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

The main activities for this first round of the project was to work on our capacity building and think of the pilot project plan. We have been able to do all these things and even more. We can now say that the UG as grown and can now be able to consume some medium projects.

Cyclical meetings

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

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

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

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 [[1]] 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

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.

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.

Conversation with Wikimedians of DRC - User Group community board seats

Recording of the panel part of the topic panel.

Voting information session with DRC community

So far we've built partnerships with 3 local institutions: local librarians, an association of journalists, and ISOC DRC. Some projects we'll be running with ISOC can be found here
We've trained African librarians about contributing to Wikipedia
We gave a workshop at the 4th Aflia conference
We've run regular training for local members of our UG (online and/or offline): we've been able to write 800+ articles on Fr Wikipedia
We've created two new WikiClubs for our UG: one in Lubumbashi and one another in Kinshasa
We've contacted Mahuton for a call for feedback: community board seats for the benefit of our community
We've been selected to be panel member on the topic Support for candidates
We gave our first Wikimania speech in Wikimania 2021.
We organized conferences: discussed open source licenses and explained the process of writing articles on Wikipedia in front of journalists
We are offering support to communities in Africa that have not yet official UGs so that they can have one
We have invited Mahuton for a voting info with our community

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.

Finances

Expense types	Total (USD)	Notes
Internet & Communication
Internet & Communication	1,200	Internet from February 2020 to April 2021
Internet & Communication	200	Cell phone calls and other communication from February to December 2020.
Total	1,400
Transport/ Materials / Human Resources and coordination
Transport/ Materials / Human Resources and coordination	600	Project coordination
	200	Transport
	225	Computer supplies
	600	Internet modem/switch
Total	1,625
Misc.
Misc.	250	Energy/electricity
Misc.	45	Wire fees
Total	295
First part total amount received	3135
Total expenses	3,320

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.

the departure of Woubzena Jifar, the former Program Officer
Time conflicts
Language barriers
Seeking experts

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.

Learn from Florence D and Rampofo
Run training sessions with the identified group of enthusiastic users
Translate some articles
Share on social media (readership)

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?