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

This project is funded by a Project Grant

Report accepted

This midpoint report for a Project Grant approved in FY 2018-19 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Wiki Loves Monuments international team/2018 coordination.
You may still review or add to the discussion about this report on its talk page.
You are welcome to email projectgrantswikimedia.org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learning from the grantee's first 3 months.

Summary

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

Participating countries in 2018

In the first half of the grant period (June - mid November), the focus was primarily on organizing the 2018 competition itself, supporting the various national competitions and preparing the international jury process.

56 countries participated in the competition through 52 or 53 'national competitions'. Preliminary numbers suggest that some 255,000 images were submitted by some 14,000 contributors, of which 79% registered after the start of the competition.

The international jury process was in full progress by the midpoint of this timeline. Evaluation has not yet begun.

Methods and activities

How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.

We followed our usual activity timeline (mostly copied/summarized from monthly reports):

Country & Data
- Worked on template infrastructure to make reconciliation between Commons and Wikidata better.
- Presence at events: Wikimania (workshop, individual outreach), Wikimania hackathon (several technical issues), WikiConvention (Presentation, workshop), CEE-conference. Preparation, participation, follow-up.
- Data cleaning/fixing support, monument lists for individual countries
- Survey for inclusivity of countries & follow-up
- Updating some documentation elements: annual updates of websites, landing page and national support documentation. Extra attention for national landing pages and publicity/social media.
- Support/onboarding countries 1-on-1 at Wikimania and through teleconferences. Numerous extra countries joined. Support late comers.
- Discussion at Wikimania on WLM in Africa
- Create & maintain overviews of participating countries, status etc. (map, tables: both public and private) - monitor country progress. Remind of deadlines, follow-up and anticipate required help. Suggest improvements to campaigns when surprisingly low participation.
Publicity and social media
- occasional blog posts
- frequent presence on Facebook and Instagram, limited presence on Twitter. Increased publicizing just before and during competition.
- Monitoring and answering inquiries on social media and helpdesk.
- Update website
- poster/flyer for both international and national use.
- Trial paid promotion on Facebook and Instagram
- Promotional clip in English & Arabic on social media
Technical
- Montage maintenance and improvement (design), bug fixes for various countries
- Monuments database maintenance, improvement and support
- Delegated adminship of Montage tool
- Make a few countries accessible through the Monumental tool
- Prepare for major blog upgrade. Design + security. (first initial fixes, later major redesign - still ongoing)
- Make possible that monuments database ingests Wikidata monument data.
- Make reporting around monuments database more useful (unknown fields, missing commonscat), improve general tracking infrastructure
- Stats tool maintenance and improvement for monitoring purposes (e.g. daily reporting, permalink)
Grant management and admin
- Conversations and follow-up towards WMF rapid grant team to support countries in their request to obtain and follow through on rapid grants.
- Discuss budget expenses, reporting
- Reporting: Figure out deadlines and structure, report monthly; collect action items and summarize them.
- Write early 2019 request
- Participation in WMF grants showcases
Jury
- Find & onboard jury coordinator (Welcome Erina!)
- Nominate, select, invite and confirm jury members
- Confirm jury process, check documentation
- Instruct and chase countries and collect submissions
- Process nominations into spreadsheet, validate submissions where feasible
- Set up jury process international jury, instruct members, start process
Other
- Collaboration with UNESCO to participate with WMFR in open doors event in their head quarters in September
- Preparing, coordinating and implementing CentralNotice infrastructure
- Preparing, coordinating and implementing upload infrastructure
- Preparing and implementing category infrastructure
- Preparing, coordinating and implementing template infrastructure
- ECHY prize coordination/discussion
- Finalize loose ends with 2017 competition

Midpoint outcomes

What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

See activities above - that should cover it mostly.

Finances

Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

Expenses are mostly focused in the second half of the project. Some minor expenses were prebursed and will be reimbursed in second half.

Learning

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges

What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

Besides the usual challenges, we are this year especially encountering challenges regarding the overhead involved in chasing national teams to deliver on time and in the prescribed format. Effort for more easy standardization is required in the future. Other challenges will probably surface as we're entering our evaluation phase.

What is working well

What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

The learning pattern format does not work well for our projects. However, we have improved some documentations that may be relevant in this context: [1] (in particular: documentation around quality monitoring by using the tools around the monuments database and how to set up an effective landing page).

Next steps and opportunities

What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points. If you're considering applying for a 6-month renewal of this grant at the end of your project, please also mention this here.

I would respectfully refer to the detailed list of actions that is part of our grant request. If additional detail is helpful beyond this, please feel free to get in touch with us.

Grantee reflection

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an grantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?

Not much has changed here compared to previous years. There are some challenges with regards to the overhead involved with the grant requesting, reporting etc.