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WM NYC Board of Directors Meeting Notes: January 8, 2016

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See also: WMF Grant call meeting notes

Details

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  • Type of meeting: Google Hangout
  • Date: Tuesday, January 8, 2016
  • Time: 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST

Attendees

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WMUS-NYC board members

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alpha order

SimpleCom members

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alpha order

WMF Staff

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Key action items

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  • Winifred to send examples of good annual plans.  Done
  • Wikimedia New York City team to make an annual plan.  In progress
  • Schedule regular (twice a month check ins) moving forward  In progress

Agenda

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Purpose: Check in with WMUS-NYC / WMF / Grants committees

Questions from WMF We want to better understand:

  1. Your overall vision for WMUS-NYC's work this year.
  2. What other activities you are planning for this year, and how they relate to this grant.
  3. What other grants you plan to request from the WMF this year, and what you plan to raise from other sources.

Documents

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Answers

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Wikimedia New York City
Chapter Overview
As of 20 Jan 2016

Objectives

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1. Review of program plans / recent activity

  • Collected Chapter Activity in one place ON WIKI:

Wikimedia NYC with the following sub-tabs:

  • Main Page (current event)
  • Resources
  • Projects & Grants
  • Partners
  • Press
  • Event Archive ←--- Key
  • About
    • Please note much of this is in progress / in development

2. Recent activity: Event archive

  • Help WMF and SimpleCom gain a better understanding of WMUS-NYC’s plans for next year, so that we have context for assessing incoming grant requests.
    • Best explanation - repeat of last year, but with more volunteer support and documentation
  • Ensure that we have found the best solution for WMUS-NYC to request funding.
  • Establish shared expectations about support from WMF, and what next steps need to be taken by WMUS-NYC and WMF.

Further responses

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1. Your overall vision for WMUS-NYC's work this year. In 2016 Wikimedia New York City would like to do the same sorts of activities as in 2015 and with the same frequency, but with more safety and consistency. The basics that we want to promise are a dependable venue, more accessibility, and comfort for people who attend. A secondary goal is more detailed tracking of event outcomes and development of individual volunteer norms to report their own outcomes.

2. What other activities you are planning for this year, and how they relate to this grant. See the other upcoming grants to the WMF below. The "2016 meetup" grant is a stable base for other projects. Having a predictable safe space to meet enables anyone else to do reporting and get support for any other projects, so in that sense, anything else happening with the WM NYC community has a relationship to this grant.

3. What other grants you plan to request from the WMF this year, and what you plan to raise from other sources. There are some other grants drafted at <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Wikimedia_New_York_City/2016_plan#Plan> WM NYC has no plans to engage in fundraising or seek grants otherwise. Instead of money, WM NYC seeks volunteer labor donations and in-kind donations of event hosting, media files, and institutional support for community members.

And another set of comments

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1. OVERALL VISION FOR 2016

In 2016, WM NYC's activities expanded threefold, adding great stress to the existing volunteers, reducing the ability for outreach to engender retention and engagement, and making it necessary to actually turn down education and outreach opportunities because of the intensity and volume of these WM NYC events. With the support of the grants, the vision is that WM NYC would help the local chapter to better execute and enable the volunteer work involved in servicing the same number of events -- as well as hopefully increasing the ability to cultivate and respond to other innovative institutional partnerships.

2. OTHER ACTIVITIES

  • Automating event execution, even if it's building blank template pages and continuing to organize the Meetup space to be a great rich resource for events and other outreach work done by WM NYC
  • Capturing metrics and creating a reportage structure that could be used as a model for other local chapters
  • More representation in partnerships in other Wikimedia Foundation partnership events and projects:
    • Wikidata
    • WikiCons
    • Wikimania
    • WikiEdu. WM NYC has supported quite a few WikiEdu courses but has had flat growth; grant funding would enable planning and infrastructure building to provide growth and engagement in supporting WikiEdu courses
    • Wikipedia Editing for Intermediate to Advanced Users, who are not being reached, and who would be able to better utilize many of the GLAM resources & holdings of event partners

3. OTHER GRANTS & SOURCES

  • Hosting: Regular hosting as in kind sponsorship (site location donation) by Babycastles, MoMA, Guggenheim
  • Tech Partnerships: BetaNYC, Free Culture Alliance, Open Data, NYC Tech Meetup, etc. activities in New York City that are currently siloed or not integrated within current event efforts
    • Many tech companies based in NYC (i.e., Google, Microsoft, etc.) as well as media companies (PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, HBO, AMC Networks, etc.) would be possible sponsors
  • Library Schools: Three library schools and active local and national library chapters in New York City full of a key audience are being under-utilized / under-served. Entities like OCLC and IMLA are possible sources of grant funding
  • Wikipedian in Residences / GLAM & WikiProject initiatives

WM NYC would also like to incorporate a committee that would do grant funding / grant writing as part of its activities, but without metrics and support (i.e., the current situation) this is not possible. The grant infrastructure would make this possible.

Notes from the call

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  • Wikimedia New York City provided a quick PowerPoint in PDF form for the Conference Call Attendees to have a brief overview of the Chapter and its activities. It was sent via email. Please send a note in this chat if you did not receive it
  • Overview of activities, unconferences, edit-a-thons, work with underrepresented groups, topic-specific edit-a-thons, events with partners
  • Events are growing specifically, reaching limit as purely volunteer organization, but we have more needs
  • Talking more about the purpose of the call, why the SimpleCom members are here: supporting organizations through any grants process and preparing for future grant applications.
  • Sydney gives a little background about the Annual Plan Grants (“APG”) process, how we might work together
  • We have a lot of different people involved now, there’s more of a need for reporting and metrics work especially around certain projects (e.g., Art + Feminism, AfroCROWD, Women in Red, Black Lunch Table)
  • Discussion around collecting metrics - how much time do we spend? P&E can give a better picture, but this is normally built into project time budgeted for each project and is normally done by volunteers.
  • We are not requesting full time staff, we are doing a lot, part time staff would help us in this particularly challenging area
  • We have made a lot of impressive progress reporting on events in the past 6 months
  • Reporting and collecting metrics is an area where we have a really heavy lift, this requires a level of expertise with statistics, and understanding how wikimetrics is working, needs more training and specialization
  • From Art + Feminism we learned that it is important to match the right tasks with the right people. For example, some people may be great at organizing events but not good at writing reports. We do a lot of events, others may do just a few but report on them.
  • After joining in 2013, we began to create templates, metrics, tools. We need someone to get the information that we need to maintain and grow programs.
  • WMF hasn’t done their homework, it seems like we are getting a lecture on things we already know / are requesting / are trying to do.
  • We have been working with other department at WMF to move our work forward.
  • Re compliance, we are here to move forward and make this happen. It’s not about paying for past mistakes, but WMF has responsibilities as a grantmaker.
  • Work has the potential to benefit the whole movement when it’s better documented.
  • Meetups grant is more urgent since the events are coming up. Staff and reporting will need more discussion. WikiConference USA. AfroCROWD may need funding.
  • You don’t need to submit a report before you submit a new grant request, but we may need information.
  • We can process the grants through PEG or Simple APG, whatever creates the least extra work for WMUS-NYC. Transition to Simple APG in 2017.
  • How to get the information the committee needs about your annual plan to assess your grants.
  • It’s hard to get a handle on the scale of the grant request because projects are disbursed. Some confusion around how funds for different projects are disbursed (e.g. fiscal sponsorship for art and feminism from WMUS-DC but project is supported by WMUS-NYC on the ground).
  • Michael Mandiberg: Wikimedia DC is the fiscal sponsor of Art + Feminism; that grant does not “go through” WMNYC. That said WMNYC members are supporting Art + Feminism, as well as AfroCROWD, Black Lunch Table, Women in Red, etc. WMNYC helps with event page hosting, administration, event follow up, proctoring at events to assist new editors
  • Overlap is in the reporting request because it is a NYC area events -- Three different projects: A+F, AfroCROWD, WMNYC (WikiWed, Editathons with various institutional and GLAM partners)
  • Wikiconference grant: More specific in terms of actual disbursement of funds
  • Discussion around timing of events, would be helpful to have an overall picture. Will be similar to last year.
  • We have MORE requests for partnership events than we can service at this point
  • Regular events
    • AfroCROWD (1-3 each month)
    • WikiWednesday (monthly)
    • MoMA (regularly)
    • Institutional partner events
  • AfroCROWD - Alice Baker in charge; Sherry is Program Manager reporting to Alice; disbursements through WMNYC; events supported / proctored by WMNYC
  • Suggestion from WMF: come up with a brief annual plan and budget to help the committee better understand
  • Request from WMUS-NYC: send us an example to model
  • Transitioning programs, sharing resources moving forward, consolidation. We work as a collective, that is unique, but it helps us function effectively. Will need to document how the infrastructure of the chapter supports various projects (even when they aren’t technically housed inside of the chapter). Example would be the metrics person used by multiple project leaders (e.g. Art + Feminism, Afrocrowd).
  • Twice monthly check ins going forward.
  • Creating models and templates to share with other chapters.
  • Support to Wikimedians around the US is also very significant, wand we need to work on documenting that.
  • Document WMNYC support of other chapters (i.e., Black Lunch Table in New Orleans, University of Nebraska at Omaha editathon, Aphra Behn Society in New Jersey) -- most of these events are all listed on our Event Archive page

Goals

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  • Create an annual plan for WM NYC with the assistance of WMF
    • Document with description of each project, list of annual budget
    • WMF will provide a sample for use
  • Create strong compliance environment in partnership with WMF
  • Create templates and metrics and functional systems that we can share with fellow chapters
  • Breakdown of which grants funded to organization vs. individuals

Issues

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  • Reporting
  • Gap in reporting need to repair track record

Thoughts

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  • Move to simple APG form (vs. submitting a series of project grants) for this year
  • Getting committee overall information they need about annual plan to make an assessment

Definitions

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  • Annual Plan Grant (“APG”) vs. Project and Event Grants (“PEG”)

Grants

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For reference:


On Saturday 9 January I read this and confirm that this documents what was discussed. - Lane Rasberry

Follow up Email from Winifred to participants in the call

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Dear Wikimedia New York City colleagues:

Thank you for joining the call last Friday.

I did some work today to improve this page about planning and prioritization for Wikimedia organizations by improving the recommendations about annual planning and linking to some specific examples: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Organizational_effectiveness/Learning_center/Planning_and_prioritization. For Wikimedia New York City right now, I'd recommend a simple plan focusing on 1) Your SMART program objectives for the coming year. 2) The activities you will do, and the resources you will need.

This will be very similar to information requested in the Simple APG application form, so I've created a draft version of that form for you in case you want to use it to help structure your plan: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Simple/Applications/Wikimedia_New_York_City/2016. You would then have the option to move forward with that as an annual plan grant application, but you are also welcome to continue with your separate grants through PEG if you prefer that.

In terms of scheduling, it may be helpful to set a regular date and time for our calls. How would Thursdays at 18.00 Eastern work for your group? If that time generally works, I can set up some recurring meeting invites that we can confirm each week before our check ins.

Erika, thank you for your candid remarks and the work you have been doing to improve your chapter's good practices over the past several years. It takes time to build good communication and trust, and I'll work on improving my tone so that it doesn't seem like I'm lecturing you without having a good enough understanding of your organization. I hear your concern about our conversation not having enough emphasis on the details of your program work, and I hope that's something we will improve on future calls, once we work out the planning and funding side of things. I'm very much looking forward to working more closely with you, Richard, Lane, Michael, Alice, and your other board members and key volunteers.

I want to emphasize again that my concerns around past compliance are not a matter of punishing the organization for what happened in the past. Rather, in light of a negative compliance history, it's more difficult for WMF to give your organization the significant amount of funding you're requesting, and I'm trying to find solutions to that. Lane, I apologize if our past communication about this was confusing. I hope our conversation on Friday helped to clarify things, and I'm hopeful that regular check ins will help us stay on the same page as we move forward together.

One important point that was emphasized on this call is the potential for broader support Wikimedia New York City can provide a number of projects in the surrounding area that may have various relationships with the chapter. This changes the way that I'm thinking about your staff request and operational funding, and I want to find a way to communicate that to the committee and to bring that out in your grant applications. Please add any other important points to our shared document here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1boBvKi9WMVY0JZ5s-bdJ2YrfuBlVU7vsvOUvc1Vmuhk/edit.

Thanks for your work and your engagement in this conversation. Thanks also to the committee members who've shown an interest in Wikimedia New York City's next steps. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns that I can address.

Cheers,

Winifred

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