Grants talk:Project/CEE Spring User Group/CEE Spring 2020

Important Campaign

In my work on Campaigns, I generally find this campaign really important as a model for the movement and a place where the CEE community learns different practices and tactics for campaign design and distribution. Its an important community building tool and

However, I have noticed that several things make the campaign tactics hard to replicate, and may be putting limits on the impact of the campaign:

• More focus on newcomers?: most of the national campaigns have rules that include allowing folks to expand articles from the list (which is great for new contributors -- who are often intimidated or run into community issues by doing things from scratch), and retention of new contributors who participated in the campaign is high in the campaign, but I don't see encouragement of newcomers folks -- by most of the rules focus on most points -- which means that new editors are very unlikely to receive an award. Is there any way that we could encourage newcomer focused awards as well?
• Communications/Central notice strategy? -- Facebook seems to be a very successful tool for this community -- and that is great, but also means it probably includes a lot of newcomers, which may or may not be incentivized by the current model (see above). Also, I am not seeing a budget for Facebook ads -- which are very effective at inviting folks into this kind of stuff. On a related note, Central Notice has been historically one of the most successful tools for encouraging participation in Campaigns from readers and signed in users -- but in the 2019 Central Notice documentation, it was not coordinated centrally. What is the strategy for international communications? Do you want to grow the reach of the communications on this campaign?
• Wiki-data driven list is highly customized and hard to localize/replicate -- I tried using a version of the CEETable for WikiForHumanRights and had to dive into a lot of lua code. How does this effect the local communities in their use of the Wikidata topics, especially since the campaign is so decentralized? Have you considered trying to use the wikidata:Property:P5008, P5008 property so that you can generate. This is probably not something to address this year, but it would be awesome to talk with the organizers after the campaign, and talk through the tactics on this.

Anyway, generally very supportive of this work - keep it up, Astinson (WMF) (talk) 16:20, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Hello, Alex, I will try to respond to the newcomer issue first. We do rely a lot on local organizers, besause they know their community best — it would be hard for someone from Austria to understand the needs of Georgian community. However, we have put a lot of effort into best practices sharing both online and on conferences (CEE meetups during these can take hours). To add my own local context (besides being on international team, I also organize contest on Latvian Wikipedia), we do have multiple prize categories (last year we had 7), some of them specially targetting new users. --Papuass (talk) 21:41, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

@Papuass: I understand: have you thought about documenting which campaign newcomer approaches work well? If not I can help. Also, in general, I am totally for localizing campaigns to make them work in context, its actually something that we learn again and again around Wikipedia editing contests: they are going to be localized, so you need to embrace that diversity. However, a couple months ago, I also did a quick analysis of the CEE results from the last few years: your reported newcomer retention is comparatively high when compared to other writing contests and campaigns -- it seems like a strength that could be built on especially as you already have a facebook strategy, already are funding local affiliates for prizes (but not comms per my comment above)-- providing guidelines and support for ramping up more newcomer recruitment and rewards might be an interesting next step if that is what the communities want. Also, especially as the mw:Growth team features start rolling out on more wikis in the next year or so, this campaign might be a good incentive for the local communities to translate and localize them. This is mostly me thinking out loud, and I realize that you are fairly far down the planning cycle for this year-- but its worth thinking about. Astinson (WMF) (talk) 14:33, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed, Round 1 2020

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for Round 1 2020 review. Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during the community comments period, through March 16, 2020.

The Project Grant committee's formal review for Round 1 2020 will occur March 17 - April 8, 2020. We ask that you refrain from making changes to your proposal during the committee review period, so we can be sure that all committee members are seeing the same version of the proposal.

Grantees will be announced Friday, May 15, 2020.

Any changes to the review calendar will be posted on the Round 1 2020 schedule.

Questions? Contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 19:31, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for CEE Spring 2020

Scoring rubric	Score
(A) Impact potential Does it have the potential to increase gender diversity in Wikimedia projects, either in terms of content, contributors, or both? Does it have the potential for online impact? Can it be sustained, scaled, or adapted elsewhere after the grant ends?	7.4
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	7.0
(C) Ability to execute Can the scope be accomplished in the proposed timeframe? Is the budget realistic/efficient ? Do the participants have the necessary skills/experience?	8.4
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	6.2
Additional comments from the Committee: This is an impactful project for content creation as well as building connections between communities and affiliates. Successful project. This project aims for clear objectives based on previous experiences and can have a significant impact in terms of content added and engaging new users. This seems to have been successful before, and while it at face value seems to be helpful to engage audiences and generate content, I find its success factors for what a successful project will look like to be a bit vague. This is a low-risk project that iterates on past years and previous successes. The returns in terms of content creation are significant, however it is less clear how the project meaningfully captures learning and/or supports capacity building & knowledge exchange between affiliates. It can be a model for other geographical areas. Good practices have been achieved for developing this project, as experience in previous editions play a huge role in identifying potential risks and trying to improve and iterate thru ways that have proven successful. As it seems possible risk mitigation is taken seriously. The ideas seem good, but I am not clear how they intend to demonstrate this was successful. Also, I am not sure how they are iterating on what they have already done before, especially across the many languages and cultures they seek to work with. Budget looks to have been reasonably decreased based on the change in goals from last year; it's also very encouraging to see more local communities covering prize costs. It's unclear how much the participating communities will be impacted by COVID-19 but international organizing team is experienced and approach is solid. Experienced users. Grantees have shown in several occasions their abilities to successfully run all the operations. They have had success before in this area, so likely have learned along the process though this has not been clarified completely in this proposal. Participation by many communities including small and minority languages in the CEE region, however not enough attention and focus is given to closing the gender gap - there are goals related to female participation and content but no road-map for achieving them. As such, reference to closing the gender gap reads to me as lip service. Although Facebook is quite popular in the area, all other means of engaging with existent community must be taken in account like central notice, individual talk pages, other working wikiprojects or contests, village pumps, other social media, etc. In the other hand this project must be praised for setting up ambitious gender-gap specific objectives as well as targeting small linguistic and cultural communities. They have community support and a history of success already. Considering that this is a regional meeting, I expected to see more supports on the grant page. This proposal should be announced to all the target communities. Successful project which brings content and involves several languages. I would like to see a clearer evaluation plan for what success looks like. I like how they speak about this both qualitatively and quantitatively, and encourage this to be developed a bit more. I recommend funding for this proposal.

This proposal has been recommended for due diligence review.

The Project Grants Committee has conducted a preliminary assessment of your proposal and recommended it for due diligence review. This means that a majority of the committee reviewers favorably assessed this proposal and have requested further investigation by Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Next steps:

• Aggregated committee comments from the committee are posted above. Note that these comments may vary, or even contradict each other, since they reflect the conclusions of multiple individual committee members who independently reviewed this proposal.
• If you have had an interview with a Program Officer, you may have orally responded to some of the committee comments already. Your interview comments will be relayed to the committee during the deliberations call.
• You are welcome to respond to aggregated comments here on the talkpage to publicly share any feedback, clarifications or questions you have.
• Following due diligence review, a final funding decision will be announced on May 29, 2020.

If you have any questions, please contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 21:24, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Round 1 2020 decision

Congratulations! Your proposal has been selected for a Project Grant.

The committee has recommended this proposal and WMF has approved funding for the full amount of your request, 6,100 €

Comments regarding this decision:
The committee is pleased to support CEE Spring in the sixth year of its annual campaign and contest bringing together several affiliates across Central and Eastern Europe. The committee appreciates the organizers’ approach to risk assessment as well as bringing attention to certain topical gaps, such as articles about regional minorities and women, through the use of dedicated initiatives (CEE Women) and prizes for work in this area.

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-- On behalf of the Project Grants Committee, Morgan Jue (WMF) (talk) 20:18, 29 May 2020 (UTC)