Projekt:Verktyg för partnerskap 2019 – Blueprinting/Slutrapport

Pdf-version av slutrapporten för projektet Verktyg för partnerskap 2019 – Blueprinting.

Summary

The project has allowed Wikimedia Sverige (WMSE) and Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) to deepen our partnership and our shared understanding and thinking regarding the possibilities of Thematic hubs as well as what changes are needed in respective organizations.

This process is in itself perhaps the most valuable outcome as it has taken the theoretical idea of a Thematic hub and made it into something tangible that can be discussed and argued about; not just in WMF and WMSE but for all Wikimedia affiliates and volunteers that have been involved or learned about the process.

The project has allowed WMSE to significantly expand its international presence and activities, including organization of and participation in numerous events, support with technical coordination and more.

The project has further made it possible for WMSE to take active steps to become a technically capable organization and a leader and coordinator in the GLAMwiki community. To that end a deepened partnership with e.g. Wikimedia Deutschland has been very important. The ongoing discussions about the strategy recommendations for Wikimedia 2030 and with key stakeholders in the Wikimedia movement and GLAM sectors about their wants and needs have been of key importance to clarify the path forward.

The project also made it possible to develop a detailed technical plan for the first year as a hub and to actively work to improve sustainability long term.

Timeline

• July 2019-September 2020: Ongoing discussions with WMF GLAM team about work and plans.
• July 2019-September 2020: Both new and deepened partnerships with other Wikimedia affiliates.
• July 2019-September 2020: Participation in the development of the Wikimedia 2030 strategy as a main writer.
• July 2019-February 2020: The FindingGLAMs project is carrying most of the costs of the initiative as it has significant overlap and has significant funding left.
• July 2019-February 2020: A small global grant program is initiated as an integrated part of the FindingGLAMs project.
• July-September 2019: Preparations and follow-up of the Wikimania 2019 conference and surrounding activities.
• July-December 2019: Preparations to be able to expand WMSE’s organization and team.
• October 2019: Offsite meeting 23-25 October with WMF and WMDE about technical scope.
• October 2019-November 2019: A set of recommendations called Ten ways to bring in funds for a sustainable hub is developed.
• October 2019-September 2020: Development of a Product plan for key GLAMwiki tools.
• November 2019-September 2020: Ongoing exchange with WMDE’s technical team about MediaWiki development.
• January 2020-May 2020: Expansion of the team and onboarding of new team members.
• January 2020-March 2020: Ensuring support and buy-in from WMSE’s members.
• January 2020-September 2020: Development of guidelines for WMSE’s technical team.
• March 2020-May 2020: Refocusing and reducing the initiative due to the COVID-19 pandemic for June 2020-July 2021.
• April 2020-June 2020: Preparation of the organization to allow for international hires.
• April 2020-June 2020: Providing inputs on public consultations both nationally and on the EU level.
• April 2020-September 2020: Preparations of the organization to allow for a distributed and global team.
• May 2020-September 2020: Development of external project grant applications take place.
• May 2020-September 2020: Coordination with WMIL and WMCH around the Cassandra statistical tool.

Goals of the project

The goal of this project was to investigate the possibility of WMSE to take a larger international role in supporting the Wikimedia movement to develop content partnerships and prepare the organization to be able to take on such a role.

Initially it was envisioned that WMSE would become what was originally called a “Center of Excellence”, however, this terminology was later updated to “Thematic hub”, in line with the development of the strategic recommendations. This was the main goal of the project. The original expectation was that at the end of the project the WMF and WMSE would be able to take a decision on whether to initiate a Thematic hub from July 2020 and establish the needed contractual pattern. The major deviation from the plan was that at the end of the project we were not able to decide on whether a thematic hub for content partnerships was to be created or not. As such the planned White paper is incomplete and will continue to be developed by WMSE and WMF until the end of the follow-up project.

For WMSE to be able to develop into a hub the organization had to both develop its capacity and gain support for the initiative from the Wikimedia community in Sweden and abroad. This was arguably successfully achieved during the project.

A secondary goal was to produce insights for the development of Thematic hubs in the Wikimedia movement. The project aimed to compile knowledge and insights about (1) needs from content partners; (2) a technical direction; (3) how to ensure equitable governance of a hub; (4) how to ensure sustainability of a hub. The work was to be based on experimentation and to gather insights by initiating the work and compiling the learnings. WMF’s team would work on providing insights through desk research about previous GLAMwiki initiatives.

Even though many insights have been gained, important work still remains. From the start the project had challenges that forced the original goals to be refocused and adjusted to reflect a new reality. The challenges included: the project start was delayed due to commitments from WMSE in other projects. As WMSE was about to ramp up the work significant organizational and personal changes at WMF took place; these changes led to a situation where previous decisions and commitments were revoked or adjusted. The challenges with the original goals were further enhanced because of the delays in the finalization of the movement strategy recommendations. Finally, when a decision was taken the last quarter of the project into the project, in March 2020, that a hub would not be able to be launched in 2020 due to the pandemic the original goals had to be further adjusted and the duration of the project extended.

Due to the many challenges the communication efforts were slowed down and discussions about governance were partly postponed. Furthermore, the focus of planned work was made more narrow and some research at WMF was reduced in scale. Due to the new organizational situation at WMF the focus increased on developing the technical plans and on experimenting with sustainability initiatives by kick-starting a fundraising effort.

Outcomes and outputs

Grouped by coherent pieces of work/outcomes and within them in rough chronological order, all kept very descriptive (as the White paper will focus on insights and recommendations).

Discussions with WMF

Outcome

Over the span of the project WMSE and WMF have had recurring scheduled meetings and workshops. John Andersson and Ben Vershbow had biweekly meetings to discuss long term strategy and prioritization. The project team also had a scheduled monthly meeting to share what each team was working on. On top of that irregular workshops and meetings took place most weeks with different constellations of participants to solve a wide range of challenges and to prepare for different opportunities. These discussions were time-consuming but still prioritized as the frequent discussions helped create a feeling of a unified team, develop a shared vision and made it possible to divide tasks and to gather inputs and insights from the different experts in the two teams.

Outputs/Documents

Most of the outputs and the documents, as described in this document, were influenced by these meetings and workshops.

Information sharing and discussions with Wikimedia affiliates

Outcome

In order to gather feedback from other Wikimedia affiliates the project team had regular meetings with:

• The ED Group on the monthly recurring meeting of the Executive directors of the Wikimedia movement. These meetings covered a wide range of topics, often focusing on inter-affiliate exchange, partnerships and financial sustainability. The ED group also met in person to discuss the initiative in Stockholm during the Wikimania 2019 conference.
• The GLAMwiki community, through both the GLAMwiki Newsletter, through dedicated groups on social media, at the GLAMwiki conference in Tel Aviv and through a number of direct conversations with key members. Many of the main documents that were developed during the project were shared with key stakeholders in the GLAMwiki community for feedback.
• The technical community, through the Wikimedia hackathon in Prague and through a number of direct conversations with key members.

Outputs/Documents

The events and the outputs are described here:

• Event reports for the GLAMwiki community meetings:
  • WikidataCon 2019, Germany.
  • CEE Meeting 2019, Serbia.
  • WikiNEM, Estonia.
  • CC Summit, Portugal.
• Event reports for the technical community meetings:
  • Wikimedia Hackathon 2019, Czech Republic.
  • Wikimania Hackathon 2019, Sweden.
• Furthermore, there were a number of activities taking place connected to the project during Wikimania 2019 as outlined in the conference program.

Working on the Wikimedia 2030 Strategy

Outcome

The ongoing Wikimedia 2030 Strategy had inspired this project to take place in the first place. The work with the strategy was actively taking place during the entire time the project was active and the project allowed WMSE to take a more active role in the work with the Strategy. The project also created insights that were possible to bring into the discussions on what a hub in the Wikimedia movement should and could be. John Andersson participated in the Resources Allocation working group and was part of the team finalizing the recommendations. The cost for travel was covered by the Movement strategy budget but work time was partly covered through this project.

Outputs/Documents

• The events included:
  • Strategy meeting in Germany.
  • Strategy meeting in Spain.
  • Strategy meeting in Tunisia.
  • Strategy meeting in the USA.
• The key insights about hubs helped develop the recommendations for the Wikimedia 2030 Strategy. The key recommendation being Ensure Equity in Decision-making.

Overlap with the FindingGLAMs project

Outcome

The FindingGLAMs project compiled data about the GLAM institutions of the world, engaged new GLAM partners in the Wikimedia movement and experimented with different ways to deliver content from content partners to the Wikimedia platforms and on how to engage volunteers to use and improve it.

During the first two thirds of the Blueprinting project the externally funded FindingGLAMs project was worked on in parallel. The overlap between the two projects were significant and in many ways complementary. As WMSE had underspent in the FindingGLAMs project in 2018 the project could cover a lot of the costs associated with the Blueprinting project during 2019 and early 2020, e.g. for work time and most of the travels. This overlap allowed WMSE to establish a larger presence in the GLAM and Wikimedia communities and to conduct experiments in order to identify technical challenges and to plan for solutions to these.

Outputs/Documents

• The portal for the FindingGLAMs initiative (the work to collect GLAM data will continue in 2021 with WMSE’s own funding).
• FindingGLAMs White Paper.
• FindingGLAMs Final Report.

Piloting an international grant program

Outcome

As WMSE had underspent in the FindingGLAMs project we had the opportunity, after consulting with the funder, to initiate an international grant program. The aim with these strategic grants were to allow for small GLAMwiki communities across the world to deepen their partnerships with local GLAM institutions and to improve the available data of GLAM institutions in countries that currently lacked good representation on the Wikimedia platforms. For WMSE this was an opportunity to learn more about how to give out targeted strategic grants that allow local teams to contribute efficiently to a global GLAM initiative. Part of the work time was covered with the Blueprinting budget.

Through this work we learned many new things, including e.g. to prepare an English language grant program focusing on small affiliates with limited organizational capacity, to investigate how to financially transfer grant funding efficiently while following the necessary financial rules and regulations. The lessons learned will allow us to quickly establish a similar grant program if future funding allows us to do so. This might be done both by redistribution of Wikimedia funding or through funding from for instance the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency or ideally a combination of the two.

Outputs/Documents

• The page for the grant program.
• Grants were handed out to 6 teams that organized events for GLAM professionals to introduce them to Wikidata and open data:
  • In South Africa.
  • In Guinea.
  • In Nigeria.
  • In Ghana.
  • In Botswana.
  • In Iran (report withheld due to security/privacy concerns).

Wikimania 2019

Outcome

WMSE had the honor of hosting Wikimania 2019 in Stockholm. As part of the Blueprinting and FindingGLAMs projects we were able to do preparatory work for Wikimania, as the conference was considered to be an excellent opportunity to discuss this initiative with the global Wikimedia community.

The Wikimania hackathon had a clear GLAM connection and the initiative was presented and discussed with the GLAMwiki community, as well as with the ED group and decision makers at the WMF. We also organized a meeting together with Europeana for National libraries to discuss how they could work with the Wikimedia movement and a meeting for GLAMwiki coordinators in Europe.

The conference allowed us to highlight our plans about the hub and to gather insights. Hosting such an important conference also allowed us to showcase the chapter’s ability and interest in organizing relevant activities for the global community.

Outputs/Documents

• Wikimania 2019 Hackathon.
• Presentation at Wikimania about the technical aspects of the initiative.
• Meeting for National libraries.
• GLAMwiki coordinators meeting.

Preparations for organizational expansion at WMSE

Outcome

To be able to take a larger role internationally around content partnerships it was considered clear that WMSE would need to grow the staff size (especially since, as a chapter, WMSE also has national responsibilities). For an expansion of the organization to be possible a significant amount of preparatory work had to be done.

Many of the policies of the organization had to be reviewed, new policies needed to be added, guiding documents for staff and volunteers had to be created or revised, financial routines established to handle larger budgets, work descriptions for different positions had to be developed etc.

This work was essential for the chapter to be able to expand past 10 staff members. This is because Swedish law applies stricter rules and regulations to employers with more than 10 employees compared to employers with fewer than that.

Outputs/Documents

The following documents were improved to be able to continue to expand and to fundraise more effectively:

• A new structure for policies, to increase clarity and consistency.
• A dedicated policy for salaries, which is needed when growing the team.
• An updated description of the division of responsibilities in the organization, which is needed when growing the team.
• A policy for when and how staff has to work, which is needed to support more teleworking.
• A Code of conduct, for staff and volunteers representing WMSE.
• An update to the guidelines for inclusive meetings (in Swedish and English), as part of the preparation for Wikimania.
• Updates to our Privacy policy, to include the tools needed for a larger staff and for increased fundraising.
• A fundraising policy, to follow the regulations around fundraising in Sweden.
• A rudimentary investment policy, outlining how to invest money collected through local fundraising which is needed to follow the regulations around fundraising in Sweden.
• A successful application for a so called 90-account, a quality stamp for serious fundraising organizations. This included new financial routines and tools needed for their reporting requirements.

Offsite meeting with WMF and WMDE

Outcome

With WikidataCon 2019 taking place in Berlin many of the WMF-staff therefore coming over to Europe we saw an opportunity to meet both with people already involved with the Blueprinting initiative and a larger stakeholder group. We therefore arranged to have an offsite in the Wikimedia Deutschland offices in the two days leading up to the conference (23–24 October 2019). The first day had the form of a smaller co-working session involving the people of WMSE and the Community Programs team at the WMF who regularly worked together on this project. The second day involved a larger group with additional representatives from the Wikidata team at WMDE and representatives from the management layer of Program, Product and Engineering at the WMF.

As a preparatory step for the offsite a scoping survey was created where the participants were asked, prior to attending the offsite, to sort an assortment of real and hypothetical tools as in or out of scope for the hub. These answers gave us a good understanding about which areas of the technical scope were in the most need of a consensus reaching discussion.

The main topics of the second day were:

• Creating a shared language and understanding of the scope of the hub initiative.
• Establishing a first rough draft of problem spaces for the technical direction.
• Creating a shared understanding of roles and responsibilities for 2019-2020.
• Identifying some early risks and opportunities.

The results from the offsite heavily influenced the technical direction and other discussions going forwards.

Outputs/Documents

• A brief report about what was discussed.

• Presentation about the Nordic Model (of leadership).
• Summary of responses to the Scoping questionnaire.

Identifying fundraising opportunities for the hub

Outcome

One core part of the preparatory work was to develop recommendations for how the thematic hub could ensure long term sustainability through different fundraising opportunities. Some, but not all the ideas could also be generalized and used by other Wikimedia affiliates aiming to develop their organizational capabilities sustainably.

The five first opportunities identified were all actively pursued as part of the project.

Outputs/Documents

• 10 recommendations for how to bring in funds for the hub were developed.

Product Plan for Content Partnerships, 2020-21

Outcome

The key outcome is that Product Development Deliverables for the first year of the possible hub were agreed between WMSE and WMF.

In early spring 2020 a Product Plan was drafted and shared with the WMF. A bit later in spring it was decided that, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the intended expansion of WMSE’s international work would be deferred until 2021. Instead, a second preparatory project was to follow.

As a consequence, the fully-fledged Product Development Plan that was in draft was deferred until it would become more clear whether a hub would be established. Instead, we created a simplified “Product Development Deliverables” document and added it as an appendix to the agreement between WMSE and WMF to initiate the preparatory work July 2020-June 2021.

The Product Development Deliverables (v1.0) set the top priority for a future hub to initially work to develop tools that would enable GLAMs and Wikimedians to batch upload structured data to Wikimedia Commons. Other, more ambitious development efforts would follow as well as implementing a structure for WMSE to maintain crucial tools and support the GLAMwiki developer community.

Outputs/documents

• Brief: Why Collections Management System vendor and aggregator partnerships? (working document, preparatory to the Product Plan).
• Product segments (working document, preparatory to the Product Plan).
• Product Plan (version 0.2, shared with the WMF-team but never finalized).
  • Product Plan (version 0.3, in draft, note that unlike version 0.2 above it also includes a suggested product development process).
• Product Development Deliverables, version 1.0.
  • Product Development Priorities, 2021-22, version 1.x (in draft, has been reviewed by WMF but has not been updated based on that review).
• Recruitment plan for developers and designers (first draft).

Knowledge exchange with WMDE

Outcome

Throughout the project we have been in contact with Wikimedia Deutschland to learn from their experience with software development and the organizational aspects of working together with the Wikimedia Foundation on this. The discussions covered both the preparatory work for the hub as well as specific support around Wikispeech.

During the autumn of 2019 we started planning for a site visit where several WMSE staff members would come to Berlin to work alongside WMDE for a period of time. In preparation of this WMDE shared several internal documents with us. These ranged from their model around software development (the Journey Model), their Best Practices around developing MediaWiki-related software. WMSE shared Wikispeech related documentation focusing on documentation, blockers and security concerns.

In January 2020 two WMSE staff members spent a week at the WMDE offices. In addition to more informal discussions interviews/meetings were held with:

• Technical Lead for Wikidata around Architecture decision for Wikispeech as well as code review going forwards.
• The interim Head of Product around Product management, team setup, metrics and decision-making.
• Engineering Managers around Recruitment procedures, Office tech setup and the Dos and don'ts when developing on Wikipedia.
• Product Managers around how to start and run a new Software Product.
• Technical Lead for Wikidata and Software developer in the Community Wishes team around the Deployment procedures and timelines for MediaWiki extensions and services as well as the available metrics one's deployment is done.

The plan was to have a second site visit towards late spring, but COVID-19 scuttled these plans. Instead, WMSE and WMDE have kept in contact digitally during the remainder of 2020, but the exchange has been primarily focused on more concrete issues around the implementation of Wikispeech and the surrounding interactions with the WMF.

Outputs/Documents

• Report from site visit (in Swedish, Wikispeech focused).
• Architecture decision record on audio storage one of the re-architecturing decisions resulting from the discussions on Wikispeech.

Rapid expansion of the WMSE team

Outcome

After the organizational changes needed to grow WMSE's team beyond 10 staff members had gone into effect WMSE successfully prepared for and then grew the organization during the project from 7 to 12 staff members (while also filling two vacated staff positions) – with work in place to further increase the team to 15 staff members in the last quarter of 2020. There was a significant need to develop internal training programs and educational material for staff members to effectively join the organization and understand the finer details of the Wikimedia movement. Not least the organizational culture had to be clearly communicated to the new staff members which was done with both individual meetings with management each week and group meetings twice a week.

Expanding the team with a total of 10 new staff members and onboarding them successfully in just over a year, without a dedicated HR team, took significant effort from the management team. However, the staff increase was needed because of the multiple commitments to different funders of projects we had postponed from 2018 or which got funded whilst work was ongoing in the Blueprinting project. Most of the newly hired staff have short term contracts ending when the different external grants are over (if WMSE does not continue to receive support for the international and technical work).

Due to the significant change in the organization needed to have a more global approach all staff members at WMSE have at least partly worked directly with the Blueprinting project. This preparatory work has been designed to allow them to take on different internationally oriented roles if the initiative continues in 2021 and onwards.

Outputs/Documents

The following staff members have been hired during the project (in order of starting date):

• Tore Danielsson (GLAM project manager).
• Josefine Hellroth-Larsson (project manager education and learning).
• Karl Wettin (software developer).
• Maria Burehäll (organizational assistant).
• David Haskiya (organizational strategist).
• Jenny Brandt (organizational assistant).
• A plan for an expansion to develop a Face2Face fundraising team was developed and four new part-time staff members signed their contracts at the end of this project.

Ensuring support from the members of the chapter

Outcome

The notion of taking a larger supporting role in the Wikimedia movement would mean refocusing of the organizational structure, of the organization's goals, of our communication about who we are and also refocus many of our existing projects and initiatives. As such we knew that WMSE’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) in 2020 would be a key moment to ensure support for the initiative.

To build momentum, significant effort went into initial discussions with WMSE’s staff and board about what such a change could and should mean as the planning progressed. After a shared understanding amongst these two key stakeholders had been reached the ideas were further refined and adjusted through Membership meetings and discussions with different stakeholders in our community.

We also worked on adding information about these efforts in our newsletters to members, through personal conversations and through social media posts.

Outputs/Documents

The AGM 2020 again unanimously accepted the key documents provided where the plans around the hub were described.

• The annual plan for 2020 and budget with the suggested adjustments to our projects and organization.
• The long term plan for 2021 outlining the intended work on becoming a thematic hub.

Also, the Annual report for 2019, where the initial work was described, received full support.

Guidelines for WMSE’s technical team

Outcome

WMSE already had some basic Developer Guidelines in place. These were primarily aimed at onboarding new and fairly inexperienced developers. In preparation for onboarding more developers we revised the existing guidelines with an eye to covering both the development work we do on MediaWiki and that which is done on other projects. In particular, we looked at ensuring that a Code of Conduct (for technical spaces) is in play even when development occurs on non-WMF places and that instructions with respect to licensing is flexible enough to work both for codebases owned by WMSE and for our contributions to existing codebases and projects.

As WMSE has been developing tools and services over the years we have now reached a point where some of those original tools may no longer be relevant to the community. Even though the projects spawning some tools have since ended they still require resources to maintain or risk either breaking or in a worse scenario becoming susceptible to security vulnerabilities. Since the hub would bring with it both more natively developed tools as well as the possibility of adopting tools developed by the community we felt it was important to investigate how we deal with the issue of maintenance and sunsetting. In addition to ensuring resourcing for future maintenance is planned for when launching a new tool we felt it was especially important to be transparent to the community about both how long we are dedicated to ensuring tools remain functional and what we consider to be included in this definition. The result was a draft for a guideline which we are now preparing for external review.

Outputs/Documents

• WMSE’s Developer Guidelines.
• Guideline for maintenance responsibilities for developed tools and services (in Swedish, draft version for external review).

Refocusing due to COVID-19

Outcome

Much of the planning for the project was centered around a very active communication effort in early 2020 to share the progress and discuss next steps. The project was also designed with the stated intention to form a dedicated team working on the hub in July 2020 with a significant financial investment and support from WMF.

However, due to the risks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic the events planned for 2020 were all cancelled. This had a negative impact on the plans and the budget had to be adjusted. This could have been handled through more digital meetings, but the pandemic also had a much larger impact.

Due to the perceived risk for WMF's annual fundraising the WMF leadership decided to take a very cautious approach and halt all increase in spending. This led to a massive shift in focus where a new interim project had to be envisioned and developed from scratch during March to May 2020.

Outputs/Documents

• An updated budget for the Center of Excellence – Blueprinting 2019 project and an extension to September 2020.
• A new agreement for the Capacity-building and best practices for Wikimedia content partnerships project for July 2020 to June 2021 (with work commencing in October 2020).

Preparing for international hires

Outcome

WMSE has always worked actively to ensure a diversified workplace. However, the main focus in this diversity work has not been on geographical diversity, e.g. with staff in other countries, as the main focus historically has been on activities within Sweden’s borders. With an increased international focus through this initiative the need to attract talent from other countries, that might also utilize teleworking, was highlighted.

Hiring internationally is not always straightforward as different rules and regulations apply. To that end WMSE looked into engaging professional legal and HR help and wrote a tender and requested quotations from a number of companies. Due to the delay in establishing a hub until 2021 at the earliest, and the lack of available funding until then, the money originally budgeted for consultants was re-budgeted to instead cover more staff time. The material developed to engage consultants can be reused in 2021.

We also took a number of steps to develop the possibility for most of the staff to do teleworking continuously, e.g. establishing new routines and tools around meetings, digital contracts through Scrive etc.

Outputs/Documents

• Request for quotation about HR support.

Providing inputs on public consultations

Outcome

WMSE responded to a number of government agency consultations as part of the project as well as other surveys relevant to the project. This was done to position the chapter amongst international stakeholders and to affect change in areas where our involvement might be increasing through the initiative.

The documents were well-received and we have continued to be invited to further consultations. The experience has also been valuable when providing responses on national consultations as part of other projects.

Outputs/Documents

In 2020, we answered the following consultations and surveys:

• European Union DCHE consultation on principles for 3D digitisation.
• European Union consultation on Digital access to Cultural Heritage to which we also contributed a position paper.
• An Europeana survey on crowdsourcing.

Applications to the Swedish Innovation Agency

Outcome

With the postponing of a decision on whether to establish a hub for institutional content partnerships, WMSE decided to investigate other sources of funding for GLAMWiki-related product development.

The Swedish Innovation Agency’s call for new CivicTech was identified as the most promising opportunity in the near-term. The purpose of the call was to fund the development of prototypes that can enhance trust between (Swedish) citizens and the public sector. In the text of the call crowdsourcing is emphasized as a good way to build such trust.

Two applications were developed with a focus on prototyping solutions around displaying historical maps and engaging minorities in improving metadata in GLAM collections. As with any external grant application the focus of the suggested projects had to be aligned with the call in question; as such the project design had to highlight the more innovative aspects of the planned work. However, the way we designed our application was that, if funded, the projects would still allow us to also work on the core technologies that had been identified and described in our technical plan. I.e. it would not be the shortest path to reach our goal of providing better core GLAMwiki infrastructure, but we would move in the right direction in the period when funding from WMF was lacking.

The two applications were shared with the wider GLAMwiki community for feedback. This was a way to highlight the work we are doing and to continuously try to engage the GLAMwiki community.

Outputs/Documents

• On August 26, 2020, we submitted two applications: Crowdsourcing along the Silk Roads and The WikiMap – old maps made anew, with and for all.
• We also co-wrote an application focusing on authority data.

Collaboration with Wikimedia Israel and Wikimedia Switzerland on GLAM-statistics solutions

Outcome

GLAMs and other institutional partners are unable to easily access to them critical usage statistics for the content they have published on Wikimedia platforms. That makes it difficult to demonstrate the  impact of GLAMwiki-partnerships to institutional stakeholders and decision-makers.

In 2019 Wikimedia Israel (WMIL) received a grant from a private donor for the specific purpose of developing a solution to provide statistics to institutions who have published content on the Wikimedia platforms. News of this was shared with WMSE which is why WMSE contacted WMIL to establish a collaboration with them. The contribution of WMSE being agreed to in the collaboration is for: requirements analysis, user testing and general feedback and input.

In the summer of 2020 Wikimedia Switzerland (WMCH) made a public release of their Cassandra GLAM-statistics dashboard. Apart from usage and view statistics the dashboard also provides “business intelligence” in the form of suggested Wikidata objects and Wikipedia articles a GLAMs’ media files could be suitable for. At the time of release it only included reports for the Swiss GLAMs that have partnered with WMCH.

Initially WMIL and WMSE imagined developing a prototype from scratch, functioning as a client to the Wikistats 2 and PageView APIs. However, after the release of Cassandra it was seen as more suitable to instead extend the functionality of this tool. It was concluded this approach would be more beneficial to the movement and to GLAMs since a more consolidated and shared solution to GLAM-statistics were to be available.

An understanding was reached between WMCH and WMIL, with WMSE in a supporting role. The gist of it is that WMIL will fork Cassandra and develop new functionalities in that fork. All such new functionalities will of course also be available to merge upstream into the original code repository of WMCH’s Cassandra.

From September 2020 a fork of Cassandra will be under development by WMIL, with support from WMSE. The first priorities will be to make it possible to translate the user interface and support Right-to-Left display. There are also new reports that we would like to add e.g. a report showing all outgoing links from Wikimedia projects pages to a particular GLAM’s websites. This is intended to provide insight into which web pages or collections items of a GLAM are (the most) used as references and/or external links in Wikipedia articles and Wikidata objects. This report is expected to be particularly useful to libraries and archives (who often make available authoritative sources suitable for articles and statements).

In the winter of 2020-21 the in-development fork of Cassandra will be evaluated by 4 Swedish GLAMs, with input and results fed back into the development.

Outputs/documents

• Requirements analysis (first draft).
• A test plan (second draft, changed to not require in-person tests).

White Paper

Outcome

In an attempt to summarize the findings and insights of the work in the project a White Paper has been developed. The scope of the White Paper was adjusted as the intention of WMSE becoming a Thematic hub was pushed forward.

The document will continue to be worked on as part of the succeeding project to capture further insights.

Outputs/Documents

• White Paper – Developing Thematic Hubs in the Wikimedia movement.

Financial report

Center of Excellence – Blueprinting 2019: 2019-07-01–2020-09-30

	Original Budget			Result
Line item	USD	SEK		SEK	USD
Work time	100,000	950,530.00		1,470,263.74	154,678.31
Legal Support*	25,000	237,632.50		0.00	0.00
HR support*	10,000	95,053.00		0.00	0.00
Travel and Events*	20,000	190,106.00		3,057.76	321.69
Total	155,000	1,473,321.50		1,473,321.50	155,000.00
* The budget was later revised on 2020-06-03 to allow Travel funds and some HR/Legal funds shifted to cover staff time (on same deliverables).
WMF Payments	Date	SEK
1st installment	2019-12-05	730,902.50
2nd installment	2020-05-27	742,419.00
Total		1,473,321.50
Exchange rate	9.5053
(based on payments)

Future work

Due to COVID-19 no decision was taken whether to establish a thematic hub or not. Instead, investigations into the possibilities of a thematic hub focused on institutional content partnerships will continue in the follow-up project Capacity-building and best practices for Wikimedia content partnerships. The project starts in July 2020 and will continue the work to prepare WMSE for a more active role internationally.