My personal 10c on this having been a chapter member for several years and a chapter committee member for some of those years is that there are the chapters who get annual funding and those who don’t. If you don’t get annual funding, then you have no staff member who can do the day-to-day administrative work (every organisation has to submit forms to their government, organise auditing, keep the web site updated, do the bookkeeping, etc) so this work has to be farmed out to the members, which means that sometimes you have nobody with the right skills (responsibilities of treasurers make it a particularly difficult role to fill) and that you use up all of people’s time and goodwill in doing the day-to-day stuff instead of doing the exciting projects you hoped you’d be doing as a chapter member. Contrary to what WMF think ,there is a lot of work involved in writing grant applications and, when you are doing it with lots of volunteers each with randoms skills and only a certain amount of spare time, generally some people let you down (family issues, busy at work, or maybe just don’t know how to write the section allocated to them) and it doesn’t get finished to meet the deadline, which is then a waste of the time of the people who did their share of the work. The net result is a somewhat demoralising downward spiral with fewer members, burned-out committee people, and fewer achievements. I’ve pretty much abandoned trying to work chapter-wide and just try to do what I can in my own local area.
WMF strongly pushes you to use volunteer time in a chapter, but overlooks practical realities. Engagement with GLAMs almost always involves weekday meetings; most volunteers are not available on weekdays due to their own employment. I have 7 upcoming GLAM sessions in the next 3 weeks (all for 1Lib1Ref) all on weekdays and despite my call for help to both chapter members and the Australian noticeboard, nobody is volunteering; I guess I am doing them all myself (assuming I don’t have conflicting commitments). Even committee meetings are very hard to schedule across 4 time zones with everyone with different working hours, different commitments to family events etc on the weekends, and technology problems with phones/computers often waste a lot of the meeting time (some people can’t get Hangouts to work for them, other people’s microphones cut out randomly, etc). Our chapter has never met face to face.
It’s really hard to get a chapter off the ground with a small population over a large geography without any staff. You get some stupid suggestions like “why do you need to be incorporated, ditch that and save all that time and admin cost” by people who clearly do not understand that without a legal entity to take out public liability insurance, the committee members or organisers of chapter events would bear the risk personally of anything going wrong, i.e. under our law, your house could be sold to pay for someone’s injuries.
I agree with Pine’s comments about impact. Given that we have no way of knowing which editors on en.WP are from our country, we have no way to measure impact of anything we do other than small group events where the individuals are willing to disclose their user IDs. Take the upcoming 1Lib1Ref sessions, I have no way of knowing the user IDs of the librarians I will be addressing or who the recipients of my electronically-distributed material are. I will not be able to tell if there is 1 or 1,000 citations added as a result of my efforts. 1Lib1Ref can presumably analyse edit summaries world-wide to see how successful it was overall but we can’t easily attribute it to specific countries. When you have a chapter that is closely aligned with a specific language of Wikipedia, you may have some chance of seeing impact by looking at overall behaviour on that Wikipedia. When you are a small nation that is one of many English speaking countries, you have no way of knowing. How do you define a success metric in these circumstances? And the lack of any indicator that your efforts are successful makes it difficult for people to sustain enthusiasm to make these efforts (I could be just wasting my time). Unless WMF is willing to create tools that map IP addresses to country/city so we can do some kind of query about readership or contribution from our area, how can we measure impact, understand trends etc. But, hey, we don’t even get a chance to discuss these issues with anyone; I’m still waiting for several months for anyone from WMF to respond to my question of who has responsibility for training.
My overall point here is that chapters are very different. I suspect if you consider chapters across the range of issues I’ve outlined, you will find very few are directly comparable in terms of how they operate and there is virtually no way to measure their impact.
Kerry
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Pine W
Sent: Tuesday, 10 January 2017 6:46 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: Jaime Anstee <janstee@wikimedia.org>; Katy Love <klove@wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Chapters
Hi Aisha,
I suggest that you contact Jaime Anstee and/or Katy Love (cc'd here) about this subject, because they are WMF staff who do a lot of work with grantmaking and performance evaluation for chapters. They might know of some analyses that could help you.
Discussions about what kinds of resources, and what quantities of resources, to allocate to the chapters vs. smaller affiliates, other kinds of grants, and WMF-run work that focuses on content and community development, have been happening for years, and are likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
Different chapters function differently, partly because of varied cultural and legal contexts, so there is not a monolithic model of how a chapter should run. The definition of "successful" varies from affiliate to affiliate.
There has been a discussion for years about how to define and quantify affiliate "impact"; my personal preference is to abolish are use of that word. (:
Pine
On Sun, Jan 8, 2017 at 5:41 PM, Aisha Brady <aishabrady@gmail.com> wrote: