Grants talk:PEG/User:Aliceba/Empowering Afrodescendant women in Wikipedia

Eligibility confirmed, Inspire Campaign

This Inspire Grant proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for the Inspire Campaign review. Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during this community comments period.

The committee's formal review begins on ’’6 April 2015’’, and grants will be announced at the end of April. See the schedule for more details.

Questions? Contact us at grants(at)wikimedia.org.’’

Proposal questions

Hi Aliceba. Thank you for submitting your proposal. It’s great to see that you’re building off the momentum and success of your recent activities, with a specific focus on engaging women. We are currently in the final stages of review and have a number of additional questions:

1. The main gender-related goals are 50% of articles created should be about women and 50% of workshop attendees should be women. What are your current numbers for attendance/content? Is this a significant increase? If yes, what specific strategies will you use to increase these numbers? If not, can you be more ambitious in your targets?

Response from Alice: For the 4 workshops we have held so far (Kickoff1, Kickoff2, HaitiCROWD, AfrolatinoCROWD), we have had 43 female attendees out of 70 i.e. 61% female attendance which we can safely maintain. Also, 50% of articles created/edited (15 out of 30) are about women or women's issues. As we have attained those numbers without child care, we can probably increase them with child care.

1. Measures of success: As mentioned above, we’d like to see more ambitious numbers around female content/participation for an Inspire proposal. In terms of participation, what are your plans for retention of women who attend the workshops/editathons? In order to reach your content goals, will you be focusing the editathons around specific themes? 20 articles for all the events seems quite low. What has been your experience thus far with article creation/improvement?

Response from Alice: Please see answer to previous question regarding female participation and articles creation. We have already met our goal of 30 articles mid-cycle for the first cycle which ends in June so we can safely increase the target on articles created/edited to 40 for this grant.

1. It would be great to have a better sense of the level of interest by the community (individuals? partner organizations?) in organizing editathons independently.

Response from Alice: For May alone, we got requests for Editathon support from the following orgs:

• Afrofuturism Conference
• Women in Jazz Editathon
• Black Lunchtable
• Afrobeat Radio at Left Forum

For After June, we have been sollicited by the Queens Public Library. --Aliceba (talk) 23:24, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

1. Please provide more details regarding the outreach to female academics. The measure of success around this activity is “female scholars involved in community.” Does this mean they are actively using Wikipedia in the classroom, as part of a Wikipedia Education Program? If yes, does the project team have the capacity to support these types of education programs? If not, we would encourage you to rethink this aspect of the proposal. If yes, we would encourage the team to start with the NYC conference to understand the interest, capabilities, and your teams own capacities to follow-up with education activities.

Response from Alice: We have the support of Pharos from the Wikimedia Education Foundation for this aspect as an adviser, participant and trainer. Ideally the targeted female scholars would not just be involved in the community but also teaching with Wikipedia.

1. It’s great to hear that you’re so supportive of empowering the local community in Haiti. However, from our experience, it takes sustained efforts over a longer time period, engaging a core active editing community to influence change. Organizing one editing workshop with limited ability for follow-up will not result in significant impact so we unfortunately will not be able to support this aspect of the proposal.
2. Regarding an “outreach campaign to make sure that Afrodescendant women are targeted by the policies Wikipedia will create as a result of the Inspire Campaign”, we wanted to clarify that we are not creating any new policies specific to the campaign. It would be great, however, if AfroCROWD’s general outreach included awareness building about the gender gap, and possibly related projects or tools that result from Inspire.
3. Please provide more details on the responsibilities of the members of the project team.

Please let us know if you have questions about the above comments or would like to schedule a call this week to discuss. Looking forward to your responses! Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 20:42, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Hi Alex, thanks for the feedback. It would be nice to schedule a call indeed. Let me know what works. If there is any possibility to hold it on the weekend, that would be great. --Aliceba (talk) 21:43, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Misc comments from top of page

Hi @Aliceba:, thanks for posting this Idea! I think it's got potential and I wanted to check in and see if you are interested in developing it further (and if funding is needed, in turning this into a grant proposal -- the Inspire campaign is offering $250,000 in grants funding to gendergap-related projects). The deadline for grant proposals is today, March 31, if you want to add more detail, rally people to help out, etc. If you'll need a couple more days, please do let me know. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 20:58, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi @AWang:- I am working on that grant proposal as we speak! Should have something by the end of the day NY Time. Thanks! --Aliceba (talk) 21:01, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi @Aliceba:, could you please elaborate the meaning of the Afrodescendant term, in light of all homo sapiens originating in Africa? I mean no disrespect, but this term is very ambiguous. 79.177.182.68 22:59, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for Empowering Afrodescendant women in Wikipedia

Scoring rubric	Score
(A) Impact potential Does it have the potential to increase gender diversity in Wikimedia projects, either in terms of content, contributors, or both? Does it have the potential for online impact? Can it be sustained, scaled, or adapted elsewhere after the grant ends?	9.3
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	8.7
(C) Ability to execute Can the scope be accomplished in the proposed timeframe? Is the budget realistic/efficient ? Do the participants have the necessary skills/experience?	8.0
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	8.7
Additional comments from the Committee: Afrodescendants are a very under represented group with the potential for many more editors of both genders. This project has great potential for creation of new articles with a lot of low hanging fruit. I very much like the idea of having a strong focus on recruiting women. This seems like an excellent project addressing one of the most pressing aspects of the gender gap (i.e. its intersectionality with racial diversity and representation). Love this idea and how inclusive it is in a targeted, pragmatic way. The impact potential seems very high, given the organizers' previous events. Right now they are working with several different language Wikipedias and it seems to be working. Would suggest being careful about over committing by working with too many different communities. Scaling back to 3 languages might show better results. Long time Wikipedians from NYC with good experience supported the first edit-a-thons and support this proposal to focus on gender diversity in content and recruitment as the project grows. They also have a dozen outreach partners. Right now, there seems to be engagement with the AfroCROWD community, but it would be great to see engagement with Wikipedia communities. For example, the "Community notification" section hasn't been completed. This proposal has a high degree of present and planned community engagement, and looks excellent on that front. The budget seems modest. Project management is reasonable to help sustain the project. Like that this draws on the support and ties of an existing community. Would be helpful to see more information about the Project Team. $180 for childcare at 3 events seems low if the caregivers are licensed and insured. Supportive of this proposal, but find the $5,500 for project management to be questionable as this type of work in the Wikimedia movement is typically done by volunteers. Allocating 60% of the budget to salary is a little high. There are quantitative goals but 20 articles is too low for the amount being spent on training and the number of workshops. Adding qualitative measures would be good.

Inspire funding decision

Congratulations! Your proposal has been selected for a Project and Event Grant through the Inspire Campaign.

The committee has recommended this proposal and WMF has approved funding for the full amount of your request, USD 6,280

Comments regarding this decision:
Thanks for engaging in the Inspire campaign! We’ll be in touch about setup soon.

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement.
2. Review the grant implementation information.
3. Start work on your project!

Questions? Contact us at grantswikimedia.org'

Report

There is no report for this activity, correct? What's the relation with Grants:PEG/Aliceba/Outreach to Afrodescendant community in US? --Nemo 13:30, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Hi Aliceba, per our discussion the due date for this report has been extended to August 18, 2016. Please note that I have moved the page here: Grants:PEG/User:Aliceba/Empowering_Afrodescendant_women_in_Wikipedia/Report so that it follows the naming convention necessary for our grant tracking tools to work. Please let me know if you need additional time or support to finish the financial documentation section.--KHarold (WMF) (talk) 23:51, 4 August 2016 (UTC)