Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Clementine Nyirahabihirwe/Africa Wiki Challenge 2021 in Rwanda

Comments from DSaroyan (WMF)

Hi Cnyirahabihirwe123, thanks for submitting this grant proposal. I have reviewed it and have the following requests:

• We now require all grantees to announce their projects and receive the Wikimedia community feedback in advance. Could you please announce this project and grant on the relevant community pages on the target wikis? Community notification may be most appropriate on a village pump, talk page, or mailing list. Please paste a link into the proposal page to where the relevant communities have been notified of this proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions.
• Please respond to question #5.

Budget:

• The Prizes budget is too high for this small-scale project. Please reduce it to 150 USD maximum. Additionally, reduce the number of offered prizes to 5. Offering expensive prizes is not a good strategy to motivate the participants and does not result in sustainable participation.
• Likewise, the Jury gifts are high. Kindly lower it to 100 USD maximum.
• The Communication & Promotion costs are also high. Please reduce it by half (150 USD).
• You plan to offer data bundles to all participants. However, you also have internet expenses for “Online opening and closing ceremony” and “EDIT-A-THONS”. What are these expenses? What is the need of having internet expenses for every event if you are also going to offer internet bundles to all participants? I think that “Online opening and closing ceremony” and “EDIT-A-THONS” expenses should be removed from your budget, but I’ll await your response to make my decision.

Looking forward to hearing from you. Best regards, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 08:37, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

Reply to the comments

Hi DSaroyan (WMF),

Thank you for reviewing this project and below are the responses.

• The project has been announced on the user group meta page and the link is also present in the proposal.
• Question #5 has been answered as well.

Budget:

• The prizes have been adjusted.
• The jury gifts adjusted as well.
• Communication costs also adjusted.
• The EDIT-A-THONS have been maintained as the first one will serve as a launch and continue with an edit-a-thon then we will have another one in the middle of the project to fix challenges they will be facing. While researching and writing their articles they will need internet as well and in the end they will need to participate in the awarding ceremony.

Best regards, Cnyirahabihirwe123 (talk) 21:14, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Additional comments

Hi Cnyirahabihirwe123 and Mrbobax, thanks for your response.

• First of all, I don't understand why you try keeping the budget around 1,900 USD. I requested some budget adjustments that you made, but at the same time, you increased the targets and costs for other items. Please note that this complicates the review process on my end. So, I'd need more clarifications:
  • Why did you increase the number of participants from 20 to 30? If you expected 30 participants, I wouldn't recommend, for example, lowering the prize budget to 150 USD.
  • How did you find out that you would have 30 participants instead of 20?
  • Why did you increase the costs of other items?
• I'm sorry but I still don't understand the rationale behind having internet costs for every event and also offering internet bundles to participants to edit articles. Given that you know you will have 30 participants, wouldn't it be easier to offer internet bundles to participants and organizers from the beginning, so that they can use it to attend different events and also edit articles? Is there anything that I miss?

Looking forward to your response. Best regards, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 07:52, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

REPLY

Hi DSaroyan (WMF),

Thanks again for the comments.

In general, we are not sticking to 1,900 USD, it is just that the numbers changed and the figures happened not to change much. Towards the end of the last year we worked on several writing contests among which there was one named "Decolonize the internet" organized by the Goethe institute, so this is the type of audience which is mostly interested into content creation and it turned out that as we have had some of them requesting to participate in the upcoming writing contests, from that we projected that we add 6 more people plus the organizing team and that is how the 30 people figure was generated.

Also regarding the prizes, we have made again the adjustments to make the prizes more reasonable for a such number of participants.

To answer your last question, yes we have made that adjustment to make it one time cost. However, in the past we have had different internet cost to different events. We hope this gives much more clarification.

Best regards, Mrbobax (talk) 12:05, 30 April 2021 (UTC)