Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Conference Fund/WikiOutdoor Training 2024

WMF review and feedback

Hi @Полупрофесионален Шофер and Wikimedia MKD team.

Thank you very much for this proposal and for your initiative in organizing the WikiOutdoor Training. I highly appreciate the time and effort you put into this proposal. I have reviewed your proposal and have some comments and follow up questions:

• With 12 responses to the community engagement survey, we unfortunately cannot determine if there is a community interest and a need for such a gathering. This is not a sufficient indication to base a funding decision on.
• Thank you for providing a clear set of objectives.
• Who are some of your external partners? Do you currently have any initiatives you are collaborating on with other institutions or partners? Can you please share some examples?
• What is the closest international airport to Prespa Lake? Our request is that events take place at locations that are no more than 1 flight from a major international hub. Does that apply?
• You mentioned a total of 30 participants, but I see the budget is reflecting only 23 participants (20 scholarships + 3 team members). Can you please clarify?

Thank you very much for this proposal. I think this is a very unique and creative idea. However, I’m afraid that this meeting is too small and therefore is out of scope for the Conference Fund. If I do think it is an innovative proposal I'm also concerned by the very low response rate which does not indicate this is a need or that this should be prioritized. Unfortunately we have a limited bucket of funds for community gathering and we do sometimes need to set up priorities based on community interest and potential impact.

I actually don’t think that a conference fund is the right path for this initiative, but it doesn't mean that it cannot be executed. So I have a couple of suggestions:

1. The in person component is quite limited. It seems like the majority of your work can be done remotely or online. And for outdoor skills such as photography and video-making skills, I think a good direction can be photography group tours, potentially with a professional instructor/ photographer. This can potentially be eligible for a Rapid fund or can be supported by different affiliates in the region if organized locally. I think you are also bringing up important points regarding the participants teaching and implementing what they have learned in their own communities. For this purpose, I actually think that having local in person tours or workshops can have a much wider impact. Instead of training 1 person from each community, you can extend your impact to several people and to grow engagement, content and skills.

2. Some of the more technical capacity building such as documenting, editing, searching and producing quality content, can be achieved online, or - by organizing local meetups and workshops (which are mostly eligible for Rapid Fund).

3. Another option is to do that as a satellite event at the CEE Meeting. Where you can benefit from more awareness and exposure to your work on a wider regional platform, more participation to engage and also better allocation of resources. If you are open to considering one of those options, and the CEE meeting organizers are willing to support it, we are open to allow a certain increase to the CEE Meeting budget request to accommodate your community meeting.

I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts on those suggestions. When you're able, please respond to the questions on meta and revise the proposal on Fluxx if needed (I have sent the application back on Fluxx so you can edit it, just don't forget to re-submit when you are done). These revisions will be due by March 5, 2024 after which the Conference Grant Committee will begin formal review of the proposal to make the funding decisions.

Best, CAlmog (WMF) (talk) 03:05, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you Chen for this initial review.

About some of your questions, please find a following responses:

• We will not include any external partners in the event, as the primary idea is to transfer our knowledge to the participants from the CEE Region.

• To Prespa Region nearest international airport is Ohrid Airport, but it is so frequent, so we will book flights to Skopje Airport (cca. 200 kms from the region), but our idea was to pick up the participants immediately and with the rent-a-cars all together to go the accommodation.

• In the grant proposal we explained that we will have 30 participants, from which we will also have 4 self-funded members, and that is why in the budget we mentioned only 13 total rooms (10 for participants and 3 for the organising team), accommodating 26 participants.

About your suggestions, please find our answers:

• We recognize the value of incorporating remote and online components, especially for technical capacity building. Our goal is to strike a balance between in-person and online activities to optimise resource utilisation while ensuring an effective learning experience. One of the objectives of our training is to transfer this knowledge to members from communities outside our county and who are already doing some kind of Wikiexpeditions.

• The idea of organising local workshops and tours resonates with our mission to transfer knowledge to less experienced communities. Drawing from our experience with Wikiexpeditions, we understand the importance of how expeditions are conducted and why they are valuable. We will explore the feasibility of implementing local initiatives, possibly in collaboration with regional affiliates but in order to that we need to organise some kind of regional event.

• We appreciate the suggestion of integrating our training as a satellite event at the CEE Meeting. Unfortunately, in this way we can not share the full potential of such an integration of our approach and how to transfer knowledge to less experienced communities without bringing them on site and showing them the real spirit of wiki expeditions. Furthermore, given that the CEE Meeting will take place in Istanbul, we will face logistical problems to conduct the Outdoor Training outside of the city limits.

Best regards, Полупрофесионален Шофер (talk) 17:16, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Firstly I want to thank you for proposing this event. I really like this proposal and, as an organiser of multiple Wiki Loves events including 2 drone photography competitions, I understand the need for an event like this and appreciate its value. A very innovative outdoor event that, I feel, has great potential. I do however have a couple questions and suggestions:

• Suggestion: have you considered inviting or otherwise including members of the OpenStreetMap community in your region? They is a very similar and mission aligned group. I can see synergies with the type of outdoor mapping events they do and this event. It would also create stronger connections between our two communities thereby adding a strong outreach component to this event.
• Suggestion: try to ensure that you have an indoor meeting space aviable, ideally at your hotel. This would give you a central meetup point to organise, decompress, review events, and share learnings with each other in a convient location. It would also provide you with a space to use in case of bad weather. It would provide some logistical flexibility.
• Suggestion: create/implement a train-the-trainer program so learnings and experiences gained from this event can be more widely shared. This would likely significantly increase the impact of this event.
• Suggestion: have you considered giving a presentation of this event, its vision, its impact, and what you learnt from it at a large Wikimedia conference so as to share this event with the wider community? Such as Wikimania or CEE conference?
• Concern: this is an expensive proposal on a per-attendee level. $26,276 for 30 attendees amounting to roughly $875 per attendee is expensive. Is there anywhere where costs could be cut and/or the number of attendees increased? Is $3000 for 2 months of an event organiser's time really necessary (for example)? Could costs be cut by having the event in a major city when travel costs could be cut down on (another example)? Having said that, we love the concept of We especially like the ‘learning by doing and not learning by telling’. This is a unique feature of this proposal and event that we find compelling.
• Concern: there is some concern around ensuring that sufficient safety precautions have been taken given that it is an outdoor event. Perhaps a safety strategy could be considered?

Again, I would like to thank you for this compelling and novel submission. We see how it could be of great value to the community in many ways. Please do not be put off by our feedback, it is just so new we have some additional questions. --Discott (talk) 12:03, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

Thank you Discott for you interesting encouraging words, interesting suggestions and helpful comments.

• Some members from our community extended contacts with the local OpenStreetMap community through the social networks, and we will make efforts to connect to them and invite to take part in the WikiOutdoor Training. We can figure out ways on how to include OpenStreetMap in the programme and teach participants to use it in order to map the visited places during the event.

• We have already made arrangements with a lodging facility that has indoor meeting space available to accommodate our needs. Given that the programme for the training will also include a indoor component, this was one of the principle criteria when searching for lodging facilities in the host region.

• The principle idea behind the training is to inspire participants to plan and implement outdoor activities in their countries as well as to develop their leadership and mentorship skills to convey the knowledge they would acquire during the event to members of their local communities. That being said, the hands-on presentations provided during the training will be forwarded-looking in the sense that they should be re-told over and over again.

• We plan to submit session proposals on the training for WikiLive 2024, which is due to be held in Belgrade in May, and for Wikimania 2024, which will take place in Katowice. In addition, we will make further efforts through the CEE Hub to contact members from other regions in order to present the idea.

• After revising the budget, we managed to cut some unnecessary items to get to a total amount of $24,700. We think that some budget items could be replaced with in-kind donations, which contributes to lowering the amount. The revised budget can be found on the following link. Regarding the number of participants, our goal was to make sure that every participant would acquire specific knowledge, so we decided to go with 30 participants as an optimal number.

• All participant will be fully insured during the event. We will also update our safety protocols to include some safety precautions.

Best regards.--Полупрофесионален Шофер (talk) 20:50, 20 March 2024 (UTC)