Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Indic MediaWiki Developers UG 2024 Annual Plan

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Applicant information[edit]

Organization name or Wikimedia Username for individuals. (required): Indic MediaWiki Developers User Group

Do you have any approved General Support Fund requests? (required): No, it is my first time applying for a General Support Fund

You are applying as a(n). (required): Wikimedia Affiliate (chapter, thematic org., or user group)

Are your group or organization legally registered in your country? (required): No

Do you have a fiscal sponsor?: Yes

Fiscal organization name.: Wikimedia Österreich

Main proposal[edit]

1. Please state the title of your proposal. This will also be a title for the Meta-Wiki page. (required): Indic MediaWiki Developers UG 2024 Annual Plan

2. Do you want to apply for the multi-year funding or renewal process? (required): N/A

2.1. For how many years of multi-year funding are you applying? (required): N/A

2.2. Provide a brief overview of Year 2 and Year 3 of the proposed plan and how this relates to the current proposal and your strategic plan? (required)

N/A

3. Proposed start date. (required): 2024-01-01

4. Proposed end date. (required): 2023-12-31

5. Does your organization or group have an Affiliate or Organizational Annual Plan that can help us understand your proposal? If yes, please provide it. (required): No

6. Does your affiliate, organization or group have a Strategic Plan that can help us understand your proposal? If yes, please provide it. (required): No

7. Where will this proposal be implemented? (required): India

8. What are your programs, approaches, and strategies? What are the challenges that you are trying to address and how will your strategies support you in addressing these challenges? (required)

Indic MediaWiki Developers User Group is a group of volunteers working on technical issues and the development of tools, with a focus on the needs of Indic language Wikimedia projects. We have been an informal group since 2018, and have been formally affiliated to WMF since 2020. During the past few years, we have been engaged in several activities including active technical development such as IndicOCR, Indic Wikisource Stats, MassMove, BookReader etc. and also outreach to welcome newcomers to Wikimedia technical spaces such as amFOSS hackathon, Small Wiki Toolkits workshop series, Wkimania Hackathon etc. A full list of our past activities can be seen at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Indic_MediaWiki_Developers_User_Group/Activities. Most of these activities have been done ad-hoc, that is whenever we see an opportunity, and that makes it really hard for us to have more structured engagements for outreach and plan capacity. A substantial part of our outreach efforts has been focused on bringing newcomers into technical spaces and helping grow the technical community in India, ad-hoc activities don’t really help in long-term impact and sustainability. By combining all our experience and learnings from the past, starting with the next calendar year, we would like to adopt an annual plan to help us address the above-mentioned challenges.

Our work is broadly divided into two groups: technical support and outreach.

1.) Technical support focuses on the active technical development of tools, user scripts, and features, helping communities with any technical issues.

2.) Outreach includes workshops targeted towards newcomers, hackathons at regional and national levels, and online workshops for Wikimedia communities.

For technical support, we plan to take up the following activities:

Technical Consultations: Currently, we do not have a comprehensive picture of the technical needs and challenges being faced by Indic Wikimedia communities. While some communities with active developers get the necessary support, others are dependent on volunteer developers. As a pilot, we will be engaging with 3-5 communities with the help of liaisons to help them surface all their needs and challenges. This may include new feature/tool requests or existing bugs. All the issues will be documented using a combination of Phabricator boards(s) and wiki pages. This will help us understand what the common themes around technical issues on these wikis are. While we won’t be actively addressing the issues during this annual plan, we will be using these to direct participants during our workshops and hackathons and also to inform future work.

User Group Technical Requests: The requests page has been well received by the community in the past. We will continue to maintain the process around accepting new tasks that come through it. We intend to do more outreach to both the community to increase awareness about it and its usage, and also with the developer community, wherein in the long term there are more developers actively volunteering to address the requests posted on that page.

For outreach, we have planned our work around three broad categories: mentoring in programs such as GsoC and Outreachy, newcomer training workshops, and hackathons (regional and national).

GSoC and Outreachy: Wikimedia Foundation actively participates in Google Summer of Code and Outreachy programs. In the past, we have both proposed projects for potential applicants and mentored students during the technical development of the projects. While retention of participants of these programs in the community continues to be a challenge across the board, given that we are planning for multiple outreach activities intertwined to increase follow-up engagement, we hope that follow-up engagement through other activities such as hackathons in the region may potentially help with retention. We have seen work in a few cases in the past, that was unplanned. We will experiment and learn how this strategy works with this annual plan.

We believe that it is important to bring newcomers into the developer community. From previous outreach activities, we realized that retention is a hard challenge to crack. However, the past activities have also helped us to learn things that may and may not work. We learnt that follow-up is important and especially ensuring the interested folks have a sense of community will help them stick around. As we only did one-off events, it had been hard to engage across activities, although it happened sometimes and turned out well.

For this annual plan, we have planned for two newcomers' training workshops, two regional/mini hackathons and one larger national hackathon.

The newcomer training workshops will be for 2-3 days, and the program will specifically focus on exposing Wikimedia technical spaces, different ways to contribute, where to start etc. to developers. We don’t have a standard program, as we usually customize it according to the participant's group which can vary. But generally, we spend 50% of the time on sessions introducing the MediaWiki ecosystem, user scripts, gadgets, tools, databases, data sources and support such as Toolforge, and PAWS. The rest 50% is spent on hands-on activity, which includes activities such as local installation of MediaWiki and extensions and also working on live issues or projects.

We will be experimenting with various workshop designs as well. In the past, we usually introduced all technical areas/tools and let participants choose to work on what they were most interested in. While this model has its advantages, it can also be overwhelming for newcomers. We will try 2-3 models and see if they will work out. An alternative is to start with the basics, and let participants try out some small goal-oriented tasks that help them interact and dive into the ecosystem, and then move on other other topics on the second day or so.

Mini/regional hackathons are planned (timeline-wise) as follow-ups to the newcomer training workshops. While not everyone from the workshops will be participating as the scholarship support for hackathons will be based on an application. We will ensure that scholarship allocation is well balanced between newcomers and veterans, and also community members who are not necessarily developers but have good knowledge of issues on the projects, and work with developers to address them. Unlike training workshops, only a little time (about 10-20%) is spent on sessions, and most of the time is spent on hackathons. We will have space for split groups if several people are interested in learning or discussing about. Note: We will not be awarding scholarships to complete newcomers who haven’t contributed at all. In the paragraph above, when we newcomers, it is in a relative sense. The hackathons are planned as follow-up activities to the training workshops, we will be allocating some slots to support promising contributors in the later hackathons.

We have one ‘’’national hackathon‘’’ planned towards the end of the year, which will be kind of a culmination of all outreach activities by the user group. It is envisioned to be a space not only for developers who write code but also create a space for community members who deal with technical issues/problems, designers, contributors documentation, testers etc. It will also be a space for newcomers that we have engaged during previous activities to connect with the larger Wikimedia community.

For the three above-mentioned categories of activities, the experiment we would like to try and learn from is to use these sets of activities as follow-up engagements along with consistent online engagements such as brief workshops or simple meetups in between. Over time, we are hoping this will build a sense of community for newcomers in technical spaces, which we have seen in the past is really crucial for retention.

We would like to use these activities not only as a follow-up for participants but also for projects and themes. During hackathons, we would like to focus on tools and issues to Wikisource projects in Indic languages (although maybe beneficial globally) and Wikimedia Commons. This is the only focus theme wherein we will actively curate tasks and mentor projects, however, during the activities, participants are free to choose to work on any topic of their interest.

There are a few other smaller-scale activities that we will be doing depending on the needs and opportunities. Examples of these include online workshops on a specific topic for developers or community members. The topics can include things such as running Pywikibot, templates etc. We also plan to give talks at 1-2 related activities, such as IndiaFOSS, Technical Summit etc.

9. What categories are your main programs and related activities under? Please select all that apply. (required)


Category	Yes/No
Education	No
Culture, heritage or GLAM	No
Gender and diversity	No
Community support and engagement	Yes
Participation in campaigns and contests	No
Public policy advocacy	No
Other	Yes

Community support and engagement

9.4. Select all your programs and activities for Community support and engagement.: Organizing meetups, conferences, and community events, On-wiki training of community members, Off-wiki training of community members; Other programs and activities if any: N/A

Other categories

Wikimedia technical spaces
Open source technology
Newcomer outreach
Newcomer retention

10. Please include a link to or upload a timeline (operational calendar) for your programs and activities. (required)

Timeline has been attached in the form of a portable document below

IMD Annual Plan 2024_ Activities Annual Plan Timeline.pdf

11. Describe your team. (required)

The Core Working Group of the User Group is comprised of User:Gopavasanth, User:Jayprakash12345, User:KCVelaga and User:Nivas10798. The Core Working Group will be leading and be accountable for the success of the annual plan. Among the members,

Jayprakash12345 will be leading the technical wing along with mentoring newcomers as needed
Gopavasanth will be leading the program planning and workshop design aspects along with planning and strategy
KCVelaga will be providing at-large coordination support, planning and strategy, and coordinating with relevant stakeholders
Nivas10798 will be leading event planning, logistics, finances and budgeting

The Extended Working Group is comprised of User:Jnanaranjan sahu, User:Krishkavya, User:Lakshmi Warrier, and User:ParasharSarthak, and they will be providing support to the core working group. This is designed in order to have sustainability of the user group in the future by grooming leadership. They will be working closely with the core group and be leading activities some activities. Among the members:

Jnanaranjan sahu will be supporting technical development and newcomer mentoring programs
Krishkavya will be supporting overall coordination and program planning
Lakshmi Warrier will be supporting event planning and communication
ParasharSarthak will be supporting documentation, communication and coordination.

Apart from the working group, Satdeep Gill will be advising from time to time as needed.

12. Will you be working with any internal (Wikimedia) or external partners? Describe the characteristics of these partnerships and bring a few examples of the most significant partnerships. (required)

For this annual plan, we intend to work with two partners, one internal and one external.

Internally, we are planning to collaborate with CIS-A2K, which has been extensively working with Indic Wikimedia communities for several years now. While we don't have the specifics figured out yet, we had a brief conversation with members of the team and we are happy to collaborate on various fronts, including but not limited, to sharing community outreach knowledge, strategizing about growing technical contributors in India.

Externally, we will be collaborating with amFOSS (https://amfoss.in/), a student-run community with over 50+ members from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri, over the last 14 years. The club has been active with various open-source projects in the past, and last year, the user group co-organized a hackathon (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_-_amFOSS_Hackathon) with the group, which was well received. We will continue to work closely with them, including not just being limited to hackathons, but also providing support for the group for students interested in contributing to open-source projects.

13. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select all that apply. (required): Increase the Sustainability of Our Movement, Invest in Skills and Leadership Development, Innovate in Free Knowledge, Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt

Metrics[edit]

Wikimedia Metrics[edit]

14. Please select and fill out Wikimedia Metrics for your proposal. (recommended)

14.1. Number of participants, editors, and organizers.

All metrics provided are optional, please fill them out if they are aligned with your programs and activities.

Participants, editors, and organizers
Metrics name	Target	Description
Number of all participants	180	* Indic Wikimedia Technical Consultations: 5 * 4 communities = 20 Skill Training Workshops = 5 * 5 workshops = 25 Newcomer Training Workshop 1 = 20 Mini Hackathon 1 = 20 Newcomer Training Workshop 2 = 20 Mini Hackathon 2 = 20 National Hackathon = 40
Number of all editors	N/A	N/A
Number of new editors	N/A
Number of retained editors	N/A
Number of all organizers	12
Number of new organizers	6

14.2. Number of new content contributions to Wikimedia projects. (recommended)

Contributions to Wikimedia projects
Wikimedia project	Created	Edited or improved
Wikipedia
Wikimedia Commons
Wikidata
Wiktionary
Wikisource
Wikimedia Incubator
Translatewiki
MediaWiki
Wikiquote
Wikivoyage
Wikibooks
Wikiversity
Wikinews
Wikispecies
Wikifunctions / Abstract Wikipedia

Description for Wikimedia projects contributions metrics. (optional)

Other Metrics[edit]

15. Do you have other quantitative and qualitative targets for your project (other metrics)? (required): Yes


Other Metrics	Description	Target
Number of newcomers to Wikimedia technical spaces	Number of people who have been introduced to Wikimedia technical spaces	50
Number of new contributors to Wikimedia technical spaces	Among the "Number of newcomers to Wikimedia technical spaces", the number of people who have contributed to at least one technical task (bug fix, tool development, documentation etc.)	20
Number of new contributors to Wikimedia technical spaces retained	Among the "Number of new contributors to Wikimedia technical spaces", how many people have been consistently contributing to technical spaces. What is considered consistent will be hard to define, however, it will be a few contributions spread out across the year.	5
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A

Budget[edit]

16. Will you have any other revenue sources when implementing this proposal (e.g. other funding, membership contributions, donations)? (required): No

16.1. List other revenue sources. (required)

N/A

16.2. Approximately how much revenue will you have from other sources in your local currency? (required): N/A

17. Your local currency. (required): EUR

18. What is the total requested amount in your local currency? (required): 38988.49 EUR

Multi-year funding request summary
Year	Amount (local currency)
Year 1	N/A EUR
Year 2	N/A EUR
Year 3	N/A EUR

Requested amount in USD: 42420.52 USD ^{[note 1]}

Multi-year funding request summary in USD
Year	Amount USD ^{[note 1]}
Year 1	N/A USD
Year 2	N/A USD
Year 3	N/A USD

↑ ^a ^b ^c The following amount in US dollars was calculated by Wikimedia Foundation staff using the fixed currency rates. This amount is approximate and may not reflect the actual currency exchange rates on the day of submission or distribution. If the application is funded, the funding will be sent in the recipient’s local currency.

19. Does this proposal include compensation for staff or contractors? (required): No

19.1. How many paid staff members do you plan to have? (required)

Include the number of staff and contractors during the proposal period. If you have short-term contractors or staff, please include them separately and mention their terms.

N/A

19.2. How many FTEs (full-time equivalents) in total? (required)

Include the total FTE of staff and contractors during the proposal period. If you have short-term contractors or staff, please include their FTEs with the terms separately.

N/A

19.3. Describe any staff or contractor changes compared to the current year / ongoing General Support Fund if any. (required only for returning grantees): N/A

20. Please provide an overview of your overall budget categories in your local currency. The budget breakdown should include only the amount requested with this General Support Fund (required).


Budget category	Amount in local currency
Staff and contactor costs	0 EUR
Operational costs	480204 EUR
Programmatic costs	3040220 EUR

21. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17S_W-u0AHedPirISvyOUZDiNgqwgTIWZDmBcHOEWwOw/edit?usp=sharing

Additional information[edit]

22. In this optional space you can add any other additional information about your proposal or organization that you think can help us when reviewing your proposal. (optional)

We have identified a few areas/processes that are not direct activities per se, but we would like to consistently keep doing them throughout the annual plan.

‘’’Documentation & Communications:’’’ We will be documenting not only our learnings but also processes on wiki. For example, planning a hackathon and its logistics, conducting online sessions etc. In addition, we will be documenting how different models of workshops have worked, their advantages and disadvantages etc. We also plan on regularly sharing our work with the wider community (the movement at large) through blog posts and social media.

‘’’User Group Leadership:’’’ While we have several members in the user group, only a few people have been actively leading the activities. We would like to plan for leadership, identify potential contributors and mentor/groom them to take the lead on activities and the user group in future. It is crucial to offload pressure on the current leaders to prevent burnout and long-term sustainability. During this time, we will not only be working to groom the new leaders, but also work towards creating processes that will ensure this in the future.

‘’’Diversity:’’’ It is a known issue that we don’t have a good gender balance in the developer community in India. We will actively work on changing that through more communication, allocating a set number of slots to ensure balance etc.

By submitting your proposal/funding request you agree that you are in agreement with the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and the Universal Code of Conduct.

We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.

Yes

Feedback[edit]

Please add any feedback to the grant discussion page only. Any feedback added here will be removed.

[fixedrate-1] The following amount in US dollars was calculated by Wikimedia Foundation staff using the fixed currency rates. This amount is approximate and may not reflect the actual currency exchange rates on the day of submission or distribution. If the application is funded, the funding will be sent in the recipient’s local currency.

[note 1]