Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Wikimedistas de Colombia/Wikimedia Colombia Conference

Dear Racso and team,

Thank you for your submission on behalf of Wikimedistas de Colombia! We are excited that you are planning to organize and plan activities with potential members who may not yet be a part of your community. We have a couple questions to better understand this project:

1. Has the user group already discussed this meeting on wiki or elsewhere? If yes, can you include links to the page? It would be helpful to know if there are specific topics, issues, projects, or challenges you know you want to address together.
2. How many people have expressed interest in the meeting? Do you think the proposed 20 people is fairly accurate or is it an estimate?
3. Do you have goals for these participants once they return to their local communities?
4. We encourage you to contact your networks to endorse or provide further feedback about this proposal.

Thanks for your reply! Morgan Jue (WMF) (talk) 01:56, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Hello, Morgan! Thanks for checking our grant request Here are my answers:

1. Yes, we have discussed the meeting before. In fact, we've been preparing for this event since December 2015 (!), but we didn't get it ready until now. We have discussed everything in our Facebook chat, so I'm afraid I can't point you to the discussion. However, I can tell you that the main goal of this small conference is to get more people involved in the group. We hope to bring to the meeting people with moderate to high interest in participating in our activities as volunteers, and to aim the activities in the event to teach them about the Wikimedia projects and wiki culture, and to show them what can we accomplish in Colombia if we work together.

While we still don't have an agenda, we aim to invite guests from other free-culture associations and groups, such as Creative Commons Colombia and Fundación Karisma, so they can give a talk or workshop about some topic of interest. That would provide the meeting with a more interesting agenda, and at the same time would help us to strengthen bonds with those kind of groups, which would be extra useful for the group.

1. The 20 people is an estimate. Given that we would cover the travel expenses for 13 people, we believe that it shouldn't be too difficult for us to have at least that amount of participants from all the country. The other 7 would be participants from Bogotá, including the people invited from other associations and institutions.
2. Yes. We are planning to give small tasks and duties to the participants who decide to join the group in order to keep them active. We still have to define what kind of tasks would we have, but the idea is to avoid people simply "cooling off" after the meeting and forgeting about the group.
3. Sure; we will.

Thanks! --Racso ^¿¿¿??? 19:49, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Funding decision

Hi Racso. Thank you for your thoughtful answers. It is helpful to learn more about your audience and your intentions for their potential involvement with the Wikimedistas de Colombia. We could see an event like this as appropriate at the local level for your current membership, as the other organizations you mentioned could help inform your group's future activities or long-term planning. However, since this event would focus on outreach for people who are not already part of your user group, we are concerned about the precedent that funding this request would set for local volunteer-run projects through Rapid Grants, most of which do not require long-distance travel for editor recruitment. In the past we have seen that it is difficult for organizers to actively engage and follow-up with remote participants from areas where there are no experienced volunteers to provide any additional support or guidance on-wiki after the event. We encourage your user group's future submissions to Rapid Grants, and look forward to supporting your work under more favorable circumstances. Morgan Jue (WMF) (talk) 21:57, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Hi, Morgan. Thanks again for your answer. I understand your decision, but I think the committee could have misunderstood part of what I said here or Ivan said in the grant request. Just in case that was the case, I'd like to make a clarification.

The meeting is not aimed at recruiting editors, but at recruiting volunteers for the group. While this may seem similar, there are important differences. The most important one is that our work with the participants (including the follow-up work) wouldn't be mainly on-wiki, but off-wiki (i.e. in the "real world"). Of course, part of the event would be focused in working on the projects with the participants (specially since most of them probably only know one or two), but it isn't the main goal of the event, as simply recruiting editors wouldn't be useful for us at all.

As a Wikimedia user group, the biggest challenge we have met since we were established has been the low amount of active volunteers we have. While we still have been able to have some impact, it's obvious that we need to grow if we want to be able to have more reach.

While we have been able to meet people who say that they are interested in joining the group (or at least "helping us"), or that have shown a big interest in our group's previous activities, it has been difficult to get them to actually get involved with our activities. I believe geography is one of the reasons: the only 3 really active members of the group are in two different cities, none of which isn't Bogota (where more interested people and potential allied institutions can be found than in our cities), so we haven't been able to even meet in person those people. While some people may get involved with the group without previously meeting others in person, I strongly believe that having at least one meeting is an important motivation for actually doing it (I'm an example myself: I was a Wikipedian for 4 years, but only got involved with the "real world" Wikimedia movement after I met other Wikimedians in Iberoconf and got motivated by what I saw and learned there). Another reason is that we haven't been able to assign duties to those interested people, not because we don't have work we need help with (because we do!), but because these people aren't experienced enough with the projects or the movement to help us without actually being a burden. I think that assigning duties during the meeting would help with this, as we'd be able to give more clear directions on how to actually do stuff. While we can't be sure that people will actually keep working after the meeting, I have no reasons to think they wouldn't if we're able to inject them with enough motivation during the event.

Is because of those two reasons that we strive to have this meeting. I think it's important for our growth.

Regards! --Racso ^¿¿¿??? 18:00, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

Hello Racso, thank you for your understanding, and for providing more context in this proposal. You clarified the distinction I did not see before, so I stand corrected, but I think the challenges you mentioned warrant further discussion among the group to develop a strategy that tackles the geography issue. While we recognize in-person meetings have intangible value in establishing relationships between people who would otherwise work together online, this would be an unusual request for us to pursue right now. I think you are on the right path towards something that will have more guaranteed impact for your community, and partnering with local institutions and organizations is a step in informing a more defined vision that could convince these editors to join your efforts. Thanks again for your thoughtful response. Morgan Jue (WMF) (talk) 20:51, 28 March 2017 (UTC)