Grants talk:IEG/Medicine Translation Project Community Organizing/Renewal

Initial feedback

Hi CFCF,

Thanks for submitting this renewal request. We've reviewed this together in recent meetings, but I'm also posting some initial feedback here:

• As noted in our feedback on your final report, we're seeing a lot of value from your project to-date, and good potential for the future. We also understand that building sustainable community organizing systems take time, so your rationale for renewal generally makes sense.
• Conducting a major outreach drive to bring folks to use the workflows and foundation you've built so far makes sense at this point.
• Because tech development would be a new avenue for you and this project to pursue, I would recommend limiting your energy to just 1 area of development for a renewal. An automating messaging system does make sense as a development priority in the service of starting to build systems that won't rely on you to notify integrators when new work is available. For this, it looks like you would need to find someone who can create an on-wiki bot that can connect with your off-wiki tracking systems. We can help brainstorm recruiting for this if the project moves forward, and perhaps you will get some community suggestions as well.
• I like the idea of having communities prioritize future articles for translation, to increase their engagement when it comes time to integrate! But, I worry a bit that this will take a lot of effort to setup well. Do you think it is realistic, in light of all your other goals for this 6-month period?
• In terms of the focus on keeping track of expansion: I agree this is effort worth investing in. Do you imagine setting limits on any future expansion so that you're able to focus for a time on the languages you're already committed to, going forward? I can well understand that as capacity grows you may be inclined to keep adding new languages, but it seems that if the target is always growing/moving, this makes everything more difficult to track, so I'm curious to understand how you're thinking about this.
• The goals and measures of success you've set seem like they'll set a useful blueprint for the next phase of this project, so thank you for documenting them here. Researching systems to track page-views of integrated articles, developing a system to measure activity and engagement and a baseline for translation-to-integration time, mentoring more volunteers to share the community organizing workload and working on a sustainability plan...these all strike me as particularly useful for this phase of the program's development, as you seek out increasingly efficient systems and processes that won't need to rely on a single person in the future. I have seen how much you enjoy working on this project, and also how much work it is for 1 or 2 people to keep it going. I'd like to see how we can support you to take it to the next level so that you can free up your valuable time and energy for other things as well!
• As your next phase continues to focus on systems and scale, my suggestion would be to limit your efforts that may not fit with this focus, or that may simply have less impact compared to the time/energy invested in them. For example, in terms of the anti-translation sentiment you've identified that still exists in a few languages: Why not just walk away from languages like Polish? What's the value in continuing to focus on those discussions right now?

Starting now, I'm giving the IEG committee and the broader community 10 days to share their thoughts on this request before we move forward with a final decision on whether to renew this IEG. I'll be notifying the IEG committee and I expect you'll notify relevant areas of the community as well. Thanks again for all your efforts so far to improve Wikipedia's medical content!

Cheers, Siko (WMF) (talk) 22:33, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Siko, I appreciate the feedback, and to answer some of your questions:

• Any attempt to get the community to prioritize future translations will be a pilot where I send out a survey to the various communities. Only if we see sufficient engagement will I consider building a more self-sustaining system, and that might be outside the scope of these 6 months.
• I chose to forgo including new languages in the goals because I believe it will be more fruitful to engage with our already very large community. We are at the point where I hope we can rely on organic growth as word of our efforts spread. Engaging with Wikimedia chapters might increase our language reach, but I see this as an added bonus rather than a goal in and of itself. By accommodating new languages I think we can build sustainable growth as we can allocate responsibility to people who want to get involved. Finding people to oversee languages is a big part of increasing sustainability, and as I mentioned in my report that's where we've seen most success. So while I'm not sure that type of focus will limit growth, it definitely takes priority over growth.
• As far as abandoning certain communities it might be inevitable, but I like to see it as more of a reordering of priorities, where we clearly state how we are willing to work with the communities as soon as someone comes along and is willing to take up the discussion. So any engagement with those communities would be more about showing that we still exist, rather than trying to convince anyone to work for us.

Best, CFCF (talk) 15:53, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your thoughts in return, CFCF. I appreciate the focus and details you're bringing to this, and not adding more languages at this time seems smart! Cheers, Siko (WMF) (talk) 23:13, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

coordinator expenses

Hi! Thank you for the report! I have just one question: you used 9 000 USD for volunteer coordinator expenses before and now you ask for 50% increase. What do you think about your involvement during prior project and new project? How many hours/day have you spent and why do you need an increase? rubin16 (talk) 18:25, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Hi rubin16! I plan to increase the work I will be performing this time round. In addition to finding myself working more than the amount of hours I specified last I would also like to keep my engagement as high as possible between September-December, where last period I had to decrease my workload due to other engagements. This way I can be more responsive to the needs of the community, having less time-constraints during the fall. I hope that answers your question. CFCF (talk) 15:53, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

comments from Thepwnco

@CFCF: Hello and thanks for the renewal request, as well as your final report - I just finished reading it and wanted to congratulate you on the success of this project to date! It's really impressive that you not only achieved but surpassed all of your short-term goals.

As for this renewal request, I think working towards sustainability of the project is a great idea. Right now, however, I worry that you are planning too many activities for a period of only 6 months and I think the renewal request (and the project) would benefit from more focus so you do not find yourself too stretched.

Some other comments and questions:

• I love the idea of capturing ‘What James does’! The methodology and tools for creating this type of document would also make for a good Learning Pattern (as far as I know nothing like this exists yet in the library).
• While I like the idea of a survey (leading to a report on each community's context and challenges), I think it is not as much of a priority as sustainability planning. Perhaps the focus here could be on developing but not deploying a survey and report template with the idea that community organizers or others could then take over
• With regards to the idea of rolling news - do you see yourself as taking on the responsibility of creating/curating the content for this? If not, have you had expressions of interest from others who would like to do this?

cheers. -Thepwnco (talk) 12:16, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

Comments from Jane023

I think this has been a great achievement, and I totally sympathize with the difficulties with the communities and really like the way you let them solve how to integrate the translations (or not) on their own. It was my biggest concern when first voting on the proposal. Now, after the fact, I can only say that I am amazed at your progress and very impressed at the list of objectives to come. Clearly you have turned these sticky issues with the various language communities into important learning patterns we can all profit from and I applaud you. As I write, the Dutch chapter is seeing a lot of flack on the Dutch Wikipedia's village pump from an effort made by WMNL simply to inform users of a survey. WMNL wants to use the survey results in order to better align itself with the community, but already the dissonant voices are being heard, discounting the use of direct messaging to the 250 most active users (though a banner is also in use). I totally agree that communication is practically impossible when means of communication fail due to pushback from the community (the direct messaging was an attempt to inform people who have turned banner ads off, and we have no way of knowing who does or does not do that). I think tools like the ones you are proposing would be useful to the entire movement and maybe you should think about getting broader support than just an IEG grant, but hey, whatever you think you CAN do, I am willing to fund at this point. Especially since I didn't believe you could do what you have done so far. Jane023 (talk) 08:48, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Jane. The languages were we have had the greatest success are the those which have been most lead by the local community, this being Persian, Italian, Oriya, Romanian and Chinese. With Mervat leading Arabic and User:Drgulcu involved with Turkish we are starting to have successes their as well. It can just really take a single language champion, but without one we struggle. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:37, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

Approved for another 6 months

Hi CFCF,

Congratulations on your successes so far! Based on what you've created to-date, and our understanding that continued support is needed in order to build a sustainable future for this program, I'm approving this 6-month renewal. Looking forward to partnering with you as you continue to grow and organize the community involved in these medical translations! Our grants administrator, Jtud (WMF) will be in touch soon to setup your renewed agreement so you can continue this IEG for another 6 months.

Best wishes, Siko (WMF) (talk) 21:43, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

Great to hear. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:59, 10 June 2015 (UTC)