Grants talk:PEG/Wikimedians of Ecuador/Wikipedia 15 in Ecuador

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

GAC members who support this request

1. --DerekvG (talk) 13:23, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

WMF comments

Hi Edjoerv, it is great to see how dedicated and enthusiastic your community is, clearly a lot of thought and effort was put into this request . As I said in my email this week, we very much want to support your community with these projects, but we will not be able to get funding to you before the event begins. We can reimburse you for approved expenses if you are able to pay the costs up front. Please see our comments, recommendations for planning, and guidelines on what expenses we would be willing to approve for reimbursement. I

1. The current proposal has several outreach events in it that we will consider funding, but, we are concerned that having so many events in a one week period may burn out volunteers. One of the most important parts of outreach is having a follow-up strategy to keep event participants engaged. This may be difficult to do if volunteers are too burned out from the week full of activities. We recommend that you spread these events out over several weeks or months will give outreach event participants several opportunities to become active members of your community.
2. We can fund up to $10 per person (for active community members and volunteers) for a WP15 event and $150 in merchandise. You could print t-shirts, or choose to create stickers or some other less expensive item to distribute to more people. We cannot fund travel to the main event, unless the travel is necessary for a volunteer to participate in a sustainable, impactful project. If there are several volunteers located in another city, we would consider funding local meetups for them to celebrate Wikipedia 15.
3. Are there local volunteers in the cities where you have proposed Wikitakes events and talks at universities? Sending a volunteer to host an event in a city where they do not live is not a sustainable approach to growing participation, so we cannot fund those travel expenses. We suggest that you host Wikitakes and university outreach events only in cities where you have active volunteers.
4. We can fund prizes/certificates for the Wiki takes events if the goal is to increase the number of active contributors in your community and not just to create content. This will require a strategy for encouraging participants to become active contributors in the weeks and months AFTER the Wikipedia 15 celebration.If you have local volunteers, they could host follow-up editathons for the Wikitakes participants where they learn basic editing skills and add contest images to articles.
5. Even with a focus on recruiting active volunteers, you should also set a measure of success for the number of Wikitakes images that will be used on Wikimedia project pages. Many event and program organizers report that goals motivate volunteers and new participants. Also, please set a measure of success for the number of new users who become active editors.
6. The advertising budget is very high, and not something we will fund. Consider wiki banners, site notices, social media, and ask partners for help with promotion. A volunteer in Athens asked a job-search website to advertise their education program - this banner attracted 5 times more women than a banner on Greek Wikipedia.
7. We will not fund gifts to partners and officials.

Let us know if you would like to modify this request and open it for review so that you can have a budget for the Wikipedia 15 event approved for reimbursement, and if you need additional clarification on these comments.

Funding decision

Hi Edjoerv, we are pleased to support your community with $450 USD to fund a Wikipedia 15 celebration lunch for volunteers (at $10 per person), as well as t-shirts and certificates to recognize volunteers and participants in the other events you have planned. We look forward to seeing the outcomes and lessons learned from the Wikitakes events, and hope to work with you in the early planning stages of your next project that needs funding. Cheers! --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 06:01, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Not funded

Hi Edjoerv. Unfortunately, we have updated the status of this grant to "not funded" as we have not been able to reach you for several months regarding the grant agreement. Best, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 16:48, 26 October 2016 (UTC)