Grants talk:PEG/Aliceba/Outreach to Afrodescendant community in US

GAC members who support this request

1. --DerekvG (talk) 15:07, 31 January 2015 (UTC) Being supportive to the Haitian community i do support this request, my suggestion to organsiers and the afrodescendant community, make sure you avoid conflicting event dates
2. I have no questions here rubin16 (talk) 15:51, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
3. I have recently been active on the ht:Wikipidya and support this project.   Bfpage |leave a message  10:43, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

Community comments

Comments from London

It is good to see an initiative like this coming forward, however I would appreciate seeing how it fits in with other ongoing activity in this area. To this end I have come up with some queries.Fabian Tompsett (WMUK) (talk) 13:55, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

Two buses

We have a saying here, you wait for ages and then two buses come along at once:

• Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 7th February
• Brooklyn Public Library 7th & 8th February

However, I can't help noticing that the second event does not seem to have been promoted yet (no mention on the BPL website that I could find), and I wonder why this initiative does not link up with the New York Chapter on the Saturday, and then develop the BPL the day after? The Schomberg Institute event has been on Wikipedia since 10 November 2014‎. It is a shame that apparently Aliceba was not able to make the December Meetup.

AFROcroWd

It is not clear what AFROcroWd is. What discussion about this proposal has there been on Wikimedia Wikis?

From our email to the lists:Afro Free Culture Crowdsourcing Wikimedia (AfroCROWD) is a new initiative which seeks to increase the number of people of African Descent who actively partake in the Wikimedia and free knowledge, culture and software movements. The workshops are open to all Afrodescendants including but not limited to individuals who self-identify as African, African-American, Afro-Latino, Biracial, Black, Black-American, Caribbean, Garifuna, Haitian or West Indian. --Aliceba (talk) 09:51, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Black WikiHistory Month

This Wikipedia:Black WikiHistory Month page was started just before this proposal, so you may have missed it. How does your proposal aim to work with this initiative?

Populations of African descent outside of the United States

You mention populations of African descent outside of the United States. What steps have you taken to involve Wikimedians from these groups in your discussions

Wikiprojects, for example Wikipedia:WikiProject Haiti etc.

Wikimedia chapters: e.g. Wikimedia Ghana, Wikimedia South Africa, Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia Community User Group Côte d'Ivoire

Other potential grant proposal

How do you view other potential grant proposal such as The Africa Project?

participation

How would you like other WIkimedians to be involved in your proposal?

Response from Milos

Fabian, thank you for the comments. Here are my responses and Alice will give her own. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

First of all, please take a look at my wikimedia-l post for general background. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

The last information which Alice and I had about The Schomberg Institute event (~late December) is that it's going to happen "in January or February". The first Wikipedia page still says January. I see now that there is a separate page, created on January 5th. At that time we were already in planning the events for the next few months (we had to solve numerous issues, including the fact that instead of applying [or even not] for a grant just for February, we had to create the program until June because of gender gap focus during the next few months), as well as we didn't get information about the precise date. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

BTW, two events are just partially overlapping. The event in BPL starts at 10AM and ends at 12:30. That makes possible that at least some people participate in both events. (Google maps says ~30 mins from Brooklyn to Harlem, which doesn't sound like a big problem for such arrangement.) Thus, we should talk about that, as well. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

We already contacted WM NYC, WM DC and US-based user groups. WM DC expressed their interest in holding a satellite event. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

AFROcroWd is Alice's (and my) initiative, named few weeks ago, with the aim to trigger creation of Wikimedia user group for Americans of African descent. At the moment, we are in the process of setting up the website. Facebook page has a bit more information. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

It is not yet on BPL's site as we are doing this on short notice. We even wanted to start in January by ourselves, but it turned out not to be achievable. Regular path of asking BPL for space is two months in advance. They gave us the venue on notice less than one month before the event. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for letting us know for Wikipedia:Black WikiHistory Month. I will add that into my lectures: We'll make a small research and then create the list of articles which could be improved and/or created during that event. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

In relation to the non-US black population, this is, of course interesting. Alice is from Haiti and, with the exception of Afro-Americans, the most of the Black Americans have strong ties with the countries of their origin. We already have the plan related to that. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

The cooperation with the non-US chapters is interesting for sure (as the ultimate goal of this initiative is to create an affiliate organization, which would participate inside of the global movement, not just in US). But in this point of time, it's too early for that. In my opinion (though, I could be wrong), the primary goal of this initiative should be to create good connections with US-based chapters. I suppose that newly formed user group (if everything goes fine, during the second half of the year) will start communication with other chapters. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

It's similar with The Africa Project. And again, it's not about me to talk about that. I suppose that the future user group would take more active role in that initiative. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

The most important role of the Wikimedians local to New York City would be to participate actively into the event. As I am the sole lecturer, I would be glad if they want to lead workshops instead of me (as it would mean that I did my job :) ). In relation to work on Wikipedia, we'd need technical support because of likely few dozens of new accounts from the same IP address. Also, like you pointed to a couple of ideas, we are completely open to every constructive contribution. There are some things which we missed for sure, as well as there are some good ideas inside of the movement. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

Response from Alice

The events have been on the Brooklyn Public Library website since yesterday:

http://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/afrocrowd-presents-intro-central-library-info-comm-020715

http://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/afrocrowd-presents-intro-central-library-info-comm-020815

More later. --Aliceba (talk) 17:22, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

Regarding promotion: As a result of our having promoted the event within our various target communities, we have RSVP's already for 20% of the Brooklyn Public Library Info Commons capacity for both days. Also, several of the communities we have been targeting have already spread the word within their groups. See also our Facebook invite which was created about a week ago: https://www.facebook.com/events/1595778877309598/. Note also that our Facebook page has about 95 Likes, again as a result of your ongoing promotion.

Regarding relationship to continental Africa: The title of the proposal explains that we are starting our initial outreach to people of African descent in the United States. As Milos has explained in the l list, it is because of the relative absence of US Blacks at Wikimania over the years compared to Africans from the continent. We count an organization of Africans in the United States as one of our outreach partners and we have mentioned in the proposal that we define our our target group as: "African, African-American, Afro-Latino, Biracial, Black, Black-American, Caribbean, Garifuna, Haitian or West Indian." Lastly we have listed the Yoruba and Igbo wiktionaries as potentially growing from our production due to the relatively large numbers of Nigerian-Americans among the African population in the United States. We have also said this in the impact section of our proposal:

"The workshops will take into account that many Afrodescendant groups in the United States might find that access to Wikipedia’s multilingual crowdsourcing platform can help them transfer free knowledge to populations of African descent outside of the United States that they are connected to through origin or direct familial bonds. Multilingual Afrodescendants may also want to use such platforms to develop and maintain online bodies of relevant knowledge in native languages such as Garifuna, Haitian Kreyòl, Igbo, Bozal Spanish, Twi or Yoruba, thereby contributing to the survival of -and increasing their proficiency in-- those languages while also feeling more culturally grounded.""

Also note that our second target city will likely be DC, home to a relatively large population of Ethiopians, Ghanaians and Africans generally.

Note that this proposal covers now through June in which we have chosen to focus on New York where I live but since this initiative is about increasing the over-all participation of people of African descent in the Wikimedia movement, our goal is global in the long term.

--Aliceba (talk) 08:13, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Regarding populations of African descent outside the United States: I have covered continental Africans above. All that applies to continental Africans applies to Afrodescendants of the Americas including Afro-Latinos, Caribbeans, Haitians, West-Indians, all of which are heavily represented among blacks in Brooklyn. As a native of Haiti who speaks, read and writes Haitian Creole and French and who created the only aggregator of blogs by Haitians wherever they live (www.haitianbloggers.com) I have been dedicated to amplifying Haitian online expression for the past 10 years. We have three Haitian organizations among our outreach partners and two Afro-Latino organizations. Both the Haitian and Afro-Latinos who have RSVP'd have expressed interest in beefing up the Haitian Creole and Spanish wikipedias/wiktionaries respectively. One of the Haitian orgs we are working with is premised on the preservation of Haitian Creole. We believe that Haitian Wikipedia [[1]], Haitian Creole Wiktionary[[2]], Wiki Project Haiti [[3]] and Spanish Wikipedia[[4]] will likely be enriched because of our project.

I included a presentation about Wikipedia to the Caribbean Studies Association Conference in May, a conference which attracts Afro-Caribbean scholars of the United States, the Caribbean and elsewhere is also part of reaching out to and involving ppl of African descent not living in the US.

This leaves out Africans and Afrodescendants in Europe. In a later phase of the project not covered by this initial grant, they should be tapped into. I am a member of the French org http://www.internetsansfrontieres.org/ (i.e. Internet Without Borders) which is lead by a Franco-Cameroonian and can help us gain ground among Blacks in France as well as continental Francophone Africans along with the collaboration of French Wikimedia. As to Africans and Afrodescendants in Britain, the lack of a language barrier as well as the large wikimedia org in Britain should allow us to branch out there with relative ease vs other countries. We will need to create deeper links to Dutch and papamiento-speaking Afrodescendant of Holland and the Caribbean, including at the Caribbean Studies Association conference, and to black populations elsewhere in Europe. --Aliceba (talk) 08:58, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Regarding the Africa Project  : The Africa Project https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Africa_Project is a proposal for the paid translation by continental African students of 5,000 English wikipedia articles into continental African languages. We are in full support of this project and of the main idea behind it and would even like to see this idea spread to the Haitian wikipedia as well: beef up the wikipedias in languages spoken by people of African descent through improvement and translation of English wikipedia articles. We believe that part of our final edit-a-thon in June may well follow that theme for two of the subgroups (Haitian and Yoruba)-- although each subgroup will ultimately decide what its priorities are at that edit-a-thon. The Africa project is complementary to ours but not duplicative and we will reach out to its author for collaboration and coordination. We say that it is complimentary and not duplicative because this proposal is for five months of work in NY for the next five months focused on increasing editorship of all Blacks in the United States, regardless of whether or not they speak an African language -- including those non-immigrant Blacks who only speak English and immigrant Afrodescendants from the Americas. The Africa project proposal is for paid translation by continental African-based university students who speak an African language. --Aliceba (talk) 09:20, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Please see Milos' response above for answers to all other existing inquiries.

Similar event on the same day

Other Wikipedians have been planning an event at the en:Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for almost a year. It happened that this is scheduled on the same day as the first event in the series of this grant, as described at en:Wikipedia talk:Meetup/NYC/Black Life Matters Editathon. NYC is definitely big enough for lots of events at the same time but I hope that in the future we can find a way to coordinate to make sure that all events have sufficient numbers of trainers on hand. Say hello at the regular Wikipedia meetups or online if you want to collaborate on something to do outreach. Blue Rasberry (talk) 01:39, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Response from Alice

The events are one hour away from each other and each is in a heavily black populated area, making for more options closer to home for the target population. We are working together now with WMNYC (Notably Pharos and Dave Goodman) to make it a cross-branded "Black Wiki History Month Weekend" with potential simulcasts of some parts of one to the other. In my outreach for the BPL event, I have let folks know of the Harlem option and many have signed up for it who live closer to the Schomburg. Everybody wins. --Aliceba (talk) 21:52, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

• FWIW, I will be at the Brooklyn event on the 7th and on the 8th. I'm disappointed I can't be at the Manhattan one also. DGG (talk) 06:16, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Hello from Art+Feminism

Hello from Art+Feminism. We have been working in NYC on a somewhat similar project for the past 18 months. We have been building some infrastructure for these kinds of trainings, which you are welcome to use and/or adapt. Here is our Lesson Plan and here are our powerpoints. These are for an introductory 90 minute training. We are finishing up work on videos for the first lesson plan, and an intermediate lesson plan.

I would also encourage you to reach out to Blue Rasberry, who can connect you to other helpful Wikipedians. Blue Rasberry has been very very very helpful for our project--Theredproject (talk) 02:48, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Response from Alice

This is very very very helpful. Thanks! --Aliceba (talk) 21:57, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

WMF comments

Thank you Alice and Millosh for this grant proposal and your efforts to diversify the Wikimedia projects. We appreciate your engagement with the community in discussions about the project thus far and have the following remaining questions:

It's great that Interglider.org is such a large supporter of AfroCrowd and their team will be leading most of the trainings. However, as noted in the discussion, it is very important to have local Wikimedians at your event for more hands-on training and help. Alice noted that you are coordinating with Pharos and David during Black History Month, which will be helpful. However, can you get commitment from other local Wikimedians to join the team or participate in certain training events? We encouraged Millosh to reach out to OR drohowa since she works with the Brooklyn Public Library and Bluerasberry has also encouraged you to reach out.

Response from Alice: I have been in touch with Wikimedia NYC since at least November via email when Millosh introduced me. I attended two Wikimedia NYC events in December: the 12/4 Wiki Salon and Skills Share and the 12/8 Art and Feminism Training the Trainers. In addition to DGG and Pharos, Bluerasberry, jim.henderson and two other NYC Wikimedians attended the Feb 7th and 8th kickoffs. I have sent the dates of all AfroCROWD workshops scheduled for the next 6 months to the Wikimedia NYC list, asking for input and suggestions. I am also slated to meet with OR drohowa to discuss collaboration with WMNYC. I am currently working with Pharos to organize two AfroCROWD sessions during Wikipedia Day at Barnard College in March. AfroCROWD looks forward to WMNYC training support at monthly events scheduled through June and to continued collaboration with WM NYC generally. The Wikipedia Garifuna incubator is a result of collaboration between myself, Millosh and WMNYC--Aliceba (talk) 19:52, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

Great to hear that you are in such close contact with local Wikimedians. Please let us know if you need any support with making this partnership as successful as possible. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 03:43, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

How did the Intro to Wikipedia event go? It looks like you had a good turnout. Are folks that participated still editing? How are you managing, or how do you plan to manage, follow-up, mentorship, and support to new editors in between the in-person events?

Response from Alice: Our kickoff events --titled Intro to Wikimedia and how to Edit Wikipedia in promo materials-- went well. We had about 50 attendees for both days, the majority of which indicated a desire to edit wikipedia in the future in their evaluation forms. A reporter from the Haitian Times attended and 4 articles appeared in the local and national press leading up to the event. I posted pictures and the articles on the event page. The first day, Millosh and DGG gave overview presentations on Wikimedia resources including the many languages of interest to our target population. A link to the livestream of Millosh's presentation is in the event page and abundant live tweets by participants can be found at the #afrocrowd hashtag on Twitter. The Second Day, Pharos offered a shorter presentation on how to edit wikipedia following which individual attendees chose between doing the wikipedia adventure, adding articles to the AfroCROWD suggested articles list, setting up personal pages, editing existing articles, creating articles or exploring and leaving suggestions on affiliate project pages such as WikiProject Haiti. We intend to encourage more active and regular wikipedia editing as the workshop series progresses and our attendees become progressively more acclimated to this new environment. --Aliceba (talk) 20:05, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for this update. We have found that online support/encouragement between sessions is very helpful in supporting and retaining new editors. Dorothy has some great tips on how to do this well so be sure to ask her when you meet! Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 03:43, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Are you partnering with host institutions (in addition to the Brooklyn Public Library) that have the necessary source materials to complete your editathons?

Response from Alice: AfroCROWD has started compiling its list of suggested articles which you can find here at the kickoff events page. I have worked with a Haitian academic, Dr. Célucien Joseph, at the list already extensive list related to Haiti and its diaspora. Our outreach partners (AfriDiaspora, Afrolatin@Project, Haitian Creole Language Institute, Yoruba Cultural Institute, Port Académie, Garifuna Nation to name a few) are all specialists of their groups. Afrolatin@project, if one visits their website www.afrolatinoproject.org, is basically an online archive, as is Port Académie, a portal of research on Haitian Studies. www.afridiaspora.com is a repository of interviews with continental African authors and African book fair organizers and participants. We will deepen their lists in collaboration with experts from their groups as AfricaCROWD (4/4) and AfrolatinoCROWD (4/12) approach. Beyond all that I am working with BPL librarians on making reference materials available to us starting at the next event, HaitiCROWD, on 3/14. I also brought reference materials that I own to the last event. My hope is to deepen ties to host institutions at the Caribbean Studies Association conference in New Orleans, which attracts academics and specialists of the Caribbean from everywhere.--Aliceba (talk) 20:19, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

While the conference in New Orleans does sounds like a good opportunity to reach another important audience, we have found that single-session outreach events do not result in long-term impact in regards to editors or content creation. What makes the events in NYC appealing is that there are multiple sessions that build off each other so people can continue their skills development with in-person training. It will be difficult to support the interested participants in New Orleans without follow-up sessions held by local Wikimedians. We would encourage you to focus your efforts in NYC and then after piloting the program, think about expansion in coordination with local Wikimedians in other states.

Response from Alice: Since you ask about what institutions other than BPL we are working with in question 3, we see the Caribbean Studies Association Conference as less of a one-off training and more as a networking opportunity with academics who focus on the Caribbean from universities and institutes both regional (caribbean) and global (US, Europe, etc.). Attendance would therefore help in meeting the request in the previous question. New Orleans is just the location of this annual gathering of Caribbean experts just like Mexico is just the location of Wikimania this year. (My presentation submission about Wikipedia as a tool for Caribbean Academics to the Caribbean Studies Association Conference presentations committee got approved last weekend.)--Aliceba (talk) 20:30, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

While we understand the networking value of attending the conference for future partnerships, we will not fund travel for this event. As a first grant to and project of AfroCROWD, we would like to see the impact of this first phase of local events and community building before looking to scaling the program further. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 03:43, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Please provide more detail on how the budget for refreshments was calculated.

Response from Alice: As predicted in our budget, refreshments cost about $100 per event, a third of that going to drinks and the rest to light refreshments. --Aliceba (talk) 20:30, 17 February 2015 (UTC)--Aliceba (talk) 20:31, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

Measures of success: We would encourage you to add another measure of success related to the number of participants that continue editing 2 months after the completion of the project (when the grant report is due). You can track this using Wikimetrics. Additionally, it would be good to measure the number of people that come to multiple sessions. 5 articles improved/created by 20 editathon participants seems quite low. We would expect this number to be higher, especially for the project overall (if new editors practice their skills in the training workshops by making small improvements to existing articles).

Response from Alice: We are keeping wikimetrics and are open to adding the measure suggested by WMF. We also intend to increase the number of articles edited or created by June to 30 but I don't see any reason why we would not exceed that if we implement certain best practices and get sufficient formal approvals by users to be tracked by username.

Some thought may or may not be given to also measuring success by a comparison of the following AfroCROWD figures in June to existing figures on file with Wikimedia NYC --for prior years of its existence-- when it comes to our target audience examples of which would be:

Number of ppl of African Descent onboarded;

Number of events introducing our target audience to Wikipedia and Wikimedia and teaching them how to edit;

Number of events culturally targeted to all subgroups of Afrodescendants-- including non-exclusively anglophone subgroups-- specifically taking into account the linguistic diversity of these subgroups and showcasing those resources to them;

Number of articles lists for black editathons containing a substantial list of articles about non-anglophone Black history and non-anglophone notable individuals. --Aliceba (talk) 20:42, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

With the addition of these metrics and deletion of the travel from the budget, we will be ready to move forward with approval of this grant. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 03:42, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! --Aliceba (talk) 18:18, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Thank you again for your proposal. Please let us know if you have questions about the above. We look forward to hearing from you. Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 22:31, 11 February 2015 (UTC)