Application or grant stage: in progress

Applicant or grantee: Amical Wikimedia

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

Amount granted: 67,800 EUR

Funding period: 1 January 2021 to 31 December 2021

Midpoint report due: 15 July 2021

Final report due: 30 January 2022

Application

Background

Annual Plan

Link to the annual plan, for the upcoming funding period: Activities Plan 2021

Budget Plan

Link to the budget plan: Budget Plan 2021

Staffing Plan

Link to the staffing plan: Staffing Plan 2021

Strategic plan

Link to the strategic plan: Amical Strategic Plan 2019-2024

Introduction

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. Community, diversity, and multilingualism will continue to be some of the core values of our program this year.

After many years of big successes, records, enthusiasm and unity, Amical has recently experienced a slight downfall and dissension. The president of Amical resigned and the project coordinator was dismissed. This followed to new elections where there were no candidates and, as result, an interim board is currently leading the organisation. By the end of the year 2020 a new board is expected to be elected.

Programs

Program 1: Community

Description

Due to the current exceptional situation of Amical, the interim board has decided to put special focus on the community (and the same thing is expected by the new future board). Now it is maximum time for us to assure the stability of our organisation and to keep all the achievements of the past. The clue to achieve this goal is to bring into focus the community.

Our main deficit is still the intermittent and diffuse participation, which we have in some territories. The retreat of very experienced volunteers or their reduction of commitment is still lasting the organisation and this cannot be solved in the short term because the transfer of knowledge and responsibilities to new members is a long process, which will occupy us in the next years. The current internal status of our organisation does not help us to find a fast way out of this situation and it all has a negative impact on our community's growth.

On the other hand, with the covid-19 pandemic we already begun to promote on-line events for our community and offer many open debates, where the community is able to give their opinion and suggestions. We would like to reach this way community members, which otherwise we would have not been able to reach. This way will also keep our purpose going on discussing the outcomes of the Strategic Plan 2030 and its impact on Catalan Wikimedia community, as well as discuss and define which are the values we want for our community, the goals we want to achieve together and the ways we want to achieve them.

Goals

We need to allocate resources and endeavour to attract young people and recover the harmony of our community. Due to a lack of generational handover and a decreasing number of young Wikimedians it is aging. 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.
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 and targets

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).

Program 2: Education

Description

Till march 2020 we were able to go on with our usual eduwiki initiatives, which we have been developing since 2007 with universities and high schools. Afterwards, unfortunately the activities and projects had to be broken due to the covid-19 crisis, which in Spain was specially acute.

The reaction capacity to the crisis was not immediate but took some months, in which all activities remained closed. The opportunities and solutions which the digitalisation offers were slowly discovered and applied so that at the end it came to a new normality, where activities could be restarted. This makes us somehow optimistic for 2021 and we think that we can go on with the activities, which were interrupted. Having considered all these factors, the philosophy of our activities in this field would remain as it was.

One of the usual goals in education was the digitalisation of the didactic documents: changing the traditional paper by a wiki format. Having said this, we could even take advantage of the current situation. The crisis has accelerated the digitisation process and therefore it should not be an obstruction anymore to our program.

Goals

As we see 2021 as a resumption of the activities which were interrupted in 2020, we leave the goals as they were the previous year. We consider them still valid for this period:

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 to 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 and targets

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).

Program 3: GLAM & Sister projects

Description

According to a survey which we made recently, GLAM projects are considered the most important and relevant activities by our community. We should be able to capitalize this big interest in order to strengthen the alliances with all kinds of GLAM institutions while we encourage and empower our community to take the initiative and lead projects by themselves. This way we can win more commitment from our community, gain partnerships and organize more activities aimed to win new volunteers. This is specially necessary since the retreat of very experienced volunteers have had a negative impact to some long-term projects, due to a lack of knowledge transfer. Now the contact with partners must be restored with new contact persons.

Unfortunately, the covid-19 pandemic will not help us to restore and boost our relationship with partners. Especially critical may be to keep our physical presence in libraries, cultural centres, schools or universities. For health reasons, we prefer to be very careful and delay our goal of gaining new agents and partnerships through meetings and venues.

Goals

As we see 2021 as a resumption of the activities which were interrupted in 2020, we leave the goals as they were the previous year. We consider them still valid for this period:

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 (continuation)
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 and targets

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.

Program 4: Communication & Outreach

Description

Communication and social networks must clearly convey our principles and values. We want to go forward with the development of communicative systems beyond social media, such as active participation in round-tables, teleconferences, and special sessions about knowledge management. We should also focus on videos and multimedia content as they are getting major importance. The compilation of information in multimedia format can ensure a better transmission of knowledge to upcoming generations of Wikimedians.

Goals

We aim to continue the outstanding impact of our social media networks. Document practices, the community, and the basic methodology of Catalan Wikimedians and their partners through research papers, press media, videos, and our blog will remain our milestones as a discourse agent beyond Wikipedia's encyclopedic role.

Objectives

Finish the development of 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 and targets

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 30K 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.
Attendance and presentation of our projects in 5 national or international events about Wikimedia, tech, digital advocacy, or free knowledge during the whole year.

Midpoint report

Noting here that the midpoint report is posted at Grants:Simple/Applications/Amical Wikimedia/2021/Midpoint report.

Grant Metrics Reporting

Metrics, targets and results: grants metrics worksheet here.

Needs Request

Requests for programmatic support

Possible request of guidance and expertise from Wikimedia Foundation staff on GLAM- or Education-related areas. This help would be for the staff, in case that the new board of Amical decides to employee somebody.

Requests for operational support

Possible request of guidance and expertise from Wikimedia Foundation staff on public communications and hiring procedures, in the case that the new board of Amical decides to employee somebody.