Grants talk:Project/WCDO/Culture Gap Monthly Monitoring

Project Grant proposal submissions due 30 November!

Thanks for drafting your Project Grant proposal. As a reminder, proposals are due on November 30th by the end of the day in your local time. In order for this submission to be reviewed for eligibility, it must be formally proposed. When you have completed filling out the infobox and have fully responded to the questions on your draft, please change status=draft to status=proposed to formally submit your grant proposal. This can be found in the Probox template found on your grant proposal page. Importantly, proposals that are submitted after the deadline will not be eligible for review during this round. If you're having any difficulty or encounter any unexpected issues when changing the proposal status, please feel free to e-mail me at cschillingwikimedia.org or contact me on my talk page. Thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 23:20, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed, round 2 2018

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We'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) 03:05, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Reproducibility and containerisation

Just as a suggestion, whenever possible, I would encourage providing scripts/recipes for allowing reproducibility of datasets generation/retrieval and website/boards deployment. Also by providing used software and tools in a containerised environment (e.g., by using Docker). --Toniher (talk) 17:22, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

@Toniher: thanks for your suggestion! We provided all the scripts [[1]]. Each of them is documented. However, a docking is a good idea we haven't taken into account. We appreciate this input.

Questions from Superzerocool

Hi marcmiquel, thanks for sharing us your proposal. After read it, I have some questions about your idea:

• I read about a dashboard that works identifying the users to reduce any possible gaps, It could have any legal issues? (I'm just thinking about EU regulations and other things).

Activity data is public (each article revision along with the username and timestamp). Anyone can download it or consult the revision tables. We won’t be using pageviews, which seems a bit more sensitive. This data is already being used to show the last edits from a user and other tools. What we are proposing is to be able to retrieve users according to certain activity levels and activity on certain topics (to foster collaborations). The aim of this tool reinforces Wikimedia activity.

• According your timeline, the planned trip to Wikimania is near of the middle of grant execution. How this event could change your timeline after Wikimania ends?.

Wikimania is a great opportunity to do both things: 1) disseminate results and explain the tools, 2) receive feedback for improvement. Since we have received many feedback from previous events and have stakeholders in different communities and areas, we’ll be more focused on developing them (e.g. the article lists are mostly different demands). Wikimania will be good to receive new ideas and feedback, probably to improve the tools’ usability. Since the plan is quite tight, not all feedback obtained in Wikimania will see its results though and will probably remain for future improvements.

• I feel a bit confused about this goal: Propose recommendations, challenges and guidelines for communities to work on the culture gap in events. How do you will do this, do you have stakeholders in some communities to reach them to provide the recommendations?.

Yes. We have a list of around 50 stakeholders, one from each community, in order to disseminate results and updates. If you want to become one, you can write at this e-mail: tools.wcdo@tools.wmflabs.org. At the same time, we are in touch with Education and other WMF members. So, we’ll use different channels to disseminate guidelines. The challenges will be more implicit in the dashboards. For instance, we believe that having 100 articles from every language-related cultural context is something that should be achieved by any medium-big Wikipedia, and for this, we propose the Top CCC articles. In order to see if Wikipedia communities are bridging the gap, editors will be able to sign up to a newsletter to see monthly updates. So, there are different complementary communication channels.

Regards! Superzerocool (talk) 03:18, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

@Superzerocool: thanks for your questions. Please, ask us anything else you want to know about. If you want to join the project, you are also welcome. --Marcmiquel (talk) 12:36, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for WCDO/Culture Gap Monthly Monitoring

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?	8.2
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	8.4
(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?	8.6
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	9.0
Additional comments from the Committee: The project seems aligned with Wikimedia goals, trying to reduce gaps in many languages and contexts. This project will improve other project, so it can't be replicated but its potential may represent a huge benefit to volunteers. This project has proven a key help for identifying gaps and thus strategic priorities for our movement. Possible impact goes far beyond our own community and spreads into academic fields as it gives another way to understand how is the largest sum of human knowledge being build. I like this project because it aims to provide the context and support people attempting to affect these gaps need. I do wonder how the project might flex for communities that need more structure. Some communities are developing and emerging, and might need more support for covering gaps than a larger language Wikipedia. I wonder how they will address those differences in needs and what that might look like. Past measures of success were realistic and actually they were met. Grantee is providing us with a comprehensive evaluation of the project past outcomes. This project will have a significant long-term impact in our community as it becomes one of the preferred tools available for our communities in order to develop successful campaigns and projects. Yes, this project is measurable, but I think we should also consider the parts that cannot be quantified but are fantastic! This project aims to impact knowledge for various stakeholders and in various target audiences. This is something I hope to see continue beyond this grant period. Marc has proven his ability to conduct the research and develop the tools needed for this project. Budget is simple but tight and I'm assured that Wikimania trip is really worth it. I feel the timeline is well thought out. I do think it will be interesting to see the information and see how this project evolves over the project period. The project has a large base of support and the user has a great way to explain how to reach his goals. Marc has developed a close work with 50 community members who give to him key information as well as a lot of effort in making this tool known to others. The aim of the project is to provide the communities with information and support. Already this proposal has strong community encouragement and I am sure the proposers will be engaged with the community beyond what they are anticipating.

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 March 1st, 2019.

Questions? Contact us.

I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 16:44, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

We want to thank the committee for such positive feedback. We are very glad of the comments received. This has felt like long waiting since we first posted the project, and we couldn't keep ourselves from thinking of particular aspects of the project planning and dissemination. We are looking forward to have a final answer. The Cultural Diversity Observatory has been and is a lot of work at different levels: research, development, communication, among others. One of the things we haven't mentioned much is how important is to explain the importance of cultural diversity for the goal of "gathering the sum of human knowledge". We hope to throw many seeds so other existing initiatives take into account the information we display and the project tools we create, but at the same time, we hope to be able to listen to everybody's projects so all the different actors in Wikimedia can later align with the cultural diversity goals more easily.

We are excited with the variety of comments. We would like to answer specifically to this one: "I do wonder how the project might flex for communities that need more structure. Some communities are developing and emerging, and might need more support for covering gaps than a larger language Wikipedia. I wonder how they will address those differences in needs and what that might look like."

Increasing Wikipedia cultural diversity implies putting efforts in covering each others' cultural/geographical content. This is a challenging endeavour that structured medium-big communities can better than smaller ones. We believe the goal for smaller communities should be, first of all, to be aware of the value of creating local content, as they are the ones who can create it best, and second, to start covering content from other wikipedias in order to ensure cultural diversity. We believe that for smaller communities it is perhaps more important to be able to convince editors of the importance of creating their local content (e.g. filling Wikidata properties if possible), rather than to encourage them to create thousands of articles about very specific content from other cultures. This is why we think that guidelines with some particular priorities (e.g. a minimum of biographies, geography, etc.) could be useful for them to concentrate their efforts. This is one particular line we'd like to explore but not the only one.

Even though it is not in the scope of this project, we would like to know more about the causes that make it difficult for small communities to find contributors - whether they are related to the language status and reputation in the Internet, the lack of technology, or socioeconomical factors that restrain contributors from editing Wikipedia. We are glad some of these issues are being addressed by the foundation at other levels. Cultural diversity is a goal that must be addressed with multiple action plans. In this grant project, we hope to deliver suitable solutions, meet community leaders, keep learning, and expand our views in order to be able to improve Wikipedia. --Marcmiquel (talk) 19:50, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Round 2 2018 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, 26,900 EUR / $24,275 USD

Comments regarding this decision:
The committee is pleased to support the comprehensive efforts in tool development, communication, and research to support contributors’ capacity to monitor and better work to reduce gaps in reflecting the cultural diversity of their communities in Wikimedia projects. Community engagement efforts, strong alignment with knowledge equity, and the expertise of the applicants to complete the proposed work were all important factors informing the committee’s decision.

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!

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On behalf of the Project Grants Committee, KCVelaga (talk) 05:09, 1 March 2019 (UTC)