Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2012-2013 round1/Wikimedia Nederland/Progress report form/Q2

Receipt of this report

Thank you, Sandra and Wikimedia Nederland, for submitting a complete progress report for 2013 Q2 on time. We look forward to reviewing it in detail in the coming weeks. Please continue to monitor this discussion page for our comments and questions, and contact us at any time if you have any questions or concerns. We will be in touch later today with instructions regarding the next installment of grant funds and to notify you any changes to your eligibility status that may have resulted from the submission of this timely report. Best regards from FDC staff, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 17:44, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for this report

Thank you for this report, and especially for the improvements implemented since the last report. We very much appreciate your willingness to share your lessons learned more openly and we encourage you to continue to deepen this reflection in future reports. We found this aspect of your report very valuable since it allows us to understand your challenges and also shows how you are working to address them. We recognize this is not easy to do well, and so thank you for this work. We also found your financial table very easy to understand, as it includes a separation of program and operational activities with total costs and percentages spent.

We encourage all entities to also read the staff summary of this quarter’s progress reports in addition to these comments.

Best regards, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 03:10, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Appreciation

• Congratulations on getting your complete team in place, and welcome to Tom Kisters!
• Thank you for continuing to report on metrics that help us understand the outcomes of your activities. We appreciate your comments about considering how to use staff time efficiently by focusing on programs that lead to clear outcomes.
• We appreciate your reflections on involving experienced Wikipedians in edit-a-thons and thinking about how to best notify the community that an event is happening in order to avoid conflicts. These are valuable lessons for others organizing similar events.
• Thank you for sharing your challenges with Wikivoyage honestly and openly. Not all programs go the way we envision. We are interested to discover how you learn from this experience and change your approach.
• Thank you for sharing the pros and cons of participating in an EU-funded project like CoSyne; it is nice to learn there were some great opportunities for volunteers.

Congratulations! Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 03:10, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

We would like to learn more

Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions about this report. Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 03:10, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

1. We found your study on volunteer motivation to be fascinating and insightful. Can you share more about how the survey may influence your strategies? Also, is there any advice you would offer to other groups who would like to conduct similar surveys? By the way, we appreciate that the survey report was linked to from this page, and even translated into English!

The outcomes of the survey played an important role in determining our priorities for 2014. In our FDC application you will find frequent references to the survey. The survey showed that many NL Wikipedia editors were not aware of the support WMNL can give them, for example by providing grants for small projects or scholarships for attending (international) events and meetings. Indeed, in some cases the editors were not even aware that WMNL existed. Also, the editors indicated that they were not entirely happy about the social atmosphere on NL-Wikipedia. The tone of discussion was sometimes experiences as harsh and they felt that it was not a welcoming environment for new editors. In 2014, we have made it one of our top-priorities to improve our contacts/interaction with the editing community. Although WMNL cannot directly influence the atmosphere on NL-WIkipedia, we will make it our priority to support any activities from within the community to improve things. SRientjes (talk) 15:45, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

2. As more and more Wikipedians in Residence are hired (you plan to have three or four placed by end of the year), how will WMNL connect and support them by facilitating connections and volunteer support?

That is a good question. We do feel that when four are in place we will have reached the limits of what WMNL - and indeed the NL Wikipedia community - can support. We expect the interaction with the WiR's to be a matter of give and take, with sometimes WMNL responding to initiatives by the WiR's and sometimes vice versa. Definitely, WMNL will be guided mainly by the priorities we have set in our Annual Plan. The collections of several of the host-institutions are so wide in content, that they will hold materials relevant to almost any topic we are focussing on. lon the other hand, the decision to upscale our activities concerning WorldWar II to a main thematic priority in 2014 was partly made possible by the fact that there is going to be a WiR at the National Institute for War Research (NIOD). On a more practical level we plan to organise a regular meeting for all WiR's, in which we can discuss and coordinate upcoming activities. Also we will invite senior management of the host-institutions to a presentation of our annual workplan 2014 to present and discuss priorities. SRientjes (talk) 15:45, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

3. It sounds quite challenging to raise funds beyond the movement; as WMNL reports, it is difficult to promise deliverables to a donor. What is your current thinking about how to diversify funding, since you haven’t made adjustments to your budget?

We will provide an amended version of the budget, including new estimates for the amount of funding we can reasonably expect to raise in 2013 in our Q3 report. Diversifying funding is still high on the list of things we want to achieve. With all the office staff now in place and a lot of the work of 'building an organisation' done, both Board and Director will have more time (and energy) for the question of fundraising. At the moment, we are in the process of discussing possible funding from a private donor and we have more exploratory contacts with at least two others. These contacts look promising, and we are fairly confident that they will lead to result.

One of the problems we are now trying to master is how to develop a concrete project proposal that is acceptable both to the funder and to the community of volunteers who will be instrumental in implementation! It is a learning experience for all involved. SRientjes (talk) 15:52, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

4. When reading Table 3, we notice you include travel costs with the staff salaries. Please clarify if these are employer-sponsored commuting benefits for employees or separate travel costs for meetings and events.

These are costs of travel for commuting to work by our employees. SRientjes (talk) 15:53, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Suggestions for future reports

• We were pleased to read about your plans to follow up with the 15 people trained at the National Museum of Ethnology in six months time. In future reports, we are interested in learning about how WMNL follows this over time and how you use the information to adjust your work to ensure higher rates of return.
• Thank you for sharing your challenges around volunteer recruitment. If you have started developing strategies to address recruitment challenges, we invite you to share them in future reports.

Thank you for taking these suggestions into account. Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 03:10, 9 September 2013 (UTC)