Grants talk:PEG/WM ZA/WLM-ZA-2014

Evaluation by the GAC

Comments

Hi Douglas and Dumi,

1. project management is nowhere defined what it means. There is quantity of two - is it a two month salary for a project manager? That should be outlined somewhere, including a brief description of the working conditions and tasks.
2. media and event promotion is quite a significant amount: on what will it be spent? Regular PR measures are normally for free (press releases etc.), so I can only assume that you will be printing flyers or similar. Can you please fill in a on that?
3. prizes: as I have commented on other similar grant requests I always have a headache with spending significant amounts of money for prizes. First I wouldn't want to gove money as a price, second they are an ideal sponsorship opportunity, like getting a good camera from a vendor as a first prize.

--Manuel Schneider^(bla) (+/-) 10:13, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi Manuel Schneider.

1. This is a nationally organised event and as such will require the work of two people in different parts of the country. This is why there are two project managers. One is myself and is based in Cape Town and other other is Dumisani Ndubane who is based in Pretoria/Johannesburg. The tasks include organisation of the overall event along with event coordination, event publication in the media (this often involves radio interviews, preparing media briefings for print media, seeking and securing as much free media as possible, giving presentations at photographic societies (which is not easy to secure I have learnt)), organising, securing and coordinating the judges and the judging process,
2. R5000 is not a lot of money to spend on media and event promotion but yes it also is not a small amount either. The money will go on two sources. Paid media in print media (some thing we have not tried before and am eager to experiment with, and paid digital media. Digital media includes -but not limited to- facebook advertising which is a great way to increase awareness and this time we want to experiment with targeting photographic enthusiasts particularly.
3. We have found that offering prizes is a great way to both incentive participation as well as raise awareness of the event. I consider myself quite good at getting freebees from partners but at this project's current state of development I would find myself having trouble trying to sell the worth of such sponsorship. However we have not been without some considerable success in this area with regards to the grant Heritage Western Cape has given us (with the strings attached that we can only spend the money on photos taken in one small part of South Africa) and ORMS who have given us substantial material support such as the support they gave us for the WLM 2013 exhibition we held last month. All indications currently are here that securing free prizes would be a) a dificult sell and b) come with strings attached. Having no prizes would reduce the level of public interest in this event considerably. I share your concerns about giving money away and we have sought to mitigate this by giving the prizes in the form of vouchers for photographic equipment. --Discott (talk) 18:42, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

+ Some information about National prizes structure would be good to know as well. Polimerek (talk) 09:36, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi Polimerek. Great question and one which was asked last year as well. I suppose it is something I should just automatically put into the bid. The proposed prizes for this year's event are:

• first prize - R 10000
  

$  931.8 / €  682.24 / £  569.22

• second prize - R 6500
  

$  605.67 / €  443.45 / £  370

• third prize - R 4000
  

$  372.72 / €  272.89 / £  227.69

• best proposed monument - R 3000
  

$  279.54 / €  204.67 / £  170.77

• and the 2nd best proposed monument - R 1500
  

$  139.77 / €  102.34 / £  85.38.

Heritage Western Cape has also pledged to give us R 5000

$  465.9 / €  341.12 / £  284.61 for the next 3 years for the photographs taken in the Western Cape, this money is not reflected in the budget. We have already signed and MOU with Heritage Western Cape and I plan to use at lest half of that money for the Western Cape prize category. All prizes are given in the form on photographic vouchers from ORMS, one of our partner organisations and one of the best photographic relators in Africa. They have proven to have been one of our best partners so far printing photographs for free or at cost and connecting us with their 16,000 customers. --Discott (talk) 18:10, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

+ Along with the above questions i would like to ask another point. You have not explained the 'National Prizes' section and there is no event details as well. On the prize giving event you have preparing for 50 people and 6 of them will get the travel and accommodation scholarship. Are they the winners of does it include some other people? --Nasir Khan Saikat (talk) 16:59, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi Nasir Khan Saikat. Good question, the 6 people in question include the top three winners as well as the best proposed monument winner. The remaining 2 slots are so that Wikimedia ZA's president and my fellow event organiser Dumisani can attend the award ceremony from Johannesburg along with one of the other directors -also from Johannesburg- who will also be assisting in the event. As for a venue location, that has not featured in this budget as I am confident that I can secure a venue for free and have a number of locations already in mind for the occasion. The award ceremony will be held in Cape Town with the launch event being in Johannesburg. --Discott (talk) 18:42, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

• I wonder why grant requests from WM ZA always ask for 14% VAT separately? It has been said back in 2012 that you won't ask for VAT separately in the future. --Saqib (talk) 11:32, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

Good point, adjusted and VAT is removed accordingly. --Discott (talk) 12:39, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

Comments/queries from Tony1

Hi, I'm always supportive of the general principle of WLM funding. Can I say how relieving it is that you haven't already started the project before applying for funding: it's not retrospective. Thus we've passed the first test.

Great work in getting those partners onboard.

Measures of success

1. Increase the quality of photographs submitted in comparison to entries from the 2013 event.
2. Increase the number of participants submitting photographs in comparison to the number of entrants from the 2013 event.
3. Increase the diversity of pictures of monuments taken so that a larger total number of monuments in South Africa have a picture.
4. Secondary metric of success: achieve 5 000 or more uploaded photographs of South African heritage sites during the month of Sepetember 2014. This objective is secondary to the above two. So if fewer than 5 000 photographs are submitted but over 80 people competed and the quality of the top twenty photographs has increased then it will be a success.

For (1), how will you assess that quantum, both for 2013 and 2014 events? It's a significant matter for WLM; my experience has been that many of the submissions could have been improved with a few tips, hints, guidelines, about composition, focus, lighting, time of day, avoidance of parked cars next to beautiful buildings, etc. Not so much that it turns off amateur photographers, but enough to steer it a little.

I hope you don't mind but I am going answer you using this colourful text. This is a very good question as assessing the 'quality' of a photograph is a very subjective thing. And it is especially changeling to do quantitatively as I hope to do and even harder to do this so as to compare one year from another. Currently our judging system reduces all top entries down to a numerical score.

I plan to use this score to determine quality and quality improvement (or hopefully not decline). At the end of September after the competition closes the judges look through all of the submitted photographs. From all of them the judges pick their favourites and give each photograph a three scores out of 5. One score to measure its atheistic appeal, one for its ability to capture what it is like to be at the monument (as a number of them will be used for Wikipedia so this is important), and another one for its artistic or technical merit. These numerical scores can then be used to calculate a total score for each year. In order to avoid time bias I am going to ask the judges to calculate the top twenty photographs from 2012, 2013, and 2014.

I love the idea of giving suggestions to for amateur photographers. I think we will do that.--Discott (talk) 19:20, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

For (2), we need the pre-existing numbers and what you'd be happy to achieve this year. It doesn't hold you to achieving it, but it's normal practice to compare when we see your report, and learn lessons in some cases (either about planning, estimating; or about what went right and what, if anything, could have been done better).

Fair enough: in 2012 (the first year which South Africa participated) we had 1861 photographs submitted by 128 participants. In 2013 we had 6432 photographs submitted by 89 participants. So we have over the past two years increased the quantity of photographs (and I believe their quality) but at the cost of the number of participants. This year I want to see higher participation rates and much higher quality but I don't care so much about number of photographs. --Discott (talk) 19:20, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

For (3), "larger" indicates that we need before and after numbers. It's too vague.

Currently only a small number of monuments are covered by the photographs submitted so far. Idealy I would like to see all the landmarks on all of the lists for each province at this link of have at least one photograph of them. I will need to do a survey of all of the monuments but that is project that must wait as right now I must prepare for WikiIndaba. Sorry if I am too vague. I know what I want to achieve but I am open to guidance on how to better evaluate it. --Discott (talk) 19:34, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

For (4), this would make more sense if we had the metrics for (2) and (3). You could retain just the first sentence, with the count of pics submitted last year in relation to that success-metric of 5000.

Please see answer 2).--Discott (talk) 19:34, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Other issues

Who's on the jury? If you haven't finalised names, or don't want to give them here, what categories of people will serve? It's unclear who the "6" flights and accomm. are for.

The judges are all independent of the competition organisers (so I play no part in it other than computing the judges collective scores). We seek out professional photographers and figures in the South African photographic community to sit on our panel. I am happy to give you the names of the people we currently have on our judges panel but I would like to shake it up a bit and invite one or two new judges following our existing principles of judicial photographic professionalism. You can find a list of our judges from last year -most of whom I we will use again this year- on our website here.

I am currently considering upping the budget for transport and accommodation so that at least one judge from Johannesburg can attend. Its a great way to say thank you but also very few of the judges take us up on the offer. What are your thoughts, should I increase the budget so we can have at least one Johannesburg based judge with us at the awards in Cape Town?

--Discott (talk) 19:20, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Will you write press releases for the prize-giving ceremony? Keen to see this built into WLM events so the movement can gain advantage from it. It's a possible way of attracting more editors/photographers into the movement.

Yes and yes. We will write press releases for the prize-giving ceremony in addition to inviting our partners and winners. This year we hope to attract more photographers but building off our growing, but still small, relationships with all the photographic societies in South Africa and building off our rapidly developing relationship with ORMS. Last year we approached ORMS too close to the event time to get them much involved. This year will be different. --Discott (talk) 19:34, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

The provision of information on Commons description pages, and categorisation, is not mentioned. Who will do this? Will they be in local languages and English? For example, a Xhosa-related pic in Xhosa and English?

We will do this as is now the tradition here. We did it in previous years before as well. Although we encourage people to add in all South African languages they know I can only do them in English as my knowledge of Xhosa and Afrikaans is too poor to do that and this year we lack an Afrikaans member on the organising team. I am however putting out a call for an Afrikaans volunteer to help out. As for Xhosa or Zulu, I am unfortunately doubtful we will find someone but we will also put a call out for a volunteer. All this is a long way of saying "it will most probably be all done in English."--Discott (talk) 19:34, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Tony (talk) 06:09, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Grant Approved

Thanks to WMZA and the GAC for your engagement on this request. It's great to see many learnings from last year have been incorporated in planning this year's event.

Thank you for responding to Tony's request regarding metrics. We definitely need that context. Another important metric is the number of photos used on wiki projects x months after the event. We encourage you to include this type of metric, which can be tracked using the glamorous tool.

We also agree that developing a strategy for assessing the coverage of monuments in South Africa is an important step. Hopefully now that WikiIndaba is over, the WLM team can review coverage of the current momument list and develop goals for this year, including more targeted outreach.

Please see the program resources for photo events page, which include guidelines and tips for shooting higher quality photos. It would be great to review these guidelines and compile a "Top 10 Tips" list which WLM participants will see when they land on the WMZA WLM homepage. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 20:48, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Alex. I have just adjusted the total ask amount taking out VAT as suggested above. Thanks for the pointers on using the glamorous tool, I think that using it to see how many images submitted are used on the Wikis might be a great way to evaluate the usefulness of pictures submitted (a vector of quality).--Discott (talk) 20:49, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

Do have one request though, I would like to know if I could reduce the first prize to R9000 and the second prize to R6000 and use the outstanding R1500 for a most used picture on Wikipedia prize category for the picture submitted in 2013 that is used the most on Wikipedia? I feel that in the long run this prize category could greatly increase the use of submitted photographs on Wikipedia in the long run. Is this okay with you all?--Discott (talk) 20:49, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi Discott. An award for most number of inclusions on wiki projects is a great idea. By "inclusions" we mean the photo used in the highest number of articles on Wikimedia projects/languages, not the photo with the most number of views. Using the glamorous tool and "show details", it looks like this image of a Dutch reformed church in Vereeniging was used most (6 times). Hopefully, by including this prize category, we can motivate contributors to increase that number! In terms of the budget, it makes more sense to include the prized category in this year's competition. The downside is that you would only be able to judge inclusions from end of Sept - November, rather than a whole year. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 21:45, 30 June 2014 (UTC)