Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Oesterreich/December2013

Vienna office

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As we decided to alter our financial year and to match it with the calendar year, we aimed at wrapping up the administrative part of our 2013 activities as complete as possible by collecting outstanding bills, travel settlements and the like. Because we also plan to outsource our accounting, we also compared different service providers.
We prepared a preliminary annual report for our general assembly in November which was updated in December and layouted and professionally printed for the first time. We will use this more fancy annual report as marketing material for volunteers, partners and donors in 2014. We put a lot of thought into what information material is most suitable for our work during the last year and decided that an attractive annual report is more reasonable than a general brochure which is usually not really up to date and the generation for similar reasons is more generic. Hence, a yearly updated annual report with current figures and background information to projects, activities and organizational developments is a good solution to these problems. At the same time, we decided not to translate our Annual report in English this year, as we already have comprehensive reporting in English throughout the year with our monthly reports and the quarterly FDC reports.

Open Data Portal

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As the end of the year approached, we also made some progress in regard of your open data portal project. The project team decided on a logo and corporate design and created an image video for potential partners (check our German website for the latest developments). We elaborated on our project plan and schedule which got approved by the Internet Foundation Austria so that we received the first installment of our "netidee"-grant. However, there is still some uncertainty concerning the schedule for the technical infrastructure: As the portal will be adapted from the Austrian open government portal in order to save costs for programming, we have to wait until it is updated to the latest version of CKAN. The deadline for this process is end of January 2014, but there are concerns that it will be postponed again. In the meantime we do our best to prepare everything alse and to expedite the acquisition of our requirements and specifications.

WLM Evaluation

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2013 for the first time WMAT decided to do a small survey with the participants of this years WLM-contest in Austria. Although there was an international survey amongst WLM-participants every year, our questions and results were more particular than in this survey. Especially the manner of realisation was somehow different to the international survey, as we did a qualitative face-to-face interview with the award-winners at the award-ceremony of WLM in Vienna. The focus was on new photographers, who participated for the first time, as the award ceremony is often the only occasion to get in touch with them.

There were three main questions that were primarily of interest for us:

  • How did you get to Wiki Loves Monuments?
  • What else do you like to take pictures of (others than monuments)?
  • Do you know about the various ways Wikimedia Österreich is supporting photographers?

Most surprisingly it became apparent that many interviewees knew barely anything about Wikimedia Österreichs supporting programs. Therefore we gave them some explanations and information material to increase the awareness of getting supported by the chapter. Also it occurred that most of the WLM-photographers learned about the contest by seeing the advertising-banner at the top of Wikipedia's mainpage. This might be a useful information for future contests and events as well, because we now know for sure, that this is the most effective way to reach external visitors of Wikipedia. We will also incorporate the results in our communication strategy for next year. We also believe that asking newbies for their view in context of such a survey and explaining them our work in person can be an important first step towards a more regular kind of engagement in our projects.

Photography Project Q4 Digest

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Some examples of photography projects supported by Wikimedia Austria in the fourth quarter of 2013: