As every year, WLM international team will be applying for funding to the Wikimedia Foundation for international prizes, project admin support, technical maintenance of tools such as Montage, translations etc for 2022-23. Here are the key questions and points from the proposal that is to be submitted to WMF through Fluxx portal, which is due by 14 April 2022. The team welcomes the community to review and share any feedback/suggestions on the talk page.
What is the overall vision of your organization and how does this proposal contribute to this? If relevant, how does this proposal connect to past work and learning?
The international Wiki Loves Monuments team’s mission is to freely document and raise awareness of built cultural heritage, increase contributions to the Wikimedia projects and bolster local Wikimedia communities around the world. We do this by leading and facilitating an annual federated, global, low-barrier photo competition. Based on this mission and experience of the past twelve editions of the competition, the international team has identified that the following will be key areas of focus for the upcoming year:
Support to national contests: In its current form, the international team needs to support many local teams on a case by case basis (for example on tools, instructions, promotion etc.) thus limiting the scalability and ease of adoption by local communities. While established campaigns, which are generally backed by regional chapters, require minimal to no support from the international team, however, countries participating for the first or initial few times require support from the international team.
Curation of resources: Both at national and international levels, the competition requires a wide range of resources including but not limited to, documentation (guides on organizing, participating, monuments database etc.), technical tools (mainly Montage), campaign infrastructure (upload wizards and central notices) that needs support for maintenance and to add new developments according to the needs of the campaign.
Exploring new pathways for engagement to support knowledge equity: During 2021-22, the international team facilitated a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion review of the campaign, which has helped to surface several challenges faced by national organizers and also suggestions on making the campaign more inclusive. As of April 2022, the mid-term report of this is available to read on this link. We will explore ways to implement recommendations from this and also the final report.
Most of this work is achieved with volunteer efforts. The budget that would be provided through this proposal is primarily used to support international awards, staff support for the volunteer efforts, technical support to the existing tools, and translations. While these may only be part of the work, these are essential puzzle pieces to make the campaign as a whole a success.
What is the change that you are trying to bring about and why is this important?
WLM is an on-going effort to improve documentation of media (mostly images) related to cultural heritage on Wikimedia Commons, and sister projects. There are certain components of the campaign which take place year over year with more or less the same approach. That is, areas of work such as documentation, maintaining the Central Notice infrastructure, running the international jury etc. are standard, and each year we would like to explore ways in which these processes can be improved and build a strategic direction for the competition. Apart from the standard components of the campaign, we would like to improve in the following areas:
Proactive support to national organizers and new campaigns: While campaigns backed by established affiliates do not usually require much support from the international team, many require regular follow-up from the team and support to set up the necessary infrastructure. During the last couple of years, owing to several reasons including the pandemic and transitions within the international team, the number of countries participating each is on decline. This year, we would like to evaluate that and explore ways where we can establish consistent communications with national organizers and provide necessary support. In addition to stabilizing existing national competitions, it is also important to keep adding a few new countries i.e. countries which have never participated in Wiki Loves Monuments previously. Currently, this is happening organically, but we would like to spend some more focused efforts in this area.
Worldwide participation: Participation has always been from countries where national competitions take place, which requires a group of volunteers to organize it. Currently, there is no for countries with no national competitions to take part in the competition even though they might have pictures from the respective countries to upload. We will plan and possibly (depending on the capacity we have) execute a “rest-of-the-world” competition.
Furthering the DEI research work: During the last grant period, we have facilitated a DEI review of the competition which identified several challenges and suggestions on solutions that can help the project to be equitable and inclusive. As the final report of this review is expected to be published in June, during the year following we will be exploring ways to implement suggestions from this review in coordination with the national competitions.
Describe your main approaches or strategies to achieve these changes and why you think they will be effective?
Collect, curate, and share best practices and building blocks: Two conditions are necessary for a successful Wiki Loves Monuments national competition: access to best practices and consistent tools/building blocks of information or technology that local organizers can use or follow out-of-the-box while keeping the barriers for innovation low. Currently, a lot of the limited time and resources of the national (and international) organizers is spent on tasks that can be done more efficiently, through better and more user-friendly documentation as well as templates that are designed based on the learning of organizing the contest over the past 12 years. Currently, much of the documentation is several years old and somewhat outdated. It is one of our priorities to support this area.
Having a part-time staff for project coordination: During the last few years we observed that the international team, which has been an all-volunteer team, is overstretched and almost all the time available is being spent on standard components of the campaign. This has left no time to think about the strategic direction of the project, and support it. There is also a risk of volunteer burn-out. Starting this year, we would like to have a part-time staff (project coordinator) to support some of the standard components of the campaign and offload some of that from volunteers, who can spend more time on evolving new areas of the project which are interesting to them. We would like staff members to be from the existing staff of our fiscal sponsor, as it will be easier to set up this model and as the chapter already has experience supporting Wiki Loves Monuments and is well aware of our needs. The job description for the project coordinator is available at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vNqLgD3A_9hOPsS7G2r_bNjGtfBKea4F67eL_IjvBas/edit?usp=sharing
What are the activities you will be developing and delivering as part of these approaches or strategies?
Preliminary work
Inform local organizers and affiliates about the new contest, initiatives, and projects the international team is working on;
Collect feedback and suggestions from local organizers;
Hold regular internal team meetings to review work done and plan for the work that is ahead;
Communicate with the WLM community periodically.
General Coordination
Update and communicate the international rules;
Update and share documentation;
Prepare (or coordinate for others to prepare) communication material that can be used and/or built upon by national organizations;
Facilitate communication channels;
Monitor statistics;
Set up a clear timeline.
Project Management
Write grant request
Maintain communication with relevant staff at Wikimedia Foundation;
Collect measures and data to be reported at the end of the program.
Report monthly and midterm on activities to WMF
Report on the use of budget at the end of the program;
Write grant report
Technical contributions
Help with the setup and maintenance of the technical infrastructure for uploading;
Help with the setup and maintenance of the CentralNotice;
Maintain an international website for participants;
Improve Montage based on the feedback from last year in order to offer jury tool services to local and international jury members and coordinators;
In coordination with partners, provide support for the technical work in specific parts of the pipeline for the migration of data from Monuments Database to Wikidata.
Communication & partnerships
Update wikilovesmonuments.org with the necessary/useful information;
Update social media channels;
Disseminate the results of the international jury;
Maintain communication with international partners.
Follow & help national organizations
Give specific suggestions and support to national organizers (mostly online, though additionally we offer onboarding sessions over Hangout to the countries participating for the first time);
Collect & answer questions of the national teams;
Crisis management for national contests;
This year in particular: improve the infrastructure that is used by national competitions. This includes documentation, templates and perhaps some tooling.
Set up & run the international contest
Set up jury processes
Find suitable jury members for the international jury
Collect results of national competitions
Support the jury in their process
Provide & distribute international prizes, awards and diplomas
Specific additional tasks this year:
Organize the Special Awards for countries without a national team
Organize the Organizers' awards
Please include a timeline (operational calendar) for your proposal
For the international Team, the yearly cycle starts around June, with active outreach to the (potential) national organizers and communications about the upcoming competition. We help the national teams with setting up landing pages if requested, creating the category structure and the banner- and upload campaigns on Commons.
The photo competition itself runs from September until October, wherein national organizers are free to choose any time period ranging upto 31 days. The international Team is standby for problems that may arise, and in the meantime will prepare the international jury.
The top 10 images from the national contest need to be sent to the international team by December, the jury deliberates in Jan/Feb and the winners are typically announced in Feb/Mar of the new year, with prizes being distributed until May
Q2 of every year is a time where the international team reflects on the past cycle, possibly onboards new members and takes time to prepare and communicate on a more meta level about the upcoming year.
you have the team that is needed to implement this proposal?
The 2022-2023 team hopes to have staff support for 15h/week for administration, documentation and incidental tasks.
The following names volunteers on the team:
Wiki Loves Monuments core team:
Ciell - general WLM communication & campaign creator for Montage
Elena Tatiana Chis - social media coordination
Erina Mukta- international prizes
Krishna Chaitanya - general WLM coördination
Ndahiro Derrick - international jury coordination
Romaine - international banners and upload campaigns
Stephen LaPorte - Montage developer and maintainer
Advisors for the WLM core team, mainly past core team members:
Lodewijk - at-large support and advising
Mohammad - Social Media.
Jean-Fred - maintainer wikiloves statistics tool, Erfgoedbot and monuments database
Mahmoud - Montage developer and maintainer
André Costa - maintainer Erfgoedbot and monuments database
LilyOfTheWest
The core team is a working team, where each member contributes effort as well as expertise. This leaves space to welcome new members to add expertise and effort, such as someone to focus on Wikidata, knowledge transfer, new participant engagement, data analysis etc.
In a few sentences, explain how your work is specifically addressing this content gap (or Knowledge inequity) to ensure a greater representation of knowledge
At the moment, our 2021-2022 DEI research is still underway. First results tell us about three different areas where national organizers experience problems in participating. Though some require buy-in from stakeholders besides us as a team to address, the outcomes give us suggestions for these three areas to work on in the upcoming years. Solutions include improving and updating our documentations on the projects, more proactive communications and support peers to connect.
With the improvement in these areas, the national organizers will be able to improve their national competitions and
join the competition for the first time,
reach more participants, what would result in
new uploaded content from countries that did not participate in the previous twelve years.
What are your strategies for engaging participants, particularly those that currently are non-Wikimedia?
There are two broad categories here for engagement with Wiki Loves Monuments, participants and organizers. Participants are users who upload images during the competition, and organizers include national organizers, the international team, and other stakeholders.
For participants
Central Notice is one of the most effective ways to inform the community about the competition when it starts and also newcomers, who are participating in the campaign for the first time. In addition to central notice, we have use our social media channels complementing the channels of national chapters and organizers to inform the non-Wikimedia communities
Special prizes: Special prizes are ways to encourage contributions/participation from specific groups. For example, in the past, we have seen having a special prize for a region increased participation from the region in terms of the number of national competitions organized. Some of the categories where special prizes can be awarded are newcomers, underrepresented regions, emerging communities etc.
For organizers
Mailing lists continue to be our main channel of communication with national organizers. Our goal is also to host monthly office hours where national organizers can gather to discuss challenges and share ideas, along with a specific topic of focus. We have been doing this during the last year, but not every month. We hope to make it more regular and consistent. As we previously mentioned, more proactive communications will be done during the outreach phase of the campaign.
In what ways are you actively seeking to contribute towards creating a safer, supportive, more equitable environment for participants and promoting the UCOC and Friendly Space Policy, and/or equivalent local policies and processes?
Currently we don’t have any physical events. The only activity the international team hosts are the online office hours where we ensure friendly space, and only actively monitor the channels including on-wiki pages. However the events organized locally even though related to Wiki Loves Monuments are handled by the respective national / regional teams, chapters, and user groups.
How do you hope to sustain or expand the work carried out in this proposal after the grant?
Sustaining the work of Wiki Loves Monuments has been a successful struggle for the past 12 years. However, we need to make additional efforts in maintaining a cooperative community of national organizers, and improve documentation. All focus areas defined this year will help in the sustenance of Wiki Loves Monuments beyond this year.
What kind of risks do you anticipate and how would you mitigate these?
One of the current risks on the international team is lack of enough volunteers over the past couple of years. This partly both due to team transitions and also the scale of the project. One of the considerations for this year is to have a paid project coordinator who can help with some of the admin/logistical tasks, and volunteers can focus on areas that interest them.
After 12 years of WLM, we have a need to develop a strategic direction for the campaign. Currently, we have mapped out some areas of improvement needs in terms of organizing, but the overall strategy for WLM still needs to be worked upon. Not having a strategic direction hinders innovation at the international level, and not having much scope for new areas of the campaign. This will be a priority for the upcoming year.
What do you hope to learn from your work in this fund proposal?
We would like to evaluate the campaign with surveys similar to what we conducted in 2019 and 2020. Surveys help us learn what worked, what didn’t and what areas can be improved. The goal of the surveys is to evaluate the campaign both from the perspective of national organizers and also the participants. In addition, we are also planning to conduct a brief data analysis on newcomers of the campaign, which will try to understand the behavior of newcomers after the campaign period is over and their retention + activity on Wikimedia projects.
Based on these learning questions, what is the information or data you need to collect to answer these questions?
Number of countries participating in total: 40
Number of countries that did not participate in the last three years: 5
Number of participants in our evaluation surveys: 40% of the total participants
Note: Number of participants, number of images uploaded etc are very much indicative of the effort and success by the national teams. The above are only the metrics the international team has direct influence over.
Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it.
Budget item
Description
Amount EUR
Prizes
Prizes, certificates, and related shipping
9000
Project Admin support
Part-time project coordinator from WMAT
15000
Campaign Outreach and Support
Designing materials, social media promotions, support to national campaigns in forms of guides, etc.
4500
Translations Support for Material in general
Onboarding Guide, and other relevant communications
3000
DEI report translations
DEI translation in ~15 languages
6000
Support to technical tools
Montage + any other tooling
6000
Micro-grants
Short grants under $500 to national organizers
2000
Working Team meeting
After 2 years, it is likely to have team meeting of international team and some national organizers.
