Grants talk:Project/Yorg/Wiki Loves Africa 2017

Eligibility confirmed, round 1 2017

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for round 1 2017 review. Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during the community comments period, through 4 April 2017.

The committee's formal review for round 1 2017 begins on 5 April 2017, and grants will be announced 19 May. See the schedule for more details.

Questions? Contact us.

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 23:31, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Comments from Ruslik0

@Ruslik0:: I am so sorry. I just did not see the notification for this comment. Thank you for your time and concerns. I hope that the information beneath helps to explain the two elements that concern you - and thank you for your eagle eye on the typos! -- Isla I appreciate the tremendous success that the project has had so far although I have some questions comments:

1. You wrote: "Assure the practicability and the legality of the contest." What does you exactly mean by legality? Copyright?

>> No, it really means to provide the logistical support that can come from an established organisation. It is practical for the project to be run by a continental team supported by an established organisation. Legally having a continental team supported by an established organisation means that the project is backed by fiscal checks and that legally, this suits the aims of the WMF in not having grant funding of such significance given to individuals or unknown entities.

1. " this year we have had to apply before Wiki Loves Africa 216 has been completed". Should probably be changed to 2016

>> done. Thanks for the eagle eye!

1. In the budget table one of the columns reads: "Budget 2016". Should not it be changed to 2017?

>> again. done!

1. A more general question. What changes are you planning this years as compared to the past contests? Can you briefly summarize them?

>> As per the list detailed on the results and best practices (draft) document our areas for improvement will be focused on the following:

• Create a bot to send a welcome and thank you all participants with suggestions on what else they can do to get other people to see their photos.
• Create a bot to assist with category cleanup of the images submitted.
• Set the theme earlier and inform possible teams so they can engage with their communities to catch local theme-relevant events, displays, or festivals that are not within the competition period.
• Creation of a generic leaflet for teams to facilitate the outreach work of the team and enable a short introduction of the Competition to local partners, funders, etc.
• Improvement of the site notice system with the help of the WMF’s advancement team.
• Increasing the scale of the communication around the voting on the Community prize.
• Inclusion of a country-based reward or “Country Cup” for the highest percentage of reused images submitted by a country (the 2017 competition will announce the 2016 images used).
• Initiate and increase communication with Wikimedia Commons administrators prior to competition’s launch.

Support local teams by:

• Orienting the local team on “how to set up a media accreditation system to facilitate access to events” (based on other chapters experience).
• Encourage stronger relationships with professional photographers and photographic communities to facilitate access to events and collect high quality pictures.
• Encourage participating countries to investigate festivals and events prior to the competition (depending on theme).
• Encourage the focus countries to provide a curated “wish-list” of subjects that could be covered by a theme, and existing articles that require images. To ensure that these are at least covered.
• Encourage local teams to translate the main page, landing page and upload wizard translated into local languages.
• Encourage teams to come up with local strategies to make the images useful and used within the Wikimedia projects.

Thanks

Ruslik (talk) 20:11, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Round 1 2017 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, USD 30,673.00

Comments regarding this decision:
We are glad to support international collaboration on Wikimedia projects in Africa.

Note that comments below are from the initial round of scoring, prior to interviews and proposal revisions. I am posting them in case there is value in hearing the committee's earlier perspective.

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Aggregated feedback from the committee for Wiki Loves Africa 2017

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?	7.4
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	6.1
(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?	7.0
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	7.1
Additional comments from the Committee: Fits with strategic priorities to increase content coverage and reach in emerging communities (in this case, across Africa). Because there is a low threshold for participation in the Wiki Loves Africa contest, there is good potential to engage new users. However, it is unclear if or how new users are retained through the project. The collaborative, continent-wide nature of the project also has potential to build capacity and leadership among local teams, though I believe there needs to be more focus devoted to this in the proposal (right now the focus is largely centred on coordinating events that drive contributions). The proposal fits Wikimedia's strategic priorities. Potentially the impact can be large but the experience from the previous years showed that this may be too optimistic. The long term sustainability in unclear although the project has run for three years. Report pages Grants:PEG/Yorg/Wiki Loves Africa 2016/Report is stil in draft mode. Why? I would like to see no delays, especially when there are paid workers who supposed to take care about it. It is a rather good fit with strategic priorities (well, more content and more participants), but its online impact is more messy. Looking through the uploads I see too many unused and irrelevant images, which lowers my note for online impact This proposal seeks to replicate the approaches taken in previous years. While I see some improvement (for example, collection of statistics in the 2016 draft report), I not see enough evidence that lessons learned from 2014+ are applied to project management. It’s also unclear how known challenges will be addressed (for example, retaining new users, receiving reports from local teams, and ensuring quality submissions) in this round. Potential learning outcomes - including how participation might engender more trust in Wikimedia projects from African communities - lack clear measures of success. The approach is iterative one. The risks (that the chosen local teams do not do their work - draft 2016 report) may be relatively high. The success can be measured. Reasonable iterative project: I do see some learnings, but I do not see how they plan to convince people to upload only reasonably usable images (while it is great to have any images of Africa, it is sad to see double-digit percent of off-topic photos). I would suggest decreasing the number of local teams/countries supported. I also think there should be more focus on quality than quantity with regards to media files uploaded. It would be nice to see a specific target for the stated goal of receiving a minimum number of high quality media uploads. The participants have an ability to execute the project as their experience from 2014-2016 showed though this can not be said about local teams. The budget is probably realistic. Regarding skills, Anthere and Isla can do it. Regarding scope and budget, I am not sure it is reasonable to keep it completely separate from Wiki Loves Women: the best performers in WLA are Wiki Loves Women teams and experienced affiliates (Tunisia, Egypt,...), and on the other side I saw little to no impact on funding provided to Zimbabwe, which makes me think that local funding is not decisive, while local experience and synergies are. Has specific target projects and languages. Would like to see engagement plan for new users beyond the two-month contest. The project supports diversity and there is evidence of the community engagement and support. Reasonable community engagement, the project seems to have less impact on African communities than Wiki Loves Women but it still makes a good contribution to diversity. I would really like to see us support this project in some way or another in order to recognize the achievements of the project team and work to date. I also acknowledge that there appear to be some significant challenges with regards to processes and reporting and I think we are not yet seeing the outcomes we would hope for after 3 years of grant funding. That being said, I think it’s important to support emerging communities, and while the majority of submitted content may not be high quality, there is a large need to improve our coverage of African countries. I’m not sure if this is possible or not...but it’d be great if there was a way of somehow merging the Wiki Loves Africa photo contest with the Wiki Loves Women project, perhaps through a shared theme (i.e. the theme for the 2017 contest could be related to women and gender) and focused activities (edit-a-thons that focus on reuse of contest images in new articles). My mistake: I recused to evaluate WIki loves projects, so I confirm my neutrality. It is a difficult case. On the one hand the project has run for 3 years with some success and the participant are clearly capable of executing it. On the other hand the results, as has been already noted, have been underwhelming. One only needs to look at their 2016 draft report - half of the local teams provided no report as of April. So, I will remain neutral as the WMF grants team probably knows better then me if the funding should continue. Honorarium for Project Staffing is very high More than 45% of budget is for "Project Staffing". Yes, I saw in past aplications it was supported. I would like to know did they try to mobilize someone from wiki community to do part of job for free. Grantee asked money for translation too. Do we really need to pay for it? We can go forward with it as it is impactful, but perhaps with a lower budget, particularly regarding national budgets that do not seem to have that high impact and project management that seems too expensive compared to impact.

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 30 June 2017 (UTC)

Update during grant

• November grant report : Grants:PEG/Yorg/Wiki_Loves_Africa_2017/Nov report