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Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/SKAP 2025 Annual Fund

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Latest comment: 3 days ago by Lady01v in topic Follow-up questions on your grant application

Follow-up questions on your grant application

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Latest comment: 3 days ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hello Shared Knowledge Asia Pacific Team,

Thank you for putting in a general support fund application. Congratulations on being part of the consortium that will be hosting the ESEAP Summit in 2025 (application; event page). While the final report for your most recent general support fund application is not due until January 2025, thank you for sharing an interim update via email. I am also including the summary document here - [1]https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m-gOGvmycdorYBik8ISt7ngnF_NEO5cqSzpd96hM6qM/edit?usp=sharing


For documentation purposes, I am also including rapid fund grants that were/are accessed by individual(s) working closely with SKAP:


Observations/ Recommendations / Notes

Below, you will find the consolidated feedback and observations from the review team (i.e. ESEAP regional funds committee and programme officer). Do take time to read and respond (i.e. provide more details) to the sharing(s) as necessary. Note: The review team may not have the same lived experience or understanding of the local context as you/your team. Hence, providing further insights will be very helpful in building on our collective wisdom and shared learnings.


  • 1) Related to question 5/ annual plan: Thank you for sharing your 2025 annual plan. As this is your second annual planning grant, it would be useful to take a moment to reflect on your first year of implementation and refine the annual planning process in 2025. Some areas that require further thinking for your annual planning process includes: a) More clarity on local context and the key issues you are looking to focus on and why; b) Reflections from past learnings and adaptations for the new year; c) community discussion, engagement and planning process. Here are some resources that focus on a combination of strategic planning and annual planning which you may find useful -


  • 1a) Suggestion: We know it will take time to think about and put together an annual planning process. We recommend adding it to your timeline and plan protected time to do this with your core team. In the mean time, please response with a proposed approach on how you plan to carry out your annual planning process in the coming year.


  • 2) Related to question 11/ implementation team: Thank you for listing down the core team, their appointment in the project and budgeting for their contribution in your proposed budget. It would be helpful if you consolidate the information above in a short brief and include: a) description of their roles (i.e. sharing job descriptions if relevant) and their contribution to your 2025 annual plan; b) If there are new consultant/ contractor roles that you are planning to recruit for your project, could you share your plans for recruitment, reporting and management and onboarding process? Could you also share what are the key legal and mandatory duties of an employer in your country when hiring on contract?



  • 3) Related to budget section: Thank you for your putting together your proposed budget. The breakdown by strategy, programme and budget line item is very helpful. Would it be possible to provide 2 additional scenarios to your budget plan? Scenario 1: USD 40,000 and Scenario 2: USD 50,000. You can use the existing budget file and add additional tabs. It would also be helpful to provide a brief description to accompany the scenarios so that we are better able to understand the implications behind each proposed scenario.


Note to applicant: During the review process, the ESEAP Funds Committee meets 3-4 times (2-2.5 hours/ session) during the review cycle to discuss the grant applications submitted for the cycle. Thereafter additional time is dedicated for individual review (i.e. one review form is submitted for each application - estimated time spend can be 1-1.5 hours/application/person). We would like to highlight that the review team spends a significant amount of time on each application reviewing and providing their perspectives. We hope you will also participate fully in the process by setting aside dedicated time and mind space to provide thoughtful responses to the feedback. During the discussion rounds, we have also captured the verbatim feedback below. Some of which may be on a similar topic. If you notice the trend, it would mean that the question/ observation was raised by several members of the review team and we encourage you to dig deeper to provide more information. If you require support in understanding the context to the feedback and/or in crafting a response. Please know that you can reach out the programme officer for support.


Observations/ Questions

  • 4) Thank you for providing an interim update. Are you able to include the meta links (e.g. project page, activity page, dashboard metrics etc) to the document so that we are able to read more about your progress and work?


  • 5) The projects proposed are numerous. However, it is unclear how their work has been carried out in 2024. In addition, with so many projects, is there enough staff? The governance of this community is also unclear, who is responsible for all these projects?


  • 6) The timeline for the 2025 project is unclear. Can you make it clear in a yearly schedule? Can't say whether the 2025 project is realistic or not because there is no online evidence of SKAP community activity in 2024. Examples which you may find helpful in presenting your timeline of activities - Project/organiser/month format; Strategy/ activity/ month format


  • 7) The research result shall be presented as a legal opinion and will be subjected to discussion with policymakers and stakeholders. How will you engage policymakers and stakeholders? The strategy document only mentioned that the research will be documented in blog and internal documentation.


  • 8) The ideas in the proposed project appears collaborative because the applicant has plans to work together with the government and other local communities. The scope of the project seems too large for the core team and perhaps a smaller and well-defined project could be considered.


On a separate note, as your application contains public policy advocacy elements, we have also invited the relevant teams to participate in the review process and there could be further questions or feedback on this subsection of your application at a later stage.


In the meantime, we look forward to your responses by 15 November 2024.

Thank you.


Regards, Jacqueline on behalf of the ESEAP Funds Committee JChen (WMF) (talk) 03:16, 12 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hi Jacqueline,
+ and the esteemed Grants Committee members. We appreciate your feedback on our proposal and this opportunity to respond to your observations and questions.
As you may all know, SKAP is the youngest Wiki community in the Philippines and every organization undergoes a period called learning curve. SKAP is grateful that the learning curve occurred during our first year of organization, we are grateful for shortcomings we made early on which taught us lessons to become better next year.
For 1. In relation to our annual plan, we had to convene and re-strategize during mid-year operations. Our first annual plan 2024, we focused on legal projects as continuity from 2023's rapid grant project. We also did language revitalization project this year, WikiGov data, Living heritage projects, digitization on Wikisource. We noticed that some of our projects are also being implemented by other PH user groups. Through these projects, we need various interests from volunteers. We need to have volunteers interested in data science, in culture and living heritage, in language, legal and we realized it is very hard to sustain and cater to a lot of varying interests. So in 2025, we decided to streamline our projects and focus mainly on our core strength which is public policy advocacy, legal and Wikidata in addition to Wikiwomen. It is going to be a lean and mean plan. Our plan is to continue what works for our community and discontinue what complicates our operations and what others are actively doing. We will differentiate and geographically expand.
2. In relation to Question 11, implementing team - we decided to have:
1) One paid staff- administrative assistant and bookkeeper who keeps records, fixes schedules, contracts project based contractors, and record keeping of our books.
2. Four (4) contractors that are Project Directors for each project which spans over a quarter.
a. WikiData Gov Project Director - in charge of the project implementation from communication, data gathering to identification of partners, selection of assistant supervisor/ data analyst, connecting with the WikiGov and Wikidata Telegram global community, scheduling and timeline, submitting deliverables and writing project reports.
b. Digitization of Local Laws and Wikiwomen Project Director - in charge of the continuity and expansion of the project from identifying partners, working with volunteers, fixing the timeline and duration, delivering to partners and SKAP the agreed upon deliverables, submission of reports and project monitoring.
c. Legislathon Project Director- in charge of leading the project, identifying focus areas, working with the researcher, identifying local law schools and university partners, working with volunteers, training new volunteer editors and in charge of volunteer growth and sustainability.
3. We also have 4 assistant project supervisors that will set up the data gathering activity which takes quite a time before the actual uploading on Wikidata. The assistant identifies relevant datasets, sources, works with the data analyst in verifying data, validation, sourcing as well as guiding the volunteers on what datasets to work on. These contractors will only serve for one month.
4. A project-based graphics designer, also a contractor to help with communications, social media and graphics which was delayed this year due to various reasons beyond our control.
Our employment process will begin with referrals from the volunteer community. We shall be posting our project-based listing across social media and our website for applicants. All applicants will be briefed on the job requirements and the expected deliverables. Once potential candidates have been finalized, SKAP officers will onboard them for the project.
Note that Philippine Labor Laws provide that project-based employees shall be employed only upon the duration of the project and for these types of staffing, there is no employer-employee relationship that exist between these personnel and SKAP. They shall be paid based on the contract presented to them in the onboarding process.
3. In relation to the budget, we shall submit a parallel budget with corresponding adjustment and its impact on our overall annual plan.
4. For links, we have a few links to share since we have not finish uploading all our documentations but we intend to finish everything by December 15. 2024. However, we have this Wikidata project link and our newly reconstructed website for reference. Part of SKAP's learning curve is the realization that we should be able to present evidence of our hard work from January to July. But instead, we opted to show you from November until December 15, so your decision to trust us again comes before our proof. And we apologize to all of you for our organization’s work in progress. We will deliver because we are almost 75% finished, only we have not yet uploaded our content.
5. For 2025, we only proposed four (4 kinds of projects) namely the continued digitization, edit-a -thons we called Legislathons, WikiGov data and Wikiwomen during the International Women's Month. However, next year, the newly established WikiCLub Cebu and WikiClub in Mindanao will augment our team. Each new WikiClub will help implement two projects with SKAP as a force multiplier so we are confident that we will be able to finish as proposed.
As to the leadership of SKAP and its projects, journalist Vanj Padilla, Doctor of Laws leads this organization. All of SKAP's corporate officers are part-time volunteers that oversee parts operations from projects to trainings to finances and growth, these people most of whom are working professionals are not paid staff so they need not be on the spotlight all the time. We are still growing, just give us a little bit more time to navigate organizational management Trust the process, trust us a little bit more and you will see the results we will deliver.
6. As to the timeline, we divide our projects by quarter as part of our 2024 Lessons Learned. Since we will have two more WikiClubs helping us in 2025, we will be able to execute better than this year. We will provide a better format if that is what you require.
7.Our community is composed of legal professionals, policy advocates, law students and our partners are law universities, legislative offices, government units and the media. We live and breathe public interest advocacy, so we rub elbows with policymakers, regulators and government officials. We participate in public hearings, sit down in round table discussions with lawmakers, submit legal opinions when asked, help shape local politics. So we are capable.There are offline and online foras where we can participate and submit position papers, we can be resource persons in legislative hearings and provide local legislators with actual research or best practices learned from various jurisdictions for them to refer to so they can make developmental legislations that help our cause not only with open knowledge but also in online child safety and other digital rights, the retention of mother tongue as a medium of instruction to help indigenous language preservation. Blogs and internal documentation is just for the research, a part of the pie. Active participation is another aspect.
8. We acknowledge the observation that in 2024 our team is small. Its okay, we are only one year old. But we did not stop there. On November 29, this year we found allies in the establishment of WikiClub Cebu. Cebu is the biggest province in the Philippines located in one of the three major islands, Visayas. SKAP established WikiClub Cebu, and in return we will walk them through with navigating a WikiClub by handholding them until they will be able to operate on their own. So as an agreement, WikiClub Cebu will be force multipliers to SKAP projects in 2025, along with another WIkiClub in Mindanao to be established in January 2025, as what is proposed. the Needless to say, Cebuano WIkipedia is one of the largest Wikipedia with over 6 million articles. SKAP took the challenge to establish a WikiClub in order to populate the Wikipedia with human editors.
Lastly, let me just share with you our small but growing team's sentiments during our strategy session. Was SKAP overly ambitious with our 2024 and 2025 proposals? We do not think so. We brand our first year of learning curve as a delayed success. We are grateful that we learned our lessons early on, because the challenges we faced enabled us to discover something wonderful which is to reduce volunteer atrophy. - a problem most communities face. By convening mid-year and restrategizing SKAP, by streamlining our plans and programs, we were able to minimize volunteer anxiety, work with non-paid staff, deepen relationships among community members and elimnate "one-off" campaigns and events.
Our problems with delays whether caused by our team or caused by others and the system beyond our control, lead us to fail fast, learn fast and see the silver lining after. And in behalf of the SKAP team, our regret to this committee is not being able to provide our proof of hard work in time before the 2025 annual plans are approved. Again, we leave it up to the committee to trust SKAP and the process. Because we are committed not to fail you too.
All of your observations are very well taken by heart, we believe you wanted to help us succeed and we trust your wisdom over these matters. You can expect our compliance and our willingness to listen to all of your feedback.
@Lady01v
for Shared Knowledge Asia Pacific Lady01v (talk) 05:57, 16 November 2024 (UTC)Reply
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