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Grants:PEG/WM CZ/Mediagrant/Final report

< Grants:PEG | WM CZ | Mediagrant
Report accepted
This report for a Project and Event grant approved in FY 2010-11 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
  • You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
  • You are welcome to Email grants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.


Compliance and completion

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Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?
YES
Is your project completed?
YES (but is scheduled to continue)
Did you use any of the grant funds?
YES

Activities and lessons learned

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This section describes what the grantee did, and what the grantee learned from implementing the project. This section should be useful to others implementing similar projects and is an opportunity for the grantee to reflect on the project's performance.

This grant focused about production of multimedia material under free licenses usable for wide variety of Wikimedia projects. As a result, we tried to encourage Czech wikipedist to photograph various objects of different types and upload those images (or movies) to Wikimedia Commons. To achieve this goal, we were using three different methods which are listed in section 'Activities' below.

See also interim reports, which were published during operation of the Mediagrant:

Acknowledgement

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However, we have to note that without the invaluable help of all persons responsible for individual subgrants and all volunteers involving in photographing or providing the critical views on individual applications, we will never be able to provide such as great results. So we would like to thanks to everybody, who somehow participated in the run of Mediagrant in the past, for great help. We are greatly thankful to all of you.

Activities

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Provide a detailed list of activities performed to complete this project, descriptions of these activities, and the amount of time spent on each activity. This section should also include a list of participants, or a link to pictures, blog posts, or videos from the project or event.
  1. Photographic documentation of Czech-related points of interest
    The key part of Mediagrant has been designed to improve the photographic content on Wikimedia Commons related to the Czech Republic. This part of the project has been described in this and this WMF blog post in great detail. Briefly, anyone who decides to participate in the project can document Czech villages, towns, nature, rivers and ponds, Czech events or traditional customs (see table), and upload these pictures to Commons. After taking a note of their pictures and their travel expenses in our Tracker system, the participants are reimbursed for the cost of the travel. This simple scheme has been designed to attract new participants and enhance content.
  2. Photographic workshops
    This part of grant concentrates on quality of pictures rather than quantity. During large "weekend" workshops, small groups of dedicated Wikimedians are educated to become better photographers. Lectures and workshops are given by experienced photographers. Two workshops take place in more remote areas of the Czech Republic and, in the end of the workshops, there are trips into the surrounding areas aiming to document it as much as possible ("Wiki takes..." style). Additionally, two smaller one-day workshops have been organized by the Protected Areas project for people from Prague. These aimed for a wider audience, first was a trip to a protected area not far from Prague and the second was a workshop in a botanical greenhouse. The latter of them has been summarized in this blog post.
  3. Cameras and photographic equipment
    The third and quite important part of this grant has been to provide participants with a professional photographic equipment to borrow and use for the documentation of Czech-related points of interest; these are offered on our Wikipedia project page. These included: a professional camera, lens, filters, a bag, a flash, a tripod, SD cards and some other minor equipment (some of it for our second camera, bought earlier). Also, this included a small scanner for Wikimedians dedicated to digitalization and a GPS logger for an easier tracking of GPS coordinates of pictures.

Lessons learned

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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 main benefit of this grant is, in our opinion, that we helped to develop a wide community of photographers actively documenting the world around us. Thanks to our 'subgrants', we were able to focus photographers into several topics which were insufficiently covered by multimedia material on Wikimedia Commons. The involvement of wider public into Mediagrant activities was supported by several successful workshops; also, the technical skills of participants were improved.
What did not go well?
We were not really able get out of 'photographing' box and we did not overgrow from Wikimedia Commons to another minor Wikimedia projects. The only exception was the purchase of the scanner for Wikisources, which was used to document 18 book volumes. Additionally, the process of accepting dozens of small receipts for reimbursement is bureaucratically complicated and has been a certain burden for the team.
What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?
A good remark in the discussion page to Mediagrant II was that content creation on Wikipedia should be connected to the media acquisition. This is something we want to work on and we already have several ideas up our sleeves. The administration shall be made easier by having a paid grant administrator able to do the most tiresome, yet fairly simple work.
Because Mediagrant originated in times when grant system by Wikimedia Foundation was being developed and several people took responsibility over it, we did not have easily traceable notes about Mediagrant rules and agreements. Often it was not so easy to find what was previously agreed and by whom (members responsible for the running of Mediagrant were exchanged by other members of Wikimedia Czech Republic during the run of Mediagrant in an attempt to improve its functioning). We learnt that if we wanted to run similar projects again, we would try to make much better and publicly traceable documentation. This step will help to get faster into the agenda of Mediagrant if new member(s) will join the committee responsible for running such as grant.

Project goal and measures of success

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This section should reference the project goals and measures of success described in the approved grant submission. See Grants:PEG/WM CZ/Mediagrant to review the goals and metrics listed in the approved submission.

Project goal

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Provide the project goal here.
"Enhancement of text content of Wikimedia projects by multimedia content."
Did you achieve your project goal? How do you know your goal was achieved? Please answer in 1 - 2 paragraphs.
Since the start of the grant in 2011, the quality of Czech-related multimedia content has greatly improved. This, of course, cannot be solely attributed to our Mediagrant as hundreds of volunteers have been working on it without a need for Mediagrant. The success of our grant is that it enabled 1) teaching volunteers how to photograph properly (during workshops) 2) attracting new out-of-community photographers and making new partnerships and collaborations and, probably most importantly, 3) photographic documentation of poorly documented and often more isolated parts of the Czech Republic, while supplying volunteers with high-quality photographic equipment to lend. This has lead to an overall 'democratisation' of photographic efforts in the Czech Wiki community. Specific numbers, which serve as an evidence of the success, will be discussed in the next subchapter.

Measures of success

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Funds spent on Mediagrant travel expenses in 2010-2013. The travel expenses reimbursement project is a major part of Mediagrant and has grown over the years as more volunteers joined.
List the measures of success exactly as provided in the approved grant submission, and evaluate your project according to each measure listed there.
The results of the Mediagrant can be summarized by hard data:
a) from Tracker software:
  • 28 192 pictures uploaded by volunteers in the long-term projects
  • 2100 Czech objects documented by these pictures in the long-term projects
  • 25 unique attendants of long-term documentation projects
b) from GLAMorous Tool search in the Category:Mediagrant and its subcategories (includes some older pictures uploaded to Mediagrant before 2011 as well as pictures from workshops, pictures taken with the Mediagrant camera, etc):
  • 49 399 pictures
  • 8326 distinct pictures used in Wikimedia projects (7700 in Czech Wikipedia, but 136 projects in total)
  • this equals to 16.85% of total images uploaded to the category or its subcategories
  • 13 949 "total" image usages on all projects
c) other data
  • 2 intensive photo-workshops (7 and 9 participants taking photography lectures and uploading 1396 pictures)
  • 2 smaller photographic events (this and this, 12 and 11 participants)
  • camera used by ~13-15 distinct photographers in a unique camera-sharing project (it was handed over between these users at least 50 times during 22 months); 12 698 images in the corresponding category for _both_ WMCZ cameras (one of them was purchased before Mediagrant)
  • about 3730 book pages scanned with a scanner by the Wikisource team (report in Czech)
  • GPS logger used in 18 instances to determine coordinates (including large wikiexpeditions); a total of 5 distinct people took advantage of this gadget.
Provide an overall assessment of how your project went according to these measures.
Measures of success were very vaguely defined in the original request, and in rare cases when they were explicitly expressed (Czech Municipalities - 1000-1500 photographs), they have been overcome.
If you were to plan a similar project, would you measure it differently? If yes, please explain how.
The measurement of Mediagrant is relatively simple as the number of pictures, participants and covered topics are all quantitative criteria that are easy to measure. Number of pictures is the least important criterion of these three - it is influenced by how many pictures are uploaded per object.

Impact

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This section ties this project to Wikimedia's broader goals, and shows what the project accomplished.

What impact did this project have on WMF's mission and the strategic goals? Please answer in 1 -2 paragraphs and include specific measures of impact such as the number of readers or editors reached by a particular project, or the number of articles edited or improved.
Increase participation - the Wikimedia movement in the Czech Republic grew thanks to Mediagrant activities. Several participants, mainly in the topic of "Protected Areas", were first addressed on social sites (Facebook) and persuaded to take pictures for Wikimedia Commons. They are now a stable part of the Mediagrant volunteer team.
Improve quality - as discussed in the chapter "Measures of success".

Reporting and documentation of expenditures

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This section describes the grant's use of funds

Documentation of expenditures has been received by WMF.

Documentation

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Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grants at wikimedia dot org, according to the guidelines here?
YES. Available to grant coordinators in our tracker

Expenses

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Please list all project expenses in a table here, with descriptions and dates. Review the instructions here.
Number Category Item description Unit Number of units Cost per unit Total cost Currency Notes
1 Travel reimbursement 95,673.48 CZK
1.1 Czech Municipalities - - - 52,935.58 CZK
1.2 Protected Areas - - - 24,512.00 CZK
1.3 Jewish Monuments - - - 7781.50 CZK
1.4 Events - - - 473.00 CZK
1.5 Scientific Photography - - - 880.40 CZK
1.6 Folk craft - - - 3024.00 CZK
1.7 Zoological gardens - - - 3593.00 CZK
1.8 Independent trips - - - 1498.00 CZK three out-of-topic photographic journeys
1.9 Digitalisation of archival diapositives - - - 976 CZK
2 Technical equipment 62,718.25 CZK
2.1 Camera and other photographic equipment - - - 51155.75 CZK includes several objectives, batteries, and other special photographic equipment
2.2 Scanner for Wikisource - - - 3690.50 CZK includes cost for transport from Brno to Prague
2.3 GPS logger for photographers - - - 7872.00 CZK
3 Workshops 35,169.50 CZK
3.1 Weekend workshops - 2 - 29672.50 CZK Weekend-long Photographic workshops for training new participants and massive documentation of a selected Czech region
3.2 One-day workshops - 2 - 5497.00 CZK One-day photographing workshops organized by WikiProject Protected Areas to support the community and learn to photograph nature
4 Administration 206.00 CZK
4.1 Stationery - - - 206.00 CZK
Total project budget (from your approved grant submission)
21,000 EUR + money allocated from past grants => 529 331.66 CZK on Czech accounts
Total amount requested from WMF (from your approved grant submission, this total will be the same as the total project budget if the WMF grant is your only funding source)
21,000 EUR
Total amount spent on this project (this total should be the total calculated from the table above)
193,767.23 CZK
Total amount of WMF grant funds spent on this project (this total will be the same as the total amount spent if the WMF grant is your only funding source)
193,767.23 CZK
Are there additional sources of revenue that funded any part of this project? List them here.
No.

Remaining funds

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Remaining funds from this grant have been returned to WMF in the amount of EUR 11,914.
Are there any grant funds remaining?
YES
Please list the total amount (specify currency) remaining here. (This is the amount you did not use, or the amount you still have after completing your grant.)
335 564,43 CZK
If funds are remaining they must be returned to WMF, reallocated to mission-aligned activities, or applied to another approved grant.
Return to WMF
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