Grants talk:Project/Public Domain Day event toolkit
Anyone may comment here
editTechnical assistance completing the box
editI requested WMF technical assistance completing the box / form of this application at Template talk:Probox. I am signalling this here to document a conversation about this grant outside this space. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:57, 6 November 2018 (UTC)
Legal changes
editLegal changes are mentioned at the beginning, but it's not clear which ones. Is it referring to the fact that 20 years have elapsed since the 20-year extension of the Copyright Term Extension Act? A clarification would be nice, especially for people who are not from the US and are not copyright experts. - Laurentius (talk) 07:44, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
- @Laurentius: Thanks for the feedback. Yes, it is as you say, and I tried to explain this more clearly from the first sentence. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:21, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
media for 2019
editI expect that lots of media will appear on this topic before and after January 2019. Here is a major community discussion from today with 3000+ comments.
en:2019 in public domain is probably the best place to sort out the media coverage on this.
Eligibility confirmed, round 2 2018
editWe've confirmed your proposal is eligible for round 2 2018 review. Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during the community comments period, through January 2, 2019.
The Project Grant committee's formal review for round 2 2018 will occur January 3-January 28, 2019. Grantees will be announced March 1, 2018. See the schedule for more details.
Questions? Contact us.--I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 03:21, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
Some clarifying questions
editHi Bluerasberry! We know each other, but for other readers of this talk page I will introduce myself - I'm Sandra Fauconnier, Program Officer for structured data at the Wikimedia Foundation. I have read through your proposal to check if everything is clear to me, and if I can help you clarify the proposal by asking some additional questions and listing a few remarks.
- Public Domain Day has already been organized quite a lot internationally, using a variety of formats. (I've attended a few in the Low Countries.) So I assume (it does not seem to be explicit in your grant application) that you are explicitly targeting US organizations and events here? Will you be looking at, referring to, and drawing inspiration from other events that have happened around the world?
- As you are applying for a Wikimedia-specific grant here, I think it's good to explain more in detail how you plan to make sure that outcomes from the Public Domain Day and the upcoming toolkit will benefit Wikimedia projects (in terms of content uploaded, new contributors...), for which you outline target numbers in your goals. Do you plan to explicitly include Wikimedia training for GLAMs, and/or edit-a-thons as part of the Public Domain Days? Will the events be connected to larger GLAM-Wiki projects? You expect that through the multiplication effect of the toolkit, other events will lead to a tenfold of contributions; do you already have ideas on how to make sure that institutions that organize 'new' Public Domain Days will also equally organize strong Wikimedia components, knowing that you probably can't influence those events directly?
- You emphasize the production and distribution of a toolkit for replicating this kind of event, and you point at the example of The Nimble Tents Toolkit. Do you know of institutions that have used toolkits like this, and of their usage and usefulness in general? I am asking because I think that active outreach about this type of event in general - like the conference presentations you are planning, but maybe also publication of articles in professional publications and periodicals - might be at least as influential, as it also involves explicit networking, building connections between people and organizations, and transferring skills in person and in various media.
All the best! SandraF (WMF) (talk) 21:44, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
- @SandraF (WMF): Brandon user:Bmw9t is the last word on this project but I will try to briefly relate the plan. I expect that Brandon is on holiday break right now but I wanted to get a brief response to you more quickly. If we need more response, then please let's wait a bit to get him into this conversation.
- This is a global project, and there is something different happening now. Copyright is complicated, but for many types of media which people want to share globally, the term of United States copyright is 25-45 years longer than in places in Europe and Asia. The Smithsonian is one publication which gives comment on this. Yes, there have been European Public Domain Day celebrations, but since Wikimedia projects are geographically located in the United States, the media which people celebrate in Europe cannot actually go into Wikimedia projects until it is legal in the United States. United States Public Domain Day 2019 makes Wikimedia projects eligible to import European Public Domain Day 1994 content, so resurfacing and making available all these old collections is part of this project.
- Yes, exactly, this project has to include training for GLAMS because we expect that almost all public domain content which this toolkit will surface will come from libraries and archives. Editathons will be part of the package, perhaps modeled after the Met Museum's Museum of Babel tool or any of the other available tools for enriching metadata around media files and promoting their reuse. While we cannot predict the future and cannot promise to influence every organization which hosts a Public Domain Day in the future, this project is an attempt to "probably influence those events directly". There is a mindset in the Wikimedia community that traditional institutions like universities and museums will not take much notice of Wikimedia projects, but on the matter of Public Domain Day, we are entering this project in the belief that the Wikimedia platform can be known among universities as a place for an organization to usefully develop, showcase, and teach public domain content which either they hold or which is of subject matter interest. Right now there is no obvious leading organization in speaking for Public Domain Day in a way that invites online community engagement. We would like to make Wikimedia projects the organization that most strongly speaks up for the public domain, and Public Domain Day, and which offers everyone in the world some opportunity to participate in a useful way through Wikimedia platform engagement. Our goal for now is less about triggering the Wikimedia global metrics - many other Wikimedia projects target those - but in matching the already existing interests that universities and Wikimedia projects have in Public Domain Day. If there is to be a future of collaboration between universities and Wikimedia projects to present Public Domain Day, then that should start now to establish a precedent and make way for growth in every direction in the future. The chosen metrics are the numbers which the project participants judged to be useful for establishing a precedent of outreach which other organizations should feel safe in following.
- From a Wikimedia perspective the most popular toolkit is the Programs and Events Dashboard which 1000+ school programs and 100,000+ students have used. While uptake of Wikimedia packages impresses the Wikimedia community, for traditional organizations, we need a package which more closely aligns with their expectations. Nimble Tents is an example of a toolkit which appeals to universities. This project is an attempt to make a toolkit which puts universities into Wikimedia projects through the Public Domain Day concept, and which will surface when any university seeks to host a Public Domain Day event, and which will surface when universities look over the portfolio of toolkits available to engage in Wikimedia projects. Yes, other ways of doing outreach could include things like paper publication, but for this project we need outreach which will have the result of getting new users to try using the toolkit to engage with public domain content in some way that leaves a Wikimedia edit record. We hope that networking, publishing, and the other outreach you described are second-generation outcomes which any organization participating in Public Domain Day will do in the future to promote their own outcomes of celebrating Public Domain Day with Wikimedia projects. Blue Rasberry (talk) 22:49, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
Question on student engagement
editHi user:Bmw9t and user:bluerasberry! My name's Melissa Guadalupe and I recently joined the education team at the WMF. This is a really interesting project of potential wide reach. I'm wondering if you could clarify a bit the "student engagement" section of your proposal. I'm not sure if I'm understanding well the distinction between the two "student workers" and the "project participants", particularly where it says "These students will be mentored by the project participants in this regard". Could you clarify who are the project participants that will mentor the students? Does that refer to the student workers? And if so I would understand that your activities will include mentorship-like guidance besides activities like the edit-a-thons you mention, would that be correct? Thank you so much! --MGuadalupe (WMF) (talk) 21:17, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
- @MGuadalupe (WMF): Thanks for the review and this is unclear. I am going to respond briefly because Brandon Bmw9t is scheduled to be on the university's holiday break right now and for about 10 days. If we need more of a reply then either we can wait till after the holiday or I can get more information.
- The "project participants" in this case refers to the three listed people who are overseeing this project, that is, Brandon Walsh as team lead mentoring from the perspective of a student program officer, Brandon Butler mentoring as a lawyer for the library with copyright focus, and me mentoring on issues related to Wikimedia project needs. Yes, our mentorship will be directed to the student summer workers, who within the bounds of the promised outcomes will decide in the context of conversation with mentors, their skill set, and their education program how to best achieve the project goals.
- Can I clarify further? If you take a holiday around this time of year, then happy holiday. Blue Rasberry (talk) 21:39, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
- Thank you for your quick and kind reply, @Bluerasberry:! This definitely answers my questions. One more quick question (and no rush in replying), will the student workers be in charge of conducting the outreach events after developing the toolkit? If so, will these activities be limited to edit-a-thons or do you have other kinds of outreach planned? Thanks again in advance! And hope you're enjoying a happy holiday season too :) --MGuadalupe (WMF) (talk) 23:54, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
- @MGuadalupe (WMF): No, the student workers will prepare the toolkit in summer 2019, then the toolkit will part of the Public Domain Day / Wikipedia Day promotion every January starting in January 2020. The students will have backgrounds in library and information science and probably will not have a background in Wikimedia outreach.
- Yes, we definitely have public education planned with the outreach. Part of the toolkit will be presenting educational materials about the relationship between the public domain, free and open licensing (like Creative Commons), and Wikimedia projects. For organizations which are interested in participating in Public Domain Day but which do not actually host an editathon, they can still use the toolkit to host a public event with a conversation or lecture about what the public domain is and what has changed in any January. Another training module in this which will not be an ediathon is the option to upload a media collection to Commons, which is usually a task for 1-2 people to do and which does not work well with a crowdsourced editathon.
- The best example that I can give of a non-editathon event is what Wiki NYC does every January by hosting a community discussion without wiki editing. See en:Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/Wikipedia Day 2017 or en:Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/Wikipedia Day 2018. Thanks - Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:08, 28 December 2018 (UTC)
- Thanks again for the thorough answer, user:bluerasberry! --MGuadalupe (WMF) (talk) 18:21, 2 January 2019 (UTC)
- Thank you for your quick and kind reply, @Bluerasberry:! This definitely answers my questions. One more quick question (and no rush in replying), will the student workers be in charge of conducting the outreach events after developing the toolkit? If so, will these activities be limited to edit-a-thons or do you have other kinds of outreach planned? Thanks again in advance! And hope you're enjoying a happy holiday season too :) --MGuadalupe (WMF) (talk) 23:54, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
Aggregated feedback from the committee for Public Domain Day event toolkit
editScoring rubric | Score | |
(A) Impact potential
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5.0 | |
(B) Community engagement
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4.0 | |
(C) Ability to execute
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3.8 | |
(D) Measures of success
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5.0 | |
Additional comments from the Committee:
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Opportunity to respond to committee comments in the next week
The Project Grants Committee has conducted a preliminary assessment of your proposal. Based on their initial review, a majority of committee reviewers have not recommended your proposal for funding. You can read more about their reasons for this decision in their comments above. Before the committee finalizes this decision, they would like to provide you with an opportunity to respond to their comments.
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. We recommend that you review all the feedback carefully and post any responses, clarifications or questions on this talk page by 5pm UTC on Tuesday, May 11, 2021. If you make any revisions to your proposal based on committee feedback, we recommend that you also summarize the changes on your talkpage.
- The committee will review any additional feedback you post on your talkpage before making a final funding decision. A decision will be announced Thursday, May 27, 2021.
@Bmw9t and Bluerasberry: Please see note above about the opportunity to respond to committee comments before they finalize a decision on your proposal. Please let me know if you have any questions. With thanks, --I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 04:27, 7 February 2019 (UTC)
@I JethroBT (WMF):Thanks very much for the thoughtful comments! And thanks also for the ping. We’re very grateful for the attention.
In terms of sustained funding – we don’t anticipate needing further funding for this particular project beyond this round of applications. The startup funding would allow us to fund the students documenting the work and developing the toolkit, which would be maintained out of the library without need for further funding. While there might be other, related opportunities for project funding related to Public Domain activities, they would be out of scope for this particular proposal.
Impact of a website like the one we’re describing can, indeed, be difficult to measure. We could point to analytics about site traffic, but I don’t think those metrics are useful in this instance. The Nimble Tents Toolkit we cited as inspiration grew from a one-off event to around ten related events at various institutions through the power of such documentation. Impact in this sense would primarily be measured by actively soliciting notice from contacts in the digital humanities and digital library communities about how they are using the toolkit. Those kinds of personal connections would enable us, perhaps, to get more specific numbers like those the reviewers are asking after.
Students will be selected by offering a CFP to the UVA community and based on the capacity for their work to be transformed by engagement with the Wikimedia community. In addition, we anticipate focusing on students who already have a demonstrated interests in open culture and cultural heritage. The training required for the students to put together a website is minimal and something with which the project participants have considerable experience. The costs and needs for this are baked into the proposal’s accounting for time spent by the participants in support of the project.
The reviewers’ idea to involve the Wikimedia community more directly in the planning phase of the project is a fantastic one, and one that we perhaps overlooked in putting together this document. If we want this to be useful for the community we should have more of a dialogue about your needs before carrying out work that aims to be helpful for you. Our hope is that events like these and good documentation for them can begin to more closely tie together open culture, Wikipedia, and copyright literacy on campuses. Hopefully, we can help to pilot ways in our own work that we could make regular reference to and engagement with the Wikimedia community a part of the process. In my mind, this means holding Wikipedia literacy and contribution events alongside similar events related to Public Domain day. I do understand, though, how this might be attempting too much to be effectively carried out in the scope of the grant.
The points about the project not fitting in with the strategic direction of the Wikimedia Foundation at this point are well taken – you all are the experts. In particular, I am very sympathetic to the need to increase impact in emerging communities and the Global South. This is a priority for our group in the UVA Library as well, and we’d be open to ideas for thinking through how this project could work in that direction as well.
The comments have been very helpful for us as we think through how we would work on the project, with or without funding. We’re grateful for the consideration and the opportunity to share the idea for the project with your group. Thanks again! — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Bmw9t (talk) 17:05, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
- I agree with Brandon above. I will restate some of what he said being mindful of Wikimedia Foundation strategic directions.
- This project requests only one-time funding There seems to be some misunderstanding about continued funding. This proposal never mentioned a future need for WMF funding. The annual event in this proposal is already an established annual Wikimedia community tradition, and this proposal seeks to build infrastructure to make that existing tradition more effective and accessible to more libraries and universities.
- The Wikimedia Foundation already invests in Public Domain Day Wikimedia Foundation staff just participated in a one-day Public Domain Day event which, if it were replicated anywhere else, would cost $20,000 to present in a comparable way anywhere else. Elsewhere as listed at en:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Day many other Wikipedia community events were hosted which had some mention of Public Domain Day, including events which the WMF funds in channels unrelated to this proposal. The tie between awareness of the public domain and Wikimedia projects already exists, is strong, is already the target of investment, and is already the target of global community activities.
- The events already sustain themselves Wikimedians already celebrate Wikipedia Day and need a public domain toolkit, and libraries already celebrate Wikipedia Day and need a public domain toolkit. This proposal seeks to match those two existing traditions, communities, and needs to direct Wikimedia editors to library events and librarians to Wikimedia engagement.
- Public Domain Day puts Wikipedia in libraries and universities Public Domain Day is 1 January when everything is closed. Libraries and universities actually celebrate Public Domain Day 2 weeks later, which is 15 January Wikipedia Day. If Wikipedia provides the package for libraries to celebrate Public Domain Day, then that makes celebrating Wikipedia's birthday part of the program. Libraries and universities will invest their own resources annually and perpetually for a Wikipedia Day / Public Domain Day event, because many of them already have plans to celebrate Public Domain Day annually.
- American copyright law decides global media policy for Commons Public Domain Day changed in 2019 because of US copyright law, but since Wikimedia servers are in the United States, we all obey US law. Public Domain Day is by law a holiday which affects the global Wikimedia community.
- This is a media donation larger than the sum donations of all GLAM partnerships ever, and it repeats annually We are not at all equipped to understand or respond to this, but every year from now on, all the media for an entire year becomes available for integration into Commons. This is not just bigger than any single GLAM partnership, but big even compared to the entirety of Wikimedia Commons. Eventually someone needs to start planning to respond to this opportunity, and sooner would be better.
- WMF is likely to spend US$200k+ on its closely related anniversary in 2021 2021 is Wikipedia's 20th anniversary. The 10 year anniversary celebrations were big and costly, and this anniversary will be more expensive. If the Wikimedia movement can distribute the event package to tie 1 January Public Domain Day with 15 January Wikipedia Day, then that will make it much easier for libraries who are celebrating Public Domain Day to celebrate Wikipedia's 20th anniversary with their own resources in 2021.
- If the team is unable to go with our execution of this project, then I sincerely hope that somehow you find funding for another team to do something similar for the same purpose ASAP!
- Brandon described student training, management, and project scope above. As he said, these things happen in alignment with what is normal at large United States-based universities. This project is not based in Wikimedia community groups, but rather in research culture with the university's reputation on the line. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:01, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
Hi all -- this is the other Brandon on the project, the copyright lawyer. I just wanted to add one additional point, in response to part of the first criterion in the scoring rubric, regarding gender diversity (both of content and of persons engaged in Wikipedia-related work). It is quite likely, given what we know about the history of commercial media and of gender representation among authors and other creators, that a great deal of interesting, valuable work by women has gone out of print and become abandoned/orphaned by copyright holders. In general, we know that copyright makes all but the most commercially successful works disappear from public availability after a relatively brief commercial lifespan.
One potential benefit of Public Domain Day activities is to surface these buried, lost, or forgotten works, and to take advantage of their newfound lack of copyright to ensure that they are more widely available, studied, and understood. No one will have to worry about ensuring the works of the Walt Disneys and Ernest Hemingways of the world see wide distribution after their copyrights expire, but it will take focused, intentional activism to surface yet-unknown works that provide a counterpoint to the dominance of male, white, heteronormative, cis- etc. perspectives.
Campus communities are especially attuned to this issue, in part because they are genuinely committed to equity and social justice, but also frankly because they are looking for new and unexplored avenues of research. Underrepresented and understudied authors, works, movements, etc. represent a valuable opportunity for teaching, learning, and research that is genuinely novel, rather than retreading or digging a few tenths of an inch deeper into the thoroughly-trod territory of canonical white dudes. Understudied orphaned and abandoned works have been available all along in the stacks at research libraries and archives, and scholars are already surfacing and writing about them in obscure scholarly journals, or teaching about them in elite classrooms or niche conferences. A Public Domain Day toolkit that empowers college and university communities to engage with Wikipedia presents an opportunity to take these projects out of the Ivory Tower and onto Wikipedia, where many many more people can engage and benefit from what otherwise would be an insular and arcane academic activity. Thanks for your continued consideration! --Bc butler (talk) 20:33, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
Round 2 2018 decision
editThis project has not been selected for a Project Grant at this time.
We love that you took the chance to creatively improve the Wikimedia movement. The committee has reviewed this proposal and not recommended it for funding. This was a very competitive round with many good ideas, not all of which could be funded in spite of many merits. We appreciate your participation, and we hope you'll continue to stay engaged in the Wikimedia context.
Next steps: Applicants whose proposals are declined are welcome to consider resubmitting your application again in the future. You are welcome to request a consultation with staff to review any concerns with your proposal that contributed to a decline decision, and help you determine whether resubmission makes sense for your proposal.
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.On behalf of the Project Grants Committee, KCVelaga (talk) 05:21, 1 March 2019 (UTC)