Community Annual Report 2023 | Wikimedia CH

Highlight activity

GLAM-on-Tour at the Swiss National Sound Archives

While officially falling under Programme GLAM, this year’s GLAM-on-Tour events saw both heavy involvement from and significant impact on the Community programme. In 2023, the GLAM and Community teams organised three GLAM-on-Tours: one at Abbey Library in St. Gallen in May, one at the Zug Library at the end of June and early July, and one with the Swiss National Sound Archives in Ticino in November.

These events required significant cooperation between the programmes. The Community Managers of all language regions stepped up, offering organisational support, linguistic expertise and regional relationships to ensure the events were successful.

The Ticino event, in particular, was a highly successful collaboration between the two programmes. One of the most multilingual GLAM-on-Tour events ever, it attracted 16 participants from Switzerland, Germany and Italy. Several of the participants were new contributors to Wikimedia projects, requiring more high-touch support from Wikimedia CH team members. What’s more, the focus on women in the sound industry and the varied programme activities attracted interest from a diversity of ages, genders, backgrounds and interactions with Wikipedia. There were even general public participants with no previous knowledge of Wikimedia CH, presenting an opportunity to introduce them to our organisation and potentially engage them as contributors to our projects.

While organising this event was challenging and required good coordination between the teams, it also allowed team members to divide responsibilities, share knowledge, appreciate other team members’ complementary skills and value each other’s contribution. Overall, it was a huge success that provided important learnings for continuing collaboration.

Programme impact

• The edit-a-thon on women photographers at Photo Elysée Lausanne was so successful that the museum invited Les sans pagEs to have a monthly workshop in 2024.
• We had well-attended New Year’s brunches in all three language regions for the first time since Covid-19.
• We better aligned country-wide activities with a new dedicated Community Manager for the Italian-speaking region, as well as a Programme Lead who oversaw all regional projects.

Looking ahead

In 2024, we will start implementing the new programme strategy. A central aspect of the strategy is to support initiatives that diversify our community. We will also review and adapt recurring activities to ensure alignment with this goal and the overall strategy. We will continue to expand collaboration with other programmes to create the greatest possible impact while sharing knowledge and working more efficiently internally. To this end, we will participate in the "Value for Good" Impact Academy with the help of the Mercator Foundation.