Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Sudan Wikimedia User Group Annual Plan 2025

Call for support and Volunteering

Dear Wikimedian

We are back to contribute despite all challenges,

we need more hands and lots of creative ideas.

kindly feel free to go through the plan activities and put you name and what kind of assistance

you can give .

We need skilled people in wiki data

List building

contest jury

community management.

On behalf of Sudan Community

Ola.mahadi (talk) 21:15, 3 March 2025 (UTC)

Feedback regarding your application

Dear Wikimedia Sudan team,

Thank you very much for your application. Congratulations on applying for your first general support grant and we greatly appreciate the time you have put into developing your proposal given the current situation in Sudan. The WMF Community Resources team, the Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa Regional Funds Committees have reviewed your application and we have the following points for feedback before reaching a final decision:

• The Committee would first like to acknowledge your intention to bring the Sudanese Wikimedia community together, both within and outside of Sudan. We also commend your efforts in thinking strategically about your growth as a community, building the capacity of your team through mentorship,
• Upon reviewing your application, we would like to bring your attention to a number of points:
  • After reviewing your activities, the Committee would like further clarification on the characteristics of your existing Wikimedia community. What percentage of them are based in Sudan, and how many are based outside of Sudan? Where is the organizing team based?

Percentage of participants in Sudan is 58.7%

Percentage of participants outside Sudan is 41.3%

Organizing Team

• Fatima Mohamed - South Darfur - Sudan
• Hassoon -Sudan- White Nile
• Ola Mahadi - Egypt
• Maram- France
• Mojtaba Abdlbagi- Russia
• Abdalaziz - Sudan -Omdurman

• • Based on this, where do you plan on holding each of your activities? This remains unclear to both Committees.

The Main goal of the in- person activities will be in Sudan, with focus on South Darfur, White Nile and Omdurman. We are in the process of building corporations with the Egypt and Uganda Community so we can have in person activities with them for the Sudanese members of our community but no clear partnership in place yet. In the meanwhile we succeeded in implementing part of our in-person events for WLA 2025 in Cairo. We are also working with new members from the North States in Sudan.

• • It is unclear to the Committees who the trainers are? Are they a part of the organizing team? Have you identified who these trainers for your activities will be?

Most of the planned activities are basic training that will be carried by the organising team especially the in person ones. In the advanced online activities and running of the online contest and content organising we are implementing it with the help of the administration of the arabic community. We have already approached a few of them and we are hoping that the mentor will help us in putting the required Term of reference in place. We already have a list of whom we have previous experience with. [refer to the list ]

• • The Committees noticed that there is a merging between your strategic plan and your annual plan. Your strategic plan should cover the needs of your community, how you plan on addressing and solving them, what are your expected goals and outcomes over the next couple of years. The annual plan should provide a detailed description of your goals, activities, timeline, roles and responsibilities and outputs for each activity in the given grant period. Would you be able to separate the two? Please reach out to me, the Program Officer, if you require further support in this request.

We put the main points of our community strategic Plan for the coming three years in the annual plan to help us clarify a few points. Documents now are separated as advised by the Program Officer but we still see the strategic plan as a draft that needs further development.

• • May you provide further clarification on how you calculated the metrics for your proposal. The Committees see that the metrics can be improved considering the budget request. Moreover, you note to engage 105 participants, although the number of editors engaged would be higher at 140. May you clarify these metrics and how were they calculated?

Please refer to the annual plan we we updated the numbers

• • The Committees see that the budget amount for conference attendance is quite high and ask you to reduce this request.

We see value in there being Sudanese Wikimedia community representation at Wikimania and WikiIndaba - so far we have not received scholarships from Wikimania. We have reduced this request to one person attending per conference.

• • We noticed that the compensated staff roles in your budget do not match the roles that you shared in your proposal. May you please clarify your exact team, what their roles and responsibilities are, and what roles are paid versus volunteer roles? Moreover, some staffing costs are considered high for an emerging group. Some roles (e.g., reporting, graphic design, facilitation) duplicate tasks expected from already paid staff, may you provide your rationale about the additional expenses for reporting, graphic design and facilitation in your budget? Also, tools like Zoom and Google Meet were both requested, reviewers recommended choosing one instead of both.

We updated the plan and budget so the compensated role are clear We cancelled the zoom registration. And we chose to keep the Meet registration due to its lighter connectivity with mobile phones used by the participants.

• • Have you considered partnerships within and outside of the Wikimedia movement to support Sudanese Wikimedia communities who are based outside of Sudan?

This was updated within the plan document in the section of the Partnership and Cooperation

• • We noticed that the fiscal partner fee included in your budget is 2% of the total budget. Confirming that the fiscal partner fee for Wikimedia Uganda is correct?

Yes the uganda user group accepted to be our fiscal sponsor with 2% of the total budget

• • Do you have any learnings or reflections from your new user training that was implemented in the previous months, and how has that informed your application?

Based on our previous experience we designed activities as basic training followed by specific content contests to keep the participants motivated and engaged. Based on the pattern of the engagement of the new users and to ensure they move to more managerial roles within the community we set the target of the individuals within a team with continuous feedback on their contribution is key to motivate new users (as awards) to ensure the sustainability we assigned the motivation role as a paid task (Project Coordination Officer). Having a long period plan is helping our community to have more active users that see the process of their individual skills developed with the community. As most of our community are students and newly graduated we see that mixing between the community career needs and the workshops scopes, as the special activities to translators, photographers, etc, will outcome more engagement to the movement.

• • The Committee sees that there needs to be both a mentor for organizational matters, as well as a mentor to support Wikimedia Sudan when it comes to training on Wikimedia projects.  

We added another person to help in mentoring the training we didn't put in the first draft as most of this year's planned training is basic training which we are capable of and have the needed experience to implement. But as we discussed, having a mentor for the training will help in ensuring sustainability of the efforts.

• • The SSA Committee also recommends that the program is too ambitious and instead recommends that you plan for

a 6 month pilot program that you can learn from and then plan an annual program after incorporating learnings. We see that the community management tools need more than 6 months to be developed and the two parts of the plan need to work parallel to complete each other. We kept the load of the training with the basic range to ensure that there is diversity in the thematic content content and Wiki Project which will help us touch different types of engagement that could feed the management team to develop the needed documents templates, developing contracts templates, ToT for volunteers, announcement and management of contests and ect. We believe that the 6 months is too short that will continue affecting the sustainability of members' contributions. Regarding the participants, we see that they need continuous involvement in the wikimedia projects to improve their technical skills, and to implement their goals in the different wikimedia projects. As well as the technical workshops will be part of the plan, in longer period projects the results of it will be tangible and will result in the content improvement plan. We conducted new user trainings in February and March of 2025 - and we managed to train X participants on basic editing of Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. However, we noticed after the training that we needed to continuously engage these participants to ensure that they remain active contributors and therefore we designed our program to ensure that there is a continuous path for new users to continuously contribute throughout the year.

• • We noticed that you also added a budget item for childcare support, may you provide further clarification for this?

These items are to improve the ability of our community members to be able to join in- person events. One of the team member leaders needs support for child care and others need support to be able to connect to the internet. Thank you very much, and please feel free to share your feedback in this discussion page by Wednesday, May 14 at 12 PM UTC.

Please feel free to respond to the above inquiries in Arabic or English.

Wishing you the best of luck.

On behalf of the WMF Community Resources team and the MENA and SSA Regional Funding Committees, FElgueretly-WMF (talk) 12:58, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

Many thanks for your time and effort for revising and valuating the plan. we responded to the enquiries in line. MmRoma (talk) 17:32, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

Final Decision

Dear Wikimedia Community in Sudan,

Thank you very much for your application and your thorough feedback. After further deliberation and discussion, we are pleased to inform you that the Middle East and North Africa Committee has agreed to fund you for a period of six months. Kindly find below the recommendations for your project:

• We see strong value in supporting Sudanese Wikimedians, and we are particularly impressed by your commitment to contributing open and free knowledge given the specific challenges in Sudan
• That said, we also see value in the community piloting the activities for a period of six months for a proof of concept before applying for a longer annual grant.
• We kindly ask you to focus on in-person activities in Sudan and any activities outside of Sudan be held online. If you would like to conduct in-person activities in other countries where Sudanese Wikimedians are located, please coordinate and liaise with the existing Wikimedia communities there and join their activities.
• Given the above, may you please reduce the scope of your activities so that they are within a six month period and update your annual plan and budget accordingly.

We look forward to receiving the updated budget to move forward with review and approvals.

On behalf of the Middle East and North Africa Regional Funds Committee, 2A04:EE41:4:BE:45FE:7FAC:F2A7:79C 11:00, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

Dear Middle East and North Africa Regional Funds Committee

Thank you for your support we have updated the plan document and the budget as per the recommendation of the committee and thank you @ FElgueretly-WMF for Today meeting we are looking forward to starting working on the plan soon.

Regards

On behalf of Sudan Community Wikimedia User Group

Ola

Ola.mahadi (talk) 21:49, 11 June 2025 (UTC)