Grants:Conference/Creative Commons Finland/Hack4OpenGLAM/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Conference Grant approved in FY 2016-17 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

• To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Conference/Creative Commons Finland/Hack4OpenGLAM.
• You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
• You are welcome to Email conferencegrants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Guidelines on how to fill out this grant report

• If you wish to write your report in your native language, you are free to do so. Please indicate (in English) what language are you using.
• If you prefer to submit the narrative report in a video format, you can. The video should be in English. Please upload the video to Wikimedia Commons and share the link in your report page. Make sure to answer all the required questions. All Financial documentation will still need to be submitted in a written form.
• If you struggle with some of the questions, or wish to have a debrief meeting with your Program Officer before submitting your report, we are very happy to meet and walk you through the report template. This can be especially helpful if you want our help in identifying and reflecting on lessons learned. Please get in touch with your Program Officer.
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Outcomes and Impact

Thanks for bringing value back to the Wikimedia movement by sharing in this report. Everything you learned during your project is useful knowledge to offer future Wikimedians planning similar work.

In this first section you are asked to reflect on your initial goals and the impact the event had on your community. Remember there is no right or wrong answer. Even if your goals have changed over time, or the impact was different than what you expected. Feel free to share your long or short answer - we are happy to hear whatever you have to share.

Did your event have any impact that you did not expect, positive or negative?

We exceeded out expectations for the outcome. There was more growth than we anticipated and some unforeseen successes. Our work with the facilitators and regional ambassadors from both Wikimedia and Creative Commons networks was a very positive experience. Through that we were able to bring together a mix of experiences and viewpoints across the questions of open access to cultural heritage in a global context and from a volunteer perspective. This is the most valuable takeaway to keep developing further.

We are also acknowledging the limits of the format in terms of productivity. Only a few of the participants were able to complete a hackathon-like outcome during the event. This relates partly to the fact that the event is integrated to the parallel CC Summit. This is however a strength of the format as well. Hack4OpenGLAM gets crossover exposure that it would not get if it was a standalone event. Several collaborations were started during the event, and worked on later with more time.

The longitudinal work was immensely valuable. The online meetings started in the end of June and slowly cultivated a small community of core contributors. This should be developed much further.

Please tell us about the top 2-3 innovative (new to you and your community) or things you tried this conference.

• Regional ambassadors was going to be a scholarship program to begin with. However, online events are so different from live events that supporting participation at the event has less positive impact, and is not supported. We started thinking how we could engage and support participants from different parts of the world, and ended up with the regional ambassadors program. The focus of the program shifted from a unidirectional communications task into a joint learning experience. It soon became evident that the group needed support in understanding and advocating further in their respective contexts the meaning of Open GLAM, GLAM-Wiki or Open Access to cultural heritage in order to attract participants to the event. This experience lead to the idea of the GLAM School, methods and resources to allow volunteers and GLAM professionals to feel confident in contributing to the open environments.
• Global Cine club was a way to arrange a joint film screening after the Final Gala. It was set up ad-hoc during the event, and it seemed so nice that we are going to replicate is as a year-round event.
• The registration system and the Hack4OpenGLAM Dashboard were created as a DIY configuration of Google Forms and a bespoke Javascript frontend. This Open Source code will be further developed in collaboration with one of the participants for another occasion.

Were there any significant changes from the initial grant proposal?

We were going to hire three facilitators instead of two, and therefore only hired seven instead of eight regional ambassadors, and were going to cover the difference from another category. This was however not needed. One of the facilitators had to cancel participation, and we were back to the initial plan.

The change from the scholarship program into the regional ambassadors program was explained above. We wanted to cover compensate some unexpected transaction costs to the team by purchasing the whole team a Hack4OpenGLAM hoodie of their liking.

What do you think will be the long term impact of this conference?

In my mind this has already lead to increased crossovers between Wikimedia and Creative Commons communities. Most of the team members (facilitators, ambassadors) would want a platform or a tool or environment for continued interaction and collaboration. I think this development should be further encouraged in order to highlight the significant nature of Open Access to cultural heritage also as a vital part of Wikimedia activities.

Do your best to estimate the number of attendees in your event that have never attended any Wikimedia event before. How were you able to support and engage this group?

46 of the 180 registered participants disclosed their Wikimedia affiliations (of which one QID, one institutional Commons category, and one User Group). Not all wikimedians did. That's all we know. The group of non-wikimedians was therefore the majority of the participants. Many of those participants, who did not attend the events, were in this group. Before the participants joined the Mattermost community platform, it was more difficult to engage them in the activities.

Do your best to estimate the number of participants who have been involved in Wikimedia activities for more than 5 years. How were you able to support and engage this group?

Many of the participating wikimedians were experienced contributors. Their contributions were invaluable in making the crossover happen. The wikimedians were maybe slightly more confident in their participation, and they were used to the self-directed nature of the activities.

Learning and next steps

Conferences and events do not always go according to plan! Please use this section considering the perspective of what future event organizers within our movement organizing a similar style conference can learn. Make sure to include lessons around work with external/ internal partners; your communication efforts; your work with the community and volunteers etc.

What would you do differently next time and why? Please share with us if there's anything you wouldn't do or something future organizers should avoid.

• We have discussed whether the event should be standalone or if it benefits more from being the side program of a bigger event, and the general consensus is in favor of a side event. We discussed an option of making a DIY Hack4OpenGLAM package to allow replicating the concept in local contexts. This should be further developed.
• Reaching out to GLAM partners requires more thought. We did not have individual GLAMs as much a priority as before. The value for GLAMs in local events might be more clearly manifested. The global reach may be better as a second step after local exposure and warming up.
• The event needs to engage participants earlier and the commitment needs to continue for longer.
• We wish to extend the reach to a wider range of potential participants, and that is a gradual process. We have to think carefully how to invite each of the desired participant groups and have a platform to conduct that work on.

Was there any non-financial support that the Wikimedia Foundation could have provided that would have better supported you in achieving your goals?

Due to time constraints we were not able to take advantage of Wikimedia Foundation communication channels. This should be taken into account at an earlier stage next time. It would also help reaching out to the Wikimedia chapters more efficiently and engaging them in the activities.

What would you recommend on a local and/or regional level as the best next step to leverage your success and momentum? (Please consider potential new allies and partners; internal wiki collaborations; future projects etc. We don't expect you to necessarily do those, we are only looking for more ideas from your own perspective.)

The local editions of the event would really leverage the potential of this work. They could feed the "main" hackathon, be part of other GLAM events, and they could be a way for the local Wikimedia and Creative Commons chapters and volunteers, GLAM institutions and professional, humanities programs and researchers, and different kind of creators and actors to liaise.

Does your organizing team / affiliate / user group have any plans to follow up with your attendees in the future or support efforts related to the outcomes of this conference within your community?

We are committed to arranging the event this year as well, but we lack the necessary background information to start the preparations. We have postponed sending out the exit survey, as we would like to combine it with the forward-looking survey as we did last year. This way we would not exhaust the participants with surveys, but we could use them as a driving force towards the next event.

AvoinGLAM has initiated the GLAM School project, which was an outcome of the experiences of the hackathon. We expect to have in-depth discussions with many of the participants of Hack4OpenGLAM in order to apply the takeaways from the event widely in a variety of activities within GLAM work.

Please add any 3 operational recommendations for future events organizers

Start early with the participants Engaging participants from an early stage or even on a continuous basis is definitely something to recommend and develop further. Engaging participants from different communities in the calls allowed them to get familiar with each other's work and ideas and to develop them for the event. In order get governmental acceptance for GLAM partners to join, they will need a longer time to get familiar with the concept.

Make contributing effortless We created a Mattermost instance at OKFI to host all the collaborative work and integrated it with the registration process with Google Forms. The previous year, we had used a commercial product to connect Google Forms to Slack that we then used. The new solution had both advantages and vulnerabilities. Mattermost was chosen in order to respond to the request from the community to favor open source solutions. It worked very well as a means to reach all the participants through it, and it offered all teams the possibility to use video conferencing on the platform. Google Forms was chosen for registration although it had been discouraged by the community. We decided to use it anyway, since it provided a very easy method of submitting and editing information for the participants, and a way for us to reuse that data easily. From the data protection perspective, it was not problematic, as we were not asking sensitive questions, all data submitted would be public. We however needed to ensure that email addresses would not be exposed in any way unless explicitly permitted by the participants. We are excited about developing this DIY registration service and dashboard further. We will need to keep eyes open for off-the-shelf open source solutions, as the features of this solution need a developer to tweak them, which may become an unnecessary burden amidst organizing an event. The complex configuration of platforms, including the CC Summit ones, also sparked a lot of criticism.

Keep going Most of the participants wished that there were ways to maintain the momentum after the event. The CC Open GLAM platform has captured much of that incentive, and individual collaborations have continued after the event. However, more and wider global interactions are very much requested.

Extra Take advantage of the communication channels of your partners. They may amplify your message beyond what you could do on your own. Visual messages are a necessity and videos are especially effective. The regional ambassadors and the facilitators created a collaborative video, it was really powerful.

Financial documentation

This section describes the grant's use of funds

Budget table

Please list all project expenses in a table here, with descriptions. Review the instructions here. These expenses should be listed in the same format as the budget table in your approved submission so that anyone reading this report may be able to easily compare budgeted vs. actual expenses.

Nr.	Item description	Budget	Final cost	Currency	Notes
1	coordinator: Program coordination, facilitation, WMF & CC Summit liaison, overall planning	7,000	7,000	EUR	As planned
2	facilitator(s): Hosting workshops events, facilitating work between participants, supporting volunteers.	4,000	4,000	EUR	As planned
3	developer(s): Piecing together the technical environment for the event, creating the website, managing the registration environment, integrating hackathon's own tech resources with that of Creative Commons	4,000	4,000	EUR	As planned
4	media manager: Managing all aspects of audiovisual technology, such as presenting audiovisual materials, supporting participants in using them, audiovisual documentation.	2,000	2,000	EUR	As planned
5	scholarships	4,000	3,500	EUR	This category was repurposed for regional ambassadors. We had finally 7 regional ambassadors at 500 euros.
6	complementary design: Design needed in addition to the official CC Summit design, or before it is available.	1,000	1,000	EUR	As planned
7	documentation materials	500	0	EUR	Not used
8	Open Knowledge Finland project costs	4,800	4,800	EUR	As planned
9	unexpected expenses	2,700	673.62	EUR	Hoodies, connectivity & small transaction fees

If you have any tips or insights on creating a budget or allocating funds, please feel welcome to share!

Summary of funding

Total project budget (from your approved grant submission): 30,000 €

Total amount requested from WMF (from your approved grant submission): 30,000 €

Total amount spent on this project (this total should be the total calculated from the table above): 26,973.62 €

Total amount of WMF grant funds spent on this project: 26,973.62 €

Are there additional sources of revenue that funded any part of this project? No

Remaining funds

Are there any grant funds remaining?

YES

Please list the total amount (specify currency) remaining here. (This is the amount you did not use, or the amount you still have after completing your grant.)

3,026.38 €

Evaluation

Optional - Event Evaluation Toolkit - In this page you can find a list of basic questions that the Wikimedia Foundation uses to evaluate large movement events like Wikimania and other regional and thematic events. Feel free to use any part of these questionnaires to evaluate your own event. You will find: Registration Questions; Post-event questions for participants and Follow-up questions for participants.

Anything else

Is there anything else you want to share about the conference or event?