Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/WBG/Annual Plan 2022-23

Good proposal from an organization in good standing[edit]

I am here in response to the notice on the mailing list.

This is a request for a modest amount of money from an organization which has consistently presented good results. Past annual reports are excellent.

Photography, food editing, and Wikisource text editing projects have been strengths of this group. It is good that more of these activities are proposed for the next year.

Critical comments: This proposal promises 285 "editors that continue to participate/retained after activities". I think that this number is too high and it sets too much pressure on volunteers to accomplish too much. I have organized hundreds of Wikipedia events in New York City as documented in en:Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/Event archive, and I am aware of how outreach works in the United States. In the United States 1-year retention rates over the past 10 years have been about 2%. Doing the math, to retain ~300 people in the United States we would need to train 15,000 people, which is too high and unthinkable. Before COVID New York City probably did the most wiki events in the world with the most people, and only gets about 1000-1500 editors a year plus an additional ~1500 who attend events and participate without editing. The situation may be different in West Bengal, but either I think promising 285 retained editors is too high or else "editors that continue to participate" means off-wiki activity like continuing to join events, engage with social media, or other activities. I know West Bengal runs good events but success should be by local standards, and what works in West Bengal may be different than metrics and counting elsewhere. Considering the relatively small amount of money requested, I think that instead of promising retention, this group should simply host its events and report outcomes. If there were Wikimedia automated tools which tracked retention - and such tools are not popular or easily accessible - then after some years this group could start reporting a retention rate. If it is helpful to leave this number in for some reason, then it should not be a hard requirement or expectation, because it is a high number.

This group is being too modest by not reporting "Number of volunteer hours", which is part of the table but left blank. I know that the organizers give a huge number of hours, and every one of the volunteer editors who join events and programs give hours too. Please record and estimate volunteer hours. If there is an event which 4 organizers discuss for 4 hours, then that is 16 volunteer hours to plan the event. If 30 people join that event and spend their 4 hours as a half-day, then that is 120 hours. This group recruits a lot of volunteer hours and it is in this group's benefit to acknowledge that. I know it is hard to measure but discuss as a group and report it.

There is 10% finance cost to Centre for Internet and Society as fiscal sponsor. In the United States all the big foundations - Fopeoplepeoplerd, Sloan, Mellon, whatever - typically offer 20% finance cost for grants. Additionally there seems to be no finance allowance to the volunteers of West Bengal Wikimedians. There is labor for managing receipts and reporting before the costs get to CIS. Unless I am missing the allowance for this, I recommend that the WMF copy the best practices of other foundations and offer the same finance and administration costs that are common in the United States. When there is a split - a fiscal sponsor then a subaward - 4%people to the fiscal sponsor and 16% to the subwardee is common. I want WBG to have the support they need to successfully administer their projects. The plan in the text says "However, as this process requires a third party organization, a good co-ordination is required between their finance team and our program leads to execute the programs smoothly right on schedule." Administration is a lot of work and comes from labor. I would like this noted, and just as I mentioned before, this should be reported with volunteer hours.

I do not see any kind of collaboration with Wikimedia Bangladesh, when I know that this is a discussed issue. Wikimedians of West Bengal and Wikimedia Bangladesh both use Bengali / Bangla language. The Wikimedia Movement Strategy has a proposal to establish hubs, and at Hubs/Ongoing, there is already a published idea that a linguistic hub could be for Bengali language both in that region and for the international diaspora. The Jackson Heights neighborhood in New York City and the Brick Road neighborhood in London are both Bengali speaking areas, so the success of West Bengal Wikimedians is necessary for international collaborations. I have said this before elsewhere, but Bengali is one of the official languages of the New York City government. Subway directions and the government ballots for voting in elections are available in official Bengali translations. I want WBG to grow stable enough to be able to meaningfully join international conversations relating to Bengali language. Perhaps in addition to this funding request, I hope that this group is additionally eligible to apply for Wikimedia Movement strategy funds even after receiving funding through this process.

Missing from this proposal is the very successful Wiki Loves Butterfly which has come to stand on its own. I see that Butterfly organizer Atudu is a co-organizer of this funding request, so all is well and the split of butterfly activities from main group activities is just an indication of growth and specialization.

Thanks all great proposal.

Bluerasberry (talk) 16:17, 14 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Bluerasberry:, thanks again for noticing our activities and sharing your extremely valuable feedback with us. Your suggestions have always guided us over time and helped us improve our programs. Regarding your critical comments here, I will try to explain our reasons one by one and what we will take as next steps to incorporate your suggestions.

High retention rate: I totally agree with you that 285 is a high number w.r.t to editor retention if we try to gain those numbers by training people in workshops; obviously with our very limited resources, that is totally impossible for us. But, we made our calculations based on Wiki Loves competitions from where we get majority of our editors. Last year, we had around 747 participants from Wiki Loves Monuments and 715 participants from Wiki Loves Food competition. We found that, Wiki Loves Monuments had around 83% new users, that means 17% people were old users from previous competitions, which comprised of 123 people. We can vaguely define this as retention number although it is true that many of them do not edit the entire year or every month, they just returned when the competition started. This happened because each year, we call every photographers who participated in any of the previous Wiki Loves Monuments in India competition. As we organize two national level competitions, we can just double the number of old users and calculate it around 250. This year, we are planning for a better promotion than before, so may be some more number can be added up, and hence an approximate number of 285. But, you are right, as this number can not be measured accurately or specifically by any tool, I will drop this metric for now until a better statistical tool comes up in future.
Number of volunteer hours: Frankly speaking, we could not really measure the volunteer hours. It is not that difficult to measure our volunteer time to execute all our projects, but we spend huge amount of time to brainstorm and plan projects in such an asynchronous way, that it would be very difficult to measure that. Anyway, I will discuss with all our teams and try to come up with an approximate number.
Financial allowance for administration: As the coordination with the fiscal sponsor and our program leads will be entirely managed by me only, I did not allot any allowance for myself. Please consider this as a service and respect to my entire group who are spending their time and efforts to lead, run and execute their projects for free out of their love and dedication of what they are doing without any kind of expectation; although we are aware of growing number of people charging hefty amount of money for similar kind of works through different grants. We are also still not a legally registered organization to handle foreign money and don't have any group bank account for now, and hence need a third party fiscal sponsor to manage our finance on our behalf and have no option but to pay them as they demand. Personally, I was not aware of the possibility to split certain percentage of fiscal sponsorship money to subawardee as no one from WMF or CIS informed me about this before when we discussed about fiscal sponsorship. I am sure, our group members do not know it too. It would be great if we get documentations of standard practice around this split, so that we can negotiate from a better position from next time. Anyway, we are putting efforts to sustain ourselves for future and lots of discussions are going on around our sustainability initiatives internally. I sincerely hope that WMF and other stable affiliates will notice our efforts and provide us guidance on how to become a strong and stable organization ourselves.
Strategy collaborations: As currently both Wikimedia Bangladesh and our affiliate agreed to collaborate at idea level without any expectation for money for now, we didn't include this collaboration in our fund proposal. Our discussions around building a thematic-linguistic hub/network is very real though and we would love to be stable and sustainable enough to connect with Bengali diaspora around the world and bring more impact to our language and culture.
Wiki Loves Butterfly: You are right. Wiki Loves Butterfly is in its separate grant period running as a specialized project, hence not included into this proposal.

Thanks again for your encouraging words. :-) -- Bodhisattwa (talk) 21:41, 14 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback from the SAARC Regional Grants Committee[edit]

Based on the application, the South Asia Regional Grant Committee would like to share the following feedback and suggestions for your consideration. If the feedback and suggestions are unclear or will require a deeper discussion, the committee members will be available for an online meeting.

It is noted that the West Bengal Wikimedians User Group (WBUG) has outlined their goals and vision with clarity. The details laid out in this annual plan appear to match the vision and desired changes stated at the start. It appears there has been sufficient room for community input. The active community input and great detail put forth in the proposal points to an overall positive impact that the user group plans to make. The effort put by WBUG to plan activities as per the needs of the community is reflected across the proposal and in the proposed budget as well.

The various activities highlighted in the proposal (and the risk assessment provided) appear quite viable. In general the activities proposed are accessible to newcomers. The user group has sufficient experience from prior activities and appears to consistently demonstrate the needed capacity to carry out what it has been proposing. WBUG has good quantitative outcome tracking systems in place, and it appears that these systems will at least continue to be employed, if not further expanded.

These being said, the following are some suggestions from the Committee:

Given that topics such as heritage, language, literature, and culture are typically important for students, WBUG may (if feasible for them) wish to consider piloting a sort of Wiki Education program. Additionally or alternatively...
...the Wiki Loves initiatives that WBUG has proposed should be made accessible for school children. Some possible modes of engagement include promoting the activity as well as allocating special prizes for students participating and contributing to these activities. These modes of engagement can be beneficial for school children, since it will help them explore topics such as cultural heritage in an engaged manner without restricting it to theoretical pedagogy.
The number of volunteers required to take forward all of these initiatives may be a source of difficulty in the future. It is imperative that WBUG plans ahead for the future and starts actively planning, engaging and retaining new volunteers. For the future WBUG will definitely need more leaders that they can rely on. Planning skill development training and arranging regular conferences regarding these themes can help.
WBUG may consider inviting an active Wikimedian from another community or a professional photographer outside of West Bengal to observe their work. This can serve as an opportunity to widely disseminate the work model followed by WBUG.
Organising orientation lectures and regular check-ins for the flagship events such as Wiki Loves Food and Wiki Loves Monuments may help newcomer volunteers and also increase the quality of content that gets uploaded.
Efforts to bring more new people into organisational capacities while retaining active Wikimedians would help in stabilising the proposed initiatives. These may also provide more opportunities for newcomers to be part of the Wiki Exploration programs.
Having plans to ensure that the proposed activities will be actively engaged with participants who are women, non-binary, or LGBTQ is encouraged.

For the Committee, Mahir256 (talk) 15:57, 30 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Presentatrion about Wiki Exploration Program in Wikimania 2021

A promotional video for Wiki Loves Monuments in India

Hello South Asia Regional Grant Committee members, thanks a lot for your valuable feedback on this grant proposal. Regarding the suggestions coming from the committee, I shall try to respond below.

We have not planned Wiki Education Program from our user group yet because we simply do not have the necessary capacity to put efforts into this kind of program. Wiki Education Program requires a lengthy negotiations with educational institutes to convince them to include Wikimedia topics into their curriculum. If we even optimistically consider that we will have high success rates in such negotiations, still it requires lots of engagement and efforts from our side. Considering our small workforce, that would mean over-stretching of our lines. That's why we thought to focus on planning programs based on our strength and not on our weakness. Also, students in West Bengal, like elsewhere in India, have already lost almost two years due the COVID-19 pandemic and the main concerns of the educational institutes will be to overcome the shortcomings of the students as soon as possible. I personally feel, that this might not be the ideal time for us to pitch Wikimedia topics into their already burdened syllabi. Having said that, we acknowledge the importance of heritage, language, literature, and culture among students and we will think about planning to engage them in future when we will have the necessary strengths to do so.
Poland organized Wiki Loves Monuments Junior in 2021 for school students engaging 11 schools. There is a practical problem though. As our existing tools do not require or filter age of the participants at any stage, it would be almost impossible for organizers and jury members to figure out if a photograph has been taken and uploaded by a minor or not. Anyway, the best practices are still not known to us, but we can consult Wikimedia Poland to learn about how they had addressed these kind of practical issues and executed their program. If a workable solution can be found out to follow, the WLM India team should have no problem to take decision to give special prizes to minors.
We welcome anyone interested in our initiatives to observe our works. We share our plans and programs regularly and openly on mailing lists and on-wiki, from where anyone can contact us. We also present our programs, create posters and whiteboards, and give postcards etc. describing our activities in different conferences, meetups etc., where interested participants engage with us.
We thank for the suggestion for organizing orientation lectures and regular check-ins for our Wiki Loves programs. Although we had conducted a orientation workshop before for Wiki Loves Monuments program last year during Wikimania, but it was not very spread out. We will definitely think about this seriously this year.
WBG is open to anyone who share our values, vision and goals, and wish to contribute to our mission. We have carefully drafted bylaws to objectively and proactively seek and search the most dedicated people from our memebers to run the organization. But like any volunteer driven organizations in global south countries, the capacity is to ambition is not always enough. We have been planning to bring more sustainability to our affiliate for the last few years, but due to various reasons and obstacles from internal and external factors, we were unable to do so. Hopefully, considering some of our ongoing internal discussions, we will succeed to shift towards a more stable and sustainable model by the end of this year.
WBG programs and activities are open to everyone irrespective of religion, caste, creed or sex and our bylaws do not discriminate among them. As mentioned above, anyone who share our values, vision and goals, and wish to contribute to our mission can join us and engage with us to take part in our activities, provided they follow our bylaws. For your kind attention, Wiki Loves Butterfly, another program supported by WBG but not included in this proposal as it has a different grant period, has considerable number of female participants in their core team.

We will be happy to have online calls with the committee to clarify our positions on the suggestions, if needed and to understand what the committee thinks about them. -- Bodhisattwa (talk) 15:26, 1 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Budget modified[edit]

Hello SAARC Regional Grants Committee and @THasan (WMF) and MJue (WMF):, I have removed the entire remaining parts section of the budget as suggested on Fluxx. Remaining fund from Annual Plan 2021-22 i.e. ₹25,501 and Wiki Exploration 2021 i.e. ₹12,727, totaling ₹38,228 will be adjusted by requesting for rapid grants separately by individuals having the funds. After removing the remaining fund of ₹38,228, the amount to be requested went up to ₹988,228. I have also rounded up the amount a little bit to ₹1,000,000/-. That means, the fiscal sponsorship charge to CIS had to be increased to ₹100,000/- as per their demand of 10% of total program expenditure FYKI, as per our program lead for Wiki Exploration program @Amitabha Gupta:, I have also changed the model of the camera and lens and adjusted the budget accordingly to have a better equipment than before. Please check this edit as reference. Thanks, -- Bodhisattwa (talk) 06:41, 12 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Funding recommendation from South Asia Grants Committee[edit]

Hi @Bodhisattwa: and members of the Wikimedians of West Bengal User Group, The South Asia Grants Committee recommends full funding to the application made by the Wikimedians of West Bengal User Group (WBUG) with the renewed budget.

The committee upon reviewing the proposal and the responses provided by the User Group (towards the feedback) have come to a decision that these initiatives must be fully supported. The User Group has successfully presented a model of collecting ideas in a distributed manner and has shown a consistent track record in grooming these ideas into successful campaigns. There has also been considerable effort by the leaders of the initiatives and of the User Group to keep the programs cost effective and deliver high impact. The method of presenting an aggregated annual plan along with a consolidated budget that is approved and endorsed by the Bangla community members is a true example of subsidiarity in decision making.

It is very important that West Bengal Wikimedians User Group set up extensive safety guidelines in consultation with the Education team, Community Programs, WMF when they would be planning to engage school children in their activities. However it is noted that the UG does not have the bandwidth to take up education related activities during this proposal period.

West Bengal Wikimedians User Group has hosted, designed and implemented many successful campaigns and initiatives in the past. These were done with minimal budget and were often times a big responsibility taken up by the volunteers. The South Asian Grants Committee wants to encourage the applicants to make use of the resources and compensate professional service providers as necessary for the success of the campaigns. Our intention is to reduce the workload and avoid burnout for the volunteers.

As part of the discussion in response to the feedback provided by the South Asia Grants Committee, WBUG representative has mentioned about working with the projects that are familiar and are accessible to them at this moment. We would like to appreciate the grounded nature of the User Group but encourage them to ensure that there is equitable representation of all stakeholders in their activities in a gradual and constructive manner. It is also a recommendation of the Grants Committee to invest in professional development of both the existing and experienced volunteers to take forward the activities of the User Group and also invest in retention, skills development and capacity building of new volunteers to take lead in the next iteration/s of the UG activities.

We look forward to continuous communication and engagement with the members of the User Group.

On behalf of the South Asia Grants Committee THasan (WMF) (talk) 04:43, 26 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you South Asia Grants Committee and @THasan (WMF): for all your feedback, recommendations and support towards this grant proposal. We are trying to build a sustainable model for ourselves so that we can expand and serve the movement for at least a decade in a more meaningful way than now and we are very keen to build our staff structure to run our program. We need all kinds of guidance and support we can get to build such a system and we deeply appreciate that the committee members are willing to communicate and engage with us in this regard. We will definitely contact the committee in near future and seek wisdom. Thanks again for the approval of full funding of the proposal. We will try our best to run all our programs smoothly and transparently like previous years and deliver results with impact as before. -- Bodhisattwa (talk) 05:21, 26 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Request to extend for the grant period of WBG annual plan 2022-23 - Approved[edit]

Hello @Bodhisattwa,

Thank you for your email. We have reviewed and approved your request. The end date for your grant has been extended to 30 Nov 2023. Your final learning report is due 31 Dec 2023; and learning conversation with PO is due 31 Jan 2024. Thank you.

Regards, Jacqueline JChen (WMF) (talk) 08:34, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]