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Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia CEE Spring 2022/Final Report

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Final Learning Report

Report Status: Accepted

Due date: 31 January 2023

Funding program: Wikimedia Community Fund

Report type: Final

Application

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General information

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This form is for organizations, groups, or individuals receiving Wikimedia Community Funds or Wikimedia Alliances Funds to report on their final results.

  • Name of Organization: Wikimedia Community User Group CEE Spring
  • Title of Proposal: Wikimedia CEE Spring 2022
  • Amount awarded: 9565 USD, 8800 EUR
  • Amount spent: 3671.75 EUR

Part 1 Understanding your work

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1. Briefly describe how your proposed activities and strategies were implemented.

CEE Spring 2022 run from 21 March to 31 May 2022. As usual in the past years, the international team set up the infrastructure by creating all the necessary pages, whereas the communities were invited to join the contest by signing up and creating the local infrastructure. Article lists were created by the local communities, with non-participating communities being allowed to create own article lists. Two sub-contests were organised alongside the main writing contest: 1) CEE Women and 2) CEE for Human Rights. The former was conducted for the third time with the goal of bridging the gender gap by writing articles about notable women, while the latter took place for the first time and was linked to the WikiForHumanRights writing campaign whose run fully overlapped with that of CEE Spring.

2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you felt were effective in achieving your goals?

The top-down approach in organising the contest again proved to be successful. There are three main parties that are necessary for successfully achieving the project's goals. The role and responsibilities of each are explained in turn.

  • International team. The work of the international team involves setting up all the infrastructure for the project from writing the grant request and creating the pages to evaluating the project and thinking about the future steps. This team is composed of people with long-term experience in community engagement and international projects, who are eager to invest their time and efforts to reach out to underrepresented communities and identify new topics of interest. The international team also works on finding local organisers and communicating the rules and principles of the contest with them.
  • Local organisers. The local organisers are the people who take the role and responsibility to bring the contest closer to their communities. These are the people who care about the compilation of article lists, setting the local rules of participation, assembling the jury for evaluating the articles and determining the prizes for the most prolific participants. Local organisers are also engaged in promoting the contest in their language so that editors are attracted to take part.
  • Participants. The work of the participants in the contest is the main factor determining the project's success content-wise. In fact, participants are editors who devote their time to write articles from the proposed lists. In many cases, the distribution of prizes and the local rules play an important role in the number of attracted participants and the size of their contributions. A successful local project requires regular communication between the local organisers and participants.

3. Would you say that your project had any innovations? Are there things that you did very differently than you have seen them done by others?

The main innovation this year was the introduction of the sub-contest named CEE for Human Rights, whose primary goal was to fill the gaps on topics related to human rights in the movement. Given that the WikiForHumanRIghts writing campaign fully overlapped with CEE Spring, the international organisers of both campaigns got in touch and decided that it would be beneficial to integrate WikiForHumanRIghts with CEE Spring. In the light of this, communities were encouraged to compile article lists with human rights topics so that participants from other communities could write articles about them.

4. Please describe how different communities participated and/or were informed about your work.

Different communication channels were used to reach out to the CEE communities, including the CEE mailing list and CEE groups on the social networks. Additionally, community leaders from the previous years were personally contacted in order to see if they would be interested to organise it again. Following the trend from the previous years, advertising the project via the CEE mailing list and the Facebook group continued to decline on account of the increased use of the Telegram group as more dynamic and interactive means of communication. During the course of the project, the project was also promoted through a central notice on top of the page. On the local level, many community leaders shared general information about the project on their village pump and some of them opted to publish a site notice with information about the local contest in their language.

5. Documentation of your impact. Please use the two spaces below to share files and links that help tell your story and impact. This can be documentation that shows your results through testimonies, videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, etc.) social media posts, dashboards, etc.

  • Upload Documents and Files
  • Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
There were several pages on which various statistics about the project's implementation were generated and regularly updated. They are available on the following links:

6. To what extent do you agree with the following statements regarding the work carried out with the support of this Fund? You can choose “not applicable” if your work does not relate to these goals.

Our efforts during the Fund period have helped to...
A. Bring in participants from underrepresented groups Agree
B. Create a more inclusive and connected culture in our community Strongly agree
C. Develop content about underrepresented topics/groups Strongly agree
D. Develop content from underrepresented perspectives Strongly agree
E. Encourage the retention of editors Agree
F. Encourage the retention of organizers Agree
G. Increased participants' feelings of belonging and connection to the movement. Agree

7. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your efforts helped to bring in participants and/or build out content, particularly for underrepresented groups?

CEE Spring is an outreach effort to promote diversity, so it has always encouraged participation by underrepresented communities. The writing of content about underrepresented communities was eased because article lists were compiled for non-participating communities.Such examples are the Crimean Tatar, Roma and Sorbian communities.

Part 2: Your main learning

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8. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What did you learn about these areas during this period?

Our main learning priority was to reveal the direction in which the writing contest develops, which could be used for planning the future editions of the contest. The main lessons learned in that regard are summarised as follows:

  • There are still underrepresented communities that have never participated in the contest or that were never represented with article lists, so reaching out to them regarding their future involvement will be prioritised.
  • Connecting and integrating other thematic writing campaigns in the movement with the contest may work well in the future because it could be an efficient approach to identify new themes and topics of interest.
  • The current format of the contest helps to increase content coverage, promotes an efficient way of developing a healthy community and stimulates the growth of smaller projects.
  • Getting larger language communities involved, in particular the English Wikipedia community, can facilitate further translation of local content that exists only in smaller languages because the articles would be translated in a major global language that is widely understood.

9. Did anything unexpected or surprising happen when implementing your activities?

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began shortly before the start of the contest, prevented the Ukrainian Wikipedia community to skip this edition, although there was a focus on improving articles and promoting the contest in a general capacity. Since that Ukrainian community has had the largest contribution in the contest over the past few years, this severely affected the final outcome from the project and resulted in a sharp decline of the number of written articles.

10. How do you hope to use this learning? For instance, do you have any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future?

The learning will be used in the process of planning for the next edition of CEE Spring. A major mid-term goal is to increase the involvement of the CEE Hub with its employees and resources in the process of organising the contest. Considering that the CEE Hub Coordinator has already started communicating with the CEE communities regarding their current needs, this should contribute to improving the communication between the international team and local organisers in the future.

11. If you were sitting with a friend to tell them one thing about your work during this fund, what would it be (think of inspiring or fascinating moments, tough challenges, interesting anecdotes, or anything that feels important to you)?


12. Please share resources that would be useful to share with other Wikimedia organizations so that they can learn from, adapt or build upon your work. For instance, guides, training material, presentations, work processes, or any other material the team has created to document and transfer knowledge about your work and can be useful for others. Please share any specific resources that you are creating, adapting/contextualizing in ways that are unique to your context (i.e. training material).

  • Upload Documents and Files
  • Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
The main resources related to CEE Spring can be found on the following links:

Part 3: Metrics

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13a. Open and additional metrics data

Open Metrics
Open Metrics Description Target Results Comments Methodology
N/A N/A N/A 437 N/A The result was retrieved from the following link:
N/A N/A N/A 465 Total number of participants worldwide. This metric measures the total number of editors who have written at least one article on a topic from the article lists on any language edition of Wikipedia considered during the course of the contest. The reported figure is somewhat lower (13.2%) compared to the projected figure of 500. The result was calculated from data at the following links:
N/A N/A N/A 25 Total number of female participants from CEE. This metric measures the total number of female editors who have written at least one article on a topic from the article lists on a language edition of Wikipedia during the course of the contest. The reported figure is significantly lower (5.7%) compared to the projected figure of 20%, which may be due to the fact that many editors have not indicated gender in their user settings. The result was retrieved from the following link:
N/A N/A N/A 25 Total number of female participants worldwide. This metric measures the total number of female editors who have written at least one article on a topic from the article lists on any language edition of Wikipedia during the course of the contest. The reported figure is significantly lower (5.4%) compared to the projected figure of 20%, which may be due to the fact that many editors have not indicated gender in their user settings. The result was calculated from data at the following links:
N/A N/A N/A 24 Least number of new articles per participating CEE community. This metric measures the least number of new articles written per participating community. The reported figure of 24 articles is the number of written articles on the Erzya Wikipedia and is above the minimum threshold of 20 articles per participating community. The result was retrieved from the following link:
Additional Metrics
Additional Metrics Description Target Results Comments Methodology
Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Diversity of participants brought in by grantees N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Number of people reached through social media publications N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Number of activities developed N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Number of volunteer hours N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A

13b. Additional core metrics data.

Core Metrics Summary
Core metrics Description Target Results Comments Methodology
Number of participants
Number of editors
Number of organizers
Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project
Wikimedia Project Description Target Results Comments Methodology
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A

14. Were there any metrics in your proposal that you could not collect or that you had to change?

No

15. If you have any difficulties collecting data to measure your results, please describe and add any recommendations on how to address them in the future.

N/A

16. Use this space to link or upload any additional documents that would be useful to understand your data collection (e.g., dashboards, surveys you have carried out, communications material, training material, etc).

  • Upload Documents and Files
  • Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
N/A

Part 4: Organizational capacities & partnerships

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17. Organizational Capacity

Organizational capacity dimension
A. Financial capacity and management This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
B. Conflict management or transformation This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
C. Leadership (i.e growing in potential leaders, leadership that fit organizational needs and values) This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
D. Partnership building This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
E. Strategic planning This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
F. Program design, implementation, and management This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
G. Scoping and testing new approaches, innovation This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
H. Recruiting new contributors (volunteer) This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
I. Support and growth path for different types of contributors (volunteers) This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
J. Governance This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
K. Communications, marketing, and social media This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
L. Staffing - hiring, monitoring, supporting in the areas needed for program implementation and sustainability This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
M. On-wiki technical skills This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
N. Accessing and using data This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
O. Evaluating and learning from our work This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
P. Communicating and sharing what we learn with our peers and other stakeholders This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
N/A
N/A

17a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Formal training provided by a Wikimedia Movement organizing group (i.e., Affiliates, Grantees, Regional or Thematic Hub, etc.)

17b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Lack of staff time to participate in capacity building/training, Lack of volunteer time to participate in capacity building/training

18. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your organizational capacity has grown, and areas where you require support?

N/A

19. Partnerships over the funding period.

Over the fund period...
A. We built strategic partnerships with other institutions or groups that will help us grow in the medium term (3 year time frame) Neither agree nor disagree
B. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to bring in more contributors from underrepresented groups Neither agree nor disagree
C. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to build out more content on underrepresented topics/groups Neither agree nor disagree

19a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Other

19b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Other

20. Please share your learning about strategies to build partnerships with other institutions and groups and any other learning about working with partners?

We did not build any partnerships with other institutions and groups in order to implement this project.

Part 5: Sense of belonging and collaboration

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21. What would it mean for your organization to feel a sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement?

Wikimedia Community User Group CEE Spring is a thematic affiliate composed of experienced Wikimedians who have contributed to the free knowledge in the Wikimedia movement as part of many other affiliates in different capacities. That being said, our affiliate connects experienced people from different communities and backgrounds who have a common goal in organising this writing contest.

22. How has your (for individual grantees) or your group/organization’s (for organizational grantees) sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?

Somewhat increased

23. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.

The sense of belonging to the Wikimedia movement gradually increases with every successfully implemented project that contributes to increasing the sum of all knowledge and raising awareness about it.

24. How has your group/organization’s sense of personal investment in the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?

Somewhat increased

25. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.

The international team, local organisers and participants as the main three groups involved in implementing the project are groups of volunteers who were driven by their wish to invest time and efforts in order to help this project.

26. Are there other movements besides the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement that play a central role in your motivation to contribute to Wikimedia projects? (for example, Black Lives Matter, Feminist movement, Climate Justice, or other activism spaces) If so, please describe it below.

Given that this edition of CEE Spring consisted of two sub-contests—namely, CEE Women and CEE for Human Rights—it is noticeable that the organisers paid attention to the gender and content gaps related to this broad themes.

Supporting Peer Learning and Collaboration

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We are interested in better supporting peer learning and collaboration in the movement.

27. Have you shared these results with Wikimedia affiliates or community members?

Yes

27a. Please describe how you have already shared them. Would you like to do more sharing, and if so how?

The results from the project are available in pages on Meta. They were also shared with the other CEE communities via the mailing list and the groups on the social networks.

28. How often do you currently share what you have learned with other Wikimedia Foundation grantees, and learn from them?

We do this regularly (at least once a month)

29. How does your organization currently share mutual learning with other grantees?

We mostly use pages on Meta and the groups on the social networks to share our learning with other Wikimedia Foundation grantees.

Part 6: Financial reporting and compliance

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30. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.

3671.75

31. Local currency type

EUR

32. Please report the funds received and spending in the currency of your fund.

  • Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.
  • Report funds received and spent, if template not used.
The financial report is available on the following link:

33. If you have not already done so in your budget report, please provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal.

N/A

34. Do you have any unspent funds from the Fund?


34a. Please list the amount and currency you did not use and explain why.

The total unspent amount is expected to be €978.85. At the moment of writing this report, the total unspent amount is €1,407.65. However, we note that an amount of around €428.80 to reimburse for the prizes in the Kazakh edition has not yet been spent because the local organisers will have to send the invoices for the purchased vouchers. After subtracting this amount (€428.80) from the total unspent amount at the moment (€1,407.65) we get to the expected total unspent amount (€978.85).

34b. What are you planning to do with the underspent funds?

B. Propose to use them to partially or fully fund a new/future grant request with PO approval

34c. Please provide details of hope to spend these funds.

We hope that this amount will be deducted from the next grant on CEE Spring because the bank fees from transferring money from the European Union to the United States are fairly high.

35. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement?


As required in the fund agreement, please report any deviations from your fund proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.

36. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?

Yes

37. Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.

Yes

38. If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here.

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