Grants:Project/Rapid/Wikimedia Tanzania/East Africa Regional and Thematic Hub (EARTH) Research grant

statusfunded

East African Regional and Thematic Hub (EARTH) Research Grant

The East Africa Regional and Thematic Hub (EARTH) proposal is focusing on doing extensive research on identifying the existing problems facing East African communities and finding out more whether having an EARTH Hub is something of interest to these communities as well as finding out how this hub will be a solution to the existing EA communities’ problems. This is being done as one of the efforts of strengthening collaboration between the community members, finding new ideas and potential areas to work on together, and developing plans to implement initiative 25, cluster D of the movement strategy. The proposal will combine research and planning activities that will be done in three phases over a period of nine months. It is a combination of both regional and thematic/linguistic due to the fact that there’s a language community that is spread across more than 15 different countries in the (SADC) region as well as in the East Africa Region. We hope to find the best ways of working together with these two focus hub ideas through a collaborative approach of design thinking on how this hub can operate in the region.

Background: Research about EARTH has already been carried out over the last two years (2020, and 2021) but we are including more research activities to discover commitments of previous and new community members in the region. The community members are keen and have already made commitments in line with the Movement Strategy implementation. We would like to find out ways of how these commitments and other new ideas can be implemented through the EARTH. Following this research, a plan and conversations with several well-established, and emerging communities will be carried out to help create a draft implementation plan, for future engagements, whether through a regional, thematic hub or not, and to seek the necessary agreement and support for the project at Wikimedia events.

English Wikipedia Swahili Wikipedia Wikimedia Commons

Wikidata

targetplease add a target wiki

start date17th June

start year2022

end date17th Feb

end year2023

budget (local currency)~~57,357,105~~ 66,219,682 TZS

budget (USD)USD ~~24,802~~ 28,402

grant typegroup

grantee• Jadnapac

contact(s)• antonicmtavangu

gmail.com• Douglaseru• Ms Kabintie

organization (if applicable)• Wikimedia Community User Group Tanzania

website (if applicable)• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_User_Group_Tanzania

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Applications are not required to be in English. Please complete the application in your preferred language.

Project Goal

What will be the outputs of your project and how will those outputs contribute to advancing a specific Movement Strategy Initiative

What specific Movement Strategy Initiative does your project focus on and why? Please select one of the initiatives described here: 25. Regional & Thematic Hubs: Hubs have been prioritized as one of the Movement Strategy initiatives for implementation in November 2021. Hubs, however, are still not well-defined both generally as a whole thing within the Movement and on a local communities and regional contexts basis. Our region, with a few WMF-recognized affiliates, and many emerging communities that lack necessary support needs more coordination and collaboration with the existing matured communities. It’s important for us to define the scope and role of a hub in our region. Throughout the past two years, we have conducted preliminary research to define how hubs should function within our region and the purpose that they would serve. Now that the scope and role of the hub in our region are fairly defined and shared within the Wikimedia community, we are looking to start the extensive, larger, deeper, and more inclusive conversations with them to plan the hub project.

Project Background

When do you intend to begin this project and when will it be completed?

Start date: 15th June 2022 End date: 15th Feb 2023

Where will your project activities be happening?: The East Africa region is our main focus. Closely related and language (Swahili) connected communities will also be considered in the research, and planning to identify whether they are interested in participating. Also due to past collaboration history, we have with other communities coming from nearby countries to EA region, we are planning to include and involve them in this project
Are you collaborating with other communities or affiliates on this project? Please provide details of how partners intend to work together to achieve the project goal.: The core collaboration is between two affiliates (Wikimedia Community User Group Tanzania and Wikimedia Community User Group Uganda), and one community in the East Africa region (Planning Wikimedia Community User Group Kenya), who will continue with the previous collaboration with other affiliates and communities in the region. The target communities of this project will include other 15 language communities, 3 regional countries (Rwanda, South Sudan, and Burundi), and 2 nearby countries.
What specific challenge will your project be aiming to solve? And what opportunities do you plan to take advantage of to solve the problem?: The challenges that this project aims to address:

Coordination: When participating in processes across the Wikimedia Movement, our region faces issues with making coordinated or representative decisions. We have been facing challenges that prevent all of our affiliates from joining Wikimedia conversations, although we have made strides in improving this under-representation for example with the joint Wikimania Scholarship, and WikiIndaba sessions, more needs to be done for stronger coordination and inclusivity. Agreement and action: While we have carried out previous research without any grant, there is a mixed feeling of agreement, and resentment among communities in the region, we would like to concretize and have sufficient agreement and support from the communities for the tangible steps in creating the EARTH. Growth: The emerging affiliates and communities in our region lack the capacity to support future growth. Since 2019, for example, we have seen a slight increase in engagement from the majority of emerging communities in the region, but others are either idle or declining in their activities. Lack of systematic way of Knowledge sharing: While some of the affiliates within our region are more capable than the others in different angles, there seem to be no good systemic ways of knowledge transfer and skills sharing.

The opportunities that this project aspires to seize: Movement Strategy: The ongoing Movement Strategy process provides an opportunity for change. We see this as a chance to start connecting our region and look for solutions to improve our work in new ways. Informed process: Now that we have conducted activities over the last two years, we know the steps and needs to be addressed and we also know the expected disagreements and difficulties. This will help us to engage in informed conversations with the community. Growth of Swahili Language: the Swahili language is one of the potential connectors amongst Wiki Communities. Despite that Swahili has been recognized as one of the official working languages by SADC, AU, and by having World Swahili Language Day as announced recently by UNESCO, there are few efforts of utilizing this within the EA region and beyond. We need to utilize this chance by running projects that will add more content on Swahili Wikipedia. We are planning to expand a Wikimedia Tanzania-led #WikiForUniversities Project (#Wiki4Uni) is one of those projects and we have already launched it in Pwani Univeristy- Kenya on March 2022.

Does this project aim to apply one of the examples shared in the call for grants and if so which one?: Hubs planning and Hubs research:

The research activities will involve interviews with community members, both virtual and in-person, Questionnaires. The research will key among other things help identify the gaps the EA communities aspire the hub to fill and will inform the thematic areas to cover in EARTH.

Project Management Team: Constitute a team (paid roles) to oversee the effective handling of the project in all phases involved.

The team will also be responsible for submitting the region’s views in hub discussions with other community members.

Project Scope

Regional Focus

The Project will focus on determining the needs for a hub in 11 Wiki communities across 11 countries namely (Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Zambia and Botswana);then plan on how these needs and ideas can be designed into an achievable action plan.

The first phase of the project will focus on Research and Planning Activities that are aimed at intensifying community outreach to gather input around what a regional hub means for the target communities, the problems they hope the hub to solve and also possibly identify thematic areas of mutual interest.

Thematic Focus

While we plan to have various thematic areas of focus based on communities' feedback, we have identified Swahili as a unifying language that binds together the East African wiki communities. This is because Swahili is the main language spoken by most of the people within the EA and SADC region, as a result it has been adopted by SADC, AU as one of the working languages. Swahili has also gained international attention to the extend of having a International Swahili day on each 7th July of the Year starting with 2022.

Room for other language communities

This project will be as inclusive as possible to spotlight other African language communities existing within the region (such as Kinyarwanda, Luganda, French) among others. Our approach will be identifying the community's representatives coming from other language communities other than the Swahili to come onboard and help to share the research processes/activities with their respective members.

Project Phases

The project plan will be broken down into Research, Planning and Reporting phases that will be stretched within 9 months.

Guiding questions:

The research will key among other areas aim to address the following (additional research questions and rationale will be developed by the Project team together with the research consultant to be hired)

Questions

What are the current and future needs the EA wiki communties are facing?
What a regional hub means for the target communities?
How will the hub help to solve their needs?
What are the problems they hope the hub to solve?
What are thematic areas of mutual interest for Wiki communities across the EA region?
Apart from Swahili community, what are other language communities that can be involved in this project?
Apart from the 11 Wiki communities, Who else should be included in this process?

Project Activities

What specific activities will be carried out during this project? Please describe the specific activities that will be carried out during this project.

Community consultation to define needs, and Map out hub-like structures: We will carry out online community engagement sessions in the 11 target communities which will be aimed at raising more awareness about movement strategy, and bringing the community up to speed on the state of implementation. The community engagement will also seek to find out the specific needs that the communities hope the hub to meet. After the research activities, we will have a second round of community engagement to share the findings of the research. The feedback received will help inform the planning phase of the EARTH.
Hub Tours : We will conduct tours of selected local hubs within Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Rwanda to learn more about their operations and areas of focus. We plan to appoint representatives in each country to conduct local tours.
Language and thematic consultation. We have already identified Swahili as a common language in the region. Additionally, since the EARTH is both regional and thematic, this step will help get feedback from the communities on the thematic areas they would wish the EARTH to cover.
Evaluation of feedback and reporting. The final findings of the research activities will be analysed and compared to the initial findings to determine the impact and next steps. A report will be shared with the participating communities, and published on meta.

How do you intend to keep communities updated on the progress and outcomes of the project? Please add the names or usernames of these individuals responsible for updating the community: The communities will be updated through our newsletter emails, social media pages as well as we will be in touch with the communities’ representatives who will be responsible for delivering the updates to their community members.
Who will be responsible for delivering on this project and what are their roles and responsibilities?: Basically, all the three steering team members will be responsible for creating updates to the communities, and we are planning that the other 3 facilitators will join the steering team where by one of them will be responsible to work closely with the core team in delivering the updates to the other community members.

Additional information

If your activities include community discussions, what is your plan for ensuring that the conversations are productive? Provide a link to a Friendly Space Policy or UCoC that will be implemented to support these discussions.: While sending the general information to the communities’ representatives about the research about the EARTH project process, we will ask them to abide by the WMF Friendly space policies as well as adhere to the Universal Code of Conduct. The same will be done for our regional meetups.
If your activities include in-person events or activities, you will need to complete the steps outlined in the Risk Assessment protocol. Please provide a link to your completed copy of the risk assessment tool.: Generally, most of the activities under this phase will be done online under a few exceptions that the steering team members will do the local tours to visit the hubs.
If your activities include the use of paid online tools, please describe what tools these are and how you intend to use them.: We are primarily planning to use Zoom as a paid tool for most of our activities due to its conducive features of break out and recording of the sessions.
Do your activities include the translation of materials, and if so, in what languages will the translation be done? Please include details of those responsible for making the translations.: Yes, some materials will need translation (eg. questionnaires and project pages). The translation will be mainly done in Swahili and French.
Are there any other details you would like to share? Consider providing rationale, research or community discussion outputs, and any other similar information, that will give more context on your proposed project.: We had a recent EARTH regional meetup (12th March 2022) where we updated the community representatives and the attended members on the progress of this EARTH research process. We are energized by their positive inputs about this project and hence we anticipate good results.

Outcomes

After your activities are complete, we would like to understand the draft implementation plan for your community. You will be required to prepare a document detailing this plan around a movement strategy initiative. This report can be prepared through Meta-wiki using the Share your results button on this page. The report can be prepared in your language, and is not required to be written in English.

In this report, you will be asked to:

Provide a link to the draft implementation plan document or Wikimedia page
Describe what activities supported the development of the plan
Describe how and where you have communicated your plan to relevant communities.
Report on how your funding was spent

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

Please confirm below that you will be able to prepare a draft implementation plan document by the end of your grant:

I confirm that we will prepare a draft implementation plan document by the end of your grant

Optionally, you are welcome to include other information you'd like to share around participation and representation in your activities. Please include any additional outcomes you would like to report on below:

Our project plan will be broken down into various phases as outline below:

Project Duration - 9 months:

The project is expected to happen within 9 Months from April to October

Research - 3 months (Community Engagement through meetups and Questionnaires will be done, we plan to conduct at least one meetup per community/week).

Make contact with the communities (identify community needs around hubs, technology, community, and content hubs)

Translation of results

Develop questionnaires to be used in the research

Field visits

Planning - 5 months

Engage communities/share results (involve the communities online to share results from the research process and make sure every potential community that was involved in the process feels their ideas are well represented, and make this room useful for any other ideas that can come up )

Meet-ups (We are planning to have 4 meetups )

Final Reporting - 1 months

Gaps and needs

Evaluation

Recommendations

Next Phase:

Plan the pilot phase

Mode Of Operation

Duration:
The project will run for 9 months (June 2022-February 2022) and will target a total of 11 communities. The community outreach will be done through virtual meetups and questionnaires. The meetups will be both decentralized and collective.

Representatives: We plan to recruit representatives from each community to help with mobilizing members during the meet ups as well as other volunteers to help with any other needed tasks. The representatives will also be crucial in providing insights and valuable information about their communities.

Questionnaires: We plan to develop questionnaires to guide the research

Hub Tours: We will conduct tours of selected local hubs within Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Rwanda to learn more about their operations and areas of focus.

Language Support: We plan to include French and Swahili translations in our activities

Project Management The steering Team will oversee the overall management of the project and recruit active and interested community members who would like to support the project

The Core Team:

Douglas Ssebagala
Winnie Kabintie
Antoni Mtavangu
Research Consultant- (to be contracted)

Community Facilitators

We plan to include 3 facilitators from the community members to join the core team (2 slots will be reserved for Affiliates not represented ion the core team and 1 slot will be for other organized groups within the 11 countries).
Additionally, during the community engagement we will identify two community representatives (volunteer roles) from each of the 11 communities, who will act as community liaisons between the project team and their respective communities.

Roles and Responsibilities

s/no	Name	Role	Responsibilities
1.	Douglas Ssebaggala	Project Lead	Overseeing the general project and ensuring that objectives are met. Providing oversight and guidance for project activities. Analyse research findings to ensure that they meet project objectives. Compiling the final project report.
2.	Winnie Kabintie	Project Coordinator	Communicate the project activities at events or conferences. Reaching out to volunteers to ensure community engagement and involvement in the project. Evaluating Project progress.
3.	Antoni Mtavangu	Project Assistant	Analyse data gathered and documentation of project activities. Ensure effective representation for the communities in all the 11 countries. Evaluating Project progress. Language support - Swahili.
4.	To be contracted	Research Consultant	Ensure quality research is carried out to lay a foundation for the project. Collaborate with the project team to design, share and discuss the best research methodologies and tools. Carrying out research in the 11 target communities in collaboration with the project team. Compiling final research findings, and aligning them to project objectives.
5.	Wikimedia Community User Group Rwanda	Project Facilitator 1	Coordination of events. Make sure agendas are made and understood. Briefing community members during meetings. Ensuring meeting objectives are met.
6.	Wikimedia Community User Group Congo	Project Facilitator 2	Coordination of events. Make sure agendas are made and understood. Briefing community members during meetings. Ensuring meeting objectives are met. Language support - French.
7.	To be determined	Project Facilitator 3	Coordination of events. Make sure agendas are made and understood. Briefing community members during meetings. Ensuring meeting objectives are met.
8.	To be determined	Community Liaisons	Take part in virtual, physical research, and project planning activities. Provide a linkage between the respective communities and the project team.

Budget

Below is the budget to the fund needed to run this project. The money will be used/spend to run activties under this project.

Budget:

ITEM	NO OF ITEMS	UNIT PRICE	SUBTOTAL (USD)	COMMENT
Data Services	11 countries	20	220	Mobile data support for virtual events
Communication and social media events promos	-	volunteers work	Volunteers work	Developing communication materials for the project e-Posters, Wikimedia channels (Facebook, Twitter, e.t.c)
Documentation	14 events	100	1,400	3 General Meetings and individual community meetups (Rapporteuring)
Facilitation	6	200 Per month	4500	Coordination of events, Make sure agendas are made and understood, briefing, ensuring meeting objectives are met. Language support- Swahili and French
Project Management Costs	9 months	1500	13,500	Compiling final report, Overseeing the general project, community engagement, Evaluating Project progress, providing oversight. Compiling final research findings. At a rate of 25 USD per hour to be distributed amongst the project management team (Maximum of 500 USD per month per person - for 3 people)
Fieldwork (Local Hub Tours)	4 communities	400	1600	Transport, meals, Accommodation, Airtime
Translation costs	Swahili and French	2@500	1000
Administrative Costs		1500	1500	rates, transaction fees, accounting, online meeting for team, stationeries,
Childcare		100@14 events plus 200@3 team member	2000	Covering all events
Miscellaneous			2,082	(for any unforeseen needs)
External Research Consultant	1	25usd/hr, 4hrs/week (400/month) for 9 months	3600
TOTAL			28,402

TOTAL AMOUNT REQUESTED USD: 28,402

Completing your application

Once you have completed the application, please do the following:

Change the application status from status=draft to status=proposed in the {{Probox}} template.
Contact strategy2030 wikimedia.org to confirm your submission, as well as to request any support around your application.

Endorsements

An endorsement from community members (especially from outside your community) will be part of the considerations when reviewing your application. Community members are encouraged to endorse your project request here!