Grants:APG/Proposals/2019-2020 round 1/Wikimedia Sverige/Impact report form

Metrics and results overview - all programs

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We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees' programs. Please use the table below to let us know how your programs contributed to the Grant Metrics. We understand not all Grant or grantee-defined Metrics will be relevant for all programs, so feel free to put "0" where necessary. For each program include the following table and

  1. Next to each required metric, list the outcome/results achieved for all of your programs included in your proposal.
  2. Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome.
  3. In addition to the Global Metrics as measures of success for your programs, there is another table format in which you may report on any OTHER relevant measures of your programs success

For more information and a sample, see Grant Metrics.

Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. number of total participants 4,276 (out of 2,500) Breakdown by gender:
Women: 1,411
Men: 909
Non-binary: 5
Un-known: 1,951
The goal was significantly overachieved. A significant amount of these participants, around 1,600, are from the WikiGap events from around the world. Around 1,200 are GLAM professionals or people reached at different GLAM related activities. The rest are divided between educational activities, activities directed towards the online communities and the Wiki Loves photo contests we organized and the conversations through the Face2Face fundraising campaign we had during the year.
2. number of newly registered users 634 (out of 800) Breakdown by gender:
Women: 101
Men: 48
Non-binary: 1
Un-known: 484
As expected we did not reach the goal for the year due to COVID-19 limiting the planed outreach events, especially in the educational sector. These new users are largely a result of the Wikipedia in Education project, the Wiki Loves photo contests and WikiGap.
3. number of content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects 98,540 (out of 40,525) Breakdown by project:
Wikipedia: 23,005
Wikimedia Commons: 45,434
Wikidata: 29,366
Other: 735

The goal was significantly overachieved. Initially we focused on datasets and batch uploads that had valuable content and where we could learn new abilities in the team, however, these uploads were of a smaller size. During the second half of the year we initiated a number of larger batch uploads and edits which affected the Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata numbers. The majority of batch edits are still intended for 2021. The Wikipedia number is mainly due to the WikiGap initiative.

4. Diversity[1] 1,498 (non-unique) (compared to 1,387 in our Impact report for 2019) We have approximated ⅔ of the participants at the international WikiGap events are women, based on reports, feedback and discussions with the organisers of the events.
5. Reach[2] (new grantee defined metric) 5,437 (non-unique) (compared to 4,865 in our Impact report for 2019) The number of participants increased significantly during the second half of the year and in total we had more than 2.5 times the reach compared to the previous year. More events and activities moved online and we were able to capture the attention of more people from across the country.


Introduction

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As for the rest of the world Wikimedia Sverige had a bumpy 2020 due to COVID-19 with many significant changes in plans and activities. However, much of our work could either be rearranged in time or taken online and we have continued to execute well during these times, with all of the staff members working the same amount of time per month as usual.

The four programmatic areas developed in 2016—Access, Use, Community and Enabling—have continued to form the base of the project structure. The first quarter the chapter had a large number of events and activities planned and successfully executed on them. We had a few major trends this year:

  1. We grew to continue growing
    1. We successfully onboarded five new great staff members: Josefine Hellroth-Larsson (project manager education and trainings), Karl Wettin (developer), Maria Burehäll (organizational assistant), David Haskiya (organizational strategist) and Jenny Brandt (organizational assistant).
    2. Work to develop a new stream of funding from Face2Face fundraising has been an increasing focus this year. We launched a set of experimental events in the autumn of 2020 where we hired 4 people to work part time with fundraising for 3 months. Based on the insights from these experiments we will increase the local fundraising work in the coming years.
    3. Policies and procedures were reviewed and supplemented when needed to allow not only for a larger team, but for a more diverse and distributed team. Planning for a comprehensive effort to translate existing material into English is ongoing.
  2. We further internationalized our work
    1. During the year we continued to prepare the organization to take a leading role in the movement and develop into a thematic hub focusing on supporting the Wikimedia movement around content partnerships. Even though the work was delayed due to COVID-19, see below, we manage to make significant improvements in our planning and operations to allow for a major increase in staff and capacities with a short notice.
    2. We actively participated in the development of the final version of the Wikimedia movement’s global strategic recommendations and of the implementation work that followed. Our ED was one of the main writers to the final document. The global strategy work also influenced the development of Wikimedia Sverige’s new multi-year strategy.
    3. The WikiGap campaign was successfully organized for a third year in a row. Originally physical events were planned in 40-50 countries, but many had to be cancelled last minute or moved to a virtual setting due to COVID-19. A large amount of the events were carried through anyway, with innovative solutions on how to make virtual WikiGap events. What was new this year was that we partnered with UN Human Rights to identify articles to focus on for our online challenge. To engage partners to identify missing articles is something we think can be scaled significantly next year and we have initiated discussions with a few interesting organizations for the international work.
    4. A new long term partnership with UNFPA was formalized in 2020. We initiated our joint efforts to design a way for UN agencies to contribute with knowledge in a crisis situation, with COVID-19 as a first test case. We will also work to share their content on the Wikimedia platforms and to partner to continue developing WikiGap. This is a model we hope can be used in other UN cooperations in the coming years, as a number of UN agencies have been in contact with us. We continue to discuss with them but have chosen to not rush into any new major partnerships, but instead to continue to develop the partnership model before we move forward.
    5. During the year we deepened our partnerships with different Wikimedia affiliates. We continued cooperating with Wikimedia Deutschland around technical development and we have also supported Wikimedia Israel in their work to develop a new statistical tool for GLAM partnerships. We have also had one of our staff members now working from Wikimedia Norway’s offices, which we now cover some of the costs for, and we hope that we will be able to deepen our cooperation around languages and technology with them.
    6. We provided five minor event grants to a number of Wikimedia organizations in Africa. The aim with the grants was to increase the coverage of African GLAM institutions on the Wikimedia platforms.
  3. We took important steps to increase our volunteer engagement
    1. Preparatory work was done to allow for an expansion of the volunteer engagement through the development of a long term strategy, a volunteer strategy and new training and educational material.
    2. More than a hundred librarians trained to use and contribute to Wikimedia projects and to organize local activities at the libraries with the long term aim to develop local volunteer groups across the country.
  4. We increased political activities
    1. Our work to provide inputs during the implementation of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market directive of the European Union into Swedish law continued, and we initiated a network of NGOs and cultural institutions and organizations affected by the proposal. This network can hopefully be maintained and facilitated for longterm activities.
    2. We met with European Commission representatives around the future of digitization of cultural heritage a number of times and provided feedback on material that they produced, e.g. around 3D digitization.
    3. As UNESCO’s new OER recommendations was adopted by the Swedish government we worked to create and facilitate a network of engaged experts in Sweden to support the implementation of the recommendations at different authorities in Sweden.
  5. We got even more digital
    1. As we closed down our office we had to implement a number of new procedures and tools to continue working effectively. Already before COVID-19 we were a very well developed digital organization, but there were a number of missing pieces that we worked to put in place allowing us to go fully digital as an organization. This included digital signatures for contracts, detailed plans for digital events, digital team building activities etc.
    2. Due to the physical risks with meeting in person the board took the decision to adjust our Annual General Meeting to become fully digital. This was the first time in the history of the association and there were a lot of practical issues to solve. The feedback from the participants were very positive, and we shared our learnings with the wider Wikimedia community and Swedish civil society organizations as many other organizations were planning digital AGMs (after ours had already taken place).
  6. We continued to innovate
    1. We joined a number of research initiatives with the hope for funding in the coming years, e.g. around article quality, around natural language processing and of cultural heritage digitization.
    2. Our work around natural language processing and audio on Wikimedia’s projects continued and we experimented in a number of ways in this underexplored area. We did deep dives regarding both musical recordings, sheet music, lexical resources and speech recordings.
    3. We participated in the digital version of the LIBER 2020 Annual Conference, where we were honoured with the price LIBER Award for Library Innovation.

Financial changes

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The funding we already have secured is covering our costs until early 2022, but do not allow for increase in operations. If no further funding is secured the current spending would deplete our reserves, which we started rebuilding just two years ago.

We struggled to gain the long term funding we had hoped to secure starting 2020. The work to become a thematic hub, and as such take a larger role in the Wikimedia movement around content partnerships, was delayed. The plan was originally to scale up the work in 2020, but Wikimedia Foundation decided last minute not to increase funding for any new initiatives due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its potential effect on their fundraising efforts. After negotiation we secured the same funding as previous year, which allows us to continue ramping our efforts to be even more ready to scale up our operations in mid-2021 instead.

We also received negative news regarding our application to the Swedish Postcode Lottery to become beneficiary of their ongoing funding support. The Lottery scaled down their funding for the year and only accepted one new organization (out of 40 qualified organizations applying). We are fulfilling all the formal criterias and intend to re-apply in 2022 or 2023, after we have increased our brand visibility in the country with a dedicated project from the Swedish Postcode Foundation.

We have significantly increased our work with fundraising, both with grant applications but also with Face2Face fundraising and online fundraising on social media.

Access

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  Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (end of the year) Comments
Access A.1.1 Enrich the Wikimedia projects,[3] with 25 new resources, through the creation and distribution of materials and by providing support and performing batch uploads. 17 20 resources out of 25
New resources were made available through projects in each of our thematic areas and spanned from very valuable content connected to the COVID-19 pandemic, to bibliographical data and different types of music related content. We also experimented with uploading data connected to objects on Wikisource.
A.1.2 150 identified[4] subject experts contribute to the Wikimedia projects with at least 1 productive edit each, through the dissemination of information, maintaining relationships or arranging thematic edit-a-thons. 146 194 experts out of 150
The experts are mostly through the Wikipedia in Library project but both the Wikipedia in Education and the Free music on Wikipedia projects also contributed significantly.
A.1.3 Involve 10 courses in the Wikipedia Education Program,[5] through educating motivated teachers and providing expertise on the Wikipedia tools for education. 5 11 courses out of 10
Due to COVID-19 this work has been limited the first half of the year. We have also adjusted the focus of this project to prepare educational material and a course format to train volunteers so that they will be able to support educational institutions in the future. In the second half of the year the number of courses increased significantly and time saved by not needing to travel allowed us to instead hold more courses and surpass the goal.
A.2.1 To increase the use of free licenses ensure that 50 organizations[6] are reached with information on free licenses. 58 179 organizations out of 50
The majority of organizations received information at events connected to the FindingGLAMs project early during the year such as the permanent delegations at UNESCO. The Wikipedia in Libraries project allowed us to continuously describe the value of free licenses for the library sector in Sweden.
A.2.2 Work actively to nurture and develop the relevant networks and contacts with people who can influence license choice of material in order to safeguard the topicality of the issue. This is achieved, in addition to regular activities, through active participation in or the organization of at least 10 new events and at least 10 new direct contacts with content owners, organizations and politicians. 17 events, 26 contacts 23 new events out of 10

54 new direct contacts out of 10

Our definition of someone belonging to our network is when they have met a representative of the association and staff has some way of contacting them, they have received information about what we do as an organization and how they can reach us. We were very active in our activities in the first months of the year. Even though the second half of the year saw many events cancelled due to COVID-19, hence limiting our possibility to meet new organizations, we surpassed the goals significantly.

Our Access program focuses on improving the free content on, or available to, the Wikimedia projects both short and long term. This continues to be our largest program, both in number of ongoing projects and initiatives, and in budget. Preparations to further scale this program in the coming years were a major focus during 2020. However, it is worth noting that a lot of work that also supports the community happens as an integrated part of the program – for example in the FindingGLAMs project support was provided to local volunteer communities in five countries.

We have over the years established strong practices around expert engagement, partnerships and technical support and we have successfully continued to build upon them during the year. We have continued to experiment and develop our toolbox to allow for new types of partnerships or activities to happen. Some of the learnings have been presented in our white paper, based on the experiences gained during the 18 month long FindingGLAMs project. They form a foundation for our thinking and planning for what technical development is needed in the movement to support GLAMs better. We continued to develop these ideas into a technical direction for the thematic hub (still to be published and distributed widely for feedback) and to a number of external grant applications that we are currently in the process of finalizing.

The interests from GLAM professionals to learn about our work and discuss possible partnerships was very large and seemed to be steady during the pandemic. There seems to be an increased interest and understanding about the values created with digital representation and activation when the physical activities have been rendered impossible. Our discussions have been very positive with many organizations and we have had a large participation at our online trainings. That said, we see many opportunities for further engagement and discussions. Our experience in this area has given us an opportunity to take a leading role and we hope to keep this momentum going.

As staff from our partner organizations work from home and focus more on the digital aspects we have seen quick responses and interest to work on different initiatives around batch uploads and the support to prepare the metadata to different collections have been very good. We will still have to see how the reduced financial strength amongst the GLAM institutions, due to lower levels of visitors etc., will affect their willingness to buy our services around batch uploads in 2021. In 2020 we did not provide any consultancy service – in fact we did not offer this to any partners as our staff’s time was fully occupied.

Wikimedia Sverige is in this for the long run. We aim to change the way organizations and the society think about knowledge dissemination and production. Creating that kind of change in attitudes will allow for the full impact of free knowledge. By convincing decision makers to adopt different forms of policies around openness we are laying the foundations for accessing new material in the future. One interesting area is to target the funds available, and this year we had the opportunity to engage with the European Commission’s next 10 year fundraising strategies, the Horizon Europe and Digital Europe programs. We have participated in meetings and send written feedback on documents to them.

We continue to support the staff at our partner organizations with trainings. We intend to broaden the offers we have to them with e.g. more networking opportunities and to take part in different reference groups where their expertise can guide our work. We established our first network around open educational resources (OER) in the spring and expanded the work during the autumn. The learnings from this network will allow us to scale to other areas of relevance to our organization, where we believe that there currently is missing support to the experts interested to further engage in an area.

Story: Raise your voice

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In this Story we are focusing on the continuous work done by Wikimedia Sverige to improve the structures for audio files on the Wikimedia projects, which includes support to share newly recorded music, batch uploads of out-of-copyright music, inclusion of sheet music, information about musicians and tools and structures for speech recordings.

 
One of the pieces of sheet music shared by the Swedish Performing Arts Agency.

The Wikimedia projects are currently not well developed to handle audio files and supporting material; as a result, there is not much audio material available and potential contributors do not have access to sufficient resources and guidance. We have tried to address this gap for a couple of years now through a number of initiatives which we continued to scale up in 2020 and 2021. The issues include how to compile the information about audio files in a structured way to make it useful and searchable, how to ensure full coverage of a thematic area, how to source the information and files properly and how to be able to both upload existing recordings and to encourage the production of new recordings in a fast and efficient manner.

We believe this to be of crucial importance as music has been part of civilization for a long time, and this is true in most cultures. As a phenomenon in society, it has an increasing value and is generally perceived as positive. Music is played by many people and it can be said to belong to the cultural expressions that both distinguish and unite groups of people all over the world.

Playing music is a way of preserving local and national culture and it is an area that is closely associated with other cultural expressions such as film and dance. As digital production of media increases, so does the need for more free material that can be used.

The Swedish cultural heritage institutions have been good at documenting music and especially Swedish folk music. There is no clear definition of folk music as it is alive and developing while it is being played. But one way to preserve knowledge about it is to document live performances. Together with the Swedish Performing Arts Agency, we have been able to share some of the recordings made by the Swedish Radio in the 40’s and 50’s under a free license.

There is another possibility here as well: creating new recordings of old music. In this way we get a modern interpretation of sheet music and works that were created hundreds of years ago. It is very fun that both old music and new interpretations can be found on the Wikimedia platforms, allowing users to hear music while reading an article about it. Since music is a common and popular way of expression, many can participate and contribute. We would like to see that music played locally across the world has an obvious place in the free knowledge sphere.

By describing the audio files in a structured format and connecting them to other resources we believe that the Wikimedia platforms will be able to provide a unique learning environment while also improving searchability overall around some specific areas of music and speech recordings.

By describing the audio files in a structured format and connecting them to other resources, the Wikimedia platforms become a unique learning environment that at the same time improves the searchability overall in certain specific areas for music and speech recordings. We have worked with institutions and created processes and structures for files and metadata. It is in this initial work where we tried and tested different solutions of, for example, modeling on Wikidata and structured data on Commons. It takes a few tries before you find a "best practice" that you are happy with and can use for the next batch of work. It is an iterative work with constant improvements.

The work we are doing with audio files of music will also help us to prepare for structuring speech recordings, which we hope to collect as part of the project Wikispeech – Speech Data Collector 2019 in 2021. In this project we will collect speech data to build better natural language processing solutions. This will also allow us to improve the different Wikimedia platforms by adding pronunciation recordings to Wiktionary and Wikidata lexemes, as well as to Wikipedia articles (e.g. pronunciation of place names). The structure of the recordings might also be possible to reuse for oral citations later on.


Story: Expectations are changing

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In this Story we are focusing on how COVID-19 seems to have increased the speed of change in the GLAM sector towards more digital meetings and activities. There is an opportunity for the Wikimedia movement to move faster with new partnerships across the world and supply an interesting addition to digital engagement that all organizations currently are struggling with.

With the global pandemic, the GLAM sector is also undergoing major changes. The needs and expectations are changing towards becoming more digital. There is a tendency for increasing dissemination of digital knowledge and although digitalisation has long been on the agenda, digital development is a requirement to be relevant.

Experience among GLAM staff to organize digital meetings with partners are likely to have increased substantially which would in turn increase our possibilities to support partners across the world in our international GLAM work as they are comfortable to organize video meetings and not just physical meetings. It seems that this could shorten the initiation time for projects as subsequent meetings can be scheduled more quickly than before. It will be interesting to see how this development will continue as the pandemic calms down and we return to a more normal existence where the institutions are meeting places.

One of the strengths of Wikimedia platforms is that they are collaborative areas. In collaboration with the libraries, we have seen that tools for communication and platforms for structured collaboration are needed. It is mainly through video meetings that communication has been developed and together worksheets and version management tools make this integration very effective.

We have received more spontaneous inquiries from organizations that develop their presence digitally. There may be e.g. festivals, meetings and other physical events where the organizers have reached out to us and wondered what we can offer and if you cannot simultaneously write articles or upload media when you are still running and planning your digital engagement.

Story: Envisioning the technical future of content partnerships

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In this Story we are focusing on how Wikimedia Sverige is trying to develop the Wikimedia movement into a key partner to organizations that have content they would like to share with the world. We believe that our current technical infrastructure prevents us from getting as far as we could. The challenges are even larger if we, as a movement, want to form content partnerships in less digitized countries across the globe, as more types of services will be needed. The efforts we hoped to initiate in 2020 have been postponed to 2021 due to the pandemic and the uncertain financial situation, but we are hopeful the work will take place.

Over the years WMSE have had many types of interesting and valuable content partnerships. We have worked hard to engage our partners in every step of the process and to encourage them to work with us continuously and to share their experiences with their peers. This has in many ways been successful, but we have identified many areas for improvement together with them. If these improvements could be made the Wikimedia movement could become the main go-to place for content owners that want to share their knowledge with the world. For partners with limited digital presence more support from the Wikimedia movement would be needed. Dedicated support would greatly benefit the partners that currently do not have the infrastructure or the means needed to bring their knowledge online. This would also allow smaller Wikimedia affiliates and volunteers in more parts of the world to form successful partnerships with local actors.

In 2019-2020 our chapter tried and tested uploading a large number of different types of data to the Wikimedia platforms to explore what can be done and what still needs to be developed. Our learnings were summarized in a white paper consisting of seven case studies.

Together with Toby Negrin, Ben Vershbow and their teams at Wikimedia Foundation we worked on developing a technical direction for content partnerships. In it we outline areas we believe could be improved upon significantly in a 12 month period. The tools were chosen based on a number of factors, such as the possibility to add the identified missing functionalities with a brand new team, if the tools have been requested by content partners and if there was any active development taking place. After the initial development sprints the tools would need long term maintenance and support to cover gaps that currently exist for content partners across the world.

Due to COVID-19 and the uncertainties around the yearly fundraising WMF halted all expansion of teams and projects in 2020. This directly affected our plans and the planning project was extended for an additional year without increasing the budget contrary to the original plan in which the budget was set to increase significantly. With the current budget we were able to continue to work with affiliates and teams that are working on tools for partnerships and refine our technical direction. The funding also allowed us to support other affiliates with batch uploads and events and to develop our organizational capacity so that we can build better tools in the future.

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In this Fail fest we are focusing on a couple of the difficulties when it comes to copyright and related rights. Many times it is about interpretations and previous practice and we believe that we must have openness and humility to the issues to avoid mistakes and that engaging legal experts is crucial.

In working with the project Free Music on Wikipedia, we discovered that many parts of copyright are difficult to understand in an effort to make media more accessible on free platforms. On the one hand, the legislation looks different in different countries, but also internally within each individual country, the rules can be interpreted in different ways. In Sweden, for example, a distinction is made between a photographic work and a photographic image. A work is copyright 70 years after the death of the copyright holder. For a photographic image the rules have changed over the years, but if the image was taken before 1969, it is in the public domain also according to American rules due to the Uruguay Round Agreements Act.

So in addition to being able to verify with certainty who the copyright holders are, you must have knowledge of both Swedish and American legislation and how it has changed over time. For music, there may be rules for new recordings of copyright-extinguished works as the event also has copyright. So it is not enough just that the song is in the public domain, the arrangement and the notes you use should also be free. Studio staff must then also be counted as copyright holders and in such cases where is the limit for their participation in the work.

There can be both difficult and time-consuming copyright issues that need to be resolved before you can share the files further. What you can do in all steps is to document the process and keep it transparent. It is important to clarify why you have the right to publish media under free licenses. There are many people who want to make more materials available but we need to find easier ways to guide people through the copyright process for the sharing of content to really take off.

Detailed project overview

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Below all the projects belonging to the program will be briefly explained and the current status presented. Synergies between the projects will be described. A few selected stories have been presented more in depth as case studies above.

For all the projects, we will state whether they are small, medium or large. In this context, a small project is defined as one where the total budget is less than 100,000 SEK (about 12,500 USD); a medium sized project is defined as one where the total budget is between 100,000 SEK and 300,000 SEK (12,500 to about 37,500 USD); finally, a large project is defined as one where the total budget exceeds 300,000 SEK (about 37,500 USD).

We are also outlining where the project will have an impact in the Wikimedia universe and who we are partnering with to deliver the best possible result.

We also have information about the importance of each project., e.g. if the project is core, essential, one-off or experimental. In this context, a project is considered to be core if it is part of our identity as an organization. The project will be organized even if impact is less in the short term and will only be cancelled after a consensus has been reached amongst our community. A project is essential if it actively contributes to one or many of the goals that have been outlined for the year or the long term strategy. Most projects should belong here. A project that is considered a one-off is organized because it is delivering a specific benefit to the organization but it is unlikely that we will repeat it in its current form. This type of project might continue over the years, but the content will intentionally change significantly over time. The experimental projects are testing a new idea, method or technology and are often externally financed. They might be a one-off or, if proved successful, become an essential project.

FindingGLAMs 2018

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What is the project: This was a major global externally funded project which aimed to add information about GLAM institutions from around the world, and the collections they hold, to Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. The database was the first one of its type and will continuously provide a service for both the GLAM sector, for organizations working with crisis situations and for Wikimedia affiliates to find potential partners. Case studies regarding batch uploads and other activities with different types of GLAMs were developed where we summarize the learnings and analyse the effect and future possibilities. We also outlined what needs to be built in the future to ensure more and deeper partnerships with content partners and around cultural heritage. As part of the project we did a lot of preparatory work for Wikimania, as the conference created a lot of value for the project.

What’s been done: The project was extended until February 29, 2020. In the two first months of 2020, we focused on summarizing and spreading our experiences both within and outside the Wikimedia community:

  • We wrote and published a white paper based on several case studies from our work. We used our experiences from working with different Swedish and international GLAMs’ materials on the Wikimedia platforms to reflect upon the current practice and propose future directions for the Wikimedia community and developers.
  • We met with the permanent delegations at UNESCO, where we informed the countries’ representatives and ambassadors about our work. This was received very positively and we were invited to organize another event with delegations from Africa in early 2021.
  • We continued uploading data from GLAMs to the Wikimedia platforms, the highlights including a collection of photographs from the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm and a dataset of archival institutions from Archives Portal Europe – which was released as CC0 as a result of our collaboration.
  • We organized the FindingGLAMs Challenge to inspire more users to edit GLAM items on Wikidata. 90 participants edited over * 16,000 items!
  • We followed the participants in our global Minor grants program, aimed at Wikimedia organizations outside of the Global North, as they organized events for GLAM professionals to introduce them to Wikidata and open data.

What's next: The project ended in February 2020. The project Tools for Partnerships 2019 – Blueprinting is a spiritual successor where we continue the planning and work based on the findings in our white paper.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Large

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, Wikisource

Partners: UNESCO, Wikimedia Foundation, GLAM institutions in Sweden and abroad

Link to the project: FindingGLAMs 2018

Wikipedia in Education 2020

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What is the project: This project aimed to engage the educational sector in contributing to free knowledge and to develop ways for us to work together. In 2020 we focused the work on forming long-term strategic partnerships, affecting policies, developing insights through research and building capacity for other actors (non-staff) to work with educators across the country. More specifically, the project increased the work around Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Access in Sweden. We started planning for a national OER meeting to further engage the Swedish OER network and highlight the value of Open Access and we worked to bring more scientific material and sources to the Wikimedia platforms. Through the hub the relevant tools can be developed.

Furthermore, we continued to support educators to implement Wikipedia-based assignments where students improved Wikipedia as part of their curricular activities. We actively highlighted and communicated Wikipedia in classroom settings. Less staff focus were directed to support educators to organize events, but instead focused on supporting peer-to-peer learning and to empower volunteers, students and WiRs to work with educators.

What’s been done: We have organized several training sessions during the year, mainly adapting our activities from physical to digital events. These activities have been held together with universities and upper secondary schools. A great focus has been on starting the development of a standardized training program, so that we can focus on scaling up our educational activities in the future, not depending on staff to hold every course. These education modules will focus on both professionals and other external people, as well as volunteers. We have also launched the OER network which has been off to a good start with a joint effort to translate the OER recommendation from UNESCO into Swedish. The network has a core of members from the education sector as well as the GLAM sector.

What's next: During 2021 we will continue to develop our standardized training, for example choose the most appropriate platform for such exercise. This will also include instruction films on how to edit the Wikimedia projects. We will also continue developing the OER network, including looking into holding an OER conference.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Medium

Importance: Core

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: Nordic Museum, Enskilda Gymnasiet, Anderstorpsgymnasiet, Stockholm University, Göteborg University, Karolinska Institute, Uppsala University, Lundellska skolan

Link to the project: Wikipedia i utbildning 2020

Samsyn 2018

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What is the project: We worked with six universities in a three year long externally funded project called Samsyn. The goal was to create a wiki with Swedish nomenclature for university outreach, available to all universities in Sweden. We set up the wiki, which was the central tool for the whole project, and we provided training for staff at the partnering universities on how a wiki works. At the end of the project suitable parts were included on the Wikimedia platforms. In 2020 the project moved into a phase of becoming more public and our role was to keep facilitating content creation and feedback from partners and to bring the material onto the Wikimedia platforms.

What’s been done: During 2020 the main page got a new design reflecting the more open approach where users can create accounts and contribute to the wiki. Another step towards a more open approach included some of the users receiving training in administrative tasks and were granted administrator rights. Instructions on the Samsyn wiki on how to perform administrative tasks were created and improved. Some categories that were used while building the wiki have been phased out and replaced with categories showing the actual content.

What's next: The big thing during the last part of the project was to make sure the wiki would live on in the hands of a new project owner with the funds left over after the project ended. Administrative work was done to prepare contracts for the support and maintenance for the coming three years.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners:

Link to the project: Samsyn 2018

GLAM 2020

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What is the project: This project maintains continuous interaction with GLAM partners and seeks out new collaborations. It also serves as an umbrella project for smaller projects funded by individual GLAMs, where they want help with a certain task within a limited time period. These smaller projects are usually aimed at making a particular collection of images or data available through the Wikimedia projects, at increasing the Wikimedia competency of an institution by having a staff member embedded at the institution over some timespan or by building bespoke tools to facilitate the interaction, or the analysis thereof, between the GLAM and Wikimedia.

What’s been done: The focus has been on acting as a meta level project providing training for partners where we want to deepen our cooperation in the future, making more GLAM institutions aware of our work, and on preparing for externally funded activities both with our long-term GLAM partners (where they pay us for the hours needed for a batch upload or training etc.) and with involvement in initial meetings for possible major projects in the future. At the end of 2019 we started supporting the Thiel gallery as they were digitizing images and planned for making them available on Wikimedia Commons during 2020.

We have revived our strategic partnerships with key players and provide a series of training activities for GLAM staff throughout Sweden. We have invited our partners to participate in our international work as experts and stakeholders. Meetings and discussions have continued and from the project "Wikipedia in the libraries" the work has continued in a new independent project with the theme LGBTQI. During the year, we held eight different events where workshops and editathons gradually switched to digital meetings.

What's next: We will investigate how we can present solutions that combine databases and intermediation and whether there is interest in testing new tools and installations of MediaWiki and Wikibase. This area has significant potential where we see an opportunity to take a leading role. We can be the node that connects different stakeholders in common goals around open linked data.

We will also start the work to create material that can be internationalized to spur GLAM activities abroad. We intend to further investigate how we can share good examples of how to work with free licenses and structured data to achieve the results the GLAM institutions desire.

Furthermore, we will investigate the needs of our GLAM partners through a survey.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Medium

Project impact: Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata

Importance: Core

Partners: Nordic Museum, Swedish National Heritage Board, Swedish Performing Arts Agency,

Link to the project: GLAM 2020

Free music on Wikipedia 2019

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What is the project: This project aimed to make more music available on the Wikimedia platforms by uploading files and structured data. This included making collections available that contained digitized material with extinct copyright, or high-quality new recordings performed by professional musicians who released the material.

By working with structured data on musical works, musicians and musical manuscripts on Wikidata and with Structured Data on Commons, we were able to improve the searchability and usability of the material. The project enabled us to delve into audio files on Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. The project was also a basis for a case study within the FindingGLAMs 2018 project.

What’s been done: We have, in collaboration with the Swedish Performing Arts Agency, worked on metadata and uploads of Swedish folk music. We have developed a project plan for activities during 2020, and are working on an inventory of music collections that may be relevant to our work. We have had initial contacts with smaller stakeholders for collaborations and in support of this we are working on a landing page on our wiki, Contribute 2020, with information on how people can get involved.

During the autumn, we continued with uploads of older material within the public domain, but also new recordings of music by musicians who were interested to share their new recordings. We also continued with editathons and workshops on Wikimedia's platforms. During the year, we held six different digital events in the form of workshops and editathons.

What's next:The work will now be analyzed and described in a final report. There are many details where methods still need to be tried and tested in practice. This will allow us to continue working on linked open data on the Wikimedia platforms.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Large

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia

Partners: Swedish Performing Arts Agency

Link to the project: Fri musik på Wikipedia 2019

Presentations 2020

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What is the project: This project includes different presentations by WMSE staff that are paid for by an external organization. The project exists to simplify taxation of our work.

What’s been done: No work has been done in the project this year. With everything closed down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of opportunities to present has been limited. Several potential possibilities have been cancelled during the year, or postponed for 2021.

What's next: We will put some effort into creating ways of concluding and communicating the areas where we can and want to hold presentations.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Importance: Essential

Project impact: -

Partners: -

Link to the project: Föreläsningar 2020

Strategic inclusion of library data on Wikidata 2019

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What is the project: A continuation of the 2018 project aimed to further improve the interconnectedness between open library data and Wikimedia data. In 2020, in addition to further developing ideas and tools that were prototyped in the previous project – such as uploading more open library data to Wikidata and investigating how it can be automatically updated and maintained – we strived to increase the usage of the data on Wikipedia. This was achieved by engaging with the community and developing tools and solutions that best fit their workflow. We also engaged with the National Library staff by providing support around the Wikimedia platforms and created opportunities to improve their internal tools by taking advantage of the increased interconnection with Wikidata. One digital hackathon was organized to create an arena for development in this area.

What’s been done: In this project work was done on several parallel tracks. Data about almost 50,000 publications and authors were uploaded to Wikidata, tools were developed to improve and update library related Wikidata items, we investigated synergies with other platforms (both other Wikimedia projects such as Wikisource and external websites) and looked at how Structured data on Commons could be leveraged to benefit both the Wikimedia communities and the libraries.

Despite COVID-19 making physical meetings impossible we held a much appreciated Wikidata training course for Library personnel and communicated our work and learnings at many international events. The abstract describing our work was awarded the LIBER Award for Library Innovation at the LIBER 2020 Annual Conference. A report (in Swedish) was published detailing the work done as well as outlining potential future areas of focus.

What's next: In 2021 we will look for new opportunities to work together with the National library and/or other actors in the library space to expand on some of the pilots investigated in this project. In particular we would like to investigate how the National Library can benefit from the Wikimedia platforms in making decisions about digitizing their materials.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Large

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: National Library of Sweden

Link to the project: Strategisk inkludering av biblioteksdata på Wikidata 2019

Strategic inclusion of library data on Wikidata 2020

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This project has been postponed to 2021. This is due to the delays COVID-19 has had on the adoption of a new long-term budget for the National Library.

Wikipedia in Libraries 2019

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What is the project: This project will prepare digital training material for Sweden’s public librarians as part of a larger national initiative to improve their digital skills. The training material was included in a learning platform created by the National Library, Digiteket. Furthermore, continuous training, different events and training at libraries across Sweden was organized, as well as two campaigns targeted towards engaging library staff to contribute to the Wikimedia platforms. After the launch of the educational platform in late 2019 and initial training of a large number of librarians, a number of training events in person were organized where the librarians were empowered to organize local activities at their libraries across the country.

What’s been done: The digital learning material has been created and published on Digiteket. We also planned the tour for the beginning of the year and invited librarians to participate. In January and February 2020 we visited five regions to conduct training for librarians so that they will be able to run events at their own libraries later on.

We conducted the second round of Wikipedia in libraries and this time we ran the events online. We took with us the experiences from our online edit-a-thons and online reference hunt from the spring. The second round started in the autumn and continued to work on the projects about literature and authors that we completed during the first course. Our focus on supporting local events at the libraries will continue and by completing the second round of the training digitally, we have trained over 100 librarians around Sweden during 2020.

What's next: The project has been completed and ended 2020-09-30, but work continues with librarians on Wikimedia's platforms, for example through Project LGBTQI that now are established on Swedish Wikipedia with recurring editathons.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Large

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: National Library of Sweden

Link to the project: Wikipedia i biblioteken 2019

Wikipedia and the SDGs

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What is the project: We received funding from the Swedish International Development Agency, for communicating the results and outcome from Wikimania, with its specific focus on the Sustainable Development Goals, to a general audience.

What’s been done: We worked with the communications agency Wenderfalck to turn the film material we had from Wikimania into communications material and a communications plan. The communications were realized in the spring of 2020, primarily through our social media channels.

The goal was to get 300,000 views of the content. In the end, the content, through the campaign, got a total reach of almost 1,5 million, 407,057 views on Wikimedia Commons, more than 20,000 views via Facebook, and the content was aired several times on Swedish Public Service TV-channel Kunskapskanalen.

What’s next: We will continue to use the communications material from the campaign, which has a central place on our website. We are further integrating Agenda 2030 into our work.

Size of project: Small

Project impact: N/A

Importance: Experimental

Partners: SIDA (Swedish International Development Agency) Wenderfalck

Link to the project: Wikipedia och Globala målen 2019

Advocacy 2020

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What is the project: Through the project, we are working to ensure that the free knowledge and user perspectives are heard and accounted for in the legislative process and amongst politicians. The project is only funded with donations and membership fees to keep them separate from FDC funded projects. We will focus on improving knowledge amongst decision makers about FoP and how the Copyright Directive might influence Wikipedia. Furthermore, we will support the work done by staff in Brussels, financially but also by providing insights into the Swedish implementation and sharing the material we create (as Sweden has gotten further in the implementation process than most countries in the EU). We will aim to support the coordination of policy work with the cultural heritage sector amongst issues relevant for both parties.

What’s been done: The largest part of this project in 2020 will deal with the implementation of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market directive of the European Union in Swedish law. Several of the articles in the directive might have negative consequences for users if implemented in a bad way, and we are working hard to safeguard the rights of the users in the implementation. At the same time, there are articles of the directive that can have very positive consequences on digitization and sharing of information on digital platforms, and in those cases, we are working hard to make sure that the legislator implements the articles in the way intended, as the copyright lobby has an interest in watering down these provisions. So far, a number of consultation meetings have been held, and we have provided thorough input and responses to the questions asked by the Ministry of Justice.

Furthermore, we submitted responses to public consultation from (1) the Agency for Digital Government regarding Principles for making information available and reusable, (2) EUIPO regarding the creation of a new web portal covering works and other creations that are not traded, and (3) the DCHE on their Working Draft on basic principles for 3D digitisation of tangible cultural heritage.

What’s next: The Ministry of Justice has still not finalized the department promemoria. We will work together with allies to provide as thorough and useful input in the consultation process on the promemoria as possible, and plan to dedicate a number of workshops, meetings and hours of writing to this end. We also hope to be able to bring up the question of the need for a modernization of the freedom of panorama provision in Swedish law on the table.

Size of project: Small

Project impact: All Wikimedia projects

Importance: Essential

Partners: National Library of Sweden, Swedish Library Association, Swedish Consumers

Link to the project: Påverkansarbete 2020

  Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (end of the year) Comments
Use To inform the public about Wikimedia projects and free knowledge, good media relations are central. This is achieved through active work with press releases, op-eds, commentaries, newsletter and presence on social media. Based on the key figures identified as metrics by the office the measured media activities for November 2020 will increase by 10 % compared to November 2019. 0 out of 1 1 out of 1
Only partial metrics for 2019 could be compiled and can be compared with this year’s numbers. What we can see is a significant increase in social media followers as an effect of our campaigns. The media visibility is however expected to significantly drop this year as we hosted Wikimania in 2019 and in 2020 had fewer events organized than usual and no dedicated communication staff currently hired. Despite the drop compared to the Wikimania year, we still received coverage for our work in 55 publications in 2020 which we are very happy about.
U.1.2 To increase awareness of the usage and trust, clearer measurement methods for how the Wikimedia projects are used, in general and by specific user groups, will be developed during the year. No work was done Not achieved
A plan for measuring the trust was developed to be conducted with the help of an external research group in 2021, however, this is likely to be cancelled due to an uncertain financial situation.
U.2.1 To decrease the number of bugs in the software and increase clarity all identified and verified bugs shall be reported on Phabricator within one week of being encountered and critical system messages will be translated.[7] The result is monitored annually. 100% (18 new bugs and 0 translation messages) 100% (7 new bugs and 0 translation messages)
We have reported all the bugs that we have encountered in the MediaWiki software. We have not included bugs that we have reported in external Wikimedia related tools.
U.2.2 In order to make content available for more people the Wikispeech extension shall be activated as a beta function on three language versions of Wikipedia before the end of the year, and supporting functionality/tools will be developed to add more languages. 0 of 3 languages activated 0 of 3 languages activated
We have implemented all the feedback from the initial code review and have received valuable guidance from WMDE. However, in the end we did not receive the needed support and buy-in from the WMF to launch Wikispeech in the near-term. This is not due to the quality of the product, but on the internal priorities at the WMF.

The focus of the program is to make the platforms and activities known, appreciated and trusted. It also includes our work to make the platforms easy to use and both our platforms and activities accessible to everyone.

Making the platforms and activities known and appreciated

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Previously, with more limited resources invested, we have targeted different expert groups etc. in our communication, e.g. Facebook groups for GLAM professionals. In 2020 we have invested resources to develop our presence on social media so that our activities and messaging will reach a significantly larger audience. This was part of our preparations for an increased focus on fundraising in the second half of the year and for our application to become a so-called Förmånstagare from the Postcode Lottery. At the end of the year we organized a second social media campaign for the year. This time we tried to test out some fundraising messages and improve brand awareness.

We broadened our focus on social media to actively share information about the value and importance of free knowledge and about the Wikimedia platforms as tools to achieve more free knowledge of better quality. We also experimented with engaging our followers to do small tasks, with the idea that this will get them “hooked” and engage more over time. This turned out to be rather hard, but we saw a lot of active interaction with the posts.

We believe that more communication will, amongst other things, improve our possibilities for increasing participation at our events, help us to find more partners, increase funding opportunities and avoid misunderstandings about our work and the Wikimedia platforms. Also, our goal of reaching 5,000 members in the association in 3 years is dependent on developing clearer communication that highlights the value of the work we do.

Story: Increasing awareness about our work

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Free knowledge for a stronger democracy – one of the videos created for our communication project around Wikimedia and the Global Goals.

In this Story we are focusing on the significant efforts in 2020 to increase knowledge in Sweden about the association and the work we do and how it help to improve the world.

This spring, we have intensified visibility efforts. It has been a long-standing issue that while almost everyone knows Wikipedia, just a few know about the Wikimedia movement that stands behind it. Through strategic, methodic and intensified efforts, we aim to change that situation.

We started the year with a communication project around Wikimedia and the Global Goals, where we worked together with a communication agency to attract visibility. We created a landing page dedicated to the Global Goals on our website, and the communication efforts with the agency directed traffic there. The total reach of the posts was about 1,450,000, and unique reach 232,000. The videos produced by the agency, based on the Free Knowledge and the Global Goals Spotlight Session during Wikimania, had in total more than 400,000 views via Wikimedia Commons, and 20,000 views on Facebook. Videos from Wikimania were also aired on Swedish Public Service in the fall, where they had in total about 10,000 views.

We believe that these efforts increased the awareness of the brand and our work. We followed up the efforts with advertising campaigns on Facebook, which led to a rapid increase in the number of followers on the platform. We set up a number of ads with different images as well as messages, inviting anyone who liked the image to follow our page. The ambition was to gain more followers in order for our messages to reach a larger crowd in the future, hoping to spread the Wikimedia Message to a new audience. The ads were targeted at a very wide set of Facebook users.

To follow up on this, we have worked more with social media in general and also with collecting and analyzing statistics. Our ambition is to reach more people in total, and also gain an audience large enough to be segmented into our different areas of work for a higher accuracy in our messages. We are also aware of the fact that some major funders are taking the reach of the organization into consideration when deciding if we will be receiving financial support from them to fund. As such this effort might also have a very direct impact on our future financial sustainability.

Story: A new digital post-pandemic world

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In this Story we are focusing on how the changes in how institutions can operate, e.g. due to COVID-19, have increased the interest for digital solutions. The visibility achieved through the Wikimedia platforms are being highlighted and we believe that the interest to work strategically with us can increase due to this.

A lot has happened in digital mediation for the GLAM sector in the last year. Almost all institutions have changed and have a digital program business with both screenings and seminars. In a report from the Swedish Museums Association, they have for the first time started counting digital visits. Visits to related pages on Wikimedia's platforms have also been included. The result is that an overwhelming part of the visits take place on Wikimedia's platforms. We saw a similar development when the Nationalmuseum closed down for renovation. The number of views increased for the files available on Wikimedia Commons.

The number of visits and traffic to websites is still calculated in different ways. No practice has yet been established. Here we can provide support and help develop new tools that the GLAM sector needs. In the Free Music on Wikipedia project, there is a clear need to be able to view statistics and use of files on Wikimedia's platforms. It is simply the clients who implicitly ask what impact different investments have.

In Sweden, a large part of the GLAM sector is publicly funded, so there are no secret business plans or pronounced strategies to compete for the digital visitors. But visitors obviously have a limited amount of time to spend on social media. Here is perhaps the opportunity to replace more light-hearted entertainment with a more knowledge-oriented, high-quality range.

For us, it is important to support that development and offer and develop our open platforms as part of the offer for digitally interested visitors. For example, much of the material produced that is new does not have free licenses. Here, early in the process, platforms could be offered where the material has a long service life. Culture and cultural heritage is well suited to put on platforms where those with special interests want an entrance and overview of a topic. That is, a well-designed and in-depth article on Wikipedia.

Making usage easy and accessible to everyone

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Through our efforts we hope to make the platforms easier to use for our readers. We focus both on our in-house development, mainly through the ambitious Wikispeech project, and on informing other developer teams about issues that we encounter during workshops and other events that we organize. We also work on methods to bring content of high value during a crisis accessible as fast as possible.

Story: Wikipedia as platform for vital information in times of crises

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As a result of our partnership with UNFPA, participants in the Wikiproject COVID-19 could improve Wikipedia with up-to-date and trustworthy information.
 
An infographic on avoiding infection shared by the Swedish Public Agency under an open license. Northern Sami is one of Sweden’s official minority languages.

In this Story we are focusing on how we have tried to develop a method for major global content partners to share their expertise and content on Wikipedia about topics that are read during a crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. During the year we have worked both with involving and engaging experts and volunteers, and with uploads of key infographics.

For years, we have planned for and worked on how to use Wikipedia for dissemination of vital information in crises. We know that Wikipedia is used as the go-to place when events are unfolding, and have pondered how we can support the volunteer community to improve the content as efficiently as possible through support from expert organizations and content partnerships.

The COVID-19 pandemic accentuated and accelerated this project, as well as the need. Through collaborations with two expert agencies, we identified innovative ways of spreading vital and correct information on Wikipedia during the pandemic.

The first collaboration was a result of an ongoing conversation around partnerships, with UNFPA (the UN Population Fund). We finalized a partnership around global campaigns and licensing of material, but both of us acknowledged the possibility and need of doing a short term effort during the pandemic. To that end UNFPA’s technical experts collated references and key messages with the latest research around the effects of the pandemic on women, maternal health, youth, elderly and the other areas they are monitoring. We initiated an editathon and a campaign to make use of these messages. The articles in which these messages were inserted surpassed a million views during the year. In tandem with this work, we also conceptualized the model through which we worked, meaning that the work can be repeated with other agencies and partners, in this or in other crises.

The other collaboration was based on mere chance. The Swedish Public Health Agency (PHA) made PDFs and graphics with easily understood information around how to protect oneself and others from the pandemic; graphics that were translated into some 20 different languages. Knowing that many people turn to Wikipedia for information, we reached out to the PHA and asked whether the texts could be made available under a free license, so that we could include them in the relevant Wikipedia articles. The agency accepted, licensed the material freely, and the community made use of them on Wikipedia. By the end of the year, the articles in which the graphics and rasters made from the PDFs had been inserted had had more than 25,000,000 views.

Through the first collaboration, we have started to develop and learn how to best work with expert agencies in order to make sure that the information on Wikipedia on essential topics in times of crises is up to date and correct. This is an area where we believe that there are much more to be done. We also learned how long-term partnerships can be used also in the short term, when new events quickly unfolds and where accurate and up-to-date information is of utmost importance.

The second collaboration taught us the potentiality of initiating conversations around CC licenses with new partners at times when the benefit is very high both for the owner of the material, for our platforms, and for the users and readers in society.

Detailed project overview

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Below all the projects belonging to the program will be briefly explained and the current status presented. Synergies between the projects will be described. A few selected stories have been presented more in depth as case studies above.

For all the projects, we will state whether they are small, medium or large. In this context, a small project is defined as one where the total budget is less than 100,000 SEK (about 12,500 USD); a medium sized project is defined as one where the total budget is between 100,000 SEK and 300,000 SEK (12,500 to about 37,500 USD); finally, a large project is defined as one where the total budget exceeds 300,000 SEK (about 37,500 USD).

We are also outlining where the project will have an impact in the Wikimedia universe and who we are partnering with to deliver the best possible result.

New for this year is that we also have information about the importance of each project., e.g. if the project is core, essential, one-off or experimental. In this context, a project is considered to be core if it is part of our identity as an organization. The project will be organized even if impact is less in the short term and will only be cancelled after a consensus has been reached amongst our community. A project is essential if it actively contributes to one or many of the goals that have been outlined for the year or the long term strategy. Most projects should belong here. A project that is considered a one-off is organized because it is delivering a specific benefit to the organization but it is unlikely that we will repeat it in its current form. The type of project might continue over the years, but the content will intentionally change significantly over time. The experimental projects are testing a new idea, method or technology and are often externally financed. They might be a one-off or if successful become an essential project.

Trust Making 2020

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What is the project: In the project we investigated the attitudes and trust for the Wikimedia projects amongst different groups in society (a specific focus will be on our own membership base). We coordinated with the team at the Swedish Internet Foundation who will write the next yearly report about “Svenskarna och Internet” (The Swedes and the Internet).

What’s been done: During the year, we investigated the possibility of being included in the SOM Survey at Gothenburg University. It is a survey sent out to a large number of citizens, and we aim to focus the questions on the attitudes and trust for Wikipedia.

What's next: We will continue to discuss with the producers of major reports of internet usage to include our projects in their research. We will also present a few topics of research for students at universities to engage them to conduct new research in the area.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: Research institutions, the Swedish Internet Foundation

Link to the project: Förtroende 2020

Visibility Making 2020

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What is the project: This project aimed to coordinate our communication work and build up the platforms that we use. Much of the actual communication efforts (social media posts, blog posts and press releases) were developed as part of the projects that they cover. This project coordinates the publication of the material and ensures that it is consistent in quality and design. In 2020 we developed a reporting format for our communication work. We kept our blog and social media accounts active with general communication to ensure awareness about our work. The website was updated regularly through the work in this project.

What’s been done: Two social media campaigns were organized which had a massive effect on the number of followers we have on Facebook. The number increased from 2,200 followers in 2019 to around 6,700 followers in December 2020 – an increase of 4,500 followers. We have collected data about followers and started to analyse the outcome of different posts as well as for the communication as a whole. We have started having recurring social media meetings to be proactive in our work, not only reactive. We also carried out a fundraising campaign at the end of the year to see how social media can be used in our fundraising work.

What's next: We will continue to increase the amount of posts on social media, including a number of posts aimed to activate our followers. The 20 year anniversary of Wikipedia will be one of the features of the year.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Importance: Essential

Project impact: -

Partners: -

Link to the project: Synlighet 2020

Wikispeech – Speech Data Collector 2019

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What is the project: The main aim of Wikispeech – Speech Data Collector 2019 is to further develop the MediaWiki extension Wikispeech so that it is possible to collect speech data through crowdsourcing. This can be used in order to improve the quality of the text-to-speech software and to extend this to more languages in the future. In the longer term it might also be used to develop speech-to-text solutions. Furthermore, the application will be a resource and a service to the entire FOSS community. The project continues into 2021.

What’s been done: In 2020 the main focus has been on the major re-architecture of the text-to-speech component, identified together with Wikimedia Deutschland, required for it to be released as Beta. Additionally time has been invested into modernising the code, first developed in 2016, as well as ensuring it’s resource usage is minimized and that it does not negatively affect users who do not wish to utilise the functionality. While work on the Speech Data Collector has largely taken a backseat to this work, high level architecture work and planning has also commenced on this tool providing the framework into which it’s distinct components can be plugged in. Discussions with other similar projects such as LinguaLibre and Mozilla Common Voice have continued throughout the year to see how we can strengthen each other.

What's next: In 2021 we aim to wrap up the project, releasing the text-to-speech component as a Beta feature on Swedish Wikipedia and presenting a working prototype of the Speech Data Collector. This prototype will then be used to develop the necessary training materials for later organization of speech collection events.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Large

Importance: Essential

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: Wikimedia Foundation, STTS, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Wikimedia Deutschland

Link to the project: Projekt:Wikispeech – Talresursinsamlaren 2019

Wikispeech for AI 2020

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What is the project: The aim of Wikispeech for AI 2020 is to act as a reference and tester for a larger project aiming to use AI to create a free text-to-speech voice suitable for reading longer texts. In 2020 we will investigate how speech data collected through the project Wikispeech – Speech Data Collector 2019 can be used to train AI to create a better voice and to test if such a voice improves the Wikispeech experience. During the year Wikimedia Sverige will support the project with expertise around how Wikipedia texts can be used as a test suite for such AI results.

What’s been done: Due to the still early state of the Speech Data Collector the main focus has been on assisting the larger project with expertise on how to select for and access persistent versions of Wikipedia articles to create a corpus of longer non-fiction texts suitable for AI training or testing.

What's next: In 2021 we will investigate how speech data collected through ​Wikispeech – Speech Data Collector 2019​ can be used to train AI to create a better voice and to test if such a voice improves the Wikispeech experience. We will also work to integrate a newly developed voice, purpose built for longer texts into Wikispeech.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Medium

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: STTS, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Swedish Agency for Accessible Media, Bonnierförlagen

Link to the project: Projekt:Wikispeech för AI 2020

Bug Reporting and Translation 2020

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What is the project:The main purpose of this project was to decrease the number of errors in the software used on the Wikimedia projects by reporting bugs and correcting erroneous translations in the software. In 2020 the main focus remained on continuous bug reporting, ensuring all staff are comfortable in raising encountered bugs and assisting the community in bug reporting. We also investigated how our technical team members can support the rest of the staff in bug reporting.

What has been done: A total of 7 bugs were reported by four staff members.

What's next: In 2021 the reporting of bugs continued and we developed a small course to teach people how to do bug reporting and software internationalization in practice. We developed a concept for translate-a-thons as part of events aimed at GLAMs or the open knowledge community, which allowed us to internationalize the software developed as part of the thematic hub.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Importance: Essential

Project impact: MediaWiki

Partners: Wikimedia community

Link to the project: Buggrapportering och översättning 2020

Knowledge in Crisis Situations 2020

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What is the project: In the long term, this project aims to find ways of working with international aid organizations on how to work with Wikipedia and free knowledge in crisis situations, as we know that Wikipedia is heavily used for information in those times. In this project the methods and material needed to achieve this are developed. The COVID-19 pandemic made this project very timely, and we initiated and advanced the partnership with UNFPA, the UN Population Fund, for working with them on how to use Wikipedia and the Wikimedia platforms to spread vital information in this crisis situation.

What’s been done: We finalized a formal partnership with UNFPA in late May. Experts at UNFPA provided key messages from the research they have compiled, material that was freely licensed and possible to include directly in Wikipedia. In early June, we held an edit-a-thon and started a campaign to encourage the community to work with the material. The material was included in about one hundred articles and by the end of summer these popular topics had reached more than 1 million views.

We delivered preliminary metrics from the first part of the collaboration to UNFPA and investigated further possibilities.

What’s next: We are investigating potential ways forward, for example looking into joint funding for scaling up the project. We are also investigating broadening the scope in the long term, involving more potential partners in the work with spreading knowledge in crisis situations. As we have developed a model we believe to be repeatable, more partners could easily join in.

Size of project: Small

Project impact: Wikipedia

Importance: Experimental

Partners: UNFPA

Link to the project: Kunskap i krissituationer 2020

Community

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  Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (end of the year) Comments
Community C.1.1 To make work easier, support will be given, by the office, 365 times to at least 100 Wikimedians (or others who advocate for free knowledge) through expertise, financing or other resources.[8] 340 occasions to 36 Wikimedians 298 out of 365 occasions

79 out of 100 Wikimedians

The COVID-19 situation limited the type of support we could offer but in the second part of the year we managed to increase the support. While the support occasions were fewer we managed to double the number of supported individuals compared to 2019.
C.1.2 To strengthen the community the chapter will support at least 75 recurring meet-ups[9] for Wikimedians 128 62 of 75
In the first 3 months of the year a large number of meet-ups took place. COVID-19 forced them to continue online, but the frequency was reduced compared to previous years.
C.1.3 To facilitate the use of new technical solutions on Wikipedia, a project shall be carried out around implementation, based on the Community's needs and desires. 1 1 technical wish implemented
The Maplink tool was finalized and activated on the Swedish language version of Wikipedia.
C.2 To increase participation from Wikimedia's underrepresented groups[10], targeted initiatives organized by the association shall result in one productive edit from 365 unique users belonging to one or more of those groups. 725 1,279 out of 365
The GLAM and educational activities are still an efficient way to engage people from underrepresented groups. The WikiGap events are however responsible for the majority of contributions from underrepresented users. (The numbers can be found on the Outreach and Events Dashboard). We estimate that ⅔ of participants were women, but not all have been editing.

Supporting existing community

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We work to support our wider community in a number of ways, which is possible thanks to staff members with a wide variety of skills and because of the infrastructure we have built up in the last few years.

We see the Wikimedia movement needing two different sets of volunteers, that to some degree overlap:

  1. The online contributors that for example edits Wikipedia, that photograph for Wikimedia Commons or add data to Wikidata.
  2. The volunteers that are interested in supporting free knowledge offline in different ways, such as organizing events, giving lectures, soliciting new members or forming new partnerships.

We have historically focused on the first group, but now we are aiming to create resources needed to grow the second group. This year we have therefore focused on building a stronger foundation by developing communication tools, developing a strategy and by developing training material.

We continued to create meeting spaces and to cover costs associated with the volunteer work. Due to COVID-19 these efforts have however been hampered as events have not been able to be organized by the volunteer community, e.g. the yearly Wikimedia camps we have organized had to be cancelled. Other parts were however possible to move online, at least partly, e.g. the regular edit-a-thons hosted by some of the volunteers.

We also worked to provide technical support to create tools (i.e. requested solutions for long standing technical problems) for the most active volunteers. This year we added a maptool to Swedish Wikipedia which had been requested.

Story: Adjusting to a pandemic

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In this Story we are focusing on the impact the pandemic has had on the organization and the changes we successfully implemented to handle it. These changes include teleworking, more digital activities and changes in our communication around certain activities.

With the COVID-19 pandemic changing 2020 for all of the world many plans had to be adjusted or scrapped. Wikimedia Sverige acted quickly to the problem and adjusted the work situation for the staff with mandatory work from home rather than at the office. All staff could freely bring home any needed office equipment from March onwards. Staff members were also regularly offered office equipment to be sent to them from the office, or new equipment being ordered to their homes to improve the quality of their home-offices. The staff was also offered dedicated, paid, staff time to increase their personal readiness level (e.g. with prepping).

Over the year we moved most of the non-digital parts of our regular work online, e.g. signing of contracts, and established a number of digital meetings to provide space for both work and social interactions. These efforts will allow us to continue to keep all operations fully up and running if the pandemic continues for 2021 or longer. These measures will also allow us to have more of the staff working from outside of the office for longer periods of time, which is beneficial regardless of the pandemic.

Our adjustments were further amplified when WMF decided to prevent APG funding to be used for events. The guidance from the WMF was generic and not customized for different contexts, which had both good and bad effects. In the short term it ended unnecessary discussions about what to cancel and what to continue with, while in the mid- and long-term the one-size-fits-all approach across the world arguably limited the work in an unnecessary way and created some confusion and frustration. This was an interesting approach to take in an international and diverse movement, known for its bottom-up approach. We note that none of our other funders or potential funders reacted in this way (for example the EU or local actors), but instead emphasized that they allowed organizations to take responsibility and act as they deemed fit in their context – and rather reduced their control to allow for more diverse and localized adaptations.

Due to the pandemic, some of our initiatives had to be cancelled for parts of the year, such as community support in the form of media accreditation or support to organize physical events. As such we have underspent and underperformed in those areas. Other areas we could adjust less dramatically. We adjusted our plans around editathons for librarians to be moved online which limited our abilities to plan physical events with the participants (a main goal of the project) but allowed us to still involve a large group of people. We readjusted our communication around Wiki Loves Earth to emphasize a local focus of taking photos of protected nature areas around you to avoid unnecessary travel. For that we also developed a prototype for a map tool to visualize it – which turned out to be popular. We also moved all our board meetings online with shorter meetings at a more frequent schedule and with more preparations and pre-readings in advance and less presentations during the meetings.

The main adjustment for us was to move our Annual General Meeting (AGM) online for the first time. As this is the most important event during the year where major decisions are taken, the AGM had to work flawlessly and at all costs avoid a situation where a member was unable to participate. As such the office formed a team of four staff members who worked together during the month before the meeting with testing and planning different solutions. We also engaged an external facilitator who has, literally, written the book about digital AGMs. The AGM was very well attended and positively received by the participants based on the feedback gathered. We shared our experience with the global Wikimedia community and with the Swedish civil society, as we expected that other organizations would struggle with the same issues we had. We hope that our documentation of the process could increase their success rate and save them some time and money.

Expanding the community

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To grow the community on the Wikimedia platforms we organized a number of activities during the year. They were specifically aimed at creating interest amongst groups of people who have yet to engage on our platforms, or around free knowledge in general.

We worked to raise awareness of Wikimedia projects in order for new participants to engage. When the new participants started to contribute we made sure to provide support to lower barriers and to create an inclusive environment.

Our cooperation with different organizations has been a cornerstone in achieving success in community growth. By involving the communities of our partners in our projects, some of their community members have joined the Wikimedia community in some capacity.

Both the WikiGap initiative and the Wiki Loves contests have continued to be strong vehicles for engagement from new volunteers and we will continue to develop these concepts further.

Story: Experimenting with global partnerships to combat gender imbalance

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WikiGap participants in Yerevan, Armenia.

In this Story we are focusing on how we have used the massively successful WikiGap campaign to engage with strong international actors, such as UN agencies and large civil society organizations. WikiGap opens new doors, but we have intentionally worked to expand any new partnership to also include other aspects, such as working with the partners to help them share their content, supporting our communication efforts or work on joint applications for project grants.

For three years in a row, we have been running the WikiGap Campaign together with the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At the start of the 2020 Campaign, more than 35,000 articles about women had been created or edited as part of the campaign, combining the efforts of more than 3,000 editors in more than 35 different languages. At the end of 2020, the total number had increased to more than 5,000 editors, creating or improving more than 50,000 articles.

The core of the campaign are all the events organized across the world on or in connection to International Women’s Day in March; events co-organized by Swedish embassies together with local Wikimedia affiliates and civil society partners. So far, however, these partnerships have been dependent on local initiatives and connections. While this is of course positive, we are working this year to add a layer of global partnerships on top of that. We have finalized a partnership with UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund; we involved UN Human Rights in the WikiGap Challenge, an online competition organized in conjunction with the campaign; and we have started the conversation with other UN Agencies, civil society with global reach and other organizations that want to join the campaign as well.

This has the potential of solving a problem which has been increasing in magnitude as the campaign has grown, namely the fact that Swedish embassies only exist in a limited number of countries. By involving other institutions, organizations and partners with global reach, we can both scale up the partnerships, and enable affiliates in more countries to join in on the campaign.

A further potential of this kind of partnerships is further variations in the theme. The WikiGap Challenge this year had, due to the partnership with UN Human Rights, a focus on women active in human rights; UN Human Rights 20 proposed women that there should be articles about, and after the Challenge, 338 articles were created about these women, in a total of 38 languages. This is a fairly straightforward way for new partners to engage in our work and, we hope, an entry point to a deeper understanding and involvement with the Wikimedia movement.

By adding other UN Agencies, civil society organizations and partners, we can work more strategically to fill the gaps we know exist, and at the same time enable the campaign to grow. We are using the large interest to join the campaign to also initiate work together in other areas. For example we got in contact with UNFPA because of WikiGap but ended up working with them around COVID-19 due to the major implications the pandemic has on the world. We are also working on developing concepts for how the IGOs can share relevant content that they have, which is either connected to WikiGap or other topic areas.

We also discussed potential partnerships around WikiGap with a number of civil society organizations to join us in organizing the events and engage their members both online and offline. Examples include the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Rights (RFSL) and World Pulse, a women-led, global social network for social change. Hopefully, one long term outcome of this is the potential to apply for further external grants and funding, a work which has been started, to continue to scale up WikiGap further.

Story: Exploring ways to activate people in a physical activity without meeting each other

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To help Wiki Loves Earth contributors find protected natural areas located close around them, we build a map tool that displays data from the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency.

In this Story we are focusing on how we had to find ways to encourage people to participate in our activities during the pandemic. We succeeded by changing how we communicated and by building tools that enhanced our messages.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced us to rethink many of our planned activities. One example of that was the Wiki Loves Earth campaign. While Sweden never, unlike many countries, enacted forced lockdown measures, long-distance movement was discouraged and larger gatherings and events forbidden. At the same time, it was our conviction that Wiki Loves Earth could provide meaning in a difficult time, a conviction that seemingly was shared by participants.

In order to make it possible for us to run the campaign, while adhering to recommendations and regulations, we chose to focus our communication on visiting local nature: exploring one’s vicinity through the Wiki Loves Earth campaign.

The main obstacle to this focus was the difficulty at the time to find natural heritage sites in one’s vicinity with the existing tools, so we explored possibilities on how to make it easier. We soon realized that the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency held data that we could upload on Wikidata, if it would be made available under the right license. We reached out to EPA, and they agreed to re-license several datasets. They also had sets with shapefiles, which we uploaded to Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. The amount of shapefiles on Wikimedia Commons doubled through the upload, which seems to be the first mass upload of shapefiles to Wikimedia Commons. This is a continuation of the many experimental batch uploads of new types of files to Wikimedia Commons which we focused on during the FindingGLAMs project. We hope that this will prove valuable for other affiliates and that we will be able to support them if they aim to add shapefiles for their local contests.

With the data on Wikidata and the shapefiles on Wikimedia Commons, we could develop a map tool that showed all natural sites in one’s vicinity, and whether they already had a photo on Wikidata (and thereby Wikipedia) or not. The tool had two benefits: it visualized the value of such a batch upload and it helped newcomers see where they could contribute with new images.

The map tool, and the slightly changed focus of the campaign, seems to have been a success. The turnout this year was more than 1,000 photos higher than last year, and the number of participants – both experienced and newcomers – rose sharply as well. We managed to lower the barriers, which was one important aim, and at the same time, we managed to encourage people to explore the local vicinity in a time where their possibility to travel was limited.

For us, it was more important to implement the tool than to make it perfect. It seems like that sufficed, as the goal of lowering barriers was fulfilled. The coding behind it is all available on Github, and we would happily help answering questions from other chapters and affiliates, interested in doing something similar.

Fail fest: Keeping up the involvement – the experience from Wikimania

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Wikimania would not have been possible without its volunteers. Even though they enjoyed the experience, we did not succeed with keeping most of them involved after the conference.

In this Fail fest we are focusing on how we have struggled to find a way to effectively engage volunteers in our work at scale. This became obvious after Wikimania when we had a large number of interested and engaged volunteers with valuable skill sets, and still we lacked the strategies, tools and plans to keep them engaged over time.

One important goal with organizing Wikimania was to attract, involve and keep a large pool of volunteers. While we succeeded with the first two parts – attracting and involving – keeping them has proven harder. The volunteers from Wikimania got an intensive crash course in the work of the Wikimedia movement; they were very content with volunteering for Wikimania in the evaluations afterwards; and we worked hard to keep them in the movement. In spite of all this, it has proven difficult, and there is no general increase in involvement, based on this pool of volunteers.

We have identified a few core reasons for why this is the case. The first reason is an unclarity in what it actually means to be a volunteer for Wikimedia Sverige. Throughout the years, the staff gained competence, efficiency and experience of working with free knowledge related projects, but one downside of this might be higher barriers for volunteers to engage. Other than engaging directly on the online projects, we have also failed to clarify what it means to be a Wikimedia Sverige volunteer, especially for volunteers who wish to engage on a deeper level. Wikimania was an exception, as it is a very concrete project with clear goals.

The second reason connects to this, as roles and responsibilities have been unclear. That means that it is hard to know what the responsibility is for a volunteer, and thus also how to deepen the involvement. We started a major work to clarify these roles and responsibilities during the fall, and visualized a roadmap describing clearly for volunteers that wish to involve more deeply how that can be achieved. This was however only the start of a more long term strategic work, involving both volunteer engagement and educational support, which will need to continue during 2021. This is further elaborated in the story “Developing strategies for the future during a year when the world took a pause”.

Finally, many of the volunteers from Wikimania were English-speaking international students, on exchange or studies abroad in Sweden. Wikimania was an essentially English-speaking environment, whereas Wikimedia Sverige’s members are generally Swedish speaking, and in some cases not confident in English. That meant that it was hard for many of the volunteers to engage in the chapter, and as a consequence, very few of them are still active volunteers today.

Detailed project overview

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Below all the projects belonging to the program will be briefly explained and the current status presented. Synergies between the projects will be described. A few selected stories have been presented more in depth as case studies above.

For all the projects, we will state whether they are small, medium or large. In this context, a small project is defined as one where the total budget is less than 100,000 SEK (about 12,500 USD); a medium sized project is defined as one where the total budget is between 100,000 SEK and 300,000 SEK (12,500 to about 37,500 USD); finally, a large project is defined as one where the total budget exceeds 300,000 SEK (about 37,500 USD).

We are also outlining where the project will have an impact in the Wikimedia universe and who we are partnering with to deliver the best possible result.

New for this year is that we also have information about the importance of each project., e.g. if the project is core, essential, one-off or experimental. In this context, a project is considered to be core if it is part of our identity as an organization. The project will be organized even if impact is less in the short term and will only be cancelled after a consensus has been reached amongst our community. A project is essential if it actively contributes to one or many of the goals that have been outlined for the year or the long term strategy. Most projects should belong here. A project that is considered a one-off is organized because it is delivering a specific benefit to the organization but it is unlikely that we will repeat it in its current form. The type of project might continue over the years, but the content will intentionally change significantly over time. The experimental projects are testing a new idea, method or technology and are often externally financed. They might be a one-off or if successful become an essential project.

Community Support 2020

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What is the project: The project focuses on supporting the Wikimedia volunteer community in various ways. The chapter provides a technology pool, in which members and users on the platform can borrow cameras, scanners and other technical equipment; financial support is also provided to organize events (during the COVID-19 pandemic only virtually), acquire literature, obtain media accreditation to take photos, and so on.

What’s been done: Large parts of the project had to be reorganized due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most events were cancelled, meaning that we could not support media accreditation. We could not fund any offline initiatives and instead we tried to focus on what could be done digitally, encouraging activities compatible with the COVID-19 recommendations and regulations. This was done through communication efforts on the Wikimedia projects and in social media and blog posts. Still, the goals of this project were heavily affected by the limitations from the pandemic.

Later on in the fall, during a relaxation period of the pandemic, we were able to support a few volunteers with accreditation for photography, such as during soccer games.

What’s next: We will make a more strategic overview over the project. We will look into how we can scale it up, how we can increase the usage of tools and support and what we can do to give support in situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The project has been highly practical in its nature, but we believe that there is potential for more strategic efforts as well.

Size of project: Medium

Project impact: Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, Wikisource

Importance: Core

Partners: N/A

Link to the project: Stöd till gemenskapen 2020

Development Support 2020

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What is the project: The project focused on giving technical (development) support to the Swedish-speaking volunteer community by solving technical problems that they have asked us to work on. 2020 is the third year we worked on the community wishlist. This year we focused on finalizing and expanding the development work we have initiated, developing a structure and routine for how we can ensure the maintenance of what is developed. The maintenance routine also informed the development work in other parts of the organization.

What’s been done: In 2020 we completed the work on one of the requests from the 2019 wishlist: activating interactive maps in infoboxes. We also developed a draft for a guideline on software maintenance (Swedish). This guideline will serve as a basis for determining how and for how long we should maintain the tools and applications we have developed (across the organisation).

What's next: Since community engagement with our wishlists was limited in 2021 we will investigate other ways of identifying technical community needs which could be worked on. The Maintenance guideline drafted in 2020 will be presented to the affected parties in order to be finalised. In addition a clear and maintainable overview of what tools we are currently supporting (incl. for how long and at what level) will be produced.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Medium

Project impact: Wikipedia, MediaWiki

Importance: Essential

Partners: Wikimedia community

Link to the project: Utvecklingsstöd 2020

Wiki Loves 2020

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What is the project: The Wiki Loves project consists of the different Wiki Loves-campaigns we are running. In 2020, we are participating in two Wiki Loves-campaigns: Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments, the former focusing on documenting natural heritage, the latter on cultural heritage. The organization of the projects includes coordination, communication and responding to questions.

What’s been done: We ran the Wiki Loves Earth campaign in May. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to rethink our communication and several parts of the setup, in order to make it safe and compatible with recommendations and regulations. In our communication, we encouraged visits to the closest natural heritage sites, sites in one’s direct vicinity. In order to make it easier to identify the closest sites, we uploaded more data about protected natural sites in Sweden. We also developed a new map tool, showing all national parks, natural reserves, biosphere reserves and natural monuments; and whether these sites already had a photo, or not. The tool got used more than we expected, and contributed to the fact that we this year had three times as many photos than last year.

In September we ran Wiki Loves Monuments 2020. This is the second large Wiki Loves campaign we are running during the year. We had however a relatively limited capacity for the campaign this year, meaning that there was relatively little innovation. 65 participants contributed with almost 2,000 photos.

What’s next: We started preparations for a new Wiki Loves campaign, with the working title “Wiki Loves Hembygd”. The campaign will focus on local history, and probably take place in 2021.

Size of project: Small

Project impact: Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata

Importance: Experimental

Partners: Unesco Sverige, ArbetSam

Link to the project: Wiki Loves 2020

A Community for Everybody 2020

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What is the project: The project aims to increase diversity within the community and on the Wikimedia platforms, in terms of both content and contributors. The main part of the project in 2020 is the annual WikiGap campaign, that we are running together with the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Swedish embassies and Wikimedia affiliates across the world. During 2020 we aimed to engage more international partners in the coordination, e.g. aid organizations and UN agencies. We supported a number of local WikiGap events with partners at universities.

What’s been done: We initiated the WikiGap campaign in March, and held an event in Gothenburg together with the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We coordinated the global campaign, with events being planned in some 40–50 countries across the world, events that in many cases however were affected by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For the second time we organized the WikiGap Challenge, an online challenge with a global scope, aiming to increase the number of articles about women on Wikipedia. 72 competitors created or improved 3,224 articles, more than 2,500 Wikidata objects and made edits in 38 languages. This year, we gave bonus points for articles on women human rights activists from a list provided by UN Human Rights. 338 articles were created about the 20 women on the list, in 32 different languages.

We started compiling a set of case studies together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with the aim of gathering best practices and developing material that can be used by embassies and affiliates for upcoming campaigns, to innovate and carry out even more efficient and successful campaigns. The finalization of these case studies had to be postponed due to the pandemic. Instead, we started compiling guidance for virtual events in 2021.

We have also initiated discussions with UNFPA – with whom we finalized a partnership in late May – and several other organizations on future involvement in the WikiGap Campaign.

What’s next: Preparations for the 2021 WikiGap campaign, and especially means and methods for virtual WikiGap events.

Size of project: Medium

Project impact: Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons

Importance: Core

Partners: Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Swedish embassies, Wikimedia affiliates across the world, UN Human Rights, United Nations Population Fund, Gothenburg University

Link to the project: En gemenskap för alla 2020


Enabling

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  Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (end of the year) Comments
Enabling E.1 For the association to work competently the office staff shall be given the opportunity to develop their skills in relevant fields and the members of the board shall strive to develop their competences. 2/9 board members and 4/9 staff members 3 out of 9 board members

5 out of 9 staff members

Half of the team took advantage of developing their skills through external courses/training. However, all staff members received a number of in-house training opportunities.
E.2 To strengthen the transparency of the organisation and to offer insights to the international Wikimedia movement the members of the board or office staff shall participate in at least 5 international Wikimedia events and on a monthly basis update international newsletters[11] and key wikiportals etc. 11 int. events and 12 newsletters 12 int. events out of 5

12 newsletters out of 12

Nearly all of the larger Wikimedia events were cancelled for the year. However, a large number of digital events around the implementation of the 2030-strategy and around education allowed us to surpass the goal. We have on a monthly basis published our GLAM reports in This Month in GLAM.
E.3.1 To ensure organizational stability the chapter shall work towards broad and sustainable funding where no donor exceeds 50 %, a 100 % increase in membership from the 31 December previous year, increase volunteer involvement by 30 % compared to the total amount for the previous calendar year. The Wikimedia Foundation was the largest funder, responsible for 50.0% of the funding. The second largest source of income was the Culture Foundation of the Swedish Postcode Lottery at 26.0%. 504 out of 904 members. 96 out of 60 volunteers. The Wikimedia Foundation is the largest funder, responsible for 57.7% of the funding. The second largest source of income is the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority at 18.3%.

496 out of 1,008 members.

70 out of 125 volunteers

WMF’s part of our funding increased due to two grants on top of the Annual Plan Grant. The distribution of funding does not take in-kind donations into account.

Most of the volunteer involvement occurred through our WikiGap activities and with work around the Open Educational Resources network we have been working with. However, the international WikiGap events organized by volunteers are not included here as we are lacking data. We had fewer volunteers this year than in 2019, the year when we had Wikimania, and because of COVID-19 preventing us from engaging volunteers with organizing our events. However, we did end up significantly increasing the number of volunteers compared to 2018.

E.3.2 To ensure organizational stability the chapter shall actively work to increase the amount of overlapping competencies in business-critical areas. Fulfilled the goal. Fulfilled the goal.
Efforts include improved documentation around finances, usage of our wiki and information about our new tools. We have continued our efforts to organize small working groups at the office instead of delegating the responsibilities to one person and on documenting the work on Phabricator.

The chapter aims to be a relevant actor for years to come and is actively working towards building the organizational capacity needed for long term activities and commitments. We need to be a good employer, a strong partner, and a well functioning democratic and transparent membership organization with a close cooperation with a strong volunteer community. The chapter is also intending to not be an isolated player but be actively involved in the international movement.

These intentions demand projects that are more long term oriented and strategic. The projects in this program therefore contribute only marginally to content production in a given year, but over time will ensure the success and sustainability of all our activities.

Increasing competence

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To be able to develop skills in relevant fields board and staff members shall be given the opportunity to develop their skills. More than half of the staff members have participated in different types of trainings this year, a few at multiple ones. The work with developing educational material for new volunteers and members to easier use our tools and join our projects has continued.

As Wikimedia Sverige intends to grow in the coming years we see a great need to ensure that we ongoingly identify and take notice of suitable board members, potential new staff members, and volunteers who have capacity to take leadership roles in different initiatives. We are in the process of developing a more comprehensive set of training materials for both volunteers and staff. We are also planning for more internal capacity building with staff members sharing their expertise with their colleagues.

Being transparent

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Ensuring that our work is transparent is core to how we plan our projects and day-to-day work. Transparency is inherently valuable as more people can give feedback, point out problems, suggest solutions and in other ways contribute.

However, working in such a transparent manner is something that takes a bit of getting used to for new team members, new volunteers, consultants and external partners. It also comes with an increased cost to ensure that all documentation is understandable, summarized and presented in the different places where our members might expect to find it. Simply making materials available without ensuring that it is understandable, and discoverable, is arguably a false transparency.

While acknowledging the issues, our conclusion is that the value of transparency is much higher than the associated cost and we worked actively during the year to increase our transparency even further. The aim for transparency affects many of the choices regarding what tools we use and it is also something that has to be done while respecting privacy.

To further improve our work in this area quarterly reviews by the ED and COO have been instigated in 2020. During these reviews we ensure that all content has been uploaded and shared as planned and that the financial information etc. is up to date.

Improve organizational quality

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For the chapter to continue to improve its quality and efficiency we worked to keep our broad and sustainable funding, with the aim of no donor exceeding 50%, and to find new financial options, including a long term increase in paid memberships and donations. We also continued our work to increase volunteer involvement in the work done by the chapter, which we believe can help ensure more innovative projects and that we can deliver high quality projects at a limited cost.

Our work to secure funding from external grants has continued in 2020. We changed our approach this year with a focus on large project grants and with new staff members leading the work on some of the applications as we identified a significant risk in this area being the dependencies on individuals. We have secured two large grants from Wikimedia Foundation, one for the hub work and one to extend our reserves, and one large external project grant that has the potential to become a multi-year grant. We also joined a few other grant applications that other organizations were developing in a supporting role, and a few of these were successful. We currently have funding secured, at our current size, into the begining of 2022.

Significant investments will be made this year into establishing a donor based fundraising model through experiments with Face2Face campaigns, social media campaigns and telephone fundraising. The first initial tests took place in September-December 2020. Based on the experience gained we hope to significantly scale the efforts in 2021 and 2022 with the hope that it will cover a significant part of our yearly budget from then on.

Our volunteer community has been supportive and active in 2020. In addition to our volunteer run board of trustees we have had 70 volunteers helping us with our projects in different ways (not including the volunteers involved in the WikiGap events outside of Sweden). The number of volunteers was lower than in 2019 as that number was inflated due to the Wikimania 2019 conference, but significantly higher than 2018. This is positive as COVID-19 limited the type of activities we could have organized this year. We are working hard to ensure that this positive trend will continue.

Story: Improved onboarding for new staff members

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In this Story we are focusing on how we have developed our capabilities as an employer to onboard new staff at a higher frequency than before. These targeted efforts will allow us to scale the team faster when funding is secured.

Wikimedia Sverige had significant funding secured in 2019 which was to be used in 2020. Because of this the association started the year with hiring a number of new staff members and significantly increased the team size. The entire process worked fairly well as a lot of effort had been invested in 2019 to prepare for a larger team. With many new staff members joining the team and sharing their thoughts, ideas and insights a lot of the material, methods and process continued to be developed. We especially invested time into improving documentation around financial routines and the tools we use. To reduce the issues and stress we also offered more hands-on support to the new team members. To that end more current staff members were given clearer responsibilities to guide the new staff members through the first few weeks.

The board and leadership also worked on simplification of policies as this was deemed important to provide a deeper understanding of the organization for both new staff members and volunteers.

Development of staff training material was initiated to be able to quickly onboard more staff in the future (see also #Story: Capacity building through education). For the fundraising staff entirely new onboarding material and procedures were developed. This will allow us to quickly hire and deploy new fundraising teams across the country.

The work done in 2019-2020 will allow Wikimedia Sverige to continue scaling the staff size, at a high speed, as soon as funding is secured.

Story: Creating a modular educational structure

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In this Story we are focusing on the process of developing training modules to educate members, staff and volunteers. This modular educational structure will both make it easier for people to join our organization and the Wikimedia movement, and for us to more efficiently train more people than ever before.

A core focus for Wikimedia Sverige, as well as for the Wikimedia movement, is capacity building. Internally, as well as externally. The situation following the COVID-19 pandemic made it very clear that we cannot depend on physical events for education and training, but have to create great educational material for online consumption.

Therefore, we set out to create a new educational system to function across our entire organization, providing possibilities for both internal and external training. A set of modules were created, that can be adapted and combined into different sets of courses.

A challenge following this work is which online platform to choose, that can satisfy the needs for both pedagogical and ideological goals. In 2020, the first drafts of courses were created using the Programs and Events Dashboard, using both our own material and the training modules provided by the platform. However, the platform does not fulfill all the needs of the organization, and the final platform is yet to be decided. One aspect of that is if we should also implement a Learning Management System, keeping track of the participants and statistics that take our training.

The content of all our courses will be closely knit to almost every part of the organization. From how to educate a new member on what we do and who we are, to a volunteer interested in Wikimedia Commons and copyright, to a group of librarians participating in #1lib1ref, to someone looking for an instruction video on how to edit Wikipedia.

As the Wikimedia Sverige fundraising work was upscaled during 2020, four new employees were hired to conduct Face2face fundraising. These employees had an onboarding program developed specifically for them, formulating new educational materials for newly hired. A handbook was created as a part of this training, containing new aspects of our organizational work such as how to handle hatred or violence in our working environment.

An important aspect of this training material was how to formulate what was taught, as the employees themselves were going to communicate the essence of the organization without having been a part of it before. This was an excellent opportunity to find the core of who we are and teaching it to others. It might be a little difficult to boil down what we do to its core, and this was helpful in that aspect.

Through the work in 2020 a foundation now exists for our modular educational approach and we are getting ready to put it to the test with new volunteers, interns and staff in the coming year. This strategy will also be an integral part of our planned training across the movement around different aspects of content partnerships as well as in Sweden where we need to provide a solid foundation for volunteers joining our organization working on different things, in different parts of the country.

Story: Passing the threshold

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In this Story we are focusing on the expansion of our team while still keeping the quintessence of what we are and how we operate as a chapter and a team. We are developing our governance documents in a different way than most organizations, we have formed our teams differently, we have allowed a lot of independence for staff members, we have focused on finding the best possible staff regardless of where they live and we have started to engage external expertise when needed.

Previously Wikimedia Sverige’s team has been intentionally limited to a maximum of 9 staff members. The reason is that after 10 employees an organization in Sweden has to adhere to a number of more stringent rules as an employer, with more policies, rules and procedures that need to be formalized. Now, however, we have reached a level of maturity that has allowed us to grow beyond this previously set limit. For a few months in 2020 we reached a total of 16 staff members.

To prepare and uphold this higher level of organizational maturity, while still staying nimble and innovative, is a challenge. A lot of thinking and planning has gone into preparing for this change. A few important choices were made to keep the core of the organizational culture through these changes:

  1. Whenever new policies are adopted the entire staff are invited for a 1-2 hour long session to scrutinize the near-ready text and crowdsource it to improve the policy. The thinking is that the entire staff is supposed to follow the policies and therefore must fully understand, support and be willing to defend the policies. This is crucial if the organization is to continue scaling further with new staff members joining and possibly criticizing the often different and unique ways we do things. The policies are intentionally kept short and the non-core parts have been moved to supporting documents. This makes the organization less rigid and the policies easier to understand and remember. This insight is something that the board has repeatedly pushed for.
  2. Within the organization different teams have been formed around different activities. These teams have on purpose been broken up over time and re-formed in new constellations for other activities. This ensures that different team members contribute with their expertise in different activities, the team members continuously learn from each other, no ‘cliques’ form and experimentation is continuously maintained. When scaling further the intention is to form teams of triads, that will shift in composition over time.
  3. As soon as the main goals have been reached in an area, staff members are encouraged to form new partnerships, expand projects and look for external opportunities. This keeps the staff interested in their work as they can co-create and own an area. The work does not get repetitive if the staff member does not choose so (which is a possibility as a good project does not necessarily have to change massively every year). This creates a lot of extra work for management to change and adjust budgets and yearly plans but the benefits outweigh the costs.
  4. As an Internet-born organization we have worked to create opportunities for staff to work remotely over the last few years. We have been very successful in this regard and many of our current staff and contractors are working from multiple different locations in Sweden and internationally. This was further accentuated this year due to COVID-19. Our intention to support the wider movement around content partnerships and the growth in staff needed for it means that we have investigated hiring internationally; work has therefore also been initiated to translate the material and policies needed for this to happen.
  5. We have initiated work to engage HR consultants to support the leadership with expertise if the increase in staff continues further and even stricter regulations start applying to our workplace.

Story: Experimenting with new ways to fundraise locally

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In this Story we are focusing on how we in 2020 have prepared and experimented in order to improve the local fundraising capabilities. The funds gained in Sweden would allow us to think more long-term about our different initiatives and further support the international movement.

Sweden is a wealthy country and Wikimedia Sverige has worked for the last 10 years to self-fund a large part of our activities. Nearly all of the funds collected has been through project grants. This has been successful over the years and has allowed us to increase our staff size to a total of 16 staff members in 2020, of which around half are funded by local means. However, project grants are, by the very definition, limited in time and with a set focus. This means that to maintain tools or initiatives over time we have had to look into different alternatives for funding. We have tried to identify funders that would be willing to cover our general operating expenses but have so far fallen short.

In 2019 we received funding from WMF to prepare our organization for a larger global role around content partnerships. However, the implementation of the next steps in this role are postponed until 2021 due to COVID-19 and we have instead received support to, amongst other things, develop our local fundraising capacities. Significant efforts to improve the information directed towards donors took place. Important insights were gained from the Swedish Fundraising Association Giva Sverige in this regard. There was also a larger team at Wikimedia Sverige involved in the preparations both with communication materials but also with direct work with donors and to develop grant applications etc.

During 2020 we activated different payment options, such as Direct Debit and the added fundraising options to our Facebook presence. The chapter also adjusted the cost of an organizational membership to promote it as a funding option.

In the beginning of 2020 a new staff member, Jenny Brandt, joined our team. She brought in multi-year expertise in leading Face2Face (F2F) fundraising (also known as street fundraising) for a number of Swedish NGOs. A team of 4 part time employees were hired to work with the F2F campaign in September-December 2020.

During this time we experimented with how to organize the team, who to approach, what messaging to use, how to utilize different locations in the best way possible and investigating the tools and other resources available and possible to use for us. The goal was to identify the most effective fundraising strategies in order to scale up the work in 2021/2022. Between May and December we regularly met and discussed with WMF’s advancement team about their experience with fundraising to learn from their past experience. This has been valuable for us in moving forwards with our plans.

F2F campaigns have, to the best of our knowledge, not been used at scale by any Wikimedia affiliate to date. We are curious to see if this approach can be developed into another stream of funding for the movement and allow affiliates across the world to be more bold and ambitious in their plans. As such we have dedicated resources to prepare reports in English about our efforts and share them with other affiliates.

In September the outdoor F2F campaign was active, as the spread of COVID-19 was reduced. The team had clear instructions and training on how to minimize risks. When the amount of infection increased during Autumn we cancelled the outdoor F2F campaign. The campaign staff instead started working on a quickly organized telephone fundraising where we started experimenting with contacting companies about supporting the Wikimedia movement.

We also experimented with a social media campaign to attract donations. An analysis will be conducted in 2021 on how social media campaigns could be organized in the future.

Overall, these exploratory efforts have laid the foundation for a set of more expansive campaigns in 2021 and onwards and we have increased our fundraising budget for the coming year accordingly.

Story: Developing strategies for the future during a year when the world took a pause

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In this Story we are focusing on how Wikimedia Sverige took advantage of a very special year, when the amount of events and travels were reduced, to think long term and focus on strategic work in relation to global and local change.

What are our common visions? Where do we aim, as a movement and as an organization? These are questions that come to us from time to time.

For Wikimedia Sverige, we had a strategy covering the years 2016-2020. When that time period was about to end, there was a need to take our strategic work further. Several influences came to affect this work. For one, we saw the new strategic recommendations from Wikimedia Foundation being formed. We also have the UN Sustainable Development Goals, that strive to unite the world in creating a better society for all, which we had as a theme during the international conference Wikimania 2019 we hosted in Stockholm.

The organization has developed a lot since the last four year strategy was adopted. We have built a stronger organization with more staff, recruited more association members and found strategies to engage and educate them. We have continuously worked to become a thematic hub for content partnerships over the last two years. The time was ripe to develop a strategy for the coming years.

An important aspect of forming a new strategy was the involvement of members in the process. The first decision in this process was made by the Wikimedia Sverige board, stating that the new strategy would be adopted by the members during the Annual meeting of 2021. Time and effort was also put into creating a process that would allow the members to contribute as much as possible.

During 2020, members could apply to be a part of strategic groups connected to the four strategic areas of the organization: Access, Use, Community and Enabling. During the fall, these groups were joined by board members and started to work together to form the focus of each strategic area. Just before Christmas, the groups handed in their suggestions for topics for the board to compose into a first draft.

Throughout the year, the foundation was also laid to form the strategic work for how Wikimedia Sverige will work with volunteers and with education. Following the organizational strategy, a volunteer strategy and an educational strategy, respectively, will be formulated. The work started on these strategies during 2020, and will continue in 2021.

These four strategic documents will form a strong platform for Wikimedia Sverige to continue developing into an even stronger organization over years to come.

Story: Digital events and ways of working

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In this Story we are focusing on how digital changes to internal processes and meetings were introduced as a result of COVID-19 and how this turned out and what will be useful post-pandemic.

As a result of COVID-19 Wikimedia Sverige has had, like so many organisations, to switch over to using more purely digital workflows. While this was a change which we had initiated already before the pandemic the emerging situation forced us to both fast track some of these changes as well as making some processes digital which we had not intended on making digital at all.

The most significant change was that Wikimedia Sverige’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) took place fully online for the first time. Limited digital participation has been possible in previous years but voting had not been possible for these participants. Making changes to such a central process as the AGM requires due diligence and to ensure this effort had the most benefit we ensured both our pre-meeting analysis, event planning and our post-mortem were shared in an easily re-usable format. The participant evaluation showed that the vast majority of participants enjoyed the format and found it suitable for the purpose, many highlighted how going digital made attendance easier. The negatives were focused on the social aspects that were lost when not meeting in person. Having the meeting be digital also allowed us to record it so that it could also be accessed asynchronously, allowing for greater transparency.

Another central process which changed to fully digital were the meetings of the Board of Wikimedia Sverige. This resulted in more frequent, but shorter, meetings. As a result of the changed format, more supporting documents were formally prepared by Wikimedia Sverige staff and shared in advance of these meetings. A benefit has been that some of these documents could also be shared publicly, allowing for more transparency into the workings and processes of the organisation. The new meeting format has been considered successful by the board as they have been able to work effectively during a year where a lot of important decisions have been made. The negative impact has mainly been on the lost social aspect of the meetings.

One of the digitalisation tasks being fast tracked was establishing a routine and supplier for digital signing of documents and digital submission of receipts for reimbursement. These two changes have reduced the number of staff needing to work from the offices, and the frequency by which they need to be in the office. They have also eliminated a lot of the delays and risks associated with sending important documents via post, this is especially true for time sensitive board documents which used to be sent on a tour around Sweden. We continue to identify more paper based processes which we can make digital instead.

Having switched all internal meetings to be fully remote has allowed us to identify multiple issues both technical (such as sound quality) and around meetings styles which had previously been endured by remote staff without fully impacting the remaining staff. Staff who were already remote before the pandemic have in fact highlighted both how much better the meetings work and how they are more fair and equal now that everyone is participating on equal terms.

During the pandemic we have both participated in, and hosted, digital events, workshops and conferences. While many of the more formal parts of these have worked fine, and even benefited from the digital change (ease of access, ease by which results could be disseminated and ease by which developed materials could be reused) the informal parts such as the conference mingle and spontaneous discussions between participants between sessions have been harder to recreate. Of particular note however are two events we organised or prepared during the year, Wikipedia day 2020 and the Wikipedia 20 celebration which, together with the weekly office fika, experimented with recreating the more social aspects of offline events.

It is important to keep in mind that even when things return to normal many of the digital transitions which have been made will remain integrated parts of how we now work. At the same time as some other meetings and events move offline again we need to ensure it is not done at an undue cost to the benefits the digital alternatives brought in transparency, fairness, ease of access and reusability.

Story: Maintenance, maintenance, maintenance

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In this Story we are focusing on the importance to plan for maintenance when developing tools and the preparatory work we have done in advance of organizing a larger developer team.

Continuous maintenance of digital tools, services, libraries and platforms is important. One might assume that this won’t be a problem until something actually breaks, but uncertainty about if something will be supported creates real costs already before that. It is also a fact that things which are not maintained slowly but surely deteriorate until they break.

Wikimedia Sverige has been building, supporting and sometimes hosting technical tools since before it had staff. As the organisation grew and time limited project based funding became more prevalent, especially for technical projects, tools were often produced without there being a natural project to inherit responsibility for it once the funding ran out. Without clear responsibilities, and allocated funding, the maintenance of such tools, when it did happen, have often been ad-hoc upon an internal need for them or a requested fix from the community. But the larger part of the community is not likely to get in touch when they have an issue with a tool which they use, especially if the experience has just deteriorated rather than if it has stopped working altogether. Additionally we have users, and sometimes institutional partners, who might be hesitant to incorporate a new tool into their workflow without assurances that it will remain viable for at least some predetermined amount of time. Finally uncertainty about if something is still maintained or not makes it difficult to determine when not to put time and effort into enhancing or improving it, independently of if that effort is volunteer or staff based.

For these reasons Wikimedia Sverige invested time into developing a first draft of a maintenance guideline meant to, in addition to the issues raised above: Give an indication of the resources needed for maintaining old tools, securing budgeting for this and weighing this into the decision of whether to commission a new tool while highlighting the long term costs of implementing a quick and dirty solution. Setting up routines for proactive maintenance of tools and for the discovery and addressing of security issues, in both cases handling such before they become an issue for the end-user. Making it clear to end-users how long a tool is being maintained and whether improvements, suggestions and bug reports are still worth the effort. Improving community trust in our projects and tools by being transparent, from the start, about our long term intentions for a tool. And finally, when we abandon a tool, to do this in such a way that the community has a chance of adopting it if they so desire or at the very least being explicit about it no longer being maintained and that it is used at the users own risk.

We wanted to do this in such a way that it created a framework to give guidance in individual cases while still being flexible enough to handle special cases. We also wanted to have this basis in place in advance of the launch of a thematic hub which will drastically increase both the number of newly developed tools and adopted tools and the incurred long term maintenance costs.

While a first draft now exists it still needs to be finalized with input from affected parties, internal and external after which a thorough inventory of the tools we have been involved in developing and setting a maintenance level for each of these.

Fail fest: A high cost from constant change

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In this Fail fest we describe the challenges we have had with adjusting the organization to a constantly changing context.

The Wikimedia movement's new global strategy has created a lot of interesting opportunities for affiliates, including Wikimedia Sverige, to find new roles and expand influence and capabilities. As an active participant in developing the strategy (see also #Story: Developing strategies for the future during a year when the world took a pause) Wikimedia Sverige had decided to position ourselves and prepare for the new identified opportunities. In fact we started our involvement with the strategy as far back as 2017. We decided to aim to become a thematic hub and support partnership development in the movement, an area we had actively worked internationally on since 2015.

Going into this change process we knew that a lot of things would be in flux and that things could change quickly. We did, however, view this as an opportunity to support the wider movement by acting as something of a guinea pig and try to share our experience and thoughts and develop new methods to reduce the amount of work for other affiliates.

Even though we walked into the process with our eyes open, we did not expect the significant delays, the severity of the issues, the many uncertainties and the extent of the constant changes that we would have to adjust to throughout the entire year. Many of the documents, processes and methods we developed had to be partly or completely reworked more than once during this one year period. However, in the end, the process was valuable to refine our thinking, to highlight opportunities for the movement and more.

Despite our best efforts we are going into 2021 with significant uncertainties and unclarities remaining. That said, we are still very optimistic about the future for our organization’s development and role within the Wikimedia movement.

Detailed project overview

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Below all the projects belonging to the program will be briefly explained and the current status presented. Synergies between the projects will be described. A few selected stories have been presented more in depth as case studies above.

For all the projects, we will state whether they are small, medium or large. In this context, a small project is defined as one where the total budget is less than 100,000 SEK (about 12,500 USD); a medium sized project is defined as one where the total budget is between 100,000 SEK and 300,000 SEK (12,500 to about 37,500 USD); finally, a large project is defined as one where the total budget exceeds 300,000 SEK (about 37,500 USD).

We are also outlining where the project will have an impact in the Wikimedia universe and who we are partnering with to deliver the best possible result.

New for this year is that we also have information about the importance of each project., e.g. if the project is core, essential, one-off or experimental. In this context, a project is considered to be core if it is part of our identity as an organization. The project will be organized even if impact is less in the short term and will only be cancelled after a consensus has been reached amongst our community. A project is essential if it actively contributes to one or many of the goals that have been outlined for the year or the long term strategy. Most projects should belong here. A project that is considered a one-off is organized because it is delivering a specific benefit to the organization but it is unlikely that we will repeat it in its current form. The type of project might continue over the years, but the content will intentionally change significantly over time. The experimental projects are testing a new idea, method or technology and are often externally financed. They might be a one-off or if successful become an essential project.

Organizational Development 2020

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What is the project: This project aimed to improve the functioning of the organization and the efficiency of our process and methods. Identified bottlenecks were improved upon through targeted activities. This project had a significant overlap with the project Tools for partnerships 2019 – Blueprinting as that project had funds that could be used to prepare the organization to scale and work internationally. In 2020 we worked to improve, clarify and update our documentation and policies. We also initiated the preparations on a few new policies identified that had been identified as missing. We also worked to continue the process of simplifying our IT environment to make it more maintainable.

What’s been done: As planned most of the work to improve the organization’s operations was done as part of the project Tools for Partnerships 2019 – Blueprinting. The main focus of this project was to improve policies and documentation and to ensure that staff had the opportunity to continuously develop themselves at work, both with external training, but also in-house training about different aspects of our work. We also initiated the work with developing a new 4-year strategy for association with the help from a large number of volunteers. Furthermore, we activated new payments options for donors and members.

What's next: The work to improve and update our policies will continue and we will continue to work on preparing the 4-year strategy to be adopted at the Annual General Meeting in 2021. The work will also include continued planning for crises and the development of a crisis exercise.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Importance: Core

Project impact: Phabricator, Meta

Partners: N/A

Link to the project: Organisationsutveckling 2020

Tools for Partnerships 2019 – Blueprinting

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What is the project: This project was aimed at exploring how Wikimedia Sverige could become a Thematic hub and to prepare the organization to scale accordingly. The expectation was that the project would continue with the project Tools for Partnerships 2020. In 2020 we prepared for a quick increase of our staff and to participate in a number of events across the world to discuss what a hub is and what it could be. We also developed a technical direction and a plan for how the organization would look like with a more international focus and with a larger team.

What’s been done: We developed supporting material for an expanded team with more well documented routines, a handbook, new policies for a larger team with more people working outside of the office etc. We also hired an organizational strategist, David Haskiya, to support this organizational change. We investigated how to structure the hiring process for developers to be able to improve the speed of new hires. We planned to engage an HR consultant to be able to scale the team in a good and timely way – but in the end we did not engage them as the timeline was delayed for a year due to COVID-19. We also provided inputs to the European Commission around different future calls for digitization projects and have continued the work with datasets of the world’s GLAM institutions (after the FindingGLAMs 2018 project officially ended).

Significant efforts went into developing a clear technical direction for the team, but when the second step of the project – which was expected to receive significantly more in funding – was delayed for a year due to COVID-19, we had to develop a number of different versions of an agreement with our partners at the Wikimedia Foundation. This agreement focused on the period July 2020 to June 2021 and funds the new project Tools for Partnerships 2020.

What's next: We will finalize a white paper outlining the experience we had from the preparatory work to date and the final report for the project.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Large

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: Wikimedia Foundation (planning), Wikimedia Deutschland (technology), Wikimedia affiliates (feedback and activities)

Link to the project: Verktyg_för_partnerskap_2019_–_Blueprinting

Tools for Partnerships 2020

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What is the project: This is the continuation of the project Tools for Partnerships 2019 – Blueprinting. The project starts in July 2020 and will continue the work to prepare for the hub. The activation of the hub was delayed due to COVID-19 and its effect on fundraising.

2020: The project will focus on building capacity in the Movement and institutions for high quality content contributions, WMSE will illustrate SDC opportunities and mentor a cohort working with SDC, resulting in the addition of 250,000 new statements. This activity will inform an update to WMSE’s technical scope by 31 March 2021 and a best practices section for batch uploads on Meta by 30 June 2021. We will also help institutions move towards Open Access for cultural heritage, and will develop an implementation toolkit and work with local partners to organise workshops in 5 countries, with a minimum of 50 participating institutions. Furthermore, the project will allow WMSE to expand the work in fundraising, both including grant application but also to initiate a first Face2Face fundraising campaign.

What’s been done: Continuous preparation of the organization's ability to scale internationally were done. Documentation was improved and scalable tools and solutions were identified.

We had numerous discussions with Wikimedia Foundation and other Wikimedia affiliates about the role of the hub and their needs and how the hub could become a valuable service for them.

We prepared a plan for the batch edits of the 250,000 statements and of the SDC events.

The first experimental fundraising campaigns were organized during the year. It included preparation first of all for a Face2Face campaign, but due to a rise in COVID-19 cases the practical implementation had to be postponed after only a short period of activities outdoors. The staff switched focus to conducting fundraising over phone targeting companies in the IT sector and adjacent fields and informing them about the existence of Wikimedia Sverige and about sponsorship opportunities. We also developed a few large applications

What's next: If funding is secured for the hub in 2021 will refocus a majority of the staff towards the establishment of the hub. We will also relaunch our fundraising efforts in Sweden. Depending on the size of the grant we will also start hiring internationally for different positions.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Large

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: Wikipedia

Partners: Wikimedia Foundation (planning), Wikimedia Deutschland (technology), Wikimedia affiliates (feedback and activities)

Link to the project: Verktyg_för_partnerskap_2020

Exchange of Experiences 2020

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What is the project: This project focused on ensuring that we shared our experiences and learnt from other affiliates through available events and platforms. To that end we took part in international Wikimedia events to build capacity and stayed committed to supporting the emerging Wikimedia Northern Europe collaboration. As part of this project we also investigated what an exchange program between Wikimedia affiliates could look like. The work to improve documentation and supporting material for Wikimania was done as part of this project.

What’s been done: We participated in workshop meetings around the strategic recommendations for the Wikimedia movement. We also shared our experience with organizing Wikimania with the ESEAP team until it was decided that the conference would be postponed until 2021. We started developing a concept for a cross-European exchange program.

One of our staff members moved to Norway's capital Oslo and we rented a desk at Wikimedia Norway's office to increase the exchange between our two organizations. This was obviously limited due to the COVID-19 lockdown of Oslo.

What's next: We will continue supporting the ESEAP team by sharing our experience from hosting Wikimania when their planning continues.

The work to establish an exchange program between European affiliates will continue. We hope to work together with 4 or 5 other affiliates to further develop the exchange program during 2021 for a launch in 2022.

The WikiNEM event will receive our support if WMNO decides to organize it in 2021.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Importance: Core

Project impact: Meta

Partners: Wikimedia affiliates

Link to the project: Erfarenhetsutbyte 2020

Association Involvement 2020

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What is the project: The project aims to increase the number of members and volunteers, and identify what support is needed from the association to make volunteer engagement sustainable. In 2020, the adoption of a new volunteer strategy for engagement is a large part of the project. The strategy will guide the work to significantly scale up engagement. Increased efforts around communications, such as our newsletter will take place. The project also includes the organization of the Wikipedia Day, the Annual General Meeting (AGM) and the Membership Meetings.

What’s been done: The AGM was carried through in April; due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was held digitally for the first time. To prepare both the association and the members for a digital annual meeting, we developed video instructions, written instructions, wrote procedural rules and other supporting material to make sure that the event went smoothly. Almost 40 people took part in the meeting, including quite a few who had never participated before, which was exciting. We carried out an ambitious evaluation of the AGM, as it was the first time it was held digitally, and identified what can be done better next time. We translated the supporting material into English to allow for easy reuse of our sister organizations and other NGOs across the world.

We were able to successfully carry out the AGM, but we had to postpone the annual Wikipedia Day which we usually organize in connection to the AGM. The Wikipedia Day was to take place at the National Library, but was turned into a virtual event on 21 November. The event was streamed via Youtube and Facebook, and had a high turnout. Speakers represented the National Museum, Finnish Public Service, Datastory and the Swedish Postcode Foundation. Karin Nilsson of Sweden's National Centre for Architecture and Design gave an opening speech.

We have also held several workshops to prepare for a new strategy for engagement, including an educational strategy, as a way of strengthening the association and scaling up possibilities for engagement. The work for a new overall strategy for the association was initiated, and developed by four working groups in the fall. The final part of the work with the strategy will take place in 2021, and a decision on whether to approve it or not will be taken by the AGM in 2021.

What’s next: We are continuing the work with both a volunteer and an educational strategy. The two strategies are being developed in parallel so that they can support each other.

Size of project: Medium

Project impact: N/A

Importance: Core

Partners: National Library of Sweden

Link to the project: Föreningsengagemang 2020

FOSS for the Association 2020

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What is the project: Here we investigated how we could support the development of the FOSS tools that we use as an organization. Through the project we engaged consultants to solve the specific issues so that we could improve the FOSS alternatives. In 2020, having launched our WordPress website, we continued to support the development of the freely licensed theme and of missing plugins.

What’s been done: A preliminary list of missing features and plugins has been identified for our website.

What's next: In 2021 our goal is to engage developers to have the identified plugins developed and released for other actors to use.

Size of project (small/medium/large): Small

Importance: Experimental

Project impact: -

Partners: -

Link to the project: FOSS för föreningen 2020

Notes

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  1. Definition: The number of participants and/or organizers of activities conducted or supported by Wikimedia Sverige who belong to underrepresented genders in the Wikimedia movement in Sweden (non-unique as we are not tracking them with names). These groups are defined as women and people identifying themselves as something other than male or female.
  2. Definition: The total number of people who have heard us talk about Wikimedia related topics through participation at events or activities, either in person or virtually (non-unique as we are not tracking them with names). Does not include reach through Social media.
  3. The Wikimedia projects mean those platforms within the Wikimedia Family that are usually called sister projects of Wikipedia:
    • Wikipedia The free encyclopedia
    • Wikimedia Commons The free media database
    • Wiktionary The free dictionary
    • Wikisource The free library
    • Wikibooks Free textbook collections
    • Wikiquote The free quote compendium
    • Wikivoyage The free travel guide
    • Wikispecies The free species directory
    • Wikiversity Free learning resources
    • Wikidata The free database
    • Meta-Wiki About the projects
    • We also include translatewiki.net.
  4. Identification can be via user names systematically connected with the institution, special user templates showing the connection to an institution, registration in a Wikiproject, or possibly through personal knowledge etc.
  5. This includes the Wikimedia projects, translatewiki.net and Wikimini, according to the principle that we train a pedagogue who uses the creation of content as a part of the pedagogical process.
  6. An organisational unit with self-governing power is included here; however, units that have been included in previous years are not.
  7. Software which is considered is MediaWiki extensions in use on the Wikimedia project or on translatewiki.net. This is in accordance with the priority order: bugs, erroneous translations, untranslated.
  8. We are counting occasions and Wikimedians as follows:
    • Only activities outside of other project related goals count. I.e. a Bot Academy focusing on cultural heritage and as part of Connected Open Heritage does not count, but an event focused on running bots but not related to a specific project count.
    • Wikimedians and advocates for free knowledge who got support count, regardless of if they used the information or not. The important part is that they asked for help/resources. I.e. people contributing to FOSS-projects count.
    • We count occasions as when someone got help from a WMSE staff member. I.e. if Volunteer 1 works for two weeks they have not gotten support, but if they send an email with some follow up questions after a week then that requires a contribution which corresponds to one occasion.
    Questions related to memberships, donations or administrative matters does not count towards the goals.
  9. With recurring meetups we are referring to some type of face-to-face meetings that are repeated over time.
  10. Underrepresented groups are here defined as:
    • women
    • contributors whose native language are different than the 10 largest Wikipedias (per 5+ editsp/month (3m avg) according to https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm) or Swedish
    • contributors 60 years or older
  11. GLAM Newsletter.

Revenues received during this six-month period

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Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

Table 2 Please 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 SEK 115,000 - 53,800 - 6,500 60,300 11,710 6,140 The expanded fundraising and member recruitment drives did not have the financial impact we had hoped for. COVID-19 meant the conditions for Face2Face fundraising changed drastically. Instead we used the time to experiment with multiple types of fundraising to be in a better position for doing a more focused drive in 2021.
Donations SEK 200,000 - 90,413 - 38,886 129,299 20,366 13,167 See above.
FDC SEK 2,950,000 - 1,720,833 - 1,757,867 3,478,700 300,399 354,236 This differs due to an amended APG Grant to increase funds for long term reserves.
Interest, misc SEK 15,000 - 256 - 3,762 4,018 1,527 409
Other grants SEK 298,920 - 0 - 0 0 30,439 0 This funding is normally made up by on-demand GLAM work which happens towards the end of the year. As we applied for a number of large project grants we decided to not take on smaller technical projects during the year. We did however work on setting up such projects for 2021.
National Library of Sweden SEK 931,000 - 794,859 - 0 794,859 94,804 80,940 Having used less of this funding in 2019, more was available for 2020. The funding we expected for two new projects did not materialize in 2020 due to delays on the funding body's side because of COVID-19.
Kulturbryggan SEK 200,000 - - - 252,244 252,244 20,366 25,686 Having used less of this funding in 2019, more has been available for 2020.
Vinnova SEK 235,120 - - - 178,610 178,610 23,942 18,188 Our applications for new projects with this funder were not successful.
Sida SEK 143,750 - 75,000 - 0 75,000 14,638 7,637 More of the funding was used in 2019.
The Culture Foundation of the Swedish Postcode Lottery SEK 500,000 - 780,595 - 0 780,595 50,915 79,488 Having used less of this funding in 2019, more has been available for 2020.
Wikimedia Foundation (special grant for Tooling for Partnerships 2019-2020) SEK 1,374,840 - 1,442,231 - 0 1,442,231 140,000 146,862 Increased due to exchange rate fluctuations.
Wikimedia Foundation (special grant for Tooling for Partnerships 2020-2021) SEK 2,315,580 - 0 - 623,686 623,686 235,796 63,510 More of this funding was postponed for 2021.
Swedish Post and Telecom Authority SEK 1,622,624 - 1,054,282 - 704,227 1,758,509 165,232 179,069 Having used less of this funding in 2019, more has been available for 2020.

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Notes:

  • Exchange rate: 1 SEK = 0.10183 USD (per 1 USD = 9.82029 SEK in APG proposal).
  • All numbers rounded to whole SEK/USD.
  • We also received in-kind donation of about 2,088 SEK (244 USD) by FSData for server hosting, 321,368 SEK (32,725 USD) by The Internet Foundation In Sweden for office space, 29,928 SEK (3,048 USD) by Google for Google Workspace for Non-profits and 900 SEK (106 USD) by The Generation for web hosting. In addition Deloitte donated a full work day of 15ish of their employees to provide organisational support through their Impact Day.
  • The original budget specifies a row for Stockholm University. Since the underlying funding comes from Vinnova it has been merged into that line.
  • The original budget specifies a row for Wikimedia Foundation (special grant for UNESCO WiR 2019-2020). Since this is a Fiscal Sponsorship it does not count towards our revenues and the row has been removed.
  • Some of this funding for Kulturbryggan and Vinnova was deferred to 2021, hence the revenue was decreased as compared with the Progress report. To avoid this confusion the Q2 values have been omitted for these entries.

Spending during this six-month period

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Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

Table 3 Please 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
Access SEK 4,448,326 - - - 2,406,440 2,406,440 452,973 245,048 54.1% This budgeted spending on this line was dominated by the upcoming Tools for Partnerships 2020/2021 project. However, the actual spending in the program was significantly reduced as the Tools for Partnerships 2020/2021 project, due to a change in focus, was reduced in size and fell under the Enabling program instead. The COVID-19 situation also meant a few expected projects were pushed to 2021.
Use SEK 2,072,242 - - - 2,497,835 2,497,835 211,016 254,355 120.5%
Community SEK 395,885 - - - 288,875 288,875 40,313 29,416 73.0% COVID-19 meant a drastic reduction in physical community activities and their associated costs. A major cost reduction was the cancellation of the yearly volunteer led Wikipedia summer camp.
Enabling SEK 1,774,840 - - - 2,656,879 2,656,879 180,732 270,550 149.7% This spending for this line increased significantly. This is in part due to a larger part of the Tools for Partnerships 2019 – Blueprinting project happening in 2020 rather than 2019 then originally planned. The main reason for the increased spending is however due to the original Tools for Partnerships 2020/2021 project (under the Access program) not starting in 2020 and a smaller pilot project (under the Enabling project) instead taking its place.
Operational costs SEK 1,848,747 - - - 722,964 722,964 188,258 73,619 39.1% The COVID-19 pandemic meant significant decreases in the operational costs as board and member meetings were moved online. We had originally budgeted for a membership drive which did not take place, instead we experimented with Fundraising activities.

External: We managed to secure funding for working on grant applications within existing projects. This almost completely eliminated the operational costs connected to grant applications. Administration and Infrastructure: Is in line with what we were expecting. Staff and ED: We have been able to do more work within the projects thus reducing the operational staff costs.

To reserves SEK 550,000 - - - 1,041,700 1,041,700 56,007 106,076 189.4% This differs due to an amended APG grant to increase funds for long term reserves.
TOTAL SEK 11,090,040 - - - 9,614,693 9,614,693 1,129,299 979,064 86.7% N/A

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Notes:

  • Exchange rate: 1 SEK = 0.10183 USD (per 1 USD = 9.82029 SEK in APG proposal).
  • All numbers rounded to whole SEK/USD.
  • In our Progress report we noted that the distribution of payroll costs across the programs was off for the numbers we reported. This was corrected for the Q4 numbers and to avoid any confusion the Q2 numbers and the corresponding discrepancy has been left out.

Compliance

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Is your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement?

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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.

  • Yes

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".

  • Yes

Signature

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Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.