Grants:Project/Rapid/Wikimedia Workshop Buea/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2016-17 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/Rapid/Wikimedia Workshop Buea.
• You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
• You are welcome to Email rapidgrants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Goals

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went?

Yes, we met more than our goals with a +5 participants and we are very happy on how the event went. We prepared the event for 40 participants but had 45 participants that attended. The event went well and most of the participants finally installed MediaWiki on the local machines and those who didn't get to the last point ended at the first step of the Wizard (to install MediaWiki) which they can finally do it on their own. The project started and ended on time and we did everything we planned to do.

In addition, @Georges Fodouop came with a few participants / Wikimedians from Douala which they spoke to us about Wiki Loves Women, Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Africa. We shared and discussed about opportunities, other projects of the movement and activities that will be taking place in Cameroon. We also spoke about our new user group to the participants and made them aware of the activities of the entire Wikimedia movement.

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
40 participants	45 participants	A week before the close of the event registration, a lot of interested persons were pinging about the event that they wanted to attend so we came up with a waiting list (which is different from the original registered participants list with the hope that some of the registered members may not come and we will replace them with those on the waiting list. So we did that and it worked just fine. Some members that registered didn't make it to the event and some on the waiting list made it, so, we did replacements. The +5 participants was as a result of the Wikimedians from Douala.
Bringing new Developers and Writers in Wikimedia	Yes the event brought new Developers and Writers into the Wikimedia movement	However, due to the discussions in the Wikimedia community and experienced event organisers in the movement (some that work for the Wikimedia Foundation), we were advised to pause the Visual Editor / Writer event and focus on the developers first in order not to put much work on ourselves. We followed that and it worked perfectly. We are hoping to organise an event for Writers soon.
Increase MediaWiki users / accounts on MediaWiki.org	Yes. We did increased the number of MediaWiki users / accounts from this side of the country.	During the event, participants created MediaWiki accounts on MediaWiki.org and also on Wikitech which they used for their software development.
Creating awareness about Wikimedia movement in the event.	Indeed we created awareness about the Wikimedia movement and its projects.	A lot of participants did not know what the Wikimedia movement is all about and it's projects. So we had a session to discuss about this and create awareness to the participants. They asked questions related to the Wikimedia movements and we cleared their doubts. A few example of the questions asked were; What is the difference between Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Wikimedia Foundation? What is the use or relevance of Wikipedia to the world? How do we as developers fit into the mission of the Wikimedia movement? etc.
Developers to setup MediaWiki locally on their PCs for development	Most of the participants finally setup MediaWiki on their local machines and they are ready to contribute to MediaWiki and start submitting patches.	At the end of the event, most participants had MediaWiki setup locally and are ready to start contributing code to enhance this platform. I (Alangi Derick) will be doing follow-ups with them to answer their questions and guide them on how to start fixing issues from phabricator.

Learning

Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

• What worked well?

Our communications to the participants and the community was very well done and we had participants aware of the event long before the event. We also followed up so well and we had little or no difficulties during the event because we informed the participants via emails that they should install some preliminary softwares / tools and setup their machines before coming.

Our team of organisers (in various sections such as; food / snacks / drinks, logistics, event organisation, internet provision etc...) worked so well. We used a Divide and Rule strategy such that we broke the organiser team into sub-teams that focused only on their sub-tasks and do it well, and don't bother about the other sub-team but make sure to know what is happening about another sub-team if a task is related to theirs. The divide and rule worked so perfectly so we are adopting this strategy for upcoming events.

Organisation of the event was well done and the event started on time and ended on time. We had users install MediaWiki locally and ready to start contributing patches to the codes.

• What did not work so well?

We planned on building an extension or hacking on an example extension but didn't do this because of time constraint.

The budget we planned for the event was not enough due to some missing pieces of the event that was not considered (when we wrote the grant) and an addition of the participants.

A few participants came with a Windows Operating system (not Unix-like) which slowed us down because the event became heterogenous. We emailed all participants to install a Unix-like operating system so that the event will be homogenous in order to save time but 2 - 3 participants did not do so.

During creation of accounts on Wikitech, only 6 accounts could be created at a time (from a particular network IP address) due to an administrative constrained so we had to use different networks to create these accounts during the event which also slowed us down. But we have 2 work-arounds concerning this;

-> We considered informing participants of future events to create accounts on Wikitech as a preliminary task before coming to the event ground to avoid the constraints.

-> I (Alangi Derick) will apply for account creator right on Wikitech in order to help create more accounts when this constraint is faced.

We don't yet know which one will be adopted but we think me (Alangi Derick) having account creator right on Wikitech is a better solution because telling users to do this will cause some problems since the procedure is a bit technical and the instance shell name is a key here which may be ignored by the user creating these accounts individually before the event.

• What would you do differently next time?

We would writing a grant with plus (+) 10% of the Grant amount in order to handle miscellaneous issues. If funds remain, we will either refund Wikimedia Foundation or carry over for upcoming events and of course let the Wikimedia Foundation know about this carry over.

Write down a list of all what participants of an event need (as preliminary) and have a pre-event session where we work only on these preliminaries so they setting their PCs up for the actual event itself and have some light talk about the event.

If we need any admin rights on any of the Wikis, we will request for them long before the event so if something comes up like account creation etc, we will handle this without waste of time.

We would only consider the number of participants to attend the event 2 weeks before the event date itself so we save ourselves the stress of adding more participants at the tail end before the event and also make sure if you are not registered, you wouldn't attend the event. But the issue with this is that, if people come to the event ground without registering and are really interested, we feel bad sending them away and letting them not attend the event. Please we need advices on this!

Finances

Grant funds spent

Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on.

Item	Spent Budget in XOF	Spend Budget in USD	Receipt Available	Comments
Internet Connectivity	30,000frs CFA	$46.0123 USD	Yes	An addition from 25,000frs to 30,000frs because the plan we expected to buy had changed cost over time.
Food and Drinks	94,300frs CFA	$144.6319 USD	Yes	An addition of 54,300frs was due to the addition of participants, increase in prices of drinks and food. Food was cooked by the restaurant so we paid for their cooking services.
Disposables & Tissue paper	2,400frs CFA	$3.6809 USD	Yes	Sugar balls had to be wrapped in tissue papers and food put in some disposables.
Transportation to and from the event	45,000frs CFA	$69.0184 USD	Yes (for our organiser from Yaounde) and N/A for local transportation	5,000frs each for the 4 organisers (for ground transportation and planning), 4,000frs for George to travel from Douala. He came with 5 other participants which he paid their transports to support us but we paid him 1 way transportation (for only him) from Douala and 15,000frs for one of our organisers from Yaounde + ground transport for logistics.
Phone calls to the participants	15,000frs CFA	$23.0061 USD	N/A	This was to direct the participants the location and ensure they are coming (and even tell some to check their emails due to no reply of our emails).
Rented 10 extra chairs	2,000frs CFA	$3.0675 USD	N/A	We rented 10 extra chairs from a local chair renter for our extra participants.
Total	188,700frs CFA	$289.4172 USD	Provided for some expenses	Some of the expenses made was to local agencies and receipts were not issued in those domains due to under development of these local agents. Those we could get receipts from, we did especially for standard items such as food and drinks (from restaurants), internet connectivity etc.

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

No. We wrote a grant for 155,000frs CFA. It was funded and sent to our Wikimedians of Cameroon User Group bank account but we received 151,000frs CFA due to bank charges. We spent 188,700frs CFA for this event which has an extra of 37,700frs CFA on the funded grant.

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?

• Yes. If it's noticed, we didn't pay for the Venue of this event which was to cost us 40,000frs CFA because the venue was free and we used this money to carter for other expenses of the event. We noticed that we underestimated the event and applied for a smaller grant. We will try our best to make sure to think through very well to make sure we apply for a grant that will be enough for next events in order not to make such a mistake again.

• We received merchandisings from Wikimedia DE which we shared during the events to prize winners and our visitors from Douala and also to event participants. Everyone was happy about this and we also wish to thank Wikimedia DE so much for their support to make the event very resourceful and enriching.

• We really tried our best to manage the funds provided by the Foundation but it wasn't enough so we spend extra on the event. All in all, the event was a huge success and the community is very happy for the success. We hope to do better in other upcoming events. We thank the Wikimedia Foundation and the grant committee for their huge support to make this event happen.