Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Wikimedia Community Arusha/Feminism and Folklore + WikiForHumanRights 2022

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Not funded[edit]

Hello CaliBen, thank you for submitting your grant application for Feminism and Folklore + WikiForHumanRights 2022. We appreciate your interest in contributing to the mission of the Wikimedia Movement. We are continuously strengthening our grants review process, ensuring that grant funding is being invested towards impactful projects and efforts geared towards contributing to the mission of Wikimedia Movement in the most efficient and effective manner. After a thorough review of your application, we have decided to not fund your Rapid Fund request. Here are the main reasons of my decision:

  • There are almost no details about the activities you plan to run in your communities. What's the need for running these two campaigns? What do you want to achieve?
  • I also couldn't find anything about the need for running these contests just for the Arusha community and not coordinating them with other Tanzanian communities.
  • The budget for both campaigns are just duplicates; there are overlapping and repetitive expenses. From the description and budget, I understood that the activities you plan to carry out are very similar for both contests. In this case, perhaps you just need to run them together?
  • All users mentioned as team members except you, are not active on Wikimedia projects.
    • Most of the team members were active only in October or June-July 2021.
    • A team member is blocked on sw.wiki. How will they support people on Swahili Wikipedia if they are blocked?
    • I also took a look at the members interested in joining the contest. Most of them are not active on Wikimedia projects either. I'd like to understand more about the active team and community members who will join the contests and other projects in Arusha. It's OK when some community members are not active. But to me, it's a concern when almost all community members don't make any other contributions to Wikimedia projects.

Thanks again for your work for the movement. Wishing you all the best. Best regards, --DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 14:06, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]


Hello DSaroyan (WMF)

Thank you for reviewing the grant proposal.

  • The Wikimedia Community of Arusha has never participated in any of these two campaigns before. The need for running these campaigns in Arusha is to create awareness and introduce and ignite the volunteers who are passionate about the topics covered in these campaigns' context.This could fit as user retention strategy for the users interested in the campaigns' context. The activities that are to be undertaken will majorly be training and editathons related to the two different campaigns' contexts identified under the project plan section.
  • The Tanzanian communities consist of the UG, USLW, and Arusha. The USLW is already running the Feminism & Folklore campaign. The nature of the planned activities for Arusha is in-person events and it is done so with a reason that most in-person events from my experience are more effective than the online ones. Therefore with the mode of the events, it would be difficult to engage people from the User group as they are miles away from Arusha.
  • The budget shows a distinction between the two campaigns. Feminism & Folklore would run on separate dates from the WikiforHumanRights campaign. For Feminism & Folklore, we were to run two offline events and for the WikiforHumanRights campaign, we were to run three in-person events. I combined the two campaigns together so that I could reduce the number of submitted proposals. I couldn't run the two campaigns together as they have different timelines. Feminism and Folkore end in March while the WikiforHumanRights campaign commences in Mid April and ends in May.
  • The team members play a big role in the preparation of the events and make sure that everything runs swiftly during and after the events. During an event, it might happen that the team members play a major role to teach others and not get time for themselves to edit anything using their accounts at that particular event.
  • Members section is not up to date. I will make sure that it is up to date (I HAVE UPDATED THE LIST). The listed community members are some that were members from the very beginning of the community. There are more community members than the listed ones. Please take a look at the event dashboards for the events taking place in Arusha. I would also like to tell you more about the community members' activeness, most of the community members become active with the events taking place. We have had no events since for a couple of months until now, so if you track the participants' activeness you will find out that they have been dormant for a while. Having a different set of events with different contexts allows for the members to find what they are passionate about and for them to start to actively contribute to Wikimedia projects regardless of the existence of events.I also observed for a couple of months when there were no events more than ten members left the WhatsApp group.

Please let me know if I can provide more details. Thank you! CaliBen (talk) 15:15, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]