Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Wikisound Audio Speaks Campaign 2024 Fiscal Year

Proposal Feedback and Invite for Comments & Response

Thank you for taking the time to submit your proposal. We reviewed it and had the following comments and questions and we look forward to your response that will then support us in the final deliberation process;

From a project review perspective, we see value in supporting under-represented communities in documenting their languages. We also recognize that the addition of audio files in several languages on Commons that can be used for Wikipedia articles. We see that your project consists of training communities in the introduction of audios in Wikipedia articles (value in terms of training). Together with a mentorship programme to train editors to enter audio files, bringing new contributors to participate in Wikimedia projects.

To support us in the next review , please find our question and further comments to engage with;

• First and importantly , we find your project to be similar to Lingua Libre and that brings a concern on overlap and therefor duplication of efforts. What is the between your project and Lingua Libre?
• We find it difficult to understand the interest to expand the project internatiionally, yet you mention that you did not have active participation this year as you had envisioned. Additionally, please share on the plan to increase participation.
• We find a lack of details about the languages to be promoted in relation to the common language (French) in the case of Benin and Niger - what is the plan of including these languages.
• Please share a rationale on having the 6 stated staff roles on the project - and their indicated costs. This remains unclear and especially when held against the scope of the project and its planned impact and their importance. For instance - we were uncertain on the need for a photographer on fixed salary for 12 months, and the same for Social Media Manager.
• We also see social media featuring a number of times in your plan and budget are curious on the rationale informing the tactic and how you will measure the impact resulting from it’s use to assess for effectiveness.
• We found your metrics to be unclear and especially on aspects related to creating Wikipedia articles and other projects. There is a sense of double counting - please be clear on the measures you will use to assess on specific goals.
• The budget requested of USD 89,520 is a outstanding significant increase compared to your current grant of USD 10,100. Would you speak to the increase taking into account all other feedback shared before.
• Lastly, would you speak to what you envision the impact of the project being in the short and long term - what needs to happen for you to confirm that the project works in fulfilling the the value the project promises to the movement .

Expert reviewers

Here is feedback on your project from staff working in the culture and heritage program;

They have mentioned various challenges that they are hoping to tackle in this project. But I am personally concerned about the project being too huge immediately after the pilot. I think with tools like LinguaLibre being available already and being used to create a million audio sounds already, it should be fairly easy to design and run a campaign around it.

I am also concerned about the entire team being fairly new to the movement with seemingly no engagement with the existing affiliates in the region.

We highly recommend you get in touch with the regional program officer to support you in understanding the questions raised or if you find it useful to meet with the committee as well, please let them know and they can organize a conversation meeting.

Thank you and we look forward to receiving your responses to support us in the next steps. On behalf of the MEA Regional Committee and Staff - VThamaini (WMF) (talk) 08:26, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Detail Answers and Explanations

Hello @VThamaini (WMF),

Thank you very much for taking the time to review our continued grant proposal WikiSound Audio Speaks Campaign 2024 fiscal year. We are delighted about how you understand how valuable this project is in supporting underrepresented communities, planning training and mentorship programs in bringing an impactful value to the Wikimedia movement at large.

After reviewing your questions we answer them based on the questions bulletin for a better understanding of our strategic plans for the proposals. Find the answers accordingly.

• Looking at Lingua Libre from its main goal we can see that Lingua Libre is a tool that allows editors to upload audio files into Wikimedia Commons. Also, to make use of it in relevant Wikimedia sister projects but with the help of a Bot using an internet connection to process and upload the audio. With no mentorship training for editors, no technical training on how to adequately edit or process audio to a desired format, or desired vocalizations, it will be difficult for Lingua Libre to access other forms of audio that require technical skills processing. Moreover, the Lingua Libre focuses mainly on oral language documentation of audio related to word pronunciation in the Wikimedia movement. And we quote from their page “Lingua Libre is a tool that allows to record a large number of words in a few hours (up to 1,000 words/hour with a clean word list and an experienced user). It automatizes the classic procedure for recording and adding audio-visual pronunciation files to Wikimedia projects. " and perhaps the WikiSound Audio Speaks Campaign is designed to provide a mentorship program for editors through training, workshops, and meetings to acquire skills/knowledge on how to create audio files technically using applications software, tools, and instruments, this gives them the privilege to make an editing on audio equalization for excellent vocalization just like image editing processing and rendering for an excellent illustration, unlike Lingua Libre that focuses mainly on oral language, WikiSound is designed to work in producing different form of audio, this is part of the WikiSound strategic plan putting different kinds of audios into consideration to create and make use of them, for example, word pronunciation (oral language) which we first start with, drum beating, instrumental music (which is now our focus target), songs, public domain sounds, animal vocalization, birds tweeting, religious recitations, and incantations worth of knowledge sharing, man-made sounds, and other examples of sounds worth encyclopedic which can not be mention. However, the scope of this project has to be implemented in a gradual process, not in a single year. This is where the difference between Lingua Libre and WikiSound Audio Speaks Campaign varies. First of all, for the pilot projects in 2023, we kickstarted with word pronunciation (oral language), In 2024 we came up with another type of sound WikiLoves Music, you can see it written in the grant proposal focusing on music not leaving oral language aside, still going along with it, here you can see the differences. Moreover, the mentorship program and contest are another big difference that shows no sign of overlapping or work duplication. Importantly, campaigns like WikiLoves Africa, WikiLoves Monuments, WikiLoves Butterfly, and other similar projects all work to contribute with images in the Wikimedia movement but from different angles and perspectives (each campaign focusing on images on a specific topic), to say that all these campaigns are supported in the movement not overlapping one another or duplicating efforts. In a nutshell, the only similarity between Lingua Libre and WikiSound Audio Speaks is all about audio contributions, both working in contributing with audio in different ways, but the difference is huge with no point of overlapping or duplication both work on different topics and areas of sound.

• Mentioning lack of participation as we said in the proposal is as a result of limited resources and limited training that limit our scope work to the extent that we limited our training, plans, and activities due to a change of plan, as recommended to start as a pilot which we understand why, and how important that is to start as pilot, but this time around we would like to expand the project to our initial plan, that would give us the privilege and flexibility to have adequate participation. In this year’s program, we are hoping to have adequate resources and suited training, workshops, campaigns, and outreaches that will increase participation, that’s why we wanted to be supported in this, to provide us with adequate resources and means of implementing our intended strategic plan. Importantly, there is a communication gap caused by undetailed explanations from us, what we mean here is that We are expanding internationally to Six countries in Africa which are as following Gambia, Chad, Cameroon, Benin Republic, Ghana, and Nigeria, making six countries, and we are including 15 language communities from the above mentioned six countries, that is to say the idea of expanding it internationally is mainly in African countries. Mentioning France, English, and Arabs is just a collaboration and sharing of ideas, especially seeing them as advanced communities, with France having the Lingua Libre tool we mentioned that this year we would use the tool for word pronunciation to help editors understand tools like it, that’s the reason why we mentioned France. Having said this now, we find out that the above is not well explained in the proposal. I hope this will help in understanding the expansion. The idea of expanding the projects to the international level (African communities) is to allow/open participation for mentees, We do believe that expanding it internationally will increase participation, having a belief that users in Wikimedia participate in international projects more than in local projects campaigns.

• For French is a collaboration and sharing of ideas not promotion as you understand, as explained in response to question 2 above. The expansion is mainly in African communities as mentioned in response to question two, which consists of six countries including Nigeria. The plan for including those languages is explained as part of our general strategic plan for the WikiSound Audio Speaks Campaign on our page here in meta WikiSound Audio Speaks Campaign under the strategic plan and collaboration, that every year we would be collaborating with User Groups, Community Leaders, and active users from different language communities to have Mentors/ambassadors of WikiSound that would help to participate in training editors in their native languages, that’s why we have mentorship program in WikiSound Campaign, coming to this point, we have communicated with some active users whom show keen interest in participating in the WikiSound Audio Speaks Campaign. The plan for including the languages is through the collaboration and strategic plans of WikiSound here WikiSound Audio Speaks Campaign. After getting approval we have indicated in our operational calendar that the first thing in the first week of January is project preparation; this will allow us to onboard mentors from the six countries and 15 communities in which we already have 7 mentors so far, to become mentors for WikiSound mentorship programs. Then we would collaborate with the existing affiliates seeing that we have all the necessary resources to help us implement the plans. The plan for Nigeria is that; we are onboarding six language communities Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Kanuri, Fulani, and Tiyap communities. The rest of the nine communities will be from the remaining 5 countries. In the case of Benin and Niger, we are including the Fon language and their community members, while in Niger Republic we would work with the Zabarmawa dialect of the Hausa language found only in Niger Republic.

• The rationale for having five staff cost not six as you mentioned will be explained as follows,

1. - Executive Program Coordinator; This is the role of the Executive Program Coordinator to oversee all work related to the program from January to December, will work tirelessly in to control the the entire program according to the operational calendar, coordinate and regulate all the aspects of the events accordingly. He would be paid 200 USD per month as a unit price for 12 months making the total of 2,400 USD per year.
2. - Program Coordinator; This is the role of the assistant Program Coordinator to help assist the Executive Program Coordinator in roles that he may require assistance in case work is not possible for one person to handle or roles that might require two people working at the same time. He would pay the sum of 100 USD per month as a unit price for 12 months, making the total of 1,200 USD per year.
3. - Graphics Designer; There is a need for for graphics designer to help in creating fliers, phamphlets, video tutorials editing, and graphics works to use in making promotional campaigns, training fliers, video tutorials, and other graphics work. His work is not too much or bulky and is very flexible work so he would given 40.1 USD as a unit price per month for 12 months making a total of 500 USD per year.
4. - Photographer; Part of the events we are hosting this coming year 2024 are as follow; outreaches, trips, in-person trainings, and workshops taking place from January to December, the number of events ranging to 10 or more events at different time and locations based on the above mentioned events, see the events in our operational calendar. So there is a need for a photographer, which is importantly required to cover the entire events, for the past decades all of the Wikimedia events we ran we paid for pictures by paying or volunteering to take the pictures to help document the program for historical and report purpose, so here for this year’s event 2024, we wanted to have a well-prepared photographer that would do the work efficiently as we planned to make the event run from January to December with huge activities to oversee. The photographer would be paid the sum of 50 USD per month as a unit salary/wages for 12 months, making a total of 600 USD per year.
5. - Social media manager; The social media manager will oversee and work tirelessly on social media posting on four or five social media handles, he would be in charge of posting fliers for promotional campaigns on social media and on-wiki, posting campaign videos and tutorials videos, posting surveys from time to time, documenting messages from audience and viewers, measuring of metrics and assessing them analytically. You will see that there are activities like promotional campaigns, outreach, studio sessions, meetings, training in different communities, and WPWA Contests, all there is need for a social media manager to carry out the task to have effectiveness and efficiency in media work for WikiSound Audio Speaks Campaign. The Social Media Manager would be paid the sum of 66.6 USD as unit salary/wages per month for 12 months making a total of 800 USD per year, as written in budget proposals.

• In regards to the social media campaign effectiveness and measure assessment, there are numerous reasons for that and different ways to measure/assess the essence and effectiveness of the social media campaign, listed below.

1. - For the community to be able to know and be aware that they can contribute audio files to the Wikimedia movement, they can add audio files, to wiktionary, they can add songs, drum beats, religious sounds, and other cultural-related sounds. This will also give room to proper awareness-making to the Contest that comes with the Campaign, the WPWA.
2. - Secondly the campaign will be able to teach the communities about the technical skills required to contribute and add audio files to the movement. this includes How to Record, How to Convert, How to Upload, and How to link the audio files. This is because using social media will make it easier for the communities to be able to get access to links for wiki videos for the training and also to be able to share the videos online for the communities. This is because new editors sometimes find it difficult to access some pages on the wiki.

And this will make the campaign go viral within communities and this will also help in getting turnover for the campaign. The campaign is not just social media-based, it going to be via Diff, Village Pump, on wiki, offline, and all means of teaching the community.

1. - In regards to the measurement of the metric for the campaign, via social media, there are tools to be used that show the amount of views, likes, comments, and shares on each social media that can be saved as PDF and be used as means of recording the metrics. There is also going to be a Google document that will be shared for people to respond to for it to be able to serve as a means of recording the responses of the whole participants and communities. This will serve as a means of reaching a larger audience/participants and also it will be a means of recording its impact on the entire campaign.
2. -Measuring the impact; this where another work of Social Media Manager is important, which he would be in charge of measuring statistical analysis, performances in WPWA, turnover in google doc surveys, responding to questions, measuring insights with the available tool in every social media handles to be saved as PDF for documentation, using other Wikimedia tools to measure core metrics for on Wiki activities. So the fix salary for Social Media Manager for 12 month is important for him work every time in counting and overseeing of measures, if not some metrics and measures will be neglected due to unavailability of other staffs.

• The idea of creating Wikipedia articles and other sister projects might look like double counting to you, but what we are trying to say here is that we accumulate the total impact from what we are expecting as core metrics after the entire program (after 12 months), we would have metrics from Wikimedia Commons; this is the number of audio files uploaded by mentees after training, workshop, contest and WPWA campaign for the entire campaign. In Wiktionary, Wikipedia, Wikibooks, and Wikivoyage; pages will be created or improved to help in linking the mentioned audio files uploaded in Wikimedia Commons, this is to have an impactful project. Importantly, we mentioned in our report that some audio files do not have articles/pages to be linked in, so there is a need for the campaign to create some page slots for the audio to fit in for an effective impact. For Wikidata, audio files will be added as labels in Wikidata items to help an automated linkage for the underrepresented communities that use the databox template to automatically generate infobox into articles. Lastly, the tools that will be used to measure these core metrics are WMF Hashtags; this tool will be used to measure contributions. A glamorous tool will be used to measure the number of audio used in different local Wikis and sister projects. The community Outreach Dashboard will be used to link all the subunit's training, campaign, and content contributions.
• Of course, the requested amount is a significant increase, the 10,100 USD is a piloting budget for the project campaign in 2023, which is planned to run for six months only. This year’s program 2024 is planned to run for 12 months. In the previous campaign (2023) we only ran two trainings (one in person, one general online training, and three local online trainings), and five meetings, hence, we managed to use the the limited resources to run the above-mentioned activities effectively, in seeing an impactful campaign progress. This year’s program is scheduled to run for 12 months from January to December 2024, with at least 12 training (online and in person), with meetups, Wikimania scholarship, Wikiindaba scholarship, studio cost, outreach cost, and staff cost, such is what makes the increase outstanding. Moreover, another reason for the increase is that there is too much devaluation in the Nigerian currency going up every month, goods and services are increasing rapidly with no notice, so care has to be taken in spending. because in the previous program, financial expenditures were hard for us to manage due to the Naira devaluating every month. Looking at the Naira devaluation in relationship to this year’s budget, we have to make a provision of adequate resources to help us in executing the program.

• The vision impact of this project will be unleashed if we are supported to carry out the project based on our initial strategic plans which we have now planned accordingly in the grant proposal that’s to be long-term. There is a need to support our strategic plans and budget to give us adequate resources for the smooth implementation of strategic plans in fulfilling the project promises. We mentioned that limiting the resources would affect the value of the impact that we intend to achieve. Importantly, the last year 2023 was short term yet we have achieved goals by providing more than 1,000 audio-impacting different wikis, though we have fewer turns for participation in WPWA, not in the entire campaigns. we do believe if supported with this strategic plan many users and mentees across Nigeria and African countries would benefit from learning the technical skills to contribute audio files and making use of them effectively in the movement, different users would impact their different communities. Also, from the previous version of this program we have seen how this project helped users contribute with audio after watching and learning from the video tutorials created. Also, rest assured that this project will indeed benefit the course of the Wikimedia movement from what we have designed to run the program through as seen in the proposal page.

Expert review: looking at the expert review concerning the project becoming huge; We wanted to be given a chance to implement the WikiSound project based on designated strategic plans, it's through this plan that we would bring excellent value and impact to Wikimedia movement on audio activities, we wanted to have adequate resources and adequate training, and having such is huge but it would add value to the movement.

Concerning the team; we want you to make in-depth inquiries about the team we are not new to the movement, we have been in the movement for the past five years, and three editors among the team have executed more than 20 projects in Hausa Community and Nigeria at large, we have worked with Hausa Wikimedians User Groups, Yoruba and Wikimedia Nigeria right from 2019 to date in so many projects. Moreover, we have a lot of experience reputation and working experience in the Wikimedia Community. We were once International Jurists for WikiLoves Africa, Admin in Hausa Wikipedias with other rights of task in English Wikipedia, with other experience which I’m not opportune to list all of our experiences and achievements as experienced editors not new to the movement.

Lingua Libre; concerning this tool We have made a detailed explanation in response to question one above, which I’m quite sure you will be very clear to understand the difference between Lingua Libre and the WikiSound Audio Speaks Campaign, and the similarities between them which will not seem to be an act of overlapping. lastly, we thank you once again for taking the time to review our proposal, we do hope that approach we have used in responding to the raised questions will be comprehensive and clear. We look forward to receiving your response again for any clarity or further explanation.

Thank you

WikiSound Audio Speaks Campaign Team

An@ss_koko^(Talk2me) 01:20, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for your response. Please link your previous reports and results of the pilot project here including any dashboards if used for the committee to engage with and learn more about the results of the pilot. VThamaini (WMF) (talk) 11:33, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Hello @VThamaini (WMF) I hope you are doing well.

There is a page we created for the report already in meta where we’ve provided all necessary documentation, links, information and other required documentation needed for reviewing and understanding the pilot project for WikiSound Audio Speaks Campaign 2023. Which we believe is better to share it with you as it contains that which is needed as you request.

All links and dashboards are provided in order and according to activities carried out, that’s to ease accessibility for reviewing.

You can find the the report page here https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiSound_Audio_Speaks_Campaign_Report_Page

Please call our attention if there is any clarification needed regarding the dashboard which seems to be complicated or further explanation is required.

Importantly, you will notice that the page was edited of recent, we changed the metrics from old version of impactful metrics which is around 30.92% to the updated one to 46.80% core metrics for the Glamorous tool. But we have kept the old version of the metrics visually and the new version update as separate. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiSound_Audio_Speaks_Campaign_Report_Page#Audios_and_impact

Please call our attention for further clarification.

Thank you

Anas An@ss_koko^(Talk2me) 10:31, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

General Support Funding - Not Funded

Dear Anas and Musa,

Thank you for submitting your application seeking General Support Funds - Wikimedia Community Fund. The MEA Regional Committee and Staff have thoroughly reviewed, discussed and deliberated upon your application and made the decision not to fund your project.

Here are a few points to note; It is clear from us, based on the information you have provided and our own review, that the pilot you implemented was useful in assessing and validating the value of your project in the movement in the suggested form. In this case, it shows there is an opportunity and that there are existing tools and projects to support those needs.

We see duplication of efforts and, therefore, a lack of clear value added to your project in its current structure and approach. We know there is an opportunity for audio documentation and representation, and we encourage you to continue experimenting with different ideas. Rapid funds are a useful program to fund future experimentation.

We hope to continue having regular conversations over the course of your project experimentation. Do set up a regular schedule to connect with your MEA Programme Officer based on your needs.

We thank you for your participation in the grant application process and hope to continue supporting you in future projects. --Aristidek5maya (talk) 14:29, 15 December 2023 (UTC)