Grants:Project/Rapid/UG BR/Education conference travel and UG meeting/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2016-17 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/Rapid/UG BR/Education conference travel and UG meeting.
You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
You are welcome to Email rapidgrants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Goals

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went? The event was successfully held and the objectives were achieved. With this funding, I (Sturm) was able to book and buy flight tickets and hotel rooms for the attendees. We developed a strategic plan for the incoming year for the UG Wikimedia in Brazil; We attended the lecture by LiAnna Davis (Wiki Edu Foundation) on educational uses of Wikimedia projects and we took part in edit-a-thon on scientific topics.

Announces: ARedeEduca, Oráculo TI
Other reports: Wiki Edu blog post; Traço de Ciência blog post and CartaCapital also report on us here.
Pictures: Category on Commons
Videos: first day and second day.

Ixocactus

My goals are surpassed, the meeting was great. See above.

Lechatjaune

I have been working on educational projects for a while now. When I decided to go to the meeting, I had four major goals:

Get in touch with WMF people who are leading this project, updating my knowledge on it.
Meet other people in Brazil who are conductiong educational projects, exchanging expericences.
Meet other wikimedians/wikipedians.
Help out during the edithaton.

I believe the project was very well organized, the structure was great at NeuroMat and I was happy with the results.

Teles

I went to the conference and meeting with the intentions of getting to know better how the WikiEdu works and wondering how could we use it in our country. I also expected to discuss with other members of our user group to define how can we work better in 2017. We had a good year in 2016 and we expect to become more organized as a group, by setting goals and objetives to the next period. I was happy to see how successful it is in North America and hope we can have grounds for bringing it to South America.
I also expected to learn how could I use it in this project we are partnering in my State.

Chico Venancio

I believe the goals for this meeting were surpassed as the mains goals I had were:

to get to know WikiEdu methods and work
discuss movement strategy and our group's strategy in specific
learn better ways to support our group's educations and outreach work
help during the edit-a-thon

All these goals were met.

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets.

Ixocactus

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
Exchange experiences with another wikimedians.	We talk about our good and bad experiences on wikimedia projects.	We learned a lot about activities of other wikimedians on start presentations. At dinners and transports we too talk a lot about this.
Updates and achievements of UG-BR and education projects.	We have many good news.	Vinícius (Chapter proposal) and Célio (APG) presents the status of proposal and a detailed APG to apply. Education projects are included at both strategic documents
Observation of activites to improve my own.	Inspiring activities.	We participate of two LiAnna Davis talks, and an edit-a-thon.

Lechajaune

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
Get in touch with WMF people who are leading this project, updating my knowledge on it.	Liana gave a very good talk both at first and second day. I think she made it clear Wikipedia may be (and is) a very powerful tool for teaching and science divulgation. Sadly as it happens in my classes, it seems the retention rate is quite small everywhere.	I think we have yet a great potential in my University to explore. We still need to deal with prejudice.
Meet other people in Brazil who are conductiong educational projects, exchanging expericences.	I had the oportunity to talk to other professors.	I believe I need to work and improve projects in my classes to achieve better results.
Meet other wikimedians/wikipedians.	We could talk a lot about chapter organization and offline activities.	We have been dreaming for a long time (maybe 10 years) about creating a chapter in Brazil and increase offline activities. It seems we have grown a lot.
Help out during the edithaton.	Edithaton was great.	We all love Wikipedia.

Teles

As a group we could discuss our strategic plan for this year and find a consensus on what are going to be our goals and objectives. That way we have something more clear to follow and better evaluate how we are doing on accomplishing our targets.
We could notice that Wiki Education seems to be a great project as we can infere from the presentation that shows article improvements and the solid engagement of many professors that are allowed to work with their students in Wikipedia and publish to the work to the public view. It remains uncertain how to bring it to Brazil an perhaps adapt it to our "third World" reality. We started to learn how to work with Dashboard platform and we were inspired for start thinking on ways of bringing anything related to WikiEdu to our events.
I was a bit frustrated for not having figured out a way of using it on the mentioned partnership, but that doesn't speaks against the value of the project.

Chico Venancio

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
Get to know WikiEdu methods and work	Watched the talk, had extensive conversations with LiAnna Davis and with our three professor's from the group	LiAnna's talk was great as a way of introducing the educational work being done in the US and Canada and our discussions were very fruitful in trying to come up with ways to adapt strategies to our reality.
Discuss movement strategy and our group's strategy in specific	Had a very productive meeting with the group were strategy for the group was discussed at length and a start of the movement strategy discussion	Unfortunately this was a little bit before the launch of the movement strategy discussions and we did not much material to discuss, but nonetheless we had discussions about what we need to have informed discussions about strategy for the movement and discussed our group's strategy at length.
Learn better ways to support our group's educations and outreach work	Learnt how to help with the Outreach Dashboard, translated the strings in TranslateWiki for the Dashboard, and discussed tactics to engage with teachers and GLAM	The Outreach Dashboard is a great tool we were not using for a lack of familiarity and knowledge of the tool, specially with a little more work from developers. The exchange of tactics with other members of the group was a very good way to improve my attempts to find and close partnerships with GLAM and professors.
Help during the edit-a-thon	Help a few users with basic Wiki editing tools, helped some experienced and new users with the content translation tool, helped a user love more Wikipedia by using css to justify all text.	We all love Wikipedia!

Learning

Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

What worked well?
What did not work so well?
What would you do differently next time?

Teles

I think the presentation hosted by LiAnna not only brings information about the Wiki Education program, but also makes people see Wikipedia differently in a very important way and very important at this moment we are living. In Brazil, we still have professors who refrain from using Wikipedia on their classrooms. That happens because of their mistaken views of what Wikipedia is and how Wikipedia works. Many of them still think that because anyone can edit Wikipedia anyone can do anything there. On the presentation, it is shown that, by providing the right information of what Wikipedia is, this mistaken view of Wikipedia is changed and the notion of media literacy is enforced as something important not only for Wikipedia, but to any kind of source we access. That is just exactly what we need to spread in Brazil at this time. That worked really well.
The workshop went well overall. We could have had that old problem with the limit of account creation per IP address as we didn't ask for the creation lift with some advance. However, organizers recommended that users had their accounts created prior to the event, which was enough to avoid more than six accounts created at the very moment of the event. I should also thank Reedy for being fast and responsive on generating the lift in the middle of the event, but that is something we should pay more attention on the next one and ask with advance.

Chico Venancio

Bringing one person for a talk on an specific topic was a great way to maximize the discussion and engagement in that topic. And LiAnna gave a great talk on the Wiki Education program.
Having a diverse audience with experienced Wiki editors, new editors and University professor and students was also very good to bring very different points of view to the questions and subsequent discussions.
Choosing a better venue and asking for grant money to host it is a necessary expenditure for next time, the acoustics was terrible by the end of the UG meeting.
Overall it was great, we need more of these events.

Ixocactus

The personal contact and experiences exchange between wikimedians was great.
Discussions about strategic planning and chapter submission was very important for me too. I run education programs and could realize that the all UG BR participants are very engaged, motivated and interested in support these programs. The last minutes are not so good because we have accoustic problems. Fortunately, the main discussions were made but the final conclusions and next steps were troubled by this.
Both lectures by LiAnna were very interesting and inspiring. She presents suggestive data and a interesting big picture on WikiEdu work. The most important learning was to verify that my personal approach on education program is very similar to thats LiAnna presented. This improve my personal confidence.
I think that researchers can be best motivated by informations about possibility of publication of FA's as peer-reviewed papers. From my own experience with department professors-researchers colleagues, I see that they are very-very busy on their careers and WM projects is only one more activity in their closed work weeks. This approach, including the looking on pageviews of entries, can be a good point to accent to these important experts that we need to engage. No doubt that presentations are wonderful. This is only a small suggestion.
USP-Neuromat integration with WM projects is inspiring. I could see some similarities-differences with my own situation. I work at a small university and think that the USP-Neuromat success integration history with WM projects is a "best pratice example" for integration between academy and WM projects in Brazil.
We talked a bit about WM Dashboard and I will try to use it on my educations programs at this semester.
My first edit-a-thon was a very useful experience.

Finances

Grant funds spent

Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on.

Ticket for flights 01 - R$ 640,53
Ticket for flights 02 - R$ 637,40
Ticket for flights 03 - R$ 866,60
Ticket for flights 04 - R$ 735,79
Hotel rooms at Ibis - R$ 690,00

Remaining funds

Remaining funds from this grant have been returned to WMF in the amount of US$220, or 1,065.13 BRL minus processing fees.

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

R$ 4.635,45 (funded)
R$ 3.570,32 (spent)

R$ 1.065,13 (remaining funds)

Yes, we are currently running many edit-a-thons and other projects.

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?