Grants talk:PEG/Ernest-Mtl/Projet Québec/Canada

Evaluation by the GAC

GAC members who support this request

1. Me. Yup. Support. Yeah. Alleycat80 (talk) 11:04, 18 September 2014 (UTC)
2. Polimerek (talk) 18:43, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Note to the reviewer

I would like to disclose that I'm married to a Wikimedia Foundation staffer but he is uninvolved in any part of this project. --Ernest-Mtl (talk) 22:55, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

GAC comments

Can I offer a simple idea to boost contribution? Please think about having a simple website with very VERY simple URL to accompany this (like "http://contribute.ca"), with simple instructions on why it's important and all the links to tutotrials, or wikisource howtos, etc. This should appear on shirts and buttons... non-costly (almost), and might be beneficial. Other than that, this looks great. Alleycat80 (talk) 11:03, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, I love the idea!!!  :) I'll reserve a domain right away and if I get the grant, the URL will also appear on the shirt! Thanks!  :) --Ernest-Mtl (talk) 16:59, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

A new domain jecontribue.ca just been accepted for the project. In the next days, I'll prepare the site to link to the different places on Wikisource... --Ernest-Mtl (talk) 17:08, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks ;-) (just got back from some off GAC time, glad to see that you got funded, and I wish you all the best with the project, Ernest-Mtl! Alleycat80 (talk) 20:42, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

The idea is great, but I have 2 practical concerns:

1. Costs of shipment - you put to your budget proposals only costs of items (T-shirts and buttons) - but if you are about to ship them to all new Wikisources contribiutors - there is also a subject of costs of shipment. I don't know the costs of shipment in Canada - but in Poland the cost of shipment of single button would be higher than the cost of the button. Are these costs to be covered by Wikimedia CA?
2. Scale of shipment and personal data collection - in order to ship anything to a newbie - you must contact him/her and ask for shipment address - then put the address on the envelope, insert the item and visit the post office. Who is going to do it? Who will maintain the database of users?. What about the privacy regulations in Canada?

Polimerek (talk) 09:31, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Hello Polimerek.

• As per the buttons, they will only be given in events. It's true sending them by mail wouldn't be cost effective. For the T-shirts, these "rewards" will be mainly given in the monthly events we'll beholding, so the major part won't have any shipment involved. If we must send a few by mail, I will be able to discuss it with Wikimedia Canada and even if there is no budget for that, it's not like I can't afford this. I have been approved a 1000$ budget from my company in order to pursue this project that is quite dear to me. This budget was mainly for travel expenses, but if I need some of it for some postage (and here in Canada, sending a t-shirt by mail is less than 2$), this is something I don't mind using this 1000$ budget for.  :) And it's not like we have thousands of t-shirts to give out... We're planning to have only 260 of them to promote the launching of the project.
• It's sure that if someone need his/her t-shirt to be mailed, they must provide a valid mailing address. This doesn't bring a big concern, from my point of view, as they are requesting it. They don't "have to" receive the t-shirt. Anyone who would not feel comfortable giving away a mailing address could always get it at any of the events. For those who would give their addresses for the t-shirt to be mailed, my office deals with tax returns, revenues, company commercial informations and other highly confidential matters every day. It would be simple to send it and be sure all the information was shredded afterward as it's a everyday policy at the office. Finally, for the database of users, the only information kept will be the usenames for the Wikimetrics reports and a Y/N flag if they have received their t-shirt or not. No address, no real names will be kept in this matter after the expedition of a t-shirt if it's done by mail.

Hoping these answers will be of help in answering your concerns. --Ernest-Mtl (talk) 15:44, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for answers. They make sense, so I have no doubt now, that your project is going to be successful :-) Polimerek (talk) 18:45, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Bonjour :) Pourquoi avoir choisi de faire des Tshirts et des boutons comme goodies ? Pour wikisource, j'aurais pensé à des choses plus proches de l'univers des livres, comme les stylos et marque-pages.
Hi :) Why have chosen tshirts and buttons for the goodies and not pens and bookmarks or other options more related to books ? Léna (talk) 09:13, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

fr Bonjour Léna... L'idée de stylos ou marque-pages est en effet plus relié à l'univers wikisourcien, en effet. Cependant, deux choses nous ont fait plutôt pencher vers les t-shirts et les macarons. Premièrement, le stylo et le marque-page sont un symbole de l'ancienne "technologie", donc l'écriture manuscrite et le livre. Or, Wikisource, son but est justement de prendre ces archives manuscrites et ces livres et de les rendre facilement accessible partout oui, mais en format digital... C'est un premier pas vers le "plus de crayons, plus de livres"... :) Deuxièmement, le stylo et le marque-page ont en effet une belle connotation "romantique" au projet. Cependant, il est rare que quelqu'un remarquera l'inscription sur un stylo que vous avez et ira vous posez des questions sur le projet. Or, le t-shirt et le macaron nous accorde plus de rayonnement, et donne un effet de visibilité que nous désirons. Nous voulons que les gens soient piqués dans leur curiosité... --Ernest-Mtl (talk) 14:55, 24 September 2014 (UTC)
en Hi Léna. It's true pens and bookmarks are in fact, more related to this Wikisource environment. but, two things made us decide towards t-shirts and buttons. First, pens and bookmarks are a symbol of the old technology, manuscripts and books. Wikisource, its main goal is making those manuscript and book archives easily accessible for anyone, yes, but in digital format... This is a first and small step towards "no more pens, no more books"...  :) Second, pens and bookmarks have a cute romantic connotation to this project. But we seldomly see someone asking questions about the meaning of the small prints on the pen you're using. On the contrary, t-shirts and buttons give us more out-reach, more visibility. We want people to be curious about it... --Ernest-Mtl (talk) 14:55, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Community comments

Tony1 comments and questions

Ernest, thank you.

• How are your "to be confirmed" venues going?
• Great to have your efforts going into this, and the in-kind support of Wikimedia Canada.
• Measures of success: "See who's returning, building their confidence, trying to create a higher community value and encourage them to help others who begins"—these are good goals, and can be expressed in the activities section; but I don't think they're suitable as measures of success. Especially that you've got it all in your subsequent paragraph. That's excellent. Any training of new contributors possible (even by offering a mentoring page onwiki where they can receive some personal treatment, feedback)?
• Fit with strategy: well, I think the intention is that you specify which strategies, but since I strongly disagree with the instructions to "concentrate on 1–2 of them", I'm happy for it to be vague.
• Are you receiving any support from the existing French Wikisource community? The section on community notification is blank. Can we be of assistance here?
• My main concern is that t-shirts and buttons are not very motivational. Have you thought of monetary awards? Nothing like cash to create competitive motivation.

Tony (talk) 13:16, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Hi Tony1!

• One of the yet-to-be-confirmed venue is for the City of Mascouche. I've talked to the mayor last week and the project is actually at the city's cultural comity. They meet once every 2 weeks, so I hope to hear from them before the end of the month. There is another one, a private college here in the region, where i'd like to include Wikisource as part of extracurricular activites in History, Poetry (French courses) and Theater. Wikimedia Canada are also doing a lot of contact lately for October, month of contribution. These could lead to future presentations of the Projet Québec/Canada in historical societies and other universities in Quebec (and also contacts are being made for a few French (or bilingual) universities in Ontario and New-Brunswick.
• Wikimedia Canada is quite happy to see that other projects are launching here. Wikipedia, Wikidata and Commons already have lots of support, but Wikisource is quite unknown in Québec and Canada. Trying to attract contributors into a project where we are not talking about composition, bringing new knowledge with source into the community but saving the old ones and bringing them to a new life with today's technology.
• Measures of success: I've edited that part a few days ago to give specifications, as we'll track with Wikimetrics and get up-to-date reports of the users participating to the project. About the training of new contributors, every events is planned to continue in a computer lab to allow the people to register and try to contribute on the project's books (and others)... The main priority is to bring an interest into these archives and what options the new technologies give us, and to bring them to edit, with experienced users available to help them in their first steps. The Projet Québec/Canada also has it's own page on the FR Wikisource, where we can give mentoring as well between the monthly source-a-thon sessions.
• The community on FR Wikisource is of a great help, although very occopied with their own projects (actually, mainly with France and BnF, the France national library). But since the beginning I'm on this sister-project, a very experienced user, Aristoi, has always been fast and a reliable source of information about the project and how to handle new pages and books into the project. With only a handful of contributors on the FR wiki, we are all trying to bring new contributors to the project and support whomever needs help. That's how we can grow into a bigger community with a common goal... Actually, the biggest assistance we'll need will be provided by BAnQ (National archive of Quebec) and Université de Montréal, two of the biggest sources of archives in the province. That's the reason the stakeholders of these two institutions are already confirmed to assist at the presentations. We want to show them the result we could all achieve working together on spreading their archives in digital formats. Especially the BAnQ, we know they have budgets to digitalise their archives but as of now, they didn't have any purpose except having them digitalised. With Projet Quebec/Canada, we are offering a mean to bring all this digitalizing to a new level.
• For some people, t-shirts and buttons may seem insignificant, but from my past experience in Wikimanias and Hackathons, I would tend to believe the contrary. All the events I attended (Gdanks Wikimania 2010, Amsterdam Hackathon 2013, Hong Kong Wikimania 2013, Zurich Hackathon 2014, London Wikimania 2014), a high percentage of the attendees where wearing t-shirts and buttons from actual and past events. Not only it's visibility to the projects themselves but they are a public statement of their belief into the projects. People are proud to contribute and they like showing it to the world with t-shirts, pins, stickers...
• About cash rewards, I'm not fond of these. I personnaly think money brings contributors for the wrong reason. People are attracted to money, but what happens when the money had been given? Most people will leave and the whole exercise will have proven big result while the money was at stake... But they don't bring community bonds for a common goal. Although I'm not fond of monetary awards, I went "fishing" with some big companies to have 3 eReaders to give away to contributors. After all, Wikisource is taking paper archives to be digitalised and processed to give easy access in ePub format. This could be a way to attract more contributors, but our main goal is to attract them in a long term way, not just for the possibility of winning something.

I hope these additional informations were answering your inquiries. I hope my English was sufficient to explain everything. I'm not that fluent in this language... :) --Ernest-Mtl (talk) 03:30, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Ernest, you're welcome. It is we who should be grateful that you're writing in English—getting your meanings across is what counts, and you do it. I perceive significant loyalty and determination, so although I'd rather there was more engagement with fr.Wikisource editors, and question the nature of the rewards, this seems like a very worthy project to fund. In terms of criterion 8, the implicit expectation is that you'll be around for a good deal longer to continue the impact of this project. Tony (talk) 01:43, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

WMF comments

Thank you for this grant request and your engagement with the discussion. We're excited about supporting more activity around Wikisource in Canada. This request is approved. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 23:34, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Request for continuation

Hi everyone... I know I'm a little late on this topic, but I've been very busy coordinating this project and having my regular job as well...

Here's a few facts:

• Since last october, many presentations were made in public libraries and we are still having a monthly event ;
• Since October 2014, Projet Québec/Canada was able to publish over 20 books of our heritage in this project and many are close to be completed soon as well ;
• Projet Québec/Canada joined the "Projet of the week" for national libraries on french Wikisource, that is bringing many people to contribute to the feature presentation of BAnQ, a GLAM collaboration in this project ;
• The entities we're working with are governments, cities, public institutions and it was kinda of overly optimistic to have them react in a 3 months span ;
• Great sub-projects have emerged from this original project, bringing more and more people to know about Wikisource and contributing on it (Fondation Lionel-Groulx, for example, a foundation about Quebec's history) ;
• Quebec's national collection books are being digitalised especially for our project as we speak, to increase the diversity of available books in Projet Québec/Canada ;
• Concordia Univeristy in Montreal is actually discussing with ACFAS (one of our collaborator) and WMCA about focusing on Projet Québec/Canada and Wikisource to be used as the template for archiving their science archives ;
• ARGUS, a magazine published by the Corporation des bibliothécaires professionnels du Québec (Professionnal librarians of Quebec association) a presentation to bring the librairians in the project, as they are on the front row to challenge the people to participate ;

In light of these facts, the original project that was for 3 months, would benefit an extension on a one year span (so from October 2014 to September 2015) as all the results of everything that was put in place since the beginning of the project, although great result were met so far. I think it would benefit to this project that the results of everything that was put in place, the (positive) decisions now being made by government and public entities and great collaborations that emerged from all the contacts with GLAM, Argus, BAnQ, to be part of this whole thing. Now that foundations are in place and the walls are being built as we speak, the upcoming results would reflect the positive impact Projet Québec/Canada will have done to the Wikisource french community and the open distribution of our national heritage in Québec.

Thanks for reading. Don't hesitate to comment or ask questions... --Ernest-Mtl (talk) 03:24, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi Ernest-Mtl . Thanks for this update and congrats on what sounds like has been a successful project thus far. The extension of the project until September 15, 2015 is approved. Please let us know if there are any changes to the budget. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 19:07, 6 May 2015 (UTC)