Grants:Project/Wikipedia in DRCongo Youth Associations/Midpoint

This project is funded by a Project Grant

Report accepted

This midpoint report for a Project Grant approved in FY 2020-21 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/Wikipedia in DRCongo Youth Associations.
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.

Initially, the idea was to train one cohort, but we did our best to have two cohorts of training in this first round. We have reached around 40 young people from different locations in the country.

Hiring the WiR

Truth be told, this is our first time to have this position; and most of our workers couldn't understant what is the role for this position, but we tried as much as we can to explain in simple word: "Wikipedia project point of contact".

These are requirements we set to find out a good person for the position:

passion for the youth
competent, i.e knows Wikipedia well and all things Wiki
available
teacher or can teach

Because it's not a regular position in the country, we just identified among the most active leaders from Wikimedia Congo, with whom we parterns sometimes, to get someone to help us implement this project.

Regular meetings

After hiring the WiR, we begun to have some regular meetings. Some of them need to be mentionned:

first official meeting to present the WiR to the stuff
meeting to set up the first cohort of the training
meeting to set up the second cohort of the training

Apart from that, there were other meetings, not with all the stuff, especially to get the evolution of the course preparation, the training progress...

Training

Course program

Unité 0 : Introduction
Unité 1 : A la découverte de Wikipédia
Unité 2 : Premier pas dans l’encyclopédie
Unité 3 : rédigez et collaborez
Unité 4 : créer un article Wikipédia de A à Z
Unité 5 : WM Commons et d’autres projets Wikimedia

First cohort

number of attendees: 12 (2 women, 1 from Goma (online participation))
Duration: 10 hrs
Outcome: Among the 12 attendees, 9 were new to Wikipedia and 8 were able to create a Wikipedia account and contribute content.
Type: face-to-face and online
More detail

Second cohort

number of attendees: 30 (+5 women) (from different cities like Kinshasa, Kisangani, Goma, Bukavu...)
Duration: +18 hrs
Outcome: around half of attendees were able to do their first edit on Wikipedia, +5 uploaded images on Commons, +3 recorded words on Lingua libre
Type: online
More detail

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.

We've been able to offer ~30 hrs of training for the benefit of young people to learn Wikipedia editing, Commons photo uploading and Lingua libre
We were able to reach out to youth in +5 cities in the country
We reached out to 5 mentors to help with the training
~20 new Wikipedia account were created
Online sessions are available on Youtube

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.

Expense types	Total (USD)	Notes
Materials & Internet
Internet	200
Laptop for project coordinator	400
Laptop for WiR	800
Internet modem/switch	50
Total	1,250
Human Resources and coordination
Human Resources and coordination	450	Project coordination
Human Resources and coordination	750	WiR Salary
Total	1,200
Misc.
Misc.
Misc.	70	Wire fees
Total	295
First part total amount received	2,500
Total expenses	2,720

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.

Most of the attendees were not comfortable with online training, as this was their first time to attend such a class. As a solution, Wikimedians of DRC (Kinshasa club) organized training sessions to show people how to use online tools.
Some mentors were not available; their mentees struggled enough
Internet quality and usage were not good.

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.

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?