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Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Wikimedia Thailand 2025

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Follow up questions on your grant application

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Latest comment: 1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hello Wikimedia Thailand,

Thank you for putting in a general support fund application. Congratulations on the successful implementation of your last grant application. For documentation purposes, we are also including your most recent report here - Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia Thailand 2023/Final Report.


Observations/ Recommendations / Notes

Below, you will find the consolidated feedback and observations from the review team (i.e. ESEAP regional funds committee and programme officer). Do take time to read and respond (i.e. provide more details) to the sharing(s) as necessary. Note: The review team may not have the same lived experience or understanding of the local context as you/your team. Hence, providing further insights will be very helpful in building on our collective wisdom and shared learnings.


  • 1) Related to question 6/ strategic plan: Thanks for sharing your 2024 strategic direction. And congratulations on being able to collaborative produce this with the Board. Having read your strategic direction, we are unable to understand how your strategic direction is linked to your annual activities. Without a clear understanding of your strategic direction and how it lends to the activities and how you measure progress/ change, we are unable to fully understand your intentions, motivations and your proposed path. We would recommend providing more clarity in this area. Here are examples that you may find useful -

Thank you for sharing your feedback and for highlighting the need for clearer links between our strategic direction and our proposed activities. We agree that, in its current form, our application lacks the necessary alignment to demonstrate how our strategic direction informs our annual activities and the mechanisms we use to measure progress and change.

To address this, we will take the next one to two weeks to construct a comprehensive table or framework that explicitly links our strategic goals to specific activities. This will include elements such as demonstrating the direct connection between our long-term goals and planned actions, outlining the logical sequence of how our actions will lead to outcomes and providing a timeline and milestones for achieving the objectives.


  • 1a) Suggestion: Reflect and re-organise your existing documents/ content based on the examples shared. We know it will take time to put together a more comprehensive strategic plan. We recommend adding it to your calendar of events and plan protected time to do this with your core team. In the mean time, please response with a proposed approach on how you plan to carry out your strategic planning process in the coming year.

Thank you for your suggestion and for providing us more information on Let’s Connect learning clinic. We agree that the current calendar that has been shared still is not well linked to the strategic direction. In response to your comment, we will take a week or two (from the time of submitting this response) due to time constraints to provide more details on how to strategically implement our activities and inline with the strategic plan.


  • 2) Related to question 8/ programmes, approaches and strategies: While it lists the programmes and activities you plan to organise, we need more details to understand why you decide on these activities and how you plan to run them, in particular for new activities (or scaled up of existing iterations). For example: micro grants; wiki club (expanded); more wikimedia scholarships. In the application (and most recent final report), it is not clear what are the learnings you are taking away from previous year and incorporating it into your new year. The information box on your affiliate meta page is useful in understanding the range of activities and provides a form of documentation on when the activities was conducted, still it doesn't help to fill the gap in your application.


    • 2a) Suggestion: Please provide a supplementary document that details 2024 activities and 2025 activities, highlighting new/expansion/ revisions from current iteration with details on why these activities, learnings/ results (i.e. dashboard statistics etc) from previous editions and how you plan to run them in the next edition (i.e. highlight areas of innovation/ new ideas that you are testing out). Here's an example on 2024/2025 activity table which you may find useful to adapt further for your own needs. You may also wish to provide a high level summary of the progress you have made against the annual plan from 2024 within the same document. Here's an example of progress made from last year's plan that could serve as a useful reference.

Thank you for your comment and for providing us with an example. Please refer to our response to comment 1a) above.


  • 3) Related to your proposed budget, we appreciate that you included a summary tab by expense categories. Here are further questions:
    • Wikimania scholarships - Please provide more details on the costing assumptions and rationale behind the need for 10 scholarship spaces while keeping in mind that wikimania scholarships are available for the community. Please provide details on the selection process for scholarship recipients. We would also recommend reviewing the Let's Connect learning clinic on guidelines, best practices, documented learnings related to travel scholarship.
    • Wikisource conference - Could you provide more details on how this fits into your strategic plan/ activities so that we understand your intention and motivations behind an in-person attendance vs an online one. Similar to above on sharing more details on the selection process and costings.
    • Office package/ setting up a branch/ accounting, legal and HR service - Please provide details on why these are necessary and how will you be using them across the team. In your previous applications, you have also planned to register as a legal entity and set up an office. Could you provide an update on progress in these areas?
    • On merchandises, are you aware that you are able to request for wikimedia swag? Here's a link that you can read about - Grants:Project/Rapid/Requesting swag
    • On laptop, camera, equipment and drone - Could you provide more details on why this is needed and the models that you are looking to purchase? You need to clearly demonstrate how the equipment will be shared with other community members. An equipment log or list must be publicly available for community members and included in the application.

Regarding the Wikimania scholarship, the selection criteria will adhere to the central Wikimedia grant to ensure uniformity. However, to align with the context of the Wikimedia community in Thailand, the following applicants will be prioritized:

Users who have submitted work to present at a conference and have received acceptance from the program committee.

  • Users from the Thai Wikimedia or sister communities who have demonstrated significant contributions to various projects.
  • Administrators or rights administrators in the Thai Wikipedia or other Thai-language sister projects.
  • Organizers of activities related to Wikimedia Thailand that benefit the Wikimedia community in any project or language.
  • Individuals from external organizations whose missions align with the Wikimedia Movement.

Wikimedia Thailand also took community feedback into account regarding the above criteria in April 2024.

The office package we have been using for the past two years is a virtual+shared office space. It is also reasonably priced (~150 USD). This is essential because an official address is required for a registered NGO (also in our case an NGO undergoing registration). With regards to our incorporation, we have already submitted all documents since last year. We have learned that this step is time consuming, bureaucratic and may take years. This virtual+shared office space in Bangkok we have rented has regularly been used for meetups and camps. In addition to the Bangkok space, we also plan to establish an informal office space in Chonburi. A few key community members are based there and a homebase can be set up to host on-site activities in the eastern region of Thailand.

On merchandise, we were aware that we could request for Wikimedia swags but we have never requested them, and rely on locally produced materials. We believe it is time to request some from WMF since it could have more perceived value than local merchandise.

On Wikisource conference, we are collaborating with the Siam Society to digitize old books and literature which are of archival and historical values. This project was part of our application in 2024. Attending the Wikisource conference is an opportunity for our members to share and learn from our neighbor affiliates, particularly WMID which is well experienced in this area of activities.

Thank you for raising an important issue on the use of a laptop and drone. This is inline with our strategic direction to increase public awareness and visibility. We believe that by creating video contents and posting them on social media platforms, it would help us generate more reach, connect to more people and more potential contributors.


Note to applicant: During the review process, the ESEAP Funds Committee meets 3-4 times (2-2.5 hours/ session) during the review cycle to discuss the grant applications submitted for the cycle. Thereafter additional time is dedicated for individual review (i.e. one review form is submitted for each application - estimated time spend can be 1-1.5 hours/application/person). We would like to highlight that the review team spends a significant amount of time on each application reviewing and providing their perspectives. We hope you will also participate fully in the process by setting aside dedicated time and mind space to provide thoughtful responses to the feedback. During the discussion rounds, we have also captured the verbatim feedback below. Some of which may be on a similar topic. If you notice the trend, it would mean that the question/ observation was raised by several members of the review team and we encourage you to dig deeper to provide more information. If you require support in understanding the context to the feedback and/or in crafting a response. Please know that you can reach out the programme officer for support.


Observations/ Questions

* 4) Travel and conference:

** Here are other conferences that may also be of interest.

***[1] Youth Conference 2025 (Event: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Youth_Conference_2025) (Proposal: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Community_Fund/Conference_Fund/Youth_Conference_2025)

***[2] EduWiki Conference 2025 (Event: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EduWiki_Conference_2025) (Proposal: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Community_Fund/Conference_Fund/EduWiki_Conference_2025_in_Colombia)

***[3] WikiCredCon 2025 (Proposal: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Community_Fund/Conference_Fund/WikiCredCon_2025:Reliable_Sources,_Feb_7-9_2025_(at_the_Internet_Archive))'' * Could you share what is the selection process for awarding travel scholarships? Are specific contribution metrics used in the evaluation? Please provide more details.

* Could you consider the winner of your competitions to get a scholarship for Wiki Conference Travel instead of General Support Fund? Have you actively encouraged members to look out for and apply directly instead of relying on the General Support Fund?

* 5) Projects from last year, did they run smoothly? Were the events well received/ good turnout? Would you be able to share an interim update of your progress. Perhaps you could provide a short 1-2 pager as an update?

* 6) Could you share links to your campaign dashboards?

* 7) We would like to understand the organisational planning and documentation process (i.e. knowledge management): Are there any working documents /research that you can share - planning documents; white paper; strategy related documents?

* 8) In your most recent report, "Overall, our use of social media has improved considerably thanks to user:Azoma, user:OraMAAG, and user:Tvcccp.We posted 84 times (500% increase) in 2023 using words and media that attract users' attention. According to Meta Business Suites, this led to 351.9% increase in reach, 260.5% increase in visits, and 480% increase in messaging conversations and 451.3% increase in content interaction." Could you provide more details on this?

* 9) When putting together the annual plan (or reflecting on last year's plan), were you able to engage the wider local community in the process? For example: Update the community on your implemented actives; gather feedback from the community on how the project impacted them etc?

There were two on-site sessions which included key WMTH members and some community members, totaling to about 10 individuals who took part in the writing of the strategic direction and annual activities

* 10) There are a lot of separate streams for publicity (drone, social media, merchandise), it would be helpful to have further explanation on the impact these have had/are expected to have.

We plan to promote our activities, Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia movement using videos, and by posting them on social media platforms, it would help us generate more reach, connect to more people and more potential contributors. To be able to effectively to so, the content has to be of high quality and should be able to grasp the attention of the viewers right away.


Thank you and we look forward to receiving your responses by 15 November 2024.

Regards, Jacqueline on behalf of the ESEAP Funds Committee JChen (WMF) (talk) 06:58, 7 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Your grant application has been approved

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Latest comment: 1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hello Wikimedia Thailand,

Thank you for your responses to the follow-ups questions.

Congratulations! Your grant application has been approved in the amount of THB 1,506,996 from 1 January 2025 to 31 December 2025.


Here are some comments from the review team that were captured from the final deliberation round

  • 11) The affiliate has only two target projects based on their metrics. Perhaps the affiliate could consider working also on other Wikiprojects.
  • 12) I suggest reducing capital outlay expenses (hardware such as drone) and focus more on active reporting of their accomplishments and having more outreach activities.
  • 13) Distributing the resource, reducing certain activities, and focusing on the priority task could help resolve the backlog that has been an issue over the past couple of years. Good luck
  • 14) I am quite not sure if Wikimedia Thailand is actively being involved in diff posts, social media. Perhaps they are and just that I may have missed them. It would be helpful if they can actively report their completed projects through storytelling.
  • 15) Based on my observations, Wikimedia Thailand does not seem to be very active on social media (Facebook). I think the drone purchase is not that important (at this point) as I imagine they can hire seasonal photographers when they want to create content. Therefore, perhaps re-consider the budget line item to buy a drone.


Recommendations

  • On this talkpage, we would like to flag questions/ responses for (1a), (2a) for inclusion into your implementation plan and take into consideration the comments from the review team marked (5), (6), (7), (8), (11-15). We also suggest that you provide regular updates on this talkpage when you have made progress in these areas with links to other relevant pages for further details.
  • For (3), please provide the link to a revised budget based on the final approved funding amount while also taking into consideration the feedback that has been provided to date. You can use your current budget file -> add a tab and name it “revised budget” -> share the link here.

For the review of your next grant application, we will take into account your new application AND progress that you have made in the areas of the recommendations captured on this talkpage. Hence we would encourage you to be proactive in sharing key updates here on a regular basis. If there are recommendations that you have considered and have assessed that it is not the right fit for now, please also provide an update to share your learnings/thought process as well.


Disbursement of Funds

To facilitate the funds disbursement process, we seek your prompt response on Fluxx and via emails with the WMF Grants Administrator team (grantsadmin@wikimedia.org). We highly encourage you to submit all supporting documents and endorse the grant agreements within the stipulated time frame. When in doubt, proactively reach out to the WMF Grants Administration team and copy your programme officer.


Change in implementation plan

We know even the best thought through plans may change.

In the event that there are changes to your implementation schedule, you can reach out to request for a grant extension (i.e. extend end date). Similarly, if there is a surplus budget or changes to your planned budget, you can reach out to me about reallocation (via email and on this talkpage). There is also the option to have the unspent funds deducted against a future grant. More details here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Return_unused_funds_to_WMF


Additional resources which may be useful


We thank you for your participation in the grant application process and hope to continue to journey with you as you embark on this project. Good luck! JChen (WMF) (talk) 15:44, 29 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

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