Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Editing Wikipedia Together - online free course for volunteers invested in community development and open access
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Regional Committee feedback and questions[edit]
@Klaul and Strainu: Hello Wikimedians of Romania and Moldova User Group, and thanks for this proposal to develop courses to support the needs of library staff, new editors of Romanina Wikipedia, and advanced editors. The CEE/Central Asia Regional Committee has initially reviewed the proposal, and wanted to offer some initial feedback and questions for your review:
- Would you be able to provide more information about the specific county libraries you will be working with in Romania? Which counties are they located in?
- We appreciate learning about the important work you have been doing with multiple libraries in Romania to support to introduce the public to Romanian Wikipedia and help support them to learn how to contribute. We understand the proposed courses are planned to take be held in Romania, based on where the libraries are situated and the communities those institutions generally serve. We would like to understand more about how communities in Moldova will be supported to access and participate in these courses as well during the funding period. Related to the course for librarians, you wrote that This course will also be promoted in workshops with representatives of at least 3 NGOs and institutions from Romania and Moldova. WMROMD will look for partner institutions that could disseminate this course in their networks. Do you expect to be able to both identify partners in Moldova and support them to disseminate this or other courses during the funding period, or is this work beyond the scope of this project? Are there any other ways that Moldovan communities will be supported through this project?
- In terms of participation, the committee noted that WMROMD would like to support greater geographic diversity in its participants, and that one aspect of this goal is a focus on supporting participation from rural communities. The committee was also interested in learning about any goals you may have to engage with any specific ethnic communities in Moldova (for example, in Transnistria and Gagauzia) or in Romania as a part of your outreach work. Do you have any goals to do outreach to specific ethnic communities as a part of your goals for greater geographic diversity in your participants?
Please let me know if you have any questions or need clarity on any feedback provided by the Regional Committee. We request your response to the above questions by 10 May 2022 in order to support the Regional Committee's decisionmaking on your proposal. On behalf of the Regional Committee, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 09:09, 3 May 2022 (UTC)
- Please find below the answers to each question:
- - We have ongoing discussions with library coordinators from 2 regions of Romania: the North-West (Salaj county and Bihor county) and another region closer to Bucharest (Argeș and Brașov counties). Some librarians from these regions are already editing Wikipedia pages due to previous projects run with them (online in Arges, in Brasov, as a Learning circle) and we kept in contact with them. What we did in previous projects was to discuss the opportunity with the county coordinators or county library directors and open a call to who would like to participate from these counties, attempting to obtain a healthy mix of people from public libraries of different sizes (rural libraries, municipal/urban libraries and county libraries). When we will do this we need to know the time of the training and the time commitment that we want from them.
- As in the past we had a generous number of people participating and we keep a running dialogue about this topic with them, we are confident enough librarians will register. At this time, however, we cannot list the exact locations they will be coming from.
- - The relationship with partner libraries from Moldova has also developed over time. Our last event together was during this year #1lib1ref campaign. Together with @Giku we are discussing ways to continue working with librarians from Chisinau Municipal Library as well as the National Library of Moldova. When the materials created during this project will be available we will be able to easily share them, through our partners, with librarians from Moldova. Among the meetings planned in this grant to promote the materials we will create, at least one we want to be focused on meeting librarians from the Republic of Moldova.
- - A number of librarians that will participate in our activities will come from rural communities. Our hope is that we can provide them with enough learning materials and support for them to consider becoming not only contributors to Wikipedia but doing their work as local history experts online too. As such they can provide access to resources and description of the diversity of their communities.
- In our medium term plan, we hope at least a few of these librarians will become local facilitators for learning how to edit Wikipedia and that way we will be able to reach out effectively to diverse populations.
- Regarding targeting specific ethnic communities, this is not straightforward due to the language barrier and the relative development of our projects. Major ethic communities in our space of interest include Hungarian and Russian, both languages with Wikipedias more developed than the one in Romanian. We estimate that for such communities a better approach would be a cross-wiki collaboration that would take advantage of the bilinguality of the participants.
- Nevertheless, when moving into more diverse areas (such as the Nort-Western counties, with about one third of the population non-Romanian), capturing a diverse population of librarians will also offer some ethnic diversity. We can provide data from previous projects if required. Klaul (talk) 05:50, 9 May 2022 (UTC)
Timeline update for funding decision announcements[edit]
@Klaul and Strainu: Due to an unexpected medical issue I experienced earlier in April, I unfortunately was not able to interact with the Regional Committee or generally work during much of April last month. Due to this absence, we were unfortunately not able to provide committee feedback in a manner consistent with our original schedule. Consequently, we will be adjusting the date for announcing a funding decision for your proposal by one week from May 18th to May 25th. This change will help support the time needed for you to review and respond to committee feedback, as well as for the Regional Committee to finalize a funding decision. Please let me know if you have any questions or need clarification over this change in the schedule. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 23:42, 3 May 2022 (UTC)
General Support Fund proposal approved in the amount of 76,320 RON[edit]
@Klaul and Strainu: Congratulations! Your grant is approved in the amount of 76,320 RON (~17,100 USD) with a grant term starting 11 July 2022 and ending 12 May 2023.
The Regional Committee is glad to support the Wikimedians of Romania and Moldova User Group (WMROMD) in its first application for General Support Funding to develop and implement the proposed set of training courses. Overall, the proposed project details are clearly described, and you have secured good partnerships with local libraries to help support the training events you are planning for different groups. We also recognize your user group’s past experience with training activities in Romanian and Moldova, in part through your work in past Rapid Grants. The committee also agrees that a flexible approach to training through both online and offline methods is helpful to support more kinds of participation in your courses.
As this project specializes in training on certain skills for specific groups based on experience – entry level (focused on improving existing article), intermediate level (for creating new articles), and advanced (for connected data, copyright considerations, and more specialized topics) – the committee is interested in your reflections on your experience piloting, revising, and conducting these different courses as well hearing about the experiences of course participants. We think it would be helpful to also specifically ask participants what motivates them to continue from entry level to the intermediate level course to support your general retention efforts in your programming for newer editors.
Finally, the committee did have some concerns and needs for clarity over the proposed metrics and some considerations for future budget planning:
- Metrics for articles created (30) or improved (50) should be separated from the number of edits (150), as these measure different kinds of impact. Combining these metrics will make it confusing to interpret this measurement at the time of reporting.
- A minor request for clarity: The target metric for "number of participants" is 100, but the numbers for different participants in the description section of the table add to 80. Could you clarify this discrepancy?
- While we understand that you are partly aiming to engage with rural communities, the targets set for participants and editors seem somewhat low compared to Rapid Grants that have been previously awarded to your user group. *Given the level of investment requested for this proposal, the committee recommends slightly increasing your targets, specifically for participants, editors, and content outcomes.
The budget related to staffing and contractors is relatively high in this proposal (about half the budget). The committee supports these roles and needs for this specific training project, but have some concerns around the sustainability of the program if growth for the training program (and your organization) depends on an increasing staff budget. Your program officer is happy to discuss some considerations around this further.
The committee looks forward to working together with you in your future work in the Wikimedia movement. On behalf of the committee, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 17:52, 27 May 2022 (UTC)