Learning and Evaluation/Evaluation at the Wikimedia Foundation/Grant lessons 2012

WM PH/Wiki Loves Monuments 2012

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

Very conservative budget — The project proposal was primarily and conservatively prepared by the project lead without soliciting the inputs of the members of the project committee who were tasked to carry-out certain activities. In the course of the project implementation, it became apparent that the budget allocations were hardly sufficient to meet the magnitude of the planned activities which were to be attended by certain personalities (VIPs). The selection of Hong Kong as host of Wikimania 2013 became a blessing in disguise for the organizers who decided realign the budget allocation from the Wikimania scholarship to augment other items. But based on the allocations presented in the grant proposal the actual expenditures for 11 of the 16 items were greater than their allocations.

The most significant among these expenditures percentage-wise is the allocation for Transportation. The project was travel intensive especially it required several trips to meet people from various government agencies, photography clubs and associations and several meet-ups to plan the execution of the activities. Plus the sourcing of materials to be used required to personally drop by the shops which were manufacturing them, thus travel expenses were almost four-folds of their allocation. Amount-wise, the Snacks and beverages allocation for the Awarding Event which was allocated for ₱15,000 saw its actual expenditure to more than ₱35,600, or ₱20,600 more that its allocation. This was a result of the decision to hold a formal dinner celebration in a venue that is fitting for the occasion, the Nielson Tower, a heritage site, that used to be first airport terminal of Manila, and is now a private library. In order to avert this scenario, the input of persons who have the experience should be solicited to come up with practical and realistic budgets.

• Negotiation with government agencies — Negotiating with government agencies was arduous, and would require a lot of follow-ups and repeated meetings just to obtain their endorsements; nevertheless, partnerships were forged between the National Parks Development Committee for the waiver of photography fees in the parks they administer, in exchange for documentation of photographs which they could also use, subject to the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. The endorsement of the National Commission on Culture and the Arts and the Department of Tourism were easily obtained by consistently following-up on them. What proved to be the most difficult was the negotiation for the waiver of photography fees in the historic old Manila which hosts a lot of colonial buildings built in the Spanish-era, as these photography fees is a major source of the agency's income. Through keen negotiation and acknowledgment of their concerns to prevent such privileges (waiver of photography fees) from being abused, the project team learned how to compromise and fine tune their demands.

• Sponsorship — The project team tried to obtain sponsors for the event, which proved to be very difficult, as Wiki Loves Monuments has no background in the Philippines to speak of. Now that Wiki Loves Monuments has local statistics available to present potential sponsors the mileage they could get in becoming a sponsor of the event, it will be in a better position now to entice sponsors.

WLM-Ph 2012 Project Team

• Dedicated team — The project initially started with 6 members, but after several planning meetings, only four were actually committed to make the project a success. These were people who would rather work, than engross themselves in proposing ideas that were impractical. With only 4 people in the project team, the team had to delegate the tasks among its members and each one worked independently and took responsibility for their tasks.

• Technical skills — It can't be denied that the 4-man team lacked the technical skills to handle technical concerns which integral to the event. Should it decide to hold the project once again, a member with a technical ability is a must. The organizers were however able to solicit help from other chapter members, Romnick Coros and Butch Bustria who had expertise in this aspect (i.e. website design and features).

• Monitoring — Most photography competitions in the Philippines would require photographers to have their printed photos submitted, or the photos in their memory card downloaded by the organizers. The manner in which the contest operated by uploading photos was "unusual" to most photographers who participated. This is perhaps the main reason why the project team received hundreds of e-mail inquiring about the procedure as they were not familiar with the interface, despite how simplified it was for an ordinary Wikimedia Commons user. There have been several cases that the photos were not properly uploaded and were not categorized correctly. This required the project team monitor the uploading activity of users to see if their photos were categorized properly, otherwise they would not appear as entries. These were all being done work hours, which is inappropriate. It would be very ideal to have someone to provide round the clock assistance by answering e-mail inquiries as well as monitor the uploading activity of users.

• Print advertisements — Print advertisements do not come cheap, especially in a country which still relies heavily on printed information than online. Bearing this in mind, the project team negotiated and haggled as much as they can to have the project's, also the chapter's first ad stint published. And this haggling resulted to a 91 percent discount provided by Smile Magazine, the inflight magazine of Cebu Pacific Air (the largest airline in the Philippines), which also appears in Starbucks Coffee shops which are popular hang-out places. The print ads came out in the April and May issues of Smile Magazine and much to the project team's surprise on the June-July issue as well, which was already for free. Timing was also essential, April and May are the summer months and peak of the travel season in the country and would have been the best time to remind travelers to take photos of cultural heritage sites across the country.
  The team also monitored the progress of the images being submitted for the contest, thinking if the number of targets could be met without additional advertising, the remaining fund for advertisement can be used for other much needed purposes. But after it bottomed to just three photos uploaded on September 19, it became imperative to pull all the stops to ensure it can meet its targeted number of participants and entries. From an average of 35 photos per day on the first three weeks of the uploading campaign, this jumped to 185 images per day on the last week of the uploading period after the ad was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

• Utilization of social media — With a very limited budget for advertising, the organizers maximized social media to promote Wiki Loves Monuments. As shown in the list of posts already provided above, it earned several "Likes" and positive "comments" that have considerably helped it be promoted at no cost.

• Catering services — The project team was faced with a dilemma after the caterer arrived at the venue extremely late during the WLM launch, forcing the project team to have fast food delivered to serve the audience, thus entailing additional costs. The organizers were actually enticed by the great deal offered by the caterer and didn't bother to enter into a formal contract or agreement which could have made settlement/negotiation for a discount easier. This was a well-learned lesson that by the Awarding ceremony, the project team made it a point to enter into a formal contract to have the terms in black-and-white.

• Three-phased judging — The project team implemented a three-phased judging: qualifying, eliminations (choosing the top 50) and final round, each with a different set of judges, which hastened the judging process, shielded the final jury from all the unnecessary burden of sifting through the thousands of entries that were submitted, and allowed Wiki Loves Monuments Philippines to hold the awarding of winners 20 days after the close of the uploading campaign.

• Partnership with other organizations — Wiki Loves Monuments opened the gates of partnership with organizations like Project Visionaries, who are present in every chapter events/activities providing the needed photo documentation, that the chapter is not often able to come up with because it doesn't have the equipment. Also, a group of theater students from the Polytechnic University of the Philippines who just wanted to have an exposure outside their campus were very much willing to lend their time and talent during chapter events by perform during our events.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

Provinces which had sites photographed for Wiki Loves Monuments Philippines 2012. Sites which made it to Top 50 are in red.

• Increased Reach — Wiki Loves Monuments in the Philippines provided good coverage of sites across the country, with sites from 57 out of the 80 provinces photographed and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The 319 uploaders were mostly new users of Wikimedia projects as shown in their talk pages in Commons which had recent welcome notes.

WLM 2012 3rd Place - Batad Rice Terraces by Cid Jacobo

• Increased Quality — As a testament to achieving this, an entry from the Philippines, that of Cid Jacobo's Batad Rice Terraces (photo to the left) placed third in the international round of Wiki Loves Monuments. Apart from these some photos which were nominated were rated by the Wikimedia Commons community as "Quality Image".

• Increased and Diversified Participation — The avalanche of quality photos, enticed some Filipino Wikipedians who were even not involved in the project or the chapter to take on the task of attaching these photos to the list of sites that were prepared for the competition which are as follows:

I – Ilocos Region II – Cagayan Valley III – Central Luzon IV-A – CALABARZON IV-B – MIMAROPA V – Bicol Region

VI – Western Visayas VII – Central Visayas VIII – Eastern Visayas IX – Zamboanga Peninsula X – Northern Mindanao XI – Davao Region

XII – SOCCSKSARGEN XIII – Caraga ARMM – Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao CAR – Cordillera Administrative Region NCR – National Capital Region

Women participation — Though it would be difficult to determine the percentage of women who participated in the contest, two out of the Top 10 winners (3rd place and 8th place) are women.

WM PH/Chapter startup 2

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

There was a long debate among the WMPH Board and lots of questions asked by the Wikimedia Foundation at the course of the grant request process. Lesson learned: The WMPH Board should carefully plan and discuss the things that we would put on a grant request to WMF before we submit it.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

• Increased and diversified participation: Despite not meeting the participation goals for our regional projects, we feel that since these are first-time events, we were able to lay down the foundations for future endeavors in those areas and, to an extent, grow the communities that are present in the regions in question. In addition, the increase of our membership body's diversity in terms of both women and non-Manila based members bides well for the Foundation's long-term goal of bridging participation gaps between those who do participate in the projects and those who don't. While the impact of this still has to be examined in further detail as more projects are implemented, we believe we're off to a good start here given the circumstances.
• Increased reach: The projects funded under this grant have spread awareness of what the chapter is and what the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation are in areas where the chapter's reach is insufficient, namely in more distant urban centers. Our continued experimentation with decentralizing chapter activities bides well for further increasing reach, but we will need to continue investing in these communities in order to assure better success.
• Increased credibility: Execution of these projects allows Wikimedia Philippines to invest in its capabilities of becoming an organization which is not only accountable to its members, but is also responsive to the needs of its audience. We believe that although there are no quantitative measures by which increased credibility can be measured in the Philippine context, people are starting to see the organization as a viable partner in furthering open source in the Philippines.

Sofia Zoo and Bulgarian Wikipedians/Sofia Zoo Powered by Wikimedia

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects? Consider the following questions and respond with 1 - 2 paragraphs.

What went well?

The reported project is the first Wikimedia funded project on the territory of Bulgaria, where, by now, there has not been established a Wikimedia Chapter. From this perspective, we have quite well made the estimation of the necessary resources to request from the WMF and properly managed the approved budget. It is also noteworthy that more than 35% co-funding was provided, which exceeds the approx. 30% co-funding that was initially ensured, and, in addition, it didn't come from a commercial source, but was provided by a dedicated long-term fellow Wikipedian.

Creating the large corpus of missing articles and improving the existing ones went relatively well, despite that it was generally an irregular process and many problems from various nature delayed and affected it negatively.

Although the members from the Zoo team did not become regularly contributing Wikipedians, they are now much more familiar with the specifics of Wikipedia, of the terms of use and free licensing, than ever before, and effectively became "Ambassadors" of the Wikimedia movement in their circles and media contacts.

Together we produced a long-term resource, that will support the Zoo's educational role in Bulgarian society, with stable references to Wikipedia as a valuable source in this highly relevant and friendly environment. The Zoo's future plans are to keep carefully maintaining the boards, and produce new ones, while acknowledging the support of the Wikimedia Foundation, and promoting the results of the project in future publications and presentations.

What did not go well?

The fact that we twice requested prolongation of the project period means that the project had its weaknesses on both the planning and the implementation stages. The two major problems (and correlated ones) concern the human resources and the time scheduling/management.

None of the members of Wikipedian team had had long-term contacts with the Zoo's staff before applying for the project, and when writing the project proposal and the project's time parameters, there was no full awareness of all job duties and seasonal dynamics in the Zoo. In the EERC unit, a lot of summer schools in zoology are organized for schoolchildren, who, on one side, are an important target group for the project, but on the other hand, represent a rather time-consuming commitment for the Zoo's staff. Moreover, in the beginning of 2013, for reasons undisclosed, three active members from the Zoo's team quit their jobs, which additionally increased the overall workload for the remaining person (Katya Zareva) and led to stress and delays in the project reporting. Technical problems with computers were also reported.

On the other side, the voluntary nature of the Wikipedians' contributions has also risen concerns about the project's successful timing: intense workload, PhD studies and defenses for two active members of the team (Venislava from the Zoo, and Vassia from BG WP), as well as the need to consult various article issues in highly specialized literature, were some of the regular reasons that led to delays of the project, as well. The inactivity of a part of the Wikipedia team was partly compensated by other editors who joined forces later on, yet commitment for long-term regularity was in general hard to secure.

Another significant problem that we met in the beginning of the project was related to the licensing contract for the Wikimedia logos, which Sofia Zoo had to sign. We were informed about the need to have this rather sophisticated legal document signed after the approval, while none of the guidelines for project application contained any hint about it, and about how complex is that process, especially when you are not a professional lawyer. In our case, all clarifications and communications between the legal offices of the WMF and Sofia Municipality (as Principal of Sofia Zoo) went via the project team, thus diverting us from our preplanned work schedule. The overall process consumed more than two months (30 April - 12 July 2012) and reasonably lead to the need to request the first prolongation. Hoping that this feedback will be considered positively as advice for improvement of the overall funding procedures, we would suggest that for such completely non-profit projects as ours, moreover ones supported by the WMF itself, the terms of usage the names/logos should be more relaxed (given the "Trademark_policy: Things You Can Do, a Summary"), and participants should enjoy more of WMF's good faith. Or, if this turns to be an irrevocable part of the process of WMF funding, it must be explicitly explained in the project application guidelines, and a copy of the contract must be available in advance for reference and preliminary preparation, in order not to affect negatively the scheduled work on the project.

What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?

Vassia: If I happen to plan a similar project in future, I would definitely prepare a more relaxed and less ambitious time schedule, and would surely try to involve more people, at least from Wikipedia community. Of course, it very much depends on the particular topic: topics where a lot of people contribute are usually well developed, while the real need of quality and quantity of content is just where the contributors are fewer. In future, I would allow both teams - from the Wikipedia community and from the external GLAM organization to get to know each other better and for longer time, before we attempt to apply for a funded project. In the present case, that proved to be a weakness, although one stemming from our enthusiasm and eagerness to do some great job for both Wikipedia and the Zoo. Usage of WMF trademarks will also be avoided, if the present policy remains the same or gets even more difficult.

WM CA/Quebec Programs 2012

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects? Consider the following questions and respond with 1 - 2 paragraphs.

What went well?

• Contribution day is a really great activity that bring local wikipedians to work together IRL; old disputes are erased afterwords. We did few other days like this, and we decide to invite also outsiders that don't know Wikipedia, so with a little training, we recruit more voluteers; newcomers are always very motivated, it's fun to see!
• At the International Scientific Conference on ICT and Education, teachers were thanking us to make Wikipedia work so well, and also help them to understand how it works. We use a powerpoint that we create based on recurent questions. We were very surprised by their openness.
• Forum mondial de la langue française, we didn't expect that it would be that big with so many people from all horisons. We had tables with computers to introduce Wikipedia to participants. We noted that many Africans were very interested in Wikipedia. The collaboration with Wikimedia France helped to bridge with the project participants and Afripedia. Those meetings are very useful for the Wikimedia movement.
• Wikipedia Takes Quebec City, first introduce Commons to photograph amateurs. We decide to invite photos clubs instead of random people, so the quality of pictures were much more higher than any other photo event we organize in the past. We also notice that prizes were not that important for them, because only the fact that they were doing this for Wikipedia (Commons) was a great feeling. Leading us to the conclusion that we can improve the cost effectiveness of this activity by reducing the prize cost to participant ratio.
• For Wiki Loves Monuments in Canada we were glad to bring Canadians on Flickr to participate, even if it was more work. The best pictures came from Flickr, and that gave us the opportunity to talk about free licence to photographers.

What did not go well?

• During the Contribution day, we were working on an article and tried to make it featured, but it is too ambicious. Twelve people on the same item causing conflicts editing, we had to work on different sections.
• At the International Scientific Conference on ICT and Education, we didn't planned so many questions for the teachers, we should have make more room for this, at least 45 minutes. Also, the Conference organizers place us at the end of the afternoon, so there was not as many people than in the morning.
• At the Forum mondial de la langue française, evreything went pretty well; many if more wikipedians could be there it would have help others to go for lunch, etc. People had to stay at their positions all day for four days.
• Wikipedia Takes Quebec City was well done, but we should have use more Twitter/Facebook; we sent a lot of press releases but that was not enough. Also, after the scavenger hunt, we can't ask people to upload their pictures on the spot; the best is to show them once with a projector, and they can do it themselves at home afterwards. Relatively speaking, the cost paid to acquire new photos was relatively high when you divide the execution cost by the number of new pictures.
• Wiki Loves Monuments in Canada was organised by international team, but I have a good suggestion for others: don't organise this alone, a country should at least have between 3 and 5 wikipedians to organise this.

What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?

• For the next Contribution days, we will partner with organizations. For example, at the Day of Mile End, we contacted the historical society of Mile End and employees of the library where we were doing the event. The result is that we had some new contributors who could find sources easily, others who knew the story of the Mile End and we created a lot of links with the community of free culture and the library network. So for future Contribution days, we will always find an association related to our theme, because we no longer work on only one article, but several articles around a theme.
• It is unclear how likely the event participants are to become long term contributors of the Wikimedia movement. Future events should put a priority on developing the volunteer base over creating content. This should be discussed at a future chapter strategic planning session and the ideas integrated into future events.

Consumer Reports/Wikipedian in Residence

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects? Consider the following questions and respond with 1 - 2 paragraphs.

What went well?

This project succeeded partly because of careful prior planning for the overall focus of the residency, which ensured strong internal ownership of the project and a clear path for collaboration between CR and Wikipedia in at least one key subject area (evidence-based health care). Second, the project succeeded because we attracted a very strong candidate who was an excellent match for the organization's internal needs and capabilities. The candidate’s broad interests facilitated easy exploration of a broad range of other consumer topic areas, and he was able to provide very specific examples of how engagement with Wikipedia could benefit CR and Wikipedia users. Further, he related well to wide range of people from different departments and functional areas within Consumer Reports. He participated in a wide range of internal meetings and activities, such as the organization’s internal Hackathon, and contributed ideas for ways that CR information could be shared in novel ways. Finally, he was able to facilitate complex discussions relating to appropriate sourcing, conflict of interest and internal social media policies, among other issues.

What did not go well?

Because of the difficult state of the economy, CR employees are under pressure to focus on core responsibilities, and it is somewhat more difficult to engage in new collaborations and projects that otherwise might be the case. As many new organizations may also find, the learning curve with Wikipedia appears to be steeper for staff members and volunteers than many of us originally expected. Therefore, to deepen engagement, we would likely need to provide more systematic training to a targeted number of people with responsibilities in specific collaborations.

Also, while we had originally anticipated doing more to explore collaborations in content areas of greater interest to women, which might attract more women contributors or editors to Wikipedia, because of time constraints, we have not yet been able to explore that issue in depth. (However we would note that a majority of family health care decisions are made by women, and many of our patient safety activists are women, so we would expect we could have some impact in closing the gender gap in editing by emphasizing those issues, as a first step in this area.) We will therefore put this issue on our followup list, and consider ways that CR can contribute more in this area.

We have also not done as much as originally anticipated to document the success of our project and tell its story to the outside world. Going forward, we do plan to expand the scope and nature of materials provided, to the extent that they may be useful as a model for other organizations.

What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?

For the sponsoring organization that is new to Wikipedia, it is difficult to say with hindsight what we could have done differently, recognizing that "you don’t know what you don’t know." We think we succeeded in part because we carefully considered how to allocate staff time and internal resources to support the planned collaborations and engagement, based upon a strong mission or business case for a specific content area. We would expect this to continue to be the case going forward, for other consumer or public health education campaigns. Looking beyond that, we now have a better idea of what resources are needed, what capacity and what type of relationships with Wikipedians we would want to have in place at the end of residency. During the residency, where possible, we should identify as specifically as possible staff members, volunteers or other stakeholders would could be trained to support the collaboration. We should also systematically consider ways we can engage and train volunteers and allied organizations who may be working with us on a particular issue. In the case of Choosing Wisely, we received substantial interest from professional medical societies with a similar interest in the appropriate use of treatments and procedures. We realized through this process that a broader project to engage several organizations with similar interests could be very effective.

WM CL/Start-up

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects? Consider the following questions and respond with 1 - 2 paragraphs.

What went well?

All the projects and activities were executed, went well and were finished satisfactorily. One of the things that made us proud was how much we were able to accomplish which such a reduced budget. Although forced by circumstances, our frugal money expenditure fostered the volunteer work within the projects, creating more commitment from members with the chapter. In the end, this helped us to run the budget at the minimum cost possible.

What did not go well?

Regarding the activities to be financed by the grant, the excesive time taken by the procedures to be recognized as a non-profit legal personality by Chilean authorities, made that the activities and goals budgeted, didn't exactly matched the progress and level of activity of the group of volunteers. This, added to a slight underestimation of costs in the budget, imposed some struggle to keep adjusted to the financial limits of the grant in some items. This last point also consumed too much energy and time, spent on trying to find lower prices that would fit the planned budget. The lesson is to give some room to not struggle that much, since time is limited for volunteers. Another of the lessons learned is that is good to keep a small amount of money for underestimated or unplanned expenses, market change and price changes.

Also, opening the bank account had some bureaucratic process that delayed us from being able to receive and execute the budget in the original time planned, this also called a delay and a subsequent request of a time extension to execute the budget. As an advice for others, if it's possible, it's important to start focusing in the bank account opening as soon as possible, at the time of requesting a start-up grant. Even though we tried our best, Chile's banking system was stricter than any of our "worse scenario" projections.

What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?

Ask an item for unexpected or underestimated costs, approximately a 10%, because, as explained before, the limit was too tight, specially for the organization of Wiki Loves Monuments.

Project soon, budget fast and precisely :-)

WM FI/Tervetuloa Wikipediaan!

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects? Consider the following questions and respond with 1 - 2 paragraphs.

What went well?

• The translation turned out well and the leaflet reads smoothly; conversational, matter-of-fact, not condescending
• The printing quality is excellent and the pages look crisp and professional.
• The leaflets were delivered promptly and in good condition.

What did not go well?

• There was a delay in getting the material to the printers due to communication difficulties in my end which meant we needed an extension.
• While co-authoring was a quick way to get the text translated and edited, it would have been faster if one team member were designated as editor

What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?

In the future, we'll probably assign an editor to handle the consistency of the content and to coordinate production. Ideally, this would be someone who has practical experience in publishing. As it is, most of the practical work was done by Nemo in Italy. Another thing to consider is to get quotes from foreign printers. The initial idea was to complete every part of the project in Finland. After getting quotes from Finnish printers, however, it was clear that Nemo's suggestion of using an Italian company was the most cost-effective even with shipping costs included. A project like this occupies an awkward niche when it comes to printing services in Finland: the run was slightly too big for inexpensive digital printing and slightly too small to make offset printing viable. As long as grant terms or other obligations don't require us to use domestic suppliers, we will probably stick with foreign ones if the Finnish print industry trend won't reverse. The native file for the leaflet is in .indd, a proprietary format. It would be nice to switch to open DTP software, so hopefully there will be an alternative to Adobe's products in the future. It would also be good if Wikimedia Foundation's graphic guidelines were updated to include only free typefaces (see the League of Movable Type for some examples).

WM PH/Open Web Day

Lessons learned

Evaluation cross tabulation of all of the events from February 2012 to February 2013

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects? Consider the following questions and respond with 1 - 2 paragraphs.

What went well?

Every event has:

1. At least 10 attendees for every Open Web Day conducted;
2. Easy registration;
3. At least one WMPH member volunteered to help.
4. Active participation of attendees during lecture and hands-on workshops;
5. Enthusiasm and cooperation of partner organizations, institutions and sponsors.

According to the filled out evaluation form:

1. For those who attended workshops, 81.5% said that their expectations for the whole event were completely met.
2. For those who attended workshops, 84.3% said that their expectations for the sessions were completely met.
3. All were satisfied and very satisfied with the knowledge that they gained.
4. All of those who attended workshops were satisfied and very satisfied with the general organization of the event.
5. For the audio-visual aids, 97% said that they were satisfied and very satisfied.
6. For the schedule of activities, 95.3% said that they were satisfied and very satisfied.
7. For the content/subject matter, 97.8% said that they were satisfied and very satisfied.
8. For the skills acquired, 94.8% said that they were satisfied and very satisfied.
9. For the training/session rooms, 97% said that they were satisfied and very satisfied.
10. For the snacks (if applicable), 91.7% said that they were satisfied and very satisfied.

What did not go well?

Change of plan

The original plan to have the Open Web Day in an internet café only happened once, during the first workshop at Netopia in Robinsons Place, Manila. Majority of the succeeding Open Web Days were held at schools. The plan changed because Mozilla did not see Internet cafes as cost effective in carrying out the Open Web Days. It was then agreed by Mozilla Philippines and Wikimedia Philippines to have the events at schools. Although, workshops were not carried out in some schools because of either lack of facilities, no Internet available or there are too many participants. In lieu of the workshops, Wikimedia Philippines demonstrated and presented how to edit articles in Wikipedia or upload pictures in Wikimedia Commons for those with no Internet or facilities.

There were also planned venues that did not materialize because of poor coordination and the project team prioritized other schools that have more potential participants thus would have more impact. Also, the project evolved and WMPH partnered with other like-minded organizations other than Mozilla Philippines. These partnerships were not part of the plan.

Workshop problems

For the events that have workshops, there were certain problems that came up. During the workshop at the Ateneo de Naga University (ADNU), not all participants were able to create an account because ADNU had one IP address and Wikipedia allows only six accounts to be created by the same IP per day. Another problem occurred during one of the workshops was editing conflicts among users editing the same page.

Schedule of events

No Open Web Day was held during July - August 2012 because the WMPH project lead, Jojit Ballesteros went to the United States of America due to his regular “day” job requirement. There was an Open Web Day meeting before he went to the USA and he asked the project team and some members of the WMPH Board to take over the project while he was out of the country. Unfortunately, neither the team nor the WMPH Board took the commitment. On the part of Mozilla Philippines, they were not able to confirm the pending Open Web Day events during these months.

Aside from these months, there were other months, April 2012 and January 2013, which the Open Web Day did not materialize because Mozilla Philippines was not able to get its budget on time (Mozilla Philippines requires a lead time of 6 weeks for their project budget approval). An Open Web Day cannot continue without the consent of both Mozilla Philippines and Wikimedia Philippines. In contrast with this (WMF) grant, Mozilla Philippines is required to prepare a budget proposal every time there is an Open Web Day.

What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?

This project aims to teach basic Wikipedia editing to those who are not familiar with editing Wikimedia projects. We could have done follow-up workshops for more familiarity (with the editing) and to discuss more advanced topics on editing articles and uploading media. The project team also had informal proposals to conduct an edithathon as a follow-up activity for Open Web Day but it did not actualize. The Bikol Wikipedia editing community started an edithathon and other follow-up activities after the Open Web Day at Ateneo de Naga University.

Discussing advanced topics and conducting an edithathon would have made the project more engaging and productive. It could make more editors more familiar with Wikimedia projects. One of the persons who attended an Open Web Day event was able to create a stub in the Tagalog Wikipedia but was later deleted because of lack of sources. Teaching the basics of Wikipedia editing cannot solve this kind of problems. If there were follow-up workshops then that person could have created an article successfully, meaning, he could have provided the appropriate sources and he could become an active editor.

WM EE/2012

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects? Consider the following questions and respond with 1 - 2 paragraphs.

What went well?

Our international cooperation has become wider. We have acquired valuable experience about running an organization, so WMEE stand on surer feet.

Although we haven't yet held our own round tables on education and copyright, we have intensive collaboration with many institutions on these themes - other interested NPOs, departments of the state, media, universities, etc. Anyway, the form of collaboration is not so important as its content and progress.

What did not go well?

Eventually, we had to cancel the visionary conference we planned, because of problems with scheduling the foreign speakers. We have postponed some events because our pool of volunteers is small and we are close to stretching ourselves too thin. Hence, we're reconsidering our strategies and have held several meetings about strategical development. It might be best if we could professionalize, at least in some extent in certain programs, as organizational activities drain our volunteers' energy.

What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?

We're going to run a similar project in 2013. And 2014. And, if fates would bless us, in 2015, 2016, 2017, etc.

WM AT/Annual Program Plan 2012

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects? Consider the following questions and respond with 1 - 2 paragraphs.

What went well?

The success of Wiki Loves Monuments shows what can be achieved when dedicated volunteers and the chapter act in concert. It also demonstrates ways for successful cooperation with GLAM institutions (Bundesdenkmalamt /Federal Monuments Office). This is emphasised by the fact that this cooperation has been awarded with WMDE's „Zedler Preis“ in 2012. WLM has proven to be a model that can be successfully applied in other countries, illustrating the importance of international cooperation and exchange between chapters.

Another very successful project was the WikiCon 2012. Please also note the very detailed lessons learned section in the context of the WikiCon grant reporting: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_AT/WikiCon_2012/Report#Lessons_learned

What did not go well?

Plans to professionalize WMAT (hire staff, establish an office) were delayed due to a lack of time capacities and manpower. However, the process is heading into the right direction now. The extent of administrative tasks related to the grant process (application, reporting, closing)is a further strain for the limited personal resources, usually it is easier to spark volunteers for supporting projects, photo contests or events rather than for administrative tasks and accouting.

What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?

Further effort will be invested in strategies to overcome the limitations caused by a shortage of manpower. This comprises measures to broaden the basis of volunteers and staff as well as communication measures on the extent, importance and necessity of the work "behind the scenes".

WM US-DC/Bootstrapping grant

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

The biggest lesson to learn is applicable to all U.S.-based chapters, present and future: forming a chapter should involve experts in non-profit governance from the start to handle the incorporation and tax-exemption recognition processes. While between the several Wikimedia DC founders we had some knowledge, enough minor details were overlooked to cause considerable delay to the process. We hope to overcome the insufficiencies of our original application by basing our new one on Wikimedia NYC's successful application, which was crafted with the help of outside experts. It would be helpful to partner with an organization or expert which has already successfully received legal recognition within your legal jurisdiction, and which is willing to help walk you through the process.

An unexpected lesson is the importance of securing a "bricks and mortar" physical business location for purposes of doing business as a non-profit, as opposed to operating as a community organization which is run out of someone's home. In addition to satisfying particular legal requirements for charitable solicitation, a regular meeting space setup is essential for high-quality audio for remote participation. The option of remote participation by phone or teleconference turns out to be especially critical for holding regular monthly meetings requiring attendance by a quorum of participants spread out through the Washington, DC area. Do-it-yourself audio teleconferencing in the Washington DC area does not produce consistent results; the WiFi in public libraries and cafes is often too slow for using Skype.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

Forming an organization allowed us to create a central entity to organize Wikimedia enthusiasts. To that end, we had over 60 members in our first year. We now have an organizational structure that has allowed us to hold ongoing outreach events, including the successful Wikimania 2012 conference, and will allow us to carry out more activities that further the goals of Wikimedia. Additionally, our funding for NARA events allowed us to hold a local event attended by over 30 people, and it allowed us to build our ties with an important free-knowledge organization in the region.

Sudhanwa/CMDA IT Expo, Pune

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

Finalising our participation in the event at a very late stage causes problems. It becomes very difficult to gather volunteers and co-ordinate with them. In this case, confirmation came very late by the organisors as the stall was to be given to us for no-cost. In future events like this, we can afford to book a stall in advance and plan our activities well in advance.

Scheduling of volunteers managing the stall could not be done well. As such, some of them had to stay back for a very long time and could not take a break. That was very hectic and tiring. Some volunteers joined and stayed back for quite some time. That helped others a lot. Meeting existing users and editors who came to visit our stall was the happiest time. All of them were very happy to see the activities at the stall and also about the monthly meetups etc.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

This was a great way to do outreach and to connect to common users. Lot of opportunities to make new editors were created just by talking to the newbies and existing users.

Ciphers and Shipmaster - Community of Arabic Wikipedia/Producer Prize

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

• Running mid-term competitions can help retaining editors
• Offering monetary prize can motivate users to generate new and high quality content
• Granting the prize only to the top participants made some of the other participants upset despite that they were already informed of the participation condition.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

• This project resulted in an increase of level of engagement among participants, judging panel, and organizers.
• This project motivated participants in pursue their pre-set goals by providing them with an incentive.

WM NO/Outreach GLAM

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

• Choose only state-of-the-art contributors to deliver lections
• Identify as many volunteers as possible to assist with practical issues
• Attract celebrities by means of mobilizing the one with reference to the other...
• Hotel had only 2 Mb/sec connection, check this well in advance and demand more!
• Take much care in mobilizing photographers to document the event!
• Follow up all contacts and project leads!

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

• Attracted at leatst 3 institutions for wikipedian-in-residence openings
• Attracted at least 15 institutions to attend and get the full message of motivation
• Provided dynamics for the present progress with the culture council project.

Tinucherian and Shijualex/Wiki Community development in India and newsletter

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

To run a project of this scale, it needs much passion and dedication from the volunteers. To start the meetup, it involves a long process of identifying interested local volunteer(s), training them , finding a suitable venue and make other logistics and publicity. We were not able to conduct meetups in many other potential cities and towns because we were unable to find such volunteers.

It is imperative that the local volunteers share enough passion and enthusiasm to conduct more meetups and academies in that place.

A lot of expenses couldn't be accounted and reimbursed due to non-availability of bills ( auto fares, food in rural areas, phone calls, and so on) and had to borne by us or volunteers. These type of expenses need to be covered by some mechanism as part of the grant agreement (if there are similar grant allocation in India).

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

Through this project, we were able to reach more people, increase participation in various Wikimedia projects and build core communities for various language Wikipedias.

We believe that we were able to seed the initial community building efforts in India. We hope the multiple entities that support WMF in India can take forward the wiki community building in India. Going forward we will not be able to contribute actively in these community building efforts due to our personal and professional priorities.

WM NO/Nordic Chapter Meeting 2012

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

• We probably set up too many goals to be achieved. Next time, 2-3 projects would probably be more realistic for cross-national cooperation in a one-year perspective. At the same time, the meeting allowed for discussion and for presenting ideas, so we agreed that success would mean to realize at least two of the projects. That is underway to be achieved.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

• Increased quality obtained in outreach result communication, and generally in the way chapters present the rationale and value of GLAM outreach to external audiences.
• Increased reach from the ongoing distribution of the Nordic Yearbook and a FSCONS Wikipedia seminar.

Susanna Mkrtchyan/Wiki conference

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects? Although our conference was well organized and successful (even we couldn't imagine), but there are some thoughts how to organize it better.

The conference starts since you make decision about the conference.

Start writing report simultaneously with organizing of the conference.

Take into account, that it is very important to attract more people in organization process. First time it was difficult, because of some people had doubted about success.

It is better to devide responsibilities at the start.

It would be better to define few partial scholarship for active editors of Armenian Wikipedia outside of Armenia.

Now most participants and non participants editors are considi about second Armenian Wikiconference in Vanadzor: to attract more people outside of Yerevan.

The main thing to continue regular meetups, to have the same vision, way of development of Armenian (or other language) Wiki projects. After the conference we formed the core of which feels responsibility and seeks the way of increasing of quality and quantity of the content of Wiki projects. Now more people are participating in organization of the workshops.

In my opinion the groups or chapters need to keep the minimum of spare money, to feel free in organizing outreach activities.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

• The conference facilitated the relation with various type of organizations to make workshops, to disseminate ideology of Wikipedia and other Wiki projects.

After the conference we succeeded weekly collaboration project. You may see the result of this project in articles Denmark, Australia, United Kingdom and Moon. Now we have group of editors which make edits every day. Along new participants there are people with various interest: historians, It specialists, writer, art critic, former astronomer,... After workshop in Yerevan State University we have more students contributors. Discussions became more creative. During the conference we got new partner: Shirak Technologies and more close became collaborations with Instigate Foundation. Now we agreed with KASA Foundation to organize a chain of workshops in Gyumry. We have organized meeting related to establishment of Armenian chapter. We agreed about the goals and content of bylaw. Also we agreed the bylaw with public register. Now we are waiting for decision from Affiliation Committee.

Kannan Shanmugham - WikiSangamotsavam 2012/Malayalam Wiki Conference 2012

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

Let us start with the hard lesson learnt. To conduct a conference of this scale much effort (both offline and online) and volunteer time are required from the wikimedians on ground. So unless you have around 6 -7 Wikipedians on ground where the conference is taking place it is better not to try to conduct a conference of this scale.

WikiSangamotsavam was the first Indic language wiki conference conducted by an Indic language wiki community. The conference helped in boosting the activities of Malayalam wiki projects. The gave the participants an opportunity to meet the fellow Wikimedians. The outreach efforts could be boosted because of the excellent media coverage. Due to the outreach efforts, primary school students digitized the poem 'Keshaveeyam' and added it to Malayalam Wikibooks. Students from other schools are also involved in creating content for wikiprojects. During the discussions that happened during the conference, a new Wikipedia education project idea was born, and a pilot program of this is now happening in Anchal Government High School. A GLAM project is under discussion. We expect that many more new projects would be launched through the connections established by Wikimedians during the conference.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

The conference introduced the concept and awareness about the Wikimedia missions to a completely new set of people spectra. Besides directly influencing the people who attended the conference (both registered and casual visitors), a shower of related news highlights through the print and visual media instilled quest and curiosity among the common mass who hitherto were not at all aware of the Wikipedia (Wikimedia) or its existence in their own local language. This conference could be considered as the largest concerted effort within Kerala and among the potential Malayalam WM users so far in spreading and propagating the 'idea' and scope of Wikipedia.

As a result of the conference, there has been a steadily accelerating trend in the number and quality of users within the Malayalam community. Although less measurable, repercussions could also be observed in general Wikipedia participation in other WM projects such as en.wikipedia etc. from the target geographical bounds. Many users are now better aware about the sister projects as well (viz. Wiktionary, Wikisource etc.) than before. Some of them finds it more worthwhile to spend their productive time in such projects.

The conference has been able to penetrate the WM concepts to some niche areas as well. Such areas include students and teachers of all levels, library activists and staff, media staff, people from co-operative movements and local self-government offices and GLAM institutions. Many of them have taken the cue from the sessions and discussions and are in the process of conceiving novel ideas that will yield tremendous mutual benefits and impacts. Some examples: (1) Members from the state and district library council have developed a new interest in setting up a project for digitizing all qualifying books within their repository. Over a long term systematic plan, they envisage a large contribution to the wikisource, almost completely on their own bare some minor technical assistance from the community volunteers. (2) The enthusiasm of school children were particularly noticeable. They have been quick and effective in capturing the intricate details of Wikipedia creativity and user level techniques. Their involvement in WM projects are definitely going to produce secondary wave effects through their parents, teachers and friends.

Several sessions during the program were focused on copy rights issues, credibility, citations and such other aspects. These have imparted a clearer vision and confidence to the existing and emerging users. The output is observable as a net enhancement in the quality in terms of editing, refining and interweaving WM articles ever since the conference.

The Malayalam community has been very special and different than its counterparts in one particular kind: since the beginning, the active volunteers have always been in good touch and harmony one to another. They have been closely and intimately connected to each other mostly by social networks and mailing lists. In fact, this has been one of the prime reasons for the projects enduring success. However, many of them had never seen or met their peers all during these years. Conference gave an opportunity to bring these birds of the same flock together at one place and reinforce the friendships into much more concrete levels. During the events, they shared a lot of technical and political wisdom among themselves both off and on-stage.

As an overall hallmark, one could notice that 'Wikipedia' has suddenly become a word that is mostly recognizable by a majority of the internet users within Kerala. Most now understands that Wikipedia is a 'very special' collaborative idea that is concomitant with the new age of Internet. The conference has stimulated and amplified the already existing mass consciousness with a new vigor and passion.

WM PH/Philippine WikiCon 2012

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

• Back to back event — Initially the WikiConference was planned to be held in July, while the Annual Meeting was scheduled on May, based on the Bylaws, which it had to comply. The project lead saw the economy of creating a back-to-back event so it only had to fly-in participants who are based outside of Manila only once. Also, if the chapter exposes the WikiConference participants to the formal chapter meeting it could potentially invite them to pursue membership in the organization.
  Keeping administrative expenses to below 30 percent is a strict requirement to become a certified NGO (which exempts donations to it from tax) in the Philippines. As annual meetings would be categorized as such, a greater proportion of expenses it could have incurred in a back-to-back meeting could be rationally classified as expenses for the conference itself.

• Preparation time — The proposal to merge the WikiConference and Annual Meeting into a single-day event was presented two months prior to the scheduled Annual Meeting which is a regulatory requirement in the Philippines. However, the Board wasn't able to act immediately on the proposal until a month later due to legal uncertainties if such a move is permissible under Philippine corporation laws. After consulting with Atty. Bernes Guerrero, a pro-bono legal consultant of the chapter, the chapter should not encounter any hurdle in the future should it decide to move the annual meeting to a better or more preferred date. The month delay caused preparations to be squeezed into just four weeks of preparation and didn't allow the organizers to gather topics or proposals for discussions for the conference.

• Courier expenses — Following standard corporate practice and regulatory requirements, invitations to Annual Meeting were sent WMPH members by courier, except those who are based outside the Philippines who received it by e-mail. In a growing organization such costs could be reduced by coursing official communication by e-mail. As a work around this regulatory requirement, the Board has since decided to solicit from its members their preferred mode of receiving official communication from the chapter. Members would be given the option to receive such communication (invitation to the Annual Meeting) by mail or e-mail and shall document their option for regulatory compliance purposes.

• Estimating participants — Preparation was a challenge for the organizers especially the need to estimate the number of participants. The organizers provided an online registration form where 67 individuals registered. This was used as a basis to determine the amount of food to be ordered plus adding some provisions in case there'd unregistered participants who would only come on the day of the conference. Unfortunately 18 registrants didn't show up, while seven participants who have not preregistered came to the conference, the result was an oversupply of food.

• Venue —The venue chosen was desirable as it had in the vicinity the lodging and accommodations for participants who flew-in and volunteers. The dining places were also nearby. The size of the breakout rooms was just enough for discussions, but there appears to be a lot of participants who are interested in Wikipedia workshops, but such number had to be capped due to limited number of available computer units.

• Simultaneous discussions — During the preparation for the conference a participant who wasn't in favor of simultaneous discussion taking place voiced his concern as he would have wanted to attend all discussions. As it turned out, there were indeed participants who were more inclined to attend a particular topic over other discussions, while others preferred to socially interact with other participants and the organizers themselves to discuss project ideas and other partnerships.

• Entertainment — The organizers partnered with a theater group of a university who wanted to have exposures outside their campus. They provided performances during intervals and the same time helped in ushering the participants.

• Inactive editors — WMPH is determined to revive fledgling Philippine language Wikipedias. Based on available data, only the Tagalog Wikipedia is experiencing a sustainable growth in the number of editors, page views and articles. WMPH reached out to editors of other Philippine language Wikipedias (ceb, ilo, pag, pam, bcl, war, cbk-zam) by posting invitations on their talk pages, however only Bikol Wikipedia editors showed interest. Instead of relying on editors who have already hibernated from editing activity, it would be wiser for WMPH to initiate projects that would introduce Wikipedia in the localities where these languages are spoken to develop new breed of editors.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

Overall, the conference provided the chapter an opportunity to gauge the sentiment of the interested individuals and Wikipedians themselves. These would help WMPH formulate strategies and develop projects that would cater to their sentiments to make chapter projects more relevant and attune to what the community wanted to ensure that they actively and continually participate or contribute to the Wikimedia projects.

• Demographics — Based on available information provided by the participants during registration:
  • Average age of participants: 28.8 years old
    • Youngest participant: 17 years old
    • Oldest participant: 71 years old
  • Women percentage: 35 percent

• Reach (Increase participation) — After the conference one of the participants from Pampanga (about 90kms N of Manila) requested to conduct a similar conference and workshop in their area. Pampanga is home to Kapampangan language which has a Wikipedia project. This is a welcome development to revive fledgling Wikipedia projects and at the same time present it to a new audience (in place of inactive editors). There are numerous language organizations in the Philippines that advocate to preserve their ethno-linguistic identity which are threatened as more and more of their language speakers follow the mainstream and would rather be fluent in Filipino/Tagalog and English than their mother tongues. Enticing these advocates to use the Wikimedia projects to them as a repository for the preservation of their languages would be a new frontier for WMPH to venture into.

• Reach — During the Editor Retention discussion, Wikipedians clamored for more informal meet-ups, rather than chapter centered meetings, which could actually be left to the Board and other members. Heeding to the call, a Wikipedian called for a the 17th Manila Meet-up on June 23 in Quezon City which was attended by five Wikipedians, there discussions about the future of a Filipino language Wikipedia was raised.

• Quality — A photography group presented a proposal to partner with WMPH to provide free photography training that should result into quality photo contributions to Wikimedia Commons. They also offered to be present at WMPH projects seeing the need to have more photo documentation of the chapter's events and projects.

• Quality — The chapter had made it known during the discussion on Improving Philippine Content that is has acquired resource materials (i.e. Filipino dictionaries, language studies) that members/contributors could borrow to assist them in coming up with articles.

• Chapter/organization specific goals — The presence of a majority of members during the annual meeting that followed the conference allowed the chapter to pursue statutory changes it had to implement to enable it to comply with regulatory requirements. WMPH's Incorporation Articles and Bylaws were affirmed by the membership which paved the way to allow WMPH to become a certified non-government organization. Such a certification will ensure that donations to the chapter would be from Donor's tax.

Ada Initiative, Inc./AdaCamp DC Funding

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

Control over conference space

We discovered that parts of our conference venue were used frequently by employees of the company that owned the space. People often walked through the area, which reduced our goal of creating a safe space for discussion. Some outside people ate our food! When we tried to stop people from walking through the conference space, the company refused to enforce it. Next time, we will make sure that physical control of the conference space is in our contract.

Gender neutral bathrooms

Similarly, we wanted control over the bathrooms, in particular the ability to change bathrooms to gender-neutral and women, since we were 96% female and some attendees wanted gender-neutral bathrooms. It turned out that we didn't have control over the bathrooms and weren't allowed to re-assign them, again because the owning company's employees frequently used them. Next time we will put the ability to change the assignment of bathrooms in our contract.

Professional day-of coordinator

We originally hired a conference organizer who was not up to the task, although she came highly recommended. As the conference neared, it became clear we needed to hire a day-of coordinator or else we would not be able to coordinate food delivery, furniture delivery, and similar tasks, despite having around 30% volunteer participation. Day-of coordinators tend to be expensive because we are competing with the wedding market. We did get a non-profit discount, though. Next time we will plan on a professional, relatively expensive day-of coordinator.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

About the AdaCamp DC attendees

(This is repeated information from the previous "Diversity" section to avoid creating links within the document)

About 100 people attended, who lived in at least 10 countries, including Japan, India, Myanmar, Argentina, Spain, Italy, Australia, the UK, Canada, and the US.

We worked hard to make AdaCamp DC diverse in many different ways. Some statistics from our post-conference survey (45% response rate):

• 25% listed their race or ethnicity as other than white or Caucasian
• 28% were born outside the United States
• 19% spoke a language other than English as their first language
• 49% were not employed as programmers or IT specialists
• 22% were students, professors or researchers

AdaCamp DC welcomed people of all genders and sexuality. From one attendee: “I LOVED learning about new things and the diversity of attendees. I found the prominence of the LGBTQ community very inspiring.”

Women of all ages are creating and using open technology and culture and we were happy to have a wide range of ages at AdaCamp. About one quarter of attendees were 25 years of age or younger, and about one fifth were over 40 years of age, with the remainder evenly distributed between ages 26 to 40. Our youngest attendee was 18 years of age.

Many people were inspired and re-energized by AdaCamp DC, and left with new motivation to both participate in open tech/culture and to work to make it more supportive of women. One attendee told us, “The experience profoundly changed me. I’m looking into volunteer and educational opportunities that I would not have considered before attending AdaCamp. And I really want to share what I’m doing.” Another says, “[One of the best things about AdaCamp was] learning about imposter syndrome and making the connection of how we hold other women back by not promoting our knowledge [...] Hugely important stuff — probably life altering in my case.”

Leslie Birch says, “I’m leaving with new tools like IRC, bug trackers and mentor lists. I have a new found desire to reach out to other women that identify as “geek”, “feminist” or both. And most of all, I’ve created partnerships that will lead to exciting workshops at our hacker space.” Another attendee says, “AdaCamp was a phenomenal event! I’m grateful to the Ada Initiative and AdaCamp attendees for helping me stay inspired to fight for open tech, open culture, and women’s involvement in both.”

Smallbones/Congressional Cemetery QRpedia Project

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

1. An inexpensive QR code project can be easily undertaken, with a cost of less than $7 per code posted.

2. Even very simple and inexpensive laminated codes will last for over 6 months, replacement will be extremely low cost when needed.

3. Since QR codes are available to only a few people, generally in only 1 location, they are not a way to increase overall pageviews (as should have been expected), but they can attract a specific audience (often unexpected) and provide a special type of Wikipedia experience.

4. Feedback from QRpedia stats can be used to identify which codes are not being scanned, so that they may be repositioned. The number of scanned codes depends on placement - stick to spots by the walkways!

5. Publicity campaigns need to be planned out in some detail

6. Scheduled events can have an impact of the number of codes scanned.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

While a $400 project cannot be expected to have a major impact on the WMF mission goals, a marginally positive impact is likely for all of the above goals.

1. Cemetery tourists, likely under-represented among current Wikipedians, were exposed to Wikipedia.
2. Organized groups of history buffs and historical societies, who have organized tours of the cemetery, were exposed to Wikipedia.
3. An increase in the number and quality of Congressional Cemetery photographs was noted.
4. The Congressional Cemetery article was improved, and an associated List of burials and cenotaphs was created.
5. Wikipedia appeared in a positive news story on Washington DC television connected to a well-known and respected historical site.

The likely impact, however, will be only noticeable if this project serves as a model for other groups, e.g. local historical societies (non-Wikipedian) or small Wikiprojects, who can learn how to provide quick, easy, and inexpensive informative signage by connecting to Wikipedia through QR codes. Great oaks from little acorns grow, even if many acorns fall by the wayside or are eaten by squirrels. This acorn has sprouted and may take root. We'll see how it grows next year.

WikiBilim/Turkic speaking wikimedians conference

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

Strength

This is our first time when we organized international conference such Turkic Wikimedia Conference. We tried to involve as much people as we can. Generally, we think TWC went very well. We received welcome letter to TWC participants from the Prime-Minister K.Masimov and the Governor of Almaty City. State agencies also participated in TWC. The leading university of Kazakhstan planning to use Wikipedia as the assessment tool in education process. A lot of thing have been done with 10 people of WikiBilim and more than 30 volunteers. We obtained good experience in organizing big events, planning and performing.

WikiBilim Foundation received support from business companies. Samuryk-Kazyna Foundation (SMK) acted as the sponsor of the TWC. SMK provided financial support in organizing contest amoung KKWP users (100 laptops) and cover other expenses.

Academia. We planned to involve more people for academia in order to start WikiPedia Education Program in Universities. There were only 10 professors and it would be great if we can start this program with some of them.

There were additional participants from Bashkortostan and Kyrgyzstan who came to conference by their own finance. OSI helped us to bring 6 person from Turkmenistan.

Weakness

Participant selection: We experienced some difficulties in selecting the participants to TWC. There are several reasons of that. First, the most of Turkic speaking wikimedia communities are not very active and there no feedback to the invitation. Second, Wkimedia communities could select available person for participation, others cancelled their participation very close to the event. We could't rebook that tickets again. Due to late confirmation we could get flight tickets more expensive that we planned.

Local ethnic cultural centers participation: We expected to involve all local ethnic communities. Most of them confirmed their participation, however not come to the event. We think that most of administrative personal of such groups are not good familiar with Internet and Wiki Projects.

Technical Development. Due to small activity in Turkic Wikimedia projects it was not possible to shcedule deep technical topics.

Language. Also we experienced problem with common language for participants. Our intention was to gather communities very close regionally and culturally. However most of participants are from post Soviet countries and mainly speaks only in Russian. Meantime participants from the Turkey doesn't speak in Russian or English. Our experts mainly spoke in English and Kazakh. But it was good step to better understanding of each other.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

TWC had good support from mass media. A lot of people were inspired by the idea of access to sum of human knowldge in own language. Turkmen participants edited wikipedia first time. more than 20 kazakh volunteers edited wikipedia first time, more than 70 participants listened about Creative Commons for first time. more than 15 participants took part in Translatewiki Workshop.

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

Communication

• in the run up:
  • entire and transparent planning on a public wiki was well proven.
  • the internal communication via a separate mailinglist was also well proven.
• during the conference:
  • purchase of walki-talkis helped enormously with the communication.
  • the distribution of contact information and emergency phones are important and were necessarily used
  • a "Cheat Sheet" given to all team members and volunteers containing every information about the conference and the venue (in alphabetical order) gave the impression to the particiapants that the vounteers knew everything (see http://mitglieder.wikimedia.at/Projekte/WikiCon_2012/WikiCon-Atlas)

Costs

• attendance-fees should be uniformly on a moderate but not to low level
• in the german-speaking area Wikimedia Deutschland is trying to establish standard costs for conferences - speak with them first before setting up your fees

Information

• be careful with Sitenotice Banners. They create a tremendous load - quite many people click them. Better link to the project page on a Wikimedia project than to your chapter's or own website - even a dedicated server is likely to go down.
• Make sure to make the weblinks visible in the banner design, or even better: link the whole banner. Some wikis have CSS rules which removed the typical link styles, so the links where invisible in the banner text.

Accomodation

• check in advance if there are any other big events in the region which may interfere with hotel booking

Program

• Plan a long time for the Call for Papers. Most applications will come shortly before or even after the end.
• From the end to the Call for Papers you need around one month to publish a finished program. Make sure you ask those whose papers you have accepted if they are really coming and ask them for a registration to be sure, before you finish the program planning.
• The call for papers should ideally end AFTER another bigger event where you can advertise the CfP and get more speakers. You can also check the speaker's qualities at such events.
• The preparation and printing of the program-booklet takes quite a while (two weeks just for printing and post-production!). Therefore program has to be ready quite early before the event.
• A collaborative closing statement seems to be usual at other events and was well accepted by the attendees. This should be well planned in advance though to include as many interested people as possible.
• There should be a real barcamp instead of an open space as unconference.

Technics

• proper wifi is crucial. Universities generally have good wifi infrastructure, though we faced issues that they were using enterprise, VPN style security settings which needed to be set up manually on older operating systems.

Facilities

• you will need more than one key to the venue and the rooms, otherwise you loose a lot of time by running after the key
• the baggage-store should be located near the administration to save man-power and still be able to watch it

Misc

• the nametag on the badge should be written in a big font and on both sides of the badge.
• there should be publicly accessible workstations for accessing the internet
• chargers for cellphones are always needed

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

• Ting Chen's report to the board: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-September/121943.html
• WikiCon 2011 had two participants from Austria and one from Switzerland. The rest were from Germany. WikiCon 2012 had...
  • at least three participants from Liechtenstein - Liechtenstein is implicitely included in WMCH's territory but no contacts have been established so far, no community was known
  • at least one participant from Südtirol - a german-speaking province in Italy which was formerly Austrian. Like Liechtenstein no contacts existed to this community before.
  • around 40 participants from Austria
  • around 30 participants from Switzerland
  • one person from Luxembourg
  • (all numbers not including on-site registration)
• At least in the smaller communities in Austria and Switzerland increased activities are experienced. Several members could be acquired by the Wikimedia Chapters. Several new projects were started - see "Measures of Success".
• It is important for the community to meet in real life. a big conference like WikiCon provides the possibility to get to know new community-people, outside your local meetups. the relationship between community-members can therefore be much better established, than via the project, irc, email, etc.

WM DK/Wikipedian-in-Residence Scholarship

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

It is our impression that being able to pay the resident was instrumental in getting the museum to find funds for a salary.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

The residence helped ~10 National Museum curators become editors, helped them create ~100 new articles, and most importantly: helped them understand some of the pitfalls of contributing to Wikipedia.

Patricio Molina - Wikimedians in Bolivia/Bylaws translation

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

Hubo algunos inconvenientes relacionados con la transferencia del dinero a Argentina que pudieron ser solucionados a tiempo. La próxima vez habrá que tener en cuenta los porcentajes de comisión que absorben las entidades financieras que liquidan las transferencias.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

A corto plazo, sí, porque permitirá a Wikimedia Bolivia ser parte de proyectos locales de difusión de conocimiento.

WM CL/Ibero-American Wikimedia Summit 2012

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

As Iberocoop and its members have grown in the past year, their experience have increased in different subjects and that makes much more difficult to host an event with a lot of topics. Probably in the following years, Iberoconf should have a main topic to discuss (probably, a whole day) and smaller talks for different topics.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

Wikimedia's presence in Latin America will be increased with the development of chapters in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Uruguay and support for new Wikimedia groups in Panama and Peru. Workshop of communication and social networks will help chapters and other groups to promote their activities and from the Wikimedia Foundation in a more effective way.

Participation in Wiki Loves Monuments in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Panama will increase the number of participants and images in Wikimedia Commons, reaching to a new audience (especially interested in photography). Also, the development of projects in native languages will be helpful to incorporate new communities of indigenous people, usually excluded or discriminated. Shared experiences with GLAM instutitions will help to increase quality and credibitily in those countries with younger groups.

WM ZA/Gauteng meeting

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

• Even though it is not the cheapest option, it may be better to go for airline tickets that can be moved free of charge.
• It is better to arrange these kinds of meetings for weekends as individual work commitments are not flexible. This will be bourne in mind when arranging the next meeting.
• Initially we wanted to use the Hector Pieterson museum without considering other options. The fact that meeting cancellations led to more available time, the organisers could visit this venue and notice that it would not be suitable for the prize-giving event. Should this venue be used, the evening would have been much less of a success than it could have been.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

• The WLM competition got more structured, as many of the brainstorming sessions led to ideas currently being implemented.

WM RS/Open Wiki GLAM of Serbia

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

The day after the conference, there was an internal meeting with local Wikipedians and GLAM guests from abroad. There we wanted to hear their comments about the event from the day before. Each of them wrote several comments on a piece of paper. We were surprised by the amount of positive comments. Misgivings were related mainly to the things we couldn’t control, such as cold weather or nonexistence of live streaming of the conference.

Conclusions from the conference and the meeting confirmed that cooperation between GLAM groups and community support are necessary for successful projects. Only few chapters are large enough and have enough resources to be able to work on that kind of projects all alone. Smaller chapters need support with projects that are similar or the same with the ones made by other chapters.

It is also important to stress that the inclusion of local institutions (whether they are GLAM or not) in the co-organization turned out to be a good way of developing our mission. Although Wikimedia Foundation’s Grant Program is in existence, it is necessary to search for sponsors on a local level, not only because it’s important to find funds outside of WMF, but also in order to make contacts with local institutions and thus demonstrate transparency and ability for work.

Did anything unexpected happen?

The whole organization was accompanied by various challenges. Only a day before sending invitations, organizers faced the possibility of having to choose a different venue. However, there wasn’t enough funds for that kind of luxury. In a successful negotiation action, we managed to secure several alternatives. However, the misunderstanding with the original venue (which was instigated by miscommunication regarding the schedules) was solved in time.

The weather gave a lot of troubles to the organizers. Untraversable roads prevented many guests from attending the conference. The organizers had to change a part of the program and the list of invitees, because of the changed circumstances. However, regardless of the weather, the response was satisfactory. About 160 invitations have been sent, of which about 140 were delivered. Between 110 and 120 people have registered, of which 75 were present at the conference. The fact that none of the participants or guests at the conference noticed any unexpected events should be considered a great success.

Would you do anything differently if you planned a similar project?

Even though we are generally very satisfied with the quality of the organization, taking into consideration the size of the project and the small amount of spent funds, we’ll try to work on improving our skills for some other occasion. We’d like to have translators and live streaming. Of course, that would require a larger budget.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

Every GLAM project and program brings better quality and stronger interest for the development of these topics and Wikimedia projects that are directly or indirectly related to the GLAM institutions. The sole cooperation between local chapters and GLAM institutions raises the importance of WMF on a local level and opens op possibilities for deeper cooperation and new goals

WM AR/Wikigenero GroupLens Participation

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

Visa's times and proceeding: the international speaker needed a visa for Argentina, since he is a citizen from Sri Lanka studying in the US. He found out about visa process in the Argentinian Consulate, and made the forms but one month before the event's date, we began to receive lots of new requirements from the Argentinian Consulate, with a few time remaining. Visa was approved 2 days before departing, and we were very close to cancel the participation (and becoming a teleconference), with all the waste of time, effort implied. Lesson learned: to identify before the confirmation of an international speaker who requires visa, if time remaining is enough to manage visa's issues.

Main speaker opening the meeting very early: Although is a common practice oriented to reinforce the "on time beginning" of activities, in this case was quite early (9hs) for a Saturday morning after a holiday (May 25th), and many people arrive late, when the talk of Anduradha Uduwage has already begun.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

The presence of Anuradha Uduwage contributed to the quality of the whole event, specially as a scientific approach to a complex issue, regarding methodology used, and questions to data analyzed. In this sense, this participation was very valuable for the public as the possibility to have direct access to the author of one of the most interesting studies on Gender Gap in Wikipedia.

The quality of all the speakers generated a stimulating exchange of ideas and projects, being the most remarkable as direct impact of the event:

• National network of feminists scholars and activists: We had an immediate meeting (June 8th) with two of the speakers from Argentina (Diana Maffía and Paola Raffetta), for analyzing future projects. Diana proposed to organize a workshop about editing Wikipedia articles commented in the event (the gender topics gap analyzed) in a feminist library and cultural center called Tierra Violeta, in a similar approach to other activity Wikimedia Argentina had programmed for next June in the University of Cuyo (Mendoza). Contrasting ideas and projects, we decided to initiate a kind of "national network" of feminist scholars and activists, in order to collaborate in the improvement of quality and representation of gender topics in Wikipedia, and use the workshop of the University of Cuyo as a pilot experience.
  • This network is being built in these days, with a new workshop planned for September/October in the University of Jujuy, and the University of Córdoba in September also, in collaboration with their respective Gender Departments.
• DIY scanner: As other project related to this meeting with people of the cultural center Tierra Violeta, Wikimedia Argentina is finishing legal details to sign an agreement of collaboration for digitizing material in public domain of the library: a very special collection of books and magazines of women, or related to feminism, especially from Argentina or in Spanish. The material is going to be uploaded to WikiSource, using one of DIY scanners of Wikimedia Argentina.
• Bilingual publication: Many people asked for the documentation (audio recorded) of the talks, and as an initiative of the Board Member Evelin Heidel, we are working in a digital (maybe printed) bilingual publication of the talks of WikiGénero, plus the conclusions of WikiWomenCamp.

Sodabottle - Tamil Wikimedians/TamilWiki Media Contest

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

• Commons workload: The huge number of entries increased the workload in normal commons maintenance activities. Apart from usual commons editors, Tamil wikimedians Thagaval.uzhavan, Surya and shanmugam have helped a lot with maintenance activities. In future contests like this, a dedicated maintenance only team (that is not involved in general coordination work) is necessary for maintenance activities - categorisation, description adding, file moving, copyvio deduction and using the photos in wikiprojects.

• Maintenance work: We kept the entry barrier deliberately low - asked contestants to provide only descriptions. We did not mandate naming conventions, elaborate descriptions / parallel English descriptions and categorising. As a result a lot of entries with vague descriptions have come in. Natkeeran/Logicwiki raised the issue of categorising early on, but sodabottle convinced them otherwise saying commons people know and can do better (assuming lesser no of entries won’t burden usual commons editors). This was a wrong move - as mentioned in point no 1, a dedicated commons maintenance team should have been formed. Currently the workload has been reduced by normal commons maintenance editors like User:Roland zh and other tamil wikipedians stepping up (User:தகவலுழவன் ,User:Shanmugamp7, User:Surya Prakash.S.A.)

• Social media in outreach: Facebook helped drive traffic. We opened a facebook page for the contest and for the first 45 days regularly posted some of the better eye catching entries that were uploaded daily. It was extremely popular, with each entry getting hundreds of views and tens of comments/likes. But facebook tends to tie down people there - a lot of people posted their entries there in the facebook page itself. We managed to get some of them to upload them to Commons. But FB is a two edged sword - it is easy to reach people but difficult to get them to leave FB and move to Wikiprojects. A lot of entries were lost this way.

• Wikiproject outreach: Graphic banners in site notices are extremely potent in attracting people. only issue is if wikimedia notices are running (like fundraiser) then the content gets pushed down.

• Borders / watermarks: We didn't anticipate this and didn't make it clear in the rules. As a result around 100-150 images have been uploaded with borders/watermarks. While border removal is easy, removing watermarks is difficult and there is a huge backlog in commons for this activity.

• Lost Entries: Loss of potential entries for the contest happened because contestants started uploading straight to commons using the normal upload wizard instead of the customized wizard link. This has resulted in hundreds of entries not being included for the contest. A few contestants, contacted the contest organisers through email/talk page and specifically requested all their entries be included for the contest and that was done. But a lot of others did not do so and we assume hundreds of entries were thus "lost".

• Currency: The prizes were announced in US dollars, but the actual prize money was held in INR. We chose dollars as a common currency as the Tamil population is spread across many countries and USD was the only option to have a commonality in prize money attraction. This has caused problems because of USD X INR exchange rate fluctuations and sending the prize money to winners. In future, the coord from North America should hold the prize money or the transfer from WMF should be initiated only when the prizes are about to distributed (as bulk of the budget is prize money)

• Audio and Video formats: A majority of the help requests from contestants was about audio and video file formats. Though detailed instruction pages exist in commons and a comprehensive help page was given, conversion to the required .ogv and .ogg formats was a considerable entry barrier. To address this online conversion to .ogg/.ogv in commons can be provided.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

• Around 15000 files were uploaded as part of the contest. This number includes 6500 audio files, 100 video files and more than 8000 images. (15,217 was the actual number recorded at contest’s close. After copyvio deletions the number is currently 15,124 and is expected to reduce slightly more). 251 new contributors and 56 existing wikipedians (a total of 307) took part in the contest. Four of the new contributors have become regular wikipedians and are creating articles for their images to be used. Contributors from India, Srilanka, Malaysia, Canada, USA, Germany, Norway participated in the contest. (list of countries is incomplete as the origin of many contributors is unknown)

• In practical usage perspective, the contest was a resounding success. About 7850 files (52 % percent of the total entries) are being used across more than a dozen wiki projects (mainspace usage alone). This includes 1642 files in Tamil Wikipedia and 6121 files in Tamil Wiktionary. [1]. Many of the uploads have been / will be featured as Pictures of the Day in Tamil Wikipedia. Two of the videos have been featured as “Media of the Day” in Wikimedia Commons front page. commons:File:A_bamboo_basket_making_depiction_video.ogv. commons:File:Drilling_operation_on_a_steel_bar.ogv. An example for the far flung impact of the contest is the case of a Norwegian wikipedian finding an image for his new article in Norsk Wiki. ta:User_talk:Natkeeran/தொகுப்பு10#Found_a_picture_thanks_to_the_competition. Another example is a prize winning entry being used as an illustration in French Wikibooks on photography. b:fr:Photographie/Thèmes/Le_mouvement

• Besides content, the contest had significant impact on other areas. One user feeling the need for faster upload mechanism in commons, wrote a tool for uploading files in bulk. [2] and is writing more tools for Tamil Wikipedia. The contest also brought two longtime Tamil wikipedians out of long wikibreaks.

SarahStierch/GLAM WIKI Santiago attendance

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

• I would work on my Spanish language skills. I have decided that after graduation I would like to take lessons. I think that this could have helped in a million ways in Chile, and will benefit me in the future. I have traveled internationally and been lucky to meet many people who speak English in most countries, but this was quite eye opening to not have that luxury.
• The planning for the conference took place during the summer holiday season in Chile. A lot of people were slow at responding or non-responsive and that was frustrating for me.
• I should have taken my own personal initiative to reach out to cultural institutions about my visit to Chile. I did take the time to reach out to women's groups, but, not GLAMs, as I thought that would be organized by the conference organizers, Wikimedia Chile. I was pretty surprised, despite numerous conversations before our arrival, that no meetings were scheduled.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

• Wikimedia Chile states that approximately 80 people attended the GLAM-WIKI conference. I would say about 60 listened to myself & Kaldari speak.
• I have started working on a collaborative project with a Chilean art student whom I met at the conference. It's her first time editing and we are writing about a Chilean female artist.
• I attended a dinner with 10 men and women from a feminist journalism group in Santiago. Strong connections were made and follow-up will be made regarding women's outreach opportunities in the near future.

Lessons learned

Catering

When asked in a post-event survey, “What aspect of GLAMcamp could be improved?” , a number of respondents pointed to the lack of coffee and tea on-site. This was indeed an issue throughout our planning. Beyond our initial underestimation of catering costs at the venue, we also had great difficulty coordinating with the venue staff. Many of our communications went unheard, whether due to email problems or short attention spans, we are not certain. The end result was catered snacks that were very expensive and insufficient; however, we believe that having engaged the caterer permitted us to bring our own drinks and snacks (not formally allowed by the venue), which mitigated the problem.

Pre-planning

Respondents also commented on the need for additional pre-planning for goals and deliverables. This was an interesting point, because the organizers repeatedly pointed people to the planning page on Meta prior to the event, with very few people engaging in the discussion surrounding topics and deliverables to focus on. Perhaps in the future more attendees will find value in this ahead of time, and be more prone to participating ahead of the event; or perhaps there are better ways to encourage advance engagement.

There is also the point about achieving a balance between the typical open flow of a Wikipedia event and the expectation to have strong deliverables from the beginning. These two ideas seem to be at odds, but we believe that GLAMcamp came close to bringing the two together. Since there were multiple requests to be even more focused on deliverables, we’ll likely be more deliberate in future events, with less fear of straying from “the wiki way” of leaving things more open-ended. In general, we consider the positive reception for an event with careful planning and more structure than past GLAMcamps a very positive development, opening the door to wider variety in the planning of similar events in the future.

It would be ideal to plan more deliberately for an on-site visit at the venue prior to the event beginning. While we did do this for GLAMcamp DC, it was a last minute suggestion and we were not afforded enough time to ensure that all of the loose ends had indeed been tied up.

One important detail: although NARA assured us that wireless Internet would be provided, we were not aware until after the event had begun that many ports (including those for SSH, IRC chat, and some mail protocols) were blocked. This impacted the technical team most strongly, but also interrupted the communication habits of many participants.

Technical track coordination

We did not initially include a lead organizer for the technical hacking in our plans; doing so would have helped greatly. We engaged one of the participants, Danny B., to play this role late in the planning process; his help was invaluable, in that it helped the original organizers keep our attention on the documentation and social aspects of the event, while staying up-to-date on the technical projects in progress. Planning for the technical aspects of this event was met with challenges due to the current climate of technical needs in the GLAM-Wiki sphere.

Funding for social events

In the grant request, we did not plan for evening social events. The main events we were able to put together were a “backstage pass” event at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, which was free of charge; and a happy hour event sponsored by Creative Commons. Sarah planned the logistics for these events, and also prepared reservations for several social outings that were at the participants’ own expense. While these plans ended up coming off successfully in the end, the organizers met with difficulty in securing sites without a budget to reserve the spaces. Since these events, especially the GLAM-Wiki Meet Up, were so successful, we would recommend funding for them be solicited in advance for future events.

WM EE/Start up II

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects?

We have tried many different projects and even more will be put to the test in 2012. We are showing what can be done with the minimal resources (we used less than € 3000 in 2010-2011 and almost all of the work was done by 4 persons – usually with only 1 person per project). So now we are also planning a massive recruitment project as we have too many great ideas and too little people to do the job.

We are planning some cooperation projects with other chapters and thinking how to export our ideas but this will be the work for the year 2012.

Our experience has shown that a thorough planning is useful for Wikipedian projects, while it is also important to avoid getting stuck in development hell. We believe we have learnt to maintain that balance.

Also, as our main (and constant) problem is the lack of people, it seems to be useful to use professionals for some supportive functions (e.g. bookkeeping) so we could use our volunteers for the best results.

What impact did the project have on WMF mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

The number of users who have contributed during last 30 days to Estonian Wikipedia has nearly doubled (from 300-400 to 600-700, mostly thanks to university projects). We used to have the growth rate of 11 000 articles a year but this rate has started to increase and it definitely will do so in 2012.

Many people now know that WMEE exists. We have developed a good representation of Wikipedia and Wikimedia Eesti on national media. For example, most recently there has been a lot of attention due to our court case against Estonian Tax and Custom Board (because of their strange definition charity work we were denied tax-exemption) and in relation to the SOPA/ACTA themes (we have written several articles to national media and talked in radio about the topic).

Photo competitions have brought 4500+ new images to Commons and some of them have been featured as well. We have started cooperation with Estonian Institute to facilitate a major photo donation from their image bank into Commons during the first half of 2012.

About 500 new articles have been created thanks to the various projects. Now we also have a collaboration that will lead to ~6000 new articles in Estonian Wikipedia (the content of "Biographical Lexicon of Estonian Science": in total there are 8000 articles) during the first half of 2012.