Grants talk:PEG/WM AM/Wiki Camp 2015

A decision has been made on this grant. Comments are still welcome on this page.

GAC members who support this request

1. -Violetova (talk) 16:02, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
2. quite an impressive report rubin16 (talk) 07:51, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
3. MADe (talk) 13:38, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
4. based on MADe questions I will support this project --DerekvG (talk) 13:50, 10 March 2015 (UTC)
5. Good report --Hasive • talk • 07:15, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

GAC comments

prior experience

Hi, guys! I saw that you mentioned Wikicamp Vanadzor 2014 - is there any report available about the budget and results of this event? rubin16 (talk) 10:27, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi, dear rubin16. You can find both of them in the section Resources. --Lilitik22 (talk) 06:44, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

comments MADe

Hey, you budget for 200 people. This seems a lot .. how do you envisage to reach this amount of attendees? Does your organisation has the potential to cope with this kind of organisation? MADe (talk) 20:50, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi. We organized a summer camp last year where we had 135 participants. Since last year our Wikipedia Education program has enlarged, we have many new editors. During this period 9 new schools joined to the existing 6 schools who participate in the program. On January we had 309 Education program editors in Wikipedia, 42 editors from Arevatsag and 11 editors from Lernapat in Wiktionary. So we have more than enough participants. Besides, 200 campers include 8 group leaders, 1 from financial team, 5 from wiki team, 2 from technical team and 2 guests for each term.

As to the potential, we have organized 2 term Summer wikicamps in 2014, 1 Winter wikicamp (see Winter wikicamp report in WM AM interim report under "Educational projects" section) in 2015 and all of them had a great success and the participants wait impatiently for the next camps. Thank you--Lilitik22 (talk) 10:16, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Wow. It seems as you are indeed able to attract the 200 people you talk about. You did not reply to my questions on handling that number of attendees. How much people are in your organising team? How does the team compare with the summer camp last year, has the team grown? MADe (talk) 19:23, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Dear MADe, at this moment organization team includes 8 group leaders, 1 person from financial team, 5 from wiki team, 2 from technical team, 2 experienced wikieditors who will help the wiki team in workshops, in total 18 people in each term of the camp. The 13 of 18 people are the same organizers as of the summer and winter camps. The responsibilities of the teams are written in the grant. These people have agreed to help in organizing both camps, the involvement of other volunteers is in the process. In Summer camp 2014 we had 14 people in organization team for each term of the camp.--Lilitik22 (talk) 11:39, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Hey, thanks for the reply. I'm now fully confident in the projet, and I added my support to this request. MADe (talk) 13:39, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you very much dear MADe. --Lilitik22 (talk) 15:31, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

comment by DerekvG

May I suggest that if you plan aother similar event (i.e. next year) please inform us on what the financial effort is the participants make to attend the camp, and/or if they come to the camp for free what is your motivation behind this. If only some of the participants are invited for free on what grounds are those people selected (like low income, refugee status, war victims or handicaps).— The preceding unsigned comment was added by DerekvG (talk)

Dear DerekvG this will be our 3rd camp to be organized (1 in 2 terms in Summer 2014 and in winter 2015). In all the camps those editors could participate for free who were very active each month during Armenian Wikipedia Education program. The same principle will be used this time as well. Our motivation is the one - to encourage all the participants to continue editing after the camp as well as to involve in organizing different wikievents by their own (e.g. workshops) and to spread wiki movement in their home cities. Thank you for your comment. --Lilitik22 (talk) 06:58, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

thanks for your reply --DerekvG (talk) 08:50, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Comments of Polimerek

Hi, How many editors from your previous camps are still active? Have you checked this? Polimerek (talk) 11:08, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi, dear Polimerek. I've just answered your question below. I'm copying it here.

We made a metrics of the last year camp participants. From August 27-March 9, 75 out of 135 have editted after the camp (during one year) which is 55%. After the camp most of the campers who live in Yerevan take part in Saturday workshops organized by WM AM till now. All of them help us during workshops and teach wikiediting tools to newbies. Last year we had wiki campers from Shirak, Lori, Armavir, Kotayk, Aragatsotn regions as well as from Nagorno-Karabakh. Many of these participants expressed a desire to spread wiki ideas and wiki editing in their home cities. They got active in their schools, universities. After the camp wiki editors from Shirak (1 workshop in Photon school, 5 workshops in KASA Fondation Humanitaire Suisse, Gyumri branch), Lori (4 workshops in Vanadzor) and Yerevan (Physmath school - 2 workshops, AYB school - 7 workshops, Yerevan State University - 4 workshops) organized wiki workshops in their schools by their own initiative. Several participants agreed to be volunteers in the wiki clubs, which WMAM opened in 2014 (Aparan wikiclub, Yeghvard wikiclub).--Lilitik22 (talk) 12:23, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

WMF comments

Thank you for this thoughtful grant request. We are very interested in the direction you are taking this project, to focus more on Armenian Wiktionary and Wikisource, and appreciate that you have been learning from your experiments focusing on Wiktionary as part of your Winter Camp. We agree these could be high potential projects for engaging newer contributors in Armenian, and will be very interested to learn about the results. Thank you for responding to GAC concerns around the size of your volunteer team and your capacity to handle the expansion of this project. While we also found your responses encouraging because you are increasing the number of people on the organizing team by 5, this might be an aspect of the project you continue to monitor closely, to make sure your core volunteers are not overworked as the project expands. We have a few questions and suggestions for improving this proposal:

1. If you are inviting guests from the Wikimedia Foundation to attend, you do not need to budget for travel and accommodation for these guests, since the Wikimedia Foundation will take on the cost of travel and accommodation if any staff do attend. Please remove these items from your budget.
2. We reviewed your measures of success, and while they are ambitious, we are optimistic that you can meet these targets for content produced at the camp based on the results of the previous camps you’ve organized. We would encourage you, since you are considering expanding this project, to begin to focus on some longer term measures of success. We see these longer term results as major benefits of your work, that can justify its expansion and the higher costs.
   • We would like an update on the retention rates of participants from your camps last summer (2014), to better understand how participants remained engaged and continued to contribute after the camps. We would also like a better understanding of how successful participants were in bringing back information from the camps to their communities (e.g. through local workshops).
   • Thank you for including your target around 100 contributors editing 3 months after the event. We would encourage you to also include some longer term targets around retention of contributors 6 months or 12 months after the event. We realize that you may not have this information ready at the time you submit your grant report for this project, but would appreciate these updates over time if this program is something that you are considering continuing year after year. We think these longer term retention rates are important.
   • We encourage you to also track and include targets for the offline activities of participants (e.g., X number of participants have organized local events in their communities within X months of attending the camp, X number of participants have attended local events in their communities within X months of attending the camp).
3. Before approving this request, we would also like an idea of how many participants in this years camp you expect to return to participate again (who have participated in a previous camp), and how many will be new participants (who have not participated in a previous camp).
4. The focus on Western Armenian funded by your other grant will be an interesting aspect for this year’s projects and we look forward to learning about how this fits with your overall Wikicamp program as well as your other work. We did want to check in with some of the challenges you have faced in the past both around the quality of content produced in Western Armenian, and the difficulty in supporting diaspora participants after the event. Would you please share some steps you are taking to address these challenges? How are you going to help diaspora participants continue to contribute even in places where there are not local resources?
5. We did also want to ask about the increase in costs of food and accommodation per participant this year. We note that an increase of 1500 AMD per person per night, while only about 3 US dollars, does result in a significant overall increase when multiplied by 14 nights and 200 participants. (Also, in most cases, cost per participant for an event actually goes down as volume of participants increases.) It would be good to have a brief explanation here about why this increase is needed, since costs for food and accommodation are the bulk of your expenses.
6. Are you going to continue with the system you used in your Winter Camp of offering the camp to some participants for free and to others for a fee? Is the process for selecting participants based on contributions going to be similar?

Finally, please remember that if this grant is approved and WMAM also submits an Annual Plan Grant proposal, that WMAM will need to end this project grant and return any unused funds to Wikimedia Foundation at the start of the Annual Plan Grant period, in the event that WMAM receives an Annual Plan Grant. This means that you should also budget for whatever expenses may be incurred after 30 June in your current APG proposal. If you have questions about that, let us know.

Thanks again, and we look forward to your responses. Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 19:18, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Dear Winifred, thank you for your comments and suggestions, we took all of them into consideration.

1. Done. We didn't know that WMF takes on the cost of travel and accommodation if any staff do attend any event. We deleted the budget for it. Thank you.
2. Longer term measures of success are a good idea and we agree with your arguments. We changed the 3 to 6 months.
   • We made a metrics of the last year camp participants. From August 27-March 9, 75 out of 135 have editted after the camp (during one year) which is 55%. After the camp most of the campers who live in Yerevan take part in Saturday workshops organized by WM AM till now. All of them help us during workshops and teach wikiediting tools to newbies. Last year we had wiki campers from Shirak, Lori, Armavir, Kotayk, Aragatsotn regions as well as from Nagorno-Karabakh. Many of these participants expressed a desire to spread wiki ideas and wiki editing in their home cities. They got active in their schools, universities. After the camp wiki editors from Shirak (1 workshop in Photon school, 5 workshops in KASA Fondation Humanitaire Suisse, Gyumri branch), Lori (4 workshops in Vanadzor) and Yerevan (Physmath school - 2 workshops, AYB school - 7 workshops, Yerevan State University - 4 workshops) organized wiki workshops in their schools by their own initiative. Several participants agreed to be volunteers in the wiki clubs, which WMAM opened in 2014 (Aparan wikiclub, Yeghvard wikiclub).
   • We changed the measures for the last point, as our camp is a continuing project. When the camp is over, after 6 months we'll update the campers' contribution statistics and will inform you.
   • Done, we updated the section "Measures of success".
3. As I mentioned in my answer to MADE's comment, since last year our Wikipedia Education program has enlarged, we have many new editors and schools who have joined to our Education program. So we'll have many editors who attend the camp for the first time. There are also editors from the previous camps who are very active and eager to participate in the camp this time as well. We'll check once again their activity in wikiprojects during the whole year and if they correspond to the criterion, we'll take them to the camp too.
4. We are on the way of developing Western Armenian content in Wikipedia by involving editors from different communities of Armenian Diaspora. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation supports us in this mission. At this moment WM AM president Susanna Mkrtchyan is in Beirut, Lebanon making appointments with the local Armenian Diaspora and trying to involve more people. After the camp we have an agreement to organize workshops for 10 teachers from Diaspora who will return to their communities and spread wikiprojects there, by training their students and by creating local wikicommunities in schools of Diaspora. Negotiations are ongoing to organize a Wikicamp in Lebanon with the help of Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation for the youth of different countries' Armenian Diaspora. Wikipedia Education Program participants from Armenia will also participate in this camp.
5. The increase in costs of food and accommodation per participant has several reasons. First of all at the end of 2014 almost all kind of food and service prices increased in Armenia. Secondly, "Voske getak" rest house in Aghveran has more convenient accommodations compared with last year's "Tsitsernak" camp. For example, in Tsitsernak all the toilets and bathrooms were outside the rooms which caused inconvenience. In "Voske getak" we don't have such a problem. The manager of the rest house already decreased the price for us as 100 people will stay there for 14 days during high season. We also organize Wiki Loves Science weekends there, for which we pay 9000 AMD per day for one participant during low season as few people - almost 32 editors, participate in one WLS weekend. However, in this case as well "Voske getak" charges us 9000 AMD instead of 12000 AMD (low season). Now we negotiate to hold August camp there too but the rest house doesn't agree, as he gives it to tourists with highest prices during high seasons. We need a place with great and many playgrounds to organize different sport contests which is an important part of our camp routine. And finding an appropriate place, which fits to all the criteria mentioned above with less price isn't possible. Besides, "Tsitsernak" camp has also increased its prices and informed us that he can't provide the camp with the same prices as last year.
6. We'll announce the start of application processing, so the students who want to participate paying the camp fee, can also apply. As last year we'll meet them, conduct a short workshop to find out their computer and editing skills, after which we'll decide whether they can take part in the camp or not. The process for selecting participants remains the same.

Thank you for reminding us about the camp grant expenses and APG. We'll discuss it and if we have any questions we'll ask you. Thank you once again! --Lilitik22 (talk) 12:16, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Completion date change request

Dear Alex, as our APG was approved we ask you to change the completion date of Wiki Camp 2015 from August 30 to June 30. And as we will be busy in August with the second term of Summer Wikicamp is it possible to change the reporting date from August 30 to September 30? Thank you.--Lilitik22 (talk) 12:26, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Hi Lilitik22. Thanks for the quick notice. I will change your completion date to June 30th and please remember that no PEG funds from this grant can be spent going forward and should be returned. The final report will be due September 30th. Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 16:08, 2 July 2015 (UTC)