Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Jnanaranjan Sahu/Odia Wikisource's 2nd anniversary
Feedback on request
editDear Jnanaranjan_sahu
Thank you for submitting this request. Before finalizing a funding decision, could you please respond on this talkpage to the following feedback?
- It's hard to effectively succeed at both outreach to new editors and training of existing editors at the same event. We think it's likely that your event will be more successful if you zero in on one or the other goal. Can you say which is your priority? Your answer to this question should inform how you respond to the following comments.
- Can you provide more information about the purpose of the press conference? What specific outcomes do you hope to achieve as a result?
- If you decide to focus on training, what metrics will you use to evaluate whether the training was successful? How will you track whether the training was effective?
Thanks in advance for your response!
Kind regards,
--Marti (WMF) (talk) 18:00, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
Thank You very much Marti (WMF) for following up. Please find the feedback for your questions below. Please note that these answers have been discussed and collaborated with people who are involved in this grant process.
It's hard to effectively succeed at both outreach to new editors and training of existing editors at the same event. We think it's likely that your event will be more successful if you zero in on one or the other goal. Can you say which is your priority? Your answer to this question should inform how you respond to the following comments.
We agree fully with your thoughts. The goal for us is to bring the larger Odia-language Wikimedia community under one roof which helps a lot in imparting value and knowledge as compared to online engagements. So sharing knowledge, providing training and integrating new community members so they can replicate the successful working models to grow the projects and the community will be our core thing during this event. Our focus will be on Wikisource but not limited to Wikisource only as the many non-Wikisourcers are going to be using this gathering as an opportunity to meet other community leaders and learn from those leaders. There will also be many 1:1 dialog that are going to be cross-project and cross-community. However, the public dialog will be an important component as well because we certainly want to grow the diversity in both content and and participation. However, we have also observed that general outreach or engagements have been less productive as compared to focused ones but the general sessions do lead to connect with like minded individuals and organizations. So, instead of putting all our efforts on organizing a public event, we would like to observe the interest of the participants and try to build rapport with those who show interest in collaborating in the future.
Can you provide more information about the purpose of the press conference? What specific outcomes do you hope to achieve as a result?
From our old public gatherings, we have seen only a small section of the media taking more interest in highlighting about our work. In general, the Wikimedia projects in Odia and the Odia Wikimedia community are not widely known in the general public. And one of the reasons is that our public gatherings have been wider and meant for general public. This time we will focus on telling the significant achievement in the form of stories so that they reach to more people and create impact, if not growing contributors at least readers.
If you decide to focus on training, what metrics will you use to evaluate whether the training was successful? How will you track whether the training was effective?
Some of the important changes we are going to make after these training:
- After Image policies and copyright related training: we will delete all the images that have copyright issues.
- After the training on value proposition: New editors will be able to have public dialog when confronted with questions like: “What do you gain by editing Wikipedia?” or “What is there for me in it”. However we may not able track outcome of such things in a tangible way.
- We can tracking the number of new editors joined because of outreach programs conducted by those who are going to be training in this gathering. We will also be able to show the consistency of the existing editors through their edit counts.
The event being a celebration of Wikisource's 2nd birthday, our primary focus will be to plan for the future and prioritize our future activities for the growth of the project and the community. We have identified some of the aspects that the tiny Wikisource community needs training in. And those training will hopefully enable the community members to independently continue their work rather than being dependent on trivial issues.
As we are focusing on providing a few focused sessions and some 1:1 sessions, we will engage with the attendees of these over a longer period of time after the event. Our evaluation will be focused on the global metrics but would not be restricted to it. For instance, those who are already contributing to Commons might not upload more number of images after this training and hence show a spike in the Global Metrics #4 (Number of new images/media added to Wikimedia article pages), but they might get better with improving the quality of the images. Similarly, improvement in the quality of articles -- by adding more citations, relevant templates and categories, writing style that is as good as English Wikipedia or other such matured Wikipedias -- is another important milestone we are expecting to achieve. Odia Wikipedia is one of the top most Wikipedias when it comes to the articles being connected on Wikidata and our focus in the recent few years has been more towards quality as compared to increase the number of articles. Thanks to the new editors who have unanimously accepted the idea of gradually growing the same articles they start rather than making a sprint of new article creation. As a significant portion of the community (almost 40% or even more) use mobile phones for editing, and considering the fact that Wikipedia's mobile app crashes severely during mobile editing, we are going to spend time figuring out how that challenge can be tackled. We are not sure if we can completely solve this or even measure the impact after the training but this is something that the community is struggling with and we will certainly strive to find a working way for those who have limited bandwidth and are editing from mobile devices.
The active editors have grown significantly in the recent past -- thanks to everyone in the community and more specifically, a dedicated team of editors in the city of Puri and Bhubaneswar. We have seen great female participation in these two communities, and we will strive to build strategy as a community to bring more women and LGBTQ members to create a gender balance in the community.
Please let us know if you need more information or feedback on anything related to the event. --Jnanaranjan sahu (talk) 22:48, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Hello Marti , This is about 10 days I have posted the feedback and we didn't get any response. This is very disappointing and discouraging. This process of the proposal no longer feels like a Rapid Grant. I hope to get a response soon. --Jnanaranjan sahu (talk) 04:36, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
- Hello Jnanaranjan sahu. Thanks for pinging me. We will post comments on Monday, when we do our weekly review of Rapid Grants. I'm sorry we didn't get to your proposal this week! --Marti (WMF) (talk) 15:33, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
Request funded
editDear Jnanaranjan_sahu
We are pleased to fund you 95450 to coordinate an anniversary event focused on helping active community members to connect and learn. Though this may include existing editors who are relatively new, we recommend that you not focus on public recruitment. We recommend this because we have observed that events that have combined both have generally been less effective than those that are focused on only one or the other.
We are providing 18000 for t-shirts (we recommend t-, rather than hoodies) for existing community members. We are cutting out the 8700 for conference bags and 1200 for stickers, banners and other promotional merchandise. If you like, you may redistribute the 18000, purchasing fewer t-shirts in order to add in some other items.
We ask that after the event, you report on any challenges, success stories or lessons you learn in the process. You can find reporting guidelines here.
Kind regards,
--Marti (WMF) (talk) 19:58, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
- Dear Marti (WMF) , it has been more than 20 days, but I neither get any follow up mail or any kind of communication. Can you update the status of this request please. --Jnanaranjan sahu (talk) 18:47, 30 November 2016 (UTC)
- Hi Jnanaranjan sahu. I apologize on behalf of the grants team. There was some miscommunication and your request did not get moved through the grants processing system. Our grants administrator will reach out to you asap. Best, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 23:26, 14 December 2016 (UTC)
- Hi again, Jnanaranjan sahu, I'm just following up to apologize on behalf of myself. I forgot to notify our grants administrator after I approved your grant. She is incredibly on top of things, and the delay is purely my fault. I'm sorry for any inconvenience this caused you! :-( Best regards, --Marti (WMF) (talk) 00:42, 15 December 2016 (UTC)
Updated the end date and start date.
editDue to delay in the funding process, we have to postpone the event. So I have updated the possible end date and start date of the proposal to reflect on the grant agreement.. --Jnanaranjan sahu (talk) 17:15, 23 December 2016 (UTC)