Grants:Project/WMDRC-UG/WMDRC - UG 2020 Activities/Final


Report accepted
This report for a Project Grant approved in FY 2021-22 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/WMDRC-UG/WMDRC - UG 2020 Activities.
  • You may still review or add to the discussion about this report on its talk page.
  • You are welcome to email projectgrants(_AT_)wikimedia.org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.



Welcome to this project's final report! This report shares the outcomes, impact and learnings from the grantee's project.

Part 1: The Project

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Summary

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Project Goals

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  1. Work with the Wikimedia Foundation to train and build capacity among the core leadership team of the User Group.
  2. Conduct a pilot program for local language contributors.
  3. Continue to support user group members.

Project Impact

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Important: The Wikimedia Foundation is no longer collecting Global Metrics for Project Grants. We are currently updating our pages to remove legacy references, but please ignore any that you encounter until we finish.

Targets

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Atelier Wikipédia en Lingala à Kisangani 2021
  1. In the first column of the table below, please copy and paste the measures you selected to help you evaluate your project's success (see the Project Impact section of your proposal). Please use one row for each measure. If you set a numeric target for the measure, please include the number.
  2. In the second column, describe your project's actual results. If you set a numeric target for the measure, please report numerically in this column. Otherwise, write a brief sentence summarizing your output or outcome for this measure.
  3. In the third column, you have the option to provide further explanation as needed. You may also add additional explanation below this table.
Planned measure of success
(include numeric target, if applicable)
Actual result Explanation
  • 5 membres du comité formé au renforcement de capacité
  • 20 membres de la communauté soutenus en terme d'internet et à l'engagement autour de Wikipédia
  • Traduire/créer au moins 20 articles dans la Wikipédia en lingala.
  • 5 membres du comoté on renforcer leur capacité en terme de leadership et de gestion de projet.
  • Plus de 10 sessions de formation organisé afin d'améliorer le niveau d'édition et d'engagement de nos membres
  • Plus de 10 nouveaux contributeurs sur le Wikipédia
  • Plus de 30 entrées en langue locale Lingala
  • 50 enregistrements audios.
  • Plus de 30 personnes formés sur l’édition sur le Wikipédia
Nous pouvons dire que le projet s'est bien déroulé dans son ensemble. Nous avons atteind et même dépasé nos objectifs initiaux. En terme de leadership, le UG s'est étendu dans plus de 5 nouvelles villes du pays où on continue de recruter les membres. Nous avons également presque fini à rédiger notre statut envue de l'obtention du titre juridique. Plusieurs de nos membres sont actifs et concernés par les événements internationaux (Wikimania, Wikiindaba, Wikiconvention, Wikimedia Summit...).

Story

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Looking back over your whole project, what did you achieve? Tell us the story of your achievements, your results, your outcomes. Focus on inspiring moments, tough challenges, interesting anecdotes or anything that highlights the outcomes of your project. Imagine that you are sharing with a friend about the achievements that matter most to you in your project.

  • This should not be a list of what you did. You will be asked to provide that later in the Methods and Activities section.
  • Consider your original goals as you write your project's story, but don't let them limit you. Your project may have important outcomes you weren't expecting. Please focus on the impact that you believe matters most.

Tout commença en 2019 alors que nous avons senti le réel besoin de grandir? Ansi avons-nous penser pour la première fois de lancer un projet de très grande envergure. Le projet WMDRC - UG 2020 Activities naquit avec le soutien total de la communauté tant nationale qu'international. Nous fûmes très optimistes et ambucieux dans ce projet, mais la WMF trouva que nous étions encore très jeunes pour mener un tel projet. Ansi decida-t-elle de modifier nos objectifs initiaux et nous demanda de travailler essentiellement sur notre (1) renforcement des capacités et (2) de mener un projet pilote.

On nous affecta Woubzena Jifar et Marti Johnson pour nous affecter dans le projet. Mais, hélas Woubzena nous quitta avant même qu'on n'aie démarré à proprement parlé le projet. Plusiurs mois passèrent sans suite. C'est alors que nous vîmes apparaitre Veronica, l'Africaine qui desormais devra continuer avec nous car Marti était maintenant affectée vers un autre département.

Après pliusieurs mois de renforcement de capacités, nous menâmes avec succès notre projet pilote sur la contribution sur Wikipedia en Lingala.

Et aujourd'hui, grâce à ce projet, notre UG a plus que jamais grandi. Nous existons desormais dans plus de 6 villes de la RDC. Notre priorité pour le moment:

  • conquérire toutes les villes du pays
  • créer un hub avec les pays du grand lac
  • créer une conférence recurente des Wikimediens du grand lac
  • accueillir des conférences internationales comme Wikiconvention Francophone et Wikiindaba
  • organiser un Wikicamp RDC

Survey(s)

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If you used surveys to evaluate the success of your project, please provide a link(s) in this section, then briefly summarize your survey results in your own words. Include three interesting outputs or outcomes that the survey revealed.

Other

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Is there another way you would prefer to communicate the actual results of your project, as you understand them? You can do that here!

Methods and activities

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DRC team Capacity building

Please provide a list of the main methods and activities through which you completed your project.

Brainstorming

  • séance de travail pour le choix de formations, opportunité de formation pour renforcement de capacité, de leadership et de gestion financière
  • Réfléchir sur le futur du groupe, en particulier comment être présent dans d'autres villes
  • Réflexion sur les projets à implémenter
  • Réflexion sur le projet pilote

Marketing et communication

  • Communication et sensibilisation avant, pendant et après sur les réseaux sociaux et avec les participants.
  • Élaboration du calendrier de la première partie du projet

Cyclical meetings

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First thing first, as we were about to start our first ever big project, it was important to have some kind of regular supervision from our Grant officers. We have established a monthly meeting with Marti and Woubzena Jifar (the former Program Officer). Later on, as Woubzena left the WMF, other officers joined us.

We have also created a WhatsApp group to make sure no one misses any important information as meeting schedule. It is via this group that we share every important thing we do here with our officers.

Learning from peers

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We've been fully blessed to be in full contact with fellow Wikimedia UG in Africa to learn from their own experience. Among those communities, we can name some below:

Côte d'Ivoire:

Samuel G has given us some useful advice as well as Donatien, the chairman of Côte d'Ivoire UG.

Wikipedia is an amazing project. You need perseverance, patience and regularity in running projects and activities. Together you can be strong. -- Donatien

Algeria:

Bachunda, the leader of the community in Algeria, is one of the guy who helped us since the beginning of the existence of our UG. We did contact him again to learn more about his UG and how we can manage well ours. We also discussed the community in Africa. He shared with us about some amazing projects they ran or are running. We've also discussed WLA and how we can implement it at home. To help us grow, he suggested that one member of our UG can join their UG to see how the work, or one of their member join our UG to help move forward.

Uganda:

Alice K was the one we discussed too much about the life of their UG. She helped us too much with librarians Wikipedia like course/project. Also promised to put us in contact with the Swedish embassy because it is a partner in many countries for WikiGap.

Benin:

We have contacted Mahuton and learned a bit about the community in Benin. It is Mahuton who pointed us to Amir to get help for minority languages.

Tanzania:

We reached out to Anthoni, the co-funder of the Wikimedia community in Tanzania, to learn about the UG and how we can work together.

Learning from experts

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Wikimedia France:

Wikimedia incubator at ContribuLing 2021.

We had two main workshops with the help of WMFr:

  • Minority languages: in two days, we discussed minority languages from Africa and the world and how Wikimedia projects like Wiktionary, Wikidata... can help preserve those languages. We did also learn more about Incubator. More videos can be found here.
  • Project management: we've learned all about project, from planning to implementation and reporting. We did discuss also finance.


Amir:

Meeting with Amir was a great pleasure as he did help us too much, mainly with technical aspect of minority wikis as keyboard. He did as some questions to us like:

  • Have you written of Lingala or Swahili, Wikipedia yourself?
  • Are there any difficulties writing on Wikipedia in Lingala than in French?
  • Do people write in Lingala on social media?
  • Etc.

He advised us about stuff to write on and people to chose (contact) as journalists, teachers... We discussed also the machine translation for Lingala, the translation of the UI...

Amir added me on the Wikimedia Language Diversity telegram group.

Asaf:

With Asaf, we discussed the metric of the project and whether we were actively contributing ourselves in Lingala. He pointed to some issues running such a project, mainly if we are not contributing to minority languages it can be a challenge to help. So, he gave us his best advice:

Forget about mass campaigns and creating awareness, focus on finding the nucleus of 2 to 3 persons who speak the language and are interested in the languages

Rompof We learned about partnership building

Florence Gouvernance d'une association

Aflia: Wikipedi in African libraries:

In this course run by Aflia, members of our UG joined it to learn more about Wikipedia and its sister projects. I've been contacted to offer courses with them.

Partnership building:

We've been part of this wonderful course by the WMF, taught by Asaf. In this course, we've learned:

  • What are partnerships, and why build one?
  • Preparing to partner
  • Negotiating partnerships
  • Running partnerships
  • Sustainability and evaluation
  • Dealing with setbacks (Troubleshooting)

Movement charter discussion:

Movement charter discussion with francophone community.

We have joined the Francophone discussion on the charter of the movement.

Pilot project plan

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We have designed a small, focused pilot version of the project with a focus on one language only. For the logical model, we have been inspired by WMFr. You can find it here.

Project resources

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Please provide links to all public, online documents and other artifacts that you created during the course of this project. Even if you have linked to them elsewhere in this report, this section serves as a centralized archive for everything you created during your project. Examples include: meeting notes, participant lists, photos or graphics uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, template messages sent to participants, wiki pages, social media (Facebook groups, Twitter accounts), datasets, surveys, questionnaires, code repositories... If possible, include a brief summary with each link.

Learning

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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 took enough risks in your project to have learned something really interesting! Think about what recommendations you have for others who may follow in your footsteps, and use the below sections to describe what worked and what didn’t.

What worked well

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What did you try that was successful and you'd recommend others do? 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
  • Renforcement de capacités de nos membres (individuel et aussi de la part de l'équipe Marti et Véronica);
  • Apprentissages avec quelques membres ayant de l'expérience au sein de la comunauté Wikiméidia (Florence D, Rampofo, etc...) ;
  • Les sessions de formation avec le groupe utilisateur identifié enthousiastes ;
  • La Traduction et création des articles (en Lingala) ;
  • L'engagement de nos membres au mouvement Wikimedia.

What didn’t work

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What did you try that you learned didn't work? What would you think about doing differently in the future? Please list these as short bullet points.

  • les sources de qualité quasi inexistantes. Quand bien même que la langue est parlée dans le pays, mais très peu de gens l'écrivent vraiment de façon académique.
  • Difficile d'utiliser les claviers ordinaires. Les claviers QUERTY ou AZERTY ne permettent pas réellement d'écrire les mots en alphabet Lingala.
  • difficulté de trouver des contributeurs très enthousiasmés. Beaucoup de gens ne sont pas d'avis à écrire sur Wikipédia, surtout gratuitement.
  • Finance insuffisante pour la coordination du projet. Les montants mensuels pour la coordination du projet n'ont malheureusement pas suffi à couvrir toutes les dépenses liées à différentes tâches de coordination
  • Problème de connectivité Internet. Nous avons rencontré des problèmes de connectivité lors des différentes sessions tout au long du projet, ce qui nous a complètement fait perdre beaucoup de temps. Nous nous efforcerons de remédier à ce problème lors des prochains événements en nous assurant que nous ne dépendons pas d'un seul réseau et que tout fonctionne correctement quelques jours avant les sessions.

Other recommendations

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If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please list them here.

Next steps and opportunities

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Are there opportunities for future growth of this project, or new areas you have uncovered in the course of this grant that could be fruitful for more exploration (either by yourself, or others)? What ideas or suggestions do you have for future projects based on the work you’ve completed? Please list these as short bullet points.

  • annual grant;
  • grant for mvmt strategy;
  • host internation confs like Wikiindaba, Wikiconf;
  • Organize Wikicamp for DRC Wikimedians;
  • Create a Hub for Great Lake Wikimedia Community;
  • Capacity building for city leaders of our UG.

Part 2: The Grant

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Finances

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Actual spending

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Expense types Total (USD) Notes
Internet & Communication
Internet & Communication 2,250 Internet from February 2020 to Dec 2021
500 Cell phone calls and other communication from February to Jul 2020.
Total 2,750
Transport/ Materials / Human Resources and coordination
Transport/ Materials / Human Resources and coordination 1,300 Project coordination
500 Transport
510 Computer supplies
950 Internet modem/switch
Total 3,260
Misc.
Misc. 600 Energy/electricity
90 Wire fees
Total 690
Total expenses 7,175


Remaining funds

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Do you have any unspent funds from the grant?

Please answer yes or no. If yes, list the amount you did not use and explain why.

If you have unspent funds, they must be returned to WMF. Please see the instructions for returning unspent funds and indicate here if this is still in progress, or if this is already completed:

  • Non

Documentation

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Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grantsadmin wikimedia.org, according to the guidelines here?

Please answer yes or no. If no, include an explanation.

  • Non

Confirmation of project status

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Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?

Please answer yes or no.

  • Oui

Is your project completed?

Please answer yes or no.

  • Oui

Grantee reflection

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We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on what this project has meant to you, or how the experience of being a grantee has gone overall. Is there something that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed, or that you’ll do differently going forward as a result of the Project Grant experience? Please share it here!