Grants talk:PEG/WM PH/Software Freedom Day Philippines 2011

Kiril Simeonovski questions

Thanks for submitting the application. In general the scope of the application is clear and it surely might be a glorious event in the Philippines. My questions here are:

1. Do you have any alternative ways to use this money instead of supporting such event?
2. How do you plan to manage the activities to receive wide attention on the event and fulfill the measures of success?
3. How can you figure out that the newbies editing on the projects will be as result of the success reached during this event?

The last question has been discussed in some of the previous applications, so I advise carefully conceived answer. Best regards.--Kiril Simeonovski 11:04, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Hi Kiril. Allow me to answer these questions, but do be advised that other members of the Wikimedia Philippines Board of Trustees will also be answering these questions, and that the answers that I can give are based on my own understanding of the situation. Anyway, I believe I can answer your questions as follows:

1. Yes, there are alternative ways for using this money, but we feel that these alternatives are untenable given our manpower resources and the time frame we currently have. Also, as I mentioned last year at the Chapters Conference, we are playing a very serious game of catch-up and events like Software Freedom Day allow us to establish a stronger foothold as a leading player in the Philippine free software movement. Standalone events, when planned hastily, will not give us that leverage and amount of networking that this event can provide.
2. As far as I know, we heavily promote our activities on the Internet via social media, which ensures that the people which follow our seven social media accounts are aware of our participation in the event. We can also write a press release on it. However, our participation goes far beyond just talking: we also actively participate in outreach activities in the events that we partake in. Essentially, we also try to encourage people to edit Wikipedia when we sponsor such events. As I am leaving for Poland around two weeks prior to this event (which I know you're aware of), I don't know how this will play out exactly, but I presume we will observe what we've always done.
3. I am under the presumption that we will have a booth which people will visit, and so when that happens, we just ask people to sign in our log sheet and we will add a column which asks them whether or not they want to start editing Wikipedia. Maybe someone else from the Board can better-answer this.

I hope I was able to answer your questions, and I hope to see the approval of this request. Thanks. :) --Sky Harbor ^(talk) 14:51, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

Hi Kiril, here are my answers to your questions:

1. Yes, there are plenty of alternative ways to spend the money and support other organizations. But we believe that it is best to support movements (like the Free and Open Source Software movement) that are aligned to our goals, which is promoting free culture. In the future, we can partner with them and they can support us also on our other projects.
2. We have done promoting events in the past through social media, bloggers and producing press releases. Those methods were quite effective and there are many people asking about our projects after our events. In Software Freedom Day, we will definitely use this method again. Of course, on the actual event, we will be having a booth that filled with Wikimedia materials (including Wikipedia 0.8 DVDs for give-aways) to promote our projects. I believe that many people would be most likely interested in joining Wikimedia projects because most of the people attending this event are Free and Open Software enthusiasts.
3. We will have all people visiting the booth to register and get their contact details. After the event, we will follow them up and invite them to join Wikimedia Philippines or participate on our projects. If they already joined one or more Wikipedias (or other Wikimedia projects), we will take note of their usernames.

I hope that Josh (Sky Harbor) and I answered your questions. If you have any further questions, we would gladly answer them. Thanks. :-) --Jojit (talk) 16:56, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you. Now I've got a clearer view over the main activities that you're working on.--Kiril Simeonovski 14:55, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

Victoria's opinion

This is an excellent project, which fits very well with the Wikimedia Movement (WM) strategic goals: finding new editors for Wikimedia projects, especially in the Global South. Because the audience of the Software Freedom Day will be highly computer literate and have/will acquire knowledge of the Open Source movement, the grant will allow to maximize impact per $ - all the infrastructure is provided. In my opinion, putting WM into a wider context of the Free Culture Movement is much better than organizing entire big events. I think the grant should be fully funded.--Victoria 15:02, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

I agree with Victoria. Seems like the whole team is very well dedicated on the activities to push the all efforts in supporting this event. And I hope it'll produce the best results for the Movement.--Kiril Simeonovski 08:11, 17 August 2011 (UTC)