Grants:APG/Proposals/2019-2020 round 1/Wikimedia Österreich/Proposal form
Overview
edit- 1. In order to support community review, please provide a brief description of your organization's work in the upcoming funding period.
Wikimedia Österreich's annual plan comprises the following three strategic areas: community support, free content, and reach / free knowledge awareness. Centerpiece of WMAT's self-conception and strategy is to sustain motivated and active Wikimedia communities as a reliable service provider. Since we serve a highly networked international (online) community, we consider ourselves a hub in this network - we connect people, ideas, and often also resources across communities and borders. Hence, we also focus on building strong partnerships inside and outside of the movement and engage in activities which co-create sustainable framework conditions (particularly regarding volunteer support, diversity and organizational effectiveness) for the wider movement in general and the DACH (Austria, Germany and Switzerland) and CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) communities in particular.
In the past years, we successfully engaged in diversity projects in Austria and the international movement, and fostered good practices for diversity and inclusion in our own organisation and at Wikimedia events. Furthermore, we started expanding our volunteer base, within the wider free knowledge movement in Austria in general and towards particularly towards tech and data science in particular, and will continue to do and refine all this in the upcoming funding period. We also believe that serving our communities must be accompanied by advocacy and public policy work in order to increase impact in all these areas in the long run. Since summer 2018, Wikimedia Austria also contributed very actively to the movement strategy process, by sending a board and staff member into two of the working groups and coordinating strategy discussions on the local and regional level.
The political situation in Austria has been difficult during the past two years and not only affected us regarding advocacy, but also in terms of severely reduced funding opportunities and generally shrinking civil society spaces, which affected some of our partnerships. Some of our partners do not even exist anymore, the gaps they left can not be filled easily. After a government crisis earlier this year and with a new government currently in the making, we hope for improved conditions.
- 2. Name, fiscal year, and funding period.
- Legal name of organization: Wikimedia Österreich
- Organization's fiscal year: 01/01-12/31
- 12-month funding period requested: 01/01/2020-31/12/2020
- Currency requested: EUR
- Name of primary contact: Claudia Garád
- 3. Amount requested.
Table 1
| Currency requested | US$ | |
| Total expenses for the upcoming year | 298,500 | 325,852 |
| APG funding requested for the upcoming year | 265,000 | 289,282 |
| Amount of funding received from WMF for the current year | 265,000 | 289,282 |
- 4. How does your organization know what community members and contributors to online projects need or want? Does your organization conduct needs assessments or consult the contributors and volunteers most involved with its work?
- WMAT is constantly looking into ways to improve its community services. In order to gain an understanding of what our contributors want and need, we apply various methods:
- Expert groups: In 2017 Wikimedia Österreich introduced a sociocratic leadership model with expert groups, which helps to distribute responsibilities but also the power of formative action on more shoulders. The groups consist of community, board and staff experts who decide and co-create new projects and initiatives, shape organisational development, and decide on budgets
- Face-to-face interaction: WMAT activities and services are discussed between board, staff and community in the context of several regular events. Some of them are focused on needs assessment (e.g. the IdeaLabs), while others mainly serve other purposes but also provide a platform for these discussions (general assembly once a year, WikiTuesdays every week, WikidataWednesdays every month, cracker-barrel meetings a few times a year in different parts of Austria). In addition, our office / staff offers one-to-one consultation for community members who plan projects and activities. The latter is also our usual way to conduct a needs assessment of new ideas and projects. Our annual plan and budget are published for discussion online and we organize a PlanningLab to foster discourse.
- Online discussions: We ask for opinions on specific issues online on our members wiki and mailing list. However, our experience shows that this usually creates less feedback than in-person discussions. Furthermore, we monitor talk pages and discussions on Wikimedia projects which are related to our chapter's activities.
- Survey: Every year, we also conducted a community survey which aims at understanding the needs of our community and to get a measurable overview of their satisfaction with the general direction of our work and our specific services. Providing a possibility for anonymous feedback is also a good supplement of our other channels for community consultation.
- 5. Please provide a link to your organization's strategic plan, and a link to your separate annual plans for the current and upcoming funding periods if you have them.
- Mission statement (in English)
- Strategy 2017+ (in English)
- Annual plan 2018 (in German)
- Annual plan 2019 (in German)
- Annual plan 2020 (in German)
Annual plan summary
editWikimedia Österreich annual plan for 2020 is mainly a continuation of last year's plan and spending pattern. We are proud that we could keep the scope and quality of our domestic programs and pursue new ideas in selected areas (newcomers, diversity), while at the same time take on considerable responsibilites in the international movement: e.g. contributing to the strategy process in various roles, fiscal sponsorships for international projects, fostering more collaboration on a regional level (e.g. in Central and Eastern Europe and the DACH-region) and a thematic level (e.g. in the volunteer supporter network, supporting the LGBT+ user group). The scope of our work grew considerably, while the financial support from the movement stayed the same over four years, despite inflation. Still, we are in a privilegded position in comparison to other groups, whose growth and new ideas suffer even more from the current vaccuum in the community support structures - one reason why we try to share our resources wherever possible, within our legal and organisational boundaries. However, this is not a sustainable situation, and we hope the movement strategy process will provide us with means to provide a basic level of support for all communities, and ways to respect and support those of us who actively work towards this goal on a local and regional level.
Spheres of activity
edit- Community Support: A diverse community of volunteers with a wide range of skills, a desire to continually improve their work together and that offers a constructive working environment to existing and new users.
- WikiDaheim (Photography contest)
- Sustainable tech community building, particularly around Wikidata
- Newcomer recruitment and retention
- Collaborating with other established volunteer organisations, to foster Wikimedia work as part of their online volunteering portfolio.
- Increasing the diversity of our community by organizing special activities for and with marginalised groups and efforts to integrate them more into our existing projects
- Designing and/or facilitating skill transfer workshops within the community.
- Encourage, support and guide local small-scale meetings/workshops in Austria and with partners in the neighboring countries
- Supporting WikiCon for the German-language communities (financially and regarding the overall organization)
- Low-threshold access to resources and assistance; micro and travel grants to support the ideas and work of volunteers (in Austria and emerging communities)
- Consulting and advice concerning on-wiki work as well as offline project management
- Establishing links and relationships to like-minded communities in the context of projects and events
- Provide travel grants for international conferences to facilitate volunteer motivation, identification with the wider movement, and online collaboration and exchange on an international level
- Funds especially dedicated to project incubation in order to foster bold and innovative ideas which go beyond our day-to-day business and established projects
- International collaboration for on- and offline volunteer recruitment in the DACH and CEE regions
- Sharing our experiences and know-how concerning (cross-chapter) volunteer support and organizational development with the wider movement on- and offline (especially in the DACH and CEE regions) to foster sustainable structures in our movement
- Serving as a fiscal sponors for major international projects
- Providing low key access to information material, swag and other resources for volunteer work for communities without affiliates or budgets, especially within the CEE region.
- Free Content: Generating, opening and distributing multifaceted and valuable content that fascinates and engages Wikimedia volunteers, partners, and readers alike.
- Photography and writing contests and projects to generate media files on Austrian cultural and natural heritage on Commons
- Austrian Free Knowledge Award to raise awareness for free licenses and highlight good practises
- Supporting the volunteer photographers / Commons contributors with a high-end tech pool (photography equipment, book scanner, slide scanner), post processing software, accreditations and travel support
- Encouraging activities which respond to a direct need for media files in specific Wikimedia articles and integrating media files into Wikimedia articles (e.g. Wiki Loves Parliaments)
- Encouraging quality content by supporting skill transfer workshops and activities (train the trainers) for the German-speaking communities
- Support of editing contests and/or events focusing on quantity and/or quality in the German-language Wikimedia projects
- Providing access to reliable sources (through literature grants and our own library)
- Projects and partnerships to increase multi-media content on Wikimedia projects
- Establishing and maintaining partnerships with GLAM institutions, like-minded organizations and multipliers in order to liberate data and content
- Supporting free knowledge in Austria beyond Wikimedia projects: Hosting RegioWiki, a regional platform featuring free knowledge that would not be notable enough for the German-language Wikipedia, and the Open Data Portal for Austria
- Reach / Free Knowledge Awareness: Creating collective impact on a societal level by working with and through others to achieve a greater impact than we could ever achieve alone.
- Education
- Conducting and supporting educational activities and edit-a-thons at universities which incorporate Wikimedia projects as a field of study and in the content of the curriculum
- Standardizing services for universities to make the activities less dependent on staff or single volunteers
- Public relations
- Maintaining communication platforms about our work for the general public
- Serving as a link between our community and the media
- Campaigning for more passive supporting members of Wikimedia Österreich
- Involving partners from different societal spheres to increase impact and generate additional funding opportunities
- EU advocacy
- Collaborating with European chapters to shape policies in favor of Free Knowledge
- Supporting EU advocacy by establishing contacts to relevant ministries and MPs on a national level
- Education
Budget
editA detailed budget for 2020 can be found here.
In addition to the projected revenues we just recently also applied for another Erasmus+ grant of 24,750 EUR for our international project "Wikipedia4Peace:Queer Edit", but the application is still pending, so it is not in the official budget yet. The grant will not only support WMAT but also communities from various other countries such as Tunisia, Armenia or Catalonia. In 2019 our grant request was successful and financed this years' edition of Wikipedia4Peace, so we are hopeful that it will be approved again.
In 2020, WMAT will also take on an additional fiscal sponsorship for the LGBT+ User Group and their first conference: Queering Wikipedia. In addition we will provide logistical support and event management resources. We hope to create an equally positive impact for the international LGBT+ community, as we did together with the Wikisourcians back at the Wikisource Conference in 2015. We also hope that these examples show that the divide between chapters and user groups, which is often prevalent in the rethorics of this movement, can and should be challenged by successful symbiotic cooperations on eye-level.
Metrics
editJust like the plan and budget, the metrics have not substantially changed from last year. But we made some changes and tweaks, based on our experiences in the past years and resulting insights what we can and want to learn from the metrics:
- We expanded the definition of quality: From now on it does not only include media files but also articles. In addition, we now distinguish improved quality and high quality in order to reflect our various approaches to content quality more appropriately.
- We will get rid of community retention as general program metric, as there are many cases where we have little to no influence on the factors that have an impact on retention (as a result of the fact that Wikimedia organisations do have no say in how the online projects are run). We will continue to track retention for selected projects, where we believe it actually tells us something about our own work (and not for example the general climate on Wikipedia&Co).
- The metric versatile content will not be defined in relation to useful content anymore but as completely separate metric. This is the more common way total file usages are counted in Wikimedia projects.
Staff
editWe do not plan to change anything in Wikimedia Österreich's current staff structure, which consists of the Executive Director, the Community Manager, the Project Manager and a Back Office Support role, which sum up to three full time equivalents (3 FTE). WMAT believes in the principles of servant management and distributed leadership and decision making. As a result, our hierarchies are flat and major decisions are made with our board and volunteers in the so-called expert groups.
Shared Metrics
editOverview
editAcross all programs:
| Participants | Newly registered | Content pages | Quality | Diversity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16,900 | 9,270 | 400,000 | 4,900 | 450 |
Definitions:
- Participants: The number of people who attend your events, programs or activities, either in person or virtually. This definition does not include people organizing activities, social media followers, donors, or others not participating directly.
- Newly registered: The number of participants that create new accounts on a Wikimedia project. These include users who register up to two weeks before the start of the even
- Content pages: A content page is an article on Wikipedia, an item on Wikidata, a content page on Wikisource, an entry on Wiktionary, and a media file on Commons, etc. This metric captures the total number of content pages created or improved across all Wikimedia projects.
- Quality: High quality – the number of community decorations for media files (featured, quality, valued) and articles (quality, featured) – and improved quality – the number of improved main namespace pages tagged as having quality issues.
- Diversity: The number of participants and/or organizers of activities who belong to underrepresented groups in the Wikimedia movement in Austria. These groups are defined as women, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, persons belonging to ethnic, language or religious minorities in Austria, foreigners and people with disabilities.
Details
edit| Participants | Newly registered | Content pages | Quality | Diversity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All programs excluding two fiscal sponsorships | 3,500 | 200 | 140,000 | 2,900 (high quality: 400, improved quality: 2,500) | 410 |
| Wiki Loves Monuments international (fiscal sponsorship) | 13,000 | 9,000 | 250,000 | 2,000 (high quality: 2,000) | – |
| Wikimedia CEE Spring (fiscal sponsorship) | 400 | 70 | 10,000 | – | 40 |
| Total | 16,900 | 9,270 | 400,000 | 4,900 (high quality: 2,400, improved quality: 2,500) | 450 |
| Graphs |
→ For previous results (2017–2019) see Grants:APG/Proposals/2018-2019 round 1/Wikimedia Österreich/Progress report form#Metrics and results overview - all programs
We changed the definition of quality: from now on it includes not only media files but also articles, and we added improved quality to high quality. This reflects our many-sided approach to content quality in a better way than our previous metrics.
Program Metrics
editCommunity Support
editAdditional metrics for Community Support program:
| Community leadership |
Community motivation |
|---|---|
| 250 | 80 % |
Definitions:
- Community leadership: Number of volunteer organizers of activities.
- Community motivation: Minimum percentage of the participants of community surveys agree that our activities contribute to motivating them for their online work.
→ For previous results (2017–2019) see Grants:APG/Proposals/2018-2019 round 1/Wikimedia Österreich/Progress report form#Community Support
We skipped community retention as general program metrics. The way we count retention depends on the activity and an all-encompassing definition of retention is not useful for us at the moment.
Free Content
editAdditional metrics for Free Content program:
| Useful content |
Versatile content |
Free content beyond Wikimedia projects |
|---|---|---|
| 5,000 | 10,000 | 1,000 |
Definitions:
- Useful content: Number of distinct new media files used in the main namespace of Wikimedia projects.
- Versatile content: Number of total usages of new media files files in main namespace.
- Free content beyond Wikimedia projects: Number of freely licensed content pages in Non-Wikimedia projects (e.g. RegioWiki).
→ For previous results (2017–2019) see Grants:APG/Proposals/2018-2019 round 1/Wikimedia Österreich/Progress report form#Free Content
We redefined how we count versatile content: not in relation to useful content anymore but as completely separate metrics. This is the more usual way total file usages are counted in Wikimedia projects.
Reach / Free Knowledge Awareness
editAdditional metrics for Reach / Free Knowledge Awareness program:
| Sustainable outreach network |
Sustainable partnerships |
|---|---|
| 5,000 | 17,000 EUR |
Definitions:
- Sustainable outreach network: Number of accounts reached with permanent online channels (newsletter and social media, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube).
- Sustainable partnerships: Amount of in-kind donations from partner organizations.
→ For previous results (2017–2019) see Grants:APG/Proposals/2018-2019 round 1/Wikimedia Österreich/Progress report form#Reach / Free Knowledge Awareness
Verification and signature
editPlease 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. General operating support through the FDC may not be used to cover political and legislative activities, although you may make a separate grant agreement with the WMF for these purposes.
I verify that no funds from the Wikimedia Foundation will be used
for political or legislative activities except as permitted by a grant agreementYes.
Please sign below to complete this proposal form.
- IMPORTANT. Please do not make any changes to this proposal form after the proposal submission deadline for this round. If a change that is essential to an understanding of your organization's proposal is needed, please request the change on the discussion page of this form so it may be reviewed by FDC staff. Once submitted, complete and valid proposal forms submitted on time by eligible organizations will be considered unless an organization withdraws its application in writing or fails to remain eligible for the duration of the FDC process.
Please sign here once this proposal form is complete, using four tildes. --CDG (WMAT staff) (talk) 17:44, 30 October 2019 (UTC)