Grants:Project/TheNEBstudio/WikiMillennials/Midpoint

This project is funded by a Project Grant

Report accepted

This midpoint report for a Project Grant approved in FY 2019-20 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/TheNEBstudio/WikiMillennials.
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.

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.

Overview

Our project has only really started in September. Until now, we have been focusing on pre-production (writing and prototype-design) and on co-building the project with Wikimedia Communities.

Media

Webcomic and illustrations

WikiMillennials Invitation illustration

Wrote the synopsis and character arcs
Wrote 1/3 of the script
Created moodboards for the visual atmosphere
Started working on the character designs
Created a first illustration published on Commons (see on the right =>)
Created the WikiMillennials Commons category.
Hired an story consultant to help with afrodescendant themes in the writing, held a 1st working session

Podcast

Created a list of interviewees
Wrote the introduction text
Recorded and mixed a draft opening intro for the podcast

Workshops

Listed potential local partners

Wikimedia Community

Screenshot at the end of the WikiMillennials Meet Up - 25 November 2020

Held a listening session with the francophone Wikimedia community
- 12 wikimedians attended, from 6 different countries (Belgium, Benin, France, Guinea, Switzerland, Tunisia), working in particular on wiki-projects related to comic-books, Africa, women and LGBT topics.
Created a "Contribute!" page where people can sign up to help or be informed (several people did sign up or suggest ideas during our listening session)
Two of the non-Wikimedian members of our team have participated in an editathon, to familiarize themselves with the wiki-world.

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.

Our project's outcomes will mostly happen when our media are produced and published (because the outcome is the effect on readers/listeners), so we don't have results just yet.

Nevertheless 2 points are worth mentionning:

We have worked on our plan to evaluate outcomes/impact on our target audience. We hope to conduct a couple of evaluations:
- qualitative study by interviewing 3 to 6 people from various backgrounds (we hope to be able to interview both French people, African francophones, and non-francophones)
- quantitative study with a survey that we will share with various test groups (20 people)
During our listening session, there was a debate about terminology, distinguishing between "marginalized knowledge", "knowledge held by a margnizalied group" and "knowledge about a marginalized group", with some misunderstanding on the approach of our project. This led us to reconsider some aspects of the creation process:
- As these sensitive notions will be explicitely discussed in the podcast, we plan to be extra-careful and specific when referring to one or the other, making sure that the interviewees use them with precision and that one of our interviewed experts explicitely explains the differences. This appears to be important for audiences both inside and outside the Wikimedia community.
- Regarding the webcomic, we really want it to be an immersive fiction, where such ideas live through the characters and story, without needing to formulate them. So to be sure the story feels really true and accurate, we decided to hire a consultant to help with the aspects of the story related to African culture and the afrodescendant experience.

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.

We have not spent any funds so far. We are preparing the contracts and will start spending in 2021.

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.

Our project involves many people from various backgrounds (artists, students, technicians, wikimedians), which requires a lot of coordination
Because of individual availabilities, COVID circumstances and above-mentioned coordination needs, the project started slower than we expected

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.

Your learning pattern link goes here

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.

Hold a listening session in English for global communities
Go into production for the webcomic and the podcast
Publish the webcomic's script on Meta for translation
Organize our workshops
Hold several presentation sessions at the end of the project to advertise for the media we created and increase impact
Evaluate the effect of our webcomic and podcast on test-audiences

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?

I am discovering that our project will be generating learning patterns content - which is great and exciting - and it makes me thinks that it could be useful, when a grantee starts a project, that the grants teams points them to a couple of existing learning patterns that can relate to their project, so that we get to learn from previous projects before starting our own journey.

We were happily surprised that the project received a warm welcome from the community, which we appreciated.

We have also enjoyed being so well supported by the grants team. And, as artists, we appreciate the fact that there is an encouragement to truly evaluate the impact of our work. In the artistic field, success is usually measures by sells numbers - which can empty some of the meaning of what we do. Here, numbers of readers will count of course, but we will also be measuring the qualitative impact that the story will have had on them (representations, attitudes) - which is what we actually aim for as artists, so it's exciting.