Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Wikimedia Libya Community Support Grant 2024

دعم المنحة

Moqdmi1 (talk) 22:48, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm Supporting Ahmed M Eltalhi (talk) 12:31, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Support Wikimedia Libya Community

I fully support and encourage this proposal because the Wikimedia Libya Community faces numerous challenges, including limited content on important Libyan topics, a lack of active editors, particularly in specific areas of expertise, the need for training and resources to improve content quality and user engagement, and, finally, technical limitations that impede the user experience or content creation. The Wikimedia Libya Community, led by a talented leaders Salema_younus and NANöR, will benefit from these grants to enhance Arabic and Libyan content.

Feedback from the Middle East and Africa Regional Funding Committee on your proposal

Dear Wikimedia Libya Community team,

Thank you very much for your proposal, describing your activities and projects in support of the Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia movement. The Regional Committee has initially reviewed the proposal, and wishes to offer some initial feedback and questions for your review. The committee felt that the overall direction of this proposal is leading towards a productive and positive test of community development in Libya. In particular, approaches like organizing Train the Trainer program and training students on how to contribute to Wikipedia and Wikidata focusing on content relevant to their studies might be a good starting point to diversify and empower these individuals to multiply the work in their respective localities later on. While elaborating on your proposed plans, the committee members had the following questions and recommendations. Questions:

• What was the rationale behind prioritizing work with more advanced WM platforms (like WikiSource and WikiData) compared to WM Commons to build the community?
• How do you plan to bring in new organizers next to bringing in new contributors? What are the strategies which will be used to retain these new contributors?
• Why did you select a 5 months timeframe for your implementation?
• What are the local challenges and knowledge equity gaps that your programs are addressing? How have you evaluated the impact of your previous rapid funds to inform the current GSF application?
• What is the purpose of attending WikiIndaba? What is the probability of attaining the necessary travel documents to attend?
• Can you please provide clarifications on the share of work between the two key organizers, what is the rationale behind having 2 organizers for a short period of implementation, what are the differences in their skill sets and experiences, how they relate to the other members of your community (who else will contribute from the existing community), and their staff time in terms of FTE allocated to each, and their total employment/contractor costs and their calculations? (While in the budget file the trainer costs are mentioned under the separate training types, we do not have a full understanding of their exact roles and total costs, in the budget breakdown they add up to 400 USD in total at a unit cost of 100 USD, whereas in the summary budget to 3,600 USD as a monthly cost of 600 USD per months for 6 months).

Recommendations:

• In your budget file, Unseen expenses at 10% rate are too high for this size of the budget, please be so kind as to revise it.
• In your timeline file, the train the trainer event only runs for one week while in other places for three weeks, can you please make the information consistent.
• Please improve your application by assigning a corresponding outcome and the target audiences for your strategic lines.
• Your team could use existing resources, such as translating the Wikipedia and Wikidata Essentials course on the outreach dashboard training platform so that members could have something to still go through after individual trainings or workshops, as well as pull useful recordings from YouTube and Wikimedia Commons to form a catalog so that community members could learn on the go.
• As this would be the first time working with a fiscal sponsor, please prepare for the additional workload of engaging with the bureaucracy and administration of an external stakeholder.

We hope you find this initial feedback useful. In terms of the schedule for our review process, please complete your review and responses to committee feedback by 01st of May 2024. After this time, the Regional Committee will begin a final review of the proposal to make a formal decision.

Thanks again for your work on the proposal and supporting our review.

On behalf of the Regional Committee, Pellagia Njau (talk) 13:44, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Response from Wikimedia Libya Community team

Dear @User:Pellagia Njau and Team,

Thank you for reviewing our application. Please find below responses to the questions

QUESTION 1.What was the rationale behind prioritizing work with more advanced WM platforms (like WikiSource and WikiData) compared to WM Commons to build the community?

RESPONSE 1:We have previously organized training sessions for beginners on Arabic Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, and we will have training sessions for the two projects in this session as well before starting the Wiki Loves Monuments contest.

Wikisource and Wikidata training sessions are aimed at beginners, and Wikidata, for example, is for computer science students. Our organizers have good experience in Wikisource and Wikidata, and we will also cooperate with trainers with experience in both projects to provide integrated training for beginners.

We believe that the diversity of skills of members of an emerging community is important, and expanding their contributions to several projects (the four largest projects in Wikimedia) will be a gain for the Libyan community, especially since we target a specialized category for each project.

QUESTION 2.How do you plan to bring in new organizers next to bringing in new contributors? What are the strategies which will be used to retain these new contributors?

RESPONSE 2:Since last year, we announced our intention and our endeavor to create a Libyan community, and we created WhatsApp groups and a special page for the Libyan community on Facebook. About 15 people joined us in the first version of the Libyan Wikipedia project, and three or four of them continued with us after that for a full year. When we started the second version of the project in September 2023, more than 20 participants joined us, and about ten of them are currently following us. During this year, we were monitoring and following up on which of the participants were interested in organizing, and so we communicated to talk to them about the importance of organizing activities in their places and explain how our plan to build the community would be through them taking on the organizational roles that we are doing now.

During this current period, from the time of writing the grant application to sending the feedback, we met with more than 10 members individually for 15 minutes to half an hour. We shared with them the grant link and informed them of upcoming activities and the budget. Our goal is to encourage them to be among the organizers of Libyan community activities. For the coming year, with the assurance that we will support them and work with them step by step to organize and coordinate activities.

We don't yet have a clear strategy specifically for how to retain new contributors, but from our previous experiences in dealing with newcomers and our observations of what they do in other communities, we always maintain communication with the participants through the general channels of the community or through individual communication. We encourage them to contribute to topics that we know they are interested in. We are interested in it, and we are also keen to maintain and emphasize the friendly environment that encourages contributors to stay in the place. As organizers, we are also interested in following sessions presented by different communities or the Wikimedia Foundation on how to retain new contributors to gain broader knowledge.

QUESTION 3.Why did you select a 5 months timeframe for your implementation?

RESPONSE 3:The period for implementing the activities is six months, from July 1, 2024, until December 31, 2024. We have the intention to provide the next grant in the first cycle, that is, at the beginning of next year, for a period of one full year. Salema younus (talk) 07:49, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

QUESTION 4.What are the local challenges and knowledge equity gaps that your programs are addressing? How have you evaluated the impact of your previous rapid funds to inform the current GSF application?

RESPONSE 4:First, diversity in projects because there is interest for a target group, such as Wikidata and Wikisource, and this means diversity in content and its documentation in different projects. The target groups in our activities are diverse, from students to media professionals and journalists, as well as those interested in photography and those passionate about reading, and this will create diversity in contributing to knowledge. Libya is a geographically vast country; the population centers are spread out, and the cities are far from each other. This is a major challenge that we are currently facing because the in-person activities will be limited to one area, and we will implement one activity in person in the capital.

QUESTION 5.What is the purpose of attending WikiIndaba? What is the probability of attaining the necessary travel documents to attend?

RESPONSE 5:'Wiki Indaba is a conference for the African community, and Libya is part of Africa. In our desire to be part of this African community and African groups, we believe it is important to have a Libyan presence at the Wiki Indaba conference. Travel documents depend on a letter of recommendation and invitation, followed by obtaining an entry visa to South Africa.

QUESTION 6.Can you please provide clarifications on the share of work between the two key organizers, what is the rationale behind having 2 organizers for a short period of implementation, what are the differences in their skill sets and experiences, how they relate to the other members of your community (who else will contribute from the existing community), and their staff time in terms of FTE allocated to each, and their total employment/contractor costs and their calculations? (While in the budget file the trainer costs are mentioned under the separate training types, we do not have a full understanding of their exact roles and total costs, in the budget breakdown they add up to 400 USD in total at a unit cost of 100 USD, whereas in the summary budget to 3,600 USD as a monthly cost of 600 USD per months for 6 months). RESPONSE 6:'The activity will last for six months, with the aim of building a community. The activities in this application are diverse, meaning that we target a specific, specialized group for each activity.

Salema is an organizer, and at the same time she is training in organizing. Her current organizational and management skills are not sufficient to build a community, so the cooperation was done from the beginning between Nanour and Salima because she is an experienced user in organizing activities, dealing with newcomers, and building Wikimedia communities.

We support members who show an interest in organizing activities. For example, the Wiki Loves Monuments contest One of the members will participate with us, and he is a student at the College of Arts. The photographers will be part of the contest, and the Wikipedia training directed at media students will be in cooperation with a member of the community who is a media specialist, and their role will be voluntary.

Our calculation was based on full-time working hours of 40 hours, and we want to draw your attention to the $600 that will be shared by two people, and each of them will work 30 hours or more per week. In addition, because the two organizations have different experiences and skills, sometimes we need time to work on the same task together. As we mentioned in the request and as we mentioned in our answer above, the roles will be mutual between us, including coordination, management, communication, and consultation, with the details of these tasks being divided by two people.

We will cooperate with experienced and specialized community members to be trainers for each separate activity, and $100 will be nominal amount for their cooperation with us.--Salema younus (talk) 06:03, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for providing all these recommendations.

• We have adjusted the unseen expenses to 5%.
• In the timeline file, the week is daily training, and the sessions (3 weeks) of Wikipedia and Wikidata will be one session per week, each lasting 3 hours.
• True, thank you for the recommendation. We have materials from previous sessions that we will use again.
• We will use the ones you mentioned in order to benefit from them, and we will be sure to share them during the sessions with the participants.
• Thank you for the advice regarding the fiscal sponsor, while clarifying that this is not the first time.--Salema younus (talk) 07:02, 30 April 2024 (UTC)