Grants:PEG/WM BE/Budget 2015 H1/Remaining funds

A request for reallocation of remaining funds has been submitted by the grantee and approved by WMFon the discussion page of this grant report.

At request of WMF this report is created detailing how remaining funds from that grant were spent. In this report we will explain what errors or misunderstandings led to the use of funds without a current grant agreement, and report on any outcomes or lessons learned through these expenditures. Receipts and supporting documents for these expenses will be to grants@wikimedia.org.

These links provide an pointer to in the first semester budget and its report

reported Project budget underspending

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Budget granted Actual Spending Underspending
Carry over to 2nd semester
€ 7810 € 3935 € 3875

Reallocation funds table

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Rounded to nearest 5€

Activity Underspend from budget allocated 2015 H1 Total budget spend 2015 S2 Comments breakdown
outreach efforts to our community (Part #1)
1.1 Setup website € 1,070.00 € 75.00 Hosting costs. Currently we used a free template and website engine.
Subtotal part#1 : € 1,070.00 € 75.00
Projects and Micro Grant program (Part #2)
2.1 Provisioning projects (6x under 150€, 1x under 1500€) € 2,160.00 € 15.00 Three small projects were funded (see overview).
Subtotals part #2 : € 2,160.00 € 15.00
Capacity building of the board (Part #3)
3.1 GLAM : Participation in SOIMA € 0.00 € 2,790.00 Projected participation cost in budget 2015 S2 2500.00€.
3.2 Attendance at meetings of Dutch WM (Erasmusprijs, Wikizaterdagen) € 900.00 € 500.00 Travel costs
3.3 Wikimeets and board-meetings € 855.00 € 685.00 750€ underspend from project days and 155€ underspend for board meetings .
3.4 Attending Conference € 0.00 € 35.00
Subtotal aprt #3 : € 1,755.00 € 4010.00
Other overspend reported in 2015 h1 (source) € -1,110.00
1.2 General admin € 0.00 € 125.00 general admin expences omitted from budget in H1
Totals : € 3,875.00 € 4,225.00

In the above table all expenses that were paid with underspend funds from the 2015 H1 budget grant.

  • For the rest we did spend within the planned budget ,
    • the website was not done in the first semester but we did in the second ;
    • instead of project days and board-meetings we did public wikimeets;
    • like in the 2015 h1 budget we had no provision for general admin cost such as postage, copies so there was a similar overspend in the second semester like in the first semester (these were unavoidable expenses).

The only expenses made outside the budget was the participation in the SOIMA conference held in September which was very important for further GLAM collaborations. The SOIMA conference was planned in the 2015 S2 budget which we had to retract. In total this conference cost about 4000,00 € but part of the cost (1500,00 €) was covered by other WM chapters that contributed both financially and materially.

How did this spending happen without a current grant agreement

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Activities not covered by Grand agreement

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A) SOIMA 2015 Conference

We received the final request from KIK-IRPA and ICCROM to partner for the SOIMA 2015 conference around july 9th, after the WLA project was submitted to GAC, when we made the announcement. The initial meeting with KIK-IRPA was held over a year ago (dec 2014) however the final request came through end of June. We submitted the expenses +/- 2500.00 € for that conference in the 2015 S2 budget, the last fortnight before the conference 3 other WM-chapters acknowledged they would partner with us, and contribute financially to the SOIMA. SOIMA 2015 - report

List of SOIMA 2015 related activities

B) General activities

Underspend from we had submitted a grant request 2015 S1 for the 2nd semester which by after over three months in the GAC review queue ran out of time between November 20nd and December 1st
-this grant request which covered the general expenses was based on using the underspend funds from 2015 H1
- we did continue to use the funds for the purposes they were allocated in the first grant : website, collaboration with Neighbouring chapter, and for Wikimeets which combine board meetings, project days with public meetings for our members, volunteers and other interested parties ( as described in the lessons learned in the 2015 h1 report)
List of activities

Results

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SOIMA

The conference was co-organised by our partner KIKIRPA[2] (the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, a federal semi-autonomous public service). They asked us to become partners and support the conference, in exchange we were offered a boot, and some free tickets. I was invited to the conference dinner. WMBE also invited other Wikimedia chapters and France, Holland and Austria responded. They shared some of the financial burden and send us brochures and gadgets a for the boot, they were invited to send a delegate. It was a very succesful conference with about 200 attendees from all over the world, but most importantly it was the official launch of the Wiki loves Art Belgium 2016, announced by our WLA partner and co-organiser KIK-IRPA.

I was asked to elaborate on how the Wikiprojects can present - for both the local language and for other more international languages - a platform to allow the general public and researchers alike to access and reuse written and Audio-Video documents about the history and traditional heritage.
Wikipedia is the virtual accessramp that brings visitors to your museum, library or archive (and Wikimedia can help you realise your potential). When the general public visit your contrinutions on Wikipedia it wil visit your website (your digital vault), looking at the picture galleries of facsimiles will most certainly trigger curiosity to visit your museum, library or archive. So museum-intendants, conservators librarians and archivists should open their vaults (indirectly, vitually, electronically) to the public, and let your hidden treasures make money to acquire and preserve more heritage.

Personal contacts established:

- Derek was invited to speak on a conference in Budapest (hungary) unfortunately i could not make the trip,
- Derek was invited to the Wikisource conference in Vienna, which I could not attend either,
- Derek was approached by ICCROM (EU) [3] and and Athar (UAE) [4] about assisting them with a project for public access to preserved AV heritage in the Persian Gulf region.
- Derek was able to link WUG Ghana, who have applied for a GAC grant to do heritage preservation work, with a speaker from Ghana University doing an coordination preservation work and as it happened this person was also trying to hook up with the Ghana WUG, a little effort on my part resulted in a hook up that hopefully produces results and might lead to further GAC requests for common projects.

WMBE contacts established;

We did meet an number of our existing partners such as PACKED, FARO and co-organiser KIK-IRPA

- at the conference we did meet with several potential partners
- Institutional partners : the Director of the Heritage department of the Culture ministery of the Flemish gouverment
- GLAM and related institutions : co-organiser ICCROM (EU), VRT and RTBF archives (public radio and tv), Stichting Beeld en geluid (NL), NPO (Netherlands public broadcaster), Albertina National Lubrary (BE),
- a dozen Belgian and Dutch private AV archiving initiatives
- people active at forefornt of the copyright and freedom of panorama agenda

Reasons and motivations

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Attending SOIMA
A number of circumstances piled together to complicate the matter and the request.
  1. planning schedule of 2015 S2 and SOIMA : WMBE did receive an early warning of SOIMA just before newyear 2015, Our Grant request for 2015 H1 had the already been submitted and we needed more information about the event sucha s purpose, impact of the conference and financials of our implication .
  2. the planning of our participation during SOIMA and the financial impact of our participation was delayed by a) the fact that impact and financials were unclear at the time of the sumbission of the WLA grant request, and the time the PEG grant WMBE-WLA 2016 took to be granted. It came nearly too late for the 2015 S2 grant request
  3. the fact that the 2015 S2 request could only be submitted after july complicated matters further.
  4. SOIMA was important for the WLA project.

The SOIMA budget was in unbudgetted in 2015 H1 but was foreseen in followup grant 2015 S2 which we had to retract as per request of WMF.

General expenses
We had to continue our unfinished / delayed work of 2015 H1 so we decided to continue executing what was funded in the 2015 h1 supposing we could get 2015 S2 funded. itś clear formn the figures that we stayed within the budgetary boundaries that 2015 H1 had set (except for unforeseen administrative expences), underpinning our statement that we only executed what we promised to do in the first place.
Comments
In the past year, with successes and failures, a group of experienced volunteers tried to set up a Wikipedia organisation in Belgium. Experience from other chapters has learned us that in the first years support from the WMF is paramount for our success. Currently, our organisation has the feeling that we are not supported enough by the Foundation. This results in the fact that Wikimedia Belgium has not received financial support since June 1, 2015, and preparation for grant requests in 2016 have stranded.
We want to discuss with the Foundation how to proceed.

WMF comments

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Thank you DerekvG for putting this report together so that we have documentation of how remaining funds from your previous grant were spent. It is wonderful to see how many wikimeets the WMBE community was able to have during the second half of 2015. Did you track how many members of your community participated in wikimeets and travel to events in the Netherlands? Further, did any new editors attend these events or did members become more active as a result of participation?

In the future, remember that it is really important to contact a program officer at WMF if you want to request changes to a grant budget or to request an extension so that you can participate in an unexpected event like SOIMA, which fell between the end of one request, and the submission of the next request. We hope that your chapter follows up with contacts you established at the SOIMA conference. Perhaps in the future you can ask them for in-kind donations to your chapter, such as event space or digitization services. You might also ask the organizations you met at the event to help your chapter promote its activities using their social media or mailing lists.

This request for reallocation approved and the report is accepted. Please use the € 3,875 remaining from WM BE/Budget 2015 H1 report to cover the expenses included in this report. Best, KHarold (WMF) (talk) 23:55, 12 January 2016 (UTC)