Grants:Project/Sudanese Content on Wikimedia 2021/Midpoint

This project is funded by a Project Grant

Report accepted

This midpoint report for a Project Grant approved in FY 2020-21 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Sudanese Content on Wikimedia 2021.
You may still review or add to the discussion about this report on its talk page.
You are welcome to email projectgrantswikimedia.org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learning from the first half of the grant period.

Summary

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

On 12th and 13th January 2022, two-days workshop that was held in Nyala city, South Darfur and on 22nd January, plus an edit-a-thon Nyala City, South Darfur was organized.
A two-days’ workshop was organized in Khartoum (Venue: Xlub Training Center) plus an extra day for edit-a-thon on the dates of 19th, 22nd and 23rd of February 2022.
A two-days workshop was held on 1st and 2nd of March, in Khartoum (Venue: Xlub Training Center) plus extra day of edit-a-thon on Khartoum.

Methods and activities

How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.

1. The team had several meetings to identify the problem regarding the Sudanese content online, and the suitable mitigation methods would be through direct contact to the people of interest (librarian, students, content creators, ....etc.) and to adopt them in Wikimedia and its sister projects training sessions
2. Contacting Wikimedia for grant and setting the report that's correctly reflects the actual problem was also discussed in the user group meetings.
3. The grant collection was quite difficult due to the financial policies in Sudan regarding hard currency, so we had an assistant from the West Africa Open Foundation as a fiscal sponsor, and then the cash were delivered to Egypt through the group member Ola and then delivered to Sudan on the date 28th December 2022
4. The situation in streets was full of demonstrations and it was not safe to start workshop in Khartoum, Nyala workshops stated earlier January
5.The workshops then started on the end of February and March and it was delayed several times due to the street situation.
6.Dashboared program was created with definite period to trace the participants contributions.

Midpoint outcomes

What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

We designed a page for the project.
Built memorandum of understandings with Sudanese Association for Libraries and information (SALI), community building with members of interest
very active member Mutasim Elmahadi (reached more than 1600 edits in 4 months)
16 new editors (new users) were part of the community
19 new articles, 728 articles edited, 302 commons upload and more than 380K articles views
Community newly participated are having regular in-person meetings with commitment, running plans and organizing an event foe Wikimania 2022

Finances

Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

Learning

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges

What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

Challanges

The Wikimedia community is on volunteering; new members are hesitated in huge contributions
The culture of online commitment to a collective work.
The security in streets, demonstrations were out and the edit-a-thon session were was delayed in due, and some participants were not able to attend.
Instability of electricity and internet networks during sessions
Inflation and cost of internt and the possibility to allocate time to volunteer

Mitigations

The user group is trying to create events online and off-line regular meetings and invite more visitors to get to know the community and its activities
Work in work friendly space, according to the budget available with the suitable facilities to encourage team work
Give the members the freedom to suggest and participate in plans, to grow the sense of belonging to the community.
Start enjoyable chatting in the time electricity off
Share private internet network during the internet connections went down
Try to handle discussions and let all available members to express their opinions
Ask members to market the user group activities to their network

What is working well

What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

Your learning pattern link goes here

Next steps and opportunities

What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points.

We are building on the efforts of the participants we shate links to pages created during the project as examples to edit add references and pictures to by new comers.

Grantee reflection

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an grantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?