Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2012-2013 round1/Wikimedia CH/Progress report form/Q3

Report received

Thank you for submitting a complete report for Q3 on time. We look forward to reading more about your activities. Due to the timing of the FDC funding cycle, it will take staff a little longer than usual to offer feedback about this report and post clarifying questions. We appreciate your patience with this process, and welcome any urgent questions or concerns that you may want to address before our comments are ready. Thank you for your attention to the reporting process during this busy time and best regards, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 02:06, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Comments from FDC Staff on this report

Thank you for this report, and thank you in advance for making the effort to read and respond to our comments and questions. Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 00:37, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Financial summary

• We are reading the actual cumulative expenses in CHF as 315,820 CHF, or 47% of WMCH’s budget of 658,710 CHF. Spending in Q3 has increased to 24% from 10-12% in previous quarters. Spending is lower than 60% across most program areas while staff costs, IT expenses, administrative expenses and fundraising expenses are over 60%. In terms of money spent, cumulative expenses are focused on salaries, IT and administration.
• There appears to be an inconsistency in WMCH’s Table 3 for the line item Free content generation. The sum of the numbers provided does not add up to the cumulative total provided. Please take a second look at the table and ensure that the numbers are consistent.

Appreciation

• We appreciate that WMCH includes detailed information about variances in actual spending compared to WMCH’s plan in Table 3, which helped us to understand WMCH’s spending in context.
• We recognize and appreciate that quality of this progress report has improved over previous quarters. Thank you for your hard work to improve the reports!
• Congratulations on involving WMCH’s community in the annual planning process. We are glad WMCH is considering improvements to the community-driven process to increase participation. We also hope that WMCH finds ways to integrate its community-driven approach with a strategic approach to planning its activities in a way that makes sense for WMCH.
• Congratulations to WMCH on the success of its projects with the Neuchatel Herbarium and Botanical Gardens, the large amount of content WMCH are creating and its observations around overcoming bottlenecks with those institutions over uploading.

We would like to learn more

1. Please explain what WMCH means by “overall community” in the section Wiki Focus.

• We appreciate that WMCH included learning from its work with all of its language communities. How do the community liaisons work together to coordinate strategies across communities? Have there been any common ideas found between the work with the German and Italian communities?

1. In WMCH’s work with different language communities, how does WMCH address complementarity or overlaps with the work of other chapters and groups focused on the same language communities? For example, how does WMCH’s work with the German language community complement that of WMDE or WMAT, or how does WMCH’s work with the Italian language community complement WMIT’s work with the same community?
2. Please share with us more about what WMCH expect the outcomes or results of the Wiki Reunions will be. Does WMCH yet measure these outcomes or results? For example, does WMCH find editing activity among participants increases after attending a reunion or have users expressed the positive results of these reunions through surveys?
3. Please share more about WMCH’s strategies for improving how WMCH works with youth and seniors together, since this is a work area that many entities find challenging.
4. Does WMCH plan to track the use of content contributed through its various activities, such as its work with scientific institutions like the herbarium and botanical gardens, on the Wikimedia projects?
5. The sponsorship of a camera in Mali is an interesting project. Please share more about how WMCH structured the sponsorship so that other chapters providing volunteers with equipment might learn from its work.
6. We would like to know more about the outcomes or results WMCH expects from some of the activities it has highlighted as successes. What outcomes or results does WMCH expect from the following successes mentioned in this report?
   • The Chapters Village
   • Developing flyers for Kiwix
   • Strong presence at Wikimania

Suggestions for future reports

• We recognize that WMCH is facing challenges with its accounting practices, especially with respect to reporting. WMCH has retroactively changed its reported numbers for each quarter. We encourage further efforts to approve accounting processes so there are fewer errors and so numbers can be understood more easily and consistently from quarter to quarter.