Grants:Project/Rapid/IMD/SWT South Asia 2021

Briefly explain what are you trying to accomplish with this project, or what do you expect will change as a result of this grant. Example goals include, "recruit new editors", "add high quality content", or "train existing editors on a specific skill".

As part of the Small wiki toolkits initiative, in the second half of 2020, Indic-TechCom, in collaboration with WMF's Developer Advocacy team, designed and conducted a technical workshop series: "Small wiki toolkits - Indic workshop series 2020". Here is a detailed report on meta-wiki: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/SWT_Indic_Workshop_Series_2020/Report
Community members found these workshops quite useful and helpful in developing their technical skills and their wiki communities' growth. So, we are now planning to continue to run these workshops (one per month) and expand them to the Wikimedia communities in the South Asian region. The objective is to impart basic to intermediate level technical skills for volunteers working on Wikimedia projects of languages in the South Asian region.

Project Plan

Activities

Tell us how you'll carry out your project. What will you and other organizers spend your time doing?

Each month, a workshop will be conducted for 2-3 hours, accommodating up to fifteen participants. Topics for these workshops will be focused on technical spaces of Wikimedia and are chosen by the organising team from time to time, based on research, emerging interests/needs, and availability of trainers. Community members can also suggest topics from the workshops page. Occasionally, brainstorming sessions and discussions may be conducted instead of a workshop, to understand community needs.
For 2021, we will be doing these sessions in two batches. First batch is from January 2021 to May 2021, and the second batch will be from July 2021 to November 2021 - a total of at least ten sessions. The months of June 2021 and December 2021 are reserved for evaluation, reporting and planning for subsequent batches.
Each workshop will be recorded, after consent from participants, and will be edited for later use, and the recording will be published on Wikimedia Commons. As these are small technical topics, they can easily be viewed by others to learn from them.
Participants will also be encouraged to share their learning with their language communities, in their own languages, in smaller sessions. In addition to these workshops, we may also facilitate workshops on specific topics, based on a community’s request i.e. a specific language community can post a request for a workshop on a certain technical topic and organization of the same will be supported by the team.

How will you let others in your community know about your project (please provide links to where relevant communities have been notified of your proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions)? Why are you targeting a specific audience?

Community members will be informed through the following channels:

MassMessage of Indic Wikimedia projects’ village pumps
Mailing lists
Social media
Emails to people who have signed up to receive updates

What will you have done at the end of your project? How will you follow-up with people that are involved with your project?

By the end of the project, we would have improved the skills of Wikimedians from the South Asian region to deal with basic technical issues on their wiki. Even if the project doesn’t result in strong technical contributors, which is not an objective as well, it would create awareness and basic technical understanding for community members, which can be further leveraged upon in later stages. We will encourage participants to work on follow-up tasks and report them back to us.
The follow-up for the project will explore more localised events, physically, hopefully if the situation improves by the end of 2021, and also explore other opportunities for this initiative to take up just apart from workshops, such as 1:1 mentoring etc. However, further planning will be done after evaluation of this project.

Are you running any in-person events or activities? If so, you will need to complete the steps outlined on the Risk Assessment protocol related to COVID-19. When you have completed these steps, please provide a link to your completed copy of the risk assessment tool below:

n/a

Impact

How will you know if the project is successful and you've met your goals? Please include the following targets and feel free to add more specific to your project:

Number of total participants: 75
Number of sessions: 10
Number of topic videos on technical topics uploaded to Wikimedia Commons: 8

Resources

What resources do you have? Include information on who is the organizing the project, what they will do, and if you will receive support from anywhere else (in-kind donations or additional funding).

Organizers:

Additional support and advisory:

What resources do you need? For your funding request, list bullet points for each expense:

! S.No	Description	Amount (INR)	Notes
1	Google Workspace (Business Standard) + domain	₹10,000	We will primarily be using it to record sessions. During the previous iteration, we were able to record sessions using Google Meet links provided by some WMF staff, however, this isn't sustainable, and is becoming quite hectic to coordinate.
2	Freelancers to edit the recording	₹40,000	The topics for these sessions are small enough to have explanatory videos, however, session recordings if uploaded directly, wouldn't be much useful for later use - so it needs to be edited and improved. During the previous iteration, volunteers involved tried doing this, but it is consuming a lot of time as none of us are skilled enough in editing videos, and also, we don't have sufficient hardware to render good quality videos. For these reasons, we would like to outsource this part to freelance editors from time to time.
3	Temporary internet data packs for participants	₹15,000	We will provide temporary internet data packs if participants request and demonstrate the need for the same.
4	Unforeseen expenses	₹6,500
5	Bank charges	₹500
Total		₹72,000	$983.75 as of 10:48, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

Endorsements

Strong support We already done a awesome work. A big yes from my side. Jayprakash >>> Talk 12:16, 7 January 2021 (UTC)
Strong support SSethi (WMF) (talk) 11:47, 12 January 2021 (UTC)