Grants:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Belgium/2021

Application or grant stage: in progress
Applicant or grantee: applicant
Amount requested: EUR 16,500
Amount granted: EUR 16,500
Funding period: 1 January 2021 - 31 December 2021
Midpoint report due: 15 July 2021
Final report due: 30 January 2022

Application

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The simple APG grant 2021 for Wikimedia Belgium (WMBE) was (proactively) approved at the end of June 2020. Now we need to submit the content of the request. The process is delayed until the end of October 2020, due to corona, and the new submission format introduced in August 2020. The sAPG 2021 should be approved at the beginning of November 2020.

Background

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The corona pandemic is still increasing worldwide. The corona pandemic will stay for the next few years. We need to organise less physical and more virtual activities: video conferencing, campaigns, online sessions, virtual museum visits, individual (online) coaching, producing video “howto” training (with subtitles).

We need more collaboration with other (larger) institutions, organisations, and peer affiliates. We can’t do everything ourselves. We have very limited (human and financial) resources. Our current strategy of collaboration with institutions and organisations works. But it should be intensified. Word of mouth advertising works. We need more knowledgeable and sustainable volunteers.

Annual Plan

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See wmbe:Annual plan/2021.

Budget Plan

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See wmbe:Budget and resource plan/2021.

Staffing Plan

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We do not have staf.

Strategic plan

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See wmbe:WMBE strategy 2019-2020.

Introduction

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Basically, WMBE will continue the same (good, proven) programs and activities as the last previous years. We will go for more stability, predictability, impact, and performance. Through 2021 we plan for more virtual activities due to corona. We plan to better support the volunteers (online help, expenses, documentation, helpdesk, training, and assistance).

We continue to use the Outreach program planning and review tool to monitor the progress and the impact of our activities on the progress of the projects. We announce and document the activities on Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons project pages. Technical aspects are documented on the WMBE website, Wikidata and other projects as appropriate for the project. We refer to existing documentation and procedures on other Foundation websites. We use social platforms to announce and report our activities.

We educate collaborating institutions and organisations to use Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, and related tools being instruments to promote and facilitate the creation of new Wikipedia pages for their own benefit. Institutions and organisations have less budgets to pay employees, so they could benefit from the Wikipedia/Wikimedia volunteers to create and maintain web pages.

We need to pay more attention to volunteer, partner, and social platform communication. Our own websites, Facebook,Twitter, and Telegram are evident instruments. The press, radio, and television are also to be kept in the loop.

We need to choose a limited number of successful and visible campaigns/activities, rather than a multitude of small, unwatched, or less important activities, that do not attract much attention or participants.

Let us also pay attention to the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia on 15 January 2021, the integration of Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikipedia, and the long-term strategy (Strategy 2030). This requires much more public attention.

We search for more collaboration with schools, universities, and more generic cultural institutions and organisations. Heritage clubs should be more attracted to our activities. Recent and early retired people are seeking an interesting new hobby, but they might require more technical training and might suffer from a slower learning curve? Individuals of +65 are less susceptible to IT techniques, and the MediaWiki interface which is not always simple, straightforward, nor well documented.

Programs

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  • Required. Each program should contain only the following information:
    • Name of program
    • Brief description of overall program (about 100-500 words)
      • A comprehensive list of activities for a program is optional, and no extensive description of these activities is required.
    • Description of SMART objectives or goals for that program
    • Target metrics at the overall program level (not the activity level)
    • Brief explanation of why this program is important in relation to your organizational strategy or movement strategy (2-3 sentences).

Volunteer program

Volunteers should not feel alone. We need to support volunteers.

But we need to guide them to a list of (missing or incomplete) subjects, closely linked to their interests, using Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and Lysteriabot.

  • Support volunteers (transport, museum tickets, training, books, brochures)
  • Have laptops available for renting during activities (Chromebook? 250-300€)
  • Corona masks with a “Wikimedia Belgium” label
  • Printed material
    • Schrijven voor Wikipedia
    • How to upload photos
    • Brochure ateliers FR/NL

Activities that are planned:

  • March - Mois de la Contribution Francophone
  • Celebrate 20 year Wikipedia: Press, radio, TV campaign - Event?
  • Wiki Science Competition

GLAM program

We need more collaboration with other (larger) institutions, organisations, and peer affiliates. We can’t do everything ourselves. We have very limited (human and financial) resources. Our current strategy of collaboration with institutions and organisations works. But it should be intensified. Word of mouth advertising works. We need more knowledgeable and sustainable volunteers.

Collaboration with Musea and organisations.

Activities that are planned:

Educational program

One way could be attracting students and young professional heritage people to start writing for Wikipedia, and using Wikidata to amend and document items. And uploading pictures to illustrate heritage.

Collaboration with educational institutions.

Activities that are planned:

  • Continue the university and hogeschool projects
  • Architectuurinstituut Antwerpen (Women designers and architects)
  • Universiteitsbibliotheek, Letteren en Wijsbegeerte, UBGent, Gent

Other possibilities:

  • other secondary schools, colleges, universities?
  • Université des femmes
  • Musée de la médecine (ULB)
  • KMI (Koninklijk Meteorologisch Instituut, Ukkel/Uccle)

Heritage program

Problem: cultural institutions have also problems with (paid) personnel and budget reduction. And so we might need to attract more volunteers, Wikipedians and Wikimedians, to gather and structure valuable content.

wmbe:Wiki Loves Heritage photo contest

Collaboration with heritage organisations:

Support: (video) training on how to use the MediaWiki applications and tools.

Activities that are planned:

  • Wiki Loves Heritage (also more about documenting on Wikidata and Wikipedia)
  • Erfgoedcel Pajottenland Zennevallei (transfer of the texts of the website via OTRS license agreements: CC0 for wp.nl pages, CC BY-SA for Wikimedia Commons images)

Grant Metrics Reporting

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Required. Metrics, targets and results: grants metrics worksheet here.

Needs Request

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Optional. The Community Resources team would like understand the best way to support the success of your programs and organization in general. If you have any requests or needs you have related to your programs, organizational operations, or other needs below under the appropriate section, please describe them here. You may instead e-mail simple wikimedia.org to reach your program officer if you prefer.

Suggestions for Simple APG Application process

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  • ...

Requests for programmatic support

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For example, requesting guidance or expertise from Wikimedia Foundation staff on GLAM- or Education-related areas.

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Requests for operational support

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For example, requesting guidance or expertise from Wikimedia Foundation staff on public communications, financial practices, or hiring procedures.

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Other requests

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  • ...

No requests needed

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If you have no specific requests, please confirm this here.

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Midterm report

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Program story

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The COVID-19 pandemic continued to bring restrictions for organising physical activities. Until and including March only virtual meetings and video conferences were possible. This was severely impacting our projects. It was only as of April-June 2021 that conditions were gradually relaxed for universities and museums. For the other partners the national restrictions prevented to organise physical activities.

As of April we had some sessions at the university and museums in non-public sessions where volunteers were sitting on multiple floors on sparse tables distributed throughout the museum, each of them with a local LAN video-conferencing session for the training, and wearing face masks during personal coaching. We have at all times strictly observed the national health and sanity rules.

Remembering 20 Years Wikipedia 15 January

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RTBF interview in the Mundaneum

We prepared for a press release, and attracted national radio, TV, journals, and magazines to report about the anniversary of Wikipedia with a broad national communication to the general public. It continues to be a problem that journalists do not understand how Wikipedia is written. They are not aware that the community has established formal procedures and guidelines on how to manage building the encyclopedia.

The national RTBF television was broadcasting from the Mundaneum museum in Mons on 13 January to describe how Wikipedia can collaborate with museums to report their collections to the public.

On 14 January there was a national radio broadcast about Wikipedia with Lieven Scheire (Mushlack), a well-known and long term Belgian Wikipedian.

The evening news of the national television brought a report on 15 January, highlighting the Pajottenland Zennevallei heritage project that is using Wikidata, Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Commons to document the local heritage.

Karrewiet Ketnet (children’s program) reported on Wikipedia, specifically focused on the children’s experience, to explain how Wikipedia is built and maintained.

Page-large publications in national newspaper and magazines:

  • Het Nieuwsblad
  • Het Parochieblad
  • Plus Magazine

We could rely on multiple Wikipedia volunteers to collaborate with the press to describe how Wikipedia works.

Wikimedia Belgium organised a video conference with 35 participants where multiple organisations, having connections with WMBE, could present themselves, and their activities related to Wikimedia projects.

List of presentations:

Watch the [vidéo] Celebration of 20 year Wikipedia - The best of Wikimedia Belgium (01:42:35) on YouTube.

Program Progress

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Volunteer program

  • Individual volunteer support via Video conference
  • Distributed 95 copies of the book “Schrijven voor Wikipedia” amongst participants of edit-a-thons.
  • Honour expense claims for personal small initiatives.

GLAM program

Wiki Women Design is a year-long project running from October 2020 till September 2021, together with major Flemish socio-cultural institutions, and museums related to design and architecture. We organise(d) 15 sessions with more than 200 participants.

Read more in This month in GLAM.

Iedereen Leest in March, the yearly youth book month campaign organised Wikipedia writing sessions about authors.

Educational program

Erasmus Hogeschool: 25 journalism students had to write an article about a Brussels subject as part of their curriculum “history and politics”. We organised two lessons about editing Wikipedia articles, and coached the students on their journey to write a first article.

Heritage program

Public Domain day 2 February and Prize session for Wiki Loves Heritage 2020.

QRpedia project in Pajottenland Zennevallei.

6-7 March WikiMatrimoine Liège, a campaign about heritage of female origine.

Collaboration with other organisations

Welcome to my Garden, and Slow travel: a project with Wikidata, Wikivoyage, and OpenStreetMap related to travelling by bicycle and by foot.

We had a first session on 24 June where Wikidata was presented by Ainali.

Seeking a Wikimedian in Residence: we are working to appoint a Wikimedian in Residence to collaborate with and amongst museums and the Wikimedia community.

Public relations

 
Wikimedia België Standaard solidariteitsprijs 2021

We created a YouTube video channel for Wikimedia Belgium

Here we (will) publish(ed) videos about conferences and how to use Wiki tools. This is very interesting for our volunteers to learn about the different tools that can be used, and also contains links to other Chapters and playlists.

New European copyright laws On 19 January we sent a letter to the responsible Belgian ministers about remarks on the pending copyright changes.

De Standaard solidariteitsprijs. For the second year in a row, we participated in a challenge organised by De Standaard, a national newspaper, to win a national newspaper publicity as a socio-cultural organisation.

Administration

We organised a General assembly on 26 June. A new board member was appointed: Sam Donvil, responsible for GLAM and the Public Domain day.

Projects to come

Projects that started on the 1st of July:

Projects to come in the second half of the year:

What have we learned

 
Wikimedia projects

Heritage organisations, and Museums are good collaborators and partners.

Wikidata - Wikipedia - and Wikimedia Commons are closely interlinked. There exists quite a lot of interesting tools that can help setting up and supporting a project: OpenRefine, Wikidata, Wikidata Query, LysteriaBot, wdfirst, Pywikibot, ISA Tool.

Use interrelated tools to organise a successful edit-a-thon:

  • Excel, Google Spreadsheets
  • OpenRefine
  • Wikidata
  • Wikidata Query
  • Project page
  • Campaign and events tool
  • ListeriaBot
  • FAQ
  • Wikimedia Commons Campaign
  • ISA Tool
  • Automated Pywikibot Wikidata editing
  • Automating Wikidata updates, to avoid spending time and effort on manual updates.
  • An algorithm makes fewer (random) errors; but the base quality of the data is of primary importance.

Project impact reporting:

Spending update Midterm

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Link to a detailed financial report for our spending during the first half of your grant period.

Total amount of Simple APG funds spent during the first half of the grant period is 1574.74 €.

Grant Metrics Reporting Midterm

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Metrics, targets and results: grants metrics worksheet here.

Final report

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See Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Belgium/Activity/2021.

Spending update Final

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Detailed financial report for your spending during the grant period. This should be in the same format as your detailed budget from your Simple APG application.

Please include the total amount of Simple APG funds you spent during the grant period: € 8,388.56

Grant Metrics Reporting Final

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Metrics, targets and results: grants metrics worksheet here.