Grants:Project/Wiki Loves Monuments international team/2018 coordination

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proposal

timeline & progress

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midpoint report

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statusselected

Project Grants

2018 coordination

summaryWiki Loves Monuments 2018: coordination at the international level, improving infrastructure and making Wiki Loves Monuments future proof.

targetMost directly: Commons and Wikidata. Indirectly also most other projects

amount32,000 EUR

grantee• Wiki Loves Monuments international team

advisor• n/a

contact• Effeietsanders• M.hekmat

organization• Wiki Loves Monuments international team

this project needs...

volunteer

created on06:31, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Friendly space expectations

Project idea

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

What problem are you trying to solve by doing this project? This problem should be small enough that you expect it to be completely or mostly resolved by the end of this project. Remember to review the tutorial for tips on how to answer this question.

The international Wiki Loves Monuments team’s mission is to freely document and raise awareness of built cultural heritage, increase contributions to the Wikimedia projects and bolster local Wikimedia communities. We do this by leading and facilitating an annual federated, global, low-barrier photo competition.

Based on this mission, the international team has identified the following issues to work on in 2018:

• Challenges in new regions: Wiki Loves Monuments will enter its 10th edition in 2019. While Wiki Loves Monuments achieves good coverage in a range of countries, there are also many countries, most notably outside Europe and North America, where it is much harder to achieve impact for national organizers. We need to assess the challenges of organizing Wiki Loves Monuments in new countries, and consider adapting the model to be suitable for these regions. We have the initial impression that at least the presence of both technical and social infrastructure (databases, potential partner organizations, active communities etc) plays a key role in that.
• Barriers for local organization: Wiki Loves Monuments is one of the activities that is frequently organized as a first activity for a team of Wikimedia volunteers, and attracts outside volunteers. However, organizing Wiki Loves Monuments is not as straight forward as it could be. Some barriers have been identified after evaluating results from earlier years (e.g. 2016 evaluation).
• Maintenance work: Facilitating a photo competition across dozens of countries requires substantial coordination, follow-up, improvements in underlying technologies and documentation, etc. (This is part of the maintenance work that Wiki Loves Monuments team needs to do every year.)
• Outdated infrastructure: Although some progress has been made, certain aspects of the Wiki Loves Monuments infrastructure, and especially documentation, have been mildly maintained, and require an update.

What is your solution to this problem?

For the problem you identified in the previous section, briefly describe your how you would like to address this problem. We recognize that there are many ways to solve a problem. We’d like to understand why you chose this particular solution, and why you think it is worth pursuing. Remember to review the tutorial for tips on how to answer this question.

This year, we want to strengthen the foundation for a healthy and sustainable Wiki Loves Monuments across the world. To that end, and keeping in mind the aforementioned problems, we envision the following approaches:

• Evaluate the framework: We want to enter conversations with national organizers to see whether the framework along which Wiki Loves Monuments has been organized in the past years, is future proof. We want to critically rethink how we organize Wiki Loves Monuments, especially considering the audiences that we do not sufficiently reach. Don't expect drastic changes overnight - helpful and painless change requires time and consultation with a wide range of communities. The international team does not have a predefined outcome in mind. This approach should be flexible, but likely includes surveys, face-to-face meetings with organizers and potential organizers. First, we want to identify the problems, consult our community around the world on possible approaches and eventually propose what we think is the best combination of approaches as the framework.
• Collect and share best practices aggressively: In the past year(s), a number of organizers have been struggling with organizing Wiki Loves Monuments in an effective manner. The international team is best placed to uncover best practices from around the world and create or lay the groundwork for an infrastructure that contains documentation, templates and potentially tools that help national organizers to more effectively organize Wiki Loves Monuments.
• Continue the shift to Wikidata: Many technical solutions require a reliable and accessible monument database. This is why the international team will keep supporting the inclusion of monuments data on Wikidata and the creation of scalable tools on top of that. This is an angle where Wikimedia Sverige has taken a leading role, and will be welcomed to maintain it. The international team’s role is to encourage countries to gradually work towards moving their data to Wikidata and also socialize the automatic creation of monuments tables using Lua modules and SPARQL queries and directly from Wikidata. This is a multi-year endeavor.
• Maintenance work: We expect to continue doing the underlying maintenance work for Wiki Loves Monuments similar to the past years. We will be monitoring and documenting this process to understand better which parts of the process we can automatize and improve, especially in light of changes in parts of the technology stack we will be working with as part of Structured Data on Commons project. This remains at the core of our existance, and will likely consume the majority of our resources and efforts.

Project goals

What are your goals for this project? Your goals should describe the top two or three benefits that will come out of your project. These should be benefits to the Wikimedia projects or Wikimedia communities. They should not be benefits to you individually. Remember to review the tutorial for tips on how to answer this question.

The international team has three main goals, as stated in our mission statement. These goals are:

• to freely document and raise awareness of built cultural heritage
• increase contributions to the Wikimedia projects
• bolster local Wikimedia communities.

As always, we do this through a federated model, supporting local national organizers to do what they are best at. This year, we want to pay special attention to making Wiki Loves Monuments more future proof.

Project impact

How will you know if you have met your goals?

For each of your goals, we’d like you to answer the following questions:

1. During your project, what will you do to achieve this goal? (These are your outputs.)
2. Once your project is over, how will it continue to positively impact the Wikimedia community or projects? (These are your outcomes.)

For each of your answers, think about how you will capture this information. Will you capture it with a survey? With a story? Will you measure it with a number? Remember, if you plan to measure a number, you will need to set a numeric target in your proposal (i.e. 45 people, 10 articles, 100 scanned documents). Remember to review the tutorial for tips on how to answer this question.

1. Freely document and raise awareness of built cultural heritage:
   1. In collaboration with our partners inside and outside the Wikimedia movement, we will support the shift towards Wikidata of our monuments infrastructure.
      1. An overview of datasets with their status and obstacles is available
      2. A workflow is described to include a built heritage dataset
      3. Existing tools maintained by the international team will be made Wikidata compatible where possible
      4. New datasets will be supported through Wikidata and participating countries will be encouraged and supported in switching to using Wikidata
   2. In collaboration with Wikimedia Deutschland, we will use the European Year of Cultural Heritage to draw attention to European heritage in the global movement.
      1. A page is created to coordinate efforts and encourage participation in international activities related to the European Year of Cultural Heritage. It can act as a model for adapting this campaign to heritage in other regions of the world.
      2. A dedicated prize (Funded by the German government) for telling stories about European cultural heritage with the use of images and explanatory texts will be made available
   3. We will create documentation aimed at heritage enthousiasts, explaining how to access the monuments datasets.
2. Increase contributions to the Wikimedia projects:
   1. Continuing impact in this category lies primarily in the support of national competitions and helping them to operate effectively. We would know our impact through a survey among the organizers.
   2. A great set of international winning pictures is always a good indication for a good process. This is of course highly subjective.
   3. Where possible, our tools and documentation can be re-used by other efforts with similar workflows. We continue making an effort to making re-use of our tools possible in other photo competitions.
3. Bolster local Wikimedia communities:
   1. By design, Wiki Loves Monuments is a project that will bring national communities together around a common theme: their shared built cultural heritage. Communities are the building block of Wikimedia projects. By encouraging communities to form around one project (Wiki Loves Monuments), we provide an opportunity for people to build relationships and networks that they can use later on to do other projects in their corresponding communities with.
   2. Measuring the impact of Wiki Loves Monuments in communities scientifically/accurately, requires research resources that are not available in abundance in the international team in 2017. Therefore, we limit our measurements to counting the number of new countries we will help organize Wiki Loves Monuments in, in 2017. The international team will focus on the longer term this year, rather than aggressively onboard new countries. We would be satisfied if the number of countries matches the number of countries in 2016.
   3. Collect and share best practices agressively:
      1. A documentation portal is available and up-to-date describing all core information that volunteers would need to organize their national competition. This documentation will suggest a standard (with templates where possible), but may also refer to alternative approaches in less detail.
   4. We plan to attend a number of international events, where we will both have tete-a-tete and group meetings with other participants and organizers. These will help with both sharing best practices and making Wiki Loves Monuments future proof. This will lead to (at least internal) reports on the participation in these events.
   5. Continued support: see above
4. Making Wiki Loves Monuments future proof:
   1. We will make progress in the evaluation of the framework of Wiki Loves Monuments. By early 2019, we will have at least a list of recommendations - and possibly decisions.
   2. During our meeting early 2019, we will put together a final set of recommendations/decisions, and evaluate the strategic direction of Wiki Loves Monuments. This will tangibly result in documents that will be shared with the wider community of organizers. Another aimed outcome is to have a gameplan for the 10th edition of Wiki Loves Monuments.

Do you have any goals around participation or content?

Are any of your goals related to increasing participation within the Wikimedia movement, or increasing/improving the content on Wikimedia projects? If so, we ask that you look through these three metrics, and include any that are relevant to your project. Please set a numeric target against the metrics, if applicable.

Yes, two out of the three goals mentioned earlier are directly related to the increase in participation within the Wikimedia Movement as well as increasing/improving content on Wikimedia projects. We will use the following metrics and numeric targets to measure whether we meet that component of our goals. Note that by design, a substantial amount of work in the international Wiki Loves Monuments team is focused on empowering local organizers to organize Wiki Loves Monuments. As a result, not all metrics suggested in the link above are metrics that the international team can have direct control over. We will only report metrics over which the international team has direct control and/or metrics that the change in their value can be directly associated with the initiatives by the international team.

• Total participants: For the international team, the participants are the local organizers. We measure each country’s participation as one participant, independent of the number of community members involved in that country for organizing the contest. We set a goal to have at least 40 countries participate in Wiki Loves Monuments in 2017.

• Number of newly registered users: This is a metric that is expected to be largely driven by the national organizers. Therefore, we are not setting a target to meet for this metric. However, the international team is interested in this metric as a measure of the health of Wiki Loves Monuments ecosystem and we will monitor this number throughout and after the contest. We do this for one or more reasons mentioned below:
  • The international team is in a good position to monitor the number of newly registered users across participating countries to identify and share best practices across projects as well as notify the countries in case an unexplained signal is observed in our trends.
  • The international team may be responsible for initiatives that can have direct impact on the number of newly registered users and for those initiatives, we will report the number of newly registered users. These initiatives are those for which the international team spends substantial effort to improve the infrastructure to lower the barriers for entry. For example, we are discussing to provide a default landing page design to the countries who choose to use it and we hypothesize that a better landing page design can increase the chances of users attempting to register an account and participate (some progress was made here last year). If we offer such a design, and if resources are available to us, we are interested in doing controlled experiments to learn the effect of such a change on the number of newly registered users as a result of this change.

• Number of content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects: Similar to the above metric, the number of uploaded images is a metric that the international team does not have direct control over. We also support the migration of datasets to Wikidata, but due to this being primarily joint efforts, it is impossible to determine which are thanks to WLM international team.

• Basic goals: As the coordinators of Wiki Loves Monuments international competition, the international team has set the goal to meet the following targets on top of what is described above (this is working from the assumption that the framework is not changed. These goals may have to be redefined if changes are already implemented in 2018):
  • 90% of the participating countries nominate at least 1 image to the international finale.
  • All critical infrastructure necessary for the start will be ready before September 1, 2018
  • The international team will ensure the availability of critical tools developed and/or maintained by the team throughout the contest and will monitor all other critical tools throughout the contest.
  • The international jury process is finalized and a jury report is published before the end of the year
  • The project is evaluated as part of the preparations for the team meeting at end 2018/early 2019
  • A survey for national organizers is executed to learn about where the international team has done well and where the team and its efforts can be improved.

Project plan

Activities

Tell us how you'll carry out your project. What will you and other organizers spend your time doing? What will you have done at the end of your project? How will you follow-up with people that are involved with your project?

The international team assumes responsibility for a wide range of activities around Wiki Loves Monuments. In this section, we will describe the activities that are (directly) funded by this grant. A more complete impression of the work of the international team in 2016 is available in these meeting notes. As no international team meeting was scheduled early 2018, this impression is not updated.

Preliminary work

• Inform local organizers and affiliates about the new contest, initiatives, and projects the international team is working on;
• Collect feedback and suggestions from local organizers;
• Hold regular internal team meetings to review work done and plan for the work that is ahead;
• Communicate with the WLM community periodically.

General Coordination

• Update and communicate the international rules;
• Update and share documentation;
• Prepare (or coordinate for others to prepare) communication material that can be used and/or built upon by national organizations;
• Facilitate communication channels;
• Monitor statistics;
• Set up clear timeline.

Project Management

• Write grant request
• Maintain communication with relevant staff at Wikimedia Foundation;
• Collect measures and data to be reported at the end of the program.
• Report monthly and midterm on activities to WMF
• Report on the use of budget at the end of the program;
• Write grant report

Technical contributions

• Help with the setup and maintenance of the technical infrastructure for uploading;
• Help with the setup and maintenance of the CentralNotice;
• Maintain an international website for participants;
• Improve Montage based on the feedback from last year in order to offer jury tool services to local and international jury members and coordinators;
• In coordination with partners, provide support for the technical work in specific parts of the pipeline for the migration of data from Monuments Database to Wikidata.

Communication & partnerships

• Update wikilovesmonuments.org with the necessary/useful information;
• Update social media channels;
• Disseminate the results of the international jury;
• Maintain communication with international partners.
• The partnership activities are focused on long term relationships with partners.

Follow & help national organizations

• Give specific suggestions and support to national organizers (mostly online, though additionally we offer onboarding sessions over Hangout to the countries participating for the first time);
• Collect & answer questions of the national teams;
• Crisis management for national contests;
• This year in particular: improve the infrastructure that is used by national competitions. This includes documentation, templates and perhaps some tooling.

Set up & run the international contest

• Set up jury processes
• Find suitable jury members for the international jury
• Collect results of national competitions
• Support the jury in their process
• Provide & distribute international prizes, awards and diplomas

Budget

How you will use the funds you are requesting? List bullet points for each expense. (You can create a table later if needed.) Don’t forget to include a total amount, and update this amount in the Probox at the top of your page too!

• Prizes and diplomas

  7,300 EUR

• Outreach and branding

  5,000 EUR

• Travel

  5,000 EUR

• International team work meeting

  12,700 EUR

• Admin and overhead

  2,000 EUR

• Total

  32,000 EUR

Considerations:

• Prizes and diplomas: This permits the purchase of international prizes for the top-10 winners (exact distribution to be determined) and diploma's for the top-15. This presumes a somewhat lower scheme than in 2017, and no donated prizes.
• Outreach and branding: This includes design for material to support national competitions (templates and documentation), branding and thank-you gifts (T-shirts, stickers etc), and may be partially used for outreach efforts to potential participants. While the international team can prepare a significant amount of material by spending our time and existing expertise, making a truly effective, accessible, and inclusive process will require bringing in some professional design support to illustrate and create select material. All design assets will be freely licensed, so they can be reused for future competitions, and shared with national Wiki Loves Monuments organizers for additional usage and adaptation.
• Travel: One of the focus areas this year is to evaluate the framework that Wiki Loves Monuments uses. It is essential to include voices beyond the international team in that process, and to be part of conversations in different fora. For that reason, the international team wants to have representatives participate in international community events such as WikiIndaba (not relevant for this request due to timing), Wikimania, WikiCon, Wikimedia CEE meeting, IberoConf, hackathons etc. Because the most relevant members of our team are located in the USA and Europe, we estimate these costs to be 4 x ~1250 EUR (travel + accommodation + incidentals).
• International team work meeting: If we want to finalize our evaluation process of our framework to a sufficient level, a concluding meeting of the international team and some non-team members will have to take place. This is where we expect discussions to culminate, and arrive at a set of recommendations. We might also use this meeting as opportunity to arrive at a complete(r) set of documentation and best practices (pre/post meeting). While details need to be fleshed out (this would be planned by november), the agenda would include the longer term directions of Wiki Loves Monuments and preparations/direction setting for the 10th edition of Wiki Loves Monuments. The meeting would likely take place in December 2018, January or February 2019 in an economical location (likely Europe or California - unless it can be combined with another meeting). A somewhat comparable meeting took place early 2017. This meeting was highly productive and helped set direction for WLM 2017 and later years. A full report is available here (Please note: we managed a very economical meeting, especially due to some cheaper-than-expected travel circumstances - a situation we don't expect to repeat to that extent). Besides international team members, we would also invite a selection of organizers from different countries, facing different challenges. For 12-15 people, we expect ~6500 travel costs, 2500 accommodation, 1200 venue, 2500 food (total 12,700).

Community engagement

How will you let others in your community know about your project? Why are you targeting a specific audience? How will you engage the community you’re aiming to serve at various points during your project? Community input and participation helps make projects successful.

Wiki Loves Monuments international team uses a variety of platforms and venues to communicate about Wiki Loves Monuments 2018. The top most often pathways of communication used are wikilovesmonuments mailing list and wlm-announce mailing list. We also use Wiki Loves Monuments blog and Wiki Loves Monuments Twitter channel, though less frequently. Outreach to a broader audience is increased compared to previous years, using Twitter, Instagram and occasionally Facebook. When opportunity provides itself, we take advantage of in-person events such as Wikimedia Conference, Wikimedia Hackathon, and Wikimania to present ourselves and have meetings with national organizers. And of course, there is the our Commons FAQ page and its corresponding Discussion page as well as personal communications (via email) with local organizers.

Get involved

Participants

Please use this section to tell us more about who is working on this project. For each member of the team, please describe any project-related skills, experience, or other background you have that might help contribute to making this idea a success.

A list of people involved in the project for 2018 is in the page Organizers 2018 and the profiles can be found here (for now).

Community notification

You are responsible for notifying relevant communities of your proposal, so that they can help you! Depending on your project, notification may be most appropriate on a Village Pump, talk page, mailing list, etc.--> Please paste links below to where relevant communities have been notified of your proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions. Need notification tips?

• The grant was developed in the international team for 2018. We shared the draft of this grant request a few days before the deadline with our wider community through our main communication channel (wikilovesmonuments mailing list), and shared it again after the deadline through our mailing list and the announcement mailing list.

Endorsements

Do you think this project should be selected for a Project Grant? Please add your name and rationale for endorsing this project below! (Other constructive feedback is welcome on the discussion page).

• I believe it should not be taken lightly that Wiki Love Monuments, a pure product of our Movement, has obtained an international place with the world record for the largest photo competition. This grant seems to be a reasonable step to meet the current global level of the contest by providing sufficient funds for valuable prizes and for the international team's appropriate organization --Abbad (talk) 16:24, 8 February 2018 (UTC).
•  Support (well, obviously) Anthere (talk)
•  Support I think the goal of being able to involve new nations is fundamental. --CristianNX (talk) 12:20, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Completely support this need to keep Wiki Loves Monuments moving forward! Islahaddow (talk) 09:03, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Presenting the achievements of WLM and making them a sustainable base dealing with world heritage will be a big step to a promising future. The European Heritage Year 2018 will have the slogan "sharing heritage - sharing values". For WLM and the Wikimedia movement it should not be only a slogan but a goal. --Regiomontanus (talk) 21:26, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
•  Support — Mehman 97 16:38, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Wiki Loves Monuments already has a remarkable track record of encouraging contributions to our projects. Improving the international coordination and shared infrastructure would be a great use of resources, since it will free up time of current national organisers to focus more on promotion and engagement within their locality, and make it easier for new countries to take part. the wub "?!" 23:05, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Slowking4 (talk) 00:05, 12 March 2018 (UTC)