Grants talk:IEG/The Wikipedia Library/Renewal/Midpoint

Acceptance of the midpoint report

Hi Jake, thank you once again for a great report and exciting work on the next phase of The Wikipedia Library! It's clear that the TWL team has accomplished a lot in the past few months. I'm pleased to accept this report, and look forward to the completion of your current work and what it offers the movement.

A few comments and questions:

1. In particular, I'm interested in TWL's satellite on the Arabic Wikipedia, since it may well be a pilot that leads the way in a 'micro-resources' model for our community members, particularly those who find it hard to access what they need to improve their contributions. I appreciate the challenges involved; again, I think it's a good reminder for us all that so many of our contributors do extraordinary work with very few resources, and TWL is an opportunity to change that in a meaningful way. What have the initial responses from the Arabic community members been to this pilot?
2. This phase intended to also reach out to the Spanish or German communities to create a similar global satellite pilot. What has held back the exploration of this pilot in the Es or De Wikipedias?
3. I understand your challenges with volunteer time, especially with technical solutions. I do want to appreciate Johnuniq and The Interior - as well as everyone else who's supported TWL as volunteers - for their incredible commitment. Do you have suggestions for us on ways we might mitigate this in the future (and for other projects)? Should we be thinking about outreach to allied tech communities and interest them in our work, so that some of them might be available for tech inputs or support? We are, as you know, continuing to talk with the WMF tech team to see how to coordinate more in the future.
4. The LexisNexis legal response is disappointing. Would it be strategic to have OCLC - such a strong supporter - write a reference, blogpost or article that documents why it believes open content is so important and how it deals with these issues, so you can point the for-profit publishers to it? Or do an interview with one of the other publishers who feels more aligned with TWL's mission, so that it creates more of a demonstration effect?
5. Finally, I much appreciated the Learning Pattern! I do like the whimsy of the TWL logo. :-) As a way to do different kinds of 'reporting' and 'learning', did you find it useful to do this?

Thanks again for your report, and all the work of the TWL team. Siko, please use this approval for any further administrative actions, including the second disbursement of the renewal grant. ASengupta (WMF) (talk) 17:42, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Perfect, thanks for completing this review, Anasuya - we'll move forward with the second disbursement and other next steps. :) Siko (WMF) (talk) 18:12, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Briefly, just to clarify about the Arabic, German and Spanish pilots (wearing my mentor/microgrants programs hat, rather than IEG program officer hat) - Arabic is still not launched, due to continuing issues with finding workable payments solutions for the book pilot, so it is too early to say re: community feedback, beyond the enthusiasm WMF got from the initial pre-launch community consult. That's not TWL's fault, though, that's an ongoing WMF issue that I'm still working on with our finance department. The plan I've been encouraging in terms of global expansion is to focus on investigating and connection-building to queue up German and Spanish once Arabic is launched as proof-of-concept and the relevant infrastructure (so close, now!) is in place to expand in new pilots, to keep growth both manageable and intentionally data-driven. Hope that makes sense to you as well? Cheers, Siko (WMF) (talk) 18:12, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Ah, that's fine, Siko, thanks for the clarification (yes, much learning to be had on supporting our communities worldwide). I'd be happy to hear from Jake if he has any feedback from simply the exploration of the idea with the Ar community, and I look forward to the pilot being launched soon! Again, if there's been any initial exploration of the idea with the German or Spanish communities, that would be great to know too, but otherwise, I'm on board with the plan as you've laid it out. :-) ASengupta (WMF) (talk) 22:15, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Hi Anasuya! Thanks for the feedback. As Siko indicated, we have been waiting to see how the Arabic Pilot kicks off (which it looks like it will this week). But the good news is we've laid the foundation for making future global pilots really doable. For one, we have a fully redesigned library kit with workflows for book purchases, journal requests, and resource sharing. All of this is now housed on Meta rather than English Wikipedia. For German and Spanish we have been planning our strategy. We identified 1-2 likely allies in those communities who we think would be great initial local contacts. We're planning to reach out to them in the next week or two. We are also attempting to seed both pilots with a unique local-language resource. So, we're pursuing The Cochrane Library's spanish version, and a German Publisher named De Gruyter. That would be in addition to potential book purchases and the English Language journal offerings. In short, we're a lot closer to being able to run those pilots, even though nothing has broken the surface yet.

As for OCLC, I really like your suggestion. One thing we can do is reach out to the publishers we have worked with and get them to share their stories about why they participated, what they've gotten out of it, and how they justified it legally. I'd like to present those stories in either a slidedeck, pamphlet, or brochure that we could use for marketing material. I've also been talking with OCLC's business development department, and they've offered to connect me to their Publisher Relations team so we can look into a joint marketing campaign through OCLC to reach out to its member publishers. I think it would be really powerful to see OCLC supporting these donations through their official channels and established relationships. I also like your idea about an OCLC co-published article and I think I have it already written! I will reach out to Library Journal and see if we can run it in May/April.

Thanks again for your feedback, much appreciated! Jake Ocaasi (talk) 14:55, 8 May 2014 (UTC)