Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia Thailand 2022

Questions from ESEAP Funds Committee

Hello Wikimedia Thailand, thank you for applying for the Wikimedia Community general support funds. We are in the process of reviewing your application and would like to hear your responses to the following questions:

1. Reports
   1. We observed that your 2020 grant report is not ready yet. Could you let us know when it will be ready?
   2. We also recommend referring to the Affiliates data portal to track if the chapter is compliant with all reporting requirements.
2. Budget and Financial Management
   1. Could you share more about the chapter's fund management capability and capacity, if your grant application is funded?
   2. Would you require additional support for bookkeeping / accounting services?
3. Programme and Strategy
   1. Could you share more about your past experience in engaging with new/returning event participants (e.g campaigns, edit-a-thons)? What worked and what didn’t work? What are key learnings you would apply to 2022 or new approaches you plan to try?
   2. And how do you differentiate between new and returning editors?
   3. How do you envision your multi-year strategy planning process will look like? Looking ahead, what do you think are the areas of growth needed in the core team (or new members to bring in) to facilitate this planning and future execution?
   4. Would you be able to share a schedule of activities by month (and estimated metrics breakdown by activity) for 2022 based on your proposed plan?
   5. Could you share more about your plans to retain more new editors by hosting meetings consisting of representatives from the WMTH affiliate and the Wikipedia community to create a model of conduct to promote better community health? Are there other thoughts on how to make the environment more welcoming and nurturing?
4. Metrics
   1. One of your strategies you have described is to increase awareness and participation of diverse participants. What other types of metrics (beyond participation numbers) would you be collecting to understand if you have made progress after one year in increasing awareness and diversifying the community? These could be qualitative or quantitative indicators.
   2. The Outreach Dashboard and Event Metrics Tool are regularly used when hosting edit-a-thons, campaigns etc. We’ll recommend using these (or similar) tools for consistency with your past reporting. Would you be able to include additional indicators (i.e. metric, target and tool) to supplement your participation numbers?

It would be really helpful to respond by 7 Jan before our next deliberation round. Thank you. JChen (WMF) (talk) 03:19, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Responses to the ESEAP Funds Committee

Dear ESEAP Funds Committee,

Thank you for your kind consideration of our grant request. Please find our replies below.

1. Reports
   1. We plan to have the 2020 grant report ready by the end of January 2022. Since we extended our 2020 grant report by one year, which is scheduled to conclude on Dec 2021, the report is therefore due on 31st Jan 2022. (See extension record on talkpage link here). We will be in compliance with the Affiliates data report once this report is submitted.
   2. We understand we need to add our 2021 activities to the timeline at Wikimedia_Thailand/Timeline#2021. This will be done in the near future.
2. Budget and Financial Management
   1. Currently, the funds awarded from WMF are consolidated in a representative’s account. Going forward, we look to set up a separate bank account for the chapter’s activities and also hire freelance accounting services to manage the funds for 2022. This is to also comply with the legal requirements when we register formally as an entity within Thailand (i.e. association or foundation). With this new setup, there will be more efficiency and transparency.
   2. Outsource professional accountant/auditor for internal bookkeeping and legal compliance is expected to be covered by the grant. One of the team member is running a business and familiar with the outsourcing process.
3. Programme and Strategy
   1. We can give some highlights here but we believe that our past reports will be the best place to share our learning.
      1. It is possible to draw people attention and participation if the task is simple and structured with deadlines e.g. photo competition, on-site intensive edit-a-thon or strategy meetings/training. It may not work if you assign them a task or give a brief induction and let people do things on their own at later time. People might not have enough time/motivation or scaffolding training is not sufficient to assist the person to become an independent editor or the task is not well structure or require too much original thinking to excel.
      2. New approach that we want to try is possibly to turn participants into organizers. Cross platform expectation is the past for photographers to turn into editor is too much. However, photographers can turn into photography competition organizer? With appropriate induction and incentive or collaboration, this should be a possibility.
   2. We use the registration date of the username on a Wikimedia project as a proxy to understand whether the editor is new. For example when we organise a campaign/event/competition, we will do a search of the username and take note if the user is new and record it accordingly. It is possible to do other analysis/segmentation of users as new [not auto-confirmed yet] /returning [return after a period of inactivity] /current [continued contribution]. The demographic data may be collected with the consent of uses if needed e.g. if we have a program that target school-age students or women.
   3. The mechanism of multi-year should be consistent with the cycle of terms of the key person in the chapter and in WMF. This is to make sure that the people in charge can implement the policy/strategies and turn those into deliverables asap. We need to be incorporated first to establish the terms of local board members. It is envisaged that we draw on expertise of existing/past board members of related NGOs in the country to help steer our newly incorporated chapter.
   4. Timeline for 2022 Please find the proposed timetable of events below. Note that it may change due to local circumstances for example taking into account the fluid nature of COVID-19 pandemic/ changing social guidelines.
      • January 2022: Incorporation, Wikipedian-in-Residence
      • February 2022: Incorporation, Wikipedian-in-Residence, partnership renewal (e.g. Promotion of Teaching Science and Technology, National Science and Technology Development Agency)
      • March 2022: Incorporation, Wikipedian-in-Residence, Swedish Embassy edit-a-thon, UNESCO edit-a-thon, hiring affiliate liaison
      • April 2022: Incorporation, Wikipedian-in-Residence, 3D scanning of medical models
      • May 2022: Wikipedian-in-Residence, 3D scanning of medical models
      • June 2022: Wikipedian-in-Residence, Wiki Loves Earth, 3D scanning of medical models, renew the current office
      • July 2022: Strategic planning, creation of bylaws
      • August 2022: Community discussion on proposed strategic plan and bylaws
      • September 2022: Wiki Loves Monuments
      • October 2022: Implementing the new strategic direction
      • November 2022: Account reconsolidation, Wikipedia Asian Month
      • December 2022: Election of new committee members and report writing
      • Breakdown of metrics by activities
        • Wiki Loves Earth 2022 in Thailand: 500 new uploads to Wikimedia Commons
        • Wiki Loves Monuments 2022 in Thailand: 1500 new uploads to Wikimedia Commons
        • 3D scanning of medical models: 30 new uploads to Wikimedia Commons
   5. We understand that volunteer contribution to our project is very fluid and fragile. The natural attrition rate of new users is very high in our movement in general. However, there are areas of improvement or areas of focus below that we aim to address at this point.
      • When people join our events, they are intrinsically motivated (e.g. attracted by merchandise/ prizes/ give-aways). As the focus of our outreach/ events have primary been students, we observed that they tend to move on after graduating from the course/from the school
      • We do need to look beyond attracting university participants going forward. At this point, we don’t have anything concrete in mind, but we will keep this as a suggestion for 2022 planning.
      • We have observed that the Wikimedia Thailand community and Wikimedia Thailand are quite independent. We hope that through the multi-year strategy planning process, we will be able to invite members of the Wikimedia Thailand movement to participate so that both entities can come together to envision a future together.
      • In addition, we also find that there are limited volunteers within the Wikimedia Chapter, which means the core functions reside very heavily with a few key members in. For greater sustainability and robustness, we urgently need to grow the team.
      • For a start, we have identified a list of potential event organizers who could work with us in implementing our 2022 work plan. Discussions are very preliminary at the moment, and we will share more when we have greater clarity.
      • The fundamental principle to create a more welcoming environment is to assume good faith for both the new editors and the veteran editors. More experienced editors administrators should see the mistakes made by new editors as a learning opportunity, and they are there to facilitate the learning process of these young editors.
4. Metrics
   1. Collection of personal/demographic data can be sensitive but it should be justifiable in this case. There are two possibilities to evaluate diversity of the readers/editor/community as a whole (1) barometer-type indicator or site wide survey for the time before and after our activities. This can be done as a separate survey or use existing data collected by WMF or third-party. (e.g. Alexa Internet) (2) Demographic survey of the new users who participate in our activities. We can ask for age, gender, geographical area, race/nationality if appropriate.
   2. We plan to use the Outreach Dashboard and its indicators (i.e. words added, images uploaded, etc.) to quantitatively measure the success of the campaigns. It is possible to track the cohort of users joined our events and analyse their contribution/retention.

-- Athikhun.suw (talk) 04:48, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

General Support Fund proposal approved in the amount of THB 560,400

Hello Wikimedia Thailand,

Congratulations! Your grant is approved in the amount of THB 560,400 with a grant term starting 1 February 2022 and ending 31 January 2023.

The ESEAP Funds Committee is pleased to support the work of Wikimedia Thailand and values the efforts in putting together the grant application and budget. Your application provides insights into your lived realities and a deeper appreciation of the Chapter’s plan for the year.

The Committee and Programme Officer sees a number of strengths in your application and track record. These are:

• Youth-led core team with strong advisory support from Dr. Taweethem Limpanuparb (Username: taweetham)
• From tracking the grant impact and the iterations that take place after each cycle, it is evident that there is a strong learning culture in place within the team
• Innovation in terms of choosing to focus on narrowing the content gap on anatomy science on English Wikipedia

We are in agreement with you on your growth area which is

• Growing and diversifying the core team for sustainability
• Building stronger ties between Wikimedia Thailand and the Wikimedia movement in Thailand

In your 2022/2023 learning journey, the Committee and Programme Officer envisions you may require support in the following areas during the course of your grant term:

• Strategic planning
• Grant reporting (i.e. strengthen clarity) and
• Peer learning from youth-led organisations. An example in the region - Project/Rapid/Hkim243/Promoting dissemination of cross-cultural mental health resources using Squid Game

We also look forward to your participation in the peer learning network where you can share what you will learn during this grant term about the process of incorporating as a legal entity.

Here are further observations from the Funds Committee:

• Grant reporting: Looking forward to reading your 2020 grant report
• Grant Application and Budget: a) Suggest to provide more clarification on the relationship of the educational programme to Wikimedia goals in future applications and b) Essential to add more explanations/ details to the budget to increase transparency. Useful reference here.

JChen (WMF) (talk) 06:44, 18 January 2022 (UTC)