Grants:PEG/ARCHÉ/Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 in Romania

Funded

This submission to the Project and Event Grants Program was funded in the fiscal year 2014-15. This is a grant to an organization.

IMPORTANT: Please do not make changes to this page without the explicit approval of Project and Event Grants Program staff. They will be reverted.

This project has already been funded, but you may still add or review comments on the discussion page.
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Report: Please visit Grants:PEG/ARCHÉ/Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 in Romania/Report to read this report, comment on this report, or review its status.

Basic information

Grant request details

Are you an organization, a group, or an individual?: Organization
Please provide your name, or the name of the group or organization requesting this grant.: Asociaţia ARCHÉ
Please provide the name (or username) of the main contact for this grant request. You do not need to disclose your legal name publicly.: Alina Chiciudean (alina.chiciudean [at] arche [dot] ro)
For groups and organizations only: Please provide the name (or username) of a second contact for this grant request.: Strainu
Please link to any relevant documents, including your website if you have one.

Project details

Official project name: Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 in Romania
Project start date: This is the date you begin work on your project. Please include a month, day, and year. You must include a project start date.; September 1st, 2014 (this is when activities that require funds begin; other activities are planned until then)
Project completion date: This is the date you finish work on your project. Please include a month, day, and year. You must include a project completion date.; December 31, 2014
Please describe the project in a few sentences: This is the fourth edition of WLM in Romania. This year we would like to increase our outreach by organizing real-life events related to the contest like a weekend roadtrip and an exhibition with all the winning pictures. We would also like to involve a younger audience by organizing a special prize for high-school students. The final objective is to transform as many of the participants as possible into contributors.

Financial details

Please request your grant in your local currency. WMF is able to grant funds in many currencies.

Amount and currency requested: 17786.00 RON
Please provide an equivalent amount in US dollars using the exchange rate provided by Oanda on the date you open this request: US$ 5,475.14

For organizations only

This section only needs to be completed by organizations requesting grants. Individuals and groups that are not incorporated do not need to complete this section.

Are you an incorporated organization able to provide local proof of nonprofit status within your country? For-profit organizations are not eligible to receive grants through the PEG program.: Answer YES or NO.; YES
Does your organization currently employ or engage any fulltime or part-time staff or contractors? If yes, please tell us how many staff or contractors you employ or engage, along with their functions or a link to your staff page. For example, "2 full time program managers and 1 part-time contractor accountant at 50% FTE each.": 1 full-time manager (Cristina Chira); all the others are volunteers

Goals and measures of success

Project goal

Please briefly describe what will be accomplished if the project is successful.

Project goal: Make Wikipedia THE place to go when it comes to basic information (name, address, authors, pictures) about historic monuments in Romania and increase the visibility of Romanian Wikipedia's activities at a national level.

Measures of success

Please provide a list of measurable criteria that will be used determine how successful the project is. You will need to report on the success of the project according to these measures after the project is completed.

Measures of success

more than 5K new images uploaded covering at least 500 different monuments
more than 5% of the participants will be involved in other Wikipedia-related activities (like article edits, reporting errors, volunteer for administrative tasks related to the contest)
over 20 high-school level participants in the dedicated section of the contest
3 real-life events - Wiki Weekend Expedition, an exhibition presented in 2 different cities in Romania and an awards ceremony
partnerships with other Romanian groups interested in open content
one presentation about the work behind the monument database to a national symposium
25% of all images used on Wikipedia pages by the end of the year
135 participants (+10% from 2013)

Project scope and activities

This section describes what will happen if this project is funded. Who will do what, and when?

List of activities

July 21st - Press release announcing the contest
August 1st-14th - Call for volunteers to work on administrative tasks
August 18th-22nd - Selecting the volunteers and the kick-off meeting
August 25th - extensive advertising of the contest
September - Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 in Romania photo contest
September 6th-7th (or 13th-14th) - Wiki Weekend Expedition
October 1st-5th - initial filtering of the uploaded pictures
October 6th-14th - Jury selects the winners from the pre-screen pictures
October 15th-21st - Organizing the awards ceremony and the exhibition in Bucharest
Last decade of October until end of the year - Awards ceremony and exhibition launch in Bucharest (pending on contracting the location) and moving the exhibition to Timișoara
Mid-November - Presentation about the work behind the database at the OSGEO seminary in Timișoara
December - writing and submitting the project and grant report

The first activity will involve writing and releasing the first announcement of the 2014 edition of the WLM 2014 in Romania contest. This will be published as an article on the official contest website and will be promoted on the social media, organizational mailing lists and press.

We will then recruit at least 5 volunteers that will help the organizing committee in promoting the contest, the initial filtering of the uploaded pictures and organizing the outreach events.

During the contest we will organize an expedition in one of the less-covered regions in Romania. The purpose of this field trip is to increase the monument coverage in the region and to train interested participants into editing Wikipedia. We will invite former winners as well as photographers that cover the historic monuments in Romania.

After the initial filtering, the jury will select and rank in order of preference the ten winning photographs. Five special prizes for the high-school participants will also be selected. By mid-October, the organizers will notify all the participants who won the competition.

The awards ceremony will take place in a suitable place, such as the shared building of Ministry of Culture and National Library of Romania in Bucharest. All the winners will be invited. At the same time we will launch the exhibition. It will remain opened for about 2 weeks and will then be transferred to Timișoara where it will be launched on the occasion of the Geo-spatial seminary there.

Budget

Please provide a detailed breakdown of project expenses according to the instructions here.

Grantees are subject to line-item scrutiny of expenses. Changes to the approved budget beyond 10% in any category must be approved in advance.

Project budget table

Number	Category	Item Description	Unit	Number of units	Cost per unit	Total cost (RON)	Total cost (USD)	Notes
1	Contest organization	Prize money (main category)	total	1	3756	3756	1143	7 mentions @ 200 RON each, 3rd prize 500 RON, 2nd prize 779 RON (750 RON + taxes), 1st prize 1077 RON (1000 RON + taxes)
2	Contest organization	Prize money (youth)	total	1	850	850	259	2 mentions @ 50 RON each, 3rd prize 200 RON, 2nd prize 250 RON, 1st prize 300 RON
3	Contest organization	Banking fees	transaction	20	4	80	24	Fifteen prizes, two transactions receiving money (one from WMF, one from another sponsor) and 3 for the exhibition
4	Contest organization	Promotional packages	piece	30	100	3000	913	for winners, jury and sponsors; might include delivery if the winners are not from Bucharest or Timișoara
5	Outreach	Wiki Weekend	person	26	250	6500	1978	transport (fee for renting a 26 place bus): price 4,5 RON/km x approx. 965 km = 4340 RON; accomodation for 27 persons (26+driver), 1 night: 80 RON / night => 2160 RON; the prices were estimated based on ARCHÉ's previous experiences, but we didn't present the details because we expect small adjustments that depend on current market conditions, like gas prices and accomodation price variation depending on the date of booking
6	Outreach	Talk @ OSGEO	conference	1	1600	1600	487	for a breakdown, see Grants:TPS/Strainu/OSGEO_Cluj#Budget_breakdown - the costs will basically be the same
7	Exhibition	Prints	picture	25	40	1000	304
8	Exhibition	Transport to/from Timișoara for pictures and easels	total	1	1000	1000	304
9	Exhibition	Easels	piece	25	100	2500	761	Part of this is covered by a sponsorship, the rest by TINACT
10	Exhibition	Vernissage	total	1	2200	2200	670	500 EUR, covered from another grant

Total cost of project: 22486 RON

Total amount requested from the Project and Event Grants program: 17786 RON (rows 1-8)/US$ 5,475.14

Additional sources of revenue that may fund part of this project, and amounts funded

The activities founded from other sources have a different background in the table above.

sponsorship from Ixia Romania - 700 USD (2260 RON)
TINACT grant - 2440 RON

TOTAL: 4700 RON

Non-financial requirements

See a description of non financial assistance available. Please inform Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) of any requirements for non-financial assistance now.

Requests for non-financial assistance

Permission to use Wikimedia's marks - this has already happened and the permission has been obtained
Supplies for outreach from Wikimedia Foundation - during our events we could find uses for any kind of promotional materials (stickers, calendars, pins, pens etc.)

Resources and Risks

Resources

This section is used to highlight your potential for successfully executing this project.

Consider including the following information:

List of team members (names or usernames):
Onwiki evidence of community support (such as a project about this discussion):
Endorsements from community members or movement groups:
Special skills or qualifications this potential grantee or project lead brings to this project:
Evidence of past success in executing similar projects:

The following people will be involved in implementing this project:

Alina Chiciudean is a finance professional with many years of experience in the domain. As a member of ARCHÉ, she has gained valuable experience in organizing events comparable in size to the ones we propose to implement. She will be responsible for tracking all the expenses, organizing the Wiki Weekend and the exhibit in Bucharest
Strainu - a Wikipedian with 9 years of experience, sysop on ro.wp, organizer of Wiki Loves Monuments in Romania from the first edition, being involved in administering the budget in each edition; he has also successfully completed one other WMF grant. He will administer the Wikipedia monuments database and will handle the relation with the wiki community. The presentation in Timișoara will also be his responsibility
Nicubunu - a free software advocate for more than a decade (former Fedora Ambassador in Romania, Gimp guru etc.), he has been an organizer of Wiki Loves Monuments in Romania from the first edition, being also involved in administering the budget. He also contributed pictures to Commons for a long time. He will be involved in recruiting and coordinating the jury, handling the relations with other photo communities, printing the photos etc.
our contacts in Timișoara will help with deploying the exhibit there

The team is based on the core organizers from the past editions of WLM Romania. Since Strainu and Nicubunu did not have significant experience administering budgets, we were happy to work with small budgets, thus obtaining one of the best cost/picture from all the participating countries (starting from just $.05/picture last year). In total, creating the list and coordinating the wikipedians to mark the pictures with the LMI code has allowed us to gather almost 47.000 images (by far the largest public database of images with historic monuments) covering more than 6300 monuments.

Adding Alina to the team will give us valuable experience in administering larger projects and organizing real-life events. We are also counting on targeted assistance from the other members of ARCHÉ. ARCHÉ was founded by the members of the "Monumente Uitate" team (a project designed to gather information about country houses and manors in the former parts of the Austo-Hungarian Empire that are now in Romania, as well as to bring architecture students in contact with built heritage in its own historical and natural environment).

The team consists today of several junior architects, an art historian, an economist, a public relations expert and a growing number of volunteers and collaborators. In time, Monumente Uitate evolved from a mere project into a more complex cultural program, that includes nowadays a collection of country houses and manors from all the Romanian regions, whose purpose is to develop numerous side-projects that aim at a better researching, preserving and promoting this precious built heritage, thus being well aligned with the targets of WLM.

Since 2013, ARCHÉ developed an educational-traveling concept, called “Castle Break”, that implies a 2 or 3 days guided cultural-trip to some of the most prominent country houses in Romania. Accumulating the values of a well-deserved getaway and of an unusual innovative lesson, these trips have been a success ever since their first edition. This format will also be used for our Wiki Weekend.

"Discover Your Heritage Through Photography" is another project implemented by ARCHÉ. The goal of the project is to inform young people on the topic of architectural heritage. The project addresses teenagers between 15-20 years old from Bucharest and surrounding areas. The main activity of the project consists of workshops on architectural photography, and will end with a photo contest (part of Wiki Loves Monuments 2014).

Risks

This section is used to identify key risks or threats that would prevent you from achieving your project goals and how you would mitigate those risks and threats.

Lack of time - in the past few years we have found that the main problem is the lack of time from the organizers; no matter how well we prepare, there will be very crowded moments (2 days before the beginning of the contest, during the last week of the contest, 3-5 days before announcing the results)
- Mitigation: recruiting the volunteers that will help us
Low participation in the contest - there is also a risk that past contributors will no longer participate this year and they will not be replaced
- Mitigation: we plan to reach a larger audience than in past years with the announcements, thus increasing our chances for new participants. We have already invited the ro.wp community to prepare and will target key individuals (past winners and a few photographers specialized in historic buildings) with dedicated invitations
Not finding an appropriate location for the exhibition - an inappropriate location will mean very low traffic and thus low impact
- Mitigation: we will start negotiations with the National Library as soon as we have secured the financing; we are also considering several museums as secondary locations.
Not meeting the management and reporting standards of the WMF
- Avoidance: we will be in constant contact with the WMF Grant team, ensuring that we fully and correctly understand the reporting requirements. Our target is to meet both WMF's and local reporting standards.

Impact

In the sections below, please describe how the project is related to the Wikimedia mission and Wikimedia's strategic priorities.

Fit to strategy

How will this project support the key organizational objectives of

increasing reach (more people will access or contribute to Wikipedia or our other projects), participation (more people actually contributing), quality (more content, more useful content, or higher-quality content), credibility (more trust in our projects), organizational maturity and effectiveness (how it will move you or the Wikimedia community forward), or financial sustainability (how it will help you achieve more in the long run)?

This statement should address at least one of the strategic priorities listed here specifically. See Project and Event Grants program criteria for decision making.: A successful end to this project will bring more quality content to Wikipedia (since we will target more professional photographers), encouraging more article writing in at least 2 projects (ro.wp and en.wp both have active users writing articles about historic monuments). Reaching our main target (making Wikipedia THE place to go when it comes to basic information about historic monuments in Romania) will also increase the reach of the Romanian Wikipedia, as more people will use our pages to get valuable informations about the monuments.

Benefits

If the project will benefit a specific online community, please tell us.: This project will directly benefit the Romanian Wikipedia, by increasing the number of pictures available and the coverage of the monuments database. Any of the Wikimedia projects could benefit by an increase in the number of editors.

Please provide a brief statement about how the project is related to other work in the Wikimedia movement. For example, does the project fit into a work area such as GLAM, education, organizational development, editor retention, or outreach?: The project has a clear outreach component, with dedicated activities.

If successful, will the project have the potential to be replicated successfully by other individuals, groups, or organizations? Please explain how in 1–2 sentences.: Wiki Loves Monuments has already been replicated in many countries and different forms (Wiki Loves Public Art, Wiki Loves Earth etc.). Our other projects (the exhibition, the talk and the Wiki Weekend, including the outreach materials created for those) will be presented in detail on-wiki, allowing others to learn from our experience.

Please list other benefits to the movement here.: The Romanian Wikimedia community will prove that it can organize real-life events with important budgets, increasing the chances of collaboration with different institutions and organizations.

For grantees

If you are the grantee or representative that wrote this grant submission, you may request changes by using these links:

Create a request for an extension of the approved project completion date.
Create a request for changes to the approved project budget.