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Latest comment: 11 days ago by JChen (WMF) in topic Your grant application has been approved

Follow-up questions on your grant application

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Latest comment: 1 month ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Hello Indic MediaWiki Developers User Group,

Thank you for putting in a general support application. Congratulations for hosting and successfully organising the most recent Wikimedia Technology Summit 2024 (grant application; event page) and for sharing updates and learnings about your annual plan at a Let’s connect cross regional session (31 Aug 2024; slides; recording)


For documentation purposes, I am also including a list of resourcing projects (non-exhaustive) led by individuals who were/are connected with the User Group. Please feel free to add onto the list as necessary.


Observations/ Recommendations / Notes

Below, you will find the consolidated feedback and observations from the review team (i.e. SA regional funds committee and programme officer). Do take time to read and respond (i.e. provide more details) to the sharing(s) as necessary. Note: The review team may not have the same lived experience or understanding of the local context as you/your team. Hence, providing further insights will be very helpful in building on our collective wisdom and shared learnings.


  • 1) Related to question 6/ strategic plan: While it is not mandatory as part of the general support fund application, we would recommend to start thinking about developing your strategic plan. Putting together your strategic plan can be supportive as you plan for the next phase of the affiliate's growth. In starting work on your strategic plan, here are examples that you may find useful -


  • 1a) Suggestion: We know it will take time to put together a strategic plan. We recommend adding it to your timeline and plan protected time to do this with your core team.
    • Here's also an example of a first attempt at strategic planning workshop, approach and planning materials. The planning materials can be also included as part of your metrics + documentation (application; final report)
    • And a Let's Connect learning clinic on developing your first annual plan and strategic planning as a collaborative process. These could be part of the self-paced learning for the core team in preparation for your strategic planning discussion(s).
    • Note: If developing a strategic plan is a stretch for 2025, do consider adapting the above and work towards a more intentional annual planning process.
    • We'll also suggest taking a moment to review/refresh the content on your meta-page so that the content remains timely, relevant and informative. For example: by-laws, people/governance structure, hosting relevant or useful resources for knowledge management etc.


  • 2) Related to metrics section: Thank you for filling in the other metrics section and for suggesting metrics that are suited for your project. We'll like to find out more about your knowledge management approach to your project. This is most relevant to your hackathon/workshop planning, curriculum planning etc. How do you plan to organise the content and are you able to host the content/learning as resources on your metapage? How can you approach knowledge management in a way that is supportive of your orientation/onboarding of new developers (and/or refresher) to wikiprojects from a technical perspective? Here are examples which you may find useful: Training resources created and hosted by Wikimedia Australia; Introduction to wikipedia and commons micro credential course. As part of peer learning within the movement, we'll also like to suggest that you/ the team document your key learnings/ journey as you implement your proposed plan. These process related learnings will help shed light on the behind the scenes work that affiliates do. We'll also recommend the team put in publication of a Diff post as part of the communications output.


  • 3) In your most recent Let's Connect session, you suggested a question for discussion among the attendees. What are different strategies you have adopted to have more newcomers to your affiliate or community groups?" Especially in the technical space of wiki. Due to time constraints, we were not able to explore this question deeply. If there is still interest in this topic, here's a pilot approach on developing skillsets/ pipeline of leaders through the Hatch a wikimedian programme put together by Wiki Advocates from the Philippines; grant application] which may be useful.


  • 4) Budget section: We observed there is a year-on-year increase of about 70% for the proposed annual budget. a) To support our understanding of the increase, would you be able to compare the proposed budget for this year with that of last year and share what are the key drivers of the increase? b) There can also be more clarity on the cost assumptions behind each line item. You can also provide online links to support your cost estimates.


Note to applicant: During the review process, the SA Funds Committee meets 3-4 times (2-2.5 hours/ session) during the review cycle to discuss the grant applications submitted for the cycle. Thereafter additional time is dedicated for individual review (i.e. one review form is submitted for each application - estimated time spend can be about 1 hour/application/person). We would like to highlight that the review team spends a significant amount of time on each application reviewing and providing their perspectives. We hope you will also participate fully in the process by setting aside dedicated time and mind space to provide thoughtful responses to the feedback. During the discussion rounds, we have also captured the verbatim feedback below. Some of which may be on a similar topic. If you notice the trend, it would mean that the question/ observation was raised by several members of the review team and we encourage you to dig deeper to provide more information. If you require support in understanding the context to the feedback and/or in crafting a response. Please know that you can reach out the programme officer for support.


  • 5) Does the affiliate plan to work with only Indic community or wider South Asia region?


  • 6) The applicant has consulted selected communities to understand their needs. However, the challenges/needs and how this proposal will address them are unclear. I also can't see any community discussion or endorsements for this grant's activities and budget. Perhaps they have discussed this in closed communication channels for their user group, but it is better to keep these discussions and endorsements transparent and open as much as possible. Their community requests page doesn't seem to have any new requests in the last nine months.


  • 7) a) Their requests page is not very active. At the same time, language community users are requesting tech support in their own village pumps. A regular watchlist and proactive action are needed as volunteers may not know about the existence of this user group. b) I couldn’t find many tools and scripts developed by the group in the current or last year. I also couldn’t find recent activities or a list of bugs/tickets to be resolved in the coming months. c) The focus on outreach is commendable, but it also gives the impression that the user group is almost solely focused on outreach. The user group should demonstrate its work throughout the year happening on-wiki and outside the workshops. Aiming for more online coordination would yield better results as developers are known for remote and asynchronous work.


  • 8) Strengths of the proposal: Tech outreach and institutional partnerships, aiming for the retention of volunteers by working with the same group consistently, are commendable.


  • 9) a. Wikisource and Wiktionary can be two important projects for this region, and they don’t even have a mobile app. Most of the new generation and potential contributors can only participate with a mobile phone, and these websites are not ready for adoption by a mobile phone yet. This is a huge challenge that is worth addressing as a whole, though the scope is beyond what a user group can tackle. At the same time, when projects like Wikidata are born out of chapters like Wikimedia Germany, we should take a cue from that and not depend on the WMF to solve every problem we have. b. While tracking metrics by the number of participants is good, it cannot be the end goal. We track outcomes on Wikipedias by the number of articles, images uploaded, etc. The same way, they should be able to track their metrics in terms of tickets resolved or tools developed (and the usage data for those tools), etc.


  • 10) a. AI has ushered in an era where everyone can code. How does the group plan to leverage this? b. Most of the tools/scripts developed so far seem to be of global use, which is good, but it also doesn’t demonstrate a focus or clarity of the scope of actions of this group. Does Indic mean any MediaWiki developer from the South Asia region working on any MediaWiki issue? Or do they have a specific focus on tech issues faced by the Indic languages in the South Asia region?


  • 11) Re question 10/timeline, could you share the link to your timeline as it is not appearing in your application.


  • 12) Upon review of the details, several observations and suggestions merit consideration to optimize the event's success. Given that the university is already located in Kochi, utilizing campus facilities would be more cost-effective rather than arranging hotel accommodations, which would significantly impact the budget. The event could be restructured into two distinct segments for better management and impact. The first could be a focused session held at the university campus, requiring travel and accommodation only for the core organizers. The second could be a separate event specifically designed for community engagement, potentially at a different location and time that best suits the participants. Regarding the proposed national-level hackathon, while the vision of hosting 50 participants is ambitious, a more focused approach with 25-30 participants might be more effective. This adjustment would enable higher quality engagement and more meaningful outcomes while optimizing the budget. The scaled approach would help maintain rigorous standards for technical contribution and maximize the value generated from the event.


  • 13) a) The proposal talks about the GSOC. But isnt GSOC sponsered by google? what is the exact role of the IMDUG group role in that? does it incur any cost to the group? b) What is the budget for the VVIT club and how it would be utilised is not clear


  • 14) Skill development for existing tech contributors is a good step. How do you plant to induct and retain new tech developers?


Thank you and we look forward to speaking on the 19 November and reading your responses by 24 November. Please let us know if you require more time. We can adapt accordingly.


Regards, Jacqueline on behalf of South Asia Regional Funds Committee JChen (WMF) (talk) 03:32, 19 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Responses to the feedback and questions

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Hello @JChen (WMF): and the South Asia Regional Grants Commiteee: Thank you for reviewing the grant proposal and the feedback - the recommendations are quite helpful for us to improve our annual plan program and the future of the affiliate. In addition, the questions are also helpful for us to think more about the details of the programs. Please find our responses below. KCVelaga (talk) 20:40, 24 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Congratulations for hosting and successfully organising the most recent Wikimedia Technology Summit 2024 (grant application; event page)

> Sorry, but there seems to have been some confusion. We haven’t organized/hosted the Wikimedia Technology Summit 2024. It was organized by IIITH - however, we did extend our support in volunteer capacity including but not limited to reviewing scholarships, designing the program and also facilitating the mini-hackathon organized before the Summit for students of IIITH and some participants.

For documentation purposes, I am also including a list of resourcing projects (non-exhaustive) led by individuals who were/are connected with the User Group. Please feel free to add onto the list as necessary.

> Thank you for compiling this list. Here are some additional initiatives:


1) Related to question 6/ strategic plan: While it is not mandatory as part of the general support fund application, we would recommend to start thinking about developing your strategic plan. Putting together your strategic plan can be supportive as you plan for the next phase of the affiliate's growth. In starting work on your strategic plan, here are examples that you may find useful -

1a) Suggestion: We know it will take time to put together a strategic plan. We recommend adding it to your timeline and plan protected time to do this with your core team.

> This is a really good point. This is something that also has been on our mind lately and something we would like to more actively think about as part of the next year’s annual plan. Before 2024, we have organized ad-hoc, mostly supported rapid grants and some support from CIS-A2K, and then we moved into a comparatively more structured annual plan in 2024, and using the learnings from that we have proposed the annual plan 2025. The annual plan of 2025 is not drastically different from 2024 in terms of overall structure, but we have started to think more about the implementation. For example, how we can better do a hackathon so that it leads to more retention. I think now is a good time to start thinking about a medium term (2-3 year) strategic plan about how the User Group should evolve and how it should position itself as part of the larger Indic community. Thank you for sharing all the resources -- we will use them to start drafting a strategic plan during the next year.

We'll also suggest taking a moment to review/refresh the content on your meta-page so that the content remains timely, relevant and informative. For example: by-laws, people/governance structure, hosting relevant or useful resources for knowledge management etc.

> We acknowledge that we fell behind in keeping our on-wiki documentation up to date, and we realize that it is important to do this work - not only for external communication, but also for internal knowledge management. Actually, we are planning to do a bulk of this during the current year’s annual plan i.e. 2024 and we have a task for that (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T372244). We have our major and final event for the year - a national level hackathon during the third week of December, so we will likely take up the documentation work towards the end of 2024. This will be crucial in efficient management of workflows and activities for 2025 - we also proposed to have a working group meeting in the first week of January 2025, during which we plan to review the documentation and update any loose ends as necessary.


Related to metrics section: Thank you for filling in the other metrics section and for suggesting metrics that are suited for your project. We'll like to find out more about your knowledge management approach to your project. This is most relevant to your hackathon/workshop planning, curriculum planning etc. How do you plan to organise the content and are you able to host the content/learning as resources on your metapage? How can you approach knowledge management in a way that is supportive of your orientation/onboarding of new developers (and/or refresher) to wikiprojects from a technical perspective? Here are examples which you may find useful: Training resources created and hosted by Wikimedia Australia; Introduction to wikipedia and commons micro credential course. As part of peer learning within the movement, we'll also like to suggest that you/ the team document your key learnings/ journey as you implement your proposed plan. These process related learnings will help shed light on the behind the scenes work that affiliates do. We'll also recommend the team put in publication of a Diff post as part of the communications output.

> We’d like to think about knowledge management in two ways, again both of which (at least partly) we want to start documenting as part of the current ongoing annual plan and continue it in 2024. There are two streams to think about

  • The first one is knowledge management within the user group itself about coordination and organizing. During the past several years, we have organized a range of technical activities that include newcomer workshop, small wiki toolkit workshops, hackathons for newcomers and experienced contributors etc. there are several learnings from each of these formats that should be documented on wiki (likely as a subpage of the user group page). Along with this we would like to document the processes to be followed for thinking about organizing a hackathon - there are several for edit-a-thons, but not many for hackathons, and also the context within India works differently, especially when working with students. So we’d like to document these, in a structure similar to learning patterns. This will not only be helpful for future leaders of the User Group, but also to share externally for anyone else interested in doing technical outreach for India and elsewhere.
  • The second one is documenting resources for new developers - as mentioned in the feedback, this would be something like how can a new developer get started with contributing to Wikimedia technical spaces. There are several guides for this already, for example, the New developers page on MediaWiki is an excellent resource - while we don’t want to reinvent, we do want to contextualize it. For example, we can imagine creating a brief guide with a collection of these resources, how to find some beginner friendly tasks, how to seek help etc. This will be something that we can easily share with participants of our hackathons for engaging post the event. Thanks for sharing the resources developed by various communities and affiliates.


3) In your most recent Let's Connect session, you suggested a question for discussion among the attendees. What are different strategies you have adopted to have more newcomers to your affiliate or community groups?" Especially in the technical space of wiki. Due to time constraints, we were not able to explore this question deeply. If there is still interest in this topic, here's a pilot approach on developing skillsets/ pipeline of leaders through the Hatch a wikimedian programme put together by Wiki Advocates from the Philippines; grant application] which may be useful.

> Thank you for sharing the resources. We will through it and see how we can adapt it to our context. This is something we’re also constantly thinking about and looking forward to trying and experimenting with new ways. One approach that worked was to separate newcomer events with main hackathons, and use the hackathons as a follow-up for new developers. Coming back to the previous point, we will also document these processes.


4) Budget section: We observed there is a year-on-year increase of about 70% for the proposed annual budget. a) To support our understanding of the increase, would you be able to compare the proposed budget for this year with that of last year and share what are the key drivers of the increase? b) There can also be more clarity on the cost assumptions behind each line item. You can also provide online links to support your cost estimates.

> From our observation, there are three factors that can largely be attributed to substantial increase in the budget.

  • Underestimation of travel and accommodation costs in the previous budget: For 2024, we underestimated the travel costs and accommodation costs which caused a stress on budget and the number of people we are able to support during the outreach activities. For example, we estimated the average flight cost to be at INR 12,000, which was very less. For example, the average flight cost between Bangalore and Delhi (two major tier 1 cities) in about a month from now is INR 16,000. This gets even higher when we do in Tier 2 cities like we did Guwahati and Bhubaneswar this year. It is a similar case with accommodation, the average cost per room is now 7K and above + additional taxes. Unlike a language or state based affiliate, where most people travel regionally, 90% of the activities have people from across the country, which increases the logistics cost, but also brings people together from various communities. So we did bump up the average flight cost and accommodation costs beyond the inflationary increase.
  • Including a part time staff member: We have budgeted to include a new part time operations coordinator for the group, which is much needed and it adds a completely new component to the budget. As I mentioned above, our in-person outreach activities have a lot of logistics components, and we realized more than 50% of the volunteers time spent on the overall activity in going into that (for example, getting talking and getting travel pref confirmations from 30-40 people; negotiating with hotels etc.), which could be better spent on activities that volunteers time would benefit from - for example, documentation, focusing on strategic plan etc.
  • Dedicated working group meetings: We didn’t have any working group meetings separately budgeted during the previous year. We used to try to club them with other activities, where most of us would be traveling. While this saved costs in the short-term, they were not really effective in practice. Whoever were present in-person would already be exhausted with organizing work and we wouldn’t really have much bandwidth to focus later on. Being a distributed volunteer team, not based in a particular region, we believe that these meetings are helpful to spend dedicated time on reviewing our practices, but also think about the longer term.
  • In addition, we also want to emphasize that 10% is for the fiscal sponsor management fee and 3% is for bank charges, and 10% is unforeseen.


5) Does the affiliate plan to work with only the Indic community or wider South Asia region?

> At the moment, we’re mostly focused on communities and volunteers based in India only. As our model is to work with editors/communities associated with specific languages, rather than regions, sometimes we might end up potentially working with folks from Nepal or Bangladesh for example. But for outreach work, we’re solely focused within India only for the foreseeable future. However, given we have bandwidth, we are happy to extend online support if affiliates in the wider South Asia region are planning to organize technical outreach in their respective regions.


6) The applicant has consulted selected communities to understand their needs. However, the challenges/needs and how this proposal will address them are unclear. I also can't see any community discussion or endorsements for this grant's activities and budget. Perhaps they have discussed this in closed communication channels for their user group, but it is better to keep these discussions and endorsements transparent and open as much as possible. Their community requests page doesn't seem to have any new requests in the last nine months.

7) a) Their requests page is not very active. At the same time, language community users are requesting tech support in their own village pumps. A regular watchlist and proactive action are needed as volunteers may not know about the existence of this user group. b) I couldn’t find many tools and scripts developed by the group in the current or last year. I also couldn’t find recent activities or a list of bugs/tickets to be resolved in the coming months. c) The focus on outreach is commendable, but it also gives the impression that the user group is almost solely focused on outreach. The user group should demonstrate its work throughout the year happening on-wiki and outside the workshops. Aiming for more online coordination would yield better results as developers are known for remote and asynchronous work.

> We will try to answer both the comments/questions together. We have observed this trend where language communities are using more than local channels to report/discuss issues, and also not using the requests of the user group (under Indic-TechCom). We did one initiative during 2024 that needs to be wrapped up during 2024 to address this, and we have proposed another one during 2025 as a follow up to that. The first one during 2024 is Indic Wikimedia Technical Consultations, where proactively reached out to community members to survey and talk to understand their challenges. It surfaced a lot of issues that we would otherwise not know. We proposed to run a technical task force during 2025 (already mentioned in the plan), in which we will have conversations with communities to work on their most pressing issues. The way we are imagining this is to have a working group formed at the beginning of the year and will be working quarterly. Each quarter the group will consult with one language community, understand their issues, and surface them using Phabricator. These will be used not only for hackathons and workshops but also to guide new developers. The goal is to do these for at least three of the four quarters.

> We have developed several tools, bugs etc. but haven’t documented them well enough. But here are some of the tools that were developed or had significant improvements during the last year, in addition to small bugs/fixes

But we acknowledge point about encouraging and focusing on more async and online engagement apart from just the in-person events itself.


8) Strengths of the proposal: Tech outreach and institutional partnerships, aiming for the retention of volunteers by working with the same group consistently, are commendable.

> Thank you!


9) a. Wikisource and Wiktionary can be two important projects for this region, and they don’t even have a mobile app. Most of the new generation and potential contributors can only participate with a mobile phone, and these websites are not ready for adoption by a mobile phone yet. This is a huge challenge that is worth addressing as a whole, though the scope is beyond what a user group can tackle. At the same time, when projects like Wikidata are born out of chapters like Wikimedia Germany, we should take a cue from that and not depend on the WMF to solve every problem we have. b. While tracking metrics by the number of participants is good, it cannot be the end goal. We track outcomes on Wikipedias by the number of articles, images uploaded, etc. The same way, they should be able to track their metrics in terms of tickets resolved or tools developed (and the usage data for those tools), etc.

> Yes, Wikisource and Wiktionary have a lot of active communities in India. We have developed a lot of tools and did bug fixes for Wikisource, but as the committee rightly pointed out at this stage, it is beyond what the user group can handle to develop a full-fledged application, but it is something we can consider in the future. However, the goal of the user group at this point is to provide more on-ground technical support to the Indic language projects and engage in outreach to expand the developer community in India.

> Yes, we completely agree that the metrics should be in terms of the bug fixes and tools built etc. We will try to orient our metrics more in that direction. Here’s also a quick overview of some of the bugs we solved during the last year - this doesn’t include all as we didn’t effectively track things only on Phabricator, as some are GitHub issues and some on tool specific boards. Based on the feedback, we will think more about how we can effectively track the number of bugs resolved, tools built etc. for metrics reporting.


10) a. AI has ushered in an era where everyone can code. How does the group plan to leverage this? b. Most of the tools/scripts developed so far seem to be of global use, which is good, but it also doesn’t demonstrate a focus or clarity of the scope of actions of this group. Does Indic mean any MediaWiki developer from the South Asia region working on any MediaWiki issue? Or do they have a specific focus on tech issues faced by the Indic languages in the South Asia region?

> When we initially started the user group and the precursor to the UG, the IndicTechCom, we were very focused on Indic languages only, but as we grew in terms of number of people and also our experience of building tools, scripts etc. we realized that it doesn’t make sense to limit ourselves to Indic languages only, which also comes with a challenge we will explain further.

  • At this point, we would like to say that the request or need usually comes from editors and other stakeholders working on Indic language Wikimedia projects. For example, a Telugu Wikimedian says I need a script to easily import templates. So when we actually set out to develop it, we develop it in a way that it not only works for Telugu, but for most of the languages if not all. Because the time and the effort to develop a user script that imports templates from one language to another, be it Telugu, Hindi or Indonesian, it is more or less the same. But thinking how the solution works globally is the best use of the developer time, rather than developing community specific solutions. So we end up developing tools that can be used globally, but the needs often emerge from Indic language communities.
  • In some cases, these are language specific - for example, digits not being rendered properly in Kashimiri - which is a specific issue with Kashimiri language, in which case we can try to solve that specific bug. Often we observe that issues with language rendering and translation, which are some of the most frequent issues when it comes to specific languages, are connected with the content translation tool or MediaWiki core itself. So when doing outreach, let's have a beginner friendly hackathon, these bugs even though they are small and related to Indic languages, we can’t really work on them. The problem being the programming language. Contributing to MediaWiki core requires a decent knowledge of PHP, and one of the challenges we’re facing in welcoming new contributors from India, who are majorly students, is that PHP is not part of the majority of CS undergrad or post grad courses in India. While they can learn online, it is a not great motivating factor for them to learn PHP just for this, as it is not usually a language that is asked in the job market. And given especially, you can contribute in other ways technically to Wikimedia technical spaces, such as using Python, JS, HTML/CSS, which often brings us to user scripts, bots, web apps etc. which are natively global in nature.

So while we want to work on the tech issues faced by the Indic languages, and we try to, that is not the only focus. We take needs from the community, and expand the scope into global usage.


11) Re question 10/timeline, could you share the link to your timeline as it is not appearing in your application.

> Here is a link to the timeline of activities: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jqOHfoK756yw52VHd2HpWIJowgxyllUPBTQJWzSfmUA/edit?usp=sharing

12) Upon review of the details, several observations and suggestions merit consideration to optimize the event's success. Given that the university is already located in Kochi, utilizing campus facilities would be more cost-effective rather than arranging hotel accommodations, which would significantly impact the budget. The event could be restructured into two distinct segments for better management and impact. The first could be a focused session held at the university campus, requiring travel and accommodation only for the core organizers. The second could be a separate event specifically designed for community engagement, potentially at a different location and time that best suits the participants. Regarding the proposed national-level hackathon, while the vision of hosting 50 participants is ambitious, a more focused approach with 25-30 participants might be more effective. This adjustment would enable higher quality engagement and more meaningful outcomes while optimizing the budget. The scaled approach would help maintain rigorous standards for technical contribution and maximize the value generated from the event.

> Sorry, we didn’t clarify the location. The main university is located about 200 km from Kochi (reference), and as we also want to include participants from other universities/colleges in Kochi, we planned a combined event. For the event space itself, TinkerSpace, where we did a hackathon earlier this year, is free of charge for open-source events like ours.

> Thank you for the observation on the national hackathon. While the total participant count might be around 50, hacking developers would be around 30-35 people only. We will have 7-8 mentors, one each per project, and some organizers. We are confident about this as we are trying a similar approach this year: Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Bhubaneswar 2024 to take place in December. Drawing from our experiences with the past few hackathons, we are introducing a slightly revised program format and participation structure for the upcoming event. Traditionally, tasks are published a few days before the event begins, and participants then select their preferred tasks on the first day. While this approach works, it poses a challenge as some participants may find themselves without tasks that align closely with their skill sets or interests. Additionally, although bugs can be addressed during the hackathon, measuring collective impact can be challenging. To address this, we have curated the tasks for this hackathon in such a way that a set of tasks collectively contributes to the substantial development of a tool or workflow, thereby progressing it to a stable version. We hope that this approach not only fosters engagement during the event but also encourages continued participation post-event, allowing developers to collaborate further on tasks until they reach completion. Here is a list of tasks we curated for the upcoming one, and each applicant has clearly been asked to indicate their plan for working on a project. We will learn from this experience for next year.

13) a) The proposal talks about the GSOC. But isnt GSOC sponsered by google? what is the exact role of the IMDUG group role in that? does it incur any cost to the group? b) What is the budget for the VVIT club and how it would be utilised is not clear

> Yes, GSoC is sponsored by Google, there is no monetary expense for Wikimedia or the User Group side. Every year, WMF announces a call for projects across the movement (which includes the Foundation, affiliates and also any individual who mentors a project). So there are three steps in the process:

For a 3/6-month period, selected interns work on the projects while mentors provide support as part of their internship which includes weekly/bi-weekly meetings, code reviews and clarifications, identifying opportunities for learning by doing etc.

So as mentioned above there is no financial cost from the User Group side. But mentorship takes a substantial amount of volunteer time and effort from the mentors, which will be a contribution from our side. So we plan to mentor at least 1 GSoC/Outreachy project during 2025.

It is a similar case with VVIT WikiClub, there is no significant financial component for it. It is a project we have already started and have done some prep work during 2024 already, such as initial project brainstorming, orienting students towards MediaWiki technical aspects, small assignments to get hands-on experience etc. It is mostly online mentorship. The project is to build a dashboard to surface various community insights in an accessible form to volunteers and other stakeholders. A group of students are working on it, and the work will mostly be conducted online. There might be an in-person component on campus to conclude the project, however, that won’t cost significantly (probably around 10K-20K INR, which can be pulled from the unforeseen funds).


14) Skill development for existing tech contributors is a good step. How do you plant to induct and retain new tech developers?

> The skill development program is actually an activity to retain new developers and grooming them to further stage Apart from the user group itself, we want appreciate several other efforts in India to expand the developer community, such as RoadToWiki program, WikiClubs by IIITH, technical outreach efforts by CIS-A2K etc. while this may feel like a lot of players, in reality it is still not enough. Despite all that, we’re still only tapping a miniscule percentage of tech talent in India. So with all these initiatives, we have seen a lot of new developers come in, who did some great work. While some developers learn on their own, some might further support, so the skill development program will help that. In addition, we also have created a Telegram channel in October, Indic Wikimedia technical forum, to continuously engage new developers, where both editors and developers talk. It has started to pick-up some engagement, and has about 100 members currently.

We hope that these responses help in further understand the context and reasoning behind our annual plan for 2025. Please let us know if there are any further questions. On behalf of the Indic MediaWiki Developers UG, KCVelaga (talk) 20:40, 24 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Your grant application has been approved

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Latest comment: 11 days ago2 comments1 person in discussion

Hello Indic Mediawiki Developers User Group,

Thank you for your responses to the follow-ups questions.

Congratulations! Your grant application has been approved in the amount of INR 6,336,712 from 1 January 2025 to 31 December 2025.


Here are some comments from the review team that were captured from the final deliberation round

  • 15) Please reach out more to all communities and make sure to keep the on-wiki documentation updated.


Recommendations

  • On this talkpage, we would like to flag questions/ responses for (1), (2) for inclusion into your implementation plan and take into consideration the comments from the review team (6), (7), (9), (14) and (15). We also suggest that you provide regular updates on this talkpage when you have made progress in these areas with links to other relevant pages for further details.


For the review of your next grant application, we will take into account your new application AND progress that you have made in the areas of the recommendations captured on this talkpage. Hence we would encourage you to be proactive in sharing key updates here on a regular basis. If there are recommendations that you have considered and have assessed that it is not the right fit for now, please also provide an update to share your learnings/thought process as well.


Change in implementation plan

We know even the best thought through plans may change.

In the event that there are changes to your implementation schedule, you can reach out to request for a grant extension (i.e. extend end date). Similarly, if there is a surplus budget or changes to your planned budget, you can reach out to me about reallocation (via email and on this talkpage). There is also the option to have the unspent funds deducted against a future grant. More details here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Return_unused_funds_to_WMF


Additional resources which may be useful


We thank you for your participation in the grant application process and hope to continue to journey with you as you embark on the implementation phase. Good luck!

Regards, Jacqueline on behalf of SA Regional Funds Committee JChen (WMF) (talk) 16:08, 29 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hello Indic Mediawiki Developers User Group,
An additional note for clarity. The amount (INR 6,336,712) published on this talkpage already takes into account both institutional development fee and chartered accountant fee. (i.e. Total B + 15% fee + 3% bank fee + 10,000 INR). Referencing proposed budget.
Thank you.
Regards,
Jacqueline JChen (WMF) (talk) 07:13, 16 December 2024 (UTC)Reply
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