Grants talk:PEG/Jayanta Nath - Kolkata Wiki Community/Kolkata Book Fair 2014

before comments please consider to read my previous same grants which was not used due to late preparation as application was over

• Grants talk:WM IN/Kolkata Book Fair 2012

Thank you for your understanding.Jayantanth (talk) 08:38, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Comments

Comments MADe

Hey Jayanta and Biswarup, I welcome this project proposal. I think it's a good idea to approach the Indian cultural community using existing events. I also love the outreach to different languages.

At the moment, I would like to get some clarifications:

1. we are providing 450$ for leaflets. I could not find more information on these flyers in the project proposal.
2. I made a quick overview of the costs: crew costs:470$, leaflet: 460$, misc: 322 $, stall costs: 4500$. Especially the stall costs (eg. booking, decoration, rentals) seem really high - even more in an Indian context. Can we approach
3. the budget overview contains some errors (eg. Hire Staff/bearer does not make INR 12.000)
4. there's an overview of "measures of succes", but I would like to get a more elaborated list.

Final remark, $5000 is a reasonably high amount. I would like to see a link with Wikimedia India. MADe (talk) 15:40, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Hi, MADe ~Thank you for your queries. We are very much aware and worried about $3300( Rs 2,00,000) for stall booking.This is 66% of total requested budget. For this cost, the organizer, GUILD, will give us only open space to make stall. We have talk with GUILD several times, about our wikimedia mission & nature of non-profit organization. But they don't give any concession. Their policies are simply business to rent/sale stall place. We are expecting huge gathering to Stall, so we should give them ,who are seriously wish to learn about Wikimedia, at least one handson document for support to encourage. All leaflets, printed material will be provided by WMIN chapter. We need at least two nos of bearer @ 500 for 12 days on 12 PM to 9PM services, Apart from the footfall at the Kolkata Book Fair Wikimedia stall, we are going to make one workshop/introduction everyday evening, it can be more practical to the coney our message. No of participant attended to the workshop is measurable and in future No of article (bn,or,as, bm) and no of Active user can be measurable.Most of the educated people in Bengal don't know about Bengali Wikipedia due to lack of awareness. We can spread the message to every visitor of Bengali Wikipedia (or Local language wikipedia) through mouth/distribute leaflets. $5000 is a reasonably high amount.as I explain $3300, we have to pay for open air space at Milan Mela. Presently I am EC member of WMIN Board. If you need we can send formal mail from the President/Secretary. I think this is for for you.Jayantanth (talk) 18:21, 1 December 2013 (UTC).

Dear MADe, As you pointed out some observations, I would like to add, I agree that the stall hiring charge is very high, I can remember in 2011, when we approached, they were very rigid about their rate. This time also they are behaving so. They fixed this rate (INR 2,00,000 for 9 sm) for last two years. The total footfall at the fair is over 2 millions for twelve days but it also observed that the quality of the Kolkata Book Fair is entirely different from any other fair in Kolkata. Here, in Kolkata, a street labour earns INR 300 per 6-7 hrs, where an educated fellow deserves INR 500, with keeping in mind that he/she will have to face and give demonstration to different types of people for 8-9 hrs per day. The proposal may be considered and I shall be happy to answer you any other queries. Thank you. Gangulybiswarup (talk) 16:22, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Hey thanks for your replies.

1. please add more information on the leaflets. 10.000 copies is a lot, how will you give them away?
2. I still have objections on the stall costs: in total 4500$. Remember, this is money which is not used by community members, but is paid to external parties. In the previous grant proposal (2012) the rental amounts to INR60,000, less than 1/3 of the current costs. What is the reason of this sudden hike?
3. The other decoration costs (part 2) are really high as well (you can probably buy a TV+DVD set, sound system or laptop for the proposed rental amounts!).
4. There's an overview of "measures of succes", but I would like to get a more elaborated list. What do you want to achieve with this grant?
5. For clarity, I changed the lay-out of the budget table, as I feel the new lay-out is more structured and will help my colleague GAC members. Feel free to change or revert this change.MADe (talk) 17:59, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

1. 10,000 Bengali Leaflet are nothing, if we distribute freely, it will be finished within today's, So our plan to distribute with genuinely interested people, who give only Rs 5 each. It will return our printing cost.
2. Always their first is priority for book seller or publisher and member of Publishers & Book Sellers Guild. We are not under this category. those rate only for bookseller on 2012.
3. Agreed! But our community is still trying to find some other vendor for low rate!
4. This is a one kind of outreach/awareness/workshop programmer. We all are till going experimental process. So the "measures of succes" may be much more what we expect. We are trying to promote Wikipedia among the educated people of Eastern India.
5. Thank you. That fine for me too!

Jayantanth (talk) 06:58, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

• Note from WMIN: We have been in touch with the local community and support this proposal. We understand that this is their third attempt at getting a stall and acknowledge the community's hard work, enthusiasm and perseverance towards making this possible. On one previous occasion they had a grant that came in too late for them to participate Grants:WM_IN/Kolkata_Book_Fair_2012.

Kolkata Book Fair is one of the most coveted events in India with millions of people in attendance - according to the Wikipedia page it is the worlds largest in terms of footfalls. With regards to costs, I would like to say that we encouraged the community to negotiate the costs but we need to keep in mind that demand for stalls is extremely high and organisers are indifferent to requests for discounts simply because they are sure of having someone else take the stall at the higher rate quoted if we do not pay up. It is sellers market economics. With regards to decoration, once again we have urged negotiation however at the same time we need the stall to look decent in front of the millions of people who will visit the fair as it is the first impression that matters most, in my experience people are drawn more towards the good looking stalls. WMIN will support the local community wherever possible to make this event a success. Do let me know if you have any further questions for us. AroundTheGlobe (talk) 06:17, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Comments Tony1

Hi, thanks for this proposal. A few initial queries:

• Could you link to your bn.WP username on the application? Does Biswarup have a username?

Ans: Thank you for you queries, I am trying to clarify them...

• You can find me at bn:user:jayantanth, en:user:jayantanth Presently administrator at BN, Biswapur Ganguly is more active, in Commons, you can find his work commons:User:Gangulybiswarup/gallery

• I don't understand 3,16,000 or 2,00,000. Perhaps the international placement of punctuation? And do we have to travel to that link to learn the approximate exchange rate? Perhaps a rough exchange rate to help us understand the budget easily?

Ans: *You can this here [1].

• Please, specify the Wikipedias. Is it just the Bangla WP? Could we have links to the main pages, just as normal procedure, or even (to be anglocentric, sorry) links to the en.WP articles on those WPs? Buried down in measures of success is "Bengali, Oriya, Assamese, Bishnupriya Manipuri major four language from Eastern India"—but does that mean there are WPs for each of these? We're in the dark. Do the organisers, between them, speak those four languages, or have good contacts for them?

• : Ans: I have clearly mention at Kolkata Book Fair 2014. This is the Wikipedia's participation at Kolkata Book Fair 2014. Not mention the language specific. But we are prepare for all Indic language wikipedia after English.

• Measures of success: could we have some numbers, please? At an estimate of what would please you, such as number of footfalls and distribution of materials? (Is a footfall defined by a spoken exchange across the counter?).

  "New contributors to the Indic language & English Wikipedias (unmeasurable)"—why is that unmeasurable? If it's unmeasurable it doesn't belong in that section; why not something more precise, as a reasonable expectation if successful: 40 registrations, with 15 of them still active after two months, with more than 20 edits a month ... or something like that.

  "There are, of course, things that cannot be tangibly measured, such as the impact of the larger participation of East Indian community ( Bengali, Oriya, Assamese, Bishnupriya Manipuri major four language from Eastern India)in the dissemination of the free culture and access to knowledge via Wikipedia/Wikimedia."—this belongs in impact, I believe, not measures of success; could you shift it?

  "Any distinct follow-up initiatives with the attendees as a direct result of the book fair stall"—impossibly vague. I'd remove unless you can say ", such as X or Y."

• Ans: Footfall at the Kolkata Book Fair Wikimedia stall & Estimate of materials distributed can be measure easily. New contributors to the Indic language & English Wikipedias (measurable) at any time at http://stats.wikimedia.org/. This is a one kind of outreach/awareness/workshop programmer. We all are till going experimental process. So the "measures of succes" may be much more what we expect. We are trying to promote Wikipedia among the educated people of Eastern India."Any distinct follow-up initiatives with the attendees as a direct result of the book fair stall"!! Actually our community will try to follow-up people after project end.

• Will you have a point of contact on-wiki for new contributors? Some kind of personal mentoring, noticeboard? That would be good.

• Ans:*Yes we have in Bengali Wikipedia. https://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WC

• "It is planned to conduct a series of such workshops in Bengali and English"—does that mean bilingual workshops, or some workshops will be in Bengali entirely, and some in English entirely? How long? Do you have the room, computers, for this, and an approach to / experience in editor training? Grantmaking staff are finding that such workshops result in new editors only where there are repeat sessions for them, and/or the participants are chosen carefully.

• Ans:* We have not enough scape to conduct a good workshop, though we would try to make bilingual (but mainly English) workshops.

• Will t-shirts really promote WMF sites? Do people actually wear them? I'm always suspicious of this item :-) Same for buttons and stickers. Are the stickers for cars, and have they really been used in your previous experience, or do they end up on people's fridge doors?

• Ans:* -Tshirts only for volunteers and contest prize winner.

• "It will be great if some of the Wikimedia officials can attend these Fair."—unsure what your specific proposal is there. I'm not being negative, but simply seeking more info.

• Ans:* I am trying contact Bishakha Dutta or other staff. I shall start one theat to our Indian mailing list.

• 1.5M people will attend the fair? Sounds like you'll be swamped in a whole suburb-sized fairground. Will your stall be in a main part, passed by many people, or stuck down the back? What does the stall rent agreement say about that? What's the demographic of people who attend? Can we expect a high proportion of people with computer literacy and reasonable connections (not just mobile phone connections, which are hard to edit a lot from)?

• Ans:* Look some flickr images [2] and [3] repoted for 2012 bookkfair total footfall of 1.7 million in 12 days,

Looking forward to discussing the details. It seems like a good activity, IF we can know more details. BTW, sorry to niggle about gender, but we do have a gender crisis in the WM movement: would there be at least one woman on duty in the stall? Tony (talk) 06:21, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

• Ans:* I am very much aware gender crisis, we with support with Sanhita ( Bisakha Dutta) organized first Womes Wikipedia Meetups/Workshop in Kolkata, you can see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Kolkata/Kolkata4, presently we have two community member preferably present at stall User:Sucheta Ghoshal, mediawiki developers & user en:User:AnkitaS.

Budget table requires details: sorry to poke and prod, but more details are required in even the most summary of financial plans:

• 1.1 Stall booking @ 9 sqm for ? full days

Ans: Fair timing 12 PM-8 PM, you can say it full day!

• 2.1 Stall decoration: this is just the cost of physical items, or is someone to be employed to decorate out of this budget? Sounds like a lot of money.

Ans: GUILD give us "OPEN AIR 9 sqm" space, we have to make stall. So we have to engaged one decorator.

• 2.3 plasma TV ... that's rented, is it? Still, I want the number of days, like $323 @ $X per day.

Ans: Ranted, here one day projector + screen rent is Rs 2000 ($33) per day. And 44" plasma TV.

• X model 14" Laptop rent ... $81 @ ? per day.

Ans: Most of the volunteer trying to use their own laptop, those rented laptop who have not.

• Same for sound system and banner (I guess you're buying the banner?)

Ans: Sound system need for Workshop and will print the banner as per stall size orientation. You can find for more details with images here Grants talk:WM IN/Kolkata Book Fair 2012 or here https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Kolkata_Book_Fair

• 3.1 Transportation: another $81 amount ... estimate and put it in so we can see at least what you're estimating: $81 public transport x 4 people x ? days ... or X number of taxi rides)

Ans: It is a lump sum amount for any materiel transportation ( like furniture, food, decorative materials..etc, not community member or Volunteer)

• 4.1 etc Insurance seems too cheap (is it through the fair organizers? Who quoted the amount? Is it a blanket electricity charge by the organisers, too? Seems rather expensive for a TV, a sound system, and a few lights. I presume there's security for downtime at nights. Internet at $65 seems expensive.)

Ans:Insurance and electricity charge as said by GUILD from their past experience.

• 5.1 Number (rather large) of Bangla FAQs is given, but no number for 5.2 or 5.3. Presumably these are rough quotes from a printer?

Ans:Because most of the people are Bengali people from kolkata, but we are arranging for leaflets for most of the all Indic wikipedia.

WMIN will fund $444, roughly? Tony (talk) 00:34, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Ans: Yes , WMIN may help us extra except this budget. Jayantanth (talk) 06:33, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

I was hoping you'd just fix up the table overleaf. That is where we need more detail.

WMIN may help ... on the application it says it will help. Tony (talk) 23:28, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Tony, WMIN will help wherever possible. As far as funding goes, we cannot commit to any funding January onwards prior to a formal answer from WMF on our FDC application (the board is yet to take the final call). --AroundTheGlobe (talk) 09:43, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Comments NLIGuy

Hi, thank you for submitting. I'm generally in favour of your proposal. Just a few highlights, after reading the correspondence with my two esteemed colleagues above:

• I would like to encourage you to negotiate the booth costs this year as well. In your remarks above you mentioned speaking with them only in the last times. I think, since it's the highest budget item, I'd like to see some effort and not only referral to previous years' negotiations. The same thing goes for decorations.
• Joining Tony1 - please provide a translation of the budget table to $ from Rs, in addition to the totals.
• I would also ask - why send 15 people? How does 10 people instead of 15 affect the budget? If not much, then it's totally fine. Otherwise, I would supply a good reason or think about decreasing.

Again, thank you! As I said - these are only comments, I'm generally in favour. NLIGuy (talk) 08:05, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Thank you NLIGuy for your kind support. About stall booking charge I have already explain. I am not get your pint about " why send 15 people? Again thank you."Jayantanth (talk) 06:42, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

I was just asking why you need 15 people to operate a stall at a fair? NLIGuy (talk) 07:45, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Update: I read this again, seems you're only sending two people to the actual conference. Please disregard my question. Sorry! NLIGuy (talk) 10:28, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

All volunteer can go to our stall, anytime any day. I have just mentioning our main core volunteer. It may be less or more on the day! Jayantanth (talk) 12:53, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Comments Polimerek

1. Budget item: "Plasma TV 44 with stand and DVD Player" - is it cost of rent or cost of purchase? If the second one - what are you about to do with this after the Book Fair? Is DVD player really needed? Most contemporary TV's are able to read memory sticks.

Ans: Hi, Polimerek, Thank you for your queries, I agreed, We don't need DVD Player, We can make it with HDMI cable with Laptop. Than you for pointing me. I have channged the Item and rate. Jayantanth (talk) 06:45, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Please also update the total in the budget table when making changes. Asaf Bartov (WMF Grants) talk 23:03, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

1. As you plan to organise workshops - don't you need more laptops? Polimerek (talk) 21:39, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Answer to 1. Hi, both are to be taken on rent, none of them will be purchased. ----Rsrikanth05 (talk) 14:05, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

US dollar amounts added

I have added approximate US dollar amounts to the budget table. Asaf Bartov (WMF Grants) talk 18:26, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for doing this. Jayantanth (talk) 06:01, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Sponsorship

Hello,

did you try to approach any involved parties, particularly the Fair organizer (regarding the space), rental services of audio/video/IT equipment, manufacturers of T-shirts etc. to have them sponsor your activity = to rent (or create) the items you need for free or (significantly) discounted?

I certainly do not have any idea how it works in India, so I am just comparing to my own experiences from 2009-2011, when I completely managed each year to have 30 sqm stall, equipped with decoration (mainly large popup wall (cost 1500 USD) and huge Wikipedia logo (cost about 250 USD)), plasma TV and either standalone computer kiosks with touch screen table computer or touch screen plasma and computers, electricity (very expensive at fairs) in total cost of more than 6000 USD (without the decoration, which was single donation but reusable anytime) completely for free. The only expenses were direct expenses to people involved (transportation, refreshment, organization) and small expenses like printing of certain signs etc.

I strongly believe all around the world are nice people willing to give at least discount for such a useful thing what presentation of Wikipedia is, especially the organizer should when you are there at least for second time as I understood (they should at least keep you the same price like in past - I see it has raised quite a lot). So I strongly encourage you to try to approach relevant parties. As we say in Czech - "Asking costs nothing" and "You have nothing to loose, you can only gain". ;-)

In general, having a stall, booth, stand, table, whatever at book fair is very good idea, because there is quite a big impact there. So I gratefully acknowledge this submission and wish you good luck with it. Apart from my main suggestion for sponsorship above, I would also advocate for promoting also all other Wikimedia projects, not to focus only on Wikipedia. (Taken again from experiences with our stalls where we made several contacts based on other projects than Wikipedia.)

Please let me know, if you would need any suggestions re the organization or approaching to sponsors, I'll be more than happy to assist you with that.

— Danny B. 00:50, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

I think my comment above to MADe will help answer your question. The thing is WMIN does not yet have charity status at the Income Tax so that hampers local fundraising. Sponsors normally like to have tax breaks which the community cannot offer nor can they get it from WMIN. This is not even our own event, there will be hundreds of other stalls vying for the same sponsors and will have monetary gains to offer unlike us. Nevertheless, will request the local community to approach a few corporates to see if they would be willing to help, however the chances of raising significant amounts would be slim so I request you not to let that affect the current grant proposal. --AroundTheGlobe (talk) 09:49, 6 December 2013 (UTC)