Annual plan (2013–2014)

This plan documents Wikimedia District of Columbia's program and organizational development plans for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2014. Wikimedia DC has begun a strategic planning process by adopting four strategic priorities and by streamlining our program structure to more closely reflect the three interconnected elements that we believe define the Wikimedia movement: content, technology, and community. The plan is intended as an initial step towards developing a five-year strategic plan which will define our broader goals within the Wikimedia movement.

Our programs
This fiscal year, Wikimedia DC will align its program structure to reflect the three interconnected factors that make the Wikimedia movement a success: content, technology, and community. The aim of Wikimedia DC is to make free content available to the world. The development and promotion of technology gives us tools to distribute free content. Most importantly, building a vibrant community makes all of this possible.

CONTENT

Washington, DC is home to major institutions of knowledge and is known for its highly educated residents. Washington's cultural institutions, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations are the site of collections, archives and artifacts of national and international significance. For the past three years, a variety of Washington-based organizations have expressed interest in improving Wikipedia's content, and we have had several successful collaborations with institutions of knowledge.

During the past fiscal year, we held five edit-a-thons with the Smithsonian Institution, resulting in 47 new articles, 105 existing articles improved, and 8 images uploaded. All of the images contributed have been from the Smithsonian's collections, and the articles have been on subject matters of interest to the Smithsonian.

George Washington University worked with Wikimedia DC to hold three edit-a-thons at their libraries and archives, covering subjects such as global affairs, labor history, the history of the university, and the Foggy Bottom neighborhood. As a result, 31 articles were created or improved, including one article in German. Access to university resources was instrumental in the improvement of these articles.

Wikimedia DC volunteers have assisted the Cato Institute in its efforts to document bills introduced in Congress on Wikipedia. According to Jim Harper, Cato's Director of Information Policy Studies, the articles written through this effort have been read more than 70,000 times, promoting public knowledge of the legislative process.

The events planned with these institutions have been fruitful in developing organizational relationships. Wikimedia DC will build on these relationships by devising longer-term program plans, including a schedule of planned events and metrics for content contributions and volunteer outreach. We will broaden the scope of our events to include non-editing events such as scan-a-thons, which allow institutions to share their collections with a broad, global audience.

Over the coming year, we will expand our outreach to other cultural institutions and universities. We look forward to continuing our collaboration and events with the National Archives with the help of Dominic McDevitt-Parks, NARA's new full-time Wikipedia specialist. We are also excited about the opportunity to support Andrew Lih in his efforts to integrate Wikipedia into his curriculum at American University. Through these collaborations, we will continue to make the open cultural content and information of Washington, DC, more readily available to the rest of the world.

TECHNOLOGY

As Wikimedia DC leverages the cultural resources of DC to improve free content, we notice that further efforts need to be made to enhance the technology that underpins the Wikimedia movement. We seek to build on the Wikimedia Foundation's substantial investments towards improving the MediaWiki software by identifying additional technological opportunities which can enhance our work and outreach efforts.

We will hold hack-a-thons to develop tools that will make Wikipedia easier to use and present structured data for the benefit of Wikimedia projects. We are especially interested in developing tools to allow cultural institutions to easily upload their collections to Wikimedia Commons en masse. We are also interested in creating tools and apps that will allow people to engage with Wikimedia content in new ways, including apps based on Wikidata and image discovery tools that make use of Wikimedia Commons' extensive collection of free media. We anticipate that these technology-centric events will raise awareness of the underlying technology that empowers Wikimedia projects, and will improve our engagement in DC's technology sector.

Technology can also help us find new ways measure the success of our outreach activities. We will explore the use of analytics, including the new Wiki Metrics tool, to measure the outcomes of our events, such as the number of bytes added to Wikipedia and the number of articles contributed, as well as the retention rates for workshop participants. We will work with our institutional partners to develop customized analytics tools that demonstrate the concrete ways that Wikimedia projects allow institutions to share their knowledge with the rest of the world.

COMMUNITY

Because Wikimedia is fundamentally a volunteer movement, success in promoting free access to the world's knowledge and building the technology to make this access possible depends on a strong community of volunteers and enthusiasts. Last year we started holding regular WikiSalons, informal events where people gather to discuss Wikipedia and work on improving articles. These WikiSalons have been successful in recruiting new participants to our movement and giving them access to the resources needed to succeed at contributing to Wikipedia. We look forward to holding additional WikiSalons, as well as other social events, in the coming year.

Starting this fiscal year, we will have new opportunities to host social events at two collaborative spaces starting up in DC: the Digital Commons at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library, and a community space planned at the downtown National Archives Building. These spaces have the equipment, Internet access, and curated information resources we need to train volunteers to contribute to the Wikimedia projects, and to develop research skills alongside technical skills such as digitizing documents.

Our offline outreach has created a sociable local community of Wikipedia editors and supporters. We are interested in enhancing our online outreach as well, in order to broaden our audience to include remote volunteers who cannot attend in-person events. We will integrate remote participants into our in-person events and build a blended outreach strategy in which the volunteers recruited through our online efforts can leverage their access to in-person events as a way to meet fellow Wikimedians in a positive, sociable setting.

We intend to continue using social media to facilitate in-person events and collaboration. Our website will serve a resource to teach prospective volunteers the ins-and-outs of contributing to Wikipedia by serving as a focal point for scheduling, events, and connecting with local collaborative efforts.

Planned projects and events
Wikimedia DC intends to carry out the following projects and events in Fiscal Year 2013–14. These plans are contingent on having adequate financial and human resources.

Fit to strategy
On September 7, 2013, Wikimedia DC's Board of Directors committed to four strategic priorities:


 * 1) Foster a welcoming and supportive social environment for local and remote Wikimedia volunteers.
 * 2) Empower academic, cultural, and government institutions to contribute content and expertise to Wikimedia projects.
 * 3) Promote women's participation in all aspects of the Wikimedia movement.
 * 4) Cultivate diversity of participation and content on Wikimedia projects.

Over the next year, we will develop a full strategic plan, building on further input from our community and feedback from our partners.

Our planned events will foster a welcoming and supporting social environment by matching newcomers with experts. Our friendly space policy has helped us conduct ourselves cordially and professionally. Our events will cultivate diversity of participation and content by raising awareness of under-covered topics on Wikipedia. We intend to fill the gaps that create systemic bias on Wikipedia by creating diverse new content and by expanding existing content. We look forward to further exploring how the region's source materials and public information can improve our encyclopedia's quality.

We will continue to promote leadership and participation among women. Our partnerships with cultural institutions and social meetups have resulted in strong participation by women. We are pleased with the gender balance at our events and among our event planners, and welcome people of diverse ages, occupations, and ethnic and national backgrounds among our participants.

Our rigorous implementation of quantitative analytics will enable us to measure our success and identify opportunities to improve. We want to demonstrate clearly to stakeholders, including our generous donors and program underwriters, how the work we carry out contributes to the fundamental mission of the Wikimedia Foundation: to provide the public with the world's knowledge, free of charge. We will upgrade the technical infrastructure to improve our organization's office functions. This will make it easier for us to understand the extent and scope of our community and give us a standardized list of contacts available to advise or assist the organization. Building social capital is an underlying requirement for all four of our strategic priorities.

As we plan events to carry out our mission in the present, we are planning our infrastructure for the future.