Grants talk:Project/Free Knowledge Africa

Proposal Clinics

Hello Timmylegend,

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 at this link. These are optional opportunities to get support improving your proposal. Let me know if you have any questions! Good luck finishing your proposal for the February 10 deadline!

Warm regards,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 14:02, 25 January 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) 02:30, 9 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. Proposals that include travel and/or offline events must ensure that all of the following are true:

• You must review and can comply with the guidelines linked above.
• If necessary because of COVID-19 safety risks, you must be able to complete the core components of your proposed work plan _without_ offline events or travel.
• You must be 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 must 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) 07:17, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for Free Knowledge Africa

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?	7.3
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	5.8
(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?	6.6
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	6.3
Additional comments from the Committee: The project seeks to increase contributions amongst Nigerians and to address the knowledge gap of content relating to Nigeria (specifically travel information) and in this way can be considered as fitting within the strategic direction of knowledge equity. While the project will target English Wikipedia, its primary focus is Wikivoyage which is a smaller project. It is unclear how the project will be sustained beyond the grant. A beautiful proposal which focuses on one of the small projects. Creating awareness and engaging people and training them on how to contribute to other Wikimedia projects aside Wikipedia does fit with Wikimedia's strategic priorities and if successful, this project would be of great impact to the Wikimedia movement Project is directly aligned with our strategic priorities. Thank you for your service to the movement. I think it fits with Wikimedia's strategic priorities. It can be sustained, scaled, or adapted elsewhere after the grant ends. I agree that there is a huge gap about African destinations on Wikipedia and Wikivoyage and this project will for sure increase the free content on Wikivoyage and improve content on Wikipedia. This project can motivate other communities in other countries to follow the path and improve the Wikivoyage content. I don't remember seeing several grants applications regarding Wikivoyage. I'm wondering whether this will be supported by the local user groups in Nigeria (Nigeria UG, Hausa, Yoruba..) in order to have a wide exposure across the local community? Noting that there seem to be some copy/paste issue in the text: e.g. "cultural institution that has an archive on Peruvian art" Irecommend to have more details on the prizes and more details on the private and public institutions to target for partnerships There is limited opportunity for learning for the movement but the risks are pretty minimal. More work needs to be done around evaluation and measuring outcomes. The evaluation plan of this proposal should be more detailed. The goals are clear but it is not clear from the proposal how they plan to measure impact. In addition, I do not see any plan or strategy designed to retain participants after the event, especially new editors. Project is well described. Risk assessment should be clearer. It is unclear to me why a website, that will lead to enduring costs (maintenance, updates), is needed. This is a small part of the budget, but might become an issue for sustainability and might not be useful. I am not sure about social media promotion: what is envisioned here? This strategy for promotion is not always a good strategy for engagement --it might work better to have a strategy to reach out to collectives, groups and programs that could more directly bear an affinity with what you are proposing. I don't know if this can be considered as innovative projects as few applications are related to Wikivoyage but it will for sure increase and improve the free content on line and will have a good impact. More details and project scoping are needed. Overall the plan is reasonable but the value of videos, standalone websites, and social media content has yet to be established for community organizing and outreach projects. More information on the feasibility of in-person edit-a-thons during COVID would also be helpful (unless the intention is just to have all events online). There is no timetable and it should be improved. The budget is efficient generally. However, the cost for online meeting platform might not unnecessary since there are so many resources for free. It should be clarified if there is a reason that free platforms won’t work. The organizers seemed to have organized a couple of events at the University of Ilorin but I am not sure they have the capacity to manage partnership and I think the goals of recruiting over 100 new contributors and 60 professionals are ambitious. In addition, I can't see a clear plan to evaluate impact and how they plan to follow up with participants after the event. Are there plans to mentor the participants after the event? If yes, who are these mentors? Very experienced group of Wikimedians with strong record of activities. Thank you for all you do! They did not provide any time breakdown. The budget seems realistic to me. But it should be more specific I am satisfied with the experience they have. But it would be great if there is more experienced wikipedian. The scope can be accomplished in less than 12 months. I think that the participant has the necessary skills in general although he is not very active on Wikivoyage (total edits= 65); neither are the other participants. Regarding the budget, it's not clear what is the breakdown of the category "Prizes for contest winners 1200$". It will be nice to see the breakdown of this budget to assess the efficiency of the budget. There are some endorsements for the project but the specific target community is unclear. It would be useful to have more information on why travel is the focus (versus history or culture of Nigeria). Is there an identified community who has expressed interest in this content area? Or perhaps the project team has existing relationships with professionals within the tourism industry (which seems to be the target audience for outreach)? There is enough community engagement and support from the community members Community has responded to the call. Since this project aims to have an impact on the whole country it will be nice to see a strong the support of the different local user groups in Nigeria. The target community is well identified. I would be more inclined to fund if we could get more details on the plan (and possibly remove/decrease the focus on videos, social media content, and website creation) as well as confirm where the interest for travel information comes from and whether there is a specific target community. The relation costs/benefits is reasonable and the impact will be in a secondary project. I would like to recommend this proposal for funding with changes, too. First, the applicants might need to make their action plan to be more clear (What/When/Where/How). Besides this, although the budget is low, there are still some space for decreasing the amount. Some items of the budget seems unnecessary, e.g., cost for a creating a website and cost for online meeting platform. It is good to see the plan also including Wikivoyage, rather than just Wikipedia. It has a modest budget to cover basic expenses, and is definitely worth an effort. I'd be recommending this proposal for funding with changes. The measure of success to recruit 100 new editors and 60 professionals should be reduced to 40 and 25 respectively. They should also draw out a clear evaluation plan and strategy to follow up with participants after the events. I do not see a need for a separate website for this project. This is a pilot project and all documentation should be done on Meta wiki. The budget is reasonable but I think the amount budgeted for miscellaneous should be reduced to 5% instead of 10% of the total budget. This is a marvelous project, being presented by committed Wikimedians. I support the on-wiki part of it. Nevertheless, a better strategy for communications appears to be needed. I don't think enough information is provided on why a website or a social media investment are needed. An on-wiki landing page may be built --like most campaigners do--, and social media promotion might not reach the expected outcomes. For dissemination to list and reach out to specific groups with which you bear some affinity, and then thinking with them how to grow a network of interested people, is normally better than reaching out to random people. I would also suggest a dedicated banner for readers from Nigeria. The proposal, including the budget, should be reviewed accordingly. I am not agreed with the plan of the Website for the project. I do not think any extra website is essential. For a Wikimedia project, Wikimedia platform is enough. And the budgeting should be more specific, breakdown needed. It will be nice to see how the prizes are distributed and I think 1200$ is a big amount for an editing contest. It would be nice also to explore if there is a way to reduce the cost of the internet 3000$ (maybe by using facilities from the University of Ilorin ?)

This proposal has been recommended for due diligence review.

The Project Grants Committee has conducted a preliminary assessment of your proposal and recommended it for due diligence review. This means that a majority of the committee reviewers favorably assessed this proposal and have requested further investigation by Wikimedia Foundation staff.

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 and post any responses, clarifications or questions on this talk page.
2. Following due diligence review, a final funding decision will be announced on Friday, April 22, 2021.

Questions? Contact us.

Marti (WMF) (talk) 05:17, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Response to Feedback from the Committee

• The potential Organizations for Partnerships includes;

1. Airlines
2. Private Travel Agencies
3. Government Tourism Departments
4. Ministry of Transport

• This project would be evaluated based on the;

1. Number of articles created
2. Number of new participants onboarded
3. Pictures added to articles

Tools for measuring and evaluating include Dashboard, Hashtags etc

• Participants will be retained via a Mailing list and a telegram group, while subsequent and other projects (campaigns and contests) in future will be shared with them.

• The proposed Website for the project would be cancelled fully hosted on Wiki.

• Promotions are needed to get people with a wide travel experience due to the peculiar nature of the project, while the project is also interested in getting new editors.

• Other local Wikimedia communities in the country would be targeted and brought on board as well.

• All events for this project are online.

• The organizers have successfully been able to host project in the past, the high figures are motivation in nature and would help drive the project.

• A paid online meeting platform is needed, as we have intentions to record the training sessions for subsequent reuse.

• The project would be sustained as a community would be built upon the project, and in subsequent years the scope would be widened activities and geographically wise.

• The schedule for implementation of the project is highlighted in the table below;

S/N	Outcomes	Time
1	Preliminary phase (Landing page, awareness, announcement)	July 2021
2	Training and workshops on Wikivoyage/Wikipedia Establishing partnerships with travel related organizations	August - September 2021
3	Contest commences	October - November 2021
4	Jury process	January 2022
5	Announcements of Winners	February 2022

Timmylegend (talk) 23:04, 4 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, $5,500

Comments regarding this decision:
The committee is pleased to fund an innovative approach to organizing volunteers to contribute travel content about Nigeria on English Wikivoyage and Wikipedia. They especially appreciated seeing community organizing targeting Wikivoyage, an underutilized project.

NOTE: Funding of any offline activities (e.g. travel and in-person events) is contingent upon compliance with the Wikimedia Foundations COVID-19 guidelines. We require that you complete the Risk Assessment Tool:

• 14 days before any travel and/or gathering event
• 24 hours before any travel and/or gathering event

Offline events may only proceed if the tool results continue to be green or yellow.

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) 00:29, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Request for clarification about a line in your project plan referencing Peru

Hello Timmylegend,

Under Goal 3 of your project plan, you have included this line:

"* GLAM counselling to at least one cultural institution that has an archive on Peruvian art, with a special focus on art made by women."

Can you confirm that this is written as you intended? Because your project is focused on raising awareness about Nigerian culture, I want to make sure that it wasn't an oversight that you referenced Peruvian art. If it is a mistake, can you update your plan to the correct information?

The main thing I'm wanting to confirm is actually whether or not you will be focusing on art made by women, because we track proposals that address the gender gap in any way. Can you confirm?

Thank you for your help!

Warm regards,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 19:10, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

Hello Marti (WMF),

It was an oversight and not part of the project plan. I will not be focusing on art made by women, I would also update the project plan to the correct information.

Thank you. Timmylegend (talk) 13:42, 23 July 2021 (UTC)