Grants:Project/Wikipedia Asian Month/2021 coordination
This project is funded by a Project Grant
| proposal | people | timeline & progress | finances | midpoint report | final report |
- coordination at the international level;
- supporting local organizers;
- improving infrastructure, outreach and sustainability.
This Wikimedia Foundation grant has a fiscal sponsor. Wikimedia Taiwan administered the grant on behalf of User:Li-Yun Lin.
Project idea
editWhat is the problem you're trying to solve?
editWhat problem are you trying to solve by doing this project? This problem should be small enough that you expect it to be completely or mostly resolved by the end of this project.
Remember to review the tutorial for tips on how to answer this question.
Wiki Asian Month's mission is to improve coverage and to raise awareness of Asian topics, increase contributions to the Wikimedia projects overall and bolster Asian Wikimedia communities. The Wiki Asian Month team achieves this by facilitating an annual federated editing competition for editors across the world.
With learned experience of the past six editions of the competition, Wiki Asian Month has identified the following areas of improvement which we would focus on in 2021:
- Lack of diversity in contribution: While Wiki Asian Month achieves good coverage in a range of Wikipedia communities, there are also many Wikimedia projects and specified focal areas, where it is much harder to achieve impact for organizers. We need to assess the challenges of organizing Wiki Asian Month in new communities, and consider adapting the model to be suitable for these projects. We have the initial impression that at least the presence of both technical and social infrastructure (potential partner organizations, active communities etc) plays a key role in that.
- Difficult to navigate as new editors: Wiki Asian Month is one of the activities that is frequently organized as a first activity for a team of Wikimedia volunteers, and attracts outside volunteers. However, organizing Wiki Asian Month is not as straightforward as it could be. Some barriers have been identified after evaluating results from earlier years, especially transitional problems between the junior and senior volunteers.
- Limited partnership: Communities are the building block of Wikimedia projects, but building strong partnership relations are a challenge.
- Maintenance: Facilitating a competition across dozens of communities requires substantial coordination, follow-up, improvements in underlying technologies and documentation, etc. (This is part of the maintenance work that the Wiki Asian Month team needs to do every year.)
What is your solution to this problem?
editFor the problem you identified in the previous section, briefly describe your how you would like to address this problem.
We recognize that there are many ways to solve a problem. We'd like to understand why you chose this particular solution, and why you think it is worth pursuing.
Remember to review the tutorial for tips on how to answer this question.
This year, we want to strengthen the foundation for a healthy and sustainable Wiki Asian Month movement across the world. To that end, and keeping in mind the aforementioned problems, we prepared the following measures:
- Diversify contribution type: We will engage with Wikimedia communities including different language versions of Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikivoyage etc. to expand local participation and recruit local organizers. We are interested in experimenting with encouraging (at least a couple of) Wikivoyage to run edit-a-thons prior to the Wiki Asian Month contest in November. We will provide the motivation for doing this effort and structural/technical support needed for running such edit-a-thons. This effort can help us diversify the contributions which in return can help Wikimedia projects with enriching their knowledge of creating Asian content.
- Improve already existing workflows: In the past years, the Wiki Asian Month international team have been struggling with organizing Wiki Asian Month in an effective manner, to build upon our previous success and to have a profound impact. The international team is best placed to uncover best practices from around the world and create or lay the groundwork for an infrastructure that contains documentation, templates and potentially tools that help local organizers to more effectively organize Wiki Asian Month.
- Increase partnership opportunities: International team dedicated to improving our partnership relations/network. The work in this area involves: creating material for seeking partnership relations, meeting with them in person, looking for opportunities to work with them towards common goals, partners to cover the story of Wiki Asian Month, and help with our outreach and branding.
- Maintenance: We expect to continue doing the underlying maintenance work for Wiki Asian Month similar to the past years. However, we will be monitoring and documenting this process to understand better which parts of the process we can improve. This remains at the core of our existence, and will likely consume the majority of our resources and efforts.
Project goals
editWhat are your goals for this project? Your goals should describe the top two or three benefits that will come out of your project. These should be benefits to the Wikimedia projects or Wikimedia communities. They should not be benefits to you individually.
Remember to review the tutorial for tips on how to answer this question.
Wiki Asian Month has three primary goals:
- to freely document and raise awareness of creating Asian content
- increase contributions to the Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Wikisource, Wikivoyage etc.)
- bolster Asian Wikimedia communities.
Nowadays, many Wikimedians participated in different project such as Wikidata, Wikicommons, Wikivoyage and so on as their favoured projects. WAM team plan to cooperate with the communities from different projects to allow everything related to Asian culture can be uploaded and stored on Wikimedia projects in different formats. We hope WAM can make participants interested in everything related to Asain and allow people from all over the world can learn more about Aisa via Wikiprojects.
As always, we do this through a federated model, supporting local organizers to do what they are best at. This year, we want to pay special attention to making Wiki Asian Month more future proof.
Project impact
editHow will you know if you have met your goals?
editFor each of your goals, we'd like you to answer the following questions:
- During your project, what will you do to achieve this goal? (These are your outputs.)
- Once your project is over, how will it continue to positively impact the Wikimedia community or projects? (These are your outcomes.)
For each of your answers, think about how you will capture this information. Will you capture it with a survey? With a story? Will you measure it with a number? Remember, if you plan to measure a number, you will need to set a numeric target in your proposal (i.e. 45 people, 10 articles, 100 scanned documents).
Remember to review the tutorial for tips on how to answer this question.
to freely document and raise awareness of creating Asian content:
- By design, the competition will increase contributions to Wikipedia and Wikivoyage projects. The lasting impact in this category is clear as contributions to Wikimedia projects are considered to be contributions that empower people around the world to freely access and build on educational content.
- In collaboration with our partners inside and outside the Wikimedia movement, we will support the shift towards Wikivoyage and specified focal areas.
Increase contributions to Wikimedia projects:
- Continuing impact in this category lies primarily in the support of local competitions and helping them to operate effectively. We will measure the number of communities in Wikipedia and Wikivoyage at the times when we are organizing campaigns for these projects.
- We aim for good outcomes out of the event (such as high participation, or at least a couple of Wikivoyage participating for this year's experimental try, etc.).
- Where possible, our tools and documentation can be re-used by other efforts with similar workflows. We continue making an effort to make re-use of our tools possible in other competitions.
Bolster Asian Wikimedia communities:
- By design, Wiki Asian Month is a project that will bring communities together around a common theme: their shared creating Asian content. The international team continues to seed new communities with opportunities, encouragements, and incentives for organizing Wiki Asian Month.
- By encouraging communities to form around one project (Wiki Asian Month), we provide an opportunity for people to build relationships and networks that they can use later on to do other projects in their corresponding communities.
- Measuring the impact of Wiki Asian Month in communities scientifically/accurately, requires research resources that are not available in abundance in the international team in 2021. Therefore, we limit our measurements to counting the number of communities we will help organize Wiki Asian Month in 2021. The international team will focus on the longer term this year, rather than aggressively onboard new countries. We would be satisfied if the number of countries matches the number of countries in 2020.
Do you have any goals around participation or content?
editAre any of your goals related to increasing participation within the Wikimedia movement, or increasing/improving the content on Wikimedia projects? If so, we ask that you look through these three metrics, and include any that are relevant to your project. Please set a numeric target against the metrics, if applicable.
Yes. Two out of the three goals mentioned earlier are directly related to the increase in participation within the Wikimedia Movement as well as increasing/improving content on Wikimedia projects. We will use the following metrics and numeric targets to measure whether we meet that component of our goals. Note that by design, a substantial amount of work in the Wiki Asian Month international team is focused on empowering local organizers to organize Wiki Asian Month contests. As a result, not all metrics suggested in the link above are metrics that the international team can have direct control over. We will only report metrics over which the international team has direct control and/or metrics that the change in their value can be directly associated with the initiatives by the international team.
- Total participants: For the international team, the participants are the local organizers. We measure each community's participation as one participant, independent of the number of community members involved in that community for organizing the contest. We set a goal to have at least 40 communities participate in Wiki Asian Month in 2021. We also set a goal to have at least 2 communities participate in the Wikivoyage enrichment initiative that we will be experimenting with in this year.
- Number of newly registered users: This is a metric that is expected to be largely driven by the community's organizers. Therefore, we are not setting a target to meet for this metric. However, the international team is interested in this metric as a measure of the health of the Wiki Asian Month ecosystem and we will monitor this number throughout and after the contest. We do this for one or more reasons mentioned below:
- International team is in a good position to monitor the number of newly registered users across participating communities to identify and share best practices across projects as well as notify the communities in case an unexplained signal is observed in our trends.
- The international team may be responsible for initiatives that can have direct impact on the number of newly registered users and for those initiatives, we will report the number of newly registered users.
- Number of content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects: Similar to the above metric, the number of articles is a metric that the international team does not have direct control over.
- Basic goals: As the coordinators of Wiki Asian Month international competition, the international team has set the goal to meet the following targets on top of what is described above:
- Around 90% participants use Fountain tool smoothly, except some special Wikimedia projects.
- Reach out to 200 community and/or offline event organizers, as well as previous participants.
- All critical infrastructure necessary for the start will be ready before November 1, 2021.
- The international team will ensure the availability of critical tools developed and/or maintained by the team throughout the contest and will monitor all other critical tools throughout the contest.
- The jury process is finalized and a jury result is published before February, 2022.
- The project is evaluated as part of the preparations for the team meeting at 2022.
- A survey for community's organizers and participants is executed to learn about where the international team has done well and where the team and its efforts can be improved.
Project plan
editActivities
editTell us how you'll carry out your project. What will you and other organizers spend your time doing? What will you have done at the end of your project? How will you follow-up with people that are involved with your project?
The international team assumes responsibility for a wide range of activities around WikI Asian Month. In this section, we will describe the activities that are (directly) funded by this grant.
- Preliminary work
To contact and communicate with our partners to make sure events can go smoothly and encourage them to hold thematic subcontests.
- Inform WikI Asian Month friends, local organizers/active editors on each project, community leaders and affiliates about the new contest, initiatives, and projects the international team is working on, through Wikipedia Talk page, Email, Social media and face to face meeting to solidify the community of the WikI Asian Month;
- Collect feedback and suggestions from local organizers;
- Hold internal team meetings to review work done and plan for the work that is ahead.
- General Coordination
- Set up clear timeline;
- Update and communicate the international rules;
- Update and share documentation;
- Prepare (or coordinate for others to prepare) communication material that can be used and/or built upon by organizations;
- Facilitate communication channels;
- Monitor statistics.
- Project Management
- Write grant request;
- Maintain communication with relevant staff at Wikimedia Foundation;
- Report monthly and midterm on activities to Wikimedia Foundation;
- Report on the use of budget at the end of the program;
- Collect measures and data to be reported at the end of the program;
- Write grant report.
- Technical contributions
- Improve Fountain tool based on the feedback from last year in order to offer jury tool services to local jury members and coordinators;
- Help with the setup and maintenance of the CentralNotice;
- Maintain an international website for participants;
- Build the technical infrastructure for the data project;
- In coordination with partners, provide support for the technical work in specific parts.
- Update fountain tool to add new function and maintained it.
- Communication & partnerships
During reorganize past years' outcome, our team notice that some cooperations are closed due to lack of communication and there is no regular communication channel, in order to rebuild these partnerships, we would like to strengthen community cooperation and guide new community growth.
- Update asianmonth.wiki with the necessary/useful information;
- Update social media channels;
- Disseminate the results of the international online event or onsite event;
- Maintain communication with international partners;
- The partnership activities are focused on long term relationships with partners.
- Redesign banner, translate the content of banner as early as possible to allow participants know the event starts. (It's WAM's annual routine and we only put it on in event time)
- Contact different communities five to six months before the WAMs start. In order to incubate and assist new communities, we will prepare a guidance book for the communities.
- Contact each communities' members to assist WAM teams to translate event materials to their mother tongues. It can assist community members understand event information clearly.
- Follow & help organizations
- Give specific suggestions and support to organizers (mostly online);
- Collect & answer questions of the organizers;
- Crisis management for contests;
- This year in particular: improve the infrastructure that is used by competitions. This includes documentation, templates and perhaps some tooling.
- Set up & run the international contest
- Set up jury processes;
- Collect results of competitions;
- Support the jury in their process;
- Provide & distribute international prizes, awards and certificates.
Budget
editHow you will use the funds you are requesting? List bullet points for each expense. (You can create a table later if needed.) Don't forget to include a total amount, and update this amount in the Probox at the top of your page too!
It is important to note that a large number of activities and projects in WikI Asian Month international team are done thanks to many volunteer hours offered to us by the members of the international team as well as volunteers who support our efforts on a case-by-case basis. We are requesting the following budget to make the work of the international team more efficient, make better use of the volunteer hours available to us, and make some of the basic and important operations for a global contest possible.
- Prizes and certificates: 1,000 USD
- Outreach and branding: 700 USD
- Administrative and miscellaneous: 5,370 USD
- Unforeseen: 707 USD (10% of total funds for any unforeseen circumstances)
Total: 7,777 USD
Considerations:
- Prizes and certificates: This permits the purchase of international prizes for the participants (exact distribution to be determined) and diploma's for the organizers. We are planning on adding a few special awards. The specific categories are still being discussed within the team and will be finalized once 2021 competition is over. Among ideas under discussion are:
- A prize to encourage participation in underrepresented areas (e.g., Gender gap)
- A quantity-based prize for those who have contributed the largest number of articles.
- A prize category to specifically recognize participating organizers, outreach coordinators and affiliations.
| Item | Total cost (USD) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Postcards | 100 | Postcard printing |
| Certificate | 50 | Certificate printing |
| Special awards | 300 | T-shirts and towel |
| Thank-you gifts | 150 | Stickers or pins |
| Shipping | 400 | General shipping and mailing costs |
| Total prizes and certificates | 1,000 |
- Outreach and branding: This includes design for material to support competitions (templates and documentation), branding and may be partially used for outreach efforts to potential participants.
| Item | Total cost (USD) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Advertisements on social media | 200 | Promotion on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) and creating or marketing materials for the project |
| Storyboarding and writing | 150 | |
| Translation of the page | 150 | We will attempt to find volunteers, but would hire translators if needed to ensure professional-level translation of materials |
| Campaign video/animation | 200 | |
| Total outreach and branding | 700 | While the international team can prepare a significant amount of material by spending our time and existing expertise, making a truly effective, accessible, and inclusive process will require bringing in some professional design support to illustrate and create select material. All design assets will be freely licensed, so they can be reused for future competitions and shared with WikI Asian Month organizers for additional usage and adaptation. |
- Administrative and miscellaneous: This is to cover various administrative costs.
| Item | Total cost (USD) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Software engineering | 200 | To update and maintained Fountain tool |
| Project Manager/Staff* | 4200 | To make sure all the processes on time. Non-event month: 10hr/ month. WAM month: 30hr/ month. (10x11)+(30x1)=140hr/ year. $30/hr |
| Google Workspace | 720 | 6 USD/person×10 (international team members) ×12 (month) = 720 USD (waiver possible) |
| Domain | 100 | The domain fee for WikI Asian Month (asianmonth.wiki) |
| Bank Transfer Fees | 150 | To cover international transfer fees for any payments and reimbursements in various local currencies |
| Total administrative and miscellaneous | 5,370 |
- Project Manager/Staff *: WAM team needs a project manager/ staff to forward or assign tasks to different team member, reorganize past WAM data, write monthly report about WAM progress and the issue we face, decide media posts with media team and take good care of income and outcome of WAM. In the non-event month, all the duty will take this project manager 10hr/ month, in event month (November), it will take up to 30hr/ month. Total: (10x11)+(30x1)=140hr/ year
Community engagement
editHow will you let others in your community know about your project? Why are you targeting a specific audience? How will you engage the community you're aiming to serve at various points during your project? Community input and participation helps make projects successful.
The WikI Asian Month international team uses a variety of platforms and venues to communicate about WikI Asian Month 2021. We use WikI Asian Month blog (asianmonth.wiki) and Social Media outlets (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Telegram channel). Outreach to a broader audience is increased compared to previous years, using Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and occasionally Telegram.
When opportunity provides itself, we take advantage of events such as Wikimedia Conference, Wikimedia Hackathon, and Wikimania to present ourselves and have meetings with local organizers. And of course, there is the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki FAQ page and its corresponding Discussion page as well as personal communications (via email) with local organizers.
Get involved
editParticipants
editPlease use this section to tell us more about who is working on this project. For each member of the team, please describe any project-related skills, experience, or other background you have that might help contribute to making this idea a success.
Please see the 2020 overview of international team members for an idea who might be in the team next year. We will evaluate team membership later this year. We always welcome applications from interested candidates to join our team! Additionally, we depend on our efforts on the hard work of hundreds of volunteers around the world in national teams.
Community notification
editYou are responsible for notifying relevant communities of your proposal, so that they can help you! Depending on your project, notification may be most appropriate on a Village Pump, talk page, mailing list, etc.--> Please paste links below to where relevant communities have been notified of your proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions. Need notification tips?
Endorsements
editDo you think this project should be selected for a Project Grant? Please add your name and rationale for endorsing this project below! (Other constructive feedback is welcome on the discussion page).