Wikidata:Eighth Birthday/Funding

Documentation of a birthday cake

This page aims to help you finding funds to organize an event for Wikidata's eighth birthday. If some information is missing, feel free to ask on the talk page or in the Telegram group.

Disclaimer and general advice

• Don't start too late! Most funding processes have deadlines, task to perform, and various other delays. For big events, we advise to start planning in January 2020, and for smaller events, around July-August 2020.
• Don't stay alone: find other people from your area or your user group to work with you on organizing the event.
• To maximize your chances to get funded, spend some time and energy on planning and describing the goal of your project. Ask questions like: what is our goal with this event? What is the target audience we want to reach? What would be the outcomes of the event? How would it benefit to Wikidata/Wikimedia? How can we measure the success of this event? Make sure that the answers to these questions are well-described and visible in your grant application.
• Important: Wikimedia Deutschland cannot provide funding for events happening outside of Germany. However, they can support events with Wikidata swag for volunteers. See the section below.

Overview of the different types of funding

• If your event is taking place in Germany, please check this page to get familiar with WMDE's project support process.
• If you're a member of a chapter or a user group, if you're living in a country that has one: please reach out to them for funding. You could for example include the organization of a Wikidata event in their Annual Grant. Maybe they also have a volunteer grant process. Don't wait last minute, as the budgets of these groups are usually decided on a yearly basis!
• If your chapter or user group is not funded through an Annual Plan Grant, and you plan to request between $500 and $2000, you can consider applying for a Rapid Grant from WMF. Please keep in mind that proposals will be ineligible if user groups have only three (3) or more ongoing grants between the Rapid and Project Grant programs, or if any current grants have overdue reports. The application would take place between July and September 2020. Please see the dedicated section below for more details.
• If you're planning to organize a middle-size or big event and request more than $2000 you can apply for an event grant from WMF. However, the application round for events happening from August 2020 to January 2021 closed on February 2nd: it's not possible to apply for an event grant for this period of time anymore.

What you should know about Rapid Grant

Birthday celebration in Rieti in 2018

Rapid grant is a grant program run by the Wikimedia Foundation. You can find details about the program, the application process and the rules on this page. You should especially read about the eligibility criteria and funding guidelines. Here's a summary of what you should know:

• Budget: from 500 to 2000 US dollars
• Timeline: for a Wikidata-related event taking place in October or November, we ask you to apply between July 1st and 15th, or even earlier.

What can be funded by a Rapid Grant?

For more details, see funding guidelines for events.

The following things are eligible for a Rapid Grant:

• Edit-a-thons
• Contests
• Workshops, trainings
• Online events (challenge, datathon)

The following things cannot be funded by a Rapid Grant:

• Event that is only a meetup or a birthday celebration
• Requests from groups and organizations that already have a current Annual Plan Grant or Simple Annual Plan Grant

If your event is eligible for a Rapid Grant, you will have to request between 500 and 2000 US dollars. Here are some of the things that can be part of your request:

• Venue costs
• Renting equipment (eg laptops, camera, equipment to live-stream the event, etc.)
• Local travel for participants to join the event
• Catering (inc. birthday cake)
• Merchandise (swag) to recognize exceptional volunteer contributions (i.e: for help organizing an event, as a contest prize, for the best contributions during an editathon, etc.)
• Stickers and pins
• Printing communication material for targetted audiences

Here are some things that cannot be covered by the grant:

• Long-distance travel for participants
• Merchandise giveaways for all participants in an event or for general outreach, including t-shirts
• Compensation for people’s time, salary for the organizers, paid editing, honoraria for speakers
• Buying equipment
• Excessively high expenses for prizes or contingency funds

What to prepare before applying for a Rapid Grant

• Make sure that your group complies with the eligibility criteria
• Both individuals and organizations are welcome to apply. If you are applying as an organization, institution or university with a person or department appointed to manage grants, please review the appropriate disbursement process with them before you apply to ensure your allocated funds will be available to you for your event.
• Write down the goals of your event: What is the target audience you want to reach? What would be the outcomes of the event? How would it benefit to Wikidata/Wikimedia? How can you measure the success of this event?
• Prepare a short description of your event: what, where, when, with who, schedule
• Prepare the budget of the event: give details about the estimate costs and which ones will be covered by the grant
• Make sure that you have enough volunteers to run the event
• If you plan some trainings, workshops, or any task related to editing, please indicate the usernames of people who will lead these events: they are expected to have experience with Wikidata
• Make sure that your event will have a Friendly Space Policy
• If you're part of a chapter or user group, inform them about your project and the fact that you're planning to apply for a grant

Request swag from Wikimedia Deutschland

Wikidata stickers in various scripts

Important: Wikimedia Deutschland cannot provide funding for events happening outside of Germany. However, they can support events by providing a reasonable amount of Wikidata/Wikibase merchandise to groups organizing an event for the birthday. The process will take place from March to August 2020. After August 31st, because of the time needed to order, prepare, send and receive the swag, no request can be accepted.

Process

an online form will be available, where you will be able to indicate your needs. Here's an overview of the things that will be asked:

• Basic information about the organizers (who, where, how you are involved in Wikidata)
• Description of the event: at the time where you request swag, a description of the event should already be published somewhere (for example on this page, you can also link to a Rapid Grant request)
• Deadline to receive the swag
• Estimated number of participants
• Estimated number of people in the organization team
• What kind of items you'd like to received (picked out of a defined list)
  • For items having different sizes: exact amount of which sizes
• How you would like to receive the items (pick them up at a Wikimedia event, receive them by post, etc.)
• Contact information: email, postal address (if you chose to receive a package), phone number of the recipient

Receive the swag

Because sending packages from Germany to various countries is complex (customs, fees, various issues with delivery...), we are going to try to dispatch the swag as much as possible during physical events when someone from your chapter or your user group may attend. One of them is the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin on April 3-5. So, once again, don't wait too much to start planning your event! Gather information, talk to the person who will represent your affiliate at the Summit.

What kind of swag?

Because we have a limited budget and because we care about the impact of our actions on the environment, we want to make sure that the amount and type of swag that organizers receive is adapted to their event. We want to avoid flooding participants with plenty of expensive items, and recommend to keep these items for special people (participants to a specific action like an editathon, winners of a contest, main organizers of the event, etc.)

Typically, here's what we suggest:

• For all participants (any size of event): stickers
• For all participants (less than 20 people): one of these items: pen, notebook, fabric bag, patch
• For a specific group of participants (editathon, winners of a contest, speakers... less than 20 people): maximum 2 of these items: pen, notebook, fabric bag, patch, socks
• For the core organizing team: T-shirts, or one of the items listed above

The following items are not available: hoodies, items costing more than 10€

If you're willing to receive a specific type of item that is not in the list, this request can be evaluated on a case by case basis. Please write to lea.lacroixwikimedia.de before August 31st.

Contact

• If you have questions about swag, communication, or how Wikimedia Deutschland can help: please contact lea.lacroixwikimedia.de
• If you have questions regarding Rapid Grants, feel free to write on this talk page