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

Report received

Thank you for submitting a complete report for Q3. 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 02:08, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Appreciation, questions, and suggestions from FDC staff

Thank you for taking the time to create this report. We enjoyed reading it and learning about your progress to date. KLove (WMF) (talk) 06:15, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Incomplete report

Kindly complete the “Compliance” section of this report.

Financial summary

We are reading the actual cumulative expenses as 442,723.38 ILS, or 86% of WMIL’s budget of 516,440 ILS. Spending in Q3 has greatly increased to 46% of the projected budget, from 19% in Q1 and 20% in Q2. Cumulative spending is very high (over 100% of the amounts budgeted) in several areas including website design, office space, travel reimbursements, marketing and management. In terms of the greatest amounts of money spent spending is concentrated in staff and office space, and to a lesser extent, in the WikiAcademy program. Cumulative spending at less than 60% of the amounts budgeted is occurring across several areas, including Wiki Loves Monuments, editors’ meeting, writing competition, Elef-Milim, scholarships and microgrants.

WMIL intended to hire an ED and rent office space in the beginning of 2013. These objectives took more time to achieve, however, as the ED costs were not estimated correctly, hiring an ED only during Q3 was in our favor.

The imbalnce in expenses on Q3 is due to the following reasons:

• Advance rent (four months) for the office, which includes taxes
• Office equipment non-recurring expenditure
• Costs for hiring an ED
• Travel reimbursements

Additionally, it is inaccurate that WMIL spent less on programs; Many of our programs received in-kind donations - WikiAcademy, Wiki Loves Monuments and Elef Milim tours. Wiki Loves Monuments received 30,000 NIS, in costs paid directly by the Society for Preservation of Heritage Sites in Israel, as well as 30,000 NIS donation from Google Israel, to be received early 2014. Elef Milim - two tours were made to Jerusalem and Petah Tikva, with entry fees to sites received as in-kind donation to Wikipedia.לסטר (talk) 09:16, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Appreciation

• Congratulations to WMIL and to Hebrew Wikipedia on reaching the 150,000 article milestone and celebrating Hebrew Wikipedia’s tenth anniversary!
• Congratulations on hiring a new executive director in August, and a warm welcome to Michal! We appreciate the observations WMIL shares in this report about the hiring process and what it has learned.
• Thanks to WMIL for including links to sound files in the report to demonstrate the results of some of its activities. We recognize and appreciate the blog posts that WMIL
• Congratulations on WMIL’s strong developing partnership with the National Library.

We would like to learn more

1. Please tell us more about how the new office, which was an important achievement for WMIL, will help WMIL achieve the results it would like to achieve. For example, how is it being utilized by the community?

The office is located in a central location, accessible by many forms of public transportation. That is the main reason that it was chosen. We envision the office to become a central place for our community of volunteers, for edit-a-thons, developer community meet-ups, event gatherings, etc.

2. WMIL writes that stabilizing and institutionalizing the chapter has been a challenging focus this quarter. Now that the new ED has been brought on, what does WMIL expect will be some of its ongoing challenges in this area?

Stabilizing and institutionalizing of the chapter is going to be an onging challenge of WMIL for the coming year. In Q3 and Q4 we did important steps in this direction: recruiting two board members, redesigning our microgrants and project procedures (to be approved during our next board meeting January 8th) and renting an office for use by volunteers and employees. Plans for this year include producing better meausrement of outcomes for our activities, and aligning WMIL to report against objectives and targets. These processes are the ED’s responsibility.

3. It seems like WMIL has changed Program 1 from the WikiAcademy to the Be’er Sheva Educational Initiative, but this is not included in the explanation of changes. Please provide some more background on this change. Was it planned? How many high school students participated in the Be’er Sheva Educational Initiative this past quarter, and are any of the lesson plans developed available online?

WikiAcademy is a successful conference that took place at June 2013. WMIL reported about WikiAcademy on prograss report Q2. The report inculded objectives and metrics. Upon completion of the conference, WMIL choose to share another exciting program with the global community - the Be’er Sheva Educational Initiative.

9th graders from 10 schools were selected to participate in the project. The 9th graders are from accelerated classes (for gifted children). The students are going to write article in “Wikipedian style”. The article is going to be checked by a committee of teachers and wikipidians. The lesson plans developed are not yet available online. The results for this project will be writing or expanding 40 articles about the city of Be'er Sheva and the surrounding area.לסטר (talk) 10:14, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

4.Since WMIL also support Wiki Loves Monuments in Israel last year, please offer some observations about how the contest this year went when compared with last year’s contest.

This year we had the experience from last year organizing the competition. There was a list of sites to which were added a few dozen places. Over the year we maintain contact with the Society for Preservation of Heritage Sites in Israel and they were enthusiastic that the WML would take place again. The greatest difficulty was that the two volunteers who led the competition last year could not devote the same hours of volunteering, this year. It took a bit of time to recruit new volunteers and divide the tasks with the activity coordinator. Another factor that influenced was the closeness between the Wikimania to the beginning of WML. There were not enough time to prepare.

With all the challenges, we achieved the target we set ourselves 7000 pictures were upload to wikicommons. לסטר (talk) 11:33, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

5.What are some of the outcomes or results of the Wiki-Air project? From the report, it seems WMIL recruited one Wikipedian as a result. Was there quality content produced as a result of this project, or has this content been used in any projects? Please provide a link to some of the content produced or used, if available.

Wiki Air project is successful due to its ability to produce high quality content that meets Hebrew Wikipedia specific needs for free aerial images such as geographic areas, landscapes, cities, roads and infrastructure facilities, that are usually difficult to document.

At the last quarter, 203 free images were taken and uploaded to WikiCommons, and many of them have been embedded on various Wikipedia articles. To be precise, since the launch of Wiki-Air project, 155 images were being used among 311 Wiki – Projects and other Wikipedia's pages (7.3% of all files). You can see the exact statistics here.

Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to quantify the number of images that were incorporated per month, but, Hebrew Wikipedia Community will continue in the joint effort to embed as many pictures as possible. Some of them can be seen in these articles:

מגידו, חיבת ציון, ,המרכז האקדמי רופין ,כפר הרואה ,תל עדשים ,ארבל ,כפר תבור ,איצטדיון נתניה ,עפולה ,אליכין ,בני דרור ,איקאה And many others.

Please visit the Israel Wiki-Air page for some more images and info.Chen - WMIL (talk) 12:28, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Suggestions for future reports

• WMIL has undergone many changes this quarter and has changed the course of its activities and staffing plan without highlighting these changes as a significant part of this report. We hope WMIL will be more open about discussing significant changes in future reports. In general, we encourage WMIL to be more open and reflective about sharing all types of challenges in future reports.
• It is difficult to understand the progress of WMIL’s programs across quarters and with respect to its plans, since the list of programs included in this report are not consistent from quarter to quarter and with the original proposal. When activities are completed in previous quarters, it would be good to know if WMIL is still reflecting on or measuring the outcomes or results of those activities, or for a note to be included if there is no relevant information to share.
• We ask that WMIL report against the objectives listed. In many cases when WMIL does not report against objectives, it is very hard to understand WMIL’s progress against targets.
• We encourage WMIL to move toward reporting on outcomes or results instead of focusing on activities and their execution. We would like to know how WMIL’s many interesting activities are affecting the projects or the communities WMIL is working with.

Once again, thank you, colleagues at WMIL, for this report, and for your work on behalf of the entire Wikimedia movement! KLove (WMF) (talk) 06:15, 22 December 2013 (UTC)