Plano de capacitação 2018

Improving chapter capacity

Wikimedia Portugal is a small/medium size chapter, in operation since 2009. We have currently around 40 associates, of which about a fourth are actively involved in all aspects of the organization, from organizing and taking part of programmatic activities, membership management and recruitment, and all other activities. These key members are spread out over the Portuguese territory (Porto, Lisbon, Funchal), which enables us to develop iniciatives in several places. In order to ensure a sustainable association and foment growth, we need to ensure that the knowledge of the current members is transferable, we need to attract and onboard new members to reduce the bus factor, and we need training to increase competences in areas that currently lack them.

Evaluation of programs, fundraising, and strategic planning are some of the areas where we need to increase our competence. We have been developing partnerships with local associations and groups, apart from the Wikimedia movement, and that’s allowing us not only reaching to new audiences, but also benefit from their experience and organization skills.

Programs and activities

With regards to programs and activities, we are focused on having a reasonable amount of partnerships running through a year (around 10), as we feel that we should be able to dedicate a reasonable amount of our limited human resources to such activities, without overwhelming and burdening them. Our current project model is one of the tools we use to evaluate success of our programs and is used throughout the lifetime of each project. The success of edit-a-thons and educational programs is also measured partially through the Outreach Dashboard. We aim at better documenting our impact already in our next annual report, by incorporating metrics from these tools.

The programs and activities we have been developing, and that we exemplify below, are designed in a way that can be developed at a slow pace, with minimum involvement from our members, but also in a way so that at some point they can gain enough traction to be self-sustainable.

GLAMs

As a showcase, the current GLAM project with the National Library of Portugal (BNP) is a reasonably large undertaking, and involves training of museum staff, writing code to map their database into Wikidata properties, and massive upload of pictures and metadata to Wikimedia projects. As this partnership evolves, we aim at starting to establish a set of standards and practices, as well as having tools developed to assist in future such partnerships (which may indeed be useful for other Wikimedia affiliates as well). It currently involves three of our members to liaison between staff at BNP and the Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons community, and develop the scripts to translate their database metadata into a WikiData-ready format. A fourth member is in charge of communication and personal contact with the BNP staff.

Another partnership we are fomenting and dedicating to is the one with Associação Presença Feminina (APF), an NGO dedicated to promote the rights and dignification of women, that maintains partnerships with a number of associations in Guinea-Bissau (namely in Bissau, Bolama and Bissorã). Wikimedia Portugal is working together with APF to improve content about Guinea-Bissau on Wikimedia projects and develop a volunteer community there. We are also working with APF on a number of initiatives aimed at engaging women and minorities (mainly African immigrants) in Madeira Island in the Wikimedia projects, as well as developing content related to Gender Gap and the culture and homeland of the people from those minorities. This involves two of our members that provide on-location assistance during workshops and edit-a-thons, and several others help in writing articles about the country.

Education

In our Education Program, we are developing a certified continuous training program for basic, intermediate and high school teachers in the use of Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. This covers, for example, proper attribution of photos and the article information from Wikipedia when used in the context of lectures. It is currently under development in Madeira and, if successful, could be expanded to other regions of Portugal.

We are also maturing our collaboration with Universidade Aberta and starting a new partnership with Instituto Superior de Administração e Línguas da Madeira.

Competitions

We also aim at resuming the organization of the annual photo contests Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth, with a minimum of assembling a juri and securing awards for national prizes. This will probably also include at least one Wiki Takes-style photo-walk and possibly some data gathering activity for wikidata. The organization of WLM in 2011 is cited as one of the main causes of burnout in our active members, so we are taking steps to ensure this will not happen again, by setting more realistic goals. The contest has also significantly evolved from previous editions and now requires much less involvement from active members, so we are certain we will not face the same issues.

We are also planning some kind of Wiki Loves activity mainly focused in rural/suburban civil parishes and hamlets, mainly aiming in a first moment at engaging those communities in the Wikimedia projects. As much of the work of compiling lists of locations that can be photographed for the competition was done in previous editions, these competitions can be organized by a couple of members with less time commitment.

New editor engagement

All our activities are mainly focused in attracting and consolidating editor engagement in the Wikimedia projects, and Wikimedia Portugal activities. Besides the ones already mentioned, we plan to develop a series of activities to fight gender gap and minorities discrimination in the projects, in the Art and Feminism initiative and a number of others along the year, in cooperation with our partners Centro de Literaturas e Culturas Lusófonas e Europeias and Associação Presença Feminina.

We’ve been working with other groups and associations from FOSS, open culture, cultural world and academia, and in our shared activities we will showcase and have the opportunity to engage with those demonstrating interest.

International cooperation

We have been talking with our congeners in Spain, Wikimedia España, to learn from their experience and are participating in a few of their coming activities not only to contribute to those activities but also to study their organization and increment our capacity by learning from a more developed organization. We aim to reestablish a closer collaboration with our spanish neighbours, planning to find new opportunities to share activities with them.

Some of our activities have mutual objectives with those of AfroCROWD, including projects directed to the African diaspora, and immigrant communities from Africa in Portugal, so we are also in contact with them when organizing events such as Africa Day, and we are also collaborating with them to motivate and help organize these communities in relation to Wikimedia projects.

We will of course continue to engage with communities in Portuguese speaking countries, in particular with the well developed community in Brazil, but also in Angola, Guiné-Bissau and Mozambique and elsewhere where there is potential for community growth. The same within Iberocoop and other Wikimedia regional partners, particularly within the framework of the Wikimedia Strategy 2030 discussions.

Membership

Another one of our focus areas is increasing membership. We currently do not charge annual fees as to remove barriers for participation, which has the downside that members may not value membership, and it is difficult to know how many of them have an actual current interest in participating in activities, in particular of people that joined years ago. We have started a campaign to attract more members, recruiting not only from the Portuguese Wikipedia, but also in other language versions that may have a reasonable amount of volunteers from Portugal, living in Portugal or with an interest in Portugal.

We have started a page asking for support to the chapter, and this resulted in some new memberships already. We will resume this campaign shortly, now focusing on editors from the Portuguese language projects, which we expect will attract the bulk of the current editors from Portugal onto the chapter.

We are aiming a mid term objective of having around 20-30 currently active editors also being active members of the chapter.

We are also investing on communication through our social media accounts, GLAM newsletter and the Wikimedia mailing list to make people aware of the activities we have been implementing, and show that the chapter is active and attractive for new members.

Funding

Wikimedia Portugal has been running with very little funding since its startup grant of 6,000 USD. Membership fees were discontinued in 2014, and we are getting about 100€/year in donations as can be seen in our last financial statements. This has meant that we have had enough money to maintain the sites, send postal notices of General Assemblies and other small things, but also that we do not have the ability to plan things out with the assurance that we will have the funds to carry out the activities.

We have some experience applying for Individual Rapid Grants from the WMF, and we intend to submit a Project Grant in the first semester of 2019. We are also looking into possibilities for non-WMF funding from agencies in Portugal or elsewhere, as well as sponsorships for occasional events.

We are aware that with funding also comes some financial management and reporting requirements, so we are also taking care to ensure that we have the capacity to handle these in the near future, before expanding too much.

We have been contributing to Wikimedia Fundraising efforts throughout the years, and as we said above, we are getting some 100€/year in direct donations through our site without doing any campaigning. We will try to improve this in the coming year, by improving the visibility of how people can donate, and by promoting a short campaign on social media to get some donations for our daily activities.

Compliance with obligations and best practices

A great deal of our work since the board elections of April 2018 has been on catching up with legal obligations, and the chapter agreement. This included updating information with the financial authorities, submitting annual tax reports and updating the holders of the bank account. We have documented these steps internally so that next Board transitions can run more smoothly.

As we have mentioned before, we plan on updating our bylaws in the near future to avoid situations where the legality of General Assemblies may be put into question. And ensure that proper communication with all associates is timely and inclusive in a way that all members can contribute to the success of the chapter equally. At the same time we want to make sure that the board and the other governing bodies are able to perform their duties in a timely manner, and with transparency and responsibility.

We are evaluating our processes for reporting and will probably change the formatting and timing of the annual report. We will make sure that yearly activity and financial reports are approved by the General Assembly and published in due time conforming with our legal obligations and the WMF organizational best practices, probably for the first time in years. And also document activities as they are planned so that both members and the wider community can have a better overview of what the chapter is doing.

Assessing our current capacity

We follow below the Community Capacity Map as laid out in Meta, to evaluate our strengths and weaknesses in terms of capacity and robustness, with capacity defined roughly as how well we can currently perform these tasks, and robustness on how many people can currently perform these tasks.

• Communications and media relations
  • Social Media
    • Low/Medium capacity (no communication plan/rarely tracked)
    • Medium robustness
      • Several people with access/post information regularly
  • Press and broadcast media
    • Low capacity
    • No robustness
      • We currently do not have anyone dedicated to performing this task, but we respond to requests from the media, when they come in.
• Community Health
  • Conflict Resolution
    • No conflicts/No mechanisms (except expulsion)
  • Abuse and Harassment Control
    • Moderation in mailing list
  • Tools
    • None/Not relevant at the moment
  • Regular newbie-friendly in-person events
    • We are restarting regular meetups in several cities to engage new editors and promote healthy interpersonal relationships
    • capacity/robustness: none (at the moment / working to improve this)
  • Help and tutorial resources
    • We are in the process of documenting all the behind the scenes governance procedures, so that if the current active members become unavailable other members can jump in.
    • Capacity: low/medium
  • Recognition
    • Low
    • We usually provide branded freebies to organizers/outside people that help organize events in acknowledgement of their contribution
• Community Governance
  • Policy enforcement
    • As an incorporated chapter, we are governed by the Civil Code in particular the articles referring to Associations, our by-laws and internal regulations. There are a number of requirements for documentation of General Assemblies, Board meetings and finances that we need to follow.
  • Governance Roles
    • Our by-laws define the Governance Roles such as Board of Directors, General Assembly Table and Fiscal Council, but it needs better definition of specific roles and tasks. The General Assembly can remove people from these roles.
  • Living policy
    • The by-laws can only be changed during a General Assembly by a qualified majority of the members present. Internal regulations can be changed by a simple majority during a General Assembly. We have never changed our by-laws since the association began, but we have been recently discussing the need to update them in the near future.
• Partnerships
  • Identifying & negotiating with prospective partners
    • Capacity: Medium
    • We have created several partnerships but do not have set standards and practices.
  • Executing and evaluating partnerships
    • Capacity: low/medium
    • We are currently discussing how best to document progress of our partnerships and evaluate them.
• Technical skills
  • Active Wikidata expertise
    • Capacity: Medium
    • We have several individuals with expertise in Wikidata, and we are leveraging them in one of our partnerships intensively.
  • Keeping up with tech news
    • Medium/high capacity
    • Tech News is available on Wikipedia in Portuguese, and is regularly followed by several members.
  • Templates
    • Medium/high capacity
  • Bots
    • Medium/high capacity
  • Lua scripting
  • Gadgets, user scripts, AbuseFilter
    • Medium/high capacity
  • CentralNotice
    • Low capacity
  • Handling image donations
    • Medium capacity
    • In a recent partnership, we have used Pattypan to map metadata, plan batch upload, test batches, etc.
  • Handling data donations
    • Medium capacity
• Event production
  • Logistics and organization
    • Medium capacity
    • Over the years we have organized several events, but we need better planning and documentation
    • Robustness is medium, with several of our current members having assisted in planning events
  • Event program (content) design
    • Low capacity
    • No documented processes, no program manager or committee designated
• Fundraising
  • Infrastructure
    • None/low capacity
    • Difficult to reconcile finances with actual donor information
  • Campaigns
    • None
  • Donor relations and fundraising communications
    • None
• Evaluation
  • Project evaluation
    • None/low
    • We see value in evaluation but haven’t done it yet.
  • Staff evaluation
    • None: We don’t employ staff.
• Human resources
  • Staff policies
    • None: We do not employ staff
• Organizational governance
  • Secretariat
    • Low
    • Over the past years, we have missed several deadlines and did not meet some legal obligations; for the past six months we have been trying and succeeding in meeting the legal obligations and expect to keep improving on this respect during the current mandate of the board.
    • In particular, deadlines and minutes have been a particular focus, and we will continue to improve on timely communication
  • Reporting
    • Low
    • Our reports are mostly a timetable of past activities with little information or reflection on the past period. We intend to improve that for the next report.
  • Financial controls
    • None/low
    • Access to money is restricted to three people defined during a General Assembly
    • Movements need to be approved by two of the people with access
    • There is an overseer body responsible for auditing the finances, though not independent.