Grants:Project/AfroCuration/Midpoint

This project is funded by a Project Grant

Report accepted

This midpoint report for a Project Grant approved in FY 2020-21 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/AfroCuration.
You may still review or add to the discussion about this report on its talk page.
You are welcome to email projectgrantswikimedia.org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learning from the first half of the grant period.

Summary

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

We have had an intense past few months, and been busy trying to set up the back end of all this project, and hold the first AfroCuration event in Mozambique. Whilst going ahead to try to secure all the cultural partners with MOUs, we have also been ensuring we are able to simplify the process of running the events, and dealing with new challenges of holding AfroCuration online. We are very much looking forward to the delivery of the remaining events during this upcoming event series, and sharing with the wider stakeholders and movement the rich content produced from all those involved.

The first event in Mozambique was a logistical challenge. We did not have the benefit of a local WMF affiliate to lean on, and therefore needed to rely on talented volunteers from the network of our WIR. Additionally, we were holding the event in one language (Portuguese) which our team does not speak, and the editing language would be different still (Emakhuawa/Macua). Therefore the importance and reliance on linguists was higher than anticipated. Lastly, it was a first instance of putting to test the participant recruitment and management system. It worked, but we have learnings we are carrying forward. We were fortunate to have a contribution from Constantino Warilla as our inspirational speaker. He is a Mozambican musical legend, and gave an uplifting and wise call to action for the youth.

A pleasant addition to our efforts of the SA event has been the Vodacom sponsorship of participant data in SA. This helps us overcome the cost-barrier that’s so often experienced by our target participants, which when in person we can alleviate. But not with an online event. Secondly, the actual sourcing of majority of the participants came from the Harambee youth accelerator network.

Methods and activities

How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.

AfroCuration Mozambique was held on the 4th and 5th of September. We received the following EXTERNAL SUPPORT for the event: Wikipedian support (expected vs actual): 10 Wikipedians were expected but we had 5 Wikipedians present. This was due to other engagements for the weekend. The 5 that were present also had network challenges. Translator support (expected vs actual). We expected to have 6 translators but had 4 due to budget, and presence of 2 event supporters (Marta and Portuguese Wikipedian) speaking Portuguese.

Midpoint outcomes

What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

Action Summary
Activities	Status	Output	Status
Hire a Wikipedian-in-Residence for a 12-month appointment (with intent to renew over a longer period). The request to the Wikimedia Foundation is to support the salary of the *Wikipedian-In-Residence for a 12 months term.	Done	500 articles across 10 African languages	196/500 [two of the 5 events has been completed so far. Mozambique Event, South Africa Event
Finalize the list of languages, and activate relevant cultural partners and seek collaboration of local Wikimedia chapters/user groups	90% complete [we are confident with languages list, and are finalising the MOU's with last cultural partner	1 new wikipedia language created	Done (Makhuwa incubator is now live)
Agree upon our implementation plan for each of the 5 AfroCuration events.	Done [we have a process that is continually being improved and refined]	500 participants	109/500 Mozambique Event, South Africa Event
Actively disseminate the knowledge produced to ensure awareness	In development (dedicated campaign and website is being developed for this)	30 movement organisers	4/30 identified (this is in MoZ, where there is no existing User Group)
		2/5 [Ethale Publishing (Moz) and Constution Hill (SA)	5 organisations trained

Finances

Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

The only change we envisage in the budget would be translator costs for the non-english speaking countries we work with.

Amount granted: $56,920
Amount spent: $18,405

Our expenses can be accessed in this this Sheet.

Learning

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges

What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

Overrun with IT management

It was too much to manage whilst focusing on delivering content. => outsource this element of event production

Connectivity

o Made us lose wikipedians o Meant participants were constantly dropping out/signing back in o => Holding Session in Plenary room (dissolving some breakout rooms) Participant interaction (peer to peer) was rather minimal Some helped each other, by responding to each other’s questions. But sometimes they’d take conversation offline and use THEIR own whatsapp group. => We need to design a moment in the sessions to do this (we had it but removed) => Help your neighbour

Live translation posed a serious challenge

Language barrier Connection issues Grasping participant questions/understanding quickly - Participant issues o Not all had LOGINS for Wikipedia o Participants losing passwords and needing to reset o Not all had started an article

What is working well

What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

Cultural Reflection session went well, strong engagement and Marta contribution was exceptional (very engaging)
Language session went well; it was thorough and anchored well on what we were trying to achieve on the day. Good context. Demonstrated OWNERSHIP of language
high level of participation and involvement (esp. considering event online and weekend) participants’ and staff’s motivation
good level of reflections on bigger picture and meaning of AfroCuration
good teamwork
excellent timing and dialogue
press release and communication
Exceeding the number of articles

This is a project first, in terms of post-event article creation Exceeding number of participants (sign ups and event participation) aimed Participants were super eager and passionately

Your learning pattern link goes here

[patterns from AfroCuration event]

Next steps and opportunities

What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points.

Ethale Publishing have begun to deploy a radio campaign in order to boost awareness and use of their new Emakhuwa wikipedia and its pages. This is very exciting and will be sure to catch local attention, hopefully driving interest in the project.

We ran the South Africa AfroCuraiton event last week (early November) in partnership with Constitution Hill, and in light of the outputs being lower than expected, we are supporting the local partner (Constitution Hill) to encourage editing among participants. This is being done through new incentives, and offering office hours with our WiR.

We are now underway with preparations for Then to Zimbabwe in December with the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, and Morocco in April with Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL). We are aligning on dates for the following South Africa event with the African Leadership Academy, which will likely happen in Feb-March.

Grantee reflection

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an grantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months? We enjoyed the impact the project has made in selected African countries and what stood out more was the Mozambique event where there is no existing Wikimedia Community. Getting them involved to be knowledge curators has been very rewarding.