Application or grant stage: grant in progress

Applicant or grantee: Amical Wikimedia

Amount requested: 67.800,00 € (75.684,92 $)

Amount granted: 67,800,00 EUR (77,154 USD)

Funding period: 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2020

Application created: 20 October 2019

Recommended application date: 1 November 2019

Midpoint report due: 15 July 2020

Final report due: 30 January 2021

Application

Background

Link to these documents, for the upcoming funding period, only if you have them.

Link to your organization's staffing plan, for the upcoming funding period. Staffing Plan 2020
Link to your annual plan, for the upcoming funding period. Activities Plan 2020
Link to your strategic plan, which includes the upcoming funding period. Strategic Plan 2019-24

Please add your grants metrics to this sheet. Note that requirements for shared metrics have changed for grants starting 1 January 2017 or later. Please visit this worksheet to view global metrics targets and progress.

Programs

Please describe any changes to your programs for the upcoming funding period, including the addition of new programs or any programs you are no longer doing. Include your rationale for any major changes to your programs here.

Please use the templates provided to add information about each program you are planning for the upcoming funding period.

The organisation

Amical Wikimedia, also known as Amical, is one of the two thematic organizations in the Wikimedia movement. Instead of a territorial scope, ours is cultural: we promote Catalan language and culture. Since October 2019, Amical Wikimedia has been designated as an organization in the public interest by the Catalan government (DOGC núm. 7991, 29th October 2019).

We are a community based, strategy led organisation, since we believe in communities as the main force of the whole movement. We work to help people from our cultural scope but also from other groups. As an example, we run our own writing challenges, but we also try our best to help other communities with translations or by being a test wiki for emerging features (Flow, Visual Editor, Content Translator...) We also actively promote multilingualism as one of the key factors of our movement, so accordingly we run several multilingual writing challenges (e.g. 288 challenge, CCC, Trace of soul). Community, diversity, and multilingualism will continue to be some of the core values of our program this year.

The 2020 proposal

Community

Description

We have an active community which seeks to expand the presence of the Catalan language on Wikipedia and its sister projects. However, our main shortcoming is the intermittent and diffuse participation in some territories, especially when long-term volunteers decide to step back or reduce their commitment and transfer responsibilities to emerging members. Turnover may not be as good as expected, and some long-term projects suffer from this reality, since partners rely upon known contacts and introducing new actors can be complicated sometimes. This partially holds back our community's growth, as we are unable to achieve sufficient visibility. Hence we need to showcase the Catalan Wikimedian activity through partners who have a presence in the area (libraries, cultural centres, schools, etc.) and also find new knowledge and free technology agents so that we can fashion partnerships through their meeting venues.

It is our intention to systematically and rigorously explain to the community what we are doing to expand and stabilise our volunteer base by inviting them to take part in management tasks so that our association’s governance becomes as cross-cutting as it should be. We also aim to stress the need to explain in a clearer and simpler way the developments of Wikimedia movement global governance and engage more members to become active actors. As a example, we need to describe and discuss what the outcomes of the Strategic Plan 2030 might eventually represent, bearing in mind that the final decisions may have a direct impact on Catalan Wikimedia community and, in some cases, could eventually confront Amical Wikimedia's core values.

Even in the advent of difficult sociopolitical situations, in Amical we commit to preserve the community and volunteerism spirit through activities which take into account each member of the association so that everyone feels engaged and appreciated whatever their ideas or concerns are.

Goal

We need to allocate resources and endeavour to attract young people. Our community is ageing due to a lack of generational handover and a decreasing number of young Wikimedians. However, as a good signal, we have noticed a slight increase in the number of female editors. We believe that low participation might not be so much a matter of interface as of group dynamics and we need to ensure that new editors can express themselves during decision-making processes (implementation of new tools, etc.) and have appropriate tools at hand to be able to spot new users who can become very active editors. We should strive not to miss opportunities in which highly educated or skilled contributors could become bastions of the association through their discourse and activities.

Objectives

Monitor activities on a monthly basis to assess and adjust the way in which we organise what we do and get a better return on the invested effort. Monitoring is funneled through our montly reports, where we invite members to take part in this appraisal and explain their activity by themselves. This helps us make management as transparent and horizontal as possible, and this self-reporting allows us to detect active members and interest areas, which subsequently will allow us to better focus our efforts to strengthen our community.
Map the community to find out where the active editors are in order to generate clusters of activities that attract other editors. If areas with a weak or nonexistent community are identified, look for partners to help us hold face-to-face meetings there.
Leverage our volunteers who are experts in many areas of knowledge and engaged with the project by encouraging them to enhance their involvement with the global Wikimedia movement and thus publicise our volunteerism-based model abroad.
Broaden the user base in other Catalan-speaking regions outside Catalonia to add new voices to the project and organise offline events to bring them together.
Maintain a high touch approach with both members of Amical Wikimedia and volunteers from the Catalan community
Focus and empower the youngest and she/her segment of the community, as they still are a very small share of Amical (17% women, 8% under-25 of our 120 members)

Metrics

Consolidate 12 very active members (leading more than 5 activities per year).
Get 3 new members or existing ones under 30 years old to increase their activity in Amical Wikimedia and ensure a generational handover.
Get at least 3 women members to join Amical Wikimedia.
Bring together and provide basics insights to our members in the Balearic Islands and in Andorra by personal meetings with them at least once, in order to create the nucleus of 2 active member hubs.
Hold personal or phone meetings and conversations with at least >50% of Amical Wikimedia's cohort.
Facilitate at least 2 events aimed at the youngest segment of the community (under 25 year-olds).
One specific workshop for newcomers of Amical Wikimedia (our team, our ethics, our discourse, our how-to).

Education

Description

Wikipedia is used by students to conduct research and by teachers to prepare lessons. However, active contribution in Wikipedia and its sister projects is fundamental for both cohorts: students develop important skills/competencies (critical thinking, collaborative work, motivation), while teachers oversee a quality and completeness improvement of the shared knowledge with the wider world. Since 2007 we have been developing eduwiki initiatives especially with universities, though we are very interested in strengthening our relationships with high schools. These initiatives have mainly consisted in revamping the traditional college assignment by changing the context where it is developed: instead of delivering a few sheets of printed paper that may only be read by the student and the professor, the assignment is done on a wiki environment. Through the education program we have been offering an interesting, stable, and reliable platform where students can not only learn how to contribute and to interact with a community but also develop valuable skills like building up relationships with other active users of the Wikimedia projects and collaborating with them in order to co-create projects and content. We are convinced that Wikimedia projects are revolutionising the concept and the use of the web, and our role in this change will surely influence the setup and delivery of trainings/schooling as well.

Goal

Our Education Program has historically shown the Wikimedia projects' educational potential by introducing them to university professors and other educational staff. We will persuade the sector to keep including Wikimedia editing activities as a part of their mandatory course projects and assignments, and they will be encouraged to become active editors themselves to improve their own digital learning methods. Our objective is to further train them in Wikimedia contributions & principles, as well as their students, so they can all teach younger pupils and expand their online skills related with free knowledge. Our main focus was the editing part; we will now also offer information about Open Knowledge so that the quality, the social, and the ethical impact of the generated content are enhanced.

Objectives

Bring Wikipedia and its sister projects to secondary schools, bearing in mind that teenagers can do further than just editing Wikipedia articles.
Keep on with the wikiprojects in university courses.
Establish new official agreements with universities, research departments, or other institutions, since these provide a framework for commitment that may transcend eduwiki projects and undergraduate assignments.
Dissemination of some core educational projects outside Barcelona's metropolitan region.

Metrics

At least 3 educational collaborations (wikiprojects or another) with secondary schools (teenager-oriented).
Mantain 75% of the wikiprojects started in 2019 as a stabilisation and long-term preparedness for teachers (33 registered as a partnership with Amical during the academic year 2019).
At least one new official agreement with an educational institution.
At least 3 university educational collaborations outside the area of Barcelona (preferably outside Catalonia).

GLAM & Sister projects

Description

Some sister projects are very fragile compared to Wikipedia since the learning curve tends to be quite steep and the communities tend to be too small to organise projects without external support. We will continue working to increase the local communities in both language-specific and global projects, as they represent different and necessary ways of presenting free knowledge that is gathered outside Wikipedia.

Regarding GLAMs, we keep on considering them as the main entry point to Wikipedia and its sister projects from the real world. In order to improve the libraries’ empowerment we will steer towards diversification, aiming at broadening the initiatives and events that can be lead from these institutions. We will also revamp our alliances with museums by seeking to align expectations and capacities from both sides of the partnerships. We will also pursue to include more archives in the mix, since several unplanned initiatives based on a few archive collections performed in 2019 have showed themselves as quite promising.

Goal

We will strengthen our relationship with cultural institutions across the Catalan speaking territory to increase our visibility among the general population and raise awareness about our goals, motivations, and scope.

We will reinforce the conception of Wikipedia and its sister projects as stepping stones towards the fulfilment of the institutions’ missions so that they are truly taken into account in the GLAMs’ daily life. Furthermore, we will insist on the importance of achieving self-sustainability of the projects and initiatives, since no special abilities are needed to be a wikimedian. Actually, everyone is a wikimedian, even though sometimes people may not be completely aware of it.

Objectives

Foster activity in all Catalan sister projects and increase awareness about them.
Get a more detailed picture about the perception and impact of these projects through a survey, open both to readers and editors of sister projects
Map the libraries of the Catalan speaking territory and their situation regarding the #bibliowikis program
Diversify the set of suitable and/or appealing proposals of activities and initiatives that can be performed with/in/by libraries and/or museums
Foster self-sustainability of GLAMwiki projects and initiatives
Collaborate with archives to fill gaps by promoting content transfers and/or crowdsourcing initiatives

Metrics

Detect and quantify stable or transitional community growth in the Catalan sister projects (current active users in Wikisource: 3-4; Wikiquote: 1; Wiktionary: 2-3; Wikibooks: 0; Wikinews: 0-1).
At least three projects focused on three sister projects, and three activities or events to promote these projects.
Updated state of #bibliowikis document.
Updated document with renewed proposals for libraries and/or museums.
At least 4 self-organised GLAMwiki projects or events.
At least 2 projects involving archives from the Catalan speaking area.
At least 2 projects involving content (pictures) donation.
Establish alliances with at least 2 institutions that are based outside Catalan-speaking territories and have a scope which is aligned with Amical's mission or projects.

Communication & Outreach

Description

Communication and social networks must clearly convey our principles and values. Besides, we need to deploy new communicative systems beyond social media, such as active participation in round-tables, conferences, and special sessions where we are to be invited as expert agents in knowledge management. Videos and multimedia content are getting major importance and we need to adapt to this and, at the same time, ensure to keep manners and language formality as much as possible. We have to warrant a correct transmission of institutional knowledge and context maps so that upcoming generations of Wikimedians and external agents can keep communicating our model within the movement.

Goal

We aim to continue the outstanding impact of our social media networks and the dissemination of knowledge provided by our members in several conferences in 2020. Document practices, the community, and the basic methodology of Catalan Wikimedians and their partners through research papers, press media, videos, and our blog will be our milestones for this year as a discourse agent beyond Wikipedia's encyclopedic role.

Objectives

Finish the development a formal Communication plan for the period 2020-2024, which started being drafted during 2019.
Keep growing our social media content (11 total active accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Mastodon) as a discursive tool and to engage content reading in Catalan.
Personal attendance and involvement into international Wikimedia events in order to share our values of volunteering, technological and linguistic activism, our stance about movement strategy, and exchange ideas and approaches with other affiliates.
Engage with other national and international Catalan language, free knowledge, or digital rights organisations in order to share common practices and approaches and design more effective outreach or advocacy actions.
Improve internal official communication with our members by optimising existing channels and establishing new ones.

Metrics

Publish at least 12 relevant blog posts in one year. This includes blog posts of Wikimedia events or activities where community members or staff participated.
Increase our impact in Twitter up to the 25K followers in @Viquipedia as one of the most relevant "influencer" accounts in Catalan.
Content and style redesign of Amical Wikimedia website.
Definition and publication of a periodical newsletter.
Consider and establish a university student internship for some communication tasks.
Attendance and presentation of our projects in 5 national or international events about Wikimedia, tech, digital advocacy, or free knowledge during the whole year.

Staff and contractors

Please describe any changes to your staffing plan for the upcoming funding period. These should include increases in staff or contractor hours, new staff positions, or staff positions you are removing. Include your rationale for any staffing changes here.

No changes have happened since 2019, when our Project Coordinator Esther Solé i Martí was hired.

For each new staff or contractor position, please use the template provided to add information about each new staff or contractor you are planning for the upcoming funding period (or to describe significant increases in hours or changes in job descriptions for existing staff). You are not required to provide this information for existing staff where no changes are required.

Budget and resource plan

Link to a detailed budget for the upcoming funding period. This budget should include all of your organizations expenses. Please specify which expenses will be covered from your APG.

2020 Budget

Grants:Simple/Applications/Amical Wikimedia/2020

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