Grants:PEG/WM IN/PEG Bridge Funding/Report

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Report accepted
This report for a Project and Event grant approved in FY has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
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Project status[edit]

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?
YES
Is your project completed?
YES

Activities and lessons learned[edit]

Activities[edit]

Microgrants[edit]

MOU between Wikimedia India and Tamil virtual academy

Wikimedia India provides microgrants for projects and events conducted by Wikimedia community members in India. These specifically include innovative projects from chapter members and the Wikimedia community and others aligned to its mission. All grantees are accountable for project expenses by line item, and are required to report on all projects. Using this program, WMIN mainly intended in the grant period from August 2015 to February 2016 to help & support the Tamil Wikimedia Outreach'. WMIN is supporting the Tamil Wikimedia Community for its collaboration with Tamil Virtual Academy (TVA). In Collaboration with Wikimedia India & the community members of Tamil community, the focus of the partnership includes

  • Tamil Virtual Academy implementing its initiatives in four verticles viz.,
  • Tamil Computing and open source Outreach
  • Tamil education
  • Tamil computing Research and Development
  • Digitization and publishing the documents under CC by SA 4.0 and GNU 2.0.

Since TVA is an autonomous institution run by the State Government of Tamil Nadu, there was a serious push of the volunteers for outreach, content acquisition and free content friendly policy initiatives.

Regarding with this, an MoU was signed by WMIN on behalf of the Tamil community & TVA. You can find the MoU here

As part of the collaboration, the following activities were conducted

  • WMIN signs an MoU with Tamil Virtual Academy
  • R loganathan was a Wikimedian in Residence working with the TVA on various projects of collaboration.
  • 2 day Workshop on Content development for Tamil Wikimedia was conducted in August 2015
  • 3 day workshop on open source media content was conducted in September 2015
  • During the book exhibitions TVA collaborating with Tamil Wikipedia and sensitizing the community on Wikimedia projects and open knowledge
  • Involvement of Tamil Wikipedians at 3rd-fuel-gilt-conference held at TVA
  • Media coverage of the Tamil workshop in newspapers Wikipedia workshop
  • Statistics

Equipment lending and community support[edit]

Continuing with our commitments to help & support the community members as part of our infrastructure scholarship, we are continuing to support the 2 following Grant requests

  • Biggest achievement has been of User:Jim Carter , As seen in these Statistics He has increased his edit count from 44 mothly edits in June 2015 to 1688 monthly edits in November 2015

Wikipedia in Tech Education[edit]

  • The Program was successfully launched with a virtual guest lecture from WMF staff Niharika Kohli in August 2015.This was well appreciated by all the faculty & the students
  • In the month of October, there was a guest lecture in the campus on Language Engineering. It was taken by an award winning scholar Vikas Yaligarand. This included a one weekend full of hands-on training. Vikas was a Google Summer of Code intern for MediaWiki in 2014.
  • In December 2016, curriculum planning was done for including the Media wiki training from January 2016.

GLAM Focus in West Bengal[edit]

GLAM focus in West Bengal is a community driven projects. The Kolikata Little Magazine Library GLAM was one of the main GLAM initiatives of Wikimedia India. This project started of on a good footing in August 2015 as seen in its project page . They were able to upload images of close to 3,000 pages. This momentum slowed down in October 2015. One of the reasons was the delay in getting the grant from WMF. Also, later, there was a difference of taking the project forward between the GLAM coordinators Santanu Chandra, Sujay Chandra and Rangan Datta. Inspite of getting to get approval from the GLAM institutions, there was no progress of the project after December 2015.

Lessons learned[edit]

What worked well?
  • Collaboration with TVA
  • Tamil Wikipedia registered 251% increase in editors who made at least an edit in November 2015. It jumped from 331 to 1165 in a month. This was made possible because of Wikipedia training camps in various districts for school teachers organized by State council for Education Research and Technology. This training was organized with zero cost for Wikimedia resources in 32 districts of the state and 1500+ school teachers were trained to contribute to Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikimedia Commons. Though we know from movement learning that new user retention will be an issue, we have won partners like these who will continue to repeat this training every year as part of the ICT curriculum for teachers.
What did't work?
  • GLAM focus in West Bengal
  • The GLAM project was going well till December 2015, but after that, there was burnout observed in the Volunteers.This was mainly due to shortage of volunteers to come forward for supporting the program leaders. This later led to abandonment of the project in January 2016 by the Program leaders.
What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?
  • We would have helped the community in finding new community leaders who would have supported them in their program

Impact[edit]

Target readership[edit]

Wikipedia (Bengali, Tamil, English), Commons and MediaWiki.

Fit with strategy[edit]

What crucial thing will the project try to change or benefit in the Wikimedia movement? Please select the Wikimedia strategic priority(ies) that your project most directly aims to impact and explain how your project fits. Most projects fit all strategic priorities. However, we would like project managers to focus their efforts on impacting 1–2 strategic priorities. Examples of strategic priorities can be found here.

  • Our Microgrants program will Increase Participation and Reach as it primarily supports projects and events from various language communities trying to enroll new contributors by increasing awareness about the Wikimedia movement.
  • Equipment lending and Community Support program will help to Improve Quality by enabling active users to contribute more and consistently. The equipment will be a shared resource for the community to conduct outreach thereby Stabilizing Infrastructure too.
  • Wikipedia in Education Tech program is one of its kind in the Wikimedia movement. It is the only education program which has a tech focus to leverage the tech talent that India is known for. Thus, this program will Encourage Innovation and Increase Participation towards the technical side of Wikimedia projects. This program will also Encourage Diversity by working on technical solutions for Indian languages and Reduce Gender Gap as 75% of the current set of students are women.
  • GLAM Focus in West Bengal will Improve Quality and Increase participation by adding to an ecosystem of reference sources in Bengali online.

Measures of success[edit]

Measure of Success Status
Microgrants
At least 2 Wikimedia communities in India are supported to conduct projects and events. Done (Including TVA)
Tamil Wikimedia Community starts executing the proposed outreach, content acquisition and policy initiatives. Done
Tamil Wikimedia Outreach Done
Equipment lending and community support -
1 long time contributor increases his/her edit activity by at least 100%. Done (User:JimCarter)
Wikipedia in Education
At least 35 students start working in projects related to MediaWiki, Language Computing research and tools. Done
At least 3 guest lectures are conducted. Only 2 were done
At least 2 hands-on workshops are conducted. Only 1 workshop was done
Students start working in at least 7 final year semester projects. -
GLAM Focus in West Bengal
Kolikata Little Magazine Library GLAM Done
At least 40 images of artifacts are contributed to Commons. Done
At least 19,200 pages are digitized and uploaded to Commons. Only 3000 images uploaded
Bejoy Narayan Mahavidyalaya GLAM
200 images of zoological specimens and slides are contributed to Commons. -
1,00,000 pages are digitized and uploaded to Commons. -
St. John's Church, Kolkata GLAM -
At least 15 registers are digitized and uploaded to Commons. -
Number of new editors from all the above GLAM activities: -
Short term: New editors during the courses and workshops: 5 -
Long term: Number of those editors who continue editing one month after the project duration: 1 to 3 -
Female editors: 1 -

Reporting and documentation of expenditures[edit]

Documentation[edit]

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grants at wikimedia dot org, according to the guidelines here? Answer "Yes" or "No".
YES, may be referred here

Expenses[edit]

The following excel sheet has the expenses HERE:

Total project budget (from your approved grant submission)
4,50,000 INR ( approx 6,743 USD)
Total amount requested from WMF (from your approved grant submission, this total will be the same as the total project budget if PEG is your only funding source)
4,50,000 INR ( approx 6,743 USD)
Total amount spent on this project
3,61,747.5 INR ( approx 5,420.6 USD)
Total amount of Project and Event grant funds spent on this project
3,61,747.5 INR ( approx 5,420.6 USD)
Are there additional sources that funded any part of this project? List them here.
NO

Remaining funds[edit]

The funds remaining from this grant in the amount of 88,252.50 INR were deducted from another grant payment for Grants:PEG/WM IN/PEG Bridge Funding/Report/Reallocation.
Are there any grant funds remaining?
Answer YES or NO.
YES
Please list the total amount (specify currency) remaining here. (This is the amount you did not use, or the amount you still have after completing your grant.)
88,252.50 INR (Around $ 1,322.4)
If funds are remaining they must be returned to WMF, reallocated to mission-aligned activities, or applied to another approved grant.
Please state here if you intend to return unused funds to WMF, submit a request for reallocation, or submit a new grant request, and then follow the instructions on your approved grant submission.
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