Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Wiki Loves Folklore 2022

Feedback by the SAARC Regional Grants Committee

Wiki Loves Folklore has established itself as a project of interest. The SAARC GRC feels that it is time to review the impact, growth and further goals. For this, some key points should be addressed in the proposal.

The SAARC GRC committee would like to know the organising committee’s views on the following:

• Outreach seems very narrow & focused towards the Wiki community only. There seems to be no effort towards establishing linkages with existing & similar projects at research institutions / non-profits / grassroots organizations working with folk art / folk music, etc. In summary, what is the project’s approach to involving the wider community of culture / folk enthusiasts, researchers, educators, etc. beyond the Wikipedians to a) participate, b) build on the knowledge created?

• Budget :

1)There is a mention of "Facebook ads" in the budget, but no specific amount. How much is going to be spent on “sponsored posts” ? What is the estimated reach / impressions ?

2) Is a website needed for this project?

3) Last year's report shared that payment portal restrictions limited country-representations. This year's proposal however does not address the same nor does it budget for any wire-transfer fee charges.

• about the writing contest : There has to be an understanding of what constitutes "folk". Playback singers, singing folk songs, for example, cannot be “folk”. It is recommended that a list of articles be created / finalized by involving people with relevant knowledge about the field (experts). This will give participants a focus to improve / create the articles listed.

• "Outcome" : Target No. of Participants specifically should include a number of people who are first-time participants in a Wiki project. For a project such as this, it is a valid metric to understand the worldwide participation. The report can also indicate an age, gender and Wiki-experience level.

• including Experts --the project can be furthered by hosting smaller sessions with the winning contributions. Example, have relevant experts share stories / details about the winning contribution;

• on Prizes -- It would be nice if instead of a higher cash amount, the prize could perhaps look at including books etc on folk culture as this would encourage the winner to additionally have access to knowledge & information & serve as reference material for editing articles too (in the future hopefully!).

The SAARC committee would make a funding recommendation based on the responses provided to the feedback.

On behalf of the SAARC Regional Grants Committee --Medhavigandhi (talk) 07:14, 31 January 2022 (UTC) and THasan (WMF) (talk) 06:58, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

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Dear @Medhavigandhi and THasan (WMF):,

We would like to thank the grants team and committee for reviewing our grant application and providing us with a wide array of rich feedback for overall growth of the project. We would also like to emphasize that this project is an international project and does not only cover South Asian communities.

Here are our responses for the comments:

Outreach seems very narrow & focused towards the Wiki community only. There seems to be no effort towards establishing linkages with existing & similar projects at research institutions / non-profits / grassroots organizations working with folk art / folk music, etc.

In summary, what is the project’s approach to involving the wider community of culture / folk enthusiasts, researchers, educators, etc. beyond the Wikipedians to a) participate, b) build on the knowledge created?

We acknowledge that our previous grant report does not cover the complete analysis of our efforts to do outreach and partnerships with cultural and folk organizations and the photographer community. Every year, we do specific outreach on focussed groups including the world’s photography groups from different regions, folklore and culture enthusiasts, different folk specific GLAM bodies (for instance Women History Museums from Zambia), folklore society London and many international organizations that work specifically on Folklore. We have been working on outreach (outside the Wikimedia projects) using email marketing campaign with professional tools and experts, social media paid campaigning, content marketing with blogposts published on various news and media outlets, folklore societies websites, book publishing agencies such as Scholastic, partnering with radio shows (we did a radio show with an african radio channel last year), newspapers and more! (Some of this years project at [1] [2] [3] etc) :)

Since last year, we have been working with our country organizers to create partnerships with the local bodies of folk from their respective regions. We have created toolkits for organizing partnerships and photo walks with the local groups and organizations and also had personalized sessions with our organizers to support them in their endeavors to organize the project locally. In short, these efforts have been ongoing and we are connecting with the Wikimedia Foundation Campaigns and Partnerships team to further expand the initiative and map a design for the Folk group to develop further. We will be needing support from Wikimedia Foundation to ensure we can become established and grow similar to Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth in coming years. We already have grown a lot since past three years over 24 Local teams from Feminism and Folklore Project and supporting over 12 National teams of Wiki Loves Folklore from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe. We welcome advisors from the grants committee to join us in celebrating folk and helping us enrich this project so we can make it even more effective and successful. We have plans to work on a research project post this project to include the folklore researchers in this journey for creating a database specific to the folk.

Budget : 1)There is a mention of "Facebook ads" in the budget, but no specific amount. How much is going to be spent on “sponsored posts” ? What is the estimated reach / impressions ?

We have been using paid campaigning on Facebook and Instagram during past iterations and overall we found that we have to do efforts in multiple aspects including social media campaigning, central notice, outreach at different cultural and photography groups present on the social media, mass emails and messages to the photography and folk agencies, and interested individuals. We will utilize the budget of over 50-100 USD for paid campaigning but we may increase or decrease the amount depending on the requirement. Average estimated impressions are usually ranging till 100k.

2) Is a website needed for this project?

Yes definitely! The people who are from outside Wikimedia Community find the presence of websites more professional, approachable and relatable. Sometimes, due to the complicated interface and multiple links in our Wikimedia pages, a lot of people get confused or lost. Having a professional website not only validates the project presence but also allows the opportunity to present the cultural and GLAM organizations for the possibility of partnerships. So far we have been approached by the various folk museums and organizations, folk societies interested in partnering and getting participation from their local community. In addition to Wikimedia Affiliates that organize our project from their local countries, there are some non affiliated independent Non profit organizations that organize this project locally from their country or organize photo walks with the local photography community.

3) Last year's report shared that payment portal restrictions limited country-representations. This year's proposal however does not address the same nor does it budget for any wire-transfer fee charges.

Each year the requirement is different, depending on the country of the winner and mode of prize distribution that is possible within their country, the wire transfer and additional surcharges such as that of paypal are required. We have initially kept 100 USD in miscellaneous for this purpose. If during this process, we find there are additional funds required, we will inform the Program Officer for reallocation of funds accordingly. But overall it is difficult to guess the exact amount in advance.

About the writing contest : There has to be an understanding of what constitutes "folk". Playback singers, singing folk songs, for example, cannot be “folk”. It is recommended that a list of articles be created / finalized by involving people with relevant knowledge about the field (experts). This will give participants a focus to improve / create the articles listed.

This is an excellent suggestion. So far we have been using different sources to create a general list for giving an overview to our local organizers. The list we have listed has been derived from Wikidata queries with the support of Nates from Le Sans UG, Women in Red and many other leaders from the international community. But the idea is to get the local communities started with the type of articles they can create under this theme. The final list is chosen by each independent Wiki project/language community participating in our project depending on their local folk and regional priorities. We are open for new suggestions for the same.

"Outcome" : Target No. of Participants specifically should include a number of people who are first-time participants in a Wiki project. For a project such as this, it is a valid metric to understand the worldwide participation. The report can also indicate an age, gender and Wiki-experience level.

There are two aspects of involvement in our projects:

Organizers - Most of our local and country organizers have at least one female in their organizing team. This factors the amount of development of the community. Some under-developed and under-represented communities have less than 5 active editors, it is harder to ensure diversity there but this really is dependent on the condition of the local community but we encourage the female and LGBTQ members to be actively involved in the project organizing.

Participants - We collect survey from the winning individuals from each contest and each local community for both Wiki Loves Folklore and Feminism and Folklore. Although we have information about the geographic location, so far we haven't collected the age, gender and Wiki-experience level due to privacy and security reasons. The diversity data survey will need additional permission from the user and most of them are not comfortable sharing this data but we will try this year to include non mandatory fields that can be opted in should the user feel comfortable sharing the data. We can collect the user data in Commons for new users. We will work with local communities to collect the data for old and new users and include that in our reports. We have also added the information in our proposal as per recommendation.

Including Experts --the project can be furthered by hosting smaller sessions with the winning contributions. Example, have relevant experts share stories / details about the winning contribution;

Thank you for this wonderful suggestion. We are already planning to have meetings with GLAM bodies and cultural organizations. We will definitely invite the winners and the jury to host sessions to hear about their stories and inner stories from experts. So far we have been taking this information from winners and the jury through email interviews which we tried to reflect in our blogposts.

On Prizes -- It would be nice if instead of a higher cash amount, the prize could perhaps look at including books etc on folk culture as this would encourage the winner to additionally have access to knowledge & information & serve as reference material for editing articles too (in the future hopefully!

We are definitely open to this suggestion and will try this out in this iteration. But this is subject to conditions in different areas. For tangible items, it depends whether the region is allowing the international courier. We could try the purchase through local vendors within the country of the winner but there are limits to the local vendors we can use from international banks. This is one of the reasons we have to keep the scenario open to include the online coupons. We did however try this out last year with the Bangladesh winners by providing them with coupons from an online bookstore.

Hope this helps in providing our vision to the SAARC GRC Committee.

Thanks

--Tiven2240 (talk) 09:51, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Funding recommendation by the SAARC Regional Grants Committee

Dear Tiven, Thank you for your response. We at the SAARC Committee understand and acknowledge the project’s international scope, its potential for impact and therefore hope for its best. Every country has organisations, and members of the academia working towards folk-research, and culture; we strongly believe that their involvement can increase the impact of this project and hope to see the WLF move beyond a photo-contest and assimilate the knowledge and contributions of researchers, academia, etc. as well. In the fourth year of this project, a conscious step in that direction will only help it grow. We urge you to make a provision for this. Meanwhile, can we have a link to the previous years’ website? We want the organising team to explore options to come up with a sustainable plan of hosting a website and not make this into a recurring expense. After due consideration, the committee has decided to fund the proposal. We recommend that the expenses pertaining to the grant must be shared with SAARC Program Officer.

--Medhavigandhi (talk) 13:46, 2 February 2022 (UTC) on behalf of the SAARC GRC Committee

Extension request

@THasan (WMF) I am writing to request extention until 7th of August to facilitate some payments for international vendors for whom we have been facing some challenges with cancellations and their internal due diligence. --Tiven2240 (talk) 16:14, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

Hi @THasan (WMF), requesting for extension till the 14th of August. --Tiven2240 (talk) 07:24, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

Request approved THasan (WMF) (talk) 13:05, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

Budget changes

Dear @THasan (WMF) We want to change our budget in some ways mentioned below:

Particulars	Current	Changed Budget
Consolation top 10 winners: 10 USD each	$ 100	$ 90
Prizes for local contest Winners :500	$ 500	$ 510
Top 10 consolation prizes: 10 USD each	$ 100	$ 70
Best Video prize and best Audio prize: 25 USD, 25 USD (each)	$ 50	$ 25
Merchandize/Gift Cards for National and International Teams	$ 100	$ 0
Website hosting, domain, g suite, website builder softwares, hosting domain for website, Postcard generator software subscriptions, Facebook paid Advertisement campaigns	$ 400	$ 555

--Tiven2240 (talk) 08:56, 27 July 2022 (UTC)

This request has been approved THasan (WMF) (talk) 13:05, 10 August 2022 (UTC)