Grants:Project/Jagseer S Sidhu/Punjabi Audiobooks Project/Midpoint

This project is funded by a Project Grant

Report accepted

This midpoint report for a Project Grant approved in FY 2020-21 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Jagseer S Sidhu/Punjabi Audiobooks Project.
You may still review or add to the discussion about this report on its talk page.
You are welcome to email projectgrantswikimedia.org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learning from the first half of the grant period.

Summary

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

6 Meetings with team and community on Google Meet
10 books were selected after community discussion and all selected books have been proofread and transclusion is also done.
Organized a voice-over training workshop for participants.
3 Books have been audio recorded.
2 Audiobooks has been edited and completed.

Methods and activities

How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.

We have conducted 6 Google Meet calls with team and community and discussed the key point regarding the projects described as follows:

Organizing proofread and validation contest.
Transclusion of books.
Providing voice-over training for participants.

The team conducted voice-over training. The trainer ‘Amit Jindal’ is a professional on-air host at All India Radio, Jalandhar.
2 new participants, other than editing and proofreading, joined the Punjabi Wiki Community.
3 Audiobooks have been recorded by the team.
2 books have been edited by professional audio editor.

Gill jassu and Dugal harpreet during Punjabi Audiobooks Workshop
Punjabi Audiobooks Workshop practice session
Participents of Punjabi Audiobooks Workshop

Midpoint outcomes

What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

Midpoint outcomes are discussed in above (Methods and activities) para.

Finances

Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

S.No.	Item	Amount
1	Equipments	57245
2	Travel	6820
3	Refreshments	2110
4	Conference Hall for training	2000
5	Internet	2520
6	Audio editing	20000
	Grant total	90695 (1227 USD)

Learning

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

Main focus of this project is to “Upgrade Skills” of local Wikimedia community for which we had organized voice-over training. 8 participants attended the workshop. The objective is to provide them a skill which can be used to create new form of content (Audiobooks) on Wikisource. Audio content is important to save the literature and language.

What are the challenges

What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

Audio recording is much difficult as compared to editing/writing articled or proofreading. Some of the main challenged we faced in recording books are:

Audio recording requires adequate environment.
It takes a lot of energy to record and we cannot record more than 2 hours a day.
Sending equipment to the participants consume too much time.

Also engaging the community is also a difficult task.

What is working well

What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

Your learning pattern link goes here
Monthly meetings.
A couple of volunteer’s response.
Proofreading and transclusion of book by volunteers.
Training session of audio recording.

Next steps and opportunities

What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points.

We will organize at-least one more workshop for trainees on their demand and trainer’s suggestion.
2 books will be recorded by professional voice-over artists.
We will organize voiceover-a-thon so that we can record books in a fast way.

Grantee reflection

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an grantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?

Working on this project is really an amazing experience. It gives a pleasure to create a new kind of content on Wiki. Although we have been working on audiobooks prior to this project but with the involvement of Wiki Community this project become more important to us. Specially the thing that these audiobooks will be published in public domain; it gives us a great pleasure as being a content creator.