Grants talk:Programs/Organizer Lab/WikiClimateCampusTourNigeria

Committee Feedback

Hello @Bukky658, @Omorodion1, @Tesleemah, thank you for your grant application, your project proposal is very clear on the goals and what the project seeks to achieve. We are also excited about the scope of work to be done under this project and your approach to working with existing communities.

General observations:

The project proposal covers in detail the scope of work and the targeted audience for the project. Your team did a good job defining your approach to reaching your audience and activities to help you attain the project's goals.

Seeing how your project will leverage existing communities to meet your project goals is exciting.

Reservations:

Your sub-activities are quite unclear, we are unable to understand how the activities play out in the various regions/states.

• How are you working with the student leaders to make sure that the sub-activities are appropriate for the participants?

We have concerns about the writing activity for the stipulated time frame.

• How will you ensure that quality articles will be turned in, especially on English Wikipedia which can usually be a difficult space for newbies to write?
• Seems quite a short time to train and have such an audience churn out quality content

We are a little worried that in your budget stipends are only allocated for organizers from the Organizer Lab and not all hub leaders/student clubs supporting the project - especially considering that a lot of the success relies on them. How are you thinking about supporting the student leaders who should be equitably rewarded for their leadership?

What we would like the grantee to improve:

• Could you describe the kind of support you are providing to the students to ensure that the project meets the goals of creating quality content?
• Tell us about how you are going to make sure that there is skill transfer happening between the coordinators to the local organizers and the participants.
• How are you going to make sure that the student club has an institutionalized, sustainable engagement with the topic area?
• We recommend you revise your budget to cover the costs of the other supporting organizers on the project.
• We want you to scope out a clear learning and evaluation strategy for your project. You captured great learning questions but with no metrics that reflect these. ie.  "Did the Fan Club organizer develop the required skills and have the time and motivation needed to continue to facilitate the campaign in his/her community?"
  • How are you going to measure this? For example, you could measure this by articles edited and quality. Did they continue to edit after the events? What motivates editors to continue to edit after activities? Are they receiving the needed support?" There is no measure of retention in the proposal. There is no metrics for perceptions of support and engagement.
  • We suggest including qualitative metrics and ideas of how you are going to measure this and also resources to have the time and do this. Could be a budgetary allocation to make sure that someone does this work.

NB: Please make indicated changes to your application on the Wikimedia Foundation Grantee Portal (Fluxx). Log in to the Grantee Portal and you will see your application in the 'Proposals need attention' section. Edit and re-submit your proposal by March 02, 2023. FNartey (WMF) (talk) 23:10, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

RESPONSE TO FEEDBACK

• Reservations:
• Your sub-activities are quite unclear, we are unable to understand how the activities play out in the various regions/states.

Thank you for your feedback @FNartey (WMF) We had to summarise our campaign sub-activties due to character limit on Fluxx. However, kindly find below a detailed breakdown of our sub-activties;

Strategy 1: Mobilizing and sensitizing undergraduate Nigerian youths on open climate.

• Environmental Education: With the help of the Ministry of Environments in Nigeria, Mission aligned NGOs and institutions such as Niger Delta Development Commission, Climate for Youth Initiative, and Community Recycling Champions among others, the project will engage in Climate and environmental education of Youths (Students) in selected Universities (University of Ilorin, Federal University Kashere, University of Port Harcourt, University of Ibadan, Kwara State University Malete, and the University of Benin) through outreach and advocacy visits or engagement where necessary with a specific focus on the triple planetary crisis. It is hoped that the sensitized students will go on to create more environmental awareness and advocacy within and outside their academic community, so they can develop and maintain environmental friendly behaviour. There will be one in-person environmental education training in six universities in Nigeria.

Strategy 2: Building a sustainable open climate Wikimedia Fan Club Community

• We will also work on building a plan with the six selected leaders of the various Wikimedia Fan Clubs (such as the University of Ilorin, Federal University Kashere, University of Port Harcourt, University of Ibadan, Kwara State University Malete, University of Benin, Benin City) associated groups and stakeholders actively working on environmental and climate issues in Nigeria with common goals to develop a long-term strategy to progressively close content and data gaps on climate-related topics in Nigeria in Wikipedia and Wikidata. In this process, we will define those interested in leading the campus tour in the six selected Wikimedia Fan Clubs, create a need assessment form to know their capacity needs, how to involve local partners such as other local NGOs and climate change clubs within their various institutions, amongst other factors. We hope this plan will develop into a proposal to access longer-term Wikimedia funds.
• Recruit 50 participants each (both new and existing) from the University of Ilorin, Federal University Kashere, University of Port Harcourt, University of Ibadan, Kwara State University Malete, and the University of Benin to participate in this project.
• This will also involve hosting one roundtable discussions in 6 selected Wikimedia Fan Clubs centred on promoting and increasing youth engagement in climate action and creating a road map to more meaningful youth engagement in Nigeria with climate experts/environmentalists and other key stakeholders in attendance. This will help participants identify and understand the intersection between environmental issues, Climate actions, and Wikimedia movements and promote a youth-open learning community.
• Increase awareness of the Wikimedia projects and report the recent research on Climate change in Nigeria and the content gap about these topics on Wikipedia and Wikidata. 50% of participants may be familiar with English Wikipedia and Wikidata. Still, they may be unaware of the shortcomings of existing articles on Climate change topics in Nigeria on Wikipedia and Wikidata, highlighting the need for this approach.

Strategy 3: Generating diverse contents

• Data-a-thons: We will carry out 4 series of online and offline Wikidata training/data-a-thon to raise awareness about the available data on climate-related topics in Nigeria to identify the gaps by introducing the participants to Wikidata query service and how to use it to track items. We will also create awareness about the importance of creating these data as a worklist that will guide participants on how to create /improve items identified to prioritise environmental issues/climate change topics relevant to Nigeria. Furthermore, participants will be trained to run queries to know the existing data gap and create and improve items on Wikidata about climate change and the triple planetary crisis in Nigeria. Once we have created a strong foundation for items on Wikidata, we will use it to inform our other activities. For instance, we will use the data to identify areas where new Wikipedia articles are needed or expand existing Wikipedia articles by adding more information to the corresponding Wikidata items.
• Edit-a-thons: We will carry out 4 series of online and offline edit-a-thon to train 50 students in each Wikimedia Fan Club, inclusive of young Climate change activists/experts, to perform minor edits (adding citations, Wikilinks, Category, Infoboxes, and descriptions, among others) on Wikipedia articles related to climate topics in the Nigerian context. A documentation page for the project containing comprehensive information about the program and a list of articles/items on climate change, natural disasters, climate action, climate finance, climate change act and other triple planetary crisis will be created to work on for easy access to the articles. We will also train them on how to continue participating actively in the Wikimedia movement and connect to the Wikimedia community in Nigeria (For new participants), the Wiki4HumanRights campaign, and other global initiatives. This is important to guarantee wider youth engagement and interest in the movement. Their contributions will be tracked using the outreach dashboard, hashtag tools, and article listing methods to track editors' contributions.
• Write-a-thons: With this activity, we hope to engage a collective of atleast 10 experienced Wikipedians who are already members of the WikiFan Clubs in the six selected tertiary institutions to work with young climate experts in writing and reviewing the quality of Nigerian climate-related content to be created on Wikipedia. Before writers publish their articles on Wikipedia, we want to ensure that they take the time to develop the content with all the necessary references using the article creation wizard and sandboxes with support from the project team. We will carry out an online training and in-person workshop with at least 10 experienced Wikimedians from each fan clubswho will create articles on Wikipedia under close watch whilst providing one-on-one support for them. We will also provide support for the article creation such as Data incentives, information resources on open databases e.g. google scholar, Wikipedia library, among others.

*How are you working with the student leaders to make sure that the sub-activities are appropriate for the participants?

• • The selected fan club leaders will be trained and provided with resources to guide the implementation of the campaign. This will include providing them with details about the campaign and organsinig online capacity buidling on the different activities to be carried out in each fan club so as to equip them with the necessary skills required as local organisers that will coordinate camapign in their various Fan Clubs. There will also be regular virtual meet-ups of all fan club leaders and project coordinators to keep track of the project implementation plan and progress report project whilst addressing any possible challenge. Given that the project will adopt the train-the-trainer model, the trained fan club leaders will be supported by the project coordinators to train and mentor members of the fan club participating in the project. The training will be done during in-person meet-ups and virtual training sessions with support from the Project coordinators. This will ensure a smooth knowledge transfer from the project coordinators to the fan club leaders to the participants.

*We are a little worried that in your budget stipends are only allocated for organizers from the Organizer Lab and not all hub leaders/student clubs supporting the project - especially considering that a lot of the success relies on them. How are you thinking about supporting the student leaders who should be equitably rewarded for their leadership?

• • Thank you for bringing your concerns to our attention. We appreciate your observation and would like to assure you that we have carefully reviewed our stipend budget for student leaders. After taking into consideration your feedback, we have made some changes to ensure that the student leaders are fairly compensated for their important role. We had earlier planned to deduct part of the stipends from the allocated organizers' budget for the student leaders. However, we have re-adjusted the budget and reduced the number of panelists to provide equitable stipends to the student leaders.

*We have concerns about the writing activity for the stipulated time frame. How will you ensure that quality articles will be turned in, especially on English Wikipedia which can usually be a difficult space for newbies to write?

• • Generally, before embarking on the camapaign we will create a project charter that will be shared with Fan Club leaders, and participants. This document will contain the skill and experience needed to participate in any of the campaign activities. It will also provide them with clear guidelines for the Campaign, including the topics, writing style, and editing requirements. To ensure that participants have a clearer picture about what each campaign entails we will provide pictorial examples of each activties and an idea of what are expected. However to ensure that we are able to turn in quality articles within the stipulated timeline, we will ensure that only experience editors that met the activtiy criteria will be enaged in this activity and a spereate WhatsApp group will be created for them so we can closely monitor their contributions during the Campaign.
  • Organize training sessions: We will organise a refresher article writing session with the selected expereinced participants to guide them through the article creation process and ensure that the articles turn in meet Wikipedia's standards.
  • Set up a review process: Together with the Fan Club leaders and other experienced editors we will setup a review process for the articles before they are published. The review process will help identify any errors or inconsistencies in the articles and provide feedback to participants to improve the quality of their writing.
  • Offer incentives: Special recognitions and rewards will be made available for participants who engage in the write-a-thon. We will provide gift vouchers for top writers, certificate of recognition based on the number of articles created during the campaign, acknowledge their contributions in Wikimedia blogs, our social media platforms, project page, and give out a barnstar on their userpage.
  • Offer support: We will also provide support to participants throughout the writing process using dedicated communication channels for participants to ask questions, provide feedback, and offer suggestions.

*Seems quite a short time to train and have such an audience churn out quality content

• • The Campaign editing/writing activities will last for two months, and will include various activities that will be tailored to the skillset, experience, and interests of each participant selected. Our campaign structure and timelines have been carefully planned, and we are confident that we will be able to meet our targets. Throughout the two-month implementation timeframe, participants will have the opportunity to engage in a range of activities that will enable them to develop their skills in writing and editing. The activities have been designed to ensure that each participant is challenged and engaged, and that their individual strengths are utilized to the fullest extent possible. We believe that this campaign will be a valuable learning experience for all participants, and we are excited to see the results that can be achieved through collaboration and hard work.

SUMMARY OF RESPONSE TO COMMITTEE FEEDBACK ON FLUXX

Thank you for taking time to review our proposal. We find the comments very useful and we have revised the proposal as advised.

Please note that:

• We noted that we will train the fan club leaders and provide them with the resources and guidelines needed to implement this project. We will also acquaint them with the different activities to be carried out in the fan clubs, as well as the level of experience required from participants in these events (See response to question 8).
• The write-a-thon will be organized over a two month period (April to May 2023) across the 6 fan clubs. This event will be restricted to only experienced members in the fan clubs and it will be closely monitored by the project coordinators and fan club leaders. However, the newly recruited editors will participate in the edit-a-thon, where they will help improve existing Wikipedia articles around the subject matter.
• We have now revised the budget to accommodate stipends for the fan club leaders for their support and commitment towards the successful implementation of the project.
• The target participants will be adequately supported to ensure the project goals are met. This support will range from organizing series of training and mentorship programs for the participants, to provision of infrastructural support such as Internet data so they can effectively participate in the data-a-thon, edit-a-thon and write-a-thon (See response to question 8).
• The project will adopt the train-the-trainer model, where the leaders of the fan clubs will first be trained by the project coordinators. The trained fan club leaders will then be supported by the project coordinators to train and mentor members of the fan club participating in the project. The training will be done during in-person meet-ups and virtual training sessions. This will ensure a smooth knowledge transfer from the project coordinators to the fan club leaders to the participants (See response to question 8).
• We hope to establish a network of climate champions within the fan clubs so they can leverage on Wikimedia projects to provide local expert knowledge around the subject matter. Through this network, the champions can be mentored and trained more on Climate science so they can engage in other climate action. This will help ensure sustainable engagement with the topic area.
• To answer or measure the learning questions, we will collect both quantitative and qualitative data using a variety of data collection methods including survey and Focus group discussion to ensure proper documentation of the learnings from this project. e.g to measure whether the Fan Club organizer has developed the required skills and motivation to continue facilitating the campaign, the following metrics could be used:

1. Number of articles edited by their members and the quality: This metric can measure the impact of the Fan Club organizer's training and coordination in their various club on their ability to contribute to the Wikimedia community.
2. Number of events organized: This metric can track the level of engagement of the Fan Club organizer with the community and how they are using their skills to drive community engagement.
3. Retention rate: This metric can measure the number of Fan Club organizers who continue to participate in the community after the event and the number of new editors who continue to edit after attending the events.
4. Qualitative feedback: Collecting feedback from Fan Club organizers and participants can provide insight into the perceived effectiveness of the training and support offered, as well as areas for improvement.

To ensure that these metrics are captured and evaluated, provision has been made on the budget for a dedicated Data Analyst/Evaluator to work with the project team to develop the evaluation framework, collect data, and analyze the results. The project organisers would also provide support in developing surveys and conducting interviews to gather qualitative feedback. Overall, incorporating both qualitative and quantitative learning and providing resources for evaluation will help to ensure that the WikiClimate Campus Campaign 2023 is successful in engaging participants, developing their skills, and empowering them to contribute to the Wikimedia community.

Thanks Bukky658 (talk) 12:53, 1 March 2023 (UTC) For the WikiClimateCampus Campaign Organisers

Change of Implementation Institution from Kwara State University to Summit University Offa

Dear Organizer Lab Grant Committee @FNartey (WMF) ,

I trust this message finds you well. I am writing to inform you about a significant change in the implementation institution for our project. Previously, the implementation was scheduled to take place at Kwara State University Malete, under the leadership of @Linason Blessing. However, we have made the decision to shift the implementation to Summit University Offa, led by @Royalesignature.

This decision was reached after careful consideration and consensus among the Kwasu Fan Club executive members. They expressed their inability to fully commit to the campaign activities due to a multitude of academic obligations and events planned for the Fan Club's academic session. In order to ensure the smooth progress of our project within the given timeline, it became imperative to make this change.

We believe that Summit University Offa, under the guidance of Royalesignature, will provide the necessary support and resources for a successful implementation. We have taken into account their expertise and commitment to our cause, making them the preferred institution for executing the project.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this change may cause. However, we are confident that this adjustment will lead to a more efficient and productive outcome for our project. We remain fully committed to achieving our objectives and appreciate your understanding in this matter.

Should you have any questions or require further clarification, please do not hesitate to reach out. We greatly value your involvement and contribution to our project.

Thank you for your attention and cooperation.

Best regards,

Bukky658 (talk) 18:28, 15 June 2023 (UTC) cc @Omorodion1, @Tesleemah