Grants talk:Project/AfroCuration

Proposal Clinics

Hello Papa,

Thanks for beginning to draft your proposal for the Project Grants open call! I wanted to make sure you are aware that we are hosting proposal clinics for applicants to ask questions and get feedback. If you would like to attend, you can find the dates, times, and videoconference links posted on this page meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project. These are optional opportunities to get support improving your proposal. Let me know if you have any questions! Good luck with finishing your proposal for the February 10 deadline!

Warm regards,

--MCasoValdes (WMF) (talk) 01:06, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Reminder: Change status to proposed to submit

IMPORTANT: Please note that you must change your proposal status from "draft" to "proposed" by the submission deadline in order for your proposal to be reviewed in the current round. When your proposal has been successfully submitted, it will show up in the "Open proposals" list (it may take several minutes for the list to update after you submit it). Applications that are not completely filled out and correctly submitted by the deadline will not be reviewed. To submit your proposal, you must complete all fields of the application and then:

1. Click on "edit source"

2. Change "|status=DRAFT" to "|status=PROPOSED"

3. Click the "Publish changes" button.

Thank you,

--MCasoValdes (WMF) (talk) 01:06, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed, Round 1 2021 - Community Organizing proposal

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for review in Round 1 2021 for Community Organizing projects. This decision is contingent upon compliance with our COVID-19 guidelines. If your proposal includes travel and/or offline events, you must ensure that all of the following are true:

• You have reviewed and can comply with the guidelines linked above.
• If necessary because of COVID-19 safety risks, you can complete the core components of your proposed work plan _without_ offline events or travel.
• You are able to postpone any planned offline events or travel until the Wikimedia Foundation’s guidelines allow for them, without significant harm to the goals of your project.
• You include a COVID-19 planning section in your activities plan. In this section, you should provide a brief summary of how your project plan will meet COVID-19 guidelines, and how it would impact your project if travel and offline events prove unfeasible throughout the entire life of your project. If you have not already included this in your proposal, you have until February 28 to add it.

The Community review period is now underway, from February 20-March 4. We encourage you to make sure that stakeholders, volunteers, and/or communities impacted by your proposed project are aware of your proposal and invite them to give feedback on your talkpage. This is a great way to make sure that you are meeting the needs of the people you plan to work with and it can help you improve your project.

• If you are applying for funds in a region where there is a Wikimedia Affiliate working, we encourage you to let them know about your project, too.
• If you _are_ a Wikimedia Affiliate applying for a Project Grant: A special reminder that our guidelines and criteria require you to announce your Project Grant requests on your official user group page on Meta and a local language forum that is recognized by your group, to allow adequate space for objections and support to be voiced).

Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during the community review period. By March 4, make sure that your proposal has incorporated any revisions you want to make and complies with all of our guidelines. If you have not already done so, you can make use of our project planning resources to improve your proposal further, too.

The Project Grant committee's formal review for round 1 2020 will occur March 5 through March 20, 2021. We ask that you refrain from making any further changes to your proposal during the committee review period, so we can be sure that all committee members are scoring the same version of the proposal.

Grantees will be announced Friday, April 22, 2021. Sometimes we have to make some changes to the round schedule. If that happens, it will be reflected on the round schedule on the Project Grants start page.

We look forward to engaging with you in this Round!

Questions? Contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 05:22, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Covid-19 planning section

Much appreciate for the above prompts. After better review of the material I realised a dedicated section of "Covid-19 planning" must be added. Content for this is already present but dispersed through the application. I'll collect these elements, draft something clear, and add the content shortly.

Something that would be helpful is clarity on the guidelines around maximum number of people meeting. From the WMF guidelines, I read there is respect of local government rules (which in some cases allow congregation of more than 10 people) but lower it's written that events with 10 people or less are eligible. Is the official position from WMF that if more than 10 is ok for local government it's ok for WMF? or is this an incorrect logical assumption on our part? I hope it's clear from the application that we wish to respect these rules, and understand the best way forward to make our events happen with the support of local Wikimedia affiliates. -Papa Baiden (talk) 11:59, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

I've just added the section now. Papa Baiden (talk) 14:23, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for AfroCuration

Scoring rubric	Score
(A) Impact potential Does it have the potential to increase gender diversity in Wikimedia projects, either in terms of content, contributors, or both? Does it have the potential for online impact? Can it be sustained, scaled, or adapted elsewhere after the grant ends?	6.4
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	4.6
(C) Ability to execute Can the scope be accomplished in the proposed timeframe? Is the budget realistic/efficient ? Do the participants have the necessary skills/experience?	4.2
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	4.4
Additional comments from the Committee: The review of the history is an interesting problem. Bridging knowledge gap in local languages does fit with Wikimedia's strategic priorities Usual GLAM structure and delivery. One of their measures of success is to create one new language Wikipedia but it is not clear from the proposal how they plan to achieve that. One of the measures of successes is "200K article views collectively". It is not clear how they plan to measure or evaluate this page view. According to the proposal, they plan to create 500 articles across 10 African languages. It is not clear from the proposal how they plan to create these articles. Who are/is going to create the article? They planned to organize a series of training but it is not clear how they plan to evaluate the impact of the training and there is no strategy on how to follow up with the trainee after the event. I am not sure a project of this scale could be successfully be implemented by the grantee. It seems more like a commercial project. Does not align with the philosophy of the Wikimedia movement. The main work is done by the WiR while the project manager is limited to some actions. This unbalanced structure seems to me not perfect for a project that should work on the content. It might be interesting for the grantee to share details of the impact of the Wiki Africa in the past project. Overall, they have the capacity to execute the project and I want to believe that they could do this effectively with the support of the local group they planned to work with. The program is ambitious about the number of languages involved. Over 80% of the people who endorsed this proposal are new editors and no significant endorsement by the African Wikimedia community. Needs additional clarification of the human resources. The action of the PM is limited to monitor the time and the budget and to do meetings. May it be sufficient for the success of the project? It seems more a top-down project and I am skeptical that this will create an impact for this specific kind of project. According to the proposal, they plan to create 500 articles across 10 African languages. It is not clear from the proposal how they plan to create these articles. Who are/is going to create the article? They planned to organize a series of training but it is not clear how they plan to evaluate the impact of the training and there is no strategy on how to follow up with the trainee after the event. Overrated budgeting and the grantee has not that much to contribute to any kind of Wikimedia projects. So there is a lack of necessary skills/experience, which is exposed within the project plan. The project will have a great impact in boosting information on Africa's Culture

Opportunity to respond to committee comments in the next week

The Project Grants Committee has conducted a preliminary assessment of your proposal. Based on their initial review, a majority of committee reviewers have not recommended your proposal for funding. You can read more about their reasons for this decision in their comments above. Before the committee finalizes this decision, they would like to provide you with an opportunity to respond to their comments.

Next steps:

1. Aggregated committee comments from the committee are posted above. Note that these comments may vary, or even contradict each other, since they reflect the conclusions of multiple individual committee members who independently reviewed this proposal. We recommend that you review all the feedback carefully and post any responses, clarifications or questions on this talk page by 5pm UTC on Monday, March 29, 2021. If you make any revisions to your proposal based on committee feedback, we recommend that you also summarize the changes on your talkpage.
2. The committee will review any additional feedback you post on your talkpage before making a final funding decision. A decision will be announced no later than Friday, April 22, 2021.

Questions? Contact us.

MSKF response to Project Grants Committee concerns

Please see below our responses to the concerns raised by the grants committee:

• Moleskine Foundation in collaboration with support from a member of the language committee went through the workflow of requesting and creating a new language, Eleme language (spoken by about 190K people in Africa) in the incubator. Working with our institutional partners and their communities, our plan is to support the growth of the Eleme Wikipedia into a full Wikipedia project. The AfroCuration project will leverage its experience and collaborations with the Wikipedia community to a new language, Macau, on Wikipedia.
• To measure the goal of “200K article views collectives”, we will use Wikimedia dashboard tools like toolforge, xtools, and the outreach dashboard, which is common practice of Wikipedia projects and campaigns to monitor and track this metric. The WiR candidate will support the project build and manage the analytical tools and outreach dashboard. Here are examples of outreach dashboards we developed in December 2019 and December 2020.
• The project is run hand in hand with community organisers and leaders of the various language communities. Their leadership will be employed in providing localised perspective on the project and to steer the project in the reasonable contexts of their communities. As stated in the grant request, the target of the project is to work with 10 language communities. So the number of targeted articles presented was based on the fact that we expect each language community to create at least 50 articles locally, which is plausible based on our previous work and past experience in such a campaign. So in essence the local organizers locally lead the editathons, the participants of these trainings (whether new or current contributors) will be absorbed through local activities and hence our close collaborations with these local groups.
• AfroCuration is far from a commercial project but a project designed to support bring diverse new editors from Africa into the Wikimedia movement to create a more inclusive Wikipedia by translating relevant knowledge on Wikipedia into African languages. Based on our consultations with community members, this project aligns with the work of the community and the movement strategy.
• The AfroCuration has two elements to it. Building partnerships with institutional partners in African and mobilizing new editors to participate in the project. Although working hand-in-hand on making sure the project is successful, the project manager will work towards identifying and building partnerships with institutional partners and the WiR will be responsible for developing implementing the campaign on Wikipedia. Both roles come together in making sure that the project is successful overall. This is a framework that has been designed based on our initial work and feedback from community members.
• We believe that the number of quoted languages involved in the project is rather entirely realistic. Particularly because we run a pilot of the project last year which saw at least 16 language communities participating, so quoting 10 actually is a moderate and narrowed approach to ensure we are living up to some of the lessons from our pilot activity last year, the reduce in the target audience is a meticulous approach tighten the target group to ensure focus and improve overall monitoring and support for the project in the select language communities.
• I think we have shown proof of our work by indicating our past projects and explaining the successes chalked therein. Our experience in the way we ran the pilot last year also showed what a reasonable budget will look like for this project and we understand if some budget lines are not the usual.

Papa Baiden (talk) 16:21, 2 April 2021 (UTC) }}

Round 1 2021 decision

Congratulations! Your proposal has been selected for a Project Grant.

The committee has recommended this proposal and WMF has approved funding for the full amount of your request, $56,920

Comments regarding this decision:
The committee is pleased to fund extension of the Moleskine Foundations prior pilot work in this important priority area. They appreciate the applicant’s practical experience, and are glad to support local language Wikipedias in Africa.

Funding contingencies:

• If any of the cultural partnerships progress to digitization or uploads, Wikimedia Foundation staff from the GLAM & Culture Team will advise.
• Continued advisorship by Felix Nartey throughout the life of the project
• If the project includes any offline activities (e.g. travel and in-person events), funding is contingent upon compliance with the Wikimedia Foundation's COVID-19 guidelines. We require that you complete the Risk Assessment Tool. Offline events may only proceed if the tool results continue to be green or yellow. You must complete the tool:
  • 14 days before any travel and/or gathering event
  • 24 hours before any travel and/or gathering event
• You must provide a job description for the Wikimedian in Residence specifically outlining the scope and planned activities of the role. Your Program Officer must review and approve the job description before the project begins. Please note that we consider funding for WiR activities to be short-term. Grant funding that the Wikimedia Foundation provides for WiRs is not intended to support ongoing workflows, but to leverage the partnership to build a sustainable platform that ensures outcomes long after the WiR has completed their service. Their work should secure long-term outcomes that do not depend on ongoing grant funding.

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement and setup a monthly check-in schedule.
2. Review the information for grantees.
3. Use the new buttons on your original proposal to create your project pages.
4. Start work on your project!

Upcoming changes to Wikimedia Foundation Grants

Over the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has been undergoing a community consultation process to launch a new grants strategy. Our proposed programs are posted on Meta here: Grants Strategy Relaunch 2020-2021. If you have suggestions about how we can improve our programs in the future, you can find information about how to give feedback here: Get involved. We are also currently seeking candidates to serve on regional grants committees and we'd appreciate it if you could help us spread the word to strong candidates--you can find out more here. We will launch our new programs in July 2021. If you are interested in submitting future proposals for funding, stay tuned to learn more about our future programs.

Marti (WMF) (talk) 01:19, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Request to make changes to our project goals

Dear community resource team I'm writing to request your support on some new decisions that concern our grant goals. Our partner for the AfroCuration event in Morocco (MACAAL) has pulled out due to some organizational changes which included a change of staff. In order to make sure the project is well carried out and our goals are met, we would like to change our partner target and reallocate the WMF funds to it. Politecnico (university in Italy), showed interest in the AfroCuration event series. Politecnico connected well with the intent of this AfroCuration event series, and thought it would be interesting to address the Eurocentrism in perspectives concerning Design, Design from Africa, and design for the future (e.g. why is the singular always singular? Is this singular vision of modernism really inclusive?) And we agreed the starting point would be producing knowledge on these themes (DESIGN, FUTURE, AFRICA) would align with the AfroCuration event series’ focus of Who We Are, by tackling the lack of information on Wikipedia relating to these areas, and doing so in African languages. The Italian university has a student group willing to edit Wikipedia on this, some of whom speak/write in African languages. And the remainder who will support via contributions to Wikidata and Wiki Commons.

We've also got in touch with Twi and Tanzania Wikimedia Communities to expand the content in their languages and perhaps hold their own AfroCuration. Which the communities are happy to collaborate with other partners outside the continent.

I'm hoping this sheds more light on our intentions and how to move the project forward.

Thank you --Tochiprecious (talk) 18:00, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Dear AfroCuration Team,

Thank you for your request for reallocation and for taking the time to meet with me to share more detail on the same and how you will ensure that communities in Africa are actively invloved in the project. It will be great to see the outcome of the events challenging singularities associated with design and this time from an African perspective. Please find your request approved. We wish you the very best and look forward to learning about the learnings achieved. VThamaini (WMF) (talk) 13:50, 24 February 2022 (UTC)