Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Conference Fund/Wikimedia and Libraries Conference 2024 (WIkiLibCon24)

WMF review and feedback

Hi @Windblown29 and the WIkiLibCon24 team,

Thank you very much for this proposal and for your initiative in organizing the second Wikimedia and Libraries Conference. I highly appreciate the time and effort you put into this proposal. I have reviewed your proposal and have some comments and follow up questions.

Objectives and Strategy:

• I like the focus on French and Arabic wikipedia projects in an African context, but I also find it a bit confusing. What is the main goal for this conference? Because the framing and the survey indicate a need for a more global platform. It sounds like you are targeting two different focus areas and participants and I wonder how will you be able to engage non French or Arabic Wikimedians and information professionals. How will the program be designed in a way that will represent this vision, and yet, be engaging for all?
• I'm also interested to know how will you build on top of the 2022 Wikimedia and Libraries conference. Is there any continuity or follow up?
• You indicated that event dates are May 1-31. I understand you probably don't have the exact dates yet, but How many days will the conference be?
• 50 responses to the survey is not a lot considering you would like to have 200 participants. I suggest keeping the survey open (or to re-open if the proposal will be accepted).

Logistical Aspects

• Scholarships - by 'per diem', you mean meals? Traditionally scholarship does not include per diem. But they do include meaks during the event.
• You mentioned you would like to have a total of 200 participants and 75 scholarships. Who will be the rest? are those locals? I'm not sure how realistic is it to expect over 100 local Wikimedia contributors (considering the 60 p metrics for 'Recruiting new librarians local to the region').
• On the same topic of the French and Arabic focus - are you going to prioritize French/ Arabic scholarship applicants? Do you have any thoughts on how to allocate the 75 scholarships worldwide?
• will you be working with Wikimedia Morocco? Are they expected to co-organize this with you? If not, who is the person(s) on ground to do all the events planning and logistics?

Learning, Sharing, and Evaluation:

• I appreciate the metics you identified and the intentional goals. I also liked the 'kiosk' idea for engagement. I see a lot of work and thoughts being invested in welcoming newcomers. I just want to point our that this means it will need to be reflected on the program design. When in fact, you have different target audiences, you need to design the event in a way that will speak to people in different levels of wiki- experience, including intro sessions for first timers. But at the same time, to have sessions that will bring value to the more experienced Wikimedians.

Budget:

• No need to include medical insurance as part of the scholarship (and for COT because all scholarship recipients (and people who are traveling outside their home country and that you are paying for their flight) are covered by the WMF health insurance. So you can remove this specific budget item. This also means that if you are considering partial scholarships that will not include flight, those recipients will not be covered by the WMF health Insurance.
• Meals during travel are usually not included in a scholarship. But regardless, I suggest you check what are the local regulations for paying cash to scholarship recipients.
• Who are the Keynote/Speakers you would like to invite? I know that the 2022 organizers also asked for this but if I recall correctly, they didn't use this budget. do you currently have someone in mind?
• I wonder if you need any translation services. Given your focus on language diversity.
• Is the travel agency fees included in the flight costs? Or are you going to do the booking yourself?

Thank you again for this proposal. When you're able, please respond to the questions above and revise the proposal on Fluxx if needed. These revisions will be due by October 2nd, 2023, after which the Conference Grant Committee will begin formal review of the proposal to make the funding decisions. Thank you, CAlmog (WMF) (talk) 03:06, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Dear @CAlmog (WMF),

@Windblown29, @Orlysi and I thank you for your message and the time you took to review our application. Below are our responses to your questions, with our responses are in italics and your questions in bold.

Best,

Michael David MILLER (@BiblioQC)

Objectives and Strategy:

• I like the focus on French and Arabic Wikipedia projects in an African context, but I also find it a bit confusing. What is the main goal for this conference?
  • There are two main goals. Firstly, is to provide an international forum for librarians around the world to discuss Wikimedia related challenges and opportunities regarding librarianship. For example, strategies to integrate Wikimedia projects into the daily work of librarians.
  • The second goal is to provide free Wikimedia project training to librarians in Morocco. Our goal is to build this free local training into this conference to help build local capacity to increase the global engagement of librarians in the movement. We believe that building global engagement is a local task, meaning that to have more global engagement, we need to focus on building strong local foundations wherever this conference goes.
• Because the framing and the survey indicate a need for a more global platform. It sounds like you are targeting two different focus areas and participants, and I wonder how will you be able to engage non French or Arabic Wikimedians and information professionals.
  • We will be able to build a programme that meets the needs of experienced wikibrarians while having opportunities for newcomers to explore and begin engaging the movement.
  • Given that this is a major international Wikimedia conference taking place in a non-English speaking nation, we want to have a strong focus on capacity building in a local Francophone and Arabic context while also offering an international conference to all librarians.
• How will the program be designed in a way that will represent this vision, and yet, be engaging for all?
  • We see a few options. The first would be to offer dedicated training tracts on Wikimedia projects and libraries in the programme. A second option would be to offer intensive pre-conference training in Arabic and French to local Moroccan and Maghreb librarians. This would address two opportunities, 1) provide them with the base skills to contribute to Wikimedia projects and 2) be able to fully engage the conference programme following the intensive training. The second option is seemingly more realistic and would allow us to partner with two important Wikimedia groups, Wikimedia Morocco and WikiFranca.
  • The point of haveing a portion of the programme focused on local and region librarians in this context is following discussions that we had with colleagues from Aflia about the absence of francophone and Arabic speaking librarians during their Wikimedia training. We see an critical opportunity to help build librarian capacity in the Francophone and Arabic-speaking worlds and contribute to multilingualism in the movement.
• I'm also interested to know how will you build on top of the 2022 Wikimedia and Libraries conference. Is there any continuity or follow up?
  • Following the success of the first community led conference, this conference has now been handed off to the Wikimedia and Libraries UG to continue the cooperation and concertation among librarians and Wikimedia projects.
  • With half of the current planning group having experience with the previous year’s committee, we are confident to secure the continuity of the previous year’s discussion while finding new topics of discussion.
  • We hope to continue discussions about issues related to the role of libraries, particularly national libraries, with Wikidata and bibliographic data, Wikimedia Commons and digitized collections, as well as Wikisource and the attribution of ISBNs to transcribed works.
• You indicated that event dates are May 1-31. I understand you probably don't have the exact dates yet, but How many days will the conference be?
  • That is correct. We hope the conference will last three full days, with a possible 1 or 2 days for the pre-conference training for local librarians. We are still finalizing the dates around national and religious holidays.
• 50 responses to the survey is not a lot considering you would like to have 200 participants. I suggest keeping the survey open (or to re-open if the proposal will be accepted).
  • Thank you for this suggestion. We will re-open the survey. Additional survey responses will be very beneficial to the building of the conference programme.

Logistical Aspects

• Scholarships - by 'per diem', you mean meals? Traditionally scholarship does not include per diem. But they do include meals during the event.
  • The use of per diem was meant to indicate lunch and dinner allocations. However, we are leaning towards catered lunches and organized suppers. We are considering foregoing the per diem allocation in favour of organized meals.
• You mentioned you would like to have a total of 200 participants and 75 scholarships. Who will be the rest? are those locals? I'm not sure how realistic is it to expect over 100 local Wikimedia contributors (considering the 60 p metrics for 'Recruiting new librarians local to the region').
  • We plan on the rest being librarians from across the world and locals.
  • Perhaps 200 is an ambitious attendance goal, but for the following reasons we believe we can at least have 150 participants and hopefully have a waiting list.
  • Given the proximity to Western Europe, we believe we will be able to attract librarians from Spain, France, Italy, the UK, etc. We also intend to work with local Moroccan library associations, in collaboration with the National Library of Morocco, to encourage librarians in Morocco to attend.
  • There is also a School of Library and Information Science in Rabat. One of this year's co-organizers knows one of the professors at this school, and this professor has already expressed interesting in encouraging their students to attend this conference.
  • One of our attendance goals is to provide a bridge between experiences Wikibrarians / Wikimedians and newcomers. We hope to be an example for future conferences to have an integrated strategy to bridge experienced and new / future Wikimedians.
• On the same topic of the French and Arabic focus - are you going to prioritize French/ Arabic scholarship applicants? Do you have any thoughts on how to allocate the 75 scholarships worldwide?
  • A new goal of this conference that we plan to test in Morocco is the idea of taking a global event and anchoring it into local goals. For the global movement to be a success, we need strong local groups. Thus our focus on building capacity among Moroccan librarians.
  • For the case of this grant application, when we speak of French and Arabic librarians, we are focusing on French and Arabic speaking librarians from Africa and the Middle East.
  • For scholarship allocation, we are still reflecting on how to allocate the full scholarships fairly. Our scholarship committee will work on creating guidelines for scholarship applications.
  • We also anticipate providing partial scholarships for local people where transportation is less expensive. From what we have seen, estimated round-trip train tickets from Casablanca-Rabat around 100 Moroccan Dirhams which is about 10 USD.  
• will you be working with Wikimedia Morocco? Are they expected to co-organize this with you? If not, who is the person(s) on ground to do all the events planning and logistics?
  • We have been in contact with Wikimedia Morocco, and they intend to collaborate with us to organize local arrangements once they have finished with WikiIndaba 2023 (3-5 Nov. 2023).
  • The National Library of Morocco will act as our fiscal sponsor, will provide us a conference space in their library and contribute to local planning logistics.

Learning, Sharing, and Evaluation:

• I appreciate the metics you identified and the intentional goals. I also liked the 'kiosk' idea for engagement. I see a lot of work and thoughts being invested in welcoming newcomers. I just want to point our that this means it will need to be reflected on the program design. When in fact, you have different target audiences, you need to design the event in a way that will speak to people in different levels of wiki- experience, including intro sessions for first timers. But at the same time, to have sessions that will bring value to the more experienced Wikimedians.
  • As we mentioned above, we intend to have a programme that is robust for experienced Wikibrarians while having intensive training opportunities for new Wikibrarians. We really want to engage in intensive local capacity building among local librarians.
  • Our committee also has a high level of professionals with vast and diverse experiences in local and international conference planning and programme development.

Budget:

• No need to include medical insurance as part of the scholarship (and for COT because all scholarship recipients (and people who are traveling outside their home country and that you are paying for their flight) are covered by the WMF health insurance. So you can remove this specific budget item. This also means that if you are considering partial scholarships that will not include flight, those recipients will not be covered by the WMF health Insurance.
  • Thank you, we will do this and insure partial scholarships have travel insurance.
• Meals during travel are usually not included in a scholarship. But regardless, I suggest you check what are the local regulations for paying cash to scholarship recipients.
  • Thank you for this point. We can revisit the idea of Per Diem. We will verify local laws and regulations.
• Who are the Keynote/Speakers you would like to invite? I know that the 2022 organizers also asked for this but if I recall correctly, they didn't use this budget. do you currently have someone in mind?
  • We are exploring prominent librarians and library and information science professors that work with the Wikimedia Projects. Nothing is confirmed at the moment. However, we have multiple candidates we are exploring.
  • In the event we do not require this budget line, we hope to transfer it to partial or full scholarships.
• I wonder if you need any translation services. Given your focus on language diversity.
  • Our goal is to see if the National Library of Morocco will be able to provide / help us find translation services for presentations. Ideally, for every conference presentation we'd have translation services into Arabic or French. However, we understand that this might not be possible. We intend to work with the National Library to see what is possible and what is not possible.
• Is the travel agency fees included in the flight costs? Or are you going to do the booking yourself?
  • We intend to work with a travel agency, but we have yet to confirm the agency.

BiblioQC (talk) 16:03, 1 October 2023 (UTC)