Grants talk:Conference/WMES/WP20Aniversario

WMF comments

Hi Florenciac,

Thank you and the WMES team for you proposal. We are happy and excited for the opportunity to support any kind of gathering and celebrations in such times. I reviewed your grant proposal and have a few comments and follow up questions.

Program and content

• Thank you for sharing the community survey results on such short turnaround. You can keep the survey going, or opening it again more closely to the event itself to gather more input if needed.
• I like the idea of having a formal morning session followed by smaller group discussion targeted to a specific interest. It can help in creating a more 'traditional' conference format to those who are not familiar with the remote events concept.
• Direct translation - this is excellent. Can you tell us more about it? Maybe we can talk about figuring out how to do direct translation for all 5 major languages you want to support even if it is more expensive? We would love to experiment with this also.
• How will the direct chat translation be conducted? It sounds a bit challenging to do on such a platform. Maybe it's worth thinking about adding in professional live translation? Closed captioning?
• Friendly space policy - I'm happy to see you intend to give extra attention to the unique aspects and challenges of virtual participation. I encourage you to also take a look at the Knot privacy policy for a good example of how to approach this from a remote event perspective.
• Designing an engagement methodology is a great next step to expand the community. But I ask that you will be mindful that Welcoming non Wikimedia participants might require designing a session or a portion of the event to 'speak' a non-wiki language for newcomers. If you just invite non-wikimedians to the event without targeting them specifically or making sure the content is clear and welcoming, it might generate the opposite outcome.
• How do you plan on targeting non wikimedians and welcoming / helping / supporting them during the following up with them afterwards?
• WMF support - thank you for being specific and clear with how we can better support your efforts.

We can definitely help with the evaluation. We also have a new evaluation plan specifically for remote events to share along with other resources.

Planning and logistics

• In which language will the event be held in? I assume Spanish?
• Resources - I see 5 people listed as the event organizers. As you mentioned this will be your first remote event, I just want to make sure you have enough capacity to do so.
• I loved your idea of 'defining a remote help hot line via chat/e-mail/telegram'. I think it's very smart to provide that kind of support via different platforms.
• What software do you plan to use? Do you need a subscription? Or to boost your current subscription to the next level / with more features for this?

Budget

• As I understand, the landing page will be up throughout 2021 - for what purpose? Will it be updated with other celebration events? Because the cost seems a bit high and I’m not sure it’s worth maintaining for the whole year.
• I like your idea on making a commemorative video. But I would like to know more about what would be the general purpose of it. This is a relatively very high cost for a video, and from our experience it's extremely challenging to create a video documentation that will go viral. I'm not sure what will be the actual impact of this video. I'll appreciate you sharing more details and thinking where can you cut down the budget for this video production.
• I'm not sure I got the idea around the 120 cupcakes. Are those supposed to be distributed?

Thank you again for the work you have done on this grant proposal. We have a lot to celebrate and we're happy to see willingness to convene even under these current difficult circumstances. Looking forward to your response. Best CAlmog (WMF) (talk) 14:59, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

Hi CAlmog, here you have our answers.

Program and content

• That’s a great idea! We will rethink some of the questions closer to the date to gather more feedback :)
• -
• We were thinking about doing an in-house-volunteer translation. Speakers would be able to speak in their native language and there will be direct translation on chat/shared notes that attendees can follow by reading while speakers present. If you are willing to experiment we can ask for budgets. We didn’t include it because it’s quite expensive in Spain and it’s not easy to find providers who can cover simultaneous translation with the languages we are willing to work with. We are open to give it a try and ask for budgets. Please let us know if you have any recommendations for service providers.
• Explained in previous question. Another option creating different zoom rooms for different languages, with specific translators for each so translation goes live on audio. We’ve seen this in virtual events from other organizations but never done it ourselves. We may need to upgrade our Zoom licence for this + taking into account translation service providers cost.
• Thank you! This is super useful and it wasn’t in our radar.
• Got it. We will be careful to design an inclusive general event. Then, we were thinking that one of the thematic sessions could be specifically targeted to newcomers. Something like: “Ask a wikipedian - a virtual meeting to get answers about everything you always wanted to learn about Wikipedia”. What do you think?
• We really need to think about afterwards and we’ll be very grateful if you have any suggestions. We were thinking of inviting them to join our external newsletter as a first way of keeping in touch.
• That will be great! Looking fwd to working with you on this.

Planning and logistics

• We are planning to have the general celebration ceremony happening/being able to be followed in Spanish, Catalan, Euskara & Galician (hopefully asturian too). Translation wouldn’t be possible for working sessions/thematic meetups and Spanish would be the default language for those.
• We think we’re fine for this as we’re getting more experience in these kind of events. We just held a 90persons meet-up and having another one beginning of Nov so we are confident we can manage. For the people listed as event organizers, this is a first working plan. We will ask for volunteer engagement if the grant gets approved, so we can expand the team.
• -
• We think we can do it with our current Zoom subscription. However and as explained before we might need to upgrade our Zoom subscription depending on what we finally do with translations. Another tool we’ve been trying recently is BigBlueButtom, which is free software and it’s being implemented by many of our partners with great results, and it might be good to consider it for this. In that case, we would need to increase our server size and get it installed. We haven’t included any of this on budget though. Maybe we should?

Budget

• We understand that it is worth it to keep the celebrations up during the whole year and we thought this was also the plan from the WMF. In our case, this is important because we will be able to reboot the January campaign throughout the year when our local Wikpedias have their anniversaries: ex May with the Anniversary of Spanish Wikipedia. We’re not planning big events or gatherings but rather communications and outrage actions. Several of our programme activities for 2021 will be linked to the Anniversary idea of celebrating the WP community. The landing page is planned as a central repository to keep all of this info visible and updated during 2021.
• We think a video will help us explain how Wikipedia is build from different perspectives/profiles and it will be a great channel to put the human side of the celebration. It’s also a chance to give visibility and recognition to special actors in our community (editors/partners). This will be a piece we will be using during the whole year and even further as WMES has never had the chance to invest in such a communications material. So even if it is a very specific Anniversary piece, we foresee a longer life for the video usage. We’re planning a sum-up video for celebration, with many people participating. Deeper interviews with those people will be launched as separate pieces during the year. As we hire services and pay for travel/production/setting costs (the most expensive part of it) we take advantage to record further material.

As this is the first time we do this kind of production we asked around to different companies/providers and got many different budgets (even a 20.000€ one). We guess producing video in Spain is more expensive than in other locations and are happy to hear suggestions for reducing costs or service providers if you have any. We are also aware the production cost is increased because we are planning to record with volunteers/partners in 6 different cities across the country. This is the only way we see to get fair representation from different language communities, which is our will. We could probably centralise video recording in Madrid and reduce costs by limiting travel/production expenses and time, but the result won’t be as inclusive as we would like it to be.

• Sorry we were not clear on that. We are planning to order them from different local providers, with the same design, but produced in different cities. The idea is that the main speakers connecting from different locations will be able to pick them up at their local store. Does this make sense or are we complicating things? We didn’t want to drop the cake idea as this is something recurrent in all WP celebrations so far… but maybe it is time to rethink about it?

Thanks to you for your guidance and support! Very much appreciated :D

Millars (talk) 21:33, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

Grant approved

Hi Florenciac,

Thank you for your work on the grant request and responding to our comments. I’m happy to tell you that we've reviewed the final proposal and are happy to support it. You will receive an email with more instructions and next steps later today. Please see just a few comments following your feedback response.

• In-house-volunteer translation - we think that's a great idea and there's actually some best practices on how to do it from past events (the last CEE meeting for example). Just keep in mind, it might be a bit challenging. Anyway, I think that's a better option than having ‘different zoom rooms for different languages’ because that way you are separating people and hearing less people and less ideas.

Although it won’t be a problem to upgrade the zoom license if you decide that is the way to go. Same for the BigBlueButtom software. I’m not familiar with that one but you should do your research and if it’s better, we can talk about it more.

• Ask a wikipedian - that’s great. We can think about how to format such a session when time comes.
• Post conference tracking and engagement - yes, we can think about a few ideas. Let’s discuss further along.
• Some of the working sessions can also be per language, but if Spanish can be the default language, that is good as well. We want to be as inclusive as possible with the translation but it’s also understandable if we can’t apply it to all the sessions.
• If you choose to keep the landing page throughout 2021 that is ok, but it means you are committing to more than just this event grant. It means that you will be expected to use that landing page for future WP20 related activities as you mentioned. That is the reason I’m pointing this out.

Thank you again for your engagement in this process! Looking forward to working with you! Best, CAlmog (WMF) (talk) 16:26, 20 November 2020 (UTC)