entire staff and volunteer member Dario Crespi, plus the members of the prejury and jury.
The contest happened as usual with this results: 947 participants, in line with our expectations (Italy was placed first for number of participants). "Participants" is still the number which is looking better in this activity. In 2015 Italy was the first country by number of participants. Another 512 people participated to our "wikigite" (wikitour) events. Besides, we got 392 institutions (more that expected: our target was 300); 12.712 pictures; 5.149 monuments. In 2015 we had less pictures than in 2014: some participants who used to upload hundreds or thousands of photos may have uploaded less to focus on quality. Please note that, in 2015, for the first time, one of our finalist pictures was ranked second in the international competition, maybe also thanks to the presence of professional photographers in the jury.
For the detailed numbers on the participation see our past report; a summary follows.
The number of WLM newsletter subscriptions raised from 500 to 1550 (much more than expected: our target was +10% than 2014).
Franco Fontana - WLM exhibition in Modena The jury and pre-jury have been changed in composition: we had 3 famous photographers involved in the jury (instead of the 2 expected, Franco Fontana, Settimio Benedusi, Uwe Ommer) and 14 people in the pre-jury (7 wikipedians and 7 professional photographers).
As for the communication strategy, we don't have a way to compare the results to the preceding year because press are clippings not available for September 2014. The press conference of September 2015 in Milan was attended by more than 30 journalists.
Many more wikigite than expected were organized: 46 in total, with 512 participants (much more than expected: our target was 5).
Sponsorship: in 2015 we had the same sponsors as 2014 (Euronics and Canon) but, additionally, we were given an unexpected economic contribution by them. We also got a new sponsor (Municipality of Massa Marittima /Toscana Foto Festival). We totally raised from them a contribution of 8,100 euros. They also paid the prizes. In 2016 we got another new sponsor, Enegan (we will totally raise 17.080 euro).
In 2015 Wiki Loves Monuments gave life to two special projects: the first one aimed at connecting Wikidata to WLM (only started in 2015 and to be completed soon in 2016) and the other one involving an important Italian archive.
All expected side activities were conducted, with one full-time staff member and involvement of all staff members plus various volunteers, including Dario Crespi for the lists of monuments and some new volunteers (members and FIAF members) for the pre-jury.
To have an overview to all the objectives related to the Wiki Loves Monuments program and the progress against the objectives please look at this table. The table provides a detailed idea of the general context of each goal: it covers the same two year period of our strategic planning (2015-2016), showing, in black, what is to be included in the funding period and, in blue, everything is out of it.
KPI Wiki loves monuments_final report
Our 5th edition of WLM turned to be a special one: WLM became "established" for professional and amateur photographers thanks to the presence, for the first time, of famous professional photographers in the jury.
WLM went beyond the limits of the photographic contest creating the occasion for new cultural projects with our partners. Starting from WLM we engaged new partners and developed with them new projects, not necessarily related with photographs, which take WLM to a whole new level of complexity. (Please see the detail in the progress report).
It was also the occasion for launching a photo exhibition throughout Italy that was especially successful (requested in multiple places from North to South).
Exhibition at Science Museum in Milan
After the inauguration on December 2015, in occasion of the award ceremony, the exhibition started its national tour and was hosted by different institutions and organizations in 2016. We had many spontaneous requests. Some of the most prestigious institutions were: the Photography Foundation of Franco Fontana in Modena; the Science and Techonology Museum of Milan which opened the exhibition within a big event and hosted it for two months; the international book festival of Taormina in Sicily.
Lobby
Our main target in lobby was to increase the awareness of institutions on the need for change of the Italian law: at least 1 meeting with the political representative.
We actually had 3 meetings with the Minister, his legal office and with members of the Italian Parliament. These meetings resulted in a proposal to the Minister containing an interpretation of the article dealing with the photographic reproduction of cultural goods.
From our experience we have learned that lobbying consultants are useful to get some tips but to have a real impact lobbying had to be led by the chapter's primary faces (president, ED, etc.) and wikimedians who know about free knowledge.
The total expenditure for lobbying activities amounted to € 3,659.98.
OpenStreetMap
Martijn van Exel (OpenStreetMap Foundation) and Simone Cortesi (WikiMedia Italia) signing the agreement between OSMF and WMI for the Italian ChapterKPI OSM final report
With OpenStreetMap program we aimed to be recognized as the Italian OSM Foundation chapter, to enhance the cooperation between the communities of OSM and Wikimedia and between WMIT and some target institutions. Our OSM activities want to make it clear for the general public that OpenStreetMap is an integral part of the open content landscape together with Wikimedia projects.
On January, 28th 2016 WMIT was recognized as the Italian OSM Foundation chapter, thanks to the work of the former Vice President (now Treasurer), Simone Cortesi. We are the second Wikimedia chapter (after Iceland) to achieve this goal and we hope it will now be easier for other Wikimedia chapters to do the same. After getting us as a chapter, the OSM community has perceived that the relationships with institutions have become easier (they have acquired an authority they didn't have before) compared to the time when there was no OSM entity but just individuals.
We hired an OSM project manager in July 2015 and, due to his sudden unavailability, in September he has been replaced by another person. Unfortunately this caused some delays. Also, we needed to refocus on some goals which were more attainable (see progress report) and, particularly, the involvement/outreach towards some entities, such as companies using geographical data or local authorities.
Despite this unexpected event, thanks to the effort of project manager, staff and volunteers within the funding period we promoted 18 OSM events and courses, reaching 527 participants (the objective was of 2 events in 2015 and at least 4 in 2016). 8 events has been successfully integrated with Wikimedia Italia events (Milan, Bari, by remote for Basilicata, Mantova, Catania, Cagliari, Napoli, Trento).
In particular the most participated event was OSMIT, the Italian conference of OSM community, that took place in Milan on May 2016: over 93 people attended the event and 15 people the mapping party.
Thanks to this work, new things are setting in motion. In fact, some spontaneous events not in the plan were organized: LinuxLudus events, OpenPuglia (with more than 100 participants) and the "mappers night" (remote editathon) were the most successful in producing new editors and contributions. We have observed 27 new contributors and 11,2 content pages added or improved on Wikimedia projects in relation to these events.
Also, some important contacts have started: we are running for State of the Map in Italy in 2017; we had a course in a municipality in September and there is space for other ones by the end of 2016.
As regards the courses and seminar with PA / Civil Defence; Universities / Professionals we re-focused our objectives as we started the execution of the OSM program later than expected and we realized we would have obtained more results in some few, more specific targets. Therefore, after a massive mailing and after having direct contacts with those target, we decided to focus on schools and civil protection where we had courses, thanks to our staffers Alessandro Palmas and Dario Crespi and multiple members (including Simone Cortesi, Carlo Benini and others). Moreover, we started to get in contact with regions, which expressed interest. We signed an agreement with Molise and we are continuing the discussion with Liguria and Emilia Romagna.
OSM and Wikimedia projects support each other in that people who don't understand one can understand the other and then both, so our outreach is simplified by dealing with both and we can hope to increase the new editors produced. When users get tired of one project, they can switch to the other instead of going completely inactive. As for quality, Wikimedia wikis have a lot of geographical information which benefits from a better map.
Education
The “Wikipedia goes to school” project aims to bring Wikipedia in the Italian classes and the long-term goal for WMIT is to be able to affirm itself on a national scale as an important partner for educational institutions, also thanks to SMS solidarity campaign. Furthermore, WMIT wanted to become more proactive by submitting to schools a standardized educational offer, more close to the actual interest of the students thus encouraging them to remain active users even when the school project is over.
KPI Scuole final report
To achieve these goals we needed to empower our volunteers structure and organize them by region, creating coordination roles (more requests for courses than active volunteers, spread over the country not evenly) and the staff, as well. As predicted, building this structured group of volunteers required some internal training. We focused mainly on the training of the 15 member coordinators (Paolo and various staff involved, with external consultants; please note that we had an objective of 5 coordinators position instead of the 15 actually created): 1 seminar in 2015 and 2 seminars in 2016. After this first experience we realized that this training program needs to be further improved: last July we started a more structured path of internal peer training, as we realized that internally we have specific needs for training regarding certain digital skills or Wikimedia projects.
Many courses were organized in secondary schools throughout the year, nation-wide: 15 total, which was our goal. Also, 20 schools, 1315 students and 240 teachers more where involved by Dario Crespi, within the project "Wikimania Esino Lario - Protagonismo culturale offline e online". These activities were not in the original plan as they were conducted by a staffer hired thanks to an external grant (we have known we got it after the submission of the proposal). These activities are indicated separately for convenience reasons but they form integral part of our plan.
One other important objective for education was to approach universities in a more structured way. We had 19 seminars/courses/presentations in universities, which proved to be a fertile ground on which we can build new partnerships. For the next strategic plan we are drafting a specific program for universities which are a completely different target from schools in public, needs, retain expectations, etc..
We also had another chance to collaborate with universities by hosting students as interns: we had interns all year round as expected and their number has increased throughout the year (1 staffer and 1 member managed them): we had 2 interns in 2015 and 4 between January and June 2016.
Unfortunately, the collaboration with UNITRE (the institution organizing initiatives for senior citizens) hasn't been started yet: we have only started contacts and a course is expected to start by Autumn 2016 (outside the funding period).
Moreover, we had a significant number of extracurricular activities or seminars held by volunteers not in the plan: 9 extracurricular initiatives and participated at the Linux Day 2015 events in 9 different cities (190 total participants) and other 16 presentation, courses and seminars (in various institutions, different from schools). We also had 1 seminar in Palazzo Montecitorio (Rome) to the members of Parliament (10 participants). Our goal was of 2 or 3 activities only.
Some of these extracurricular courses are those promoted with IFOA. This was our first structured experience with vocational training institutions meant for life-long learning. The results show that the context is unfavourable (students not especially motivated, low literacy and so on) but can still learn something and produce small useful contributions. Given the amount of public spending and the number of hours of such courses within job orienteering and work training schemes, there is a nearly unlimited potential for growth given sufficient buy-in from the training institutions.
We think it's important to point out that some additional projects were organized independently and spontaneously by volunteers. The biggest project was in the Vicenza high school "Liceo Quadri", led by two young active wikipedians and volunteer members who belonged to the school and helped by the local long-time members of the chapter. Their actions managed to involve a significant portion of the students of the school and to make many of them join hands-on activity, in particular by registering to the wikis. The students have not yet produced especially significant contributions to the wikis, so the main result is one of personal development for the participants (which we can't assess precisely): perhaps more integration in the school curricula and credits would make the students spend more time on the activity.
Thanks to the FDC contribution we have been able to organize our first SMS solidarity campaign, which includes a TV spot about the educational WMIT's activities in the schools and media coverage (press and web). This activity for a certain point of view was a challenge (see below).
Screenshot spot sms solidale WIKIMEDIA ITALIA 2016
In 2015 we started to work on the construction of a solidarity SMS campaign, aiming to increase WMIT's brand awareness and to finance an action on schools on a national scale. This was the first time for Wikimedia Italia and we were not totally aware what to expect. As recommended, we relied on a professional agency since the beginning. It’s a long and complicated process so we knew we needed help to realize the communication materials (TV and radio ads and press materials) and, most of all, a guide to get in contact with the stakeholders involved.
In fact, in order to have a phone number assigned, to which people can donate via text messages or phone calls, and go on air on TV and radio, a specific procedure has to be followed.
This activity represented a challenge because it was hard to convey Wikipedia/Wikimedia values to a very large audience and to involve mass communication and testimonials.
The core of the campaign is the TV commercial that usually has a famous testimonial supporting the cause. Unfortunately we couldn’t find a testimonial. Even though we received positive feedbacks from the people we got in contact with (an anchorman, an astronaut,…), no collaboration actually started.
Nevertheless we think we got through this obstacle well, because Andrea Zanni (President of WMIT at the time) offered to be in the video and the final result turned out to be very satisfying.
Once we were ready with the TV spot, approval by TV stations was needed to go on air. Thanks to the experience of the communication agency we managed to contact all the main TV channels.
Two important channels granted the broadcasting, La7 and Sky, but unfortunately the two most important ones didn’t allow the broadcasting (RAI and Mediaset). According to the agency supporting our work, not going on air on those channels compromised the success of the campaign. At the end of July we collected around 5,000€, much less than predicted. The agency confirmed that it is very difficult to obtain the support of Rai and Mediaset the first time: they are very strong and powerful as regards the effects of their broadcasting and need to be sure of the value of the partner they work with. We had a lot of meetings and calls in order to present ourselves and be recognized as reliable partner: Rai (the first channel of the national public TV) gave us a positive feedback, although it didn't broadcast our commercial, but we are confident for next year campaign. We learned that it's crucial to meet managers and supervisors of the tv company in person to gain their trust. Thanks to these meetings we have started with Rai a constructive dialogue: our interlocutors suggested to promote the project first and to launch the advertisement afterwards. On the same page seems to be also Sky (pay tv).
We believe that our dialogue with Rai helped focusing the attention of the channel on Wikipedia and its mission, in fact on July there has been a 5 minute
segment about Wikipedia within an educational program called "Complimenti per la connessione" ("Congratulations for the connection") which aims to teach general concepts about the internet and technology to the general public. It was very accurate and positive.
Moreover, the time schedule was postponed and reduced. The TV spot didn’t go on air until late July, when the main tv programs already closed the season and the share was lower, and for two weeks only.
We faced the fact that for Italian TV channels some social causes are more “appealing” than Wikimedia’s goal to give every person free access to all human knowledge. Despite this, we have reached a public we would never be able to approach.
We believe we have to keep on communicating the social importance of Wikimedia’s values and WMIT activities in schools, but we are optimistic because we have started interesting relations with TV and radio channels representatives.
At last, the video we realized in 2016 has any time reference so it can be used again in the following years. Since the big investment of money and time on the realization of the video and the beginning of the relationships has already been done, we are confident that in the next years we'll be able to focus on expanding our network of contacts and cultivating relationships.
Museums
WLM exhibition at Science MuseumEditathon at Science Museum
Our goal for the year was to introduce WMIT in the museum/archives area, which represented an unexplored ground for our organization before, and to quickly create relationships with the main Italian museum associations (ICOM and Museimpresa) in order to spread our message and mission and promote our activities as much as possible. See the detailed plan.
KPI Musei_final report
Some WIRs achieved big quantitative and qualitative results, like commons:Commons:Museoscienza (5 thousands uploads, 1 million monthly accesses to the images shortly after the upload time). We hope that in the future this will help convince more museums to invest on the Wikimedia projects (financially and otherwise).
When we decided to focus more on museums during 2016 and we picked wikimedians in residence (WIRs) as the best offer we could make them, we were not sure that it would be possible to achieve much with such limited resources. It was a bet.
We felt that, to expand our reach within museums, we needed to reach some critical mass and to gain their heartfelt support, including a financial investment. In fact, investing in a partnership with a single museum is not helpful unless it leads to a wider tide of free knowledge adoption by a significant group of museums in the country; however, a small association like ours can't alone compensate (and pay for) the deficiencies in online communication of multiple Italian institutions.
The model of the Wikimedian in residence immediately appeared to be a suitable solution, for various reasons. First, Wikimedia Italia had already tried WIRs in multiple institutions with various lengths (4, 6, 10 or 12 months), so the model proved flexible. Second, at least one WIR had managed to start small (4 months) and then convince the institution to make the experience permanent. Third, although every institution is different, a minimal set of outputs is rather easy to replicate given some premises (e.g. that the institution has a website and some digital photos or scans), as we have reached a core of shared practices, experience and infrastructure (including consensus on some guidelines in the relevant wikis). Fourth, although an impactful WIR needs many different skills, the core knowledge we must guarantee is provided by any experienced wikipedian (how to clear copyright and licenses, how to upload some files and transform some text into acceptable articles) and given the high unemployment in Italy it must be possible to find some experienced users available for a paid position. Finally, as WIRs have become common in various kinds of institutions in multiple country, it's easier for institutions to understand and get motivated (as long as they care about other experiences).
All this considered, we decided to offer funding for museums to get 2 months of paid WIR, selected and hired by Wikimedia Italia (no hassle for them) and sent to them to achieve some agreed goals.
We expected the hardest part would be to recruit institutions, hence most effort was put into devising an effective and safe process. With the help of ICOM, we opened a call for applications where we asked museums to come to us (rather than have us chase institutions across the country) and agree to a set of very simple and minimal requirements such as providing 100 images to be uploaded on Wikimedia Commons with a free license.
In hindsight, the call for applications might have been seen by the institutions as the typical call from a grantmaking entity, where you participate to expand your entity's budget and do the minimum possible to pass the requirements, with the understanding that you will not be asked anything more. If so, the call might have selected entities which don't live on stable funding and which are (administratively) used to asking grants. However, Wikimedia Italia is not a grantmaking entity (our budget is considerably smaller than most of the museums we involved) and our intention was only to provide some seed money, while asking for funds from the participating institutions if the partnership proved successful. Some effort is needed to reconcile expectations and expand the museums' involvement in the future.
At the end of the application period, we were relieved to find out that we had way more applications than available slots and at least two institutions of national importance had applied. We then spent a lot of staff and volunteer time (including our precious volunteer GLAM spokeperson, Virginia Gentilini) to process the applications.
A less exciting experience was the selection of the persons to fill the positions, which ended up to be a short ad-hoc job opening, mostly advertised within our members and wikimedia community, to be processed by a small committee with strong involvement of the board. Luckily, multiple experienced wikipedians applied, so we had plenty of choice. Because no applicant had a previous experience as WIR, assessment had to be based on the strengths and weaknesses with regard to the many involved skills, which can be known from the applicants' activities on the wikis but not objectively assessed. Anyway, the 4 required persons were selected and we seemed good to go; only at the last moment we discovered that one of them had changed mind and we ended up replacing him by making one of the other three WIRs cover two positions. Only months after the opening we discovered that some experienced wikimedians did not apply (also) because they had not understood that some position was available in their own city, or what the wage would be.
Compared to such long preparations, the crucial phase of the story started and finished as quick as lightning. Two months are normally hardly enough for a WIR to get used to the institutions, yet we asked them to achieve concrete results and to report on them thoroughly. Because the selected persons were used to independent work, we only provided them with a checklist of minimum standards to adhere to: they were expected to figure our the best tactic on their own. Later, we asked them to report twice a month in our newsletter and to discuss progress and needs with chapter staff.
When we had just recovered from the hectic selections, it was already time to wrap up. Most WIRs needed staff help to complete their reports with some quantitative assessment, as well as varying amounts of technical help for uploads and templates; but they all reached some concrete results despite the short amount of time. In particular, Museoscienza uploaded an impressive set of 5000 images which will keep editors busy at illustrating articles for a while; Mansutti uploaded frontispieces of some rare volumes at an uncommonly high quality, further improving certain articles already worked on by BEIC; MUSE involved nearly all employees (20) in the wiki activities; Museo Galileo got 9 employees involved despite the scattered setup of the institution and the extremely uncomfortable logistics of the WIR (who lived at a distance of 3 hours of travel by fast train).
We had won our bet. It was possible for us to develop a successful partnership even with just 2 months of WIR time. However, this was just the beginning! The next phase was to get the WIRs renewed, or at any rate to get more funding to extend them.
As of this writing, however, 3 months have passed and this phase has not started yet, essentially because the WIRs scholarships have started later than expected (January 2016 instead of July 2015); we still have to work on convincing the institutions that WIRs have a huge return on investment and should be deemed worthy of their own internal resources and on developing a peer pressure which will bring more museums to spontaneously invest on the Wikimedia projects with our help.
We signed an agreement with ICOM and we will have the chance to communicate with the museums about the results of the WIR program during the ICOM assembly (October 10, 2016). We did not manage to organise any training for museums because the context was not ready for these activities; as of today we have had a weak promotion from ICOM.
As for other sectors, we participated in the annual conference of Museimpresa which resulted in the agreement with food museum of Parma (Museo del Cibo) which released all its digitised materials.
We also signed agreements with Touring Club/WW1 and Micheletti Foundation (Brescia) which resulted in a some hundreds uploads. 1 staffer involved in the uploads, 2 members helped with the outreach and negotiations.
20 letters were sent to directors of major museums in Italy and meetings happened with two of them (Uffizi and Brera): this action resulted in the project of an editathon at Uffizi to be held on January 21, 2017.
We also had a meeting (in September 2016) with 2 museums to start some projects together (Triennale and Istituto Centrale per la Grafica).
Volunteers
To have an overview to all the objectives related to the Italian Volunteers program and the progress against the objectives please look at this table. The table provides a detailed idea of the general context of each goal: it covers the same two year period of our strategic planning (2015-2016), showing, in black, what is to be included in the funding period and, in blue, everything is out of it.
The goal for this year was to address the emerging need to make volunteers' involvement more systematic. The need to appoint regional and thematic coordinators became soon a priority: in several programs the request for activities was higher than our concrete possibility to satisfy it; the number of active members needed to be increased. See the detailed plan.
To organize volunteers with geographical criteria/according to projects involvement, we found 15 coordinators (8 regional, 7 thematic), volunteers who take responsibility for activities in a specific area: they are listed in our public contact page and receive personal email addresses. Recruitment and selection was managed by the board, mainly Ginevra Sanvitale as projects coordinator.
To support such volunteers, between 2015 and 2016 we organized 3 seminars (two in Bologna and one in Roma) for coordinators. Those who participated are continuing the training until the end and will have a third meeting, tête-à-tête, with the consultant for people management/team building. Support and training for coordinators/members not as successful as expected, in that satisfaction and interest was lower than expected especially in one training for coordinators; training/meetings for members distributed all across Italy needs to be different from what we did, maybe online.
The "train the trainers" needs to be further improved: last July we started a more structured path of internal peer training (see planning page), as we realized that internally we have specific needs for training regarding certain digital skills or Wikimedia projects.
Thanks to their official role, some coordinators were empowered to be more independent and effective volunteer members, e.g. in their relations to the press and other outreach activities. Time travel is not available to prove it, but we feel some outreach results would not have been achieved.
Additionally, to involve new people in our projects, we organized a Training day about WLM in June 2015 and by the end of November 2015 we standardized the offer in the educational area.
Libraries
Our goal for the year was to consolidate the existing relationships in order to replicate on a larger scale projects that are already planned for the years to come and become even more a reference point for the library sector thanks to our strategic partnerships. See the detailed plan. It is also important to outline that the know how of our volunteers in this field is very strong and the activities we carried out during the funding period allowed us to strengthen our visibility, presence and impact in the library sector.
To have an overview to all the objectives related to the GLAM - Libraries program and the progress against the objectives please look at this table. The table provides a detailed idea of the general context of each goal: it covers the same two year period of our strategic planning (2015-2016), showing, in black, what is to be included in the funding period and, in blue, everything is out of it.
Activities are also regularly featured in the Italy report of the GLAM newsletter.
KPI Biblioteche_final report
Please find here below a description of the main objectives of our GLAM - Libraries program that we have reached:
Events focused on libraries and Wikisource for a generic audience continued, mostly organized by our volunteer members, especially Andrea Zanni, our former President and Virginia Gentilini, our GLAM coordinator. The Wikisource contest continues to produce meaningful contributions; the Italian Wikisource community was happy with the new contributors who stayed after the contest (final results: 2864 proofread pages, 4094 formatted pages, 101 participants, 35 new users). This has allowed us to achieve the aim of recruiting new Wikimedia projects contributors via libraries. Nevertheless, we found some difficulties to devise training activities which will turn librarians into wikipedians. Sometime there is little clarity on the institutions' expectations and event formats. The downside of the room for experimentation is that our partners do not yet know what to expect. This might change if we manage the managers of librarians (or of their training) to first get hands-on experience on the Wikimedia projects to get the gist of their functioning; or if we manage to set up a partnership with the national association of librarians (AIB) and to organise a series of workshops in a replicable format. We are getting better by trying different teachers and approaches (also depending on the attendees' needs) and by monitoring the institutions' satisfaction and the users' activity on the wikis. We have also realized some unplanned activities: WMIT contributed to the realization of the first Wikisource conference in Vienna, November, 20th to 22nd (with 3 Italian participants), whilst a Wikilab at the Library of Trento on Wikisource has been realized.
Another objective was to transmit skills to operate on Wikipedia to librarians and to increase content releases thanks to Wikipedians in Residence, with at least 2 in 2015 and 1 in 2016. As expected, 2 new wirs have been activated in 2015 (1 WIR in BNCF in Florence and 1 in the Public Library of Trento) and 1 new wir has been activated at BEIC in 2016. BEIC achieved what we believe to be the biggest content release ever of contemporary photographs on Wikimedia Commons: commons:Commons:BEIC#Paolo Monti archive on Commons. BEIC continues to be our flagship project, which we always use to demonstrate with concrete results what librarians (and digital libraries) can do on Wikimedia projects. We are still studying how to create a project concerning the import of bibliographic data from the National Public Library of Florence on Wikidata.
We also offered several workshops - 9 in 2015 and 15 in 2016 - for organized groups of librarians (mostly universities and consortia), and we are continuously refining our formats. This activity is funded by the requesting entities and is mostly performed by paid experienced wikimedians (1 staffer and some members) with significant workforce spent in negotiations (2 staffers and 1 volunteer member). This allowed us to exceed the objective of at least 3 courses by 2015 and at least 15 courses by 2016, and to strengthen initiatives that are already in place with libraries. Please, note that, among the courses we held in 2016, only a few were with AIB (the Italian Library Association), with which we would like to forged strategic relationships. Partnership with AIB continued to slowly tighten, mostly led by our volunteer members. Despite this, an agreement is ready to be signed (probably by the end of 2016).
The stand at Bibliostar during the "Stelline" conference (national yearly conference for Italian librarians) had exceptional results was used to make about 20 attendees join the association. Our members also attended and gave presentations as usual, gaining a good attendance and some active dialogue with the librarians. Out of ~60 attendees to our conference (4 interventions with 9 speakers, with 12 wikipedians involved) and another ~60 new newsletter subscribers. Additionally, two university libraries started projects with us: a training for librarians (completed) and a planned project on Open Access. Activity in the mailing list remained stable after the event.
In the perspective of increasing the awareness about GLAM projects, a sending out of 50 email to the lists of librarians have occurred. Other expected activities also happened, mainly conducted by staffers with the exception of the National Library of Florence (BNCF) which is conducted independently by their staff with the occasional involvement of some WMIT member.
Some initiatives have been cancelled due to a change of interests in the volunteers leading this activity and also to the increasing unexpected requests for other activities in the GLAM - Library program (Coderdojo in Bologna and Padua, wikisource competition at National Central Library of Florence and our participation at IFLA conference): these actions have been replaced with a Wikilab at the Library of Trento on Wikisource. On the other hand, our activities with libraries has allowed us to improve quality and participation: libraries often have access to plenty of digitised material which they don't really use, whilst some librarians are born wikipedians and wikidatans and can easily involve new editors in Wikisource.
Italian Wikipedia
Our main goal is to improve the quality of Wikipedia articles and to involve new users, with special attention for women. Moreover, to help find a solution to the well-known problem of user retention, our goal is to be able to set up an adequate support structure. See the detailed plan. Please note that the activities planned in this area were mostly experiments: we did not find a successful format yet for the support telephone line. Most impact on the Italian Wikipedia was achieved in other programs with GLAMs/WIRs.
To have an overview to all the objectives related to the Italian Wikipedia program and the progress against the objectives please look at this table. The table provides a detailed idea of the general context of each goal: it covers the same two year period of our strategic planning (2015-2016), showing, in black, what is to be included in the funding period and, in blue, everything is out of it.
KPI Wikipedia in italiano_final report
Please find here below only the main objectives of our Italian Wikipedia program:
In terms of increasing the numbers of users and quality of contents, we activated 2 university interns in 2015 and 4 in 2016.
OTRS online training with a lawyer happened, with 6 participants in 2 sessions in 2016. The objective was to realize training events for OTRS users in Italian by June 2016 (at least 1 session in 2015 and 2 sessions in the whole 2016). The online training offered to OTRS volunteers by a lawyer has been the first for us. Such small online workshops for very active Wikimedia contributors might be a scalable approach to provide valuable support to specific areas in the editing community. The training session has been recorded. A large backlog in the Italian queues was cleared shortly after the event, also thanks to some new OTRS volunteers who joined the training. In areas where volunteers are overloaded and there is a resistance to letting new people lend a hand, it's useful to help new volunteers to get started without causing additional burden on existing volunteers with their need to learn. However, the Skype line has not been implemented.
We have also dealt with the reducing of the gender gap: three events dedicated to women have been realized: the organization of the second edition of the national GLAM Libraries conference in Florence (90 participants of which 80 were women), a Wikihackathon for the International Woman Day and the participation at the event "100 women against the stereotypes".
We have also been able to realize some unplanned activities in this field too: during 2016 the number of events dedicated to Wikipedia and its "promotion" increased. Some events were promoted by us or our volunteers: i.e. 15 events for the celebration of the 15ht birthday of Wikipedia in January in various cities of Italy or some general seminars (Genova and Trento); some others were organized by others and we were invited (Spring Festivals in Pisa). We also organized 6 wiki-aperitifs aimed at engaging new volunteers/members. Moreover, we managed to engage new volunteers and members, since WMIT offered 12 scholarships to participate at Wikimania Esino Lario 2016. These last two activities led us to address to the Wikimedia movement strategic priorities of participation and innovation.
Revenues received during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report)
Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.
Legend:
"D" and "F" mean "conflated with next column".
Table 2Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.
Please also include any in-kind contributions or resources that you have received in this revenues table. This might include donated office space, services, prizes, food, etc. If you are to provide a monetary equivalent (e.g. $500 for food from Organization X for service Y), please include it in this table. Otherwise, please highlight the contribution, as well as the name of the partner, in the notes section.
Revenue source
Currency
Anticipated
Q1
Q2
Q3
Q4
Cumulative
Anticipated ($US)*
Cumulative ($US)*
Explanation of variances from plan
Membership fees
EUR
7,629.00
D
1,981.10
F
4,571.00
6,552.10
8,537.08
7,331.99
Donations
EUR
40,044.14
D
17,203.57
F
5,534.77
22,738.34
44,810.59
25,444.88
Donations are 50% less than predicted, because we focused our fund-raising campaign more on 5x1000 and SMS solidarity campaign than donations
Grants and Wikimedia contributions
EUR
148,950.54
D
86,887.80
F
62,062.70
148,950.50
166,680.12
166,680.07
5x1000 (tax donations)
EUR
142,000.00
D
247,265.17
F
0.00
247,265.17
158,902.26
276,697.14
5x1000 revenue is unpredictable. The estimation of € 142,000 was based on 2014's amount. In 2015 it grew of around € 100,000. The money transfer is usually in November, so in Q4 the amount is zero.
Funding and compensations for institutional activities
EUR
63,901.04
D
30,180.00
F
36341.01
66,521.01
71,507.18
74,439.00
Please see the table below for details
Occasional funding
EUR
680.00
D
385.00
F
85.00
470.00
760.94
525.94
Donations collected in cash during events
Roundings and extraordinary income
EUR
10.00
D
3,771.56
F
6,100.00
9,871.56
11.19
11,046.57
The municipality of Massa Marittima gave a donation of € 1,999 to produce an itinerant exhibition of WLM's photos. The donation is part of a public tender. Moreover, the main sponsors of WLM 2015, Euronics and Canon, postponed the payment of their economic contribution to the contest (6.100€). The tenant of WMIT's previous offices gave a deposit for the use of the space.
Intrabank transfer
EUR
C
D
14,000.00
F
G
14,000.00
I
15,666.42
Bank transfer between WMIT different bank accounts
[IN-KIND] Office rent
EUR
7,590
D
4,140.00
F
2,070.00
6,210.00
8,493.44
6,949.18
The owner of the office in Monza let WMIT use the space for free until March 2016.
[IN-KIND] Google Grant
EUR
C
D
35,379.46
F
53,551.43
88,930.89
I
99,516.34
WMIT's request to be part of Google Grants, a Google non-profit program, was accepted, giving us $10,000 per month in in-kind AdWords advertising. The sum reported is what was actually used from July to June. The campaigns generated over 140k clicks and 5 millions impressions, including over 30k clicks to it.wikipedia.org backstage pages.
Total revenues
EUR
410,804.72
D
441,193.66
F
170,315.91
611,509.56
459,702.80
684,297.53
* Provide estimates in US Dollars
(Exchange rate in Wikimedia Italia APG proposal: 1.119029979)
Funding and compensations for institutional activities
Cumulative
Cumulative ($US)*
Training courses in libraries
3,382.40
3,785.01
Training courses in schools
5,371.86
6,011.27
Courses in museums
500
560
Wikipedian in Residence in libraries
4,500.58
5,036.28
Wikipedian in Residence BNCF
8,000
8,952
OpenStreetMap consultancy
4,238.56
4,743.08
Wikimedia Sweden - project Connected Open Heritage
4,179
4,676
Project Osservatorio Balcani Caucaso
4,900
5,483
Total
36,341.01
40,666.68
Spending during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report)
Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.
Table 3Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.
(The "budgeted" amount is the total planned for the year as submitted in your proposal form or your revised plan, and the "cumulative" column refers to the total spent to date this year. The "percentage spent to date" is the ratio of the cumulative amount spent over the budgeted amount.)
Expense
Currency
Budgeted
Q1
Q2
Q3
Q4
Cumulative
Budgeted ($US)*
Cumulative ($US)*
Percentage spent to date
Explanation of variances from plan
Program (excludes staff)
EUR
184,657.00
D
28,327.64
F
116,851.45
145,179.09*
206,636.72
162,459.75
78.62%
Please find the explanation of variances below
Operations (excludes staff and programs)
EUR
56,834.23
D
42,160.61
F
41,399.23
83,559.84
63,599.21
93,505.97
147.02%
Staff
EUR
161,723.49
D
87,682.62
F
103,403.98
191,086.60
180,973.44
213,831.63
118.16%
Please find the explanation of variances in the paragraph below
TOTAL
EUR
403,214.72
D
158,170.87
F
261,654.66
419,825.53
451,209.37
469,797.35
104.12%
N/A
* Provide estimates in US Dollars
(*)Please note that the real programs' expenditure sums to €148,555.64. The number in the table (€145,179.09) is different due to the fact that in Q2 we did not include programs' expenditures made with credit card.
WMIT's staff grew more than predicted. Besides the original staff (that consists of 1 Executive Director (full time), 1 Administration - Business Management (full time) and 1 Communication Press/External Relations (part-time)), new staff members have been introduced. 1 Project and Community Manager (full time), 1 Wikipedian/GLAM expert (part-time), 1 Project Manager for Wikimania 2016 (part-time), 1 Project Manager for OpenStreetMap (full-time), 1 intern for Wiki Loves Monuments during the months of the contest in 2015 who has being confirmed as professional consultant in 2016. As reported in the proposal, in the staff cost is included the lobbyst for WLM also.
The difference between advanced (€184,657.00) and cumulative program expenses (€148,555.64, the total sum of programs' expenditures including all the payments, also made with credit cards) of €36,101.36 is due to SMS solidarity campaign, which turned out to cost less than predicted, and the fact that 2 Wikipedians in Residence were not activated.
Libraries. Variances from the plan: one of the two Wikipedians in Residence included in the program has been working for the Library of Trento thanks to a public tender, so she does not represent a cost for WMIT.
Museums. Unfortunately we had to reduce the Wikipedians in Residence, which is the main activity concerning museums. We activated 4 WIR projects in 4 different museums, but they were funded by WMIT with a scholarship. We postponed the activation of another WIR project funded by a museum in 2016.
Italian WIkipedia. Although we didn't complete all the activities, this program happened to cost more than predicted. The reason is that we focused on sustaining volunteers engaged in promoting Wikipedia. In particular, the request for public events on Wikipedia grew all over Italy and we reimbursed travel expenses of the volunteers who led the events. Moreover, WMIT offered numerous scholarships to participate to Wikimania Esino Lario 2016, for a total expenditure of around 10.000€ (12 national scholarships, 5 staff members, plus a grant of 3.000€ for international scholarships). As suggested by the FDC support team, we included in the program expenses the national scholarships only (€ 4.449,76).
OpenStreetMap. Most of the activities planned are delayed due to the fact that the person hired to manage OSM projects has started to work on September instead of June 2015. The main event, that represents the biggest expenditure, was the OSMit conference that took place in Milan in May, 2016.
Education Program. The main variance from the plan is the SMS solidarity campaign, which turned out to cost less than predicted. The main expenses is represented by the payment to the communication agency. Although, in the agreement with the agency is included a clause declaring that the total sum due would be reduced if the total amount collected was less than 20,000€. We collected around 5,000€.
Wiki Loves Monuments. The main variation can be explained by the fact that the national exhibition of WLM 2015 photos had a great success and was requested in various cities of Italy. WMIT paid for the assembly and the transportation of the panels with the photos, which turned out to be more expensive than expected.
Volunteers. We spent more than expected because we supported the initiatives involving the regional and thematic coordinators. Mainly, they organized many events for the 15th birthday of Wikipedia in January 2016 and they attended the three trainings we promoted in Bologna and Rome.
Communication Plan. As predicted the main activities were the ones related to the celebration of WMIT's first decennial: concert, printing materials, ecc. In addition, there were other unexpected expenses. Some of them are payments postponed related to activities that took place during the first semester of the year (Festambiente; publishing of the new website). Moreover, given the significant number of press clippings we decided to extend the contract with L'Eco della Stampa (press monitoring service). At last, to strengthen WMIT brand awareness, in 2016 we worked with a professional graphic designer and with a communication agency. The agency offered to create our 2016 5x1000 campaign as an in-kind donation, but we still had to cover some costs for the product.
As required in the grant agreement, please report any deviations from your grant proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.
As regards the revenues, the deviations are related to:
the unexpected increase in the cinque per mille (from 142,000.00 euros to 247,265.17 euros);
the in-kind google grant of 88,930.89 euros
This turned into a significant increase of the revenues from 419,825.53 euros to 611,509.56 euros.
2 wirs project in the GLAM - museum program were not activated
the SMS - solidarity campaign costed less than predicted as its cost had a variable part linked to the results
about +20% in staff due to the following:
the fundraising part-time position was refocused as evaluation position,
a schools project manager was added
about +45% in the operation expenses, related to the increase of the activities (particularly high were the expenses for Archeowiki, an old project completed before the funding period but with some final expenditures during it, and Wikimania Esino Lario tickets for staff members and international scholarships)
Despite this deviations there is a slight difference between the budgeted (403,214.72 euros) and the final cumulative (419,825.53 euros).
Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".
Yes
Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code ("Code"), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Grant funds as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".
_and_Simone_Cortesi_(WikiMedia_Italia)_signing_the_agreement_between_OSMF_and_WMI_for_the_Italian_Chapter.jpg)
