Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Discover, Develop, Invent on Wikipedia, Together

Regional Committee feedback and questions

Hello Strainu and Klaul. Thanks for your proposal to continue to support WMROMD’s work and activities over the next year. The CEE/Central Asia Regional Committee has initially reviewed the proposal, and wanted to offer some initial feedback and questions for your review:

• The committee appreciates your efforts to maintain and integrate the online curriculum developed in your previously funded work into the context of a larger set of programs in the current proposal. We agree these resources could be helpful for your university partners.

• The committee also appreciates the work you are doing to support training for translators through the crash course, and the committee recommends that the Translation extension and Content Translation tool be featured parts of this training. Can you confirm if these or other methods and tools are involved in your training?

• In terms of the substance of training in your work with university students, we wanted to understand more about what particular areas you are training on. Also, in what ways are you teaching about both the benefits as well as limitations of using and contributing to Wikimedia projects?

• Can you tell us more about the campaign video that will be produced? What campaign(s) will it involve, and what kind of promotion will it support?

• Given your interest in working with some local language communities, have you considered activities in Wiktionary these goals? The project is a good place to support productive contributions and where risks around editor conflict are minimal compared to Wikipedia projects.

In terms of the schedule for our review process, please complete your review and responses to committee feedback by May 8th. 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, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 07:04, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

I JethroBT (WMF), thank you and the committee for the feedback and questions. Please find our answers below:

• On this point, we would like to mention that we are looking to reuse our content as broadly as possible, including in the help pages of Wikipedia. The policy paper created in relation to learning how to write in a balanced and neutral way and the learning material created for learning about NPOV principle are stand alone documents that will be shared at the events and with prospective partners of our UG.
• The translation module of our article writing course, which presents the content translation tool, will be the backbone of the translator course. We are yet to fully understand if the audience would be interested in translating software and/or project help pages as well. Depending on the analysis we will have with our first audience (from the University of Iași), we will decide on how much to dive deep on the Translation extension and/or translatewiki.net.
• We would like to state upfront that we do not do a course on Wikipedia, but rather prepare the students for assignments related to Wikipedia, which is very different. We generally touch on the philisofical part of using and editing Wikipedia only briefly, mentioning conflict management and the importance of verifiability and trusting sources rather than Wikipedia itself.

The course has a standard part (visual editor, main Wikipedia rules, test pages, "work in progress" templates), but we heavily customize the content based on the requirements of the teachers: for the University of Iași, for instance, we will prepare the translator training, as the course is preparing translators. For the University of Bucharest, we insist on conflict management, seeking help early and choosing good articles, as the students are fully responsible to choose and write articles on a rather narrow field, with many generations before them already covering the most obvious topics.

Also, being just an assignment in one class, the training can't be too long, as the students will loose interest.

• Wikimedia community has not been part of The National Week of Volunteers (SNV) even though yearly thousands of volunteers contribute to this project. We would like to change that in 2024. The SNV is gathering volunteers around the country and puts them in the spotlight, for a week the conversation focuses on the importance of volunteering and the great efforts done by volunteers. The communication plan related to this week will be developed in consultation withhe community of editors and we will contract a communication team to prepare materials that would promote the volunteer work done in Wikipedia project and our volunteers (if they want to). Videos had great impact on our social media channels that is why we were aiming at creating some as part of this campaign.
• Using Wiktionary is an interesting idea. We haven't really considered it, probably because in Romanian, the Wiktionary is complete (for the Romanian language, at least). We appreciate the fact that this is not true for other languages, so we will mention this possibility to our partners. However, considering the level of activity in roa-rup: and rmy: we feel the risk of serious editor conflict is quite weak.

Klaul and Strainu (talk) 06:52, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

General Support Fund proposal approved in the amount of 20,047 USD

@Strainu and Klaul:Congratulations! Your grant is approved in the amount of 20,047 USD with a grant term starting 16 June 2023 and ending 31 May 2024.

Compared to your previous General Support Fund which focused specifically on developing online and offline course content, the current proposal represents a more standard annual plan consisting of multiple, independent programs. We are glad that WMROMD has the capacity to support this expansion in its scope of work over the next year. The committee supported full funding for your activities over the next year on the basis of several strengths in your proposal:

• Your programmatic plan focuses on important, fundamental areas to help build capacity and sustainability in your organization, such as volunteer recruitment and a search for partners. When you report on these activities, we will be interested in learning more about what partnerships you are able to develop and in what ways they may be able to support your work.
• Your program plan also covers a fairly large range of activities given the size of your organization, including trainings, several major campaigns, pilots for new activities with aligned partners, among other events. While this initial scope presents a lot of exciting opportunities, please be careful around your capacity as you will also be actively recruiting volunteers at the same time. It will be important to take time to prioritize some of these activities and campaigns over others if it is too challenging to do it all.
• Overall, the committee also felt that your metrics and outcomes were realistic and achievable, particularly around outreach, partnerships, and content-related outcomes in your evaluation plan.

For your next proposal, one request we have is that in your metrics related to meetings (e.g. strategic planning meetings, community online meetings), please try to use metrics that reflect outcomes related to these meetings that you feel are important to share, instead of only measuring the number of meetings held. While meetings are important for various reasons, knowing how many meetings were held doesn’t provide a lot of information about what happened during those sessions. For example, a goal for some of your meetings might be to gather ideas for piloting future activities, or to formalize a plan for communications for recruitment. Consequently, you could consider metrics related to developing a certain number of pilot activities, or to finalize a communications strategy for recruitment, which could be provided as a brief document. These kinds of changes in your metrics for your next proposal will help us understand more about why your meetings are important and how they are contributing to your organizational development.

One important change in the General Support Fund is that a written midpoint report is no longer required for the General Support Fund. We will continue to have a midpoint conversation to meet and generally reflect on your progress, needs, and updates on your ongoing and future movement work.

In terms of next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement.
2. If you want to discuss the funding decision or have questions during the funding period, you are welcome to contact your regional program officer.

Thanks again for your hard work preparing the proposal and supporting our review process for the General Support Fund. We look forward to your work this year!

On behalf of the Regional Committee, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 05:50, 29 May 2023 (UTC)