Grants talk:PEG/WikiFranca/WikiConvention Francophone 2016

A decision has been made on this grant. Comments are still welcome on this page.

GAC members decisions

GAC members who support this request

1. --DerekvG (talk) 14:54, 4 March 2016 (UTC)
2. --Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 09:25, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
3. — Danny B. 00:27, 3 May 2016 (UTC) (and thanks for the detailed submission)

GAC members who abstain from voting/comment

1. Conflict of interests. Léna (talk) 09:37, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

GAC comments

Thanks for the submission. The request looks great with detailed information about many important aspects but it seems like there is very little or no information about the programme. Hence, my questions are the following:

1. What are the main topics that will be included in the programme? Do you plan to focus more on specific topics?
2. How many sessions will be held at the conference? How many presentations will be given?
3. How do you plan to encourage higher involvement of participants during the conference?
4. What are you thoughts regarding the conference follow-up? Do you plan any global initiatives on the French-language projects?

I would be glad if someone from the programme committee shares some thoughts about these questions. Best regards.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 12:19, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

1. As this is a community event, we don't want to restrict the topics people, especially editors who are not involved in a chapter, will talk about. With all its limitations, the survey of CEE Meeting 2014 seems to corroborate the idea that attempt of chapters members and editors are different. The call to conferences will start in a few days, and we hope to be surprised! Sure, we will talk about classical topics such as GLAM and education, but we hope for more emphasize on sharing knowledge: learn LUA, how to use pywikibot, how to do outreach with Visual Editor, how to master new tools like the Content Translation extension, and so on.

Subjects that will be probably covered during the event:

• tools developed by WMF (especially Visual Editor, Flow, Content translation)
• community aspect: detect and remove vandalism, attract and retain Wikipedia editors (Aide et accueil project, edit-a-thons, WikiMooc),
• a large part will be dedicated to LUA and Wikidata ; indeed currently there are many disagreements and unawareness about Wikidata on the French Wikipedia.
• maybe some sessions about regional languages in France.
• demonstrations of tools (like crotos, wikiscan, etc.)
• lobbying: at the UE level (dimitar) and in France (FOP campaign of WMFR)

The role of the Program Committee is thus more to help speakers to structure their session: not just selecting, but nurturing the propositions.

2. There will be 4 sessions in parallel and at least 45 presentations for 170 attendees. Cultural events and informal talks will take place on Friday and Sunday afternoon.

In comparison, the German WikiCon 2015 had 60 sessions. I didn't found the number of attendees, but they were probably more (+200).

The event is designed to minimize cost for participants, as well in financial as in paid vacation matter. Wikimedians will be able to leave the conference Sunday at 2 PM. Most of them would be able to be at home Sunday evening and at work Monday morning.

3. First of all, the conference itself will be designed by and for the attendees. Therefore there will be an active involvement of these participants during the conference. Second of all, the formats are flexible and we hope this opportunity will be seized to have a maximum of interactive sessions, mainly around problems solving and best practice sharing. The common language will help a lot to make conversations flow! Last but not least, informal exchanges will also be encouraged, around social events such as a special evening, the community village, the fact that most of the the attendees will be hosted in the same building, and so on.

4. I think that we will do the same thing that what was announced for CEE Meeting 2015.

Documentation. We are doing our best to document the planning of the event on meta, phabricator and Google docs. For example, we published the benchmark of WikiCon, the timeline of our event and contacts an reasons of cities rejected.

We will also do our best to document the entire meeting and share learnings and experiences with the wider movement. According to the plan, there will be textual notes of all sessions and video recordings of some sessions (we put a goal of 20% in our grant). We will also do some video interviews of participants, especially scholarships.

Evaluation. After the meeting, attendees will be surveyed to evaluate general satisfaction of meeting participants. Also a general analysis of the conference organization, its form and programme will be made to support future meeting organizers. The results of these activities will be published by 31 October 2015.

Projects. Sharing experiences and learning about each others’ projects, in addition to the programme design activities related to this meeting, will lead to more concrete collaborative efforts, which will result in actual on-wiki impact to various Wikimedia projects in many languages.

On behalf of the program committee, Pyb (talk) 15:08, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Comment from Ilario

No comment about scholarships. I suppose that they include only flights. I am always in favor of a cost sharing scolarships because it's inefficient to see that they are 30%-50% of the costs of the meeting. Probably fewer but motivated attendees should be considered a more efficient measure than counting a high number of attendees.

Anyway I suggest to leave the streaming except the case you can demonstrate that there is a high audience. Without an interaction the streaming gives only the advantage to be in real time. Probably the best would be to store the video files in a repository and to give the possibility to use them asynchronously. Basically I don't see a good costs/benefits relation. --Ilario (talk) 23:07, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your advices. We added video/streaming to the PEG but we are not sure what we will do exactly. It could costs a lot of money or time to for a small benefit. We still need to work on this subject.

We planned to deliver full scholarship (transport, accomodation and visa). I understand your point of view. But it's a goal of the event to lower the financial barriers of the event, by delivering scholarships, and founding accommodation that cost 35 euros per night. We are still waiting for the formal agreement, but scholarships for French-speaking population living in developing countries will be offered by the International Organisation of La Francophonie. Pyb (talk) 15:29, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Community comments

Date of the event

Can we know the date of the event --Touzrimounir (talk) 18:23, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

The venue is not already booked. We plan to organize the event the 20-21 August. Pyb (talk) 19:13, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

August 19th-21st. Léna (talk) 10:44, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

WMF Comments

Hi Pyb, thank you for all of the hard work you have put into this request, and into planning this conference. Your response to questions on the discussion page have been very helpful for understanding the kind of planning and thought you have put into this conference. It is always good to see that conference organizers have used surveys to find out what topics participants want to focus on the most. It is also clear from the many endorsements on the proposal that there is broad interest from the French language community to have this meeting.

• Chapters receiving Annual Plan Grants are not eligible for funding through Project and Event Grants. Although exceptions are made to fund movement-wide events, 75% of anticipated participants live in France, which would suggest that this event is a national conference. For that reason, we are not able to consider funding this conference through the PEG program.

• We do understand that one goal of this conference is to gather editors living in other Francophone countries, so we would consider funding travel scholarships or contributing toward event fees to cover the cost of participants living in countries without APG funded chapters.

• Looking closely at the budget, there are some expenses that could be cut to lower the cost of the conference. 9,013 Euros could be saved by providing just one dinner during the conference, eliminating t-shirts, merchandise, streaming, touch screen computer rental, and a conference banner from the budget. Making these changes to the budget may make it easier for WMFR and WMCH to adapt their annual plans to support this event.

This conference sounds like a good opportunity for WMFR and WMCH to engage with and support editors on French language projects. If those chapters decide to adapt their annual plans to provide more funding for this event, we can discuss ways to provide additional support so that editors from other countries are able to attend. Please let us know if you have any questions. --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 09:58, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Rescope of the request

Hello,

Since we were able to secure funding from Google France, L'Oréal foundation and Francophone International Organization to pay for travel scholarships for people coming from Francophone Africa. The challenge now is to find travel funding for French Canadians, we would like to send 4 or 5 participants, in part to prepare for Wikimania as WikiFranca is organizing Wikimania 2017 in Montreal. This is an important opportunity to get more people involved in organization of Wikimania, and to discuss project in person with people we have only met online.

Budget is approximately 1,200 Canadian dollars per person, accommodation 30 euro per night with breakfast, for 4 night.

Goals:

• Set goal for # of new volunteers or user groups (4 user groups) from WikiFranca conference who participate in wikimania organizing.
• Goal for strengthening WikiFranca coop, get more user groups and and individuals in the organization and participation of “international francophone contribution month”. 2 user groups currently help organize, 2 individuals help organize now. 3 new user groups help organize, and at least 6 people helping with the international coordination of the contribution month. The international organization team is very important to the success of this project, additional help is crucial.

WikiFranca with WM CA as fiscal sponsor.

Thank you in advance, Benoit Rochon (talk) for WikiFranca.

Hi Benoit Rochon . We are happy to support 5 French-Canadians to attend the conference. However, I am not clear from the grant what the exact amount is you are requesting. Please update the infobox and the budget table with the amount in the currency you would like to receive the funds and we can move forward. Thanks, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 21:51, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Hi Alex, thank you for your message. I've update the infobox to reflect the new reality of this grant, according to the 3 sponsorships we already have : Google France, L'Oréal and Organisation internationale de la francophonie (OIF). These sponsors are not covering the travel/accom of 5 French-Canadians, and we hope WMF can allow us to attend to the first French convention in August. Best regards, Benoit Rochon (talk) 22:11, 28 June 2016 (UTC)