Grants:TPS/Yug/Mozfest

THIS IS A STUB !!!!! PLEASE DO NOT COMMENT / EVALUATE YET !

This is a draft submission to the Wikimedia Participation Support program. It's not yet ready for review, so there is no need to comment just yet.

statusdraft

Travel & Participation Support

please add the name of your event

summaryLinguaLibre com and hackathon, so contributors get trained with this Wikimedia audio recording tool.

event locationLondon, UK

event websitehttps://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Lingua_Libre:_Massive_Open_Audio_Recording

event date(s)2017/10/?

amount requested?£ ($?US)

home countryFrance (Paris)

creator• Yug

submitted on20:48, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

Create your report

Learn about reporting

Proposed participation

The project

Wikimedia France chapter (WM-fr) current lead technical project is LinguaLibre. LinguaLibre is defined as a Massive Open Audio Recording system : an opensource and open-license web application which boosts the recording of mass of words or sentences into clean, well cut, well documented audio files. Generated data-sets can be used for language conservation, language learning, and text-to-speech researches. So far, over 120 000 audios have been created and shared with Wiktionary and Wikipedia. Kick started by the WM-fr chapter as a Franco-French project, we recently switched to production phase, and wish to push it so it become as soon as possible a self-sustainable open source project.

Demand is high for presentations and workshop on this new audio recording tool by Wikimedia :

• we recently built official partnerships with French universities
• we recently started international communication and training of non-French contributors at the 2017 Vienna Hackathon
• we recently integrated 4 volunteer developers from Germany, Israel and India at this same event

More can be done. Wikimania would be the perfect place to scale up our outreach.

Applicants

LinguaLibre as a solid team of about 8 contributors. 5 of them submitted a workshop proposal to Wikimania, with realistic expectation that travel grants would come from the French chapter. As of now, we request a core delegation of 2 people to be sent :

• Nicolas (Zmoostik) is the core developer of LinguaLibre. Initially an open source activist within the field of open audio recording not related to Wikimedia, Nicolas got hired 3 months by WM-fr in 2015, with the mission to create the current massive open audio recording system. His contribution is mostly on coding and linguistic. He has critical knowledge to lead deep on boarding of other volunteer developers.
• Hugo (Yug) is a former Wikipedia administrator, team builder, and former PhD student on Chinese language and mobile learning. As such, Yug co-initiated the LinguaLibre project, gave frequent feedback, and currently lead the community outreach for LinguaLibre. In May 2017, Yug went to Vienna's WM hackathon introducing LinguaLibre to other volunteer developers and Wikimedia communities.

Both Nicolas and Hugo are articulate speakers, willing to lead the planned workshop on LinguaLibre. Nicolas would then focus on development and on-boarding developers. Hugo will do advocacy for the project, search full time for language lovers, multilingual contributors and communities, set up one-on-one training sessions and build our international network for long term growth.

Goal and expected impact

What will happen ?

As explained above and in the successfully submitted workshop proposal, we are confident that we can provide good value for money to the Wikimedia's community. This by maintaining our planned workshop, promoting the tool to curious wikimedians, train contributors who will then become ambassadors spreading the new toll accross the globe. Onboarding 4-8 developers to the project, twice as many as for the Vienna Hackathon, seems a realistic objective.

On the contrary, without the support of a TPS grant, no representative of the LinguaLibre's team can travel to Montreal. The announced workshop will have to be cancelled, wikimedians will not be reach nor trained, the LinguaLibre project as well as the Wikimedia community will lose one valuable year of contributions on audio recordings.

Satisfaction of criteria

As for the Wikimania, our team of 5 volunteers successfully submitted a workshop proposal this spring. The community and reviewers already validated the solidity and validity, namely :

1. promoting LinguaLibre fits Wikimedia strategic priorities due to its contribution to language conservation and learning via mass production of clean audio recordings
2. level of demand, support, and participation are good. See the workshop submission and the Vienna Hackathon.
3. potential impact is clear : as the tool is now in production, promotion is needed so wikimedians can start to using it, developers can start to add sugar on it
4. the cost of investment we request today to the WMF TPS seems to us reasonable

Budget breakdown

This budget would allow 2 skilled contributors to promote LinguaLibre among the global community for 3 days.

Item	Price / grantee	For ? grantees	Comment
Hotel	/£	x2= £	80€ x 6 nights with 2 single beds in London, for 08/08-08/14
Train/Flight	/£	x2= £	Paris-London-Paris
Registering	/£	x2= £
Food	0£	x2= 0£	we take this on ourselves, as normal days.
Others	100€	x2= 200£	flight variation, metro, bus, etc.
TOTAL (est.)	?£ ($?US)	£ ($4,200US)

Grant asked : ?£ ($?US) for ? representatives of LinguaLibre.

Other instructions

• We can book the plane tickets ourselves (please tell us if you have better prices)
• We don't need advance disbursement
• Suggestions to lower costs are welcome.
• Please note while we do have enough time to handle this grant request, time is also short. Also, please feel free to contact me as needed by email.