Wikimedia Conference 2015/Programme/29

29: Leveraging volunteers through programs

slides (pdf)

(Please note that the presentation itself was not documented)

Original Description

In November 2012, the Wikimedia Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) proposed that we discuss “impact, outcomes and innovation, including how to measure, evaluate and learn” across the Wikimedia movement.

This request raised some important questions, such as:

What will lead to a significant improvement in our overall community health?
How can we better learn from each other and adapt our programs?

To address these questions and help measure the impact of our programs, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Program Evaluation and Design initiative started in April 2013, with a small team and a community call to discuss program evaluation and has been working to develop evaluation capacity and reporting in order to map and mine programattic efforts led by volunteer and grantee community program leaders.

This session will offer an overview of the a second round of programs evaluation reporting, findings related to impact, and recommendations for program effectiveness in terms of how programs develop, change and contribute to larger movement goals.

The data included in our second round of evaluation reports is expected to enable program leaders to compare, contrast, and connect to one another across different locations, languages and cultures. Specifically, the programs evaluation and reports will:

help guide choices of programs that impact shared movement goals
help find and share stories across different Wikimedia communities
help the WMF Grantmaking team identify promising practices, and develop program toolkits and learning patterns
inform communities about promising practices and potential new partnerships

In addition to offering an overview of the latest programs impact evaluation lessons, the session will include a brief discussion about where we need to go next in terms of developing measures to capture our outcomes and impact and remaining evaluation and/or research questions for designing effective programs.

Desired Outcome: Share recommendations for program effectiveness, guide choices of programs that impact shared movement goals, share stories across different Wikimedia communities, help Grantmaking identifies promising pracices and develop toolkits and learning patterns, inform communities about promising practices and potential new partnerships, discussion of needed ways to capture outcomes and impact
Audience: Wikimedia program leaders
Session Format: Overview presentation followed by discussion; 60 min
Speakers: Jaime Anstee, Edward Galvez, María Cruz (all WMF)