Grants:TPS/Solstag/CulturaDigitalBR2011/Report

Event name

Festival CulturaDigital.Br 2011

Description of your participation

For a complete and multimedia description of Wikimedian activity during this event, see our community report in Portuguese.

As proposed in the grant request, I focused my efforts on raising awareness about the Wikimedia Grants program, particularly with Culture Spots and people connected to them.

Below is a list of the persons and organizations contacted and a brief description of the ideas discussed with them:

• Ônibus hacker - could use a grant to enable wikipedia editing inside the bus, which currently has no wireless internet.
• Baixa cultura - helping host the material from a documental project they are planning with museums
• Patricia Cornils - integrate wikipedia in a project about public information on health policy and institutions
• Alex Freire - infrastructure needed to get children in Ilhabela (an island on the coast of São Paulo state) to use wikipedia and help catalogue the biodiversity of the region
• George Araújo - works with cartography of Rio's distant neighborhoods, would like to integrate wikipedia (perhaps also openstreetmaps) into that
• Marcos Rodrigo - works with community banks and solidarity economy, would like to produce videos to be incorporated into wikipedia
• Anita e Anapuã - work with native knowledge issues in indigenous communities within Brazil, I also told them of the Oral citations project
• Jamila - works with community education and communication, said she has a project that she wants to send to the grants program
• Hugo - from Mirako, an ecovillage which runs educational projects in its neighboring rural area, was already trying to get resources to enable the use of collaborative libre content
• Florencia (Guatemala) - an Argentinian who lives in Guatemala, where she works with indigenous communities that she thinks could make better use of the wikimedia projects; was also interested when I told her of the Oral citations project

Currently, I am following up with each of them, giving priority to those who have also been following up with me, in order to help them figure out how can they best benefit from the Wikimedia projects while also contributing to them, and how can the grants program be of use to enable that.

I also talked about Wikimedia and the grants program during the Fora do Eixo general meeting at the festival. They are a peer network of thousands of artists, culture workers and agents throughout the whole country, very much related to the Culture Spots program. As a result, Wikimedia Brasil was invited to participate in their fourth annual congress, which took place in São Paulo soon after the festival. There's already a community report for that congress, in Portuguese.

Beyond this grant's main commitment, which was to promote the wikimedia projects and grants program with cultural agents, over a thousand booklets explaining wikipedia were picked up by partipants of the event, plus promotional buttons and stickers. I also helped organize and took part in an Open Educational Resources meeting during the festival.

We also drew and painted posters and placed them all over the event - the reason why I requested resources for office material. Displaying the posters was in some sense a side-effect, as part of the plan was to make the crafting of the posters an event and an opportunity for engagement, by using crayons and ink and waiting for people to come help us (sometimes out of pity for our poor drawing skills...), which worked well. Both curious participants and graphic artists came to our assistance and we used that to start conversations about wikipedia. Even a wikipedian from England, who had come to the festival to talk about a non-wiki project, showed up, helping to color one of the posters and drawing Jimbo asking for money (and a yacht) at its top.

As a funny note... one guy came to me telling that he had posted a picture of one of our posters on facebook the ruling social network, along many other pictures of the event, and people would comment on it more than on any of the others, amazed at the handcrafted piece among all the digital material in the festival, particularly because it came from those whom they consider the most virtual of all people: wikipedians.

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What lessons were learned that could help others in similar events?

Most things related to my grant proposal went as planned, with the exception that I thought perhaps I would actually sit down and write a grant proposal with somebody during the festival, but once I got there it became clear that people were focused on engaging in more vibrant activities and preferred to work on formalities later, having time to think things over.

Interesting that this was not so much the case last year, in São Paulo, where the event happened in an open but more constrained surrounding. The environment and architecture of the premises in Rio de Janeiro, plus a general feeling that this year the festival had developed into something more meaningful, created a different flow to the meeting.

Unrelated to that, but also important, was confirming the assumption that, at least in an environment supportive of wikipedia, giving people a fun and collaborative way to express that feeling, as with drawing posters together, yields engagement. Having promotional material to distribute helped, as people would also come for them, but with much less involvement.

What impact did your participation have on the Wikimedia Mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

For the short term, I introduced the grants program and discussed possibilities of participation and wikimedia values with at least 10 groups that became well interested in getting more deeply involved with wikimedia, possibly presenting a grant proposal. A lot more people saw our posters and would stop to see us drawing and painting them, which led to many, though more informal, conversations about wikimedia projects.

It's hard to talk about further consequences as developing this contacts is now ongoing work, but given the diversity and reach of groups contacted, depending on how they follow up the medium-term impact could be in the hundreds, with a long-term potential for thousands of people being educated about our values and provided guidance to use or contribute to the wikimedia projects.

Detail of expenditures

Here are the expenditures to be accounted from my grant, in accordance with the documentation emailed to the foundation for both me and Rodrigo's grant, since for convenience we cross paid some expenses.

Item	Value (in R$)	Paid by
Flight Campinas-Rio	166.13	Rodrigo
Flight Rio-Campinas	170.56	Rodrigo
2011-12-01 lunch_for_one	16.00	me
Half of 2011-12-01 dinner_for_two	63.80/2 = 31.90	me
2011-12-01 taxi	10.00/2 = 5.00	me
Half of 2011-12-02 lunch_for_two	42.00/2 = 21.00	me
2011-12-02 office_supplies	28.70	me
2011-12-02 paint	34.30	me
Half of 2011-12-03 lunch_for_two	52.00/2 = 26.00	me
Half of 2011-12-05 taxi_1	10.00/2 = 5.00	me
Half of 2011-12-05 taxi_2	10.00/2 = 5.00	me
Hostel - abdo	200.00	me
Total	R$709.59

You may notice that, in the request, I did not explicitly include meals. I was expecting to partially cover them as part of accommodation related costs, however, our hostel did not offer meals other than breakfast, so we ended up eating out, as going to the market and preparing food would have taken valuable time. In any case, we did not include every meal, in particular not when we acquired alcoholic beverages. So, regarding this, feel free to choose whether to refund the lunches and dinners above.

Amount underspent/left-over (please specify currency)

I was not sure if the left-over should be taken from the amount granted or the amount requested. For now I'm leaving in respect to the amount requested, as the amount granted up to now seems to only show up in our private communication.

Requested value		Amount executed		Left-over	%
R$970	-	R$709.59	=	R$260.41	26.84%