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Brazil Program/Reports/Ação Educativa's grant - first semester/pt

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Moving into the new model and onboarding in Ação Educativa

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Acaoeducativa onboarding
  • A welcoming and onboarding meeting in Ação Educativa: About 20 people working in the most different areas of Ação Educativa participated in our presentation about the catalyst project as well as about the Wikimedia projects, aiming at building bridges and connections with our partner organization.
  • Complex onboarding process: in the following months, a few challenges, from the cultural adaptation, team cohesion to small but important practical issues led to having half of the team in general satisfied with the process and half of the team skeptical and unsatisfied. Not only we have half of the team still working remotely, but also, we've lacked in effective engagement from both parts - not all staff members and community satisfactory engaged with the organization and also the organization still didn't actively engage in the community dynamics and spaces. We're at this moment setting a calendar to bring all stakeholders into a discussion on how we can improve that.
  • Culture clash: while Ação Educativa is an old-time traditional NGO in Brazil, working to enforce the right to education way before digital media technologies was a popular asset, Wikimedia movement emerged in a context in which digital technologies not only bring opportunities, but they are also key to collaboration and education processes we want to build. For our movement, technologies and the Wikimedia projects are core, they are the heart of a collaboration process that aim at providing access to knowledge everywhere in the world. The Brazilian Wikimedia movement, as some will know, is ṕarticularly resistant and critical to more traditional organizational models. While we had seen this as an opportunity for bringing two very important expertises together - the ones related to participation processes in general and popular education from AE and the ones related to online, open and asynchronous collaboration, as well as to build knowledge together in a complex system from Wikimedia movement - we haven't yet succeeded in working well together, neither it's clear to what extent it's likely to succeed, looking at both fostering the Wikimedia projects growth and enforcing education rights from such diverse perspectives.
  • Are we in the right track?: the challenging question aims at opening a debate on how fruitful our partnership can be. On the specifics, we should be questioning whether any local organization would perfectly match Wikimedia movement's main goals, while Wikimedia projects can be seen as a way of achieving their goals, but they might never be (and why should they?) their main purpose of work or even their main objects of study or action. Under a more global view, potential strong partners of the Wikimedia movement, when partnering directly with WMF (even if after community review), might become seen as opponents rather than real partners. Instead of putting them to work together, are we pushing community away from partner organizations? Even if we handled community reviews in which the community could bring inputs into the decision making process of which organization we should partner with, there is no perception of consensus and of co-responsibility for the choices made. Is the community willing to play the role of bringing organizations to partner with Wikimedia Foundation, considering the current model for Brazil?

*Community consultation process:

Program activities

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Knowledge production and dissemination

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Activity 1: To map open educational resources and collaborative building of knowledge in the education field, in collaboration with Open Educational Resources communities, Wikimedia Community, free culture movements and educational institutions partners. Make it available on Meta and br.wikimedia.org websites

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English

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OER field and archives Mapping

Hirings for this ad-hoc team took place between December and January, the detailed planning was made during February and the mapping itself started in March.

Temporary contractors: Jamila Venturini (coordination), Luiz Augusto Pereira (mapping and analysis of resources and archives), Michelle Prazeres (field mapping / qualitative interviews). Supervision: Oona Castro and Gustavo Paiva

The mapping has comprised more than 22 archives plus 231 resources, and the process was documentated in the Portuguese Wikiversity. About 80 people were contacted and 30 in depth interviews were carried out with key players from the Brazilian Open educational Resources movement, including activists, researchers and content producers. The field mapping aimed at identifying the most important existent initiatives in Brazil as well as their consensus and different points of view regarding concepts, law enforcement and political strategies, business models and legal framework.

The outcome of the field mapping may be of great help for the Wikimedia movement in case volunteers decide to actively engage and participate in the OER Brazilian movement, either for the design of strategies and to better understand the current political state of this wider movement. Also, the OER and access to education movements can benefit from the findings of such mapping, since we identified a gap between the OER Brazilian movement and the more traditional education movements, finding very little dialogue between those two important actors for the promotion of the free, open and democratic education.

 
Partial data regarding the mapping of OER in Brazil

40 archives have been identified and we analyzed 22 of them and 231 resources regarding their licenses, formats and production and distribution models. Among the main findings, one may find: 1) great part of the resources distributed as OER are not free licensed, which means they are not compatible with Wikimedia projects; a great amount are regular copyrighted material, with no explicit license for free use and distribution, though some are intended to be freely used online; alternative non free licenses (CC-BY-NC-SA for example) are also used for a significant part of the resources available (check the graph); 2) although OER Brazil has adopted (and influenced on) the Unesco's definition of OER, there are still disputes in place in the content production field on the concept of OER.

A group talk with educators allowed us to better understand how open educational resources are being used (or not) in the daily work of professors in their classes. The main conclusion of this phase of the research was that educators not only make little use of the materials but also know very little about copyright licences. They are more concerned about availability and quality rather than formal authorization for use or distribution.

Jamila Venturini has also made presentations sharing information gathered by the research as well as searching for dialogues with similar initiatives under development. She participated as a speaker in the Education, human rights and technologies course, in the Open Education week, together with the coordinator of the Catalyst Program, and in the Open education, society and technology seminar in São Paulo.

In july, we're finalizing the mapping with a comprehensive research report, which will be published in the Wikiversity, and the analysis of 22 archives and 231 analyzed resources, considering their compatibility with Wikimedia projects and other issues. In August, we'll widely bring attention to the results of the research, with a thematic publication online, a public debate and workshop with professors, as well as an edit-a-thon to bring in to the projects resources that can enrich our projects, as well as improve the quality of related articles in Wikipedia.

Although we didn't find a great percentage of archives and resources compatible with Wikimedia projects, the mapping still brings contributions to the projects. The most important contribution, however, may be one which allows the Brazilian civil society, including the Wikimedia community, to engage in the public debate regarding open educational resources with a pretty clear understanding of its current state, its political challenges, its conceptual challenges and disputes, allowing a more mature position that can contribute with public policies that encourage collaborative production of educational content and access to free knowledge.

Activity 2: To organize a public event about educational practices and the collaborative creation of knowledge content and release of the result of the open educational resources mapping

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TRANSLATION NEEDED

Mapeamento de Recursos educacionais abertos

O proceso de contratação de equipe ad-hoc para realização do mapeamento aconteceu entre dezembro e janeiro - o planejamento ocorreu ao longo de fevereiro, e o mapeamento começou efetivamente em março.

Equipe (temporária): Jamila Venturini (coordenação), Luiz Augusto Pereira (mapeamento e análise de repositórios e recursos), Michelle Prazeres (mapeamento do campo). Supervisão geral: Oona Castro e Gustavo Paiva

O mapeamento ainda está sendo realizado, com documentação permanente no projeto Wikiversidade. Até agora, foram feitos 80 contatos e 29 entrevistas em profundidade com atores do campo de recursos educacionais abertos, entre ativistas, pesquisadores e produtores. O mapeamento do campo tem por objetivo levantar as iniciativas em curso, bem como os consensos e os conflitos do campo relacionados a conceitos, estratégias jurídicas, modelos de negócios, marco legal.

 
Dados parciais do mapeamento de recursos educacionais abertos no Brasil

Além disso, foram identificados 40 repositórios, analisados 11 deles, e 127 recursos educacionais com relação a suas licenças, formatos e modo de produção/compartilhamento. Entre as principais conclusões estão: 1) a de que boa parte desses recursos não apresenta licenças livres; a maioria está protegida por direito autoral padrão, sem licença (e por consquência sob as mesmas regras do direito autoral padrão); as licenças alternativas não livres (por exemplo CC-BY-NC-SA) também são utilizadas boa parte dos recursos educacionais disponíveis (veja gráfico ao lado); 2) a de que embora o movimento REA-Brasil tenha adotado (e antes influenciado inclusive) o conceito da Unesco, no campo de produção de conhecimento livre ainda há disputas em torno dos conceitos e definições a serem defendidos.

Uma roda de conversa com educadores foi realizada para ver como os recursos educacionais vinham sendo implementados em sala de aula. A principal conclusão dessa fase da pesquisa foi de que os educadores apropriam-se pouco não apenas dos materiais, como dos conceitos relacionados a licenciamento. Ou seja, eles estão mais preocupados se conseguem utilizar os recursos do que se estão autorizados a utilizá-los e como.

A coordenadora Jamila Venturini tem feito apresentações compartilhando os dados da pesquisa e buscando dialogar com outras iniciativas em curso. Ela participou como debatedora no curso, da Semana de educação aberta, junto com a coordenadora do programa catalisador, e do Seminário em educação aberta, sociedade e tecnologia.

Neste mês de julho, chegaremos à etapa final do mapeamento com a conclusão do relatórios de pesquisa, que será integralmente publicado na Wikiversidade, com destaque para a análise dos 22 repositórios e 232 recursos analisados e compatibilidades destes com os projetos Wikimedia. No mês de agosto será feito um processo mais amplo de divulgação, com a produção de uma publicação virtual temática, realização de um debate público e de oficina com professores sobre o tema e uma Edithaton para fortalecer a incorporação dos recursos encontrados a projetos como o Wikicommons e o Wikisources, além da edicação de artigos da Wikipédia relacionados aos temas da pesquisa.

Embora a porcentagem de projetos com licenças compatíveis com a dos projetos Wikimedia não seja alta, o mapeamento trará um número importante de contribuições para os projetos. O principal legado porém, deverá ser a disponibilização de uma pesquisa que permita à comunidade brasileira ampliar sua percepção sobre o campo político constituído em torno do debate sobre licenças e recursos educacionais abertos no Brasil (seus interlocutores e disputas conceituais e em torno de políticas públicas) e a percepção dos projetos Wikimedia como recursos educacionais abertos, de modo a alimentar a proposição e experimentação de novos modelos de fomento aos projetos, sobretudo na área educacional, e a atuação em prol de políticas públicas que fomente a produção colaborativa e compartilhada e conhecimento.

Está em fase de desenvolvimento um estudo para apontar quanto o trabalho desses pesquisadores dentro da Wikiversidade em português influenciou na dinâmica da comunidade.

In February, we have organized a seminar called encontro "Acesso a conhecimento, educação e direitos humanos" (Access to knowledge, education and human rights). It aimed at getting community members, Ação Educativa and partners to:

  1. get to know more about the partnership in place and know each other;
  2. Debate affairs of common interest and field of work, such as access to knowledge and to education in an open and participative way;
  3. Kick off debate on access to open educational resources, raising concerns that helped frame and plan the mapping.

A general evaluation of the meeting has been posted here.

 
First public event at Ação Educativa, since the partnership started

About 70 people subscribed for the event and 45 people attended. The meeting was successful regarding the quality of the debate and the participation of in person attendees and online watchers (the event was broadcasted and speakers interacted with online participants), as well as it did inspire us in the detailed framing of the OER mapping. However, the objective of showing how much in common the Wikimedia community and Ação Educativa might have when it comes to their respective mission, towards access to knowledge and education failed. There was also embarrassment due to the fact we brought together community members who were conflicting at that time in the debate, which in fact happened because we changed the initial intended structure: originally, speakers in the afternoon were supposed to speak in different talk sessions in rounds, in order to share experiences and proposals of work related to access to knowledge; while trying to avoid decline of the audience as time passed by, speakers were put all together for one single session, creating space for tension and it ended up conveying the idea we as organizers were creating an embarrassing situation for the volunteers invited to talk. Also, we expected and invited the community to run a self organized meeting on Sunday, but there was not much excitement and action on this.

 
Access to knowledge meeting - Feb/2014

We acknowledge that, despite the quality of the event and debate, we were not able to achieve two of the objectives: bridge the gap perception on the objectives of Ação Educativca and the Wikimedia community and create a dialogue channel with the community about the project. On the contraty, it ended up pushing some people away (including staff members who are also community members). The community and part of the team expressed lack of understanding with reference to what an event like that could contribute to the Wikimedia projects - evaluating otherwise that it's far from the objectives of the project (such as: increase participation, diversity, reach and content). To the event organizers, the event aimed at broadening the circle of stakeholders involved in the project and aware of the partnership, creating a channel for permanent dialogue, as one of the steps towards the convergence of people concerned about free knowledge in Brazil. As we've said, we believe we achieved part of the objectives. Also, dissatisfaction of team members with the event's agenda and model was not detected earlier, but only shared in the evaluation meeting, which made it even harder to create a good communications channel with other community members.

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We expect that contents from the compatible mapped databases will be uploaded to projects like Commons and Wikisource. Our team is working on a tool to track the upload of materials that have origin in the mapped resources to wikimedia projects.

Content production and dissemination

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Activity 1: Adding content produced by Brazilian organizations and bring them into Wikimedia projects

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Ação's own materials
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Ação Educativa had a lot of publications online, available to anyone, but not properly licensed. Ação has hence been revising the licenses of their published content to add them into Wikisources. After internal discussions, supported by the program's staff, Ação Educativa has managed to assume the incorporation of CC-BY licenses in its journalistic publications, which include more than 10 websites and blogs, a monthly published cultural magazine and three bimonthly newsletters, as well as videos. Besides, other publications shall be licensed under CC-BY-SA, such as methodological guides and research materials.

As the first stage, Ação Educativa published the book Práticas de Educadoras under CC-BY, with articles that bring experiences and reflections about the teaching practices under the perspective of educators that take part in the project Nossa Escola Pesquisa Sua Opinião (a partnership between Ação Educativa and the Instituto Paulo Montenegro, that make use of surveys to generate information and knowledge for school communities of the public schools system from eight Brazilian states and more than six countries). The process has been an important first step towards the institutional understanding of licensing considering every project of Ação Educativa (over 40), that is in the process of incorporating free licenses. From this first experience, the editorial unit of Ação Educativa has built knowledge on legal and licensing standards for future contracts and other procedures in the publishing process so they can spread the practice to new works, though there is still room to grow and expertise to be developed.

Until August, Ação Educativa will have relicensed all the works from collection Em Questão (thematic publication about emerging issues in the educational public debate), which will also allow its publication in the Portuguese Wikisources, as well as methodological guides, as the ones from Coleção De Olho nos Planos.

Our general view is that the Creative Commons licences are a legal framework for a practice that Ação Educativa had already adopted for the great majority of its works, with full access and permission for changes and derivative works, considering different location and context needs, but were not properly licensed. The Wikimedia community and the project staff members helped Ação Educativa better understand how the licenses work and Ação is committed to strengthen its participation in this field, through dialogue with other civil society organizations in Brazil advocating for the use of open and free licenses, and to impact on better public policies for free educational content, throughout other projects and programs carried out in the organization.

Third Party Materials
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We are working with others organizations to have theirs content published on wikimedia projects. We have manage to engage different players to work with different projects. In Wikinews not only Ação but also Revista Espírito Livre have joined the Projeto Revista. In Wikibooks, the Niterói city hall culture team have not only created an tutorial but also have developed improved global icons for projects evolution.

In this activity the wikiproject Healthy can be highlighted. We manage to engage different groupse (such as RedeHumanizaSUS, Comunidade de Práticas, Secretaria Municipal Rio de Janeiro - regional sul, LAISS-CSEGSF-FIOCRUZ) with the volunteers to work on partnerships for free content production and dissemination. Join this eforts our team has manage to develop a research on heath related articles behavior and now this data is being automatically generated on the ptwikis timeline. Also, we have manage to be part of biggest Brazilian event on the field, the Mostra Nacional de Experiências em Atenção Básica e Saúde da Família, joining debates on healthy and communication, setting up a Edit-a-thon and giving grants for community members to attend the conference. After this debates we developed the GLWiki tool, that will allow the engaged groups to links theirs users (more than 30k) to Wikipedia, inviting then to improve contents in the encyclopedia.

The QR Code partnerships haven't showed up any results yep. We managed to talk to UNIRIO's Tourism School and they are willing to implement a project with some Rio de Janeiro State municipalities not only to generate QR Code signs but also to improve Wikivoyage.

Also, our team has been working hands on to upload some rare materials to Commons and Wikisource. More specifically, we been working with a Italian culture center in São Paulo and we've already scanned some rare and expensive books about the origins of the city of São Paulo that are on public domain.

Activity 2: Engage at least 30 professors in Wikimedia projects class assignments activities

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Looking forward to engage more professors we have localized and installed in ptwiki the WEP Extension. Now we are working on the development of a tool that will generate automatically tracking data on the courses that uses the extension, in a related way to this research that compared two different successful classes that used distinct methodologies.

Eight professors participated in the Education program with class assignments in late 2013 and 2014, being one of them running two courses. As the use of the extension didn't become standard from the beginning, their activities have been tracked and organized in two pages: our previous education program page and in the new extension page.

Although we haven't engaged 30 professor in class assignments, other activities were carried out, such as Bandtec creating a project for development of tools related to Wikipedia, lecture and training for over 40 professors in Piraí Digital and in the Education, human rights and technologies course at Ação Educativa. As a result of the course, professors have proposed activities in the Wikimedia projects aiming at secondary students, to be carried out during the second semester.

Capacity Building

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Activity 1: Course 'Education, technology and human rights'

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The ad-hoc team to implement the course, that was initially planned by the permanent staff, was hired in March, 2014, the classes started in April and it ended in June.

Team running the course was composed b Bianca Santana, Alexandre Abdo, Celio Costa and Gustavo Paiva. Both Oona Castro and Denise Carreira overlooked it. There was also an advisory committee which was formed by Jaqueline Lima Santos, Salomão Ximenes, Juliane Cintra e Gabriel Maia Salgado, all of them professionals from Ação Educativa who have been involved in previous human rights courses of the organization. The course documentation is available at this page, with videos, summaries and the presentations.

Targeted at professors, teachers, journalists, school coordinators, educational content producers and activists, the course covered a wide range of subjects related to technology, education and human rights. All activities were documented on Wikiversity.

The topics of the course go from the relations between education and technology to Wikipedia itself as a teaching, learning and collaboration tool, as well as open educational resources, distance learning, the history digital technologies and governance of internet. Attendees have gone trough an editathon of Wikipedia articles about the subjects discussed during the course and each of them have also built a project to work on Wikimedia projects in their professional lives.

 
Lawyer Rizzi speaks about Education rights (by Bianca Santana)

More than 130 people subscribed for the course and 70 were selected and called to enroll. About 50 people have attended at least one of the sessions. However, no session had more than 40 people attending and got the end of the course with 23 people got the right to get the certification, which riquired 80% attendance. we’re going through analysis on what may have been causing evasion. Classes happen on Saturdays and we have received feedback of mothers who faced problems in finding people to watch their children, as well as of people that were informed they would need to work on Saturdays. So far, no one has declared having evaded as a consequence of frustration regarding the course, but we’re still looking into that.

The course has been well assessed by participants and those participating are excited about getting to know more about free knowledge as well as tools and projects they can make use of. The two main concerns raised by team or community members during this course planning and development were on the evasion as well as on the direct benefits for Wikimedia projects. The staff of the course evaluates that the main benefits are the projects bilt by the attendees, since they indicate possible uses of the Wikimedia projects in a more significant way for the educational area, for example, since they were built in the perspective of the theachers themselves. Therefore, it would be an important second step to keep in touch with the attendees and try to engage Wikimedia voluntiers, besides the staff itself, in making those projects come true to try to evaluate its eficcency.

On the one hand, activities like this would be important to expand the targeted audience to know about Wikimedia projects and other related online resources which can be used in educational processes, to engage people that wouldn’t ‘naturally’ make use of such tools, or at know them well. However, it’s an investment on a long term journey and aims at qualifying the debate among key actors about the impact of technology on education system through a broader perspective. On the other hand, it’s also argued it requires a lot of efforts and does not result in huge direct impact on Wikimedia projects. Although that was not its primary objective since the beginning, only after the project had been approved and started, concerns on this matter were raised. There isn’t yet consensus within the team of how important activities like this would be in a future project. Our team will publish a study on the content generated by the students of this course to help further evaluations on this matter.

Activity 2: Developing methodology/guide for the collaborative organization and documentation of educational experiences with Wiki tools

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Wikimedia projects already count on several wiki pages, as well as mailing lists, to share learnings and document experiences regarding the use of educational experiences with Wiki tools, we have brochures on cases carried out around the world, there are in person meetings throughout the year (sessions in Wikimania, sharing of learnings in meetings like Iberoconf and the Wikimedia Education Conference) and other evaluation tools (such as Wiki Metrics). Though we still believe methodologies can improve (specially for local contexts), we decided to prioritize other program activities with direct impact on Wikimedia projects and reallocate the budget which was going to be used to develop new methodologies to the Wiki Loves Earth - Brazil contest, which was initially proposed to be a supporting activity through human resources and microgrants (or other WMF grants to the Brazilian user group/Brazilian Wikimedians). We can still contribute to the improvement of such methodologies only based on the current available human resources through analysis of how well those learnings have been shared.

Activity 3: To create and distribute print material in order to help professors lead activities in the classrooms.

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Basic Principles guide localized into Portuguese

We have been working on a comprehensive material in a magazine style (about 50 pages, on coated paper) to guide anyone interested in contributing to Wikimedia projects, either as an editor, a professor, an ambassador, a photographer, a developer, a data analyst and so on. A new deadline (July, 15) was required by the designer in order to have the final version. It will be handed to key interested people, and it'll also be available under CC-BY-SA to be modified, improved, printed in parts or as a whole. Meanwhile, improvements and localization of material produced by WMF were made, such as the "basic principles" guide. It took us more time to develop it than it had been planned, but we've been working with a very senior designer to make it attractive, easily understandable, and nice to read.

Activity 4: To deploy online training sessions for professors and students engaged in the education program.

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This hasn't been accomplished as we planned. We made it on demand, according to requests done by professors and partner organizations that we couldn't handle in person. Less than five sessions were deployed. This has been somehow controversial within the team on how useful activities like that would be useful and in which extent it would sound amateur. On the one hand, the experience would be helpful even to understand whether it works or not. On the other hand, constrained by limited time available, staff members decided instead to focus on video production and other strategies such as in person workshops and online documentation of "help guides" on br.wikimedia.org (still to be finished) and on the Portuguese Wikipedia.

Activity 5: To create online material and localize tools in order to facilitate professors in leading activities in the classrooms.

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As stated above, documentation of "help guides" on br.wikimedia.org (still to be finished) and on the Portuguese Wikipedia was made to help professors through the task of implementing the education program. Also, the online training was improved and the WEP Extension was localized and installed on portuguese Wikipedia.

Activity 6: To create tutorial to be embedded in existing educational and digital inclusion platforms, distributed and operated by governmental agencies and other organizations.

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For this effort we will use the material that has being explained on activity 3 as soon as it is ready.

Activity 7: Create online sessions for volunteers interested in engaging in the Education Program as ambassadors.

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This is an activity we added as part of the community review process of this proposal, from inputs added by a volunteer from the international community and in which we're still failing to execute. We have to reframe strategy to try to engage more ambassadors, but, so far, message we have been getting in consultations is that most volunteers are already overwhelmed with their current tasks and workload.

We've had positive return of pt:Instituto Federal Fluminense studants that joined some online sessions and became campus ambassadors on pt:Bom Jesus de Itabapoana.

Support communities building

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Activity 1: To build, maintain, stimulate and energize a network of professors from the Brazilian education program and help them become self-sustainable and managed.

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We've created a mailing list and encouraged professors to exchange information, experiences and to organize meetings in which they would be able to strengthen a network, offering support (financial and organizational) to get this in place, but we thought that should be led by experienced professors who have already been doing activities on Wiki, in order to reduce level of dependence on the program. We've also put professors from the same universities in touch (there were professors from the same universities working independently and not in touch). However, the first semester of 2014 has been extremely complex for universities. The school calendar was compressed by the World Cup, making the core school period happen between March and early June. Even though, three universities have more than one professor working and starting to build internal groups: the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), and Faculdade de Comunicação Social Cásper Líbero. There is potential for development of a national network of professors involving those universities, but also challenges considering their courses are mainly in different areas (UFRGS: Maths, Physics and IT; UNIRIO: History and Tourism; Cásper Líbero: Communications/Journalism). We've also seen the interest of new professors to join this efforts in the following universities: Unifesspa, UERJ, UFRRJ (campus Nova Iguaçu), IFF, UNB, USP and UFRGS.

Activity 2: To support the organization of regional and local community meetings throughout Brazil.

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Activity 3: To help the community build a network or developers, researchers and data analysts.

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We have acted in many different fronts to engage developers, researchers and data analysts.

  • We gave speeches in some conferences, such as FISL, Rio Info, Mostra de Saúde and inside computing courses about technical development with Wikipedia.
  • We organized different hackathons: FISL 15 for developers, Anti-Vandalism for community members, L2 for researches and Garoa's WikiDay for the hackerspace members.
  • We translated some tutorials about mediawiki and tech development in wikimedia.
  • We gave support to community members that wanted to development it's own works.
  • We reviewed Brazilian researches papers for the Research:Newsletter.
  • We helped researches that were studding Wikipedia to go on with their efforts in the following institutions: FGV-Rio, IBICT, UFRJ, UNIRIO.
  • We looked for external partners to integrate software with the wikimedia projects, such as Brasil.io, Portal do Software Público, Brazilian Government Open Data initiative.
  • We tried to bring free culture tech players, such as hacker clubs/free software communities/open data groups , more close to the community.
  • We engaged on the community initiative of creating "wikigames" for the portuguese Wikipedia

Activity 4: To support the community in organizing a photo contest

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Pantanal - MS / Foto de Eduardo Efrain da Silva

As our program started in the end of 2013 and will end on August, 2014, we had planned to support and encourage the community in organizing a photo contest different from Wiki Loves Monuments, either national or international, during this period in order to develop experience to participate in other Wikimedia photo contests. As Wikimedia Ukraine proposed the Wiki Loves Earth contest, we suggested the community engaged in it. The Wiki Loves Earth 2014 - Brazil started on May, 1st. Pictures are being uploaded to Commons campaign. Brazilian wikimedians also helped creating the pages of the contest as well as the tool to monitor the global contest development. So far, 95% of Brazilian participants are new in Commons. This is a good and a bad thing in our perspective: good because the contest has been able to outreach new users and make them know Commons; bad because it's a symptom of low level of engagement of our current community members - which is also made clear in the little of use images in Wikipedia articles so far. We're therefore developing a strategy to reach out to those new users and invite them to edit Wikipedia and to get to know how to collaborate with Wikimedia projects. Our team is developing a tool to track the retention of this new users.

There was also criticism over certain level of "centralization" in the decision making process of the contest. We have indeed decided to organize it despite some volunteers opinions that the contest should take place in 2015. Our decision was due to the fact that it had been planned in our project, which will end before the next year. Also, we believed the benefits of having Brazilians participating in the contest would overcome the cons of not having the contest totally led by community members and we could learn how to implement it, document and share the learnings so in the next year or semester we and the community could improve that. We still hope this does not overshadow volunteers protagonism and that we're able to share all learnings and achieve the primary goals of supporting a photo contest. This lack of community engagement with the contest can also be seen on the "Best contributions" award, that are lacking suggestions for winners and/or criterias. To help with this issue, we developed a ranking of contributions evaluation to support this award decision.

The top 10 photos of the contest will be published in the magazines "Fotografe Melhor" and "Revista Espírito Livre", and will also be part of an exhibition in "Paraty em Foco", one of the major photographic events in Brazil. The participation of this photos in Paraty will be sponsored by the program, and this cost has raised some concerns by volunteers, but we decided to move on and others volunteers are now working on writing projects to get external sponsorship for others exhibitions.

For the content goals side, we may already celebrate.

 
Photo by Del Lima

Activity 5: To create a micro grants program to support the community develop activities and become stronger in Brazil.

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A proposal to create the microgrants program was opened in the very end of October, 2013. A few questions and suggestions were posted and accepted. We created some rules and procedures for submitting microgrants requests. We also invited volunteers to join a committee, but no one volunteered for that. Currently volunteers support or not the request and the Brazil program coordination gives the final word on that, based on rules and supports. So far we have been very flexible on deadlines, but this has been an issue.

 
Wikipedians Vini_175 and Teles in the IV Mostra Nacional de Experiências em Atenção Básica e Saúde da Família

During 2014, 4 microgrants were requests, being three of them submitted through established templates and procedures. One exception was opened because the templates hadn't yet been created when it was requested and there was an urgency because the request was for a user group volunteer to attend Campus Party about the then recent approval of the Brazilian Wikimedians Usergroup. The program coordination authorized but raised the problems regarding short notice to buy the tickets and transparency issues, informing the request should have been then submitted on the activity page, rather than through email, so anyone could track it. But as we hadn't the model in place yet, it was decided to approve it.

Four out of four grant requests were approved. Three were granted, as one of the requests was withdrawn by the proponent, for personal reasons.

Total in the budget: R$ 27.000,00

The total granted in Brazilian reais was so far of R$ 2898,81 (approximately US$ 1400).

Still available: R$ 24.101,19

Experiments and data analyses

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Activity 1: To monitor the development of the actions led by the Brazil Catalyst program to allow overall community review of the reach of the catalyst program objectives.

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We have performed isolated researches on programs activities such as Edit-a-thon das minas or class assignments but wasn't able to create up today a centralized place for the program goals tracking. We have also asked for outreach activities attendees to answer a online survey to evaluate the events, and we plan to create a way to automatically upload this answers anonymized to the wikis. Also in this activity we plan to publish a stats generator complementary to the WEP Extension, that will provide live data for the program courses.

Activity 2: To support the community in building a strategy to retain active and new editors through an experiment properly monitored.

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We have helped the community to generate isolated data on newcomers and started studying the decline of users based on a research done on English Wikipedia.

The planning of the experiments didn't got much feedback from the community and up to today they weren't realized. We plan to run experiments with the use of GettingStarted and with messages sent with the bot.

Activity 3: To support the community in the localization of tools to prevent low quality edits and vandalism.

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We helped the efforts to improve the abuse filters and co-organized an AntiVandalism Hackathon, where many thing were improved and new ideas emerged. We plan to have the bot that started being developed in the hackathon running before the end of the program.

We are also working on the localization of Snuggle and STiki, and we plan to have at least one of then fully working on Portuguese Wikipedia by the end of the program.

Activity 4: To support the community analysis of their projects through regular data analyses on the development of the communities and websites content.

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We improved the Portuguese Wikipedia timeline, allowing the creation of dynamic data, the upload of new datasets and the addition of new events by just editing a wikipage. We plan to also add to the timeline data related to the vandalism researches already made.

We plan to have an automated way to generate geolocalized queries on the projects. By now we were only able to run some researches manually.

Many small development projects lead by volunteers had our support, such as:

  • Creating a list of globally popular articles that don't have interlinks to ptwiki
  • Tracking new users creation and their activities.
  • Tracking vandalism after the removal of the CAPTCHA emergencial mode.
  • Generating data about old user permitions.
  • Generating data about deleted pages.
  • Creating a ranking of Wikipedias without counting small articles.

During the project we haven't seen the tech community in ptwiki grow significantly, but it's members seems to be more active and more qualified to perform complex tasks. We believe that having experienced technical consultant interacting with then in regular basis has helped the improvement of this cenario.

Education and expert outreach

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  • The Education Program in Brazil has for now two years experimented core and alternative approaches and strategies. What we mean by core is to invite professors to develop class assignment activities on Wikipedia. We had already tried new strategies to engage/invite professors, as our first open call in 2012.
  • In December 2013, the Brazilian Education Program tried a new approach: we decided to follow just in part the model based on the open call we had done in 2012. In the former, we had a deadline for submissions and we would evaluate and select 15 which we were going to provide support to. In the latter, we decided we wouldn't 'select' initiatives, nor establish a deadline for submissions. We published a call for professors to engage in the program with links to “how-to”s, tutorials, materials, so they might be able to do it without our individual support, aiming at allowing the program to grow. The reason for this decision was that we concluded it's not sustainable to offer in person dedicated support to all classes and there's no room for growth if we pick this model. Also, only a few ambassadors in Brazil were stable and provided continued support. Therefore, we decided to improve the tutorials and support materials and inform professors they should rely on them and we offered online support. With that in mind, it wouldn't make sense to establish a deadline for engagement in the program (any professor may engage whenever) or a selection process.
  • Although we spread the word, the strategy didn't fully work. In majority, professors didn't come to us through the call. We'll create a form in order to guide the professors on the right questions (s)he should be answering in order to create a plan to work on Wikimedia projects. Our assumption is that not all professors would instantly and independently visualize all opportunities in developing work on Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects. We believe a form with questions may inspire professors and help them build projects.
  • Risk analysis: 2014 is a very complex year in Brazil in terms of calendar. If Brazil is already known for its various holidays, in 2014 we're having the World Cup going on in the country and Presidential, State and Federal Congress elections. Plus, Carnival happening later than usual (in the beggining of March). This made schools' and universities' calendar shrink and we are dealing with a very short class period in the first semester as well as a very agitated scenario on politics, with social movements on the streets, strikes and so on. Those latter don't necessarily impact schools calendars, but it does affect the country and cities as a whole in terms of what they're attention and energy are at. However, we still expect we can overcome some of those risks by suggesting shorter and more objective projects which don't necessarily depend on educational calendar, as one may see below.
  • We have had 5 professors from the program continuing their work, even if making changes to them. And we also have 4 new professors engaged in the program – 2 working on Wikiversity, 2 will probably work on Wikipedia. Among the other 5, one is leading extension activities, 3 are doing class assignments, 1 is developing a communications strategy project for Wikimedia projects.
 
Rio Branco's students and professor with our team
  • Our Education program team has also decided to experiment another new approach (not dependent on educational calendars): instead of only focusing on universities to create content in the projects, our staff members have been encouraging other institutions beyond the educational field (but also producers of educational content) to become partners of ours in many ways: technical schools imrpoving tools, government and public institutions to open their content and change the licences of their educational content production. More than 10 organizations and potential partners were contacted. Rodrigo Padula organized more than 20 meetings with those partners. However, it has been hard to leave meetings with an angreement in hand, or with very concret and practicle steps to be followed. Organizations show interest, want to do “something”, but are under very beaurocratic structures, depending on very complex processes, and many partnerships just don't happen. A learning for us is that, for every 10 organizations we speak to, about 2 really get committed to developing a project.
 
Principios basicos professores
  • Among the organizations one may find Bandtec, University of São Paulo, UFF (Federal University from Rio), UNIRIO (Federal University in Rio), UFPA (Federal University of Pará), IPEA (NEMESIS project), Embrapa (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation), UFMA, FATEC, Petrobras, Centro Paula Souza.
  • Production of material: since October, our outreach team has been producing a new comprehensive material on Wikimedia projects.
 
Access to knowledge, education and human rights meeting
  • We organized at Ação Educativa a first meet-up debating access to knowledge, education and human rights. The majority of participants were professors from different cities. They have demonstrated interest in better understanding Wikimedia projects and developing activities with them in their courses. We also created room for connections between community and educators, as well as brought together activists and professors who had already tried to develop activities on Wikipedia but faced great challenges and are now engaged again in trying new approaches.
 
Access to knowledge, education and human rights meeting


 
Wikimedia CPBR7 B
 
Wikimedia CPBR7 J

Other activities

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Correio da Wikipédia

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We have supported the development of the portuguese Wikipédia "Correio da Wikipédia" publication for some months. During this effort our team manage to write content for the publication, created a script for e-mail newsletter and granted a space for "Correio" in "Revista Espírito Livre", a well known magazine about Free Software and Free Culture in Brazil.

But some volunteers questioned if the presence of the catalyst team in the publication wasn't occupying others volunteers' space so our team decided to step back and stop collaborating with the publication. Unfortunately, some weeks latter the project halted.

Translate Extensions

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To help the Portuguese communities to be able to use newly developed software our team joined efforts on the translation of the following mediawiki extensions: mobile interface, nearby, Visual Editor, Getting Started, Guided Tours and Education Program.

Follow-up new functionalities implementation

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In order to help making transitions easier our team have fhelped the contact between SF teams and Portuguese wikis communities during software updates, such as: Visual Editor, removal of CAPTCHA emergency mode, Echo and Beta Features.

Translate global announcements

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Looking forward to generate more interest for the global movement in Brazilians volunteers we have translated to pt-br some global WMF texts.

Upcoming activities

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  • To create a guide on how to apply for WMF grants and funds, envisioning community activities in the future
  • To create a reference page on local grants opportunities for the community
  • To finalize and distribute videos and print materials developed throughout the year
  • To summarize ideas and proposals emerged during the consultation process and develop proposals for actions and projects
  • To re-start Correio da Wikipedia and other newsletters
  • To kick-off the partnership with Nova Escola

Administrative activities

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Administrative staff members from Ação Educativa working to support Wikimedia's project are the administrative assistant Camila Menezes, the human resources analyst, Márcia Lima, and the Finance and Administrative area coordinator, Marcos Silva. Contracts regarding not only the team but all third party services providers, contracts regarding the re-licensing of Ação Educativa's work, as well as monthly monitoring of the budget, payments to all contractors, grantees and staff, and every financial transaction and activity, reimbursement of expenses, hirings and financial reports for execution monitoring, are all works under that has been done for the project under their responsibility.

Communications

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Fundraising

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Brazilian office of Ford Foundation showed interest in supporting Ação Educativa's work along with Wikimedia projects in order to enhance diversity (related to content and to participation regarding gender, race and social classes). It was written to the wmbr community list about it and WMF advised us to wait to look for new funds. A volunteer suggested we taught the community how to and it'll be done, to leave it as a legacy for the community, though we understand it's not for lacking in knowledge on how to raise funds that the community does not do it. All available grants in the WMF as well as our microgrants program makes it clear it's not about existence of funds and creating shortcuts for it, but more about developing or not projects that require funds. Anyway, our guide is also intended to bring it up: when and for what is a grant helpful?

Meet-ups

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Community meet-ups are usually meetings proposed by the community which we attended and supported, except for those cases in which we proposed to attach a community meeting to an activity.

  • WikiRio 10: scheduled by volunteers, ended up being a staff meeting with Achal Prabhala, a member of the Wikimedia advisory board, and Ana Toni, a member of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees
  • WikiSampa 26, 27 de abril de 2014, às 10:30 da manhã, no Conjunto Nacional.
  • WikiSampa 25, 8 de fevereiro de 2014, na Ação Educativa, evento "Acesso a conhecimento, educação e direitos humanos"
  • WikiSampa 24, 31 de janeiro de 2014 às 20h e 1 de fevereiro de 2014 às 10h
  • WikiSampa 23, 18 de janeiro de 2014, às 14h, como parte do WikiDay
  • WikiSampa 22, 07 de dezembro de 2013, às 10:30 da manhã, no Conjunto Nacional.
  • WikiSampa 21, 17 de novembro de 2013, às 10:30 da manhã, no Conjunto Nacional.
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