Grants talk:Project/Eventmath

Proposal Clinics

Hello,

Thanks for beginning to draft your proposal for the Project Grants open call! I wanted to make sure you are aware that we are hosting proposal clinics for applicants to ask questions and get feedback. If you would like to attend, you can find the dates, times, and videoconference links posted on this page meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project. These are optional opportunities to get support improving your proposal. Let me know if you have any questions! Good luck with finishing your proposal for the February 10 deadline!

Warm regards,

--MCasoValdes (WMF) (talk) 16:09, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Reminder: Change status to proposed to submit

IMPORTANT: Please note that you must change your proposal status from "draft" to "proposed" by the submission deadline in order for your proposal to be reviewed in the current round. When your proposal has been successfully submitted, it will show up in the "Open proposals" list (it may take several minutes for the list to update after you submit it). Applications that are not completely filled out and correctly submitted by the deadline will not be reviewed. To submit your proposal, you must complete all fields of the application and then:

1. Click on "edit source"

2. Change "|status=DRAFT" to "|status=PROPOSED"

3. Click the "Publish changes" button.

Thank you,

--MCasoValdes (WMF) (talk) 16:09, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed, Round 1 2021 - Community Organizing proposal

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for review in Round 1 2021 for Community Organizing projects. This decision is contingent upon compliance with our COVID-19 guidelines. If your proposal includes travel and/or offline events, you must ensure that all of the following are true:

• You have reviewed and can comply with the guidelines linked above.
• If necessary because of COVID-19 safety risks, you can complete the core components of your proposed work plan _without_ offline events or travel.
• You are able to postpone any planned offline events or travel until the Wikimedia Foundation’s guidelines allow for them, without significant harm to the goals of your project.
• You include a COVID-19 planning section in your activities plan. In this section, you should provide a brief summary of how your project plan will meet COVID-19 guidelines, and how it would impact your project if travel and offline events prove unfeasible throughout the entire life of your project. If you have not already included this in your proposal, you have until February 28 to add it.

The Community review period is now underway, from February 20-March 4. We encourage you to make sure that stakeholders, volunteers, and/or communities impacted by your proposed project are aware of your proposal and invite them to give feedback on your talkpage. This is a great way to make sure that you are meeting the needs of the people you plan to work with and it can help you improve your project.

• If you are applying for funds in a region where there is a Wikimedia Affiliate working, we encourage you to let them know about your project, too.
• If you _are_ a Wikimedia Affiliate applying for a Project Grant: A special reminder that our guidelines and criteria require you to announce your Project Grant requests on your official user group page on Meta and a local language forum that is recognized by your group, to allow adequate space for objections and support to be voiced).

Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during the community review period. By March 4, make sure that your proposal has incorporated any revisions you want to make and complies with all of our guidelines. If you have not already done so, you can make use of our project planning resources to improve your proposal further, too.

The Project Grant committee's formal review for round 1 2020 will occur March 5 through March 20, 2021. We ask that you refrain from making any further changes to your proposal during the committee review period, so we can be sure that all committee members are scoring the same version of the proposal.

Grantees will be announced Friday, April 22, 2021. Sometimes we have to make some changes to the round schedule. If that happens, it will be reflected on the round schedule on the Project Grants start page.

We look forward to engaging with you in this Round!

Questions? Contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 07:00, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Marti! Brendan and I are looking forward to participating in this round of the process.

--Greg at Higher Math Help (talk) 19:51, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for Eventmath

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?	6.2
(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?	6.4
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	5.6
Additional comments from the Committee: Wikiversity needs support The project probably lies within Wikimedia's strategic priorities as it is aimed at using Wikiversity in education. On the other hand its long term sustainability and scalability is difficult to evaluate. Interesting approach with the campaign. The project seems to be very innovative. The potential impact is probably high but the risks are difficult to estimate. The project may become unsustainable in the end. There are well defined measures of success. It is innovative in that it connects math and decision-making support with current events, something not ordinarily done. The grantees seem to be expert about content in internet but they have a poor experience in contributing to WIkimedia projects and mainly Wikiversity. The participants can probably execute the project within 12 months and have necessary skills to achieve their goals. The budget is reasonable. The number of outputs is ambitious, and it is suggested they may want to scale back a bit to ensure the most important ones are doable within the time. There is a visible community engagement. A good submission in terms of clarity and completeness of the project. Finally a clear documentation. The approach and the idea seem to be interesting but do the grantees have experience? To be investigated. The sum requested is relatively small and I am willing to give this interesting project a chance. This is a modest cost to engage in an often-neglected Wikiproject that hopes to help instruct students in math while addressing current events.

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:

1. 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. We recommend that you review all the feedback and post any responses, clarifications or questions on this talk page.
2. Following due diligence review, a final funding decision will be announced on Friday, April 22, 2021.

Questions? Contact us.

Marti (WMF) (talk) 05:21, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Joint response to aggregated committee feedback

Thank you all so much for your feedback!

We were absolutely thrilled when we found Wikiversity and this grant program. We had been searching for the right platform, and the infrastructure and vision laid out by Wikiversitarians is just perfect. So, it's very rewarding for us to reach this stage of the process.

In particular, it's helpful to receive your input about reducing the number of project targets, since this will free up time for the most essential outputs.

• Per your guidance, we will eliminate the breadth target for domain and subject coverage in the initial entries. Since workshop attendees will begin entries for their own classes, wide coverage will be an organic outcome of the attendance target.
• Similarly, we will scale back the target for community endorsements of individual entries, from two endorsements on each of three entries, to one endorsement on each of three entries. This way, we can retain an important target while making time for other tasks.

We're super excited by the opportunity to use our skills to help fellow math educators, and these improvements will help us do that. As a community, we've been trying to incorporate timely content into math classes for a long time. Now we have the chance to develop a unique resource that solves this important problem.

We're especially encouraged by the robust community response to the Eventmath proposal, and we're looking forward to building on this response as we put our plan into action! We'll keep watching this discussion in case you have any further guidance or questions.

Thank you all again!

--Greg at Higher Math Help (talk) 21:00, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

--Bwsulliv (talk) 21:06, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

Updates on timeline and partner work

Timeline update

I also just added a comment about what we have in mind for the timing of the online workshops: leading into the fall semester, and then again between the fall and spring semesters. We think this clarifies a bit about the timing of the project (working during the summer to prepare for the fall) and mentions a possibility for future activities and support (hosting these workshops as educators prepare for upcoming semesters). --Bwsulliv (talk) 23:00, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Clarifications on timeline and partner work

Hi everyone!

I've updated the overall timeline in the introduction to the Activities section to reflect the changes Brendan made. Our update is based on the observation that most of the preparation for the workshops will only need to be done once during the twelve-month grant period. For example, before the first round of workshops, we will assemble a backup list of starter articles and posts, write the feedback forms, and develop an extensive list of interested community members through our promotion strategy.

As originally proposed, we will complete the primary activities by mid-August. Since follow-up workshops will require comparatively little work, our new timeline allows for additional follow-up workshops near the end of 2021, as educators plan to teach a new set of courses. This will strengthen and broaden the community of contributors: more experienced contributors can grow their skills by partnering with newcomers.

In the Activities table, we've also made additional edits to the description of the workshops, to clarify the role of partner work in fostering community and in supporting prolonged engagement. Just as Brendan and I will collaborate on the infrastructural aspects of the project, workshop partners will have the opportunity to support each other as they develop and share the entries they make for their own teaching!

--Greg at Higher Math Help (talk) 06:47, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

New Wikiversity advisors

Guy vandegrift

Brendan and I heartily thank Guy vandegrift for joining Eventmath as a Wikiversity advisor! Guy is an experienced Wikiversitarian and open-educational-resource advocate with a focus on undergraduate mathematics, and he is now listed in the new Wikiversity advisors section. Provided the grant is approved, he will join us during monthly video calls between the end of May and mid-August. During these calls, Brendan and I will provide project updates, and Guy will provide valuable perspective regarding Wikiversity policies and practices. We're excited to have him on board! --Greg at Higher Math Help (talk) 19:39, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

Dave Braunschweig

Brendan and I also sincerely thank Dave Braunschweig for completing our two-person Wikiversity advisory committee! Dave is an experienced Wikiversitarian, consultant, and teacher who recently earned the Faculty Innovation Award from the American Association of Community Colleges for his advocacy of open educational resources. He is now listed alongside Guy in the Wikiversity advisors section of our proposal. He will join us for the monthly video calls as his schedule allows, and as a highly active member of Wikiversity, he will be available to provide on-wiki support as needed. We really appreciate his support!

New collaboration

Already, Guy and Dave have each given us new ideas.

Promotion and adaptation

A suggestion from Guy regarding an existing group within Wikiversity led us to the idea of an open mailing list to apprise the Eventmath community of updates, such as workshop dates.

He also mentioned an economics professor who assigns essays based on current events. This professor is not the only one. In fact, this reminded me of my own experience as an economics student and an essay that I wrote, not coincidentally, about high textbook prices due to a publishing oligopoly. With this project, we can not only furnish mathematics educators with open-access materials, but also we can provide a model for educators in other disciplines. Since current events affect all aspects of our lives, this goes beyond math and social sciences. In any field, a collaboratively-built repository will help educators to spend more time providing individualized feedback to students, and less time choosing articles or devising assessments.

As a second example, our project would be an excellent model for language learners. After all, when I was first learning Spanish, I went to the news. Brendan does the same when he wants to practice French. The news is relevant, it provides examples of current usage, and it uses simpler language than literature. An article about a new technology might be categorized according to its usage of the future tense, for example, and it could be paired with essay questions about the future of the technology. Once categorized, other teachers seeking a lesson on the future tense would be able to quickly find a suitable article.

Documentation and adaptation

A suggestion from Dave made us think more carefully about transparency. This led us to the idea of posting meeting minutes as part of our project documentation. Since our campaign approach incorporates a wide range of promotional activities, project documentation in general could even be helpful for projects that do not pair academics with current events.

All these ideas evolved with the help of just a couple brief discussions with Guy and Dave! Brendan and I really appreciate their support. --Greg at Higher Math Help (talk) 09:18, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Round 1 2021 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, $9,600

Comments regarding this decision:
The committee is pleased to fund this interesting, well-planned and unique approach to engaging and organizing math teachers on Wikiversity. They are glad to be able to benefit from the project team’s experience, skills and existing network in the mathematics field, and appreciate your collaborative approach to working with the Wikiversity community of volunteers. They look forward to watching how this project scales over time.

NOTE: Funding of any offline activities (e.g. travel and in-person events) is contingent upon compliance with the Wikimedia Foundation's COVID-19 guidelines. We require that you complete the Risk Assessment Tool:

• 14 days before any travel and/or gathering event
• 24 hours before any travel and/or gathering event

Offline events may only proceed if the tool results continue to be green or yellow.

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement and setup a monthly check-in schedule.
2. Review the information for grantees.
3. Use the new buttons on your original proposal to create your project pages.
4. Start work on your project!

Upcoming changes to Wikimedia Foundation Grants

Over the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has been undergoing a community consultation process to launch a new grants strategy. Our proposed programs are posted on Meta here: Grants Strategy Relaunch 2020-2021. If you have suggestions about how we can improve our programs in the future, you can find information about how to give feedback here: Get involved. We are also currently seeking candidates to serve on regional grants committees and we'd appreciate it if you could help us spread the word to strong candidates--you can find out more here. We will launch our new programs in July 2021. If you are interested in submitting future proposals for funding, stay tuned to learn more about our future programs.

Marti (WMF) (talk) 01:18, 23 April 2021 (UTC)