Grants talk:PEG/WM VE/Start-Up/Report/Interim

Thank you for submitting this interim report. It's good to hear you were finally able to purchase equipment for the chapter. Congrats on a very successful Wikivoyage Contest! 14,236 photos is really impressive!

We have a few questions/comments on the report and we look forward to your response:

1. Do you know how many of the photos submitted during the Wikivoyage contest are already being used on wiki projects? You can use the glamorous tool to find out! Have prizes for WikiVoyage been given out yet?
2. What is your assessment of how the edit-a-thon went? The report says there were 8 articles created, but can you provide more information? How many people attended? Were they new or experienced editors? Did the edit-a-thon meet your expectations? If not, what lessons were learned?
3. Which cultural and educational institutions are you partnering with? What is the goal of those partnerships?
4. Is Venezuela currently participating in Wiki Loves Monuments?
5. We understand some of your volunteer project organizers are no longer active. Do you have a strategy for replacing them or conducting more outreach? How will this affect the plans for the remainder of the grant period? Venezuela has over 200 active editors. It might be a great time to organize a wikiconference to get an understanding of who the editors are, what are their interests and needs, and how the chapter can support them. We are happy to brainstorm ideas with you.
6. You have spent about 17% of the budget. Do you plan on making any changes for the remainder of the grant period?

Thank you for your work and we look forward to talking more about the grant plans and vision for WMVE. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 21:06, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Hi Alex, thanks for the imput, to answer your questions;

1. We don’t know how many are being used; some of our members proposed to organize something with the Wikivoyage site to make room to so many good images of Venezuela. We are still in the evaluation phase, probably by mid October we had the winners of the contest.
2. The information is available in es:wiki, only 2 new editors came by this edit-a-thon, the rest were our volunteers. Frankly, the event did not meet the expectations, we even use the CentralNotice to gather attention, but we didn’t saw the same outcome of wikivioyage contest (the edit-a-thon was held one month after wikivoyage ended).
3. Our main partner is one firm that develops free software; they want to approach middle and high schools in Venezuela with a wiki-software based in Wikipedia. They have a data base of educational content and want to add others feature like videos (i.e. khan academy). We’re still trying to digest the project but seen very important because they have the contact with the schools in here, and we have the wiki knowledge. Another key institution is the UCV (Universidad Central de Venezuela), the most important college of Venezuela; we are going to participate in a tech congress next month to start to moving thing there. The main goal of this is to start our project of education in the UCV.
4. No, due to the log of the WikiViajes we decide to not participate this year, the outcome of WikiViajes really to us by surprise.
5. We need more volunteers, this is a fact. Yes, some of our member left (in a bad way, like they were burnout for the effort of putting together the chapter) but some of the others left the country for good, how to found replace for them is still unknown for us. We are happy to discuss and have brainstorm sessions with you guys. The wikiconference seen a good approach to gather new volunteers and we’re definitely going to talk about it.
6. Yes, probably with the periods. March 31 is around the corner, we start to move things a few months ago, we need more time, more ideas, more people, more of everything, we set our general assemble early in November, and after that date we probably gonna make some changes to this grant.

Regards, --Oscar (t) · @ 20:08, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Hi Oscar. Thanks for the responses and for taking the time to talk with me the other day. We recognize the political situation has made some of your activities, especially education, difficult to complete and that the turnover in volunteers has had a large impact on WMVE. I will follow-up regarding ideas for volunteer recruitment and a Wikimedia Conference. Hopefully the general assembly will be a good opportunity to think about your resources and adjust your program plan. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 18:45, 30 September 2014 (UTC)