Grants talk:Project/Wikipedia in DRCongo Youth Associations

Proposal Clinics

Hello,

Thanks for beginning to draft your proposal for the Project Grants open call! I wanted to make sure you are aware that we are hosting proposal clinics for applicants to ask questions and get feedback. If you would like to attend, you can find the dates, times, and videoconference links posted on this page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project#Upcoming_Proposal_Clinics. These are optional opportunities to get support improving your proposal. Let me know if you have any questions! Good luck with finishing your proposal for the February 10 deadline!

Warm regards,

--MCasoValdes (WMF) (talk) 17:47, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Reminder: Change status to proposed to submit

IMPORTANT: Please note that you must change your proposal status from "draft" to "proposed" by the submission deadline in order for your proposal to be reviewed in the current round. When your proposal has been successfully submitted, it will show up in the "Open proposals" list (it may take several minutes for the list to update after you submit it). Applications that are not completely filled out and correctly submitted by the deadline will not be reviewed. To submit your proposal, you must complete all fields of the application and then:

1. Click on "edit source"

2. Change "|status=DRAFT" to "|status=PROPOSED"

3. Click the "Publish changes" button.

Thank you,

--MCasoValdes (WMF) (talk) 02:19, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed, Round 1 2021 - Community Organizing proposal

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for review in Round 1 2021 for Community Organizing projects. This decision is contingent upon compliance with our COVID-19 guidelines. Proposals that include travel and/or offline events must ensure that all of the following are true:

• You must review and can comply with the guidelines linked above.
• If necessary because of COVID-19 safety risks, you must be able to complete the core components of your proposed work plan _without_ offline events or travel.
• You must be able to postpone any planned offline events or travel until the Wikimedia Foundation’s guidelines allow for them, without significant harm to the goals of your project.
• You must include a COVID-19 planning section in your activities plan. In this section, you should provide a brief summary of how your project plan will meet COVID-19 guidelines, and how it would impact your project if travel and offline events prove unfeasible throughout the entire life of your project. If you have not already included this in your proposal, you have until February 28 to add it.

The Community review period is now underway, from February 20-March 4. We encourage you to make sure that stakeholders, volunteers, and/or communities impacted by your proposed project are aware of your proposal and invite them to give feedback on your talkpage. This is a great way to make sure that you are meeting the needs of the people you plan to work with and it can help you improve your project.

• If you are applying for funds in a region where there is a Wikimedia Affiliate working, we encourage you to let them know about your project, too.
• If you _are_ a Wikimedia Affiliate applying for a Project Grant: A special reminder that our guidelines and criteria require you to announce your Project Grant requests on your official user group page on Meta and a local language forum that is recognized by your group, to allow adequate space for objections and support to be voiced).

Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during the community review period. By March 4, make sure that your proposal has incorporated any revisions you want to make and complies with all of our guidelines. If you have not already done so, you can make use of our project planning resources to improve your proposal further, too.

The Project Grant committee's formal review for round 1 2020 will occur March 5 through March 20, 2021. We ask that you refrain from making any further changes to your proposal during the committee review period, so we can be sure that all committee members are scoring the same version of the proposal.

Grantees will be announced Friday, April 22, 2021. Sometimes we have to make some changes to the round schedule. If that happens, it will be reflected on the round schedule on the Project Grants start page.

We look forward to engaging with you in this Round!

Questions? Contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 06:47, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata

I'm excited about the Wikidata training part. Do you mind expanding a little bit about what topics/areas you're going to train participants on that they would otherwise not be able to find on YouTube or Wikimedia Commons? Could you also add an outcome in your goals for Wikidata? Thanks -—M@sssly^✉ 17:09, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for Wikipedia in DRCongo Youth Associations

Scoring rubric	Score
(A) Impact potential Does it have the potential to increase gender diversity in Wikimedia projects, either in terms of content, contributors, or both? Does it have the potential for online impact? Can it be sustained, scaled, or adapted elsewhere after the grant ends?	6.0
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	5.3
(C) Ability to execute Can the scope be accomplished in the proposed timeframe? Is the budget realistic/efficient ? Do the participants have the necessary skills/experience?	4.3
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	5.8
Additional comments from the Committee: Interesting idea but the application has a long preamble and does not go into detail. This is an ambitious proposal. The applicants are trying to find a way to encourage more youth in DRC to participate in the Wikimedia movement. This request is heavily focused on training which I think is great because, while there are already many training materials on almost all the major Wikimedia projects, the existing ones -- and all the good ones for that matter have particular target groups/audiences which usually doesn't resonate with the regions that this grant seek to work from. Hence, more material made by the people who understand the regions better have a chance of becoming more useful to folks in that region. Project fits with Wikimedia strategic's priorities and has a big and long term impact.Nevertheless and to be more sustainable I suggest to train employees from the Ministry in charge of Youth in the DRC and key leaders from the local organisations so they can replicate this project in the next years. The main idea of this proposal will be implemented by a single full-time staff instead of a local Wiki community. Therefore, we believe the risks of the proposal would be higher than other similar proposals. Meanwhile, even though it seems necessary for such a case, there does not have an internal control system for the proposal. High potential for impact with a long term impact on the development of the local community and local content on WIkipedia. Clear targets except for: -commons as if we have +300 new editors we can expect more than 50 images, -Wikidata where the impact is not very clear. It seems that the applicant has no enough experience on Wikipedia. The time to accomplish the proposal is over 12 months, which means it is not eligible to meet the criteria. The costs are high. However, there are not sufficient reasons for planning the budget, especially while they're requiring $1,000 to buy a laptop. Also, we could not identify if the applicants have all necessary skills or experience for executing their plan so far. Project can be accomplished in 12 months. Realistic/efficient budget except for the topic Evaluation 6000$ which is not clear. Participant has the required skills and experience to execute this project. We can see there are some endorsements from the community. The project has the community support either from local wikimedians or African/Francophone wikimedians. The target community is very clear. Nevertheless it's not clear how the diversity is supported. In case the applicant has poor or no experience in Wikipedia, it would be complicated to understand how the project has been defined. The application is complete and it is not clear how the budget has been calculated. I am not recommending funding this proposal now. The one of the reasons is the full-time staff they're requiring is not eligible to the criteria. Also, the budget is not clear enough. I believe some changes to the proposal would be helpful if they can get some support from the WMF team. Besides that, I was wondering if it is an official proposal from the DRC government. If it is, I am not sure will the programme become the best way for them receiving resources from WMF. If it is not, they may need to do more disclosure in order to avoid any misunderstanding. Great to see an application that supports the embedded a WiR within an institution and creating content in local languages. Would have liked the application to have included more about the WiR role as an advocate within the institute and expected outcomes (not just quantitative outputs) for the role and project. The budget should have some revisions, 7500 USD on water seems high. What are the costs of installing and creating access to Kiwix? What are the project management costs - is it associated with a salary or other activities? The amounts requested is on the high end, maybe a few adjustments can be made to it. Yes but would like to see more explanation for the topic "Evaluation 6000$".

Opportunity to respond to committee comments in the next week

The Project Grants Committee has conducted a preliminary assessment of your proposal. Based on their initial review, a majority of committee reviewers have not recommended your proposal for funding. You can read more about their reasons for this decision in their comments above. Before the committee finalizes this decision, they would like to provide you with an opportunity to respond to their comments.

Next steps:

1. Aggregated committee comments from the committee are posted above. Note that these comments may vary, or even contradict each other, since they reflect the conclusions of multiple individual committee members who independently reviewed this proposal. We recommend that you review all the feedback carefully and post any responses, clarifications or questions on this talk page by 5pm UTC on Monday, March 29, 2021. If you make any revisions to your proposal based on committee feedback, we recommend that you also summarize the changes on your talkpage.
2. The committee will review any additional feedback you post on your talkpage before making a final funding decision. A decision will be announced no later than Friday, April 22, 2021.

Questions? Contact us.

--Mercedes Caso (platícame) 05:06, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Response to committee comments

We thank you so much for your comments on our proposal. Following them, we've made some adjustments to our initial plan, as requested by most of you. So, we decide to run a pilot project with 200 young leaders for a period of 8 months. We also plan training for our staff for sustainability as requested by some of you.

Before moving forward, we want to clarify some misunderstandings about our status. We're NOT representing the Ministry in charge of Youth, but we're an independent department (commonly called "division") within that Ministry that has many other services. You can learn more about how the administration works in the country here.

• No, the project won't be implemented by us only. We are in full contact with Wikimedians of DRC UG from where we got advice and most of their members are OK to volunteer as mentors for the success of this project.
• Target: 200 new editors and 100 images uploaded. We won't be covering Wikidata anymore. Let's focus on a deep understanding of Wikipedia and Commons. We expect our trainees to participate in WLA 2022 campaign.
• Yes, we're not experienced, editors. It is for that reason that we request hiring an experienced Wikimedian full-time.
• The project execution time is now 8 months (6 mo of full-time WiR employment). No, there's no problem with executing our plan. I have more than 40 years of experience running projects to benefit the youth with international partners like Enable, Unicef... or local ones. So, we are experts in managing youth projects.

--Divijeune (talk) 16:27, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Veuillez vérifier votre e-mail

Cher Divijeune,

Je vous écris pour vous demander de bien vouloir vérifier deux courriels que nous vous avons envoyés le 22 avril et le 11 mai. Nous vous remercions de bien vouloir nous contacter dans les meilleurs délais à l'adresse suivante : projectgrants [at] wikimedia . org.

Meilleures salutations,

Mercedes Caso (platícame) 17:08, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

Round 1 2021 decision

Congratulations! Your proposal has been selected for a Project Grant.

WMF has approved partial funding for this project, in accordance with the committee's recommendation. This project is funded with $5,000

Comments regarding this decision:
The Project Grants Committee supports partial funding of $5,000 USD for this proposal. The committee was most interested in supporting a youth organization in DRC that will work towards knowledge equity by engaging young people in Wikipedia to share content that represents their cultural context.

Grantee needs to provide a job description for the Wikimedian in Residence specifically outlining the scope and planned activities of the role. The Program Officer must review and approve the job description before the project begins. Please note that we consider funding for WiR activities to be short-term. Grant funding that the Wikimedia Foundation provides for WiRs is not intended to support ongoing workflows, but to leverage the partnership to build a sustainable platform that ensures outcomes long after the WiR has completed their service. Their work should secure long-term outcomes that do not depend on ongoing grant funding.

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement and setup a monthly check-in schedule.
2. Review the information for grantees.
3. Use the new buttons on your original proposal to create your project pages.
4. Start work on your project!

Upcoming changes to Wikimedia Foundation Grants

Over the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has been undergoing a community consultation process to launch a new grants strategy. Our proposed programs are posted on Meta here: Grants Strategy Relaunch 2020-2021. If you have suggestions about how we can improve our programs in the future, you can find information about how to give feedback here: Get involved. We will launch our new programs in July 2021. If you are interested in submitting future proposals for funding, stay tuned to learn more about our future programs.

Mercedes Caso (platícame) 18:29, 14 June 2021 (UTC)