Grants:Project/MSIG/Indic Oral Culture Project/Report

Movement Strategy Implementation Grant Report
Report Accepted

Please review the notes below before submitting your report.

Your draft implementation plan document should address the following questions clearly:

What movement strategy initiative or goal are you addressing?
What activities will you be doing to address that initiative?
What do you expect will happen as a result of your activities? How do those outcomes address the movement strategy initiative?
How will you measure or evaluate your activities? What tools or methods will you use to evaluate your activities?

To create a draft implementation plan, we recommend the use of a logic model, which will help you and your team think about goals, activities, outcomes, and other factors in an organized way. Please refer the following resources to develop a logic model:

Overview of logic models on Meta-wiki
Example logic models for reference for other movement activities (such as partnerships and edit-a-thons)
Blank logic model template on Google Drive

Outcomes

Please respond to the following questions below:

Where have you published your draft plan? Share the link to it here:

We do not have a draft plan as of now.

What Movement Strategy initiative is this draft plan supporting?

Global Approach for Local Skill Development: participants from various Indic languages were trained to record oral culture, to upload them, to transcribe them, and to reuse them on various Wikimedia projects.
Movement Strategy/Initiatives/Content Initiatives in Underrepresented Communities: the project included participants from various underrepresented languages, which then received training to create oral culture content.

What activities have you completed to produce this draft plan?

We conducted a series of training sessions for the participants. During the first session, the participants were informed about the project, the agenda, and a video creation assignment. The second session was focused on creating good quality videos using available resources, etiquettes, and things to remember during field work. The two subsequent sessions focused on training the participants to prepare videos for upload, various methods of video upload, and creating transcripts for the videos. The three meetups with the participants spread across beginning of January to the second week of March helped understand their experiences and needs on field work, to clear doubts regarding video transcription, and to introduce the concept of reuse of created content on Wikimedia projects. Each meeting consisted of a Q&A session for the participants. Apart from that, a mandatory meetup was planned with each language team prior to them leaving for field work. Please find more details in the output section. An online event was also conducted on 21st February: the International Mother Language Day, with BHARATHESHA ALASANDEMAJALU was invited as the guest speaker. He informed the participants on the process of the creation of the Tulu living heritage documentary 'Purse Kattuna'. This session was planned in order to help participants who want to continue recording their oral culture in the form of documentaries.

In which community channels have you announced your draft plan?

We are going to share the project report instead of a draft plan. Please find details below:

We have published two Diff article to share the project’s progress and report with the community.
We will be sharing the project report at these places within a month of the completion of the project:

Telegram channels and India mailing list.


Target Outcome	Achieved Outcome	Explanation
Involve participants from 5 languages	9 language communities from 3 countries: Nepal, India, and Bangladesh were involved. Oral culture of overall 11 languages documented.	Ahirwati, Gojari, Tulu, Telugu, Tamil, Odia, Eastern Tharu, and Marathi documented by their speakers. Chak, Marma, and Garo languages by NDEC participants. The expenses budget for 5 participating languages was divided among 9 languages.
Improving the toolkit	Improved and additional resource created	Field work preparation tips
Recording oral culture	Folk songs and folk tales recorded	147 files created and uploaded, consisting of 142 videos, transcriptions of videos, and 5 audio recordings.
12 meetups	7 group meetings, 1 online event, and pre-field visit meetings with each language team	Link to meetup details here. Apart from the group meetings, we also carried several individual meetings with volunteer participants to resolve issues and to assist them. A joint chat group and 9 separate chat groups were created with each language team for regular updates.
In-person meetup	Not actualized	The event was scheduled for 17th and 18th February '24, and the participants would arrive on 16th February at the venue. However, due to ongoing farmer's protest, a nationwide shutdown (Bharat bandh) was announced on the 16th. As a safety measure, we postponed the event to March '24. As the protests didn’t abate by the 1st week of March, we decided to cancel the event.
15 participants	18 participants	Find participants details here. 3 language participants were retained from the Needs Assessment project workshops: Sangram Keshari Senapati, Priyanka yadav jhadodiya, Rafi, and Wasiul Bahar.
User group	User group was not formed	As the project was short-term and the amount of participant engagement done so far is not enough to apply for a user group.It needs to be formed organically. An in person meet-up of participants is important to foster connection which in turn would result in discussions around and possible formation of such a community.
Additional outcome	Edit-a-thons for project participants and for non-participant Wikimedians	Overall 5 participants joined. 44 articles created, 73 articles edited, 210 total edits, 5 editors, 22.73K words added, 71 references added, and 245.72k article views. We noted that we need more time to prepare for and to share about edit-a-thons.

Engagements and presentations

The project was presented at at South Asia Community Call on 17th December 2023: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/South_Asia_Open_Community_Call

Diff article: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2024/02/27/updates-from-the-indic-oral-culture-project/

Telegram Groups: TTT, General Chat - South Asia, Language Diversity

Updates and requirements shared on India mailing list and with Kashmiri Wikimedians

Finances

Grant funds spent

Total funds received: 665348 INR
Spent funds: 543286 INR

Please find the budget details in the spreadsheet.

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

Yes, 122062 INR

The remaining fund can be utilized in the proposed project: Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Enhancing Indic Oral Culture on Wikimedia projects

Remaining funds are retained by the grantee with WMF's permission until after the report review has been completed and report has been accepted, at which time the WMF program officer will also provide instructions regarding the grantee's reallocation or return of the unspent grant funds.

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?

Participants reported the issue of ‘MaybeEncodingError’ when using video2commons to upload files. Same issue reported by a participant on the Discussion page of video2commons.
Files larger than 500 mb cannot be converted to webm using free converters, so uploading larger files becomes complicated in such cases.
Internet shutdown resulted in issues with uploading files for the Gojari team in Jammu, India.

Gallery

Garo elderly man sings traditional song
Marma elderly man sings traditional song
Man sings traditional song in Telugu
Ahirwati folksong
Eastern tharu folksong
Gojari folksong
Marathi folksong
Odia folksong
Tamil folksong
Tulu folk tale
A girl singing Chak folksong
Screenshot from Introductory Meeting