Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Wikimedia Engagement and Community Development in Northern Cyprus Through University Clubs (ID: 23553028)

Comments from I JethroBT (WMF)

Hello Biologg and thanks for your proposal. I am approving your proposed activities in Cyprus with the following comments:

• We appreciate your work setting up and leading the AÖA Wiki Club in Cyprus earlier this year, and that your programmatic work will involve both this club as well as the mentioned METU NCC Wikipedia Society. I agree that given how new the club is, some time spent on university and online outreach to attract programmatic and potential club participants is important to ensure your club has a reliable set of potential participants across your programmatic offerings.
• Thanks for your engagement with the Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey in preparing this proposal as well as in the earlier stage of setting up the club. The planned list of activities involves a promising number of areas to support community engagement on Wikisource, as well as on gender gap-related topics.
• I have increased funding amount in USD based on our Finance team's declared currency exchange rates between TRY and USD, which should bring your award amount close to your estimated budget for these activities.
• In a previous proposal of yours, we asked what engagement you had with the Wikimedia Community User Group Cyprus regarding that proposal. We were not able to fund your earlier proposal because engagement with the user group on the proposal was minimal, and we normally expect individual applicants to notify and coordinate local affiliates of events they are running with local affiliates. For this proposal, I learned that you did not contact the user group at all. Normally, this would have also made this proposal not eligible for funding, but after communicating with the user group, they were open to supporting your proposal provided that the activities were not tied to the User Group given there was no coordination. While I understand there are ongoing, important sociopolitical circumstances in Cyprus that make some kinds of collaboration challenging, we expect that in future funding proposals that you will communicate with Wikimedia Community User Group Cyprus to coordinate on future events that involve Cypriot communities before submitting Rapid Fund proposals. You may, of course, continue to collaborate with Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey and other User Groups as relevant to your activities.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns, and we look forward to your activities next year. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 00:46, 15 October 2025 (UTC)