Grants:Conference/Tremej/itWikiCon2018/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Conference Grant approved in FY 2017-18 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/Tremej/itWikiCon2018.
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.

Goals

Did you meet your goals?

Two goals were indicated in the project grant and are here below reported, and have both been widely achieved:

exchange and discuss knowledge and experiences aimed at strengthening the online collaborations and leading to new ideas and collaborative projects amongst community members
grow skills and abilities in order to increase the community members expertise and awareness.

The 3 day conference included over 35 sessions, selected by the program committee also taking into account the community survey results illustrated in the project grant.

over 8 sessions/workshops were dedicated to capacity development on topics such as SPARQL, Media Wiki API, Templates, Wikidata, Commons and Wikisource;
over 4 sessions/workshops were dedicated to discussions/presentations on outreach activities concerning Wikipedia, Wikisource and OSM;
3 sessions were dedicated to GLAM projects;
1 session was dedicated to the topic of inclusion & diversity on Wikipedia;
1 thematic session was dedicated to the EU copyright directive;
1 session was dedicated to the Wikisource community meeting.

The event also saw the participation of five guests:

Mr. Lukas Mezger, a.k.a user Gnom, board member of Wikimedia Deutschland, who gave two talks, one on the new EU copyright directive, and one on how WMDE works;
Mr. Andrew Dalby, a.k.a. user AndrewDalby, administrator of Wikipedia in Latin language, who gave a talk on the importance of Latin in the era of Wikipedia;
Ms. Chiara Milani, librarian and researcher at the Biblioteca Comunale di Como, which hosts one of the biggest collections of manuscripts of the Naturalis historia, who gave a talk on the Plinio il Vecchio;
Ms. Susanna Mkrtchyan, a.k.a user WikiTatik, president of Wikimedia Armenia, who gave a talk on the outreach and educational activities based on wikipedia organised in Armenia;
Mr. Jan Berkel, a.k.a. user jberkel, who conducted the only session dedicated to Wiktionary.

as well as to WMF staff:

The greeting message of Ms. Katherine Maher during the opening cerimony.

Mr. Aaron Halfaker, a.k.a. user Halfak, who intervened via skype call on the topic of AI antivandalism tools;
Ms. Erica Litrenta, a.k.a user Elitre, as foreseen also in the grant request, on the topic of Community Relations.

During the opening cerimony, a greeting message of Ms. Katherine Maher was presented.

As foreseen in the grant, on the Saturday, two outreach activities were organised for the general public:

the morning, was dedicated to Vikidia and Wikiversity, 5 kids (range 8 - 13 years) participated to the event which was led by community members, users Mattruffoni and Maupao70;
the afternoon, was dedicated to Open Street Maps, again 5 kids (range 8 - 13 years) participated to the event which was led by 3 OSM experts Mingo23, LorenzoStucchi and Eluinie.

Thanks to the numerous available university rooms, it was also possible to dedicate one room to meetups and other community activities.

Furthermore, in collaboration with Wikimedia Switzerland an Ideathon was organised on the Saturday, which saw the participation of two groups of users. After the project presentations, both groups were granted 1000 CHF to develop their projects.

The Wikimedia Italia general assembly was also held during the event.

For more information see the complete program as well as the event official website as well as all materials uploaded under the category itWikiCon2018.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
Number of participants 100+	101 participants (paying a participation fee of 10 euro) attended the event (this number also includes organisers).	The virtual "postcard" sent to participants at the end of the event. The participation increased of more than 30% with respect to the itWikiCon 2017. Many active community members - from all over Italy and nearby countries - as well as a number of locals participated in the event. At least 3 teachers from local schools came to specific sessions and were also keen to get involved in dedicated projects with their classes.
Dissemination/outreach event with at least 15 participants per session	2 session open to the younger ones (8 - 13 years of age) were organised on the Saturday, the morning session was dedicated to Vikidia and the afternoon sessions to Open Street Maps.	The Vikidia session during the Open Day. As mentioned above, despite the communication on the local press, local facebook pages etc. we only managed to have overall 10 participants (5 in the morning and 5 in the afternoon). Parents and kids all reported very positive comments, however for next time a different strategy needs to be adopted in order to better reach and involve the general public.
Media Coverage	Over 10 articles on the local media, coverage on the national channel (Rai 1) regional evening news, both on TV and on the radio, article dedicated to the Copyright directive on Wired Italia (online edition). Full press coverage can be found here.	Lukas Mezger interviewed by Wired. Thanks to local collaborations we managed to have the local newspaper La Provincia as media partner for the event, which followed us before, during and after the event. Furthermore, thanks to the support of Wikimedia Italia Staff we prepared a press release which was sent to a number of newspapers and direct contacts a few days before the event.
Involvement of local institutions	We managed to invole: Camera di Commercio di Como (Chamber of Commerce of Como), Provincia di Como (Province of Como), ENAIP (local professional school, both during the event for the catering as well as before the event), Associazione Sentiero dei Sogni (local cultural association), Museo della Seta (Silk Museum).	Bar tenders of the ENAIP school during the Friday evening event. The event was for some partners the beginning of a strong collaboration, while for some others the strengthening of existing collaborations. With the above mentioned partners we have also organised the Wiki Loves Monuments local Lake Como 2018 edition, which culminated in an exhibition of the best pictures at the premises of the Chamber of Commerce, as well as in the ongoing organisation of the Wiki Loves Monuments Lake Como 2019 edition, as well as a lively program of events for 2019 involving editathons, workshops and wikigite.

Next steps

Please share a brief update about the status projects, important discussions and/or capacity building that took place at the event.

itWikiCon 2018 in Como was the second Italian WikiCon. The Italian community is now organizing itWikiCon 2019 in Rome, building on the previous very positive experiences which have been widely appreaciated by the Italian community as reported in the feedback survery (only in Italian language).

	Activities during the conference	2 months after the conference	6 months after the conference
Strategic Discussions: Were any significant issues your community discussed at the conference?	1. EU copyright directive: there was one session by Lukas Metzger dedicated to this topic, as well as one meetup.	1.Wikimedia Italia organised an evening presentation on the topic of the EU copyright directive on 10 December 2018, at BASE (WMI office).
Capacity Development: Please list capacity building sessions or workshops.	1. Session on SPARQL Wikidata 2. Session on MediaWiki API 3. Session on advanced templates and Lua 4. Session on tools such as EmailUser, MassenMail, Montage, Cat-a-lot, VisualFileChange, Page Views,ComeOn!, Imker downloader, MergeItems and many more 5. A session dedicated to introducing WikiSource for beginners 7. A session on how to create djvu files 6. A workshop on photograpy and Commons		Survey participants 6 months after event -- how many people have used the skills they learned?
Projects or Working Groups: What are the most important projects that were started or improved during the conference?	1. Wikisource project: meeting of the WikiSource Italian community, further discussions on the launch of nap.source (WikiSource in Neapolitan). 2. At the Ideathon, Ogoorcs proposed to develop Daty, a native Wikidata interface to simplify Wikidata editing. 3. Wiki Loves Earth: the first Italian edition of the photo context was organised in 2018 by users Civvì, CristianNX and Yiyi, and was limited to the Italian Alps. During the ItWikiCon2018, the team presented the work done for the 2018 edition and launched the 2019 edition covering all of Italy. 4. WikiSource community discussion on the Djvu format and its alternatives. The project concerning the digitalisation of the series Scrittori d'Italia, developed in the framework of the GLAM/BEIC collaboration, was presented in this occasion. The project used ad hoc developed scripts for the generation of Djvu files. 5. A discussion on the project The Italian cultural Heritage on Wikipedia, which aims to bring the Italian cultural and natural heritage on wikipedian and sister projects, as well as on Open Street Maps. A meet up was organised to discuss the project.	1. Waiting for the nap.source launch. 2. Announcement of the release of the alfa version of Daty. 3. The team is working on the launch of the 2019 Wiki Loves Earth edition. 4. Thanks to the development of such tools it has been possible to start the second phase of the digitalisation process (rereading and formatting). 5. Further project developments can be found at link.	Provide an update on projects that were started, or changes that were made as a result of work done at the conference.

Learning

Conferences and events do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

What worked well at the event?

Everything worked particulary well and the event run very smoothly, with no major problems.

The location, the University of Insubria in Como, might have been a too big and dispersive place for 100 participants. However thanks to the support of the staff of the University we managed to choose a number of rooms not too big and close to each other which gave to the event a more community like atmosphere. Furthermore, all rooms were equipped with table plugs for computers, projectors, and all necessary equipment which was operated by one university staff who was in place for the full duration of the conference.

As organisers we decided to organise also two evening events, which worked out very well and strenghened relationships amongst community members:

the first evening, thanks to a collaboration with the local culinary institute (which also supplied the lunches during the event) we organised an apericena (aperitif with non seating dinner) within the rooms school located close to the University. The event was very successful as it enabled participants not only to get together but also to familiarise, know each other better, start discussing project and ideas, in a very cosy and familiar ambient. Costs for the evening were covered by the grants received, we favored this event instead of coffee breaks during the day.

the second evening, we proposed to all participants a dinner in a local pizzeria/paninoteca with which we had agreed a fixed price and menu. Over 50 people participated to the event (evening costs covered by participants), making it a very succesfull choice. Once again this was the occasion for participants to get to know each other better, discuss projects etc. During the evening the award ceremony for the Wiki Ricci also took place. It was the first edition of this prize organised by members of the Italian Community and dedicated to members of the Italian community. We hope to have a second edition in 2019.

As organisers we believe both events turned out very well and were very important both for networking but also for people to get to know each other better, which was also one of the goals, and of the drivers, behind the idea of an Italian itWikiCon.

Finally some team members dropped out during the organisation, however thanks to the communication actions that took place since the beginning (i.e. from when we received the confirmation of the grant), we managed to involve and received the support of new/less active community members.

What did not work so well?

The research for sponsors was the most difficult task and led to quite poor results. Although we started quite early with sponsors, we managed to obtain the University rooms for free (we only had to pay for heating and for two University Staff members for IT and General Services who followed us during the weekend), the insurance covered by a local broker, and water bottles for speakers again froma a local water supplier/producer. We also managed to obtain discounted prices from a total of three hotels/hostels in the town of Como. Apart from these sponsorships, all other attempts such as obtaining a discount on local public transport to move around the city, sponsorships in cash to cover some expenses etc. were not successful.

Furthermore once we received notice that the grant requested to Wikimedia Foundation had been reduced by more than 50%, we requested the support of the two local chapters Wikimedia Italia and Wikimedia Switzerland (note that a part of Switzerland has a strong Italian speaking community), which responded very well granting us the amounts of 3.500 euro and 3.000 euro respectively, on top of the amounts already committed upon writing the project grant. Thanks to their support and to revised and reduced budget we managed to cover all costs and organise a successful event.

The two chapters have also commited to financially support the itWikiCon2019.

What would you do differently next time?

Conference sessions: the number of overall sessions (over 35 excluding meetups) and the number of parallel sessions (up to 5) was in the end a bit to high. Next time we would try to keep this number lower, which of course implies making a narrower selection of all proposal received, which is some cases is not an easy task.

Scholarships: the number of requests for scholarships, and the assigned ones, where quite lower than expected, and budget was left over for further scholarships. One option could be to start earlier with the scholarships request procedure (we opened the call on 6 October 2018, and closed it on 20 October 2018), a second option would be to perform a better communication of the call.

Outreach event: unfortunately, as also highlighted above, the organised event did not have the expected outcome in terms of numbers. However in the feed back survey we received quite a few positive comments and ideas on how to organise it better in future occasions. One interesting idea is, rather than to communicate the event through local media, to involve directly teachers and students from local schools.

As a last input, future itWikiCon organisers, should read carefully through the final survey which offers many interesting hints on what can be done better.

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.

Number	Category	Item description	Unit	Number of units	Actual cost per unit	Actual total	Budgeted total	Currency	Notes
1. Travel & Accomodation						2.739,99	5.650,00	EUR
1.1a	Travel & acc.	Full scholarships for speakers and volunteers	per grantee	11	126,49	1.391,41	2.500,00	EUR
1.1b	Travel & acc.	Partial scholarships for speakers and volunteers	per grantee	0	0	0	650,00	EUR
1.2	Travel & acc.	Scholarships for participants	per grantee	8	106,85	854,79	1.500,00	EUR
1.3	Travel & acc.	Scholarships for participants	per grantee	2	246,90	493,79	1.000,00	EUR
2. Venue and meals						5.420,46	10.482,00	EUR
2.1	Venue & meals	Venue and cleaning	n/a	n/a	n/a	780,80	2.750,00	EUR	The amount refers to heating costs for the weekend and cost of 2 people (one for technical and one for G&A issues) that have been on the premises for the all duration of the event. Rent of the venue was a contribution in kind from the University (the amount can be estimated to be of the order of 3000 euro, higher than originally foreseen).
2.2a	Venue & meals	Lunch Friday 18 - packet lunch	per person	53	6.10	323,30	4.500,00	EUR
2.2a	Venue & meals	Saturday 19 - buffet lunch with full catering	per person	108	14,64	1.581,12		EUR
2.2a	Venue & meals	Sunday 20 - buffet lunch with full catering	per person	73	14,64	1.068,72		EUR
2.2a	Venue & meals	2 vegan lunches per day	per person	6	24,40	146,40		EUR
2.2a	Venue & meals	Welcome aperitif (on Friday 18 evening)	per person	75	14,64	1.117,52		EUR	Note the amount includes also 2 vegan menu at a cost of 24,40 EUR each.
2.2b	Venue & meals	Lunch (cooks and waiters)	n/a	n/a	0	0	750,00	EUR	Contribution in kind, actual value difficult to estimate. We have signed an agreement with a local "cooking" high school (ENAIP Lombardia sede di Como) and this activity became part of the practice activities that students need to do to complete the course.
2.3	Venue & meals	Coffee break	per person	110	3,66	402,60	2.000,00	EUR	Only one coffe break on Saturday 19 afternoon has been organised.
2.4	Venue & meals	Coffee break for outreach event	per person	0	0	0	250,00	EUR	Only one coffe break on Saturday 19 afternoon has been organised, costs included under line 2.3.
2.5	Venue & meals	Lunches for organizers	per person	0	0	0	192,00	EUR	Not needed.
2.6	Venue & meals	Water for speakers	n/a	96	0	0	40,00	EUR	96 water bottles of 0,75 l, supplied for free by local sponsor Acqua Chiarella
3. Materials and communications						943,13	1.096,53	EUR
3.1	Mat. & comm.	Printed materials	n/a	n/a	n/a	147,62	175,00	EUR	leaflets, posters, posters for outreach event, name tags for tables, etc.
3.2	Mat. & comm.	Technological materials	n/a	n/a	0	0	165,00	EUR	Not needed as all necessary equipment was supplied by the University.
3.3	Mat. & comm.	Bags	1 bag	200	2,29	457,50	180,00	EUR
3.4	Mat. & comm.	Printed badges	1 bagde	125	1,29	160,74	15,40	EUR
3.5	Mat. & comm.	Badge holder	1 badge				32,50	EUR
3.6	Mat. & comm.	Lanyards	1 lanyard				102,85	EUR
3.7	Mat. & comm.	Stationery	n/a	n/a	n/a	33,70	75,00	EUR	Peper, pens, coloured pencils, adhesive tape, scissors, etc.
3.8	Mat. & comm.	Flipcharts	n/a	n/a	0	0	91,00	EUR	Not needed as all necessary equipment was supplied by the University.
3.9	Mat. & comm.	Website domain	n/a	n/a	0	0	59,71	EUR	Contribution in kind estimated in 45,51 EUR from associazione informazioni.
3.10	Mat. & comm.	Pins	1 pin	300	0,48	143,57	200,00	EUR	0,48 EUR is an average cost as pins were made in two different formats.
4. Operating expenses						0,00	1.700,00	EUR
4.1	Op. expens.	Insurance	n/a	n/a	0	0	600,00	EUR	Insurance fully covered by local sponsor Scolari Broker for an amount of 230,00 EUR.
4.2	Op. expens.	Fiscal sponsor administrative costs	n/a	n/a	0	0	1.100,00	EUR	In kind contribution of fiscal sponsor Wikimedia Italia for dealing with itWikiCon2108 amounts to approx. 2.000,00 EUR.
5. Contingency						0	950,00	EUR	Was estimated as 5% of total costs, however was not needed.
TOTAL						9.103,58	19.878,53	EUR	Total Actual excludes contributions in kind.

Summary of funding

Total project budget (from your approved grant submission):

19.878,53 EUR

Please note that there was a mistake in the total budget in the approved grant submission, as not all expenses had been summed correctly.

Total amount requested from WMF (from your approved grant submission):

10.409,90 EUR

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

9.103,58 EUR

Total amount of WMF grant funds spent on this project:

4.131,00 EUR

Are there additional sources of revenue that funded any part of this project? List them here.

We received funding from the following:

Wikimedia Italia funded 1.500,00 EUR for Scholarships and 3.500,00 EUR for other expenses (not fully used).
Wikimedia Switzerland funded 1.000,00 EUR for Scholarships and 3.000,00 EUR for other expenses (not fully used).
A participation fee of 10 EUR and 15 EUR (late purchase) was charged to participants which led to raising an amount of 876,58 EUR after deducing fees (Eventbrite was used for collecting registrations).
Donation in kind from Scolari Assicurazioni, Università degli Studi dell'Insubria, Acqua Chiarella, Associazione Culturale Informazioni and Wikimedia Italia have been listed and identified in the table above.

Remaining funds

Are there any grant funds remaining?

NO

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.)

No amount left.

Anything else

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